Houses

Tyson was the world’s weakest ten-year-old, and so by default he was the world’s weakest ten-year-old Penobscot. I’d watched him after school, trying to shoot hoops in the yellow-stained Community Center on the rez, always air balling. He was tall, way too tall for his age, and while he was two years younger than I was, he looked down on me with huge eyes, a crooked nose, boogers crusted around his nostrils. To be honest, Tyson looked like a lanky baby bird, feathers all plucked, pointed bones wanting so badly to pierce through his delicate skin.

His mother, Betty—a distant cousin of Mom’s, which also made Tyson my weakest relative—had started coming over on Sundays to drink margaritas. One Friday night, I was sitting at the kitchen table and through the thin white curtains I saw a dark green truck pull down the driveway. My sister, Paige, was smoking on the couch.

“S’gheti Betty’s here!” she hollered.

Mom hurried down the hallway, laughing. “Don’t say that in front of her.”

Tyson got his thinness from his mother, and she really did look like a piece of spaghetti, especially when she drank and danced, flopping around our kitchen like a cooked noodle.

Whenever the back door opened, all the blinds in the kitchen and living room sucked in, rattled against the glass, and then settled, like something in the house was trying to breathe. When Mom unlocked the deadbolt and opened the back door, it seemed the house sighed when it saw Tyson.

“Betty, doos,” Mom said. She opened the screen door. Tyson was behind his mother, standing almost as tall, with a backpack slung over his sharp shoulder.

Betty didn’t thank Mom right away for taking Tyson. Instead she asked Mom if last weekend she’d left her tequila here. “I’m sure I left it,” Betty said.

“That was yours?” Paige said from the living room.

Mom and Betty stared at Paige. “It was,” Betty said, and to Mom she said, “No worries. Thanks again for taking him. We haven’t made it up to camp all summer, and now it’s already fall.”

Mom smiled her you’re welcome smile. Betty turned, told Tyson to behave himself, and Mom shut the door behind S’gheti Betty.

“You can put your backpack in David’s room,” Mom told Tyson. “It’s straight down the hall.”

Tyson took his shoes off and started for my room, and so I had to follow him.

“Right there’s fine,” I told him, pointing against the wall. He set it down and then sat on my bed, which grossed me out. If his nostrils were that boogery, then I could only imagine what his jeckin smelled like. But I kept my mouth shut. I left my room, thinking he’d follow me—wasn’t that what you did at a stranger’s house?—and I went to the living room. Mom was scrubbing the kitchen sink, char scratching against metal. In the living room Paige was watching CSI, arms folded behind her head like wings.

I plopped down next to her. During a commercial, Paige looked at me, then looked around the room.

“Where’s that kid?” she said.

“In my room.”

She laughed. “You just left him there?”

“What am I supposed to do with him?”

“I don’t know, go play or something.” She pushed me off the couch and then spread out. She propped a pillow under her head.

I moped down the hall. Tyson was still on the edge of the bed, sitting in the exact same place as I’d left him. He looked at me, blinking with those big eyes, and then he looked at his backpack, then back to me.

“You want to see something?” he said, and he didn’t really wait for me to say yes or no, just got up and unzipped his bag. He pulled out something gray, and then I saw what it was. A PlayStation 1 and a controller, the black cord tangled and knotted.

I snatched the PlayStation from him and inspected it.

“Careful!” Tyson said just a little too loud, and Mom heard. She came down the hallway.

“What are you doing to that boy?” she said to me.

I turned, holding the PS1. “Nothing,” I said. “Just looking at his PlayStation.”

“Really,” Tyson said. “He was.”

Mom looked from me to Tyson.

“Can we put your TV in here so we can play?” I asked. Mom said go ahead, waved her hand at me like I was the one who’d interrupted her. She went back down the hallway, and Paige told her to stop cleaning the sink and watch TV and have a drink with her.

Mom never used the twenty-four-inch, box TV in her room. The cable jack in the back was busted, so she couldn’t hook the antenna up. But the yellow, white, and red plugins were in good shape.

“Help me get the TV,” I told Tyson, who followed me into Mom’s room. I had to flick the lights on; her curtains were pulled shut and it was real dark. “Come here,” I said, ushering him to the dresser. “Grab one side and I’ll grab the other.”

He looked a little hesitant, but then stepped forward.

“On three,” I told him. “One, two, three.” We lifted it up, and I knew right then that we were screwed: Tyson lost his grip, the TV slipping out of his hands, and both the TV and I went down onto the floor with a bang.

“David!” Mom yelled. Tyson stood straight up, stepped back. Mom came back down the hallway faster than the TV had fallen. She saw it and cocked her head. She stared at me and said each word real slow: “What’s my TV doing on the floor?”

“He dropped it,” I said.

“It slipped,” he said. “I couldn’t help it.”

Mom took a deep breath and she shook her head. She pushed me aside and picked up the TV. She brought it into my room. Before I could start hooking it up, Mom pulled me through the hallway and into the kitchen, away from Tyson. “If that TV is broken,” she said, “I don’t want to hear it. Don’t tell me. That’s the last thing I want to know.”

“It’s not like you use it anyway,” Paige said from the living room.

“Mind your business,” Mom said, then looked at me. “Now go play your game.”

I turned to leave, but she grabbed my arm. “And get that poor boy a tissue.”

I plucked a tissue from the bathroom, and in my room I handed it to Tyson. “You ever seen one of these before?”

He looked at it, and he smiled. “Sorry about the boogers,” he said. “Allergies.”

While he cleaned his nose I hooked up the PS1, plugged the colored cords into the colored plugins in the back. “Please don’t be broken,” I said. I pressed the on button.

It was. The Sony logo popped up first, the screen a weird green, and then the PlayStation logo faded in, also green. Somehow, the color got all messed up when it hit the floor. Everything was green, but in different shades so the visuals could still be seen and followed.

Still, the TV was broken. I looked at Tyson.

“I didn’t mean to,” he said.

The loading screen popped up. insert disc, it read.

“Where’s the game?” I asked.

Tyson dropped his tissue, got on all fours, and opened the disc drive.

“You forgot the game?” I said.

“I thought there was one in here.”

“Do you have a key to your house?”

He got up and sat on the bed. “We can’t go to my house.”

I stood up, put my arms out. “Why not? It’s only a couple of roads over.”

“Because my brother’s there, and he’ll get mad. I’m supposed to stay here.”

“What if he’s not there? What if he’s out? It won’t hurt to look.”

Tyson breathed in real deep, released. “I can’t.”

“Tyson,” I said. I was standing over him while he sat. It was the first good look I got of the top of his head. At least he shampooed. “You can’t bring a PS1 to someone’s house and then forget the game. That’s worse than going to someone’s house and chagooking in their toilet and not flushing.”

He laughed at that.

“Now come on.” I pulled his arm and stood him up. I wondered if he could tell I didn’t shampoo that day.

When we left the house, the sky was gray, and a wind blew. Mom was out back with Frick, her boyfriend, who was raking, trying to get ahead of fall. “Hey, guy,” he said, and I thought it was directed at me, but he was looking at Tyson. Tyson knew Frick, because when Betty came over to visit Mom, Frick was over at Tyson’s house visiting with his father, Harold, who worked for the Overtown Mill. Frick and Harold sat out back in the boiler room, drinking and smoking. At least that was what he always told Mom.

“Where you going?” Mom said. She took the rake from Frick and raked some spots he’d missed.

“Just going to walk around,” I told her.

“Stay out of the woods,” she said. “Last time you came home you were covered in mud and ticks.”

“Yeah, because—”

She put a hand in the air. “Just stay out of the woods, David. And be home no later than four. Frick and I are going out at five, so we’re eating early.”

I started walking down the street; Tyson lagged behind. “What do you think of Frick?” I said over my shoulder.

He caught up. “I don’t know.”

“Come on,” I told him, “I’m not setting you up. He’s weird, isn’t he?”

“Maybe a little. I hear them talking in the boiler room all the time.”

“So they do sit in there and drink?”

Tyson nodded. “Yeah, he’s always trying to get my dad to go to a sweat lodge, telling him he needs to clean out his system from the years working at the mill.”

I laughed.

“But Dad just tells him to stop acting like an Indian.”

“He is an Indian,” I said. “We’re all Indians. Maybe he does need a good sweat.”

Tyson laughed. “Dad says the boiler room is good enough.”

The road curved, and I cut into the woods. Tyson stopped.

“Your mom said don’t go in there.”

“Oh, come on.” I waved him in and he followed. It was quicker—much quicker—to cut through the woods to get to Tyson’s. I thought it’d save us twenty minutes, but Tyson took baby steps, kept watching the ground, watching his feet, avoiding anything that looked like mud. And whenever he brushed against the tall ferns, he stopped to look for ticks. When the path ended, splitting open onto his road, I was convinced taking that route would’ve been quicker in the first place.

“You hate me, don’t you?” I said, tapping my shoes loose of leaves and dirt.

But Tyson didn’t get that I was messing with him. “No, no I don’t hate you.”

“You need to learn to bite back,” I told him.

He stared, blinking.

“Never mind.” I started walking down the road, acting like I knew where his house was. I got the general direction right, because from behind, Tyson grabbed my wrist—snagging my shirtsleeve on a nail had more pull to it.

“Wait,” he said. “That’s his truck.”

“Whose?”

“My brother’s. We can’t go there.”

“Let’s wait a bit, see if he leaves.”

Tyson shook his head. “What if he sees us?”

“Why are you so scared of your brother?”

“I’m not.”

“Sure seems it.”

Tyson didn’t look at me. “Shut up.”

I patted his back. “Good,” I said. “Not perfect, but you’ll get the hang of biting back. Come on, let’s go wait in the woods.”

On a damp log, we sat and watched his house through balding fall trees. An hour had gone by, an hour in which every few minutes Tyson had jumped up, slapping at the spiders and creepy crawlers going by on the log and over his shoes. I hadn’t called him out on it, but I was pretty sure he pigadeed once when a spider crawled across his arm.

I didn’t know what time it was, but soon a door slammed and we saw his brother, D, who was about Paige’s age, come outside. The only thing Tyson and Darrell had in common was their height. Well, what I imagined Tyson’s height would be when he was fully grown. Darrell was tall, but also wide; his arms were bigger than my head, and, from across the way, it looked like his shoes were as big as a clown’s.

Darrell started his truck, and we watched him pull away. “Let’s go,” I told Tyson, who got up and pushed past me.

“Wait up,” I said. He was really hauling it across the street, didn’t even look both ways, just darted across like a crow in front of a car. I was struggling to keep up with him.

At his door, Tyson lifted up the black foot mat and peeled the key off the cement steps. His hands were shaking when he unlocked the door.

All the houses on my street and his street were the same: rectangular and drab. The only difference was what was inside. His house had new wooden countertops, sleek log siding, carpeted living room—ours was linoleum—and, instead of a woodstove, he had an actual fireplace.

“I thought your parents were going to check out their camp,” I said. “This looks like it. A real fancy one.”

Tyson pointed at my feet, and I took my shoes off.

“What do all the rooms look like?” I said.

“We don’t have time.” He was sweating. “My brother can come back any minute.”

“Would you relax,” I said. I opened his refrigerator, which was as packed as the freezer. “Can I have one of these?” I pulled out a pepperoni Hot Pocket.

“No, put it back, we need to hurry.”

“Come on! You got—” I turned and counted, “—six boxes.”

“Fine, take it.”

I stuffed one in my pocket. “What are you so paranoid about?”

“Would you please just hurry.” He started down the hallway.

I snagged a second Hot Pocket and shut the freezer.

I followed him down the hall, and we went to the room at the very end—what would be my room if it were my house. The floor was covered in clothes, and on the windowsill was an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. Each wall was covered in posters, some tacked up, others taped, and a couple were ripped, peeling. I only recognized a few: Pulp Fiction, where that woman was lying on her stomach, head propped up, smoking; Scarface (“Say hello to my little friend!”); and The Simpsons Movie, the one where the whole family was on top of their burning house. A real ratty entertainment center with a boxed TV the size of Mom’s stood by the wall.

“This ain’t your room,” I said. “Unless you smoke cigarettes.”

Tyson knelt in front of the entertainment stand and opened the side compartment. “This is my brother’s room,” he said. He pulled out a black CD case, unzipped it, thumbed through it, and slid out Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back.

“Wait, wait, wait,” I said. “Did you steal your brother’s—”

A truck door slammed and Tyson zipped up the CD case, tossed it back into the side compartment, and ran to the window. He unlocked the window and tried his best to slide it up, but he couldn’t.

“Help me,” he said.

I kind of wanted to watch him struggle, but Tyson looked like he was about to cry. And then he did start crying. When I turned and ran down the hallway to the back door, he yelled my name. I grabbed our shoes and hopped down the hallway, slipping mine on.

I threw his shoes at him. “Here.”

He put them on while I opened the window and popped out the screen. The ashtray spilled over Darrell’s unmade bed. I didn’t snap the screen back in place, and Tyson and I crept alongside the other end of the house, listening for the slam of the back door, listening for a clean escape.

We didn’t hear his brother go back inside, but we did hear him swearing, probably at the cigarette butts on his bed. “Motherfucking, goddamn cocksucker!” The window slid open, and he grunted, snapping the screen back in place from inside, or so it sounded.

Tyson was shaking. “We gotta go.” He tried to run, but I held him back.

“Wait a minute, dummy,” I whispered. “He’s gonna come outside. We’ll walk the opposite way he does, and wait for him to go out back.”

But I was wrong. Way wrong. Darrell didn’t snap the screen back in place from inside. He crawled out and snapped it back in place from the outside, and then crept around the corner and saw us.

“What were you jerkoffs doing in my room?” he said.

We spun around and faced him. Tyson grabbed my wrist, and I didn’t think he could squeeze that hard.

“You’re in deep shit,” he said, pointing at Tyson. He glanced at me once. Maybe I lied about them looking different; Darrell looked like a bird, too, except a full-grown vulture, patches of hair missing, a weak beard. He was monstrous, but I didn’t shake. Mom was scarier. I spun my wrist loose from Tyson’s grip, grabbed onto his own wrist, and started running, just bolting it across the street while Tyson bobbled behind me.

Darrell didn’t follow, but yelled from the front lawn. “You’re in deep shit,” he said again.

Tyson pulled back, and I lost hold of his wrist. I kept running, thinking he was right behind me, but in the woods all I heard was my own feet crunching over leaves. I stopped and looked back. Tyson wasn’t there. I backpeddled, heading to the road, truly thinking I’d see Darrell dragging Tyson inside by his thin little neck.

But Tyson was where he broke free from me. He was standing there, red-faced and hyperventilating. Staring at his brother. Then he raised his finger, pointed at Darrell, and yelled louder than I thought was ever possible: “Fuck you, asshole!”

Darrell laughed at him, and Tyson turned around. He was crying, boogers running from his nose.

I would have laughed at his face too—he sounded so stupid—but I couldn’t help thinking that was the first time he’d ever cursed, the first time he’d ever pushed back.

I told Tyson to hurry up, and he started running ahead of me. He was so fast I was struggling to keep up with him. But then again, maybe he spent his whole life running from his brother, so he was conditioned to haul jeckin when he needed to.

When we made it back to the end of the path, Tyson slowed down and plopped right against a tree. Then he slid down against the scratchy bark and sat down. I sat next to him. We were breathing heavy, and my vision was all blurry from sweat dripping in my eyes. I wiped my face on my shirt, and I looked at our shoes, which were covered in mud, leaves stuck to the bottom. I plucked a tick off Tyson.

After I caught my breath, I said, “I don’t think he knows you took his PS1.”

At first Tyson didn’t say anything, just stared at the trees. He was sweating worse than I was. Then he looked at me and laughed. Just started cracking up, which made me laugh, and then we were rolling around in the middle of the path, laughing so hard no sound was coming out, our faces red.

When our laughing fit was over, we sat up. Tyson looked at me all serious. “Not yet he doesn’t know.” And he jumped up, and started sprinting down the road to my house.

Back home, Frick was sitting at the kitchen table, a cigarette burning in the ashtray. His eyes were closed, and they stayed closed when I slammed the door behind Tyson and me and all the curtains sucked in and out. The house was quiet—too quiet—and then I heard the low voices of Mom and Paige down the hallway. I took my shoes off and headed to my room, but Frick held his arm out and stopped me. He didn’t even open his eyes.

“Wait,” he said.

I did and listened. Mom was whisper-begging Paige. “Just for the night,” she was saying.

Paige didn’t whisper back. “You invited me!”

“Hush,” Mom said. She peaked out her door and down the hallway. Then her door closed.

Frick nudged me. “Go on,” he said.

I figured it had to do with going out. Mom always invited Paige out to a friend’s house or to the bar, but since Tyson was over maybe Mom felt a bit responsible to stay in, and her way of getting around that feeling was by asking if Paige would stay home.

But I knew Paige wasn’t going to stay. She made that clear when we were all eating dinner, Tyson sitting on a stepping stool because we didn’t have an extra chair.

“What do you think will happen?” Paige said to Mom. “That they’ll die?”

I said we’d be fine, and Mom shot me a look. I said it again a few minutes later—being around Paige always made me a bit pushier with Mom—but that time Mom put her finger up to her lips. The silent cross I called it.

I didn’t see what the big deal was. They’d be out for a few hours, come home at eleven, twelve at the latest. It wasn’t like they were leaving us for the rest of the weekend.

“Why don’t you stay home, and I’ll go out?” Paige said. She bit into her bread and butter.

And then Mom just went back at her. “You’re not coming with us. We won’t let you in the car. You’re staying.”

Paige did that thing where she flicked her eyes up real fast and nodded. It was her try-and-stop-me face.

After dinner, Mom slammed the plates in the sink, and I had to turn the volume all the way up on Mom’s TV. She heard the loud start-up of the PlayStation over the clashing of dishes and she came down the hall, water dripping off her fingers, and told me to turn it down.

I did, just a bit, but then I shut my door. I didn’t have a door handle—like most things in our house, it was broken—and so I had tied a red and black checkered scarf where the doorknob should had been, the knot pressing against the latch. It was nice; when I slammed my door no one could hear it.

On the edge of the bed, I held the controller. The only other gaming system I had ever played was a Nintendo 64, with those pitchfork looking controllers, trying my best to figure out Mario’s castle.

“So,” I said to Tyson, who had grown quiet since dinner. “What are the buttons?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“I’ve never played it before.”

I stared at him. “You have a PS1 in your house and you’ve never played it before?”

“You saw my brother,” he said.

Mom and Frick left not too long after Mom finished the dishes; she slammed the back door so hard that the walls shook.

It was Tyson’s turn to play, and he jumped that little green Bandicoot—on an unbroken TV, he was orange—through the level, dodging boulders, racing to an end. I didn’t know how long it had been. We were glued to that green screen, taking turns, making our way to the boss every so often, kicking his jeckin, but eventually it stopped being easy, and we kept losing life after life trying to beat one boss. More than once I wanted to take that controller and slam it like Mom slammed plates. But I knew Tyson would throw a fit. That’s my brother’s, he’d say. Don’t.

When I couldn’t take dying anymore, I got up to pee, and when I opened my door all the lights were off. I stepped past the bathroom and into the kitchen. “Paige?”

Nobody.

I peed. The overhead fan hummed, keeping me company. I flushed, and then I thought I heard knocking on the bathroom door. I didn’t wash my hands, and I opened the door real fast.

Again, nobody.

“Did you hear someone knocking?” Tyson asked me when I sat back down, taking the controller from him.

“No,” I said. “Didn’t hear a thing.” That’s exactly what Mom said to me when the Goog’ooks—evil spirits—acted up at night. Denial always made me feel better.

There was something creepy about sitting on my bed and, in my periphery, being able to see down the dark hallway, so I paused the game and shut my door.

The only noise in the whole house was the button mashing coming from Tyson and me, trying for the sixth time to beat Dr. N. Gin, never able to dodge his spaceship’s laser.

“I ducked just in time!” I argued, handing the controller to Tyson. He laughed at me.

The room was quiet, the game loading, and we both heard it. A click.

“Must’ve been a pipe,” I said, but it wasn’t a pipe. When the game was loaded, Tyson hit pause, listening.

“It’s just a pipe,” I said again, but then my door flew open and banged against the wall, and both Tyson and I grabbed on to each other.

It was her.

“You’re a fucking jerk!” I yelled. Tyson still held onto me. I tried to throw the controller at her, but it was plugged in and only went so far.

Paige was laughing and laughing, holding herself up against the doorframe, one hand gripping a cup.

“I play the long game,” Paige said. “Been hiding in the living room forever.”

I got up and tried to shut Paige out, but she held the door open. “Move,” I said.

“Oh, come on.” She ruffled my hair. “You’re just mad because I got you.”

I let go of the door and sat back down. I handed the controller to Tyson, who still had one hand to his chest, his heart.

“You got to admit,” Paige said. “I got you two good.”

She did—my legs were still shaking, and I was mad at her. But she did hide out for who knew how many hours. I tried to hide my smile.

“This time,” Paige said, “I really won’t be here. Don’t tell Mommy I left. I should be back before her.” She started down the hallway and then turned around. “And David,” she said. I was watching Tyson look at her with his huge eyes. His hand had relaxed a bit, but was still by his heart, holding onto his shirt. “Don’t let the real Goog’ooks get you while I’m gone.” She flicked her cigarette ash on the floor.

And then she turned, footsteps fading down the hall. The back door opened, blinds sucking in and out, the house’s sigh. Shadows when the door closed. A draft slipped in, slithered over the kitchen and up the hallway, and the cigarette ash Paige had flicked to the floor tumbled and scattered like crushed bone.

After so many tries, Tyson and I called it quits. We just couldn’t beat Dr. N. Gin. Maybe it was our eyes, staring at that green screen for at least five hours. I definitely knew that was why I was so tired. On the last try, my eyelids scraping with each blink, I saw Tyson sitting up against the wall, dosing off. I turned the TV and PlayStation off and Tyson woke up.

“Let’s try again tomorrow,” I told him.

In the hallway, I opened the closet and grabbed at the top shelf for the blankets for Tyson, but I couldn’t reach. “Get over here,” I told him. He did. “Grab your bed up there.”

“All of them?”

“If you wanna be comfy.”

He grabbed the blankets, and I helped him spread them out on my floor.

“Here,” I said, handing him the pillow I didn’t sleep with.

The house was too quiet, too dark to fall asleep. I got up.

“Where you going?” Tyson said.

“Be right back.”

I didn’t know why, but I didn’t turn any lights on, just stumbled through the dark and into the living room and flicked the TV on. I turned the volume up.

My bed frame whined when I slid under the blankets.

“Why’d you turn that on?” Tyson said.

“I need some noise.”

“Do you use a fan?”

“Do you see a fan in my room?”

He mumbled no.

Soon, I was right there on the edge of sleep, that feeling of a leash being taken off the neck, and then his voice grabbed me back.

“Are there really Goog’ooks in your house?”

I didn’t say anything.

“David?”

“Hmm?”

“Are there Goog’ooks in your house?”

“There’s Goog’ooks in every house,” I told him.

I heard him shift on the floor. “There’s none in my house,” he said.

In the night, Tyson screamed. A silhouette of a man crouched over him, holding him by the shoulders and shaking him.

Frick.

“Harold!” he yelled. “The Jesuits are coming!”

From under my blankets, I kicked my leg out and hit Frick as hard as I could. He let go of Tyson and stood up. My door was open, no lights on in the house. I had no idea what time it was.

Frick stood there, mumbling, and then he started to shake. Not little shakes, but violent tremors. He stole my blanket, covered his shoulders, and walked out of my room into the dark hallway. The cold slipped through my thin sheet.

I rolled over and looked at Tyson, who had rolled over too. He made no noise, but he had to be awake. Just had to be.

And, again, I was right there close to dreaming when there was a crash. Then silence. A door slammed; a light sparked. I was up. It was Mom.

“I want you out!”

Paige, I thought. Mom knew she’d left us.

“Paige!” Mom yelled louder, but it wasn’t a yell in the house. She was yelling from outside, from on the concrete steps. “Paige, I don’t want him here. He needs to go.”

Frick?

“Look it!” Mom was saying. “Look it, look it. My wrist is all bruised. Dickhead.” She said it again, louder: “Dickhead! Look it! My shelf, ruined!”

What’d he do? I was about ready to get up, go and see what was happening, but then Paige spoke: “Go in your room,” she said to Mom. “I’ll get him out.”

“No! I’m gonna watch.” I heard her feet stomping.

“Don’t!”

“I could do it, too. And I want to.”

“He’s out cold. I’ll get him to his truck. Go in your room.”

I heard footsteps down the hall, heard a body hit against the wall, felt a face peek in my room. Mom. I kept my face above the sheets, kept my eyes closed. “Gwus,” she said. And then Paige came down the hallway and pulled Mom into her room. She shut Mom in. Paige’s feet scraped against the carpet to my bed, and she leaned toward my face.

“Stay in bed, David. Just stay in bed.” She smelled only of cigarettes. A kiss of smoke to my head. “Just stay in bed.”

She left the room, closing my door the only way it closed: without sound. But that it was closed didn’t mean I couldn’t hear through it. Paige made noises, grunting noises, dragging noises, and she swore more than once. But never did the house make a noise: no floors creaked, no doors banged, and no blinds sucked in and out. Breathless. Soon, the light under my door went off, and she walked the hallway, opened Mom’s door, closed herself in there. I heard her talking quietly. Mom made no noise, and so I knew she was crying. Mom spoke only once: “Duna’gakia, doosis.”

Thank you, my little girl.

I got up out of bed, slipped out of my room. Through the dark I walked into the living room. I picked my blanket off the floor, wrapped it over my shoulders, and went to the back door. I touched the wood in the dark, my fingers searching for the deadbolt latch. It was cold. I turned it once and sealed us in. I squinted at the clock on the wall. I went back down the hallway, and Mom’s door opened.

Paige spoke quietly. “What did I say?”

“I was locking the door,” I whispered.

Smoke hand in my hair, she nudged me to my room and into bed. “Sleep.” She shut my door.

Paige went in the bathroom, the fan humming, growing louder and louder until she flushed the toilet and flicked the fan off. The bathroom door opened, creaked a bit. Then Mom’s door opened, and Paige slid in. A click.

It was then that I heard his breathing. How long had he been snoring? How long had he been unleashed, way away, dreaming? And was it easy for him.

“There’s none in my house,” I whispered. “There’s none in my house.”

In the early morning, the sun barely touching my blinds, I woke to Tyson still snoring. I watched him, his crooked nose, eyes crusted with googies, hair flat on one side. His breaths were short, quick, his blankets undulating over him.

I got up, walked the cold linoleum into the kitchen. Five-thirty a.m. Mud and dirt covered the floor, and in the living room a shelf was on the ground, Mom’s little knickknacks scattered all over the place. I slipped the shelf back on the two nails, went around picking up her small glass turtles and miniature buckets, filling them with the tiny, tiny painted wooden fruits.

After I’d placed everything back on the shelf, Tyson came down the hallway, rubbing his eyes, squinting at the growing sun shining through the kitchen window.

“Sleep good?” I said.

“Real good.”

With my foot I brushed as best I could the dirt on the floor, piling it near the back door.

“Hey,” I said to him. “Let’s bring that PS1 to the living room TV. Play it in color.”

We hooked the PS1 up in the living room, turned the TV down way low, and while the game was loading, our stomachs rumbled. We looked at each other, and nothing else needed be said. I went to the freezer and, hidden under an empty ice tray, were the two Hot Pockets I’d taken from his house. I nuked them in the microwave, and on the last second I hit end, not wanting those five obnoxious beeps to wake Mom or Paige. Tyson was already playing, but he paused the game to take his plate.

The first two bites were piping hot, and my tongue was all burned when I reached the still frozen middle. Tyson didn’t dive right in; he took his time, nibbled, blew on the oozing cheese and slices of pepperoni. I was all done by the time he got to his middle.

“I’m not waiting,” I whispered, taking the controller while he ate. I unpaused the game, and as I did Dr. N. Gin’s laser killed me and Tyson laughed. “Let’s see you do it,” I said to him.

Tyson set his plate down, cold cheese stuck to his lip, and he took the controller. Then he went at it, hitting Doctor N. Gin one after the other, running back and forth on the platform and dodging each laser blast. I was leaning forward, really close to the TV, looking back and forth from the screen to Tyson, who told me to move, he couldn’t see. And then Dr. N. Gin started blasting away parts of the platform, a part of the level we hadn’t before reached, and Tyson had to jump the little bandicoot away, kept getting to safety until finally the spaceship backed up, settled, leaving us on the edge of the couch, wondering what next.

What next?

And then the spaceship started shaking, grew greener and greener and greener until Dr. N. Gin and the spaceship imploded. That little orange bandicoot just started jumping up and down, celebrating like Tyson and me, each of us standing on the couch, balancing on flimsy cushions while we bowed to an imaginary audience.

“Thank you, thank you,” Tyson was saying. I clapped and clapped, and then a voice spoke out behind us and we sat right down, still as stone.

“You two are retarded,” Paige said. She did look like she wanted to laugh, but she held back behind puffy eyes. She put her finger to her lips. The silent cross.

Tyson or I must had accidentally hit a few buttons, because when Paige left and we looked at the TV, the game had started the next level, and we were already dead. Tyson held the controller, and I reached over and hit x.

Restart, lives replenished.