“Bug!”
The slight gloss that had begun to cloud over the boy at the counter’s eyes disappeared in an instant as he snapped to attention.
The gesture appeared strange on the boy, unsuited for one so young, but there were several odd things about the boy, from the unpleasant Quasimodo look stemming from a lump over one eye and the other being caught as if in a permanent squint; his eyes were strange, too, for how out of place they appeared on his young face.
If one were to search through the house, they could find pictures of this boy, not more than a year or two before, with hair golden like the sun and a grin, now-faded, in his eye; now the soft features of a boy framed blue eyes that had shifted from tropical, paradisiacal blue to something more resembling a stone dropped into the fathomless depths. Even his hair seemed to have lost some of its luster and diminished.
James Eugene ‘Bug’ Greyson’s name carried the same lopsided imbalance as his appearance, as did his nickname's origin: cowering and begging not to be killed once, upon hearing the family releasing a torrent of abuse about an errant spider and how the life would be ground out of it that struck a little too close to home.
The gloss had begun to return to his eyes.
After the pair in the room were sure he was paying attention, listening to the dangerous situation he’d landed them in, their argument had resumed and he went back to being forgotten, something intimately familiar to him.
You have to pay attention, though, a voice in his head warned him as the temptation to slip into his mind and conjure up imaginary places, people, creatures, things—to escape from this drab, dim kitchen with its ever-pervasive air of something that smelled like the accumulated bits of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that had slipped into house’s vents over the years of running a daycare.
“—someone sees them, we could get—“
“It’s not going to matter if there’s a surprise inspection.”
“Those were supposed to be developed last week. If the police already have a copy, what do we say when they knock and ask where ours is?"
“Anytime, Todd, anytime. It’s a daycare. They just pound on the door and—"
“I don’t know!” It was hard to tell whether his body or his voice was more tense. Already, he was gritting his teeth with such force the sound could be heard from across the room. “But if they’re destroyed and they know we picked them up, it’s destruction—”
He couldn’t bring himself to finish the sentence; instead his eyes darted around the room: first to the windows, then to the phone, but even that wasn’t enough to ease his mind no one could hear.
The more James heard the panic and saw his frantic movements, the more certain he was; this time, whatever he’d done, it had been bad.
What pictures? Part of him thought about thought about asking but he was afraid he knew the terrible answer already and didn’t want them to accuse him of acting innocent, trying to lie to them, pretending to be a victim, turning on the tears.
When Lenny had taken the pictures, he’d said that it was because James had been misbehaving, warned him there would be a reckoning—even Ratched hadn’t seemed in the mood for her usual fun by riling him up, straddling the fence on whose side she was going to take.
“I’m supposed to be at the library by now,” he said.
He stomped out of the room and returned a second later, keys jangling in his pocket.
“Figure this out, Milady. I need to go study my investments and get back so I can work in the morning. Gonna be hard to make ends meet if you get the daycare shut down because you can’t—"
Storm clouds formed in the brief seconds before she answered; James felt his heart sink. If they fought, everything would get worse. He thought, again, about saying something, but nothing he could say would help.
You’re in so much trouble.
“Bug! Come on. What are you doing?”
The scene had changed in the brief moment when he had slipped away, overwhelmed by fear. His father was gone and his mother now stood with the sliding door cracked open, just enough to let the two of them slip out into the crisp autumn night. She pulled the door shut behind them. Only a sliver of light slipped through the blinds, illuminating only a small patch of light on the massive deck
Seeing this, his mother guided him around to the side of the house, where there were no windows, where the little play house for the daycare blocked any view from the road. Cloudy as the night was, he could make out something indistinct and unrecognizable in her hand. When had she gotten it?
When you weren’t paying attention in the kitchen. This is the kind of thing that keeps getting you into trouble. She’s going to be even madder if she finds out. Don’t ask what it is.
“James Eugene Greyson, you need to see this. You need to realize how much trouble you almost got us all in.”
But for what?
He knew better than to ask. It was his fault and asking her what and why would only make her angrier—something this severe wasn’t a mystery and she would know he was lying.
Lenny told you. He said you’d be in trouble. You should have listened. Another voice, weak, began, But I thought if she knew, she would—
It didn’t matter what he thought. He’d been wrong. Lenny had told him so. Ratched had looked at him like he’d really crossed a line when Lenny was upset enough to call him a bastard. And now here was the proof of it.
He’d taken a risk and gotten burned. It was the kind of thing he heard his dad talk about all the time.
A match strike snapped him back, again, from his drifting thoughts. There would be time to sort this out later.
Once he was in bed. Safe. Alone.
Once he was sure his punishment for the night was over.
After two matches didn’t do the trick, she bundled them and pulled the photos out of the envelope, letting the empty space within the orange, red, and white envelope flick to life with corrosive flame. Before its unquenchable appetite could sicken and die from gluttonous surfeit, quenched with paper alone, she reached for the pictures and began to drop them in, one by one.
The grey smoke turned dark, dark as night, and the stench of the glossy photos as they burned filled the air.
“You need to watch, James,” his mother said, before he could begin to drift.
He made himself look into the swirling fire, saw the second picture as it felt the first kiss of fire: him, in pajamas, standing in the kitchen where his parents had argued only a few minutes before, a blue box of Cap’n Crunch in one hand. Or was it Frosted Flakes?
Don’t get distracted. You’re in trouble. Mom’ll be mad if she sees.
His dad had bought up money, and he knew what that always meant.
Anything that got between him and money was getting between the family and financial independence, and that couldn’t be tolerated.
A sizzle and another acrid burst of smoke as a few pictures tumbled into the flames. These ones were harder to look at, but as much as he wanted to turn away, his mother’s voice kept ringing in the back of his head: you need to watch, James.
Through the corrosive fire, he caught glimpses of his pajamas, no longer covering his body but binding it, spread-eagle, the knots pulling tight around his wrists. All but one only showed him—but there was one, toward the end, showing the larger man climbing onto the bed, crawling like some beast coming up from hell.
“Do you have any idea how much trouble you’ll be in if these are ever found?”
A few more pictures tumbled into the fire, showing the clothed man over the near-naked boy, their faces sickeningly close. He gritted his teeth until he heard them crack, the same way his father’s had in the kitchen, almost like a kernel in a bag of popcorn, and that jarred more words from her.
“If anyone ever finds out—if you ever get asked—you know what they’ll do? The police will come and take you away. They’ll never let you see grandma or grandpa again. You won't see any of us. Ever again. That's what will happen.”
A chill ran through him as ice sprouted from his core. He fixed his gaze on the flames more resolutely now, trying to peer through them despite the smoke, despite the dryness in his eyes. He needed to remember.
“The police will come and take you away. Remember that foster boy down the road? That’s what they’ll do to you. You get kicked around from house to house with people who bully you. And no one cares what you say or want. You don’t get to ever see your family. Is that what you want?”
He shook his head, but that wasn’t enough.
“Is that what you want, James?”
She hesitated before dropping in the penultimate bundle of pictures, as if she might reconsider what she was doing, as if she might decide to turn around and go inside and send them off to the police herself, like she might call them out and have him taken away for his misbehavior.
She had the pictures—what if she kept them? What if someone saw them? Then how much trouble would he be in?
“No!”
His voice cracked with desperation and she fixed him with an odd gaze, as if measuring him, checking to see whether he wanted them destroyed bad enough, whether he had learned his lesson, whether he was sorry—complicit—enough for her comfort.
And then the pictures tumbled into the flames.
This time, they didn’t sicken him. He felt grateful, eager to see them burn. Glad to know that they would be gone and, once they were, this terrible fate hovering over his head would be gone, too.
“Are you sure?”
She hesitated again with the pictures in her palm and he nodded, then remembered this hadn’t been enough before.
“Yes! Please, mom! I’ll be a good boy, I promise!”
“Okay. I’m trusting you, James. You know how important trust is, don’t you? I’m one of the only honest people you’ll ever meet, so it means a lot for me to trust you. I can trust you, can’t I?”
“Yes!”
One picture tumbled in, just enough to keep the begging flames sated.
His lip began to tremble with desperation but he fought back tears, forced himself to keep staring into the flames.
His tears were all fake, anyway, weren’t they?
That was what Lenny and Ratched kept telling him. And mom and dad agreed after seeing how easy it was for her to tickle his sides or his armpits or just run her hair over his face and take him from sobbing to giggling—so when he was crying out on the bed for help, those were fake tears too, weren’t they?
“He can just turn on the tears,” they’d kept telling their parents.
And soon their parents had come to agree: “Quit turning on the tears to get what you want, James.”
So they were fake, right? Just like how he had been fooling himself when he thought misbehaving was going to get Lenny in trouble instead of him. Of course mom would know she could trust Lenny: Lenny had earned her trust. James hadn’t.
But this is my chance to change that.
Another picture tumbled into the flames and snapped his attention back. He hoped before his mother hadn't seen it drifting.
“I promise I’ll be better mom. I won’t tell anyone and I won’t do it again!”
Another picture; there couldn’t be many more, maybe two, three at most?
His heart raced faster, as if he was nearing the finish line; he could feel the burden of these pictures being lifted from him.
“You’re going to be on your best behavior from here on out?”
“Yes, mom, I promise!”
“Do you promise? If you really promise…”
She paused long enough for another picture to meet its demise, chewing over her thoughts.
“If you really promise to be good—and you need to be good, I better not hear anything about you misbehaving in class or causing any problems while you’re being babysat or anything bad, I might not have to tell grandma about this. But you have to really promise to be good.”
And of course he did; the words spilled out as effusively as they could in his limited little boy vocabulary, begging that grandma didn’t need to know about this.
What if she never wanted to see him again?
“I promise!”
And the last of the pictures tumbled into the fire.
Memories repressed and denied, the pair made their way back inside.
Later, as he lay in bed, still unable to deal with the lingering terror and anxiety from what had happened, he found his thoughts drifting to a day over a year earlier, during his dad’s last slow season, a day when Mrs. Cappelle had called the class over into the reading corner first thing in the morning.
It was a terrible, scary day, she said, and their parents might not act the way they normally did.
But everything was going to be okay and they would understand more when they got older and learned more about what had happened, what the Twin Towers were, and why this day was so important. He could remember something about it in the news coming up in the news a few weeks later that got his dad angry and repeating, time and again, that people with nothing to hide had nothing to worry about.
He’d been proud, then, to think he had nothing to hide.
Now, he knew what it was like to be someone with something to hide.
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