Vengeance(121)

She smiled when she saw me, and my bad mood disappeared again in an instant. “Pretty good.”

“Seems like a tough job. Dealing with Dylan, I mean.”

She opened her mouth to answer, then closed it. After a moment, she said, “He’s . . . how do you say it? Hands full?”

“Hands full is right,” I said, and we both laughed. “How long have you worked for his family?”

“Three months. My friend worked there before me. She told me not to take the job, but . . .” She shrugged. “I need the money.”

“Tell me about it.” I looked down at the end of the platform, then back at her. I wanted to find out more about Britta, who she was and where she came from, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Dylan. I was still haunted by that image of him holding Amber’s head underwater. “Have you ever wondered if he might be . . . dangerous?”

I thought about a case we’d studied in criminal justice during spring semester, involving two seven-year-old boys who had murdered a toddler. We discussed whether they should be punished as severely as teenagers, or even as adults, despite their age. Their attorney had argued they were too young to know what they had done and should be released, but the court disagreed. The boys were sentenced to juvenile detention until the age of twenty-one, which some of my classmates thought was extreme.

Not me. I believed they were stone-cold killers. They wouldn’t stop. As soon as they got out, they’d just do it again.

“Dangerous? No, not little Dylan.” Britta shook her head emphatically, but there was uncertainty in her eyes.

A train rumbled at the edge of the tunnel, its headlights blasting through the dark. I turned to Britta.

“So I was thinking . . . do you want to get together sometime? For coffee? We could even talk about something besides Dylan.”

She smiled, beaming at me. “Yes. I would certainly like that.”



AFTER THE POOL episode, Dylan was on his best behavior for the next two days, and I started to think that maybe I was wrong about him. Maybe he wasn’t such a bad kid, and I had just overreacted.

And then there was the incident with the Star Wars figures.

Kids weren’t supposed to bring their own toys to camp, but I didn’t see it as any big deal. He’d brought them out of his cubby during afternoon playtime, and since Rebecca hadn’t noticed, I didn’t say anything.

“This is me,” he said, holding out an Anakin Skywalker figure. “And this is you.”

Apparently I was Darth Vader.

When I reached for the figure, Dylan pulled it away. “Huh-uh,” he said with a fake babyish voice. “It’s mine.”

He sat at one of the tables and moved the figures across an imaginary starscape. Ignoring him, I let myself get drawn into the kitchen area by Amber, who served me an imaginary breakfast of pancakes and ice cream. “Delicious,” I said, spooning it up.

And then I heard Dylan call my name. “Eddie! Eddie!”

I looked over but all I saw was Royce jabbing his paintbrush furiously at the easel, creating a splotchy mess, and Michael painting a picture of a dog the exact same shade of green as his socks.

“Eddie!” I heard for the third time, and when I finally saw him, I was shocked.

Dylan had built his favorite shape, the tall tower with a single long block on top, only this time he had added something else to it. My missing shoelace. Dylan had tied one end of it along that top block and the other end of the lace hung down, forming a makeshift noose around the Darth Vader action figure.

“You’re on my galley,” he said, smiling.

And I thought: gallows. He’s been saying gallows. He must have learned about them on his family vacation to England, during a visit to some medieval castle or other. Now instead of a fort or a spaceship or anything a normal kid would create, the little son of a bitch was making a gallows, just so he could threaten me.

I charged across the room, my arm pulled back, and Dylan flinched as though he thought I might hit him. I didn’t. Instead, I swatted the blocks aside, watched them scatter across the floor. A couple of the pieces flew toward the easel and landed at Royce’s feet. He stared at me in utter shock. Rebecca whirled and stared at me. But I ignored her and looked right at Dylan.

“You knocked down my galley,” he said, his lower lip starting to quiver.

“Yeah, well, fuck you and your goddamn galley.”

I was about to say more when Rebecca stomped over, kicking aside one of the fallen blocks. “Eddie, get your stuff and go.” That was all she said, that I was fired.

When I got down to the lobby, I went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face and then ducked into a stall, where I tried to throw up. But I couldn’t. I was angry and confused. I went through it all, trying to imagine what I should have done differently, but I knew that things had had to end like this. Dylan had made sure of it.