Disappearance at Devil's Rock by Paul Tremblay Page B

Elizabeth. It is. But you didn’t see Tommy. You—”
    â€œMom. He was there. It wasn’t just seeing him. I—I smelled him. His smell was there. I swear to God I could smell him, too.”
    And that’s too much for Kate. She stands up, loudly knocking the kitchen chair back into the wall. She stuffs her earbuds back in, as deep as they can go so that the drone of Ministry’s “N.W.O.” jackhammers inside her head. She walks out of the kitchen and into the living room on the way to her bedroom. The living room really isn’t on the way. Kate feels Mom and Nana call out to her, their words bouncing offher back. She doesn’t stop. She doesn’t end up going to her bedroom, either. She goes into Tommy’s room.
    His bed is made, which is just wrong. It makes Tommy’s room look like a hotel room or a movie set. Mom must’ve come in and made it this morning before Kate got up. Tommy’s bed is never made. It isn’t that Tommy is a total slob; far from it. His room is always more clean and tidy than Kate’s disaster area. Tommy never dumps his clothes (clean or dirty) on the floor. All of his books and comics are neatly stacked in the big bookcase along the wall and in the smaller one built into his bed frame. His desk is clear of clutter. His pens, pencils, and markers sit like floral arrangements in plastic cups of various colors, the color scheme hinting to some design and reason. Even his posters (Iron Man, the Avengers, a Minecraft Creeper, and a life-sized wall decal of the Legend of Zelda hero Link) are positioned in an orderly fashion; one on each wall, each hung from the same height. So Tommy isn’t opposed to keeping his room neat; he only thought that making his bed was unnecessary. As he once eloquently explained to Kate and an annoyed Mom, making the bed was purely cosmetic. What was the point if no one was going into his room to see his bed anyway, and if he was going to turn down and sleep in the same blanket and sheets again? Kate agrees in principle, and she’s adopted a more extreme version of Tommy’s philosophy with her own room.
    Kate turns off her music and listens for footsteps coming down the hall. There are none. She can’t even hear Mom and Nana talking anymore. It’s dark in Tommy’s room. She doesn’t turn on a light. Instead, she pulls up the blinds on the two windows on either side of his bed and inwardly braces at the thought of finding someone (a dark shape, the dark shape, Tommy?) staring back through the glass. There’s no one there. His windows are east-facing and look out into the green, rectangular backyard. It’s sunny out, but the sun has already begun its descent on the other side of the house.
    Tommy’s desk is a sturdy hunk of lacquered wood that is probably older than their house. Mom picked it up at a yard sale a few years ago, and it took the three of them to lug it past the front door and then drag it (with towels underneath the desk legs) into Tommy’s room. Tommy refers to his desk as Stonehenge, and it’s as clean and kept as it was on the day they brought it into the house. It has none of the graffiti or gouge marks that splotch Kate’s tiny, elementary-school-reject desk.
    Kate sits at his desk, willing herself to not dwell on what Mom said about believing Tommy was dead and the shadow image of Tommy’s ghost and how it oddly dovetailed with what kids were saying online. Of course not not-thinking about something like that is impossible, and she imagines his ghost all scrunched up below her, reaching out for her feet. She takes multiple quick looks under the desk and around the room, trying but not hoping to see Tommy.
    The desk chair is hard molded plastic and is cold on the backs of her thighs. Adrift on the vast expanse of the desktop is his laptop. It’s closed and unplugged. Stickers of cartoon characters are all over it, and the mostly ironic