Just then, the door opened and a lady cop motioned for the detectives to come into the hall. “Sit tight, kid,” Detective Forehead told me. “We’ll be back to have you sign a confession in a minute.”
They didn’t have anything for me to sign when they came back, though. Instead, they did something I never would’ve expected in a million years. They told me to go home.
I’m like, “What? Just like that?”
“Just like that,” Detective Forehead said as he studied the contents of some kind of paperwork.
“Don’t worry, Dylan,” added Detective Hair Gel. “We’ll be in touch. Don’t leave the city.”
Don’t leave the city. Like maybe I had a private jet waiting to fly me off to Acapulco.
CHAPTER 3
Waiting for my parents to come pick us up, Randy and I sat on the edge of the concrete planter in front of the station trading interrogation stories as we simultaneously texted the news to whoever came to mind. Turned out Randy didn’t crack under pressure after all. In fact, he had a better strategy than I did—playing dumb ass. He acted like he couldn’t even understand the questions, getting the cops to restate them over and over, then acting like he understood, only to come up with an answer that made no sense at all.
“I think those guys chasing us might have been Wiccans,” he told them when they asked him how long he’d known Hector.
Not bad. Maybe Randy was some kind of weird genius after all. He wore them out way before they could wear him out, so they came back at me.
“But why do you think they let us go all of a sudden like that?” he asked, the streetlight shining on his oily brown hair.
“Simple,” I said. “They probably finally called the grocery store and found out we were at work all evening. Idiots.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Kind of hard to get loaded up on ecstasy with your buddies when you’re standing around catching salami coming down a conveyor belt and packing it into paper or plastic. They should’ve called the store before hauling us to the station.”
“Nazis.”
Driving us home, my parents also got pissed about the cops giving us the third degree, but did they do anything about it? No. They just rattled on about civil rights until it finally dawned on my mom that finding a dead kid in a Dumpster might be traumatic for our tender teenage minds. Then she and Dad both started in with their TV-talk-show psychotherapy. Randy and I traded exasperated looks like, Parents—how can they be so clueless?
At home, I passed on their offer to sit around the kitchen table with some cold leftovers and discuss my feelings about what happened. They meant well, but how could I talk about Hector Maldonado while Mom and Dad stared back at me like I was still their five-year-old little teddy bear? No, I accepted the cold meat loaf all right, but I took it back to my room, where I could call my all-time best friend and confidante, Audrey Hoffman.
I’d known Audrey since the days of the little inflatable backyard swimming pool—me in my Tiki-head swim trunks and her in the frilly pink one-piece that I never let her forget. I mean, you should see her now—she’s definitely not frilly or pink. Mostly she does her hair in pigtails and wears plaid shirts, baggy black pants, and some kind of hat, mainly a black Kangol 504. Artsy garb. She’s the photographer on the school paper but plans on doing high-art photography later on.
Audrey used to live across the street, so we did everything together. We read the same books, watched horror movies on late-summer nights, even shot two-character videos in the backyard. The best had to be the one about two Martians trying to figure out how to eat spaghetti. It was pretty hilarious.
When she found out her parents were getting divorced and she would have to move across town with her mother, she came straight to me. Same with when she decided she was a lesbian in seventh grade. Turned out we had similar tastes in girls. Not that either one of us was exactly successful in that department. At least not by the start of junior year.
So, anyway, there was no way I could go to bed without talking to her voice-to-voice about this latest ordeal. In a way, she was kind of like my conscience sometimes. I could talk to her, and she’d help me figure out what was really important. This time she didn’t seem to totally get what I was going through, though. I tried to explain how the cops had hammered away at me, making me feel like a total nobody loser, but she kept pulling the conversation back in Hector’s direction.
Why didn’t I haul him out of the Dumpster? she wanted to know. Give him a little dignity. And she couldn’t understand how the cops could be so sure Hector had OD’d. Guys like Hector don’t OD, not in her opinion. She even wanted to know when his funeral was going to be. Like I could possibly know that already.
I’m like, “Look, I’m trying to explain how these cops go at you like everything you ever were doesn’t matter.”
And she goes, “Well, I just thought you’d care a little more about Hector.”
“I care, but nobody can do anything to him anymore. Me, I’m not so sure about.”
Maybe talking about the thing wasn’t such a good idea after all. When I got into bed, every time I closed my eyes I saw Hector’s face, staring blankly, the candy-bar wrapper stuck to his cheek. I felt his arm next to mine and his hair against my fingers. Dead-kid hair. And in the background I heard Detectives Forehead and Hair Gel drilling me with questions, trying to beat me down. What if I hadn’t had an alibi? Would I be in jail right now? It was enough to make you feel like a beetle on the sidewalk with a boot raised right over your head.