So how do you lose your only friend? It’s an excellent question. I’m still searching for the answer. All I know is that the chain of events kicked off sixteen months ago. At the time, life was about as perfect as it will ever be. I should have known it wasn’t going to stay that way. I should have been prepping for disaster. The universe was worried that I’d go soft being happy. I needed trials and tribulations to keep me on my toes.
First my father accepted a job offer in Dubai. It was supposed to be temporary. “Only a couple of years,” my parents assured me. They seemed blissfully unaware that they were talking to someone for whom two years was the difference between Pokémon and pubic hair. I should have whipped out the Kishka at that point—and threatened to expose my mother’s crooked family tree. Then again, if I ever make a list of the shit I should have done, it would stretch all the way to Atlantic City.
While my parents enjoyed the fruits of slave labor in a tacky desert hellhole, our house in New Jersey would be transformed into a high-end vacation rental. I was not allowed to stay. They were adamant about this, though I emailed them countless articles about the things that took place in high-end vacation rentals and assured them that I couldn’t possibly do any more harm to the house than the furries and orgy enthusiasts who’d soon be occupying our bedrooms.
In the end, I was given two options, and staying in Brockenhurst wasn’t one of them. I could move to Dubai—or I could pack my bags for boarding school. My father’s illustrious alma mater in Massachusetts had accepted me for the spring semester. Which meant dear old Mom and Pop must have been plotting the move behind my back for quite some time. I would have been heartbroken if I’d ever trusted them in the first place.
I considered running away. I was pretty handy with a slingshot and pellet gun at that point. I figured, if nothing else, I could live in the woods. It was Kat who pointed out that I’d gone completely insane. There weren’t enough woods left to hide me. Besides, two years was nothing in the grand scheme of things, she said. And she said it with such conviction that I started to wonder if she could see the grand scheme from her bedroom window. At the end of our time apart, we’d both be out of high school, together and free. She swore we’d talk every day until then.
For the first six months we did. Then Kat’s mother, Linda, announced she was marrying a man named Wayne Gibson. He’d moved to town around the same time I left, and they’d bonded over bourbon at some local bar. Suddenly Kat was busy helping her mom make arrangements for the wedding. Our texts and video chats dwindled to a few a week. After the blessed nuptials took place, she sent me some pictures of the event. I didn’t say so at the time, but I thought her new stepdad looked like a real douchebag. He wore a military dress uniform with a bunch of fancy medals that he’d polished to a shine, and in every picture he stared straight at the camera, as if daring the photographer to take the photo off-center. But Linda in her frilly cupcake of a dress was beaming like she’d just been crowned prom queen. She’d always been so nice to me, though. I figured her happiness was all that mattered.
That was when Kat slowly began to vanish. She’d send me a strangely cheery note now and then, but most of my texts went unanswered and my emails weren’t opened. In my more paranoid moments, I started to think that maybe Kat had planned it all. That maybe she’d convinced me to leave New Jersey because her grand scheme didn’t include me. I went a little nuts with the cybersurveillance. I set up a Google alert for her name. I studied her dormant Instagram feed for secret messages. The last thing she’d posted was a series of photos devoted to the home improvements her new stepfather was making. There was nothing really interesting in the pictures—just lots of electronics and wires. She hadn’t posted on Facebook in months, so I stalked the profiles of our mutual acquaintances, searching for clues. I spotted a blur of copper-colored hair in the background of a few party pics, and that was it. Kat was alive, but she was moving too fast to be captured on camera. I kept writing her, sometimes three emails a day. The last time she responded, she told me she needed some space. The message was one sentence long.
Everything I thought I’d known had been torn down and reassembled. Kat had been my touchstone, and without her, I didn’t recognize the world anymore. I didn’t care to. I stopped going to class. I stayed in the dorm, playing Assassin’s Creed with my roommate, a Ukrainian head case named Elvis who collected toy robots and possessed a very dim view of the human race.
Then one morning four months ago, I woke up to find a Google alert for Katherine Foley. The Brockenhurst newspaper was reporting that she’d been arrested the previous night for stealing her stepfather’s SUV and driving it into an ornamental koi pond. The police report noted that a sodden, half-smoked joint had been discovered under the gas pedal.
The paper didn’t publish a picture, but I had no trouble finding a few online. I’m still surprised the photos didn’t go viral. The black SUV was submerged all the way to the backseat doors, and the pond’s fat golden koi were gliding in and out through the open windows. The half of the vehicle sticking out of the water was almost perfectly vertical. It was a truly impressive feat of automotive mishandling.
Scrolling through the pictures of Wayne Gibson’s SUV, I kept thinking back to that fateful day when I’d first stumbled across Gangsters of Carroll Gardens. One glimpse of the Kishka and I’d known he was my grandfather. I didn’t need to read the caption or contact the local genealogical society. I’d just known. The same way I knew that the wreck I was looking at on Facebook wasn’t an accident. I can’t explain why, but there was no doubt in my mind that Kat had destroyed her stepfather’s car on purpose.
Elvis drove home to see his parents most weekends, and he kept a run-down Volkswagen off campus. I suppose I should have been more suspicious when he offered to loan me the car if I let him use my computer. But I would have given him a kidney, too, if he’d asked. So I handed over the computer and drove seven hours to New Jersey. When I pulled up in Kat’s drive, I thought I might have made a wrong turn. The beautiful house I found in the middle of the woods looked nothing like the hovel I remembered. It was painted white, and the jack pines around it had been cleared. Somehow the foundation had been lifted as well, and the house no longer seemed to be sinking. I knocked on the door and Kat’s stepfather answered, greeting me with the same stare I’d seen in the wedding photos. He was compact and wound tight—six inches shorter than me and thirty years older. But I knew he could probably take me and I could see he was eager to try.
He politely informed me that Kat had been grounded and couldn’t see any friends. She’d fallen in with a bad crowd, he explained, and she needed some time alone to get her head back on straight. I assured Mr. Gibson that I had never belonged to any crowd—good or bad—and I’d driven all day just to see his stepdaughter.
“I know who you are, son,” I remember him telling me. “And I don’t think Katherine wants to see you. You haven’t been back here in months, and it would probably be best if you just stayed gone.”
It stung for a second, I gotta admit. That was just about the last thing I wanted to hear. But while part of me was inclined to believe it, hearing it come out of Mr. Gibson’s mouth felt wrong. There was no way in hell Kat would share her feelings—any feelings—with a man who looked like he invaded third-world countries for sport. So I asked if I could have a word with Linda instead. I was told Mrs. Gibson wasn’t at home, which was total bullshit. It was past seven in the evening, and I could smell Linda’s signature stew cooking. I said I’d be happy to wait, and Mr. Gibson said that wouldn’t be wise. When I sat down on the porch, he phoned the cops.
Officer Robinson arrived on the scene, and I was sure I’d been thrown a bit of good luck—until he and Kat’s stepfather greeted each other by name. Officer Robinson (Leslie Robinson, I now knew) took me aside for a man-to-man. He said he sure was sorry to hear about my recent breakup, and boy, did he feel my pain. He’d been dumped a few times in his day, and he’d learned that “sometimes a man has to just walk away.”
“Kat’s not my girlfriend,” I told him.
The cop just laughed. “Maybe it was never official, but you think I’m too old to recognize a young man in love?”
His expression was so cheesy that I wanted to vomit, but I managed to keep the contents of my stomach from spewing out onto his shoes. I swore I wasn’t in Brockenhurst to win Kat’s heart. Something was wrong with her, I insisted over and over. But I didn’t have any evidence to offer. As desperate as I was at that point, I wasn’t crazy enough to inform a policeman that my best friend had destroyed an SUV on purpose.
Officer Robinson wholeheartedly agreed that Kat was in trouble. The kids she’d been hanging out with were pretty bad news. But he promised me the Gibsons had the situation under control. They didn’t need—or want—any help. And then he warned me not to return to the house.
“Mr. Gibson works in the security business,” he told me in a low voice. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he has cameras up all over this property. I know for a fact that he’s licensed to carry a firearm, and I’m sure he’s got a few hidden away here. Believe me, Simon. You don’t want that man ever mistaking you for a prowler.”
I’m not an idiot. I knew better than to go back to Kat’s house. But I didn’t give up on her, either. For the next few days, I hung around town, sleeping in Elvis’s Volkswagen and trying to run into Kat. I was loitering outside the high school the following Monday when her stepfather dropped her off at the front door. I know she must have heard me calling her name, but she never even glanced in my direction. She clutched her books to her chest and bolted toward the entrance. When I tried to follow her inside, a guard stopped me and I got to have another man-to-man with Officer Robinson, who informed me that it’s never a good sign when a girl runs away from you. This time I had to agree.
An hour later, Officer Robinson personally escorted me and Elvis’s Volkswagen to the Brockenhurst town limits. I spent the first part of the drive back to Massachusetts cursing Kat for ignoring me. As I passed through Connecticut, the crosshairs of my rage shifted to Wayne Gibson. When I reached the Massachusetts border, I nearly did a one-eighty on the freeway. The SUV in the koi pond meant something, I was sure of it, and the answer was back in New Jersey. But I had no money and no place to stay, and I couldn’t bear any more sappy sympathy from Officer Robinson. The hopelessness of the situation was sinking in when I arrived at my boarding school dorm and was greeted by the FBI.
When the agents told me why they were there, I knew in an instant that opportunity had knocked. At some point during the three days I’d been gone, someone had used my computer to hack the server of the world’s largest manufacturer of Internet-connected toy robots.
Laugh all you like, but it’s not as ridiculous as it sounds. Imagine what someone who’s truly evil could do with an army of toy robots that can see, speak and record. The FBI certainly had a few ideas. But my roommate, the Ukrainian wing nut, apparently had something quite different in mind. He’d reprogrammed the toys to inform the children of the world that “The robot revolution is nigh.”
I don’t even know where Elvis was that evening. Probably hiding in a bathroom stall. Whoever was responsible for the hack was looking at a minimum of three years in jail, the FBI informed me. I’m sure that’s what would have happened if I’d ratted out Elvis, who’d already turned eighteen at that point. His parents were astrophysicists or something equally useless. My parents, as I’ve mentioned, are lawyers.
In the end, it was a win-win-win situation, as far as I was concerned. I got kicked out of school and sent back to Brockenhurst. Everyone thought I’d gone nuts. And since I’d saved Elvis’s life, he was now my humble servant. Of course I got probation. My parents were forced to return to the States and pay a massive fine, which they swore they’d recoup from my future earnings.
When the sentence came down, the judge must have seen that I was pleased with my punishment.
“You really thought it would be funny to scare the socks off a bunch of little kids? What are you—some kind of nihilist?” he demanded.
“No, sir,” I told him. “But I certainly appreciate all the good work those folks do.”
That earned me two months of mandatory counseling. But if I had a chance to do it all over, I’m pretty damn sure I’d say the same thing again.
So here we are.
I didn’t plan any of it. Fate brought me back to New Jersey for good. There’s no other place my parents can send me. No private school will accept me—not anymore. The United Arab Emirates denied me a visa. I didn’t just burn all my bridges. I blew them to hell with nuclear missiles. My father, who was forced to give up his cushy position in Dubai, refers to me as “the boy with no future.” Which is true, just not for the reason he thinks. Anyway, I couldn’t care less about the future. I came back for Kat. I did what I had to do. To be honest, I would have done anything.
The irony is, this particular princess doesn’t want to be rescued. I’ve been in Brockenhurst for four months now, and she’s barely said a word to me. I hoped Otherworld would fix that. But tomorrow morning when I see her at school, I don’t expect anything to have changed.