Voluntary Committal by Joe Hill

Author:Joe Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780061845185
Publisher: HarperCollins

I DIDN’T WANT to have anything to do with Eddie after that, but he couldn’t be avoided. He sat next to me in classes and passed me notes. I had to pass notes back to him so he wouldn’t think I was brushing him off. He showed up at my house after school, without warning, and we sat in front of the TV together. He brought his checkerboard and would set it up while we watched Hogan’s Heroes. I see now—and maybe I saw then—that he was consciously sticking close to me, watching over me. He knew he couldn’t allow me to put a distance between us, that if we weren’t partners anymore, I might do anything, even confess. And he knew too that I didn’t have the spine for ending a friendship, that I couldn’t not open the door to him when he rang the bell. That it was in me to just go along with the situation, no matter how uncomfortable, rather than try and change things and risk an upsetting confrontation.

Then, one afternoon, about three weeks after the accident out on Route 111, I discovered Morris in my room, standing at my dresser. The top drawer was open. In one hand he had a box of X-acto knife blades; there was a whole pile of junk like that in there, twine, staples, a roll of duct tape, and sometimes if Morris needed something for his never-ending fort, he would raid my supplies. In his other hand was the Polaroid of Mindy Ackers’s crotch. He held it almost to his nose, stared at it with round, uncomprehending eyes.

“Don’t go through my stuff,” I said.

“Isn’t it sad you can’t see her face?” he said.

I snapped the picture out of his hand and tossed it in the dresser. “Go through my stuff again and I’ll kill you.”

“You sound like Eddie,” Morris said, and he turned his head and stared at me. I hadn’t seen a lot of him the last few days. He had been in the basement even more than usual. His lean, delicate-boned face was thinner than I remembered, and I was uniquely conscious in that moment of how slight and fragile, how childlike his build was. He was almost twelve, but could’ve easily passed for eight. “Are you and him still friends?”

I was ragged from being worried all the time, spoke without thinking. “I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you tell him to go? Why don’t you make him go away?” He stood almost too close to me, staring up into my face with his unblinking saucer-plate eyes.

“I can’t,” I said, and turned away, because I couldn’t bear to meet his worried, mystified gaze. I felt stretched to the limit of what I could take, my nerves worn raw. “I wish I could. But no one can make him go away.” I leaned against the dresser, rested my forehead against the edge of it for a moment. In a rough whisper that I hardly heard myself, I said, “He can’t let me get away.

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