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When the credits rolled, Manny didn’t wait for the tag-on scene we knew came later, he just stood up, didn’t look around, and filed out with the rest of the crowd, his legs stiff but moving, his arms swinging in a limited range, like action-figure arms. I leaned over, threw up into and through the bottom of my cupholder, and then smushed my cup down into it like to hide it.
Manny was good for it all, was always game. Until we kind of just left him behind like a baseball glove we didn’t need anymore.
We deserved him coming for us, yeah.
I froze, looked harder, finally cued in to a painted-on eye watching from a break between the bushes. Manny.
“You’re growing, aren’t you?” I said to the idea of Manny. The idea of him nodded back. He was hungry, he was growing, and he sort of remembered us.
It had been the same superhero movie we’d taken Manny to.
held it down with my hand like the truth was trying to rise up, force itself on me.
a mannequin juiced on Miracle-Gro,
I’d read Frankenstein in AP English, so I knew you don’t just walk away from your creations. Not without consequences.
Either way, we were dead.
My alibi was streaming in my bedroom, which I wasn’t in.
Like all of our families, though, they were potential collateral damage, innocent parties Manny would crush when he reached down through their roof for the kid he used to play with, the kid who used to love him.
Tim’s dad, ex-dad, former dad, grieving dad, whatever,
His first question back would probably be along the lines of “why me,” as in, Why just him, as in: Why not you too, Sawyer?
No, this had to be me. I had to toughen up, like my dad was always telling me. You were right, Dad. Thanks for the advice, man.
I cut the engine just down from Tim’s house, coasted into the trees, tensed up because, with the headlight off for this final approach, I might be about to get sliced in half by a barbwire strand I wouldn’t see until too late.
“Saw?” he creaked, stretching it into a yawn, and of all the moments of this whole thing, this was by far the longest one. It was like the world was suddenly this huge balloon inflating around me, everything swelling at once, the pressure all around pounding in breath by breath. I hadn’t expected him to say my name, I mean, hadn’t expected him to call me what he and no one else had been calling me since third grade.
It’s not easy, killing your best friend. One of them, anyway. But, I told myself, this was the only way to save his family from Manny.
It was the movie we’d taken Manny to. The same one Shanna had been pirating.
In the reflection of his monitor I could see his face, dying, and my balaclava’d eyes above, crying. “I love you, I love you,” I said to him during his last few kicks, because I didn’t want him to die any more scared than he had to.
fell back onto his bed, cried the rest of my insides out, almost throwing up from it,
It wasn’t my fault, I wanted to scream. I shouldn’t have to feel this, like this. I was the hero here, not the bad guy. I was saving lives. The few I had to take shouldn’t count against me, shouldn’t hurt so much. Not when considered against all the people not dying.
I pulled out the flea market knives I’d brought as backup and used them to pin Tim to the wall like an insect in biology.
Kids at school would be talking about him for years. For forever. “You’re welcome, man,” I said to him,
I was learning.
TWO DAYS LATER I called an emergency meeting of those of us not yet dead.
Did he look like a guy who had just lost two of his lifelong best friends? I wasn’t sure. Did I look like that?
I’d bought it for two reasons. The first was that, when Tim had seen me, seen my actual me-face, I’d nearly lost it, nearly quit, nearly had to run away. Second, if I looked like Manny, and if I was doing this because of Manny, then it was really like I wasn’t even doing it, right? It was like Manny was here himself by proxy, me as his mini-avatar, who could fit into the tight, human-sized spaces.
It’s probably best we were all dying, right? We were falling apart anyway. Too much was changing.
when we sat up on the hot pebbly flatness of the water spout hugging our knees, that was when I started crying. Not JR, not Danielle, me,
And it’s not like aging was going to be a concern for her either.
So the little brother I’d been trying to protect, he was scarred for life now. Great. He was alive to be scarred, though, I told myself.
trying to decide who next. It doesn’t mean I’m a good friend.
I hope it was fast. Like it wasn’t with Tim. But that was my first try. He was practice, he was me finding my feet.
Why would a man made of plastic want human food?
Would they make the necessary connections, draw the good deduction, save me from having to finish what I’d started?
“if, like, you and your friends, Gabe and Alexa and whoever, if y’all find a mannequin like from the department store, then you know not to play with it, don’t you?”
Roaches have always been his terror.
For me, what was a thousand times scarier than a bug was a blank-faced man made of plastic watching a whole movie, then standing up from that movie, walking away into the real world. And also having to stab Tim to his bedroom wall, after choking him with a glow-in-the-dark edging line. And Shanna seeing her bedroom window suddenly bright with headlights.
This is what I do, I save people. And dogs.
and Tim had been going to die anyway, so it’s not like I even really did anything, right? Anything except save them.
Sacrifices were having to be made. Prices were having to be paid.
On the way to Steve’s compact, sensible little hatchback—of course he’d drive something like that, not anything cool
I’d been hesitating, watching them, thinking if Manny came for Danielle while she was out with Steve, and Steve got crushed in a giant footprint or whatever, that would be no great loss, really. I might even get bonus points.
Steve-o the raging pube.
They were in what I guess, if we’d all lived, we might have started calling the Manny Seat: right in the middle of everything.
But then, suddenly, Danielle was standing in front of me, staring right at me, the bright movie screen behind her glowing through her hair like she was the superhero.
That’s how she thought, trust me.
Like I say, I never went for Steve, not really. And I have zero idea what Danielle saw in him.
My glow-in-the-dark cord whipped up into the dusty projector light like a tentacle in a monster movie, soaking in every last lumen it could, then looped down over his throat,
