Chapter 10
Billy Parker
Billy Parker was ripped from sleep by the deep, guttural sound of the dog barking next door, the image of the monster in his nightmare still ringing in his head like the horrible notes of a high-pitched flute.
He couldn’t make out the details. All he could see was a dark shadow of a man, blood gushing from his mouth.
Billy had had the recurring dream since he’d woken one night and he could have sworn he saw the monster standing at his window.
The monster didn’t speak, didn’t move, all he did was stare at him with a predatory kind of stillness.
When Billy cried out—once his frozen vocal chords started working—the monster disappeared.
Poof, gone like magic. His mom was furious he’d woken her, and she told him he was mad …
stupid … worthless. The next day, when she had calmed down, she told him it was just a bad dream.
Probably it was just a nightmare, but he’d kept the curtains shut after that.
The dog was still barking. Billy groaned and rubbed his eyes. Sitting up, he blinked sluggishly into the dark until the layers of the room came into focus.
“Fucking dog,” he mumbled under his breath.
It was always barking. It was a rotten something, the lady who owned it said, a big black-and-brown dog.
Rotten seemed about right for waking him this early.
It used to bark at him too, but Billy had snuck him food, if you could call peas food, jamming them through a hole in the fence.
Eventually the dog, Mack, had become his friend.
He would gallop up to the fence and slobber on Billy’s hand.
Billy even snuck over there sometimes when the lady next door went to work and his mom was asleep on the couch or sitting at the kitchen table staring at it like it was a TV screen, smoke hanging out of her lips.
She barely registered anything Billy said or did when she was like that.
Billy’s belly growled around the emptiness. His mom didn’t come home for dinner last night, and he and his sister had only had a peanut butter sandwich. He wasn’t allowed to use the stove because he was only eight and his sister, Lottie, was six. Not that there was anything to cook anyway.
He got up, took off his Superman pajamas and threw them on the floor.
He opened the drawer and rifled through until he found a pair of shorts and a gray Superman t-shirt.
Billy loved Superman. Sometimes at night, when he lay in bed, he dreamed his father was Superman and he would fly down and smile and say, “I’m so sorry, Billy, I didn’t know I had a child.
I came for you as soon as I found out.” And he would take him, Lottie and his mom to a big, beautiful home, where he would have all the food he wanted.
Billy padded barefoot out to the hallway, walked to his sister’s room, and peered in.
Her blonde hair fluffed out across her pillow, she was huddled under her pink comforter sound asleep.
Billy walked past his mother’s room. He wasn’t allowed in there when the door was closed.
He knew better than to open and look. He walked in once when he heard his mom moaning.
He thought she was in pain. She had yelled and thrown a pillow at him.
The door to her room was open about an inch, so he paused, trying not to make a sound, and peeked in. The bed was unmade and empty.
Billy sighed; it was the second night in a row she didn’t come home. He wouldn’t be going to school again today.
He went to the kitchen and opened the cupboard door.
They had four bits of bread left. He pulled the chair out from under the kitchen table, heaved it over to the cupboard, and stood up on it.
Right at the top of the cabinet was an old coffee tin.
His mom hid all sorts of things up there, and sometimes it had some change in it.
He stood on his tippy-toes and reached in.
Snagging the tin, he dragged it out, coins dinging against the side.
Happy, Billy climbed down, grabbed a knife, and jacked it under the lid, carefully maneuvering it until the lid clicked up.
He reached in, fumbled around, and pulled the coins out.
He was pretty good at counting money. He pulled the coins across the bench, adding them up as he went, and worked out they had four dollars and thirty-five cents.
He could buy a full loaf of bread with that.
He slipped the money into his pocket and carefully put the tin back where he got it from so his mother wouldn’t know he had taken it.
She would sometimes scratch her head and say, “I was sure there was a few bucks left. You didn’t take the money, did you, Billy? ”
Billy would shake his head and with a straight face tell her no. She would mutter a cuss word under her breath.
Billy jumped down.
Next, he made two peanut butter sandwiches and turned on the TV to watch cartoons.
Climbing up onto the old brown couch, he ate one, but he was still hungry; he stared at the remaining sandwich, trying to ignore the gnawing in his belly.
The sandwich seemed to call his name. He bit his bottom lip.
He could eat it, go to the store in the morning, and buy a loaf for Lottie.
He reached for the sandwich. Then snapped his hand back and sat on it just to be sure.
Lottie would be hungry too when she got up.
If his mother didn’t come back by lunchtime, he would put a cartoon on for Lottie and sneak off to the corner store a few blocks away. He didn’t leave her unless he had to. People asked questions if they saw him out alone on a school day.
Questions usually led to them being removed and made to live with strangers, or his mother yelling at him, neither of which appealed to Billy.