Hellhole (12 page)

Max wanted to scream. It was hard enough to protect his mother from this monster, and then he'd gone and roped Lore into it—now he had to worry about Audie, too? How many innocent lives could he endanger within a twenty-four-hour period?

There was a knock at the kitchen door.

Burg started to get up, that predatory look still in his eye, but Max cut him off. “Stay here,” he ordered.

The leer was replaced by a petulant frown. “But I'm hungry.”

Max ignored this and went back up into the kitchen. He couldn't blow Audie off forever. And he'd much rather cause a scene in his kitchen than in the middle of a crowded school hallway.

“Hey, Audie,” he said, pulling the door open.

“That,” said the visitor, “is not my name.”

Lore stood on the stoop, her face red and sweaty from biking, her ponytail windblown.

“Oh,” said Max. “Hi. Again.”

Lore shifted her weight to one foot, then the other. “I'm sorry I yelled at you.”

Max noticed a pair of dark circles under her eyes. Had those been there before? “That's okay.”

“I'm just going through some stuff—
still
going through some stuff . . .” She looked frustrated with herself, then shook her head. “Whatever. It's no excuse. Sorry.”

“Ain't no thang,” Max replied, inexplicably.

“Because actually—” She brought her eyes up to his. “I changed my mind. I want to help you.”

That
he did not expect. “Really? Why?”

“I have my reasons.”

“Uh, okay. But—” Max at least had the presence of mind to know he shouldn't look a gift horse in its scowling, deadpan mouth, but he had to be up-front. About this, at least. “But it could be really dangerous. You know that, right?”

“I know,” she said, examining her chewed-up, unpolished nails. “All the more reason to dispose of him, for your sake and your mom's sake. So here I am. Just a girl standing in front of a boy, asking him to accept her devil-expelling assistance.”

“Okay. I mean—God. Thank you.”

Lore walked past him into the kitchen, tossed her bike helmet onto the table, and turned around.

“Well?” she said impatiently. “We can't love it when a plan comes together if the plan doesn't come together, right?”

 

Max kicked off their brainstorming session that evening in the only way he knew how: with school supplies.

“Wow,” Lore said, sitting on the living room sofa and taking in the two-by-three-foot posterboard easel in all its nerdly glory. “That is a thing that you own.”

“Oh, this is just left over from the Paleontology Club,” Max said. “I'd had high hopes for getting an
Ankylosaurus
swap meet going and—you know what, forget it.”

“I'm already trying.”

He uncapped a marker and wrote “
IDEAS
” at the top of the poster. “Now—”

“Hey!” Burg bellowed from the basement. “Where's my after-dinner snack?”

Max gave Lore a tight smile. “Excuse me for just a moment.”

He went into the kitchen, grabbed the bag of Combos, and chucked it down the stairs like a missile.

“These come in
pizza flavor?
” Burg cried.

Max returned to the easel and readied the marker. “Okay. Go.”

Lore had evidently done some brainstorming of her own during her bike ride epiphany; she immediately started ticking off items on her fingers. “Okay. Ways to procure a house out of thin air: We buy one, we build one, we dupe a real estate agent into selling us one for no money, we find an abandoned one and take it for ourselves, we break into one and kill its owners—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Max was aghast. “We can't do that!”

“Why not? I have a crowbar.”

Max was getting all sweaty again. “Let's just start with a list. Say them again, slowly.”

She did so, and he copied them down in rickety lettering. “I can't believe you just came up with these off the top of your head,” Max said, jokingly adding, “Have you done this before?”

Lore clenched a pillow between her fists.

“Just trying to lighten the—okay, let's start with the first one,” he said, hastily tapping the word “buy.” “I, for one, am dirt-poor. You?”

“Oh, I'm loaded. I only wear the same skirt every day to throw kids off the scent of my many walk-in closets.”

“So buying is out.” He drew a thick line across the word. “What about building?”

“Sure. What with your architecture degree and my easy access to large quantities of airplane glue, the sky's the limit.”

“Hardy-har,” he said in a doofus voice, something his mom always did when he told a bad joke. “I don't suppose any of your immediate family members are contractors who do pro bono work on the side?”

“Nope.”

Max tapped the marker against his head. “How can we convince someone to build a house for us for free?”

“How about Habitat for Humanity?”

Max was about to bust out the ole hardy-har again when he realized she was being serious. “We can't defraud a charity!”

“Why not? They build houses for people who are in need.
We
are in need. Probably more so than any of the other people who get free digs. None of
them
are plagued by evil demons threatening to kill
their
loved ones.”

As a sign of just how far he had fallen down the ladder of righteousness, Max actually considered this for a second. Just for a second, though. “No,” he said firmly, crossing out “building.” “We can't get charities mixed up in all of this. That's just wrong.”

She rolled her eyes. “We're stealing a house here, Max. There's going to be a staggering amount of ‘wrong' involved no matter how you do it.”

He didn't know what to say to this, so he went back to the board. “Real estate. You know any agents?”

“Nope. You know anything about real estate law?”

“No. Wait—I did play a lot of Monopoly when I was younger.” He bit his lip. “Could we buy a deed? Or a . . . mortgage?”

“You don't even know what you're saying, do you.”

Max crossed out “real estate.”

A car pulled into the driveway next door, its tires swishing through the rain that had started to fall. Max hurriedly adjusted the curtains, making sure they covered the window completely.

Lore snorted. “Afraid your popularity stock will go down if you're seen with me?”

Max made a flabbergasted noise. It sounded a lot like the word “flabbergasted.” “Me? I'm not popular.”

Then came one of those rare instances in which Lore looked unsure of herself. “Aren't you friends with that guy on the football team?”

“Sort of. I mean, I'm really more friends with his girlfriend, Audie. She lives next door. We've known each other since we were two, and we kinda grew up together, and one time we touched tongues, but that was
only
part of an experiment to see if cooties were contagious—”

“Okay,” Lore said, holding up her hands. “That's all the information I require.”

“But
I'm
not popular. They are. I'm just the sad third wheel.”

“Have you told them about your new roommate yet?”

“No.” Max was about to explain why he couldn't—how Audie was bursting with happiness and puppies and rainbows, so he needed to protect her, while Lore was an abyss of misery and despair from which no joy could enter nor escape—but at the last second he decided that that might not be the sort of thing people like to hear about themselves.

Luckily, Lore cut him off. “Good,” she said, fiddling with the seam of the pillow. “You should protect them. Don't bring them into this.”

There was that clouded-over look in her eyes again, the one Max desperately wanted to ask about, but she'd already started speaking again. “Any other friends?” she asked. “Who we should be protecting?”

Max shrugged. “I mean, there's Paul, I guess. But he's mostly just the guy I sit with—”

“At lunch,” Lore said, nodding. “Yeah. I know how that goes.”

Max raised his eyebrows. “Yeah?”

Lore had relieved the pillow of some of its stuffing. She rolled it between her fingers. “You know what happens when you transfer into a school in your junior year? You're well and truly screwed. All cliques and friendships are solidified by then, and no vacancies are left. So I was this weird interloper who glommed on to the only group that would have me. They're nice, but . . . yeah. I wouldn't call them friends either.”

Max felt an overwhelming urge to give her a hug, but he knew that acting on it would probably lead to more bodily harm. “You transferred from Westbury Prep, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Why'd you come back?”

“There was an incident that happened while I was there.”

“Oh. What kind of incident?”

She glared at him. “I killed a kid because he asked too many questions about my personal life.”

Max coughed. “Gotcha.” He looked back at the easel, as if expecting it to burst into song to diffuse the tension. It did no such thing. “So . . . breaking in?”

“Yeah.” Lore sank deeper into the couch and propped her legs up on the coffee table. “We find an abandoned house, we break in, make sure no one is living there, then squat.”

Max stared at her. “Squat?”

“Yeah.”

“You mean, like . . . go to the bathroom?”

Lore stared at him. “See, this is why you can't rely on board games to teach you all you need to know about life.” She leaned forward, speaking slowly and brightly, as if hosting a bizarrely delinquent segment of
Sesame Street.
“Squatting is the term for when you live in a building that you don't legally own or rent.”

“Oh.”

Max added “squat” to the board, wondering how he'd never heard of it before. It was a good crossword word. “Well, that's out. We can't break into a house.”

“Why not?”

“Because we'll get in trouble! We'll get caught!”

She rolled her eyes. “Not if you do it right.”

“We're
not
breaking into a—”

“Hey!” Burg again shouted from downstairs. “I'm still hungry!”

Max plodded across the room and stuck his head in the door. “How can you still be hungry?”

“I'm watching
Iron Chef.
Battle Scallop is making me salivate.”

“Well, I'm all out of snacks.”

“But there's still a half-hour left! I'm
dying!
”

Max wholeheartedly wished this were true, but he checked his anger and spoke in an even voice. “What do you want?”

“Something with shellfish would be nice. Bobby Flay is making ceviche!”

Max stormed into the kitchen, found a months-old box of fish sticks in the freezer, and tossed it down the stairs.

This must have pleased Burg, because he began to sing the old commercial jingle. “Jeff, the Gooorton's Fishermaaan!”

“I think it's ‘
Trust
the Gorton's fisherman,'” Max shouted down.

“You're dead wrong there, pal!”

Max didn't think he was, but arguing further seemed pointless. “Hey,” he called out to Lore as he made his way back into the living room. “Do you know if it's ‘Trust the Gorton's Fisherman' or ‘Jeff, the Gorton's'—ahhh!”

Lore had disappeared. Or rather, Lore had deftly ducked into the hallway closet, as evidenced by the small fingertips poking out to pull the door shut.
Why
she had ducked into the front hall closet Max couldn't understand until he saw his mother squinting at the thermostat, looking washed-out and frail and highly annoyed for having to get out of bed.

Mrs. Kilgore turned to her son. “I'm pretty sure it's ‘trust,'” she said. “Not ‘Jeff.'” Her brow furrowed. “Who are you talking to? And what's with the easel?”

Max's expression had frozen into an expression not unlike that of the fish Jeff had caught for his sticks, open-mouthed and frozen. “It's a school project,” Max blabbed, then couldn't stop himself from adding, “for calculus.”

For the love of all that is holy,
he thought.
It's like a sickness.

His mother looked at the list of words on the board—
buy, build, real estate, squat
—and opened her mouth to ask a question, but Max butted in before she could. “Can I get you anything, Mom?”

“I just came out to check on the thermostat,” she said. “It's getting kind of hot in here—”

“Hey,” a voice bellowed from the downstairs. “You got any tartar sauce up in this piece?”

Max twisted around, but it was too late. Standing there in the basement doorway, crumbs in his beard, pants AWOL, and in full view of Max's mother, was Burg.