I wanted to believe him, you know. But Mousey, he was dangerous. Besides, with everything he knew, ten thousand pounds just wasn’t enough. “What can you buy with ten thousand pounds?”

Your brother gave a little smile. “A ticket to Hawaii,” he said.

Chapter 9

9

November 2005

You’d think that taking a life would have weight. Death should be something heavy. It ought to matter, like turning eighteen, or losing your virginity. But after that day at the clay pits, I woke up just the same as before. That’s how it was with Ratboy. That’s how it was with Poodle.

Poor Poodle. I never told him what really happened on that day. I even tore the pages out of my St. Oswald’s diary. I wanted him to feel miserable. I wanted him to feel guilty. After all, I thought to myself, why should he be allowed to forget? Why should Charlie Nutter have something that I never would?

He left me by the Pit Shaft the day we did for Ratboy. He was pretty upset, and I guess he didn’t want to stick around. I was still on a high, though. The fire in the burned-out car was still warm, and so I sat there awhile, enjoying the glow. But then I heard a funny sound coming from the Pit Shaft; a kind of croaking, slithery sound. Ratboy, climbing out of the pit, all dead and fishy and covered with mud, to take revenge on his killers. Or so my mind kept telling me, even though I didn’t believe in ghosts, or retribution, or even, really, God. So I went to look. And when I got there, I found that I was half right. But Ratboy wasn’t a vengeful ghost. Mousey—he was still alive.

He must have been tougher than he looked. That muddy water was freezing. And even though he could hardly swim, he’d managed to paddle across the pit to the side where the bank made a bit of a slope—not much, but just enough to pull himself out of the water and make a grab for a dead tree root that was sticking out of the frozen bank.

When he saw me, his mouth worked. I think he was trying to call for help. But nothing came out but a kind of squeak, as if he really were a rat.

“Shit,” I said.

I wasn’t scared. But really, Mousey, I had no choice. I could hardly help him out. He would have told his parents, and Poodle and I would have been caught. I had to finish him off before he somehow managed to climb out of the pit—and he was making a decent try, in spite of those wet and slippery sides.

Ratboy must have guessed as much. He started to claw at the sides of the pit with his greasy, shaking hands.