Jason used to tell Harvey jokes he didn’t get and he told him all the scary stories he knew. Real stories—the Glencoe Munchkins and the Beast of Bladenboro and the Gray Man down at the beach who comes to tell you that something really terrible is about to happen, and that’s just the start of it. There’s that girl who worked at the Dog House killed by a killer, and Harvey’s mom has even seen the murderer. There’s a train engineer whose head got cut off and he walks around looking for it, and the statue in the cemetery who used to have ruby eyes but somebody stole them and now she haunts whoever goes there at night because she thinks they must be the ones that took her eyeballs. Jason drove Harvey by her one night and it made him shiver to look at her, even though she didn’t really look scary at all. She actually kind of looked nice, like the music teacher at Harvey’s school, a woman who walked with a cane and farted when she played the piano loud. If you sat right up close you could hear it and you didn’t even need Super Monkey supersonic ears, but Harvey got in trouble for laughing.

Jason taught him to say, “You can tell it’s Mattel. Just smell!” and everybody at school liked that. Jason had good things to say, like if somebody asked Harvey about his lip he could just say he got sliced by a killer who was hiding under his bed, like that story Jason told him about the maniac under the bed and Harvey had to ask what a maniac was.

“Crazy. Psycho.”

“Like Lizzie Borden?”

“Who knows,” Jason said. “I think she just got mad one day and let her folks have it.”

At night when Harvey is being Super Monkey, he says things like: “Please, Lizzie, please don’t murder people.”

“I can’t help it, Harvey. They make me so mad.”

“Yes, you can, though, Lizzie. You can take a stick and beat on a bush or rock while you pretend it’s who you’re mad at. And then you can say, ‘I am so sorry. I am sorry to spank you. It hurts me worse than it hurts you. Don’t ev-er let me see you do that a-gin.’”

Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks, and when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one.

“Psycho,” Jason had said. This was the same day Jason gave Harvey a bunch of things as he packed to go off to school. He gave him the Klingon ring and he gave him the model of the Enterprise that they hung from a hook in his ceiling. He even gave him an old stuffed dog that Jason said he was pretty sure once belonged to his real father.

“Before he died?” Harvey said.