It was midnight when I heard a creaking noise through the wall.

I elbowed Tub.

“I don’t want dentures, Grandma.”

“Tub!” I hissed. “Wake up!”

He snorted, looked around, and pulled the hockey mask to the top of his head. I pressed a finger to my lips and pointed to my ear. He nodded.

Nothing for several minutes. Tub’s eyes began to droop.

Again: a creak, this one long and tortured.

“Tub. Tub. This is it.”

“Just your dad, Jim.”

“Dad would be checking all of the locks. We’d hear him.”

Tub opened his mouth to protest before his sleepy brain realized that I was right. A third floorboard creaked, then a fourth. Whatever it was out there was getting closer. I looked through the closet slats at the crack beneath the bedroom door. A moment of unbearable tension passed. Then a shadow daggered the moonlight. My breath caught in my throat. I wanted to tell Tub to get the arrow into position but couldn’t utter a word.

Then the shadow slipped away.

Tub was oblivious. He raised the head of the stick to his nose.

“This thing smells weird.”

“Shhh!”

“Not like sweat. It smells, I don’t know. Brand-new.”

“Never got used. Shhh!”

“Oh. Well, don’t feel bad. It’s not your fault you lack muscle tone. It’s glandular.”

I pressed my sweaty forehead against his and hissed. “Dad took this stuff away because sports are dangerous. Too many late nights and away games. So he took it all away. Never even let me try.”

Something metallic crashed to the kitchen floor.

Tub and I jumped. Our foreheads peeled apart and our eyes widened.

His knuckles went white around the hockey stick.

“You want to try now, Jim? Give this stuff a spin?”

There’s no telling how long we stared at each other in the darkness of the closet, ratcheting up our bravery through a sequence of manly nods and the throttling of our athletic gear. Fifteen minutes might have gone by before we were properly psyched up to go exploding from the closet like a sports team, albeit one that wasn’t sure what sport it was playing.

Right away my foot hit the marbles. I grabbed for Tub, but he was skidding on marbles, too. While he went face-first into the artificial crotch of JSJ2, I went sprawling backward into the dresser. A slew of forgotten objects fell upon me in succession: a broken kite, a bottle of foul-smelling cologne, a plate of half-eaten scrambled eggs, and, of course, the nanny cam.