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In mid-June, a new family with a twelve-year-old daughter moved into the Italianate house next to Jeremy Fitzgerald's. Jeremy called Mike Afton and invited him over to have a look. Until then, there hadn't been any girls their age in the neighbourhood, which Jeremy regretted. At once Mike refused point-blank. What interesting could there be? Besides, he'd promised to help his Dad in the workshop. If he ran away, he wouldn't live long after. But that afternoon Jeremy nevertheless found Mike in his backyard.
They set about fixing Jeremy's bike. Mike had dug up a chain for it in a scrapyard not far from his maple-fenced house on the outskirts. Jeremy believed that's where his older brother had found the bicycle to give him for birthday. Mike ribbed Jeremy for being upset with his brother. His birthdays were never celebrated. Dad said being born wasn't an achievement to commemorate. And since only girls wanted presents, he only gave them to his daughter. From time to time, the friends would peer over the hedge or into the windows of the neighbouring house. They scratched their sunburnt noses and shoulders. Mike's scraped knee twitched. The trees rippled in the heat.
They both secretly wanted to introduce themselves as the new kid on the block before the neighbours advised her and her family to stay away from the Aftons and Fitzgeralds.
Jeremy's knowledge of women was limited to his mother, movies, and a few high school girls. Mike's mother rarely came to Hurricane. She was an actress. His sister was three. Mike had seen various girls in movies and books, but he never wanted to have anything to do with them in person. This seemed disgusting.
"Why's that?" Jeremy asked when Mike told him about it. He was curious, but the high school girls either threw used toilet paper at him or threw him in the dumpster.
Mike explained: "When Elizabeth was born and we were told she was a girl, Dad said, 'Finally, I'm in luck.' As if he'd been out of luck the first two times. He'd misfired, damn it."
Something orange caught his eye. Mike poked Jeremy in the shoulder. They rushed to the hedge and, without knowing why, lay belly down.
She stepped out onto the porch of the Italianate house. The first things that struck Mike's gaze were carroty dungarees and colourful hair clips. The boys themselves were running around in stained, faded T-shirts. Upon further inspection, Mike figured out the girl's brown complexion wasn’t from the tanning.
He and Jeremy exchanged glances. Mike suddenly realised that almost everyone in Hurricane was white. Except for Jeremy's mother, who was Khasi. That’s a people in India. Jeremy's father taught English there and married a local student after bringing her to the United States. And also Lalo, who used to work in the kitchen at Fredbear's Family Diner, had relatives among the Shoshone Natives.
"Are you the Fitzgeralds?" the girl shouted from the porch.
Mike and Jeremy froze up. They all at once forgot how to speak, and what one could say in such situations. The longer Mike stared at her in silence, the more stupid he felt. It annoyed him.
"He's a Fitzgerald," Mike finally said, nudging Jeremy with his elbow. "And I'm Michael." And for some reason he added, "It means 'no one is like God.'"
"And I'm Nichelle," the girl said. "That means my parents are Star Trek fans."
She walked down the porch and cautiously approached the hedge. All three were silent for some time.
"Do you go to Maple Grove Middle School?" Nichelle asked.
"Sometimes," Jeremy said. "Just not in the summer. We don't go there in the summer."
"I'll go later. In September," Nichelle said.
They remained close-mouthed for a tad longer.
"I've got connections at Fredbear's Family Diner. They have the only edible pizza in Hurricane," Mike said.
"I’m fixing a bike, a Western Flyer," Jeremy chimed in. "There it is. It broke when I was riding it through the mountains and fell into a ravine."
"Oh," Nichelle dropped. She wanted to say something else, but apparently took fright and changed her mind. Indeed, what would she hear in response?
"I love horses." — "All girls love horses."
"I want to become a camera operator." — "They won't hire you as a camera operator."
"I can write poems." — "You're lying." "You stole that from Dickens," although neither Mike nor Jeremy had read Dickens.
...Midweek, Mike and Jeremy took Nichelle to Fredbear's to get fries. Her parents forbade her junk food. They went in a roundabout way, so Christy Strand or anyone else they knew wouldn't see. They'd pick on all three, and it would anyway be embarrassing. Uncle Henry was working the register in the morning. Upon learning that Nichelle had just moved in, he treated her to a free pizza. She shared it with the Jeremy and Mike and got to eat only two of the eight slices.
Nichelle was terrified of going to the abandoned football field, but the boys tricked her into travelling there anyway on the back of Mike's bicycle. Jeremy laughed at her tear-stained face, and Mike said nothing. More than anything else he dreamt of catching a horned rattlesnake. For Dad and Dave, his little brother. Bessie would be good. She was still a baby. But in reality, they only caught one snake—a blind one, the kind that live in owl holes. And a bunch of lizards, which they stuffed into Nichelle's pockets. On the way back, the three got tangled in tall nettles, tumbled down a ditch, took the wrong road, and arrived home almost at night. Mike walked Nichelle to the porch and headed home only after making sure the door had slammed shut behind her. She didn't say thanks. Upon digesting this, Mike spat over the Penningtons' fence.
Dave opened the door for him. Dave was seven, still carrying a teddy bear and occasionally wetting the bed. He put his finger to his lips: from the hallway, they could see the shadow of their Dad sleeping on the couch. Mike went to turn off the TV in the living room. Bessie was curled up in front of the screen, dozing at Dad's side. Mike poked the remote control with his pinky, and the room plunged into darkness.
“Feed Bess and Dave,” came his father’s voice in the pitch darkness, deep and trumpet-like from sleep.
The urge to pick up something sharp and stab Dad between the eyes engulfed Mike, but he immediately feared his impulse and shamed himself. William Afton is a widower with a living wife, working like a horse to raise three loafers. He earns money so Mike, Dave, and Bessie have food on the table and a roof over their heads. Mike cooks grub and looks for people to fix the roof, since he himself is too posh to push. All fair play.
One day, Nichelle and Mike came to help Jeremy rearrange the flower pots on the veranda. Less than fifteen minutes later, the pot-dragging turned into game of tag, the game of tag into a pursuit, and the pursuit into capture. Nichelle pounded her fists, demanding to be let out of the shed. The boys threw their weight against the door that had no lock. Mike left Jeremy only for a moment to drag a rake and block Nichelle's exit with it. Why—he couldn't remember two years later, when the three of them were doing the same thing to Dave.
"Who are the people that moved in next to the Fitzgeralds?" Dad asked one evening at dinner. Mike had cooked bangers and mash and put the kettle on. Having just showered, Dad washed away the sharp smell of burnt metal and black grease stains. He and Uncle Henry were setting up a new business location, which would feature not two, but five animatronics to entertain customers. Just like last time, they were building the animatronics themselves.
"The Penningtons. They have a share in a video equipment company," Mike replied, wiping the remains of mashed potatoes from Bessie's face. His sister was having a hard time keeping her food in. She was getting too excited telling what happened on that night's episode of Sesame Street.
"Yeah," Dad said wistfully. "We need to set up cameras in the new location. And in the house... Dave's got a habit of running away. To his Mummy, you see. Like a toddler."
"I miss her!" Dave exclaimed. He always looked like he was about to burst into tears. "When is she coming again?"
Mike found himself thinking that he wouldn't have teased his brother if he'd shit his pants from just the look their Father gave him.
"Maybe she would have come more often if you hadn't told her about what Dad and Janet were doing in the backseat," William Afton said in a deadly quiet voice. Janet was the nanny.
"Seriously, Dave. Turning in your own father? What a rat," Mike scolded his brother nonetheless.
"And you're a parasite," Dad reminded him. "You do nothing for the family, just get fat on my money and complain about how you're up to your neck in problems. I wish I had your problems. At least your woman hasn't run off to travel around Europe with hairy Italians. Go on, Wills, vegetate among the Yanks in the middle of nowhere while I show off my whore face at the Paris Opera—"
It seemed to Dad that the berserk, heavyset, and noticeably cross-eyed mediocre singer with whom he had somehow started a family was the object of irresistible desire for all men on Earth.
"Daddy, gentlemen don't speak like that," Bessie flared up, and her father immediately broke off.
Bessie wielded a terrible power over William Afton. She only had to pretend that she’s about to cry to have her father obey almost any command. Mike suspected it was because Bessie looked like her mother, but in the way she carried herself and the thoughts that clung to her tiny head, she was a dead ringer for her father.
"You're right, Bess," Dad agreed in a completely different tone, peaceful and jolly. "Don't hold a grudge, lady and gentlemen. Whatever happens, you are all my treasures. Dummies, but treasures."
He ruffled Dave's hair and kissed Bessie. It was another reason not to hang out with girls before Nichelle appeared. Dad never kissed Mike.
"I'm going to visit a friend tomorrow evening. I was invited," Mike said, pouring tea for everyone.
"Only after you help out at the diner. You haven't yet finished working for May you’d spent with a broken arm," Dad replied more harshly and continued the interrogation: "What's the friend's name? Phone number?"
“Nichelle Pennington—”
Dad choked on his tea. After clearing his throat, he looked at Mike strangely. Mike regretted never finding a single horned rattlesnake.
“They are good people,” Mike assured.
“That's not the point. I just thought you were gay.”
“Dad!” Mike blushed.
That summer, the kids got lost again, in August. Mike, Jeremy, and Christy Strand were building a raft. Nichelle was eager to help, but Christy told her to go to hell where she belonged. His parents said the Penningtons’ ancestors fought for the devil at the dawn of time, while the Strands’ ancestors fought for God. Jeremy and Mike gave Christy a good kicking, after which the four of them climbed onto the raft and set off down the narrow river, pushing off with wooden poles. They ended up in the waterweed. Mike sat there, looking gloomy because Nichelle apparently didn't understand what he and Jeremy had done for her. She huddled in a ball, viced between Mike and Christy, and didn't look at all flattered. Well then. Let her defend herself next time.
The poles no longer reached the bottom. The boys tried paddling with their hands with no use. Then Mike, as the eldest, jumped into the water and tried to push the raft ashore, kicking his legs, but the current was stronger. Frailty washed over him, frality in the face of the nature, Jeremy, and Nichelle Pennington. He and the raft were carried deeper into the forest cut through by the river. They only reached shore when Nichelle, held by the feet by Jeremy—he was the tallest of the boys—clung to a thick branch of a snag. Mike envied her then. Only years later would he decide that it had been mortally dangerous and inhumanely cruel to force Nichelle to atone for her ingratitude like this. They had to abandon the raft. Barefoot, they trudged through the forest, over wood chips, over shards of glass, through cobwebs and unfamiliar paths flattened by car wheels.
Walking Nichelle to the porch, Mike plucked up his courage and locked his arms around her, almost lifting her off the ground. In that moment, he felt so free—no Dad, no Dave, no Bess, no school, no worries… Nichelle let out a startled gasp, broke free, and darted home. Something died inside of Mike. He didn't know then that Nichelle, despite everything, would go out time after time the moment she saw him and Jeremy kicking a ball outside her window.