Chapter 16

The first person he killed was his grandfather. Ethan was eleven years old.

He didn't particularly dislike Grampy, who, when he had been healthy and living in his own house, had always let Ethan play with his collection of military weapons and even given him a boxful of toy metal soldiers—British and German and French ones—that for about a year had been Ethan's favorite possessions in the world.

But Grampy had a stroke—a bad one, his father said—and now he had to come and live with them. And because Ethan had the only bedroom in the house that was on the first floor, he'd had to move out and relocate to his older brother's room on a trundle bed with a saggy mattress. He wasn't mad at his grandfather for taking his room, although it did occur to him that the sooner Grampy died, the sooner he'd get his room back. No, what really bothered Ethan about having Grampy living in his house was that his mother made him go into the smelly room every afternoon when he got home from school and sit with his grandfather for a while.

"He doesn't do anything," Ethan said to his mother.

"No, but he's your grandfather, and even if he doesn't show it, I'd bet it makes him feel happy as a clam just to have you in there next to him. Tell him what you studied at school. Just because he can't talk doesn't mean he can't hear what you say and understand."

So Ethan would sit with his grandfather, who just lay there, one part of his face slacker than the other, and with drool on his lower lip. Sometimes Ethan would use the time to get a start on his homework, but often he would actually talk to the old man, tell him about some class, or how much he hated his classmate Karen Armitage, who thought she was better than everyone else. And sometimes he would read out loud to him. Ethan, in his twelfth year, had discovered that he actually liked to read. Part of that was discovering the Goosebumps series, hand-me-downs from his brother who was now thirteen and reading Stephen King. But the books that Ethan had fallen in love with most were his sister's old books. She had a bookshelf full of them in her single bedroom. Judy Blumes and Lois Duncans and all of the Flowers in the Attic books. She even had some pretty dirty books, like Lace by Shirley Conran (Ethan had flipped through it, just reading the sex stuff) and TheClan of the Cave Bear and Endless Love.

What the books taught him was that there was a whole world out there, an adult world, of sex and death and betrayal and lies. It was like a playground where you got to do whatever you wanted, and it made him want to skip right through the rest of his childhood and be an adult. But, instead, he was an eleven-year-old who had to go and sit next to his dying, smelly grandfather because his mother thought it would make him happy as a clam, one of his mom's weird expressions. So Ethan read stuff aloud to him, and it was pretty clear to him that Grampy didn't understand a word. He was practically dead already. Ethan thought, If I was like this, I would want someone to come into this room and put me out of my misery. Once he had that thought it became a permanent part of his mind. It was like reading that scene in Lace where the man puts the goldfish into the woman's private area and she loves it. That was part of his mind now, too.

Over time, Ethan began to enjoy going into Grampy's room after school. It was funny that Scott, his brother, never had to do it, mostly because he was now in high school and had a lot of homework. His sister Vicky didn't seem required to make visits, either, and Ethan wondered if that had something to do with the fact that in the last year something had gone decidedly wrong with his sister. She was out late all the time, and when she was home, she and his mom just yelled at each other. She smelled of cigarettes and booze and hair spray. Ethan had decided that Vicky was stupid, maybe even stupider than Scott, and that was saying something. If she wanted to sneak out of the house and smoke cigarettes and get drunk and meet boys, why wasn't she better at it? Why did she get caught? Ethan's father, who worked in the city, was always exhausted when he came home. All he cared about was drinking whiskey, watching sports highlights, then going to bed. Ethan's mother was around more, that was true, but she was always humming to herself and swaying around the house and, honestly, it didn't take a genius to slide right past her without her even noticing. Ethan did it all the time.

Ethan thought about these things while sitting next to his grandfather. He thought, If I were Vicky and had just gotten my driver's license, then I'd be able to get away with anything. He hadn't really had thoughts like this before, not about what it would be like to be someone else, and he wondered if it had something to do with all the reading he'd been doing. Because, honestly, it had never even occurred to him until recently that other people had thoughts at all. He stared at his grandfather and tried to imagine it, tried to imagine words and ideas moving through his brain. All he came up with was that he must want to die, lying in bed being unable to move.

In October his mom had a screaming fight with Vicky that was so bad that his father came home early and Vicky ran out the door. Ethan asked his mom, her face all wet with tears, if he could eat in his room, and she said, Of course, honey, and hugged him in a way that Ethan knew had more to do with his sister than with him. Once he was in his room with his microwaved meat loaf, Ethan climbed out the window and onto the porch roof. It was steep, but not so steep that you couldn't slide along it. He went to his sister's window, which was never locked, opened it, and snuck into her room. He wanted to look at her books, but he was also a little curious about what all the screaming had been about lately. He turned on her desk lamp, not worrying about getting caught because his sister had put a padlock on the outside of her door to keep her parents out of there.

He went through her underwear drawer, mostly filled with stained white underwear, but toward the back she had a couple of lacy things from Victoria's Secret. Something about that was funny, and then Ethan realized that her name was Victoria and so was her underwear. At her bookshelf he found this small dark paperback called Go Ask Alice, a book he'd heard about that was all about drugs. He put it in his back pocket, then went to his sister's unmade bed. She still slept with the stuffed dog—Doggy—she'd had since she'd been little. It had floppy ears and weird plastic eyes and was so old that it was coming apart and had been sewn back together so many times it looked like an accident victim. Ethan slid his finger into one of the sewn-up seams and ripped it a little more, then put it back where he'd found it. But then he had another idea and hid Doggy under the bed. There was a ton of crap down there, old T-shirts his sister had slept in, a few textbooks, and a hundred dust bunnies. He covered the stuffed animal under one of the disgusting T-shirts.

In Vicky's bedside drawer he found her old diary, and cracked it open, wondering if she'd written anything new in it. But she hadn't, at least not for a couple of years, and Ethan had read most of what was in there, anyway. There were some tampons in her drawer as well, and Ethan looked at the directions on the back of the box, glad that he wasn't a girl. There wasn't much else in the drawer that he hadn't seen before, just a bottle of something called Midol.

Before leaving, he looked through his sister's trash bin, filled with damp Kleenex and gum wrappers and at the very bottom a piece of plastic, half-blue and half-white. Ethan almost picked it up but decided it was somehow related to tampons, so he covered it up again.

Back in his own room, he ate some meat loaf, then started to read Go Ask Alice.

The next week was crazy because one night Vicky didn't come home, and Ethan's parents called the police. Then there were more fights and screaming and even one moment when Ethan snuck down late at night and saw his mother holding Vicky on the couch almost as if Vicky was still a baby. They were both crying and rocking each other, and Ethan watched from the doorway, more confused than he'd been by the fighting. All he knew was that what he was looking at made him feel queasy.

It was around this time that he first came up with the idea of killing his grandfather. That would show them, he thought. Everyone's freaking out because Vicky can't control herself, and meanwhile Grampy dies all alone in his room. The thought of it made Ethan feel like he was smiling inside of himself. Also, if Grampy died, then he'd get his own room back. There had been at least two times in the past month when he'd woken up in the middle of the night and heard noises coming from Scott's bed, bedsprings squeaking and little groans. He knew what his brother was doing because he'd read one of his sister's books all about puberty. It was disgusting to him, and he'd already vowed that it was something he would never do himself. But what it mostly made him feel was that he wanted to get back into his own bedroom on the first floor.

It was either on Halloween or maybe it was the day before that Ethan sat in his old bedroom listening to his grandfather breathe. In and out. In and out. Like some kind of machine that keeps running long after it's stopped being useful. While Ethan listened, he thought about other stuff, like how they'd learned in history class that a million people had starved in Ireland because the potatoes went bad. Ethan was pretty good at math, so he kept trying to picture what a million people looked like. He laid them side by side over rolling hills, and that helped. And sometimes he let one candy corn represent a person and then tried to picture what a million candy corns would look like. That actually wasn't helpful at all.

His grandfather made some sort of snorting noise and Ethan looked at him. But his expression hadn't changed. Without thinking too much about it, Ethan stood up, walked over to his grandfather, and pinched his nose shut. It didn't really do anything, because Grampy's mouth was always open. With his other hand Ethan pushed his grandfather's mouth closed and held it that way. Nothing happened at first, and then his grandfather's head moved back and forth a little and a strange rattling sound came out of his throat. Ethan thought about letting go, but he wanted to see what would happen next. About a minute later it was pretty clear that his grandfather was dead. He left the room and walked to the bathroom, where he washed his hands. He only went back into Grampy's room to get the book he'd brought in there with him, his English textbook, all about grammar rules. Then he went to the kitchen and told his mother that he was going up to his room to study.

"You visited Grampy, right?"

"I did. Told him all about my day."

"Thanks, honey."

Up in his brother's room Ethan shut the door and lay down on his cot. He wondered how long it was going to be before his mother discovered that her father was dead. He was glad he was dead because it would mean the house would go back to the way it was before, but he wasn't excited about all the things that would happen first. Crying and a funeral and other relatives. Still, it would go back to normal in time. He'd get his room back on the first floor. Scott would get his own room all to himself and be able to do disgusting things to himself all day long. His sister wouldn't be the most important person in the family for at least a few days, although she'd probably try. What about Grampy? Ethan tried to examine his feelings about what he'd done to his grandfather. He held the feeling like it was a Rubik's Cube and looked at it from every side. At first he told himself that he'd done his grandfather a favor, the same way his parents told him they were doing Sparky a favor when they took him to his final visit to the vet. But in the end, after looking at every side of the cube, Ethan decided that it hadn't been a favor, but it also hadn't been much of anything. All he'd done was kill someone, someone who was going to die anyway.

He'd finished his English assignment and was starting on his history assignment when he heard his mother wail from the first floor.

After the funeral, and when things had gone back to normal just as he'd predicted, Ethan took out his feelings again to look at them. He still didn't feel bad about what he'd done. His mom had been pretty sad at first, but at the reception after the funeral she'd seemed pretty happy, laughing and drinking wine with his two aunts. He'd brought them together by what he'd done, and he tried to understand if that made him feel good. It didn't, exactly. But he did feel something, and he wasn't sure what it was.

Before he fell asleep that night, he carefully tore a blank page from the back of his English notebook. At the top of the page he put his own name, Ethan Conor Saltz. He underlined it. Then two lines down he wrote the number 1, and following that he wrote his grandfather's name, Martin Conor Byrne.

He folded the paper so that it was a fourth of its original size, then slid it between the pages of one of his old picture books, There's an Alligator Under My Bed.