Watchers

Believe

Different people believe in different things. I'm not one to say who's right or wrong. In fact, in seventh grade, you kind of believe what your parents tell you to believe. You don't actually get your own mind until later. I remembered my grandma telling me a long ways back, before she died of lung cancer on my tenth birthday, that anything can seem real if you believe in it strongly enough. So sometimes I'm not sure what exactly happened to make things seem real. All I know is that some really bizarre stuff started happening after I began to seriously wonder if I'd been struck by lightning, if that story had truly been about me. Let me give you an example.

It was a couple of days after Adam's mom got those flowers that I actually saw my friend again. I was heading over toward his house, meandering in the basic direction of it, when I realized I was walking too slowly past the home of Dylan Doyle. Letting my curiosity get the better of me (which isn't a wise thing to do so close to the home of a vile enemy), I sneaked up to the fence and peered through the board slats. What I saw was his yard, and, as always, it was filled with tons of dolls. Girl dolls, boy dolls, dolls with missing eyes, dolls with no hair. All of them had clothes on at least, but I'm telling you—not only was it just plain unexpected, it was creepy. There was no reason a kid my age should play with dolls, and especially a kid like Dylan Doyle.

Remembering the way Dylan had pushed me into my locker, I suddenly wanted to run to school shouting out that he played with dolls in his backyard when no one was looking. Then I realized that school was out for the summer. Or at least, it was out for most of the other kids. I was going to have five more weeks of it come July. Telling a bunch of summer school losers about Dylan's babyish hobbies wasn't really worth thinking about. They'd all be too zoned out to care.

Anyway, as I was standing there thinking about the fun of squealing on that little turd, I heard a voice come from off to my side. With horror, I recognized it as belonging to the very person I was thinking about. "What are you doing looking through my fence, March?" snarled the leprechaun.

Feeling like someone had pulled my guts right out of my body, I slowly, slowly turned to face the little terror. He didn't look like he normally did, all grinning like the devil and holding the glow of trouble in his eyes. In fact, he looked mad. I don't mean annoyed; I mean furious. So furious that it took all of his strength to hold back. His shoulders were kind of shaking and his eyes were narrowed as they stared at me. His moppy red-brown hair practically stood on end, he was so angry.

I felt weird. I'd never seen him in any mood but obnoxious. He was hard to picture any other way. Sometimes you don't really look at your enemies as human beings. You don't see them different than you want to. I'd always thought of Dylan as scum, so I'd always pictured him as causing trouble. He wasn't supposed to have feelings. But I was pretty sure that I saw some there on his face that day. There was something there, anyway, and I didn't really get how to interpret it.

"I said, what are you doing?"

I shook my head. "N-nothing . . . really. I was just . . . jus—"

"Get lost!" he growled through his teeth.

For some reason my feet were rooted to the pavement. I wanted to run—honest—but I seriously couldn't move. "Look, I'm sorry . . . I . . ." Why was I sorry?

He started toward me. My heart jumped into my throat. Dylan was about a foot shorter than me, but you have to remember: he was tough; I wasn't. I wasn't a fighter. One of Dylan fought harder than five of me would have. I'd looked through his fence on a hundred occasions, but this one afternoon, I'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It just figured. My luck hadn't been holding up lately.

"Get your ugly face away from my fence!" he shouted. He came right up to me and grabbed my shirt collar, shaking me pretty hard. "What are you looking at, huh? You like to play peeping tom or what? You sicko!"