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"I dare you."
Intent on the trench he was digging in the sand with a small gardening shovel he borrowed from the tool shed earlier that morning, Cody Mathers didn't even glance up. "Double dare you," he responded quickly.
Dillon Reeves smiled to himself. This part was always so easy. "Double dares go first," he retorted, then quickly averted his gaze so Cody would not see the glint of satisfaction twinkling in his hazel eyes.
"Huh uh, that's not even true."
"Maybe not back in Cleveland, but it is here. Double dares always go first."
Frowning slightly, Cody glanced over his shoulder at the overgrown path leading deep into the center of the woods. It was really dark in there. Maybe there were even bears or snakes. Who knew, even the swamp thing could be hiding in a clump of bushes somewhere close to the path waiting for a boy just like him to come along so it could snatch him up, snap his neck with its slimy hands, then eat him for a morning snack.
He made up his mind quickly. "Yeah, well, doesn't matter anyway. My mom won't let me play in the woods."
It wasn't exactly a lie. True, his mother never told him not to go in there, but if he came right out and asked her, "Hey, Mom, can I go build a fort back in the woods where the bears and snakes, and maybe the swamp thing, or something even scarier is waiting to gobble me up?" she would respond with a very firm no.
"What would I do without you?" she would cry as she gathered him into her big arms and squeezed him so tightly against her chest he wouldn't be able to breath. She did that sometimes. "Promise me," she would say as she stared into his eyes.
"Promise me that you will never, never go in there. I would simply die if anything ever happened to you." Well, okay, that part was probably a lie. More than likely, she'd threaten to smack him cross-eyed if she even suspected he was thinking about going into the woods. But either way, she wouldn't want him to do it.
"Baby," Dillon responded softly.
Cody jumped to his feet at the taunt and stepped closer to Dillon. Baby? He wasn't a baby, for cripes sake. He'd be twelve in a little over two months. That sure as hell wasn't a damn baby, was it? "What did you call me?"
Dillon, who had turned twelve all the way back in February, but was still short for his age, tilted his head slightly to look up into the other boy's eyes. "Baby," he repeated.
"Don't call me that again, Dillon. I ain't no damn baby." Not a baby at all, he reassured himself, but not stupid either.
This is the tough part, Dillon reminded himself. Get him mad enough so he'll end up doing it, but don't make him so mad he hits you, and then goes home and refuses to play with you anymore. He shrugged slightly as if it didn't make a bit of difference to him one way or the other.
"Okay, I guess you're not a baby. Are you done with the shovel?"
Everything would have turned out differently had Cody let it drop, but he couldn't. It was tough enough being the new kid in the neighborhood without having someone like Dillon Reeves, born and raised in the same town, start telling other kids he was a baby who was too afraid to walk in the woods. If he had given it a little more thought, he probably would have figured out the other kids' moms didn't let them play in there either. He really wasn't a stupid boy, but he knew how easy it was to end up unpopular and lonely. It had happened before in other towns and he didn't want it to happen here. Not if he could help it.
"Yeah, I'm done." He watched the smaller boy drop to his knees in the sand, retrieve the shovel and begin to earnestly dig another trench next to the one he'd finished moments before.
"I bet you never been in there either."
"Sure I have," Dillon smiled at him sweetly. "I been in there lots of times. It's not bad once you get used to the dark and the smell."
As he stared into the woods intently, Cody guessed he understood the dark part. The trees looked pretty thick and he figured the sun couldn't shine through the heavy branches too well. That would make it dark, but smell? What was Dillon talking about?
"Smell?"
"Yeah, sometimes it stinks, kind of like dead stuff."
"How do you know what dead stuff smells like? It could be anything. Maybe there's a swamp in there." His mind was still on the creature that could lurch out from between the trees at any minute to tear apart some unsuspecting boy who was stupid enough to cross its path. "That's probably what smells bad."
"Our cat died. I found it in our back yard with its head mashed in. There was a lot of blood on it, and when I got really close to it, I saw little white worms crawling all over the place. It stunk too."
Fascinated, as most eleven, not quite twelve-year-old boys are, by talk of blood and worms; Cody plopped down in the sand beside Dillon. "Really? What do you think happened to it?"
He shrugged. "Don't know. Maybe it got hit by a car." Actually, the cat had died after he hit it in the head, twice, with a brick because it scratched him when he tried to stick a firecracker up its butt, but Cody didn't need to know that. Nobody needed to know that.
"Doesn't matter anyway."
"What doesn't matter anyway?"
"The smell. You don't have to worry about getting used to it because you're not going in the woods. Your mom won't let you."
He felt Cody stiffen at his side, but pretended not to notice. He simply kept digging his stupid little trench with Cody's stupid little shovel that wasn't any good for anything else. You couldn't dig a real hole with it to hide, say, a dead cat in. Especially not if your mother caught you at it and thought you were sad because the dumb cat was dead. There might also be the neighbor's dog that happened to wander too close when you were practicing knife throwing, or birds that accidentally fell out of their nests. And once or twice, hadn't there been something even bigger and better to dump into a hole and throw dirt over until its weird eyes couldn't stare at you anymore? He was pretty sure there had been. But this little shovel couldn't help you do any of that neat stuff. Nope, all you could do with it was dig useless little trenches and then fill them back in again.
Cody frowned again as he scraped handfuls of dirt out of his hole. "But I ain't no baby."
If Dillon was a nice boy, he would have agreed, and they could have kept playing or gone home to wash up for lunch. But he wasn't a nice boy. He wasn't anywhere close, even though his mother believed he was.
Dillon knew he shouldn't spy on his mother and her friends, but if he was home when someone from the neighborhood came to visit, he would hide in the front closet and listen.
"Dillon," his mother would say as she passed a plate of cookies or refilled an empty coffee cup, "is such a nice boy. He is so tender-hearted too. Don't you know when he found Mr. Chips, our poor dead kitty, in the backyard, he actually wept? Mind now, when he realized I saw the tears, he tried to wipe them away, but I noticed. Yes, my little Dillon, who is really not so little anymore, is such a nice boy."
Dillon eavesdropped on so many conversations in which he was the topic of discussion, he had come to believe he was one of the best kids in town. Neither he nor his mother, who truly was sweet and kind, realized none of the other mothers in the neighborhood liked him. They never knew those women always felt a sense of unexplained repulsion whenever he came knocking on their front doors to ask if Billy, or Joe, or Sam could come out to play. But they tolerated him because they all loved his mother, who would do anything for anyone without a moment’s hesitation.
So instead of agreeing and making life easier for Cody, Dillon hesitated for a long moment before nodding in agreement. "I know."
Cody knew he didn't mean it, and he felt himself getting mad all over again. "Well, why don't you do it then?"
"Oh, I would, but double dares go first. But I would do it after you."
Cody rose to his feet, swiped at the knees of his pants with exaggerated slowness to wipe off the sand, and then stepped toward the path. "How far is it, do you think?"
Dillon stayed on his knees, but carefully laid the little shovel he'd been gripping tightly down beside his denim-clad leg and rubbed his hands together as if to wipe away the grime before responding. "'Bout a quarter of a mile. It doesn't take but a few minutes to walk there." He's going to do it, he thought gleefully. He's going to do it.
"And you'll do it if I do it, right?"
"No, forget it. I don't think it's such a good idea after all. Not if your mom told you not to go in the woods. I wouldn't want you to get into trouble."
"Now who's being a baby? How will my mom ever find out? Unless you plan to tell her."
Dillon smiled sweetly as he shook his head. "I'd never tell her you went into the woods, Cody. I promise. No matter what happens, I'll never tell your mom you went into the woods."
Sighing, Cody nodded. "All right, let's do it then. But let's hurry 'cause I got to get home for lunch."
Dillon scrambled to his feet. "Yeah, me too."
The light in the woods was faint, but it wasn't as dark as Cody had imagined. And no bears or snakes or swamp things tried to attack him, although he felt his heart do a little whump-a-bump-a-whumpa every time a branch snapped under his feet. Best of all, though, was he didn't notice the bad smell of any dead things. He had been half afraid he might gag or puke if he smelled something really gross, but now he didn't have to worry.
He saw the ledge before Dillon pointed it out to him, and knew immediately he had agreed to do a dumb thing. A kid could break his neck jumping off of there, and who knew what might be down on the other side. There could be sharp sticks waiting to poke out an eye or jagged rocks wanting to rip his best jeans and scrape up his knees.
They walked out to the edge, Dillon in the lead, and looked over the side. "Looks pretty steep," Cody said just to say something.
For a long moment Dillon did not respond. He seemed totally lost in thought, but he finally glanced at the other boy and nodded. "Yep."
"You promise you'll jump after I do?"
He shrugged. "Sure. Listen, Cody, if you don't want to do it, don't. No big deal. Let's not go on and on about it."
"I'll do it. I'll do it. But if I rip these jeans, my mom sure is gonna throw a fit."
"Yeah, well."
Cody stepped closer to the edge, drew a deep ragged breath and closed his eyes. "On three," he said. "One," he bent his knees and swung his arms. "Two . . ." That's when he felt the hands push roughly against his shoulders. Before he could get his balance and stop his fall, he felt a foot kick him high up on his butt. As he tumbled downwards, he felt the jagged rocks he had feared gouging into exposed skin as his shirt rode up his back and his jeans tore in several places. Mom's going to be mad, he thought right before he began to scream.
Dillon stood at the top, enjoying the sound of the other boy's cries for a moment before he began his careful descent. Reaching the bottom, he carefully stretched out a sneaker-clad foot and kicked Cody over onto his back. There was a lot of blood, lots more than when Mr. Chips died. Cody moaned and said something he could not understand.
He knelt down to hear better. "What?" There was no response, so he shook the other boy's shoulder roughly. "What did you say?"
"Pushed me . . . it hurts."
"Yes, well." He glanced around, saw exactly what he needed lying a few feet away, stood up and walked over to get it. Cody's eyes were open when he returned to his side. "What . . .?"
"This," Dillon explained softly as he dropped the heavy rock onto the prone boy's face. He liked the noise that it made so he picked it back up and dropped it again. "And this."
He did not know how many times he dropped the rock, but stopped only when his arms got tired. It was impossible to tell who the boy lying at his feet was, and for a few seconds he really could not remember his name.
"Cody," he said at last, and smiled. "Looks like you tore your jeans after all, kid. Don't worry. I promised I wouldn't tell your mom you went into the woods and I won't. Maybe she won't notice that your pants are ruined."
He slowly climbed back up to the top of the ledge, glanced back once, and then realizing he was hungry, turned towards home and lunch. Before he was halfway out of the woods, Mrs. Reeve's good boy began to whistle a happy little tune. After all, it had been a very pleasant morning.
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