Page 28 of The Intruder

Today I meet Anton again after school to work on our project. I find him leaning against the building, his bag slung on his shoulder, but he’s not smoking like he was last time.

“Out of cigarettes?” I ask him, hoping he won’t ask me to steal some of my mother’s.

His brown eyes meet mine. His black eye has faded in the last few days, but you can still see it. Devin has been out all week, and people are saying he fell off his bike and got a concussion. “I quit, actually.”

“Really?”

He runs a hand through his green hair. “They were always making me cough, and they stunk up my clothing.”

Except when he says it, he’s looking down at my arms. Where he saw the cigarette burns.

“Was it hard to quit?” I ask him. My mom tried to quit once, and she was going out of her mind with cravings and snapping at me even more than usual. As much as I hate the cigarettes, it was even worse when she was off them.

“Kind of.” His grin is lopsided. “I’m trying not to think about it. In fact…” He fishes into the pocket of his baggy jeans and comes up with a lighter the same color as his hair. “Can you take this for me? I just need it away from me.”

I take the lighter and stuff it into my own pocket. My mom has a bunch of lighters, but she usually keeps them in her purse. You never know when something like this will come in handy.

We walk back to Anton’s apartment together.

This time, we play a game where we try to skip over the entire distance between two cracks on the street.

Anton is several inches taller than me, so he’s much better at it than I am.

But it’s not really a competition. It’s just something we’re doing for fun during the walk.

“By the way,” I say when we’re a few blocks away from his apartment building, “I never asked you what you did to piss Devin off so bad.”

“Oh.” He brightens as if pleased by the question. “I grabbed his backpack during gym and emptied it all over the floor.”

“That’s it?”

“He had some history project in his bag that got pretty messed up. Especially when I stepped on it. Also, when he got angry, I told him his mother was butt ugly.”

That’s enough to make me bust out laughing. “Why would you do all that to him?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. I hate those football jocks, and I thought it would be funny to mess with him.” Then he adds, “Devin didn’t think so.”

I don’t get it. Why would you mess up somebody’s backpack like that when they didn’t even do anything to you?

Especially when that kid is a lot bigger than you are.

Sometimes it seems like Anton can’t stop himself from doing bad things.

When I do bad things, it’s always on purpose.

If I mess with somebody, it’s only because they deserve it.

When we get to Anton’s apartment, it’s completely empty and quiet.

There’s no sign of his mother or his brother.

I follow him to his room, and I notice the closet is open.

At the bottom of the closet is a bunch of free weights.

That’s when I look over at Anton’s arms and realize for the first time that even though he’s skinny and on the short side like I am, he’s got decent muscles, especially compared to most kids our age.

“Do you work out?” I ask him.

“Trying to.” He picks up one of the twenty-pound weights and lifts it over his head. “One of these days, when my dad comes at me or my brother, I’m going to be ready for him.”

I bet he will. I get the feeling that Anton is not the kind of kid to be underestimated.

He lets me have his desk again, and I spread out my materials while he digs around in his own backpack. He finally pulls out one crumpled page of notes about igneous rocks and passes it over to me. He wrinkles his forehead while I look it over.

I can barely read it. His handwriting is really bad. So is his spelling. Pretty much every other word is misspelled. If I didn’t know he did it, I would say this was written by a third or fourth grader. I glance over at him.

“It’s bad, I know.” Anton drops down against his bed, staring up at the ceiling. “I suck at school.”

When I look at the notes he wrote, it makes me wonder if there’s more to it than just “sucking at school.” A bunch of letters are written backward, which is super weird. I mean, even if you are bad at school, you should know which way the letter R is written.

But he tried. I wonder how long it took him to come up with this page of notes. Probably forever.

“It’s okay,” I say. “Let me copy it over.”

We go through it together, and I tell him the parts that I think we can use and also the parts we need more information about. He listens the whole time and even agrees to go with me to the school library tomorrow. Unlike me, he is still allowed to check out books.

“You’re good at explaining things, Ella,” he says.

“Thank you,” I say, and I feel happy because I enjoy helping Anton. Especially since he seems to care about doing a good job on this project more than I thought he would.

“You’re really smart,” he says, and I realize it’s the first time anyone has ever said that to me, even though I get plenty of A’s in school. “Not like me.”

“You’re smart too.”

“Nah.” He avoids my eyes. “I’m really not.”

“Everyone’s brain works differently. Just because the teachers don’t explain stuff to you in a way you understand it, that doesn’t mean you’re not smart.”

He doesn’t say anything, but a smile twitches at his lips. I like making Anton smile even more than I like teaching him.

We’ve been working for about an hour when there’s a knock on the door. My heart speeds up, terrified that it’s Anton’s dad, but then a child’s hopeful voice says on the other side, “Anton?”

Anton rolls his eyes. “I’m studying. We can play later.”

Except Anton’s brother doesn’t listen. A second later, the door swings open, and the little boy I saw last time I was here bursts into the room, full of energy. He beams at the sight of his big brother and immediately scrambles onto the bed next to him.

Anton grits his teeth. “I told you, get out, squirt.”

Brad’s eyes rake over me, and he giggles. “Anton, is this your girlfriend?”

Anton’s whole face turns bright red. Between his face and his hair, he looks like a Christmas tree. “Okay, that does it…”

He grabs his brother around the waist and hauls him off the bed, mussing his hair as he goes. At first, I’m not sure what he is doing, but then he throws the younger boy into the closet. He slams the door shut and then uses a key that was in a pen holder on his desk to lock it.

“There,” he says to the closed door. “Let’s see you bother us now.”

Anton just locked his brother in the closet.

I jump out of my chair, panic rising in my chest. I imagine the poor kid hunched in the dark, grasping for a pull string to turn on the bulb, finding only air. A cold sweat breaks out on my forehead.

“What are you doing?” I scream. “Why would you lock him in there? That’s horrible! You’re horrible!”

Anton stares at me with his mouth hanging open as I reach for the doorknob to the closet, wrenching it with all my might. But it’s no use—it’s locked.

Instead, I grab Anton’s arm, trying to get the key away from him. “You have to let him out!”

“Ella…”

“Let him out right now!” I shriek. The key is enclosed in his fist, and I grab his fingers, trying to pry them open.

Anton holds it out of reach, keeping his other hand on my shoulder. “Ella, Ella, calm down, okay?”

“You just locked your brother in the closet!” I’m close to tears. How could Anton do something like that to a little boy? “You can’t do that! It’s not right!”

“He likes it though.” Anton nods at the closet door. “I would never hurt him—he’s my brother. This is just a game we play. I taught him to pick locks, so he can get out any time he wants.”

“You…you what?”

“I taught him to pick locks.” He shrugs. “It’s a useful skill to know.”

As if on cue, the door to the closet pops open, and Brad looks incredibly proud of himself as he darts back into the room, and they high-five each other.

After another minute of coaxing while Brad peppers him with questions, Anton manages to get him to leave the room with the promise of playing Nintendo later.

I, on the other hand, can’t stop shaking. Even though it wasn’t happening to me, it was somehow almost worse to see that little boy trapped. It happens to other kids too. Plus, Anton probably thinks I’m nutso the way I was screaming.

Although there’s one thing that keeps sticking in my head.

“You know how to pick locks?” I ask Anton.

“Of course,” he says, like that was a super stupid question.

“Can you show me?”