Mixtape for the End of the World Page 17

  “One!”

  Their lips touched. Hers soft against his own, he breathed in every ounce of the moment that he could. Electricity flowed through his body and he felt her lips part, her tongue flick at his. He tasted bubblegum as she pressed into him.

  As the people in their homes below welcomed Y2K, Derrick and Haley welcomed the end of the world with a kiss.

  27

  ♪ Tonic – You Wanted More ♪

  AS IT TURNED out, the world continued spinning on January 1, 2000, and society didn’t fall into darkness. The planes in the air stayed their course, the television and radio signals continued to broadcast.

  When the second semester started the next week, Derrick was excited to get back to normal and to see his friends. The break had been long and boring. He was ready to get back to the hustle and bustle of school. He missed it.

  He hadn’t talked to Haley since that night on the roof. They’d kissed, and when the world didn’t blow up, she pulled away from his lips and watched the rest of the fireworks show, both in silent understanding. After the encore, dozens of fireworks shooting off in the black sky in near succession, he helped her climb down from the rooftop.

  In the ensuing days, Derrick watched as a moving truck pulled in front of the Swanson home, and a collection of boxes being paraded into it. He watched from the driveway as she and her mother left, presumably to their new apartment on the other side of town, away from their neighborhood. Every night, he thought about her. He sat on the rooftop alone. He missed having her so close, having her next door.

  This morning, Cassandra drove them to school. Though she was hardly home since getting her car, in a sense, it made them closer. Derrick found himself enjoying the time they had together more than they once did. She let him play his music on the stereo, and as they pulled into the parking lot, he thanked her for the ride.

  “I’ll be here after,” she said, a fake grin across her face. “Don’t run late. I will leave you.”

  Derrick waved her off and pulled his headphones over his ears.

  Inside the school, just as the first bell rang, Derrick opened his locker and saw something in there already. At the bottom of the shelf, a package had been slipped through the vents. He picked it up, examining the envelope. It was small, wrapped in brown craft paper and tied with a string. His name was written on it in an elegant hand, cursive in black Sharpie.

  He pulled the string and unwrapped the package. A tape spilled out of the wrapping. On the label, in the same handwriting as on the paper, was scrawled:

  Mixtape for the End of the World

  Love, Haley

  On the back side of the label, he read over the track listing that she’d created. All of his favorite bands were there, and some of her own.

  He held the thing in his hands and smiled. He wanted to listen to it immediately, but instead he would wait until he was home at the end of the day so he could play it unhindered.

  “What’s that?” a voice behind him asked.

  Derrick pulled the headphones from his ears and hung them around his neck. Turning, he found AJ was standing in the middle of the hallway, a backpack slung lazily over one shoulder.

  “Just a mixtape,” he said, slipping the cassette case into his pocket.

  “Nice,” AJ said. “Where’s your first class?”

  “Mr. Thompson’s world geography class,” Derrick said.

  “Sweet! Me too!” AJ held out his hand for a high five and Derrick hit it with his own. Then, they embraced in a hug.

  “I missed you over the break,” Derrick said. “Is that weird? I feel like that might be weird.”

  “Not weird at all,” AJ said. “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had. I hated not getting to hang out like we wanted.”

  They walked to class together in lockstep, right-foot, left-foot, as the students in the hallway filed into their respective first period classes.

  “I wrote some new songs over the break,” AJ said apprehensively.

  “Good,” Derrick said. “Let’s jam them after school.”

  “Really?” AJ asked, his face lighting up.

  Derrick nodded. “Yeah man,” he said. “I’m ready to play again.”

  -THE END-

  Excerpt from

  Picture Unavailable

  May 2022

  Picture Unavailable Excerpt

  -Prologue-

  * * *

  BEN

  Twenty-five years ago

  * * *

  Benjamin Cotter stood at the corner of 16th and Marshall Street waiting for Stephen. Dressed in his red Power Rangers costume, he watched as groups of other kids—some younger, chaperoned by parents, and some older, without supervision—went from house to house, bags and pails held in hungry hands as adults stuffed their containers with candies.

  This was the first Halloween that Ben was allowed to go trick-or-treating without his mom walking him around the neighborhood. In the back pocket of his pants was a hand-drawn map of the streets of Westfield. On graph paper, he had drawn out all the streets between Main Street and Paradise Road—sixteen blocks total. Ben knew that he and Stephen would be able to hit every house in that rectangle of Westfield, amassing stockpiles of candy that would last them til Christmas.

  The vinyl and polyester of the costume itched the back of his neck and he lifted the plastic mask from his face to get a few breaths of fresh air. The inside of the mask was already beginning to condensate from his breath and the abnormally warm weather.

  Late October in Westfield usually brought cooler weather. It had even been known to snow once or twice on Halloween night as a cold front creeped over the mountains and rolling hills north of town. Tonight, however, it was an unseasonably warm sixty-five degrees. Though the weatherman on channel seven said that a cold front was expected to hit sometime after sundown, that gave them at least two hours to collect as much candy as possible before that happened.

  “Hey man,” a voice said behind him.

  Ben turned and nearly screamed.

  A five-foot tall grim reaper stood on the sidewalk with a plastic grocery bag in his hand.

  “What do you think?” the grim reaper said.

  “Whoa!” Ben exclaimed. “That is probably the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Stephen’s face was painted white and black, made up like a skeleton with dark circles around his eyes and his lips looking like they’d been sewn together.. Over his head, a black hood was attached to a robe that fell to his feet. He held a plastic scythe in his free hand.

  “I know,” Stephen said, the makeup on his face cracking as he grinned. “Ready to get some candy?”

  Ben and Stephen had been best friends since kindergarten, and they had been talking about this night for nearly as long. Finally, able to go trick-or-treating alone like the big kids. This particular Halloween night was special as well because it was on a Saturday night, which meant the adults handing out candy would be doing so longer than usual. Most years, the porch lights were extinguished by eight. Tonight though? Ben thought they would be able to walk til at least ten before needing to head back to his house.

  After school, his mom had taken him to the Blockbuster across the street from Westfield Grocery. He picked out a couple of movies for after trick-or-treating, including his favorite, War of the Worlds.

  They started walking down the sidewalk, falling in step behind another group of teenagers. Ben recognized one of them as Tyler Bradley, an eighth grader who looked more like a sophomore or junior. Tyler, nearly a full head and shoulders taller than everyone else in school, wore his football uniform as his costume, and he looked more like a high school linebacker than a thirteen-year-old.

  Tyler glanced back at Ben and Stephen and gave them a vicious grin. “Look who it is,” he said. “It’s the homo patrol. Could you two have picked even more lame costumes? I mean, who still watches Power Rangers? What are you, in the fifth grade?”

  “Tyler, stop,” one of the girls that accompanied him s
aid. She wore a pixie costume with glitter on her face. Ben knew her from algebra class.

  “What? It’s Halloween,” Tyler said. “Trick-or-treat, right? Let’s see the bags.”

  “We haven’t even got anything yet,” Stephen said. Though, before the statement was out of his mouth, Tyler had snatched the plastic bag from his grip.

  “If this thing isn’t full by ten o’clock, I’m kicking your ass. Both of you,” he glared at Ben now too.

  “Oh my god, Tyler,” Pixie Girl said.

  One of the other kids that walked with Tyler, however, joined in. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Better have these bags full. If not, it’s gonna be homo hunting season.”

  Tyler shoved the plastic sack back into Stephen’s chest as he and his friends walked off.

  Stephen stood dejected, staring at the new hole that had been ripped in it.

  “It’s alright,” Ben said. “We probably won’t see them again tonight.”

  “Yeah,” Stephen said.

  “Come on, let’s go back this way,” Ben said, pointing them toward 17th Avenue. “We can start on Seventeenth and work toward Main Street before taking eighteenth to Paradise. If we take each street like that, all the way to Twentieth, we’ll hit, like, ninety houses.”

  “Whoa,” Stephen said. “That’s…”

  “Three miles,” Ben answered. “I mapped it out.”

  Stephen’s eyes lit up beneath his frightening makeup. “This is going to be awesome!”

  They crossed the street to the next block and knocked on the first door. An elderly man dressed as a clown answered the door and dumped a handful of candy into their bags. The next house, they got even more. Every single house with a porchlight illuminated, they knocked on the door, receiving candies and sweets from all the adults in the neighborhood.

  “Oh, you look scary,” one woman said to Stephen. She smelled like wine and she wore a black skirt and a headband with cat ears on top. She turned to Ben, “And you are…” she started. “A motorcycle driver?”

  “I’m a Power Ranger,” he said.

  “I don’t know what that is, but you look very nice too,” she slurred before going back in her house where other adults could be seen from the front door. They were all gathered around, drinking from red plastic cups while wearing different costumes.

  Continuing on each street on their path, Ben’s cloth grocery sack was overflowing with sweets, packages of M&Ms and lollipops and Tootsie Rolls threatening to spill out. The handles on Stephen’s bag sagged from the weight of his haul. Ben looked at the Timex on his wrist and illuminated the glow dial. It was 9:30.

  “We should probably start heading back to my house,” Ben said. “My mom wants us back by ten.”

  “Good. I don’t know how much more my bag can hold.” Stephen lifted it up. The bottom looked ready to split at the seam.

  “I got War of the Worlds to watch,” Ben said. He couldn’t wait to get back, to dump out all their candy, pick out the best ones to eat while watching their movies.

  As they walked back toward 16th Avenue, porch lights started extinguishing, signifying that the candy-givers were out and done for the night. They saw fewer and fewer trick-or-treaters too, and the ones they did see were older. All the little kids were assumedly zonked out after a night of walking the streets. Ben remembered being carried home after a long night of trick-or-treating more than once, his bag of candy held in his clutches.

  From behind them, Ben heard the footsteps and then the voice that came after. “Hey, Cotter!”

  Ben turned to see Tyler and his two friends walking toward them on the sidewalk. “It’s time to pay up!”

  Ben’s eyes met Stephen’s. They held the same frozen fear that he felt himself. They were no more than six blocks from home, but Ben knew they could cut the alley as a shortcut and hop the chain link fence that ringed their backyard.

  “Follow me,” he said to Stephen. “Run!”

  They both bolted for it, their tennis shoes pounding on the pavement. Stephen’s black robe flowed behind him as the boy clutched his bag of candy close to his chest. They were both sobbing and heaving, sucking oxygen as they ran. Ben turned once to see Tyler and his cronies gaining on them just as he and Stephen made it to the mouth of the alley.

  “I can’t…” Stephen began to say, his words choked as he tried to keep up with Ben.

  Turning into the alley, Ben pulled Stephen behind a large green dumpster. The metal dumpsters were spaced every few houses and with little light shining into the alleyway, Ben hoped they could avoid being seen.

  They huddled together behind the dumpster. Tyler walked a few yards into the dark alley and called out, “This isn’t the end, Cotter! I’ll see you and your butt buddy at school on Monday!”

  Ben and Stephen both waited for the bullies to leave, to make their way back to their own neighborhood. Realizing he had been holding his breath, Ben finally let it out and greedily sucked more in. “I think,” he said between breaths, “they’re gone.”

  Peeking around the corner of the metal dumpster, Ben confirmed that they were alone. He stood up, dusting his costume from the dirt and filth that hung around the ground. With his free hand, he helped Stephen up as well and as they started to make their way back to the street, a rustling in the air behind them made him turn around once more.

  For a split second, Ben thought that Tyler and his friends had walked around the front of one of the houses and circled back to the alley to catch them off guard. A lump formed in Ben’s throat. He had no energy left to run anymore, but the idea of getting beat up made his legs start moving.

  “Oh no,” Stephen groaned.

  On their feet, they started toward the street as the rustling continued behind them. As they ran toward the asphalt, Stephen’s foot caught in a pothole in the unpaved alley. He tumbled forward, his bag of candy spilling out in front of him.

  “No!” he cried. “My candy!”

  Ben crouched down to help him scoop it up when he saw their pursuer in the alley.

  It made him freeze once again. It wasn’t Tyler, or his cronies, or any other person. It was a shadow, a darkness that swallowed everything else.

  “Stephen.” The name croaked out of his throat with more effort than it should have been. “Stephen, let’s go!”

  He went to pull his friend up, but the boy continued to scoop up candy back into the bag.

  “Stephen!” Ben screamed. The shadow grew closer, its open maw sucking the air and light behind them. “Run!” His voice was shrill in the night yet sounded far away and it echoed through the alley.

  Getting to his feet and profusely sobbing, Stephen held what candy he could close to his chest as the two boys ran for the street. Behind them, the shadow grew closer. Ben could feel its reach, the cold nothingness, on their heels.

  Ahead of them, a lamp glowed in the night. Erected on a wrought iron pole, its light emanated warmth, completely opposite of the cold darkness that pursued them. Ben felt the pull of the light, and everything inside him told them that they needed to get to the lamp that stood in the front yard of the nondescript house.

  “To the lamp!” he cried out.

  Stephen continued to sob, candy falling from his arms. Like Hansel and Gretel, a stream of Tootsie Rolls, Dots and Reese’s cups lined the path they ran as they sprinted toward the light.

  “Ben!” Stephen said. “Ben, I can’t…”

  “You have to!” Ben cried. “Run!”

  “Ben!”

  Ben turned once more to see Stephen slow, his legs no longer able to push his body. Reaching out to his friend, Ben meant to take Stephen’s hand, to pull him, to put the boy on his shoulders if he had to, in order to get them to the lamp safely.

  There, in front of him, no more than three yards away, the darkness swallowed Stephen.

  “Stephen!” Ben cried. Turning, fear pounding in his chest, Ben reached out and touched the metal of the lamp post. He wrapped his fingers around it and then his arms and then his whole bo
dy. His eyes clamped as tight as his grip on the pole, he waited for the shadow to take him too.

  It never happened.

  Opening his eyes, he looked around at his surroundings.

  It was daylight. Slumping jack-o-lanterns, having been left out on the front porches of their respective houses, greeted him with their snaggletooth grins. A cat sashayed in the road, stopping for a moment to stare at him before continuing on across the street and under an evergreen shrub.

  The water sprinkler in the lawn he found himself in oscillated as the ch-ch-ch-ch rang through the quiet morning air. The light of the wrought iron lamp was extinguished.

  In the street, birds pecked at the candies that had been strewn on the asphalt from Stephen’s arms.

  “Stephen?” Ben went to speak, but his voice was nothing more than a whisper. He stood up from the grass, his Power Rangers costume dew wet and cold. “Stephen?” he called out again, but still his voice barely resonated.

  Stephen wasn’t there.

  Not knowing what to do, Ben Cotter stood up and walked home, his feet shuffling on the cold pavement of the street, the cloth sack full of candy heavy in his grip.

  A Note from the Author

  Mixtape is probably the most autobiographical story I’ve written thus far in my career. Playing in garage bands was a seminal part of my teenage years (yes, we got the cops called on us for a noise complaint), and my biggest goal here was to distill those experiences here in way that felt both unique and familiar. I actually started writing this story nearly twenty years ago, while I was still in high school myself, but I knew that I wasn’t mature enough as a writer or as a human to do it justice. I’m glad I was finally able to get it out in its current form. It’s a story I was meant to tell for a long time.

  * * *

  Music was huge in those formative teenage years. It still is, and I’m always listening to something, either through headphones or on the record player in our living room at home. Learning to play music, though—learning guitar and piano as a fourteen year-old—was something that gave me some of my best friends and some of the most exciting experiences in high school. If anything, I hope that I distilled those experiences in these 60,000+ words.