“Chicken!”
“Am not!”
“Chicken!”
“Am not!”
“Chicken…shit.”
With that single syllable, Brady Wilton crossed the invisible line that defined the boundary of off-handed squabbling and escalated the stakes immeasurably. There was no backing out now. Kyle knew it and stood ready to face the consequences.
“Chickenshit,” Brady repeated slowly, his tongue savoring each syllable as if he were trying to infuse as much authority into his boyish treble as his big brother Frank had in his sometimes warbly, mostly teen-age bass when he used that word.
“Chickenshit.”
“Am not!” Kyle Jantzen yelled, painfully aware of how lame that retort was next to Brady’s sudden explosion into near-adult near-obscenity. Of course, Kyle could easily have spiced his own phrasing up-he heard the F-word often enough from his Dad to know that nothing, nothing could top that one. But he also knew what his mother thought of the F-word, and the fatal sounds choked in his throat when he tried to slip them in between the two words. (He knew from close scientific observation of his father’s speech patterns that the F-word worked best like that, slipped in between two other words that weren’t that bad at all).
“Am f… — am not!”
“Then ya gotta do it.” Kyle glanced up the long stretch of street bordered by glowing porch lights and dotted at irregular intervals by an assortment of juvenile ghosties and ghoulies shouting ear-splitting choruses of “Trick or Treat” at each open doorway.
He let his gaze wander further upward, finally stopping at the dark house outlined in the evening light. Then he turned his attention back to Brady, at this point in his short life bravely disguised as a gory mummy trailing shrouds of ragged, dusty, pukey mummy-stuff (otherwise known as one of Mrs. Wilton’s old white sheets ripped into long strands and stained with mud and ground-in ketchup that Kyle could smell a dozen feet away-the odor threatened to break the illusion but somehow he didn’t care).
“Now?” Kyle’s voice took on a whining pitch that contrasted with his All-American-hero’s black and silver cowboy outfit, complete with hat, holster, and twin silver six-shooters.
Brady nodded. “Now…or you’re a chickenshit for life.”
Kyle nodded in return. That was the way it would be. Once branded, always branded. It didn’t matter that Brady was Kyle’s best friend in the world, or that they had lived their entire nine years side-by-side in two of the dozen or so homes that had dotted this part of the valley before new houses started cropping up all over, covering favorite fields with asphalt and concrete and boringly tame lawns, enclosing wild bike trails and impromptu baseball fields with faceless slump stone fences, appropriating for faceless new people the scattered oak trees just made for small boys to climb on lazy, sunny, summer afternoons. Kyle and Brady lived across Bingham Boulevard from the Charter Oaks, and even though Kyle would have died for Brady and Brady would have died for Kyle-they had actually promised in blood to die for each other-Kyle knew that if he chickened out now, Brady would be honor-bound tell all the guys at school on Monday. That was the way the world went.
“Kyle wouldn’t do it,” Brady would stage-whisper to Bobby Marx or Jimmy Sanderson or one of the other kids. “He was too chicken.”
Out of deference to the decorum of school-or more likely, out of fear of Miss Robinson’s sharp hearing, capable (as most of the boys knew to their sorrow) of penetrating like radar to even the farthest corners of the schoolyard-Brady would probably leave off the offending shit, but what was left would be enough to make life a living torment for Kyle. So in spite of his hesitation, he was already dismally aware that he really had no choice at all.