Hellhole Read online

  The door opened. Stavroula emerged and approached the counter. “Sure you don’t want to stay till close? I pay you overtime! You save up for car? Take nice girl out?”

  “No thanks.” He made a beeline for the exit lest she spontaneously develop x-ray vision and demand that he empty the contents of his bag. “Any other night I would, you know that.”

  “Psff,” he heard her huff as he left. “You and your precious Fridays.”

  Once he rounded the corner and unlocked his bike, Max let out a final sigh of relief. He’d gotten away with it. “The purr-fect crime,” he whispered, followed by a strong urge to punch himself.

  The town of Eastville was known for four things: its renowned hospital, its renowned high school football team, its renowned granite quarry, and its stupid, stupid name. No one could say with authority what Eastville was supposed to be east of, as it was located in a fairly nondescript area far from the highway, in the wilds of western Massachusetts—west of Boston, west of Springfield, west of anything significant. The only thing it was east of was a big, ugly hill (known locally and affectionately as Ugly Hill) that was covered in a variety of shrubs and brambles that looked brown in the summer and browner in the winter. They didn’t even glitter prettily in the snow, because snow didn’t bother to stick to them. It recoiled from their thistles in disgust.

  Max threw a glance at the hill as he pedaled through town, surprised at his ability to perceive its outline. Normally E’ville was anything but bright, but owing to the lights of the football stadium bouncing off the low clouds in the sky, it was as if a dome had encased the town in a glowing, reddish hue.

  The crisp September air bit at his face. A loud cheer mushroomed up out of O’Connell Stadium as he rode past, and there was Audie’s voice, booming out of the speakers. In the school’s hundred-year history, there had never been a female football announcer at Eastville High—not until the day Audie marched up to the athletic director and flashed that irresistible smile of hers, informing him that she was going to be on ESPN one day, and if he ever hoped to score some tickets to the Super Bowl, he’d give her the job.

  He gave her the job.

  “And what will you be, young man?” Max muttered to himself in a spot-on imitation of Audie’s mother.

  A convict, he imagined the cat meowing from inside his bag. It’s death row for you, bub. You’ll probably get the chair. I’m a very important cat. Back on my home planet, I was a queen, I tell you! A queen!

  Max was not adapting well to the criminal life.

  He rounded into the parking lot of the Food Baron, stopped in front of the exit, and looked at his watch. It was 9:03 p.m., the T. rex skeleton informed him. He took exactly $4.81 out of his pocket and waited.

  Two seconds later the automatic door swished open. Out poked a sweating bottle of sparkling apple cider. Max exchanged it for the money, then expertly slid it into his bag.

  “Hey, Paul,” he said to the person formerly attached to the cider, a short, pimple-faced kid wearing a Food Baron apron.

  “Hey yourself” was the standard reply.

  Paul had been the only other student to show up for Mr. Donnelly’s after-school Paleontology Club last year, an endeavor that had clearly been doomed from the start. (Even Mr. Donnelly hadn’t cared enough to show up.) The two of them had chatted and exchanged their favorite geologic periods—Jurassic for Max, Cretaceous for Paul—and from then on had sat at lunch together every day. Slowly, accidentally, Paul became Max’s friend, or at least served as a decent pinch-hitter friend once Audie got too popular.

  And it was a good thing, too, because Paul looked even more the part of a dweeb than Max did. A curly-haired ginger, he possessed glasses that wouldn’t have been out of place at a nursing home, and a bucktoothed overbite fighting an epic battle against a complicated set of braces. But Paul was a nice kid, if a little dull, and his propensity to repeat the same word over and over sometimes got distracting.

  “Busy night?” Max asked.

  “I’ll say. We got a big squash shipment, but the squash was really dirty, so I had to wash each squash.”

  “Oh my gosh.”

  “Do you want to buy a freshly washed squash?”

  “No, thanks, I’m good with the cider. Have a good night!”

  The errands continued. Max hung a left onto Main Street—the founders of Eastville had apparently expended every drop of their creative juices on the town name—and biked past the dark storefronts, most businesses having closed early because of the football game. Only a couple of them were still open—a quirky gift shop whose owners cared nothing for sports, and a pizzeria, in front of which Max came to a practiced stop.

  “Hi, Mario,” he said with a nod as he entered.

  Mario the pizza guy smiled through his bushy mustache and opened the oven. Max hadn’t even needed to place an order; that large cheese pizza was already waiting for him, just as it was every Friday night at 9:05 p.m.

  He paid for the pie and then—because he was still coasting on the high of his successful theft and feeling really crazy—added an order of onion rings.

  Mario’s eyebrows went up. “Big night?”

  Max stuffed the onion rings into his bag. “You have no idea.”

  The squat ranch-style house that awaited Max was its usual dark and foreboding self, the kind of unkempt pile of shingles and shutters that neighborhood kids sometimes likened to the abode of a witch. Its once-white aluminum siding had long ago turned a sickly shade of brown. The lawn was overgrown and scorched yellow in the late-summer heat; Audie’s father often threatened to fine Max for not mowing it, but only in jest, as it made his own lawn look all the more pristine by comparison.

  The backyard was another story altogether.

  Max flipped open the mailbox to find two bills and a DVD. He scowled at the bills, but the DVD lit a tiny, happy spark inside him. He grinned, tossed all the mailbox’s contents into his backpack, and walked up the driveway.

  His cat—a real one named Ruckus, not the stolen plastic atrocity—greeted him at the door by way of hissing and swiping at every available inch of skin, as Ruckus’s favorite hobby was climbing atop the refrigerator and dive-bombing hapless kitchen entrants until they were forced, bleeding and broken, to retreat. “Ow!” Max shouted, then immediately shushed himself. Red, puffy scratch marks were already popping up from his skin. “Out of my way, spawn of Satan,” he whispered, swatting the orange furball away.

  Two plastic champagne flutes, the bottle of cider, a stack of paper plates, and the onion rings all got piled on top of the pizza box as Max headed into the hallway. He stopped in front of the first door on the right, then, struck by an idea, put everything on the floor and pulled the bobblehead out of his bag instead.

  He opened the door a crack and stuck the misshapen pink head in. “Mrow!” he squeaked.

  “Ruckus, is that you?” the voice inside said. “My—my God, what have you done to yourself? You got a makeover! Let’s see, I’m sensing exfoliation, sequin implants, corrective eyeball surgery, and is that . . . decapitation?”

  “Mrow.” Max made the cat nod, bouncing its spring-loaded head back and forth.

  “Well, dahling, you look stunning. Only a matter of time before Bravo gives you your own show. You’ll be the most intelligent thing on the network.”

  Max snickered, entered the room, and leaned over the rails of the hospital bed to give his mother a kiss. “You like it?”

  “It’s breeeeathtaking,” she said in a perfect imitation of the ridiculous way the ladies on QVC said it, her eyes sparkling in jarring contrast to the rest of her. Bulging collarbone, pale skin, sunken cheeks—she looked even thinner than she had when Max kissed her goodbye before school that morning, he thought.

  But he didn’t let his face show it. “I thought you might,” he said, handing her the cat.

  “Look! No matter where I move it, still it stares,” she said in awe, holding it at different angles. “Where on earth did you get this?”


  He hoped to sound nonchalant when he said, “Work.”

  She frowned and placed the cat on her nightstand. It joined an old-school beeper, plus a troll doll, some sort of unicorn-as-angel figurine, and a one-eyed koala dressed as a princess, each kitschy monstrosity more breeeathtaking than the last. That Goodwill Store had been a treasure-trove until it closed a couple of months earlier, transforming into an upscale boutique where even the chintziest snow globes were out of Max’s price range.

  “I hope it didn’t cost too much,” she said. “Stavroula give you a discount?”

  He nodded, for once thankful for the hair shelf that shielded his eyes. “Yep. Big one.”

  “Or maybe you stole it.” Every one of Max’s muscles seized, until he realized she was joking. “Maybe you’re secretly the Booze Hound,” she teased. “Robbing all those liquor stores, getting sloshed every night right under my nose.”

  “Ha!” Max laughed forcefully. “Yeah right, Mom.”

  That was too close. Quick, distract her with dairy.

  He retrieved the pizza from the hall and placed it on the bed next to her blanketed legs. “Let the Petty Pizza Pity Party . . . commence,” he said, opening the box.

  His mom breathed in deeply, then moaned. “Crack. Pure crack. And—sakes alive, onion rings? I’m in heaven. Wait—have I died and gone to heaven and I don’t even know it? Is this a Sixth Sense situation we’ve got going on here?”

  Max snickered, poured the cider into the plastic flutes, and sank into the ratty armchair beside the bed. “How was your day?”

  “Oh, thrill-a-minute,” she said bitterly, helping herself to a slice and a ring, one in each hand. “What would you like to hear about, the newest Bowflex infomercial? Or the latest shipment of bimbos on The Price Is Right? Or—funny story—the time I got up to brush my teeth but all of a sudden felt so weak I dropped my toothbrush in the toilet?”

  “You dropped your toothbrush in the toilet?”

  “Yeah. Which reminds me—I need you to get my toothbrush out of the toilet.”

  “Will do.”

  She slurped up a wad of cheese and gave him a sad smile. “Oh, Maxter. What would I do without you?”

  Chronic heart failure wasn’t nearly as much fun as the name implied. Max’s mom was young—she’d had him when she was only a few years older than he was now—so a viral infection was the only explanation the doctors had been able to come up with. She had survived the virus, but her heart just barely squeaked by, and she’d been in a state of decline ever since. As a nurse, she’d at least been able to handle her own medication, but she and Max both knew that she was past the point of getting any better.

  Her former colleagues begged her to stay at the hospital, but she always refused. (“Yeah, like I want half my coworkers coming in to gawk at my emaciated body and trade small talk. ‘Come on in, Phil, grab an IV pole and let’s get this party started!’”) Confident, stubborn, and fiercely independent, she’d spent the last two ailing years retreating from society, not wanting anyone but her son to see her in such a weakened and pathetic state. Her parents had thrown her out of the house when she’d gotten pregnant with him, and she hadn’t been in contact with any members of her family for years, so she’d learned not to rely on anyone but herself.

  And Max.

  Max had not minded the added responsibility of caring for his mom; she’d done it for him by herself for so many years that he certainly owed her the same courtesy. But when he wasn’t kept up all night by the idea of her going into sudden cardiac arrest, he was ceaselessly worrying about the financial strain. Every moment he wasn’t in school he was at work at the gas station, forgoing any and all extracurricular activities and socializing, should he ever discover what that word meant. He was barely able to put food on the table and pay the bills every month, let alone cover his mom’s medical expenses, to say nothing of the desperately needed heart transplant they’d never be able to afford.

  He glanced at the beeper on her nightstand, the one that would send an alert from the hospital should a spare organ ever drop into their lives. It hadn’t gone off yet, though, and Max had all but given up hope that it ever would.

  “So, what’s playing tonight?” his mom asked, going in for a second slice. She really wasn’t supposed to be eating all that cheese, but when she’d threatened to set herself ablaze at the thought of a life devoid of mozzarella, her doctors had agreed to exactly two slices per week. Which translated, in her opinion, to four. “If John Cusack’s involved, I’ll have to brush my hair first.” She combed her fingers through a flat, lifeless strand, then snorted. “Provided I can still hold a comb.”

  Max shook his head. “You’re too good for John Cusack, Mom. The guy hasn’t put out a decent movie in years.”

  “You bite your tongue, young man. Say Anything . . . ? Lloyd Dobler standing outside the bedroom window with the boom box? John Cusack is one of America’s finest—what’s that?”

  When he’d pulled the DVD out of his bag, one of the overdue bills had come with it. He stuffed it back in. “Nothing.”

  It’s only a second warning, he thought. They don’t cut the electricity until after the final one.

  “Hey, here’s a question for you,” he said brightly, holding up the DVD. “What happens when two hopelessly romantic business rivals hate each other in real life but fall in love over the Internet?”

  Her eyes lit up. “You’ve Got Mail!”

  She clapped as he popped it into the DVD player. “Oh, Max, you’re the best. You have no idea how much I needed this.”

  Cheesy romantic comedies put the “petty” in their weekly Petty Pizza Pity Parties, for reasons that soon became obvious.

  “Die, Meg Ryan!” Max’s mom shouted at the screen as the actress flounced around her children’s bookstore. “Get crushed underneath a bookcase of Harry Potters and DIE.”

  “Won’t work,” Max said. “Her perkiness will save her.”

  “And yet, inexplicably, Tom Hanks will only find her all the more charming.” She narrowed her eyes. “What a loser. Living on a boat. Boat hobo.”

  “Mom, you’re the only person on the planet who hates Tom Hanks.”

  “Good,” she said, peeling blobs of cheese off the bottom of the pizza box. “Then I get to be the one who slays him.”

  They continued to rip the movie to shreds, with analyses both profound (“You know why he needs to make friends on the Internet? Because in person, women keep laughing at him when they see the size of his—” “Mom, stop.”); vindictive (“She’s faking that cold. No one looks that cute when they’re gushing mucus.”); and cruel (“‘Daisies are the friendliest flower’? Who talks like that, other than people with brain damage?”). Max joined in on the barbs, even though he sometimes secretly liked those kinds of movies. They always had happy endings, a precious commodity that was not guaranteed in real life.

  Plus, Tom Hanks gave him hope. The man’s head looked like a loaded baked potato, yet he always got the girl in the end.

  When at last “The End” was typed out on the screen and a cursor hovered over it and clicked it away (“Lame.”), Max rubbed his eyes and stood up. His mom leaned back into her pillows with a contented sigh.

  “Thanks, hon,” she said, squeezing his hand. “You did good.”

  “I try.” He picked up the pizza box and his backpack, then leaned over to kiss her on the forehead. “Night, Mom. Love you.”

  “Love you too, babe,” she said, her eyes already fluttering. “Thanks again for the mutant cat.”

  Max snickered and closed the door behind him. He thought for a moment about heading into the basement to log some hours on the Xbox in the hopes that he might one day beat Audie at Madden, but the tendrils of a headache were beginning to spread through his skull, worming into the spaces behind his eyes. He told himself this was due to the stress of stealing the cat. Definitely not from the effort of holding in tears at the end of the movie.

  Look, he couldn’t help it. Tom and Meg
were just too charming.

  When he got to his bedroom, he dropped his backpack to the floor, the overdue bills along with it. He’d deal with them tomorrow. Or, rather, he’d check the family bank account balance, confirm that there wasn’t enough money in it to pay said bills, and throw them into the garbage bin tomorrow.

  He fell into bed but couldn’t sleep. He stared out his window at the perfect view of Ugly Hill that it provided, but its blahness only depressed him more. The familiar refrain of what am I gonna do, what am I gonna do ran through his head like a stampede of collection agency wildebeests. One concern led to another, a chain reaction with no end in sight.

  Well, there was one end—but he didn’t want to think about that.

  He tossed and turned, yet sleep refused to come. He watched the clock on his nightstand flip over, one minute at a time—2:59, 3:00, 3:01—until finally, unable to endure another minute of worry, he got dressed and grabbed his shovel.

  Excavate

  MAX WAS OUTSIDE IN LESS THAN A MINUTE, wearing his crummiest pair of jeans and a jacket that was far too thin for how chilly it had gotten. Not that there was any danger of getting lost and dying of exposure out there; he knew the overgrown hiking trails of Ugly Hill by heart. Everyone in E’ville did, as it was the only halfway decent place to make out. Or do more than make out.

  Or, in Max’s case, dig holes.

  Aside from being notably hideous, Ugly Hill had one additional claim to fame: about ten years prior, a paleontology team from Harvard University had discovered a rare fossil beneath its ugly dirt. It was so rare they hadn’t been able to identify it, and as far as Max knew—since he had periodically emailed Dr. Cavendish, the professor and expedition leader, about it—they were still stumped a decade later.

  The discovery garnered a lot of attention when it happened—Eastville even made the national news for a day or two. But once the excitement died away, any and all scientific interest went with it. The original discoverers had been a team of bored undergrads who thought Paleontology 101 would be an easy A and had already moved on with their lives, and the few honest-to-God paleontologists who showed up to properly search the area ended up finding nothing but more ugly dirt and a bunch of used condoms. So everyone gave up on it.