Free Wonders of the Invisible World by Christopher Barzak

over.”
    Jarrod made a face like the guys on the team were some exotic food he’d never try willingly. Octopus or raw fish, maybe. But baseball players? “Nah,” he said. “I’ll have to hang out with them soon enough, once we start spring training. I figured we could have one of our old horror-flick-marathon nights, like we used to. For old time’s sake.”
    I looked at him for a while, wanting to say I wasn’t comfortable with this change in plans, wanting to say I wasn’t comfortable doing something we did back when we were kids, because doing that would make me think about all of the
other
things I couldn’t remember us doing.
    But instead I said, “Sounds fun,” and asked, “What do you have in the lineup?”
    “I’m thinking we should go for a classic first,” he said, raising his eyebrows a few times with real excitement that I was good with his change of plans. “Maybe a slasher. Then we can move on to something current, possibly a supernatural thriller. Those were always your favorites. Or we could watch something so bad it’s funny.”
    “When we were kids,” I said, “we didn’t watch scary movies and laugh.”
    I said this with confidence. This much I could remember.
    “Christ, no,” said Jarrod. “Back then I
believed
in the boogeyman. And you seeing all kinds of spooky shit sure as hell didn’t help convince me otherwise.”
    I looked down at the orange shag carpeting. It was the same carpet I remembered from when we were kids, and it was probably the same carpet that had been in that trailer before Jarrod’s parents had lived there. Looking at it made me feel a little better, because it was something I hadn’t forgotten, a touchstone, something that had leaped the chasm between my past and present, making everything feel continuous inside me, at least for one brief moment.
    Also, it was easier to look at that carpet and refuse to think about what Jarrod had said about me seeing spooky shit back then.
    “Hey,” he said, his voice softer now. “I’m sorry, Aidan. I didn’t mean to bring that up again.”
    I looked up, sucking in one cheek a little, and said, “It’s okay. I’d rather you talk about it than pretend it was never real.”
    “Thanks,” he said, like I’d done him a favor. He stood in the doorway between the living room and kitchen, his arms braced on the frame above his head. “I’m glad to hear you say that. I hate having to be fake around people. I’m glad I don’t have to be fake around you.”
    He turned to go into the kitchen and left me standing there wondering why he would ever have to be fake with anyone. A guy like Jarrod is usually the sort lifted up on everyone else’s shoulders because he can throw a baseball past batters and leave a bit of smoke coming out of the catcher’s mitt afterward. At least he didn’t see things other people couldn’t. At least the thing that made him different was a good thing.
    A minute later, he returned with a couple of beers. “Want one?” he said, holding out a sweat-beaded bottle.
    I thought about my mom and her prediction that drugs and alcohol would appear at Jarrod’s party. A little anti-drinking commercial played in my mind for a second, and my mom was an actor in it, wagging her finger at me. Why did she always have to be right?
    I shrugged it off a second later, though.
It’s just one beer,
I told myself. And
it’s just the two of us, anyway.
And that piece of logic nullified the accuracy of my mom’s prediction just enough for me to not care.
    I took the cold bottle out of Jarrod’s hand then, and twisted the top off like a trouper.

    By ten, we’d made our way through two old slasher flicks—
Nightmare on Elm Street
and
Friday the 13th
—and we were just getting to the end of a third movie—
Paranormal Activity
—which had been made like a documentary about a demon-possessed woman whose boyfriend won’t stop filming her.
    “What an idiot,” Jarrod said, shaking his head as the movie