Free Thunderstruck & Other Stories by Elizabeth McCracken

turned off with a wrench; mud must be knocked from shoes and the portable phone doesn’t always want to hang up and the fridge door will float open if you aren’t careful. And then one day, when the kids are with their father—thank God, as it turns out—you come home and surprise him in your kitchen. Maybe you’ve known all along who it was.
    And maybe he even has a crush on you. That’s the thing about crushes—sometimes they fly below the radar, the way in high school, when someone told you a boy had a crush, you could tell by the way he ignored you. The way heignored you meant everything. A terrible word, crush—you could die from crushing, from having one, anyhow; you remember listening to music that meant the world to you and nothing, you were quite sure, to your beloved. Who knows what teenagers listen to today; your own boy plays music that you can’t imagine swooning to; your own boy is friends with this boy, who is now in your kitchen, licking his lips nervously to oil up his mouth. You know everything about this kid: a neighborhood babysitter, sixteen years old but enormous, big enough to gently swing a laughing five-year-old over his head without fear; an altar boy who goes to the library to pick up books for his grandfather, in his pocket the grandfather’s faultless library card; a part-time drugstore clerk; a good boy who loves his parents, whose parents love him.
    What you don’t know is that he has a knife, and that you have frightened him.
    Ninety-six times, though. We couldn’t imagine it. We tried it ourselves, started to hit our own knees softly, ninety-six times. We gave up, we got tired, we made ourselves sick.
    Four days later, they made the arrest. The accused was the blond boy whose father had come in screaming. Another library patron. We all knew him, too: Tommy Mason. The Masons were a big, famous family in our town. Tommy Mason’s grandfather had been mayor once, back in the 1950s.
    An altar boy, a good boy, a boy with a library card. Could such a boy possibly be guilty? He lived across the street from the dead woman. He had shoveled her walk in the winter; his sisters had sold her Girl Scout cookies. Hewas good friends with Suzanne Cunningham’s oldest child, Kevin. Kevin Cunningham had found his mother’s body.
    Within twenty-four hours, every library staff member who knew how had looked up the accused’s library record. Tommy Mason’s card was still delinquent, told us nothing: a single book called
Soap Science
, no doubt for school. We looked at the record for the book daily—the title, the author (Bell), the publication date (1993), the due date (May 4, two years ago). We wanted to know something. These were the only facts we had.
    We weren’t supposed to do that, of course. We were supposed to be bound by ethics and privacy, but it felt as if we could break them, the way that cannibalism, in certain extreme cases, is acceptable.
    He was put in jail, and nothing could persuade the judge—also a patron, as it happened—to let him out on bail. Reports came down from the neighborhood and on the TV news. Mr. and Mrs. Mason let themselves be interviewed in their kitchen. They swore that it was impossible, that time would prove them right. Ask anyone in the neighborhood: Tom was the best kid. He wasn’t even interested in girls—why would he kill one? The Masons’ hands were woven together on the kitchen tabletop; their fingers were the same pink, their hands a solid knot. Mr. Mason was calm and reasonable. We wondered whether Tommy Mason was taking the fall for him. We remembered the screaming father, bright red with the idea we’d denied Tommy Mason anything; surely he turned that anger on his family.
    The papers interviewed neighbors.
Such a nice boy. There was something about him. He didn’t have a temper
.
You know, he was off—he didn’t have what you’d call emotions. He was shy. He was a loner. He was a daydreamer. Sometimes he stared through people’s