Free B003UYURTC EBOK by John Corey Whaley

somewhere, she had introduced the Woodpecker haircut. It was for young boys, mostly, and consisted of a Mohawk-style cut with the tips of the standing hair died a bright red, in honor of John Barling’s imaginary friend. I thought it was ridiculous but couldn’t help watching her every time she completely destroyed a kid’s head with her clippers and dye. Duke Lister was the firstone to get the haircut, and as soon as all the other twelve-year-old boys in town saw him posing for pictures in front of the huge wooden cutout of the Lazarus, which had replaced an old dogtrot cabin as the main attraction of the city park, they all filled my mom’s salon with ten-dollar bills in hand.
    “Have you ever seen such a thing, Cullen?” my mom asked me as she massacred Caleb Cooper’s seven-year-old head of hair.
    “Sure haven’t.”
    At what point my mother decided it was appropriate to pretend to be okay, I had no real clue. What I assumed was that she was trying her best to go about life in as normal a way as she had three weeks earlier in the hopes that Gabriel would reappear just as easily as he had vanished. My father, on the other hand, stayed on the phone pretty much all day long. He talked to sheriff’s departments all over the state. He contacted newspapers to print missing ads, but few would agree to publishing articles about a possible runaway. His plan was to make sure that Gabriel’s picture was in every newspaper in the state. He was also working on setting up a website, with the help of the kid who fixed computers at Wilson’s Furniture Store.
    It is hard to explain why, after only three weeks, I had lost all hope that my brother would be found. It did go in phases, though. One day I would wake up thinking,
This is it. He’s coming home today
, and the next day it would be more like,
They’re going to find his body today.
The only way I could comfort myself was to imagine that my brother had, in fact, just gotten fed up with us and run away. I pictured him in New York City, getting a job as a mail boy in a big company and working his way up to amanagement position after going to night classes. I saw him in a coffee shop asking a girl to marry him and becoming a father soon thereafter. I saw him looking at a framed pictured of him and me and replacing it with one of his new family. I saw him smiling. He was endlessly smiling.
    I was getting tired of my parents hugging me every night. I was getting tired of Lucas Cader sleeping on my floor. I was tired of Aunt Julia’s crying every single day, whether I saw it in person or heard it through the phone. Mostly, though, I was getting sick and damn tired of hearing and reading and seeing shit about that damn woodpecker. And sitting up one night in my bed as Lucas flipped through channels on my TV, I wrote this sentence down in my book, the same one I keep my titles in:
If I had a gun, I would shoot the Lazarus woodpecker in the face.
    Fulton Dumas gave me the creeps. It wasn’t only because I’d caught him giving me the odd stare-down on more than one occasion, but also because of the way he would say a sentence and then repeat it back to himself under his breath. He also gave Lucas Cader the creeps, so much so that Lucas had developed a theory that Fulton should be investigated in my brother’s disappearance.
    “They questioned him and his mom the same way they did us, Lucas.”
    “It doesn’t matter. People who do things like that know how to hide the truth. I don’t trust him.” Lucas stared through my bedroom window at the Dumases’ house next door.
    “I think you’re just getting paranoid. Why would he be so stupid? Who takes someone from the house next door?”
    “Exactly. It’s the perfect plan: kidnap the next-door neighbor. No one would ever be so dumb as to put themselves so close to the crime scene. And no one would ever suspect the neighbor, either. That’s why he did it. He’s sitting over there right now, doing God knows what.” Lucas