Free My Sunshine Away by M. O. Walsh Page A

it was also the tension. When Louise saw Jason and me tromp into the room, she snapped as if caught. “What have you boys been doing?” she said. “Jason, what’s going on?”
    “Nothing,
Louise
,” Jason said. “I was just going to show him my knives.”
    “Did you change your sheets?”
    “I’ll do it later.”
    “But you won’t, will you?” Louise said.
    Tin Tin laid her head on the table as if falling asleep.
    Jason grabbed the back of my shirt.
    “Come on,” he said, and I followed him toward his room.
    Jason didn’t bother to flick on any lights as we navigated the cluttered living room and passed into the narrow hallway. And since our house and the Landrys’ house were both designed the same way—four-bedroom, three-bath ranchers, large and functional, with windows galore—I recognized the fact that this could easily be my own home we were skulking through. Their den was simply set up in the opposite direction, their fireplace laid in a different brick. Instead of the scented candles my mom kept aglow on the end tables, they had ashtrays, overrun with spent butts. All the same. Totally different. How easily, I wonder now, could we have switched addresses and been changed?
    When we passed what in my house would have been my older sister Hannah’s room, Jason stopped and pointed at the door. “That’s the mother lode,” he said.
    I looked up to see a series of latches on the door, each run through with a combination-style Master lock.
    “What’s in there?” I said.
    Jason smiled his gap-toothed smile.
    “Wouldn’t
you
like to know?”
    I then followed him into his room, where he finally turned on the light.
    “Pretend to be doing something,” he said. “Tell me if
Louise
comes.”
    Jason walked into his closet, got on the floor, and riffled through the dirty clothes.
    I looked around his room. It was full of posters that seemed tooyoung for him. Nothing embarrassing, exactly, but apparently decorated years prior and never thought of again. There were Transformers posters, Winnie-the-Pooh posters, and the wallpaper had a border of clowns. His chest of drawers was also something like I might have, pasted with Star Wars and Hot Wheels decals, while on his desk stood a small fishbowl, murky and green. Its only inhabitant was a dead tetra, molting in a castle.
    I sat down on Jason’s bed and watched him fiddle with a knife in his closet, prying open a panel in the wall, and I felt something cold begin to seep through my shorts. I put my hand on the bed and it was wet. I stood up and wiped my hands on my shirt.
    “Why is your bed all wet?” I said.
    “Shut up and listen for my mom,” he said. “Play Nintendo or something.”
    I walked over and flicked on the small TV screen in the corner. I pressed the power button on the Nintendo. As the television warmed, and the images came to, I heard his mother walking down the hall.
    “Jason,” I said, and she walked in.
    She held a bundle of sheets in her arms.
    “What are you boys doing?” she asked. “Where’s Jason?”
    Jason walked out of the closet with the knife in his hand.
    “What are you doing in here?” he said. “This is my room.”
    “You know what I’m doing,” she said, and walked over to his bed. She pulled off the sheets and crumpled them onto the floor, exposing a plastic mattress with a large circle of dark yellow in its center.
    “Get out of here,
Louise
,” Jason said. “I told you I was going to show him my knives.”
    “You can do that while I’m here, can’t you?” Louise looked over at me. “Is that really what you two are doing?” she asked.
    “I was just playing Nintendo,” I told her.
    So Jason feigned a presentation as Louise changed his bed. He brought out a box full of knives, some Swiss Army, one Rambo, and a slew of bowies. He pulled them out of their leather sheaths and used the blades to cut the thin hair on his arms.
    “Look how sharp,” he said. “Imagine what this one could do.”
    “This