Tamar had fled school in a panic. He was now officially in trouble with everybody, good, bad and indifferent, adult, teen and child. He would normally take the Upton bus and transfer to the Sever Mills bus, and then walk only two blocks home. Those who hunted him would know this.

What was a nerd on the run to do?

He had one advantage. School did not get out for a while.

But had the Simpson Boys already begun the hunt?

If he could leave school early they could too. They might be out looking for him already.

What about the police?

He might be wanted as a witness to the Simon Diesel thing.

What about Mom?

She might have been called.

Whatever the case, if someone were hunting him, they would be looking around the bus stops. He decided to walk. That way, if they were looking for him now, he would not be on the buses or bus stops. An image of him being dragged off a bus stop and into a sewer by the Simpson Boys and taken down to some secret place of torture filled his mind.

That image was soon crowded out by one of Officer Searles stopping the bus he was on, and sending a SWAT team onboard to apprehend Tamar, fugitive witness and truant nerd.

Then there was an image of Mom, dragging him to her vanity by gripping his earlobe between her thumb and forefinger, and then standing there before the mirror and forcing him to look at himself while she cussed him, just like she did to Dad.

“No!”

He heard his voice ring hollowly from the walls of the brick houses that lined the street.

He would flee; run forever if need be. He had done nothing wrong at school. He was a good student. He would not permit himself to be persecuted by the grownups who did not care about him and the kids who picked on him. He could not run much farther though. Truth be told, he was a poor runner. He set to marching with deliberate steps, up side streets and through alleys, not up the main streets that the busses followed.

After a while he got hungry and stopped into the 7-11. He bought a greasy taquito with his bus fare, wolfed it down while the grease ran down his chin, and soon felt real tired. He thought for a minute about calling Jesse or Bro. The cell-phone was not in his pocket, and it occurred to him that he had lost it, probably while running. That was a weird sinking feeling when he realized that he was cut off from the world.

Within a few hours he was almost home, walking past Stoner Park, when the Sever Mills bus rolled by and he heard the Simpson Boys yelling cuss words and threats out the windows. He wished now that Granny were here. She hated cuss words and had a heavy purse. But she was in the old age home and could not help him.

Stoner Park had always given him the willies. It was the place where wild white boys like Simon Diesel went to do their drugs. In fact, just two weeks ago, Joey Watkins had been found dead of an overdose in this park. That had confirmed Tamar’s suspicion that it was a bad place to go. But the Simpson Boys, the three surviving ones, were piling off the bus ahead of him and he was cutoff with no place to go, but into the creepy park. So he fled into a place he had always shunned, that was to him a tree-covered house of horror.

He could hear them whooping it up behind him, obviously glad that he had chosen to flee into the park. Stoner Park was known to be Simpson territory.

Had he just made a fatal error?

Would he ever emerge from this park again?

Would the Simpsons do to him here what Simon Diesel had done to Daryl, and to himself?

Would he end up like Joey Watkins, a dead body in the park, being carted off on the news under a yellow sheet?

He ran, and his book-bag became too heavy, so he heaved it off to the side, hoping it would slow the pursuit, as the criminal boys, all a year older than him and bigger, stopped to loot his things. He hoped absently, that they were grossed out by the stink bug collection, and the rat he had preserved in a mason jar of vinegar for his project.

On he ran, deeper into the park. Soon he was near a pumping station above the smelly stream. There was not a grownup in sight. No decent people went into Stoner Park. White people took their dogs to mess somewhere else, somewhere nicer. He ran past the pumping station, and then began to feel a pain in his ribs. He panicked and began breathing faster, and started getting faint.

It was late September and the weeds still crowded high beneath the looming trees, possibly offering a place for a nerd to hide. He limped on a little farther, and then saw it: the Place of Death; the spot where Joey Watkins had been found overdosed and dead. The yellow crime scene tape was still there.

He stood, stooped in pain and frozen in fear, wondering what it must be like to be a dead body laying in those weeds. Then he heard the Simpson Boys whooping like wild Indians in one of the old westerns Granddaddy used to watch before he passed, except that these ‘Indians’ cussed. In he went, like a ghost under a haunted church, creeping into the place where Joey Watkins did his last drugs, right past were the news lady with the red dress stood and announced it to the world.