Clown in a Cornfield Read online

  “Dude kicked me out of class once for wearing a Vikings cap,” Tucker cut in to add. “On game day.”

  Well. That didn’t seem weird to Quinn. Dress codes were dress codes. Or was that a city thing? There didn’t seem to be a strong gang presence in Kettle Springs.

  “Did you catch any of his rant on there?” Janet asked Ronnie, motioning to the phone.

  “No! I wasn’t even filming! He really did throw us out for nothing!”

  “You really missed it?” Cole said. “And look where it got us.” He motioned around the room.

  “Not to mention the fact that if we’re banned from Founder’s Day, I’m now missing out on a churro,” Tucker said.

  Ronnie looked ready to apologize like before, but instead Janet interrupted and doubled down.

  “Oh, like we’re not going anyway. And how were we supposed to know Mr. Vern was going to flip out over something so small?” Janet said. “That would have played well on the channel, too. Did you see how red he was? I thought he was going to pass out . . .”

  “You have a YouTube channel?” Quinn asked, finally admitting to herself that simply dipping her toes into the social scene wasn’t going to be possible. She was in it now. The deep end. The five of them were doing time together . . .

  “Yeah, we have a YouTube channel,” Ronnie corrected.

  “They used to have a YouTube channel,” Cole said, a further tweak. Distancing himself.

  “They,” Janet scoffed. “We still do. Even if some people don’t like to be on camera as much as they used to.” Janet nodded at Cole, both of them looking different flavors of exasperated.

  “What kind of channel?” Quinn asked Janet, breaking the moment of awkwardness.

  “Stunts, pranks, we have—had, whatever—almost six thousand subscribers. A few videos have gotten, like, fifty thousand views. We’re growing. Or at least were until a little over a week ago.” Another withering look to Cole. “Seems like we might really be done now.”

  While Ronnie and Tucker seemed to be under the boy’s thumb, Janet didn’t seem to give a shit. Quinn liked that.

  “Check it out,” Tucker said, handing over his phone. “There’s no Wi-Fi here, but I’ve got the page cached.”

  Quinn scrolled through videos with names like: “Roof Jump on a Moped—Must Watch!!”; “Old Lady Freak-Out—Waitress goes H.A.M.”; and “KILLER CLOWN—HAUNTED BARN STUNT TrY Not to LauGH :-D”

  The last video’s thumbnail showed a familiar-looking clown in a porkpie hat, grasping an oversize plastic sickle and sliding out from behind a barn door.

  “That clown,” Quinn said, recognizing the hat more than anything else.

  “You’ve seen him before?” Cole said, surprised, happy.

  “Yeah, I meant to ask someone what was up with him”—she thought of Rust, but didn’t say his name, as it didn’t seem like her neighbor fit with this crowd—“I’ve seen his face around town. On buildings and stuff.”

  “Oh,” Cole said, seemingly disappointed that she didn’t know the clown from their videos. “The town loves Frendo. He’s, like, our mascot. But he’s lame, so we’ve been trying to give him a makeover. Rehabilitate his image. Make him a little more . . . homicidal.”

  “That reminds me,” Janet said, a sidebar with Tucker that was only a little distracting and rude. “You should get in touch with Dave Sellers, see if he’ll trade shifts with you tomorrow.”

  “Shifts?” Tucker looked confused for a moment. “Ah. Gotcha,” he said, figuring out whatever she was asking. “I don’t think the guy has a phone, but I can try to find him around town. Five bucks and he’ll hand over the suit.”

  “Whatever you two are planning,” Cole said, pointing between Janet and Tucker, “leave me out of it.”

  “So what happened? Why aren’t you making videos anymore?” Quinn asked, trying to get the conversation back on track.

  When he spoke about the channel, it was obvious that Cole was proud of their work.

  Nobody answered.

  Tucker, Ronnie, and Janet squirmed, looked to Cole as he thought about it.

  “We had an incident last week.” Cole paused. “I got drunker than I should have.”

  Tucker coughed, put a hand on Cole’s desktop. “That’s one way to put it, man. But you didn’t mean it. We all know that.”

  The hand moved to Cole’s shoulder and he shrugged Tucker away. “I’m good,” Cole said to the bigger boy. Tucker looked ready to stand, give Cole a full shoulder rub, if it was requested. It was extreme, even for sports bro fraternity, and Quinn had to wonder if Tucker knew how sad his hero worship looked.

  “He burned down the factory,” Janet said, cutting through the fog of Tucker’s coddling.

  The pieces of town gossip she’d gotten from Rust and then Ginger began to knit together, giving Quinn a better picture of what was going on.

  “It was my family’s factory,” Cole corrected, as if that made it less of a crime. “My dad’s at least. And it had been empty for over a year. At the time of the fire.”

  He’s pretty cute, for an arsonist. Ginger’s words came back to Quinn.

  “No one got hurt or anything,” Tucker said, coming to his friend’s defense. “It just got out of control, but the way everyone is reacting, you’d think no one in this town ever threw a rager before.” Tucker was clearly used to standing up for Cole, no matter what.

  Cole looked over and up to make eye contact with the big kid. He smiled. Even beaten and sad—and with that unattractive air of I’m the boss—Quinn could tell that Cole had the capacity for kindness. Or at least she hoped he did, that she wasn’t just developing a crush, ready to give more slack to someone who . . . maybe just admitted to a major felony?

  “I made a mistake,” Cole said, voice soft. “I fucked up. But in my defense, the factory’s been boarded up too long and all it was doing was sitting around and slowly rotting. It was a stupid reminder of the way things used to be. I’m not sad it’s gone.”

  “Mostly gone,” Janet corrected him. That was right, the inside might have been burned out, but the structure was still standing. Quinn almost told them that she could see Baypen from her bedroom window.

  “Say what you will about Kettle Springs . . . ,” Ronnie seconded. “The volunteer firefighters are on point.”

  “Fine, mostly gone,” Cole said, glaring at Janet.

  “Cool,” Quinn said, then, reaching for a change of subject, a way into this group she wasn’t sure getting involved with was a good idea: “So, where’d you shoot the creepy clown video?”

  “At Tillerson’s barn—” Cole stopped mid-thought, mid-word, and snapped his fingers, pointed to Janet.

  “Don’t look at me, it’s open invite.”

  “That’s very neighborly of you, Janet,” Tucker said.

  “What she means to say is she’s spent most of this week putting together a party,” Cole explained, some life coming back into his sad-dog eyes. “And you’re definitely coming.”

  She looked at the room around her, everyone seeming to be ready for what came next, for her answer, different levels of involvement on their faces. Everyone except Ronnie, who was taking great pains to look like she didn’t care.

  “I am?” Quinn asked, buying time for him to elaborate.

  Cole’s invitation was phrased like a command, but somehow it felt like a challenge.

  “You bet you are. Day after Founder’s Day.”

  Founder’s Day. She wanted to ask what it even was. Whether they thought Mr. Vern had formally banned her from the “public event” like he had them, but there was no time.

  Cole looked to Janet, tenderness in the expression. He nodded.

  Go on.

  “You saw a little bit of it, in class. What it’s like around here,” Janet started. “There’s so many people—and Mr. Vern’s the least of them—trying to shut us up, trying to make us who they want us to be. Trying to tape our mouths shut and tie us in bubble wrap.”

  “But for one night
we’re going to say fuck ’em,” Cole said, picking up the energy. “We’re going to do it where nobody’s around to stop us. Out in the corn, drink and smoke and do—”

  “All the things that make Kettle Springs great,” Ronnie added.

  “Kettle Springs is great?” Tucker sneered.

  “It could be,” Janet said, suddenly wistful. “It will be for one night.”

  “And you,” Cole said, winking at Quinn, “cannot miss it. Not if it’s the last thing you do.”

  Four

  “Everything’s so cheap, it’s like living in the fifties,” Quinn’s dad said, turning the menu over to begin again from page one. “Salisbury steak for five bucks! And it comes with a side.”

  “A side of diabetes?” Quinn asked. Tentative.

  She was relieved to see him smile. It’d been a rough afternoon since getting home. The school had called Dad, letting him know she’d gotten detention for “disciplinary issues.” He didn’t take it well, began pressing her with questions about acting out. But by the time she’d recounted her story, explaining about YouTube channels, celebrity boys, a factory fire, a science teacher’s Mr. Hyde moment, and a mysterious party invitation, Glenn Maybrook could only chuckle and say:

  “Well, I guess don’t make it a regular thing.”

  Whoever he’d spoken to from the school hadn’t mentioned Founder’s Day, and neither had Quinn.

  Quinn looked around them at the Main Street Eatery. Yes, that was the actual name of the restaurant. The establishment was a cross between the greasy spoons that peppered South Philadelphia and the proper diners on the other side of the Delaware River in Jersey. They were seated in one of the booths next to the windows and watched the sleepy late-afternoon rush of Kettle Springs.

  Quinn picked at a splotch of crusted ketchup in front of her. It came off easily against her fingernail. Otherwise, the place was clean enough but not antiseptic. This was not a chain restaurant, hadn’t been plopped down whole cloth in a weekend. The knickknacks dotting the walls had earned their spots. A “Missouri’s Best Chili, 1998” runner-up plaque hung with pride alongside pictures of the decades of Little League teams the restaurant had sponsored.

  As Quinn scrutinized the decorations, she noticed that, oddly enough, nothing seemed to date beyond the early 2000s. It was like time had stopped for the Eatery just after the turn of the century. The effect made the Eatery seem less like the walls were celebrating the restaurant’s place in the community and more like they were preserving the artifacts of a time long past.

  Quinn’s dad was looking down with a private and doofy smile, still perusing the menu. “They have chicken-fried steak. I haven’t had chicken-fried steak since—” And he stopped mid-sentence. Quinn knew where the thought was going to end up, more or less. Glenn Maybrook had last had chicken-fried steak with Mom. Somewhere. On a road trip, maybe. Probably before Quinn was born or before she could remember. If he were able to without crying, he’d tell her that it tasted great but that it kept them both up all night with indigestion. “Anyway,” he soldiered on, shaking his head, “that dish sounds like it will be good for business. A real artery clogger.”

  He kept at it: “Do you think it’s okay to order something from the breakfast side and something from the lunch?” Poring over the menu was the happiest he’d looked in weeks.

  “I think here in the fifties they let time travelers get away with anything they want,” Quinn joked.

  He deserved this. Samantha Maybrook might have robbed them both of any enduring optimism toward the future, but snatches of occasional fried food–inspired happiness really shouldn’t be too much to ask.

  Their waitress came over, looking harried. The woman wore her hair up, in a style that Quinn had only ever glimpsed in pictures and old movies: the beehive. Despite the worry lines on her face and smudges in her makeup, the hairdo was perfect. The waitress wore large, mermaid-scale earrings that gave her face an unpleasant reptile quality when paired with her blue eye shadow.

  Warmly and professionally, the woman fielded Dad’s questions about the menu. Quinn glanced to the window to keep from staring at the mole that’d poked through the waitress’s thick foundation.

  Across the street, she saw a group of men on the corner, one with a banner draped at his feet, the other two pointing up. They were hanging a sign welcoming everyone to Founder’s Day. They seemed to have things under control, so Quinn let her eyes drift down the street. There’d been plenty of interesting bumper stickers around town, but she couldn’t help but pick out the truck with the gun rack, the “Don’t Tread on Me” magnet, and an American flag sticker with a dark blue stripe. Back home, the truck wouldn’t have belonged to a Philadelphian, the sticker representing a Pennsyltucky bingo, but in Kettle Springs it was starting to look normal.

  A kid Quinn didn’t recognize walked by the window and she turned away to avoid meeting his gaze.

  With fresh eyes, Quinn realized that the Eatery’s clientele skewed much older than at the diners she knew back home, which mostly served as after-school hangouts this early in the night. She remembered how much the waitresses hated the groups of teenagers. Sometimes nursing hangovers, kids would take over three or four tables for hours, order milkshakes and fries and demand free refills on Cokes. All that while not historically being great tippers.

  In fact, Quinn noticed, there wasn’t a single other teenager in the Eatery. Unlike the town itself, which seemed sleepy for so early in the evening, the Eatery was bustling. A veritable sea of liver spots, soup noises, and mothball stink.

  After settling on an order, Quinn’s dad leaned over the table and said, “I’m going to hit the head before the food comes.”

  “Thanks for sharing.”

  Quinn pulled out her phone. Usually picking up her phone was muscle memory, but right now she had a purpose. She was going to try looking up her new classmates—fellow detentioneers—on Instagram.

  Unlocking her phone, she overheard her dad say: “Heya, I’m Dr. Maybrook. Pardon me, but it looks like you’ve got a cane there. Why don’t you stop by and I’ll be happy to take a look. I’m at Doc Weller’s old practice.”

  Glenn Maybrook conducted a version of this conversation with three separate customers, trying to sell his new practice, but none of his potential patients seemed eager to talk with her dad. Which wasn’t surprising—a strange man was approaching them and asking how long they’d had that scaly patch of skin below their elbow. It may have been that Quinn was a conspicuous eavesdropper, but every time she raised her eyes above the back of the booth, she saw old, dull eyes staring back at her.

  Her dad’s awkward glad-handing wasn’t the problem. No. It wasn’t her imagination, wasn’t paranoia. The old folks in the diner weren’t talking to her dad because of her. The patrons were responding to her dad’s pleasantries by giving Quinn a stare-down.

  Instead of creeping her out, like those old, rheumy eyes staring at Quinn probably should’ve, all they did was make her angry. Quinn almost thought to bare her teeth and growl to really give them something to be afraid of, but caught herself and toyed with the beads of condensation that had formed on her glass of water instead.

  “Tough crowd,” her dad said as he slid back into the booth. Their food arrived a moment later. Quinn’s dad cleared his throat to ask the waitress a question and for one horrible second Quinn was terrified he was going to ask if she’d ever had that mole biopsied. But, instead, he asked for syrup. “I like it on my bacon,” he said as if the request needed explanation, and then, inexplicably, he winked. The waitress smiled and winked back, if only by gratuity-based reflex.

  Quinn had to admit the food was good. Putting the fifties prices aside, chipped beef on toast had its charms.

  “This can’t be every night,” she said between mouthfuls. “We need to do less eating out, less takeout. There’s got to be a decent supermarket around here. We’re in farmland, right? Where’s the farmers’ markets and cute roadside stands?”

  “I don�
�t know sweetie, but . . .” Her father trailed off. She heard the sleigh bells affixed to the restaurant’s door jingle.

  Please don’t be Cole. That was her first thought and it surprised her.

  But she turned in her seat to see it wasn’t Cole at the door. It was a grown man clad in what Quinn had always thought of as “highway patrolman tan.” There was a star on his chest. Not the silver badge that Philly cops wore on their belts, but an honest-to-goodness sheriff’s star with more points than seemed necessary. This was a massive man, with the reddened, visible pores of someone who was both old and prematurely aged. His thick, rectangular gray mustache was as standard-issue as his belt, handcuffs, and sidearm. Quinn tried to imagine him ten or twenty years younger and just couldn’t. She suspected he might have always looked this way.

  The lawman tipped his hat to her father, then removed it. He winked at Quinn and then sat in the booth behind theirs without “waiting to be seated” as the sign instructed. Quinn felt the vinyl of the booth’s upholstery pull tighter as the man sat back-to-back with her. She could hear the sound of his spurs settle as he sat, despite the fact that he probably wasn’t wearing literal spurs.

  “Sheriff Dunne, what can I get you?” their waitress said, patting the side of her beehive, searching for the pencil nub that might’ve disappeared in the early eighties.

  “The usual. Thanks, Trudy,” he said.

  “Black coffee and a baked potato with cheese, coming right up. Yer a creature of habit, George,” she said, a girlish giggle in her voice.

  This exchange revealed two things: that Sheriff George Dunne didn’t understand how meals worked, and that their waitress was—of course—named Trudy.

  After the sheriff ordered, the Main Street Eatery released a collective sigh. It didn’t seem like fear exactly, but the same kind of star power Cole had exhibited at school, playing to a different audience. With the normal din of arthritic hands on silverware resumed, Quinn felt comfortable enough to ask the question she’d been holding in since she’d gotten back from school.