“When did your family buy a pedo van?” asked Kyler, while he sipped his soda. We were driving up the street towards my home.
I lived at the end of a cul-de-sac with two other houses on it. They were all big two-story things built from the same model, the only visual difference between them was color.
“What are you talking about?” I asked back, using one hand to steer the wheel and the other to clench my burger. We were straight out of school and our first stop was for fast food. The we was me: Logan Shaw, my buddy: Kyler McEwan, and my cousin: Ryan Shaw.
“The white child molester van in your drive way,” he said laughing. Kyler was about six feet tall, with buzz cut blonde hair. He almost always dressed in a hoodie and board shorts. The stank of weed often clung to him.
“What the…” It was a Ford Econoline with no windows, parked on my driveway with its back doors open. My garage door was open as well.
“Isn’t your family supposed to be in Oregon or something?” asked Ryan from the back seat. Ryan was someone who had lost the genetic lottery. He had bad skin, greasy brown hair, a hook nose, weak arms, and a permanent gut.
“They are in Oregon. Left on Wednesday,” I told him. Looking at my neighbors’ driveways, I could tell no one was home. It was around three in the afternoon and my neighbors didn’t have kids. The two living in the house to my left were newly weds who both worked, and the guy living to my right was a salesman always on the move.
“So is that your sister or something?” he asked, then began slurping through the straw in his milkshake.
“She’s in Oregon too.” I tried to think of any reason why a shady looking van would be parked in my driveway.
“So…”
“Yeah.” I came up with nil.
“What does that mean?”
“Dude, you’re getting fucking robbed, bro!” yelled Kyler, sounding very amused with the idea. Normally I took anything that came out of his mouth with a large grain of salt, but right then it seemed like he was right.
“Burglarized is actually the correct term,” Ryan mumbled.
“Who the fuck cares? His shit’s gettin’ stolen!”
“Yeah, but words have meaning. You should use the right words.”
“If you know what I mean, it doesn’t fucking matter.”
“Just because I’ve learned how to understand you doesn’t mean everyone ha-”
“Both of you shut it!” I yelled. I had no idea what to do, but my heart was pounding. I parked the car and unbuckled my seat belt. “I’m calling the cops,” I said pulling out my phone.
“Bro, don’t do that!” Kyler protested.
“Why the hell not?”
“What if he has one of those scanners, like to listen in on police stuff.”
“I’m pretty sure they don’t work like that. Even if they did, so what?”
“Then he’ll know the cops are coming and he’ll fucking book it, bro!”
“He’s not Spider-Man, Kyler!”
“You don’t know that.”
“I don’t know if he’s Spider-Man!?”
“Well, you don’t.”
“Are you fucking high?”
Kyler started giggling “Yeah, I lit up in the bathroom while you guys were ordering.”
“Wow, okay. Please do me a favor and don’t talk while I call 911.” I tried calling, that’s when my phone told me I was low on power. “Fuck! Is it possible to text 911?’
“Nah, dude.”
“Shut it, Kyler! Ryan, give me your phone.”
“I didn’t bring it,” Ryan said, while nervously chewing a french fry.
“Kyler?”
“I left mine with Ashley.”
“No one has a phone? No one has a fucking phone?! Is this 2000 and fucking five? Are you kidding me?”
“Nah, dude, it’s 2015.”
“Fucking shut it, Kyler!”
“Dude, chill.”
“Everyone out of the car,” I said, unbuckling my seat belt and shoving the remnants of my hamburger into one of the grease-stained paper bags that littered the floor.
“Why?” asked Ryan, as he copied my actions.
“We’re going to corner this asshole.” I stepped out of my car and went towards the trunk. It was the last school day of the week, so Kyler and I’s sporting gear was back there. We weren’t allowed to use lockers over the weekend.
“That’s a really bad idea. I can’t even put into words how dumb that is.”
“This gonna be dope!” Yelled Kyler. He started stretching on the sidewalk as if waking from a nap.
“This is not going to be dope!” Ryan started breathing heavily. “If that’s actually a burglar in there, we all run a serious risk of bodily harm. I mean, criminals are usually dangerous, you know?”
“Why do you gotta be so fucking basic, Ryan?”
At that point Ryan just stopped talking. Not because he was offended, more like flabbergasted.
“Both of you keep quiet, so he doesn’t hear us,” I said while looking up at the house windows, they were all open. About a month ago my house’s air conditioning unit blew out.
“What if it’s a she? Bro, what if she’s hot? Like one of those sexy criminal ladies.”
“Kyler, if you don’t shut it I’m seriously going to kick your ass.” I opened the trunk and looked inside. There wasn’t much to work with. The most dangerous things we had were: my tennis racket, Kyler’s lacrosse stick, and Ryan’s laptop. “I’m taking the racket. You guys grab something hard. Hell, get a rock off my lawn if you want. This is how we’re going to do this. I go in the front door, Ryan goes in the garage, and Kyler goes around back. That way there will be no escape, we converge then beat the shit out of him.”
“What if she has a gun, will I have to seduce her into dropping it?” asked Kyler.
“It’s not a she. If he has a gun and you try to seduce him, he’ll probably shoot your dick off. So be my guest and seduce him, Kyler. I’m sure it will work out great.”
“I’m just putting all our options on the table, bro.”
“Fantastic, now shut it and please don’t fuck this up. Okay, I’m going in now. Hurry up and grab your shit.”
I tightened both hands around my tennis racket, then crouched down. High in the sky, the sun was shining bright, whole street was lit up like a movie set. There wasn’t a chance the crouching would do anything, but that’s what I did.
As I crept around the car and onto the sidewalk, Kyler picked up a stone frog statue off my neighbors lawn and Ryan looked around nervously. I motioned for both of them to do their job and they followed behind me. Three white kids crouching outside a suburban home. Hell, we were practically invisible.
As we got onto the driveway, Kyler went towards the back fence gate, while Ryan moved into the shadows of the garage behind a box of old comic books.
I nodded to them in a meaningless gesture, then went around the van, and towards my front door.
The neighbor’s cat, a golden-haired fat one, sat on the doormat. I nudged it in an attempt to clear the way. It just started rubbing its head against my foot. I kicked it and it hissed. As I tried to push it off the porch with my racket, it jumped on me. Clawing and scratching at my chest, I threw it towards the lawn.
Like a creature from a horror movie it flipped to its feet and started charging me.
I quickly opened the front door, ran in, and slammed it shut.
Then I heard a deep and concerned voice say, “Hola…” I didn’t respond. It sounded like it was coming from my parents’ bedroom. “…Ernesto?” Then I heard footsteps moving slowly but surely towards the staircase. My heart felt like it could burst at any second.
Then Ryan was next to me, he had moved through the clutter of the garage and then the laundry room within seconds. In his hands was my old baseball bat, I felt like an idiot for not grabbing it myself, but I had my racket and that had to be enough. I took a second to look down the hallway for Kyler, but it looked like he wasn’t inside yet. So I decided Ryan and I were enough.
We both began to creep up the staircase. We moved up each step together, bumping our shoulders every so often. Above us, but out of sight, we could hear the burglar trying to be quiet. Then there was a loud crash.
The sound of broken glass and cracked floor. “We’re gonna fucking kill you, bro!” It was Kyler from downstairs. I later learned, that he had thrown the stone frog through the kitchen window, because the dipshit didn’t know how to open a sliding glass door.
With that noise and the threat on his life, the burglar ran away from the stairs and back towards my parents’ bedroom.
“Go!” I shouted to Ryan, while pushing him forward.
He got up the stairs and into the main hallway then charged towards my parents’ bedroom.
The burglar slammed the door in his face.
“He closed it!” Ryan said, while trying to pull it open.
I ran up next to him and pushed it forward. It wasn’t locked, Ryan just wasn’t going in the right direction. We both fell through the door and over a mattress which the burglar tried to ply it shut with.
“Please, you can have everything I own!” The burglar shouted. He was an average looking guy. Latino, with short hair and a mustache. Not fat, but not thin either.
We ignored his pleas and began whaling on him.
I hit him in the chest with the racket and he waved his arms around trying to stop me. After my third or fourth hit he managed to grab the racket out of my hands and throw it in a corner.
Then Ryan pulled back like he was going to hit a home run and cracked the guy over the skull. The guy fell to the floor but Ryan kept swinging. The steady whacking sound of metal against skin and bone, echoed through my ears.
By the time Kyler got upstairs, the burglar’s brain was nothing more than paste.
“Oh shit. Did Ryan kill him?” Kyler asked, his eyes as wide as a cat’s. He finally sounded concerned, his voice dropping from a high pitched squeal to low hushing. Although that didn’t stop him from pilfering the dead guy’s pockets. He pulled out a phone and a wallet.
“Yeah,” I said, catching my breath. I didn’t know if he actually had, but how else do you answer that? The man’s head looked like a cracked watermelon. It was still mostly intact, but if we picked it up, I was sure it would fall apart.
Ryan’s hands were shaking now, the bat wavering out of control. Then he let go and it fell to the floor. The aluminum thing was dented beyond repair, and coated in reddish brown. Strands of black hair stuck to the blood.
Then it sounded like someone was farting and we realized the burglar just shit himself.
We all ran out the room.
Ryan started spazzing out and just kept repeating, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Over and over again.
I tried to comfort him by patting his shoulder. Although now the adrenaline was wearing off and I wasn’t in the best state of mind either.
Then Kyler said something. “Alejandro Gonzalez, air conditioning repair.” He was holding a business card he pulled from the wallet.
That’s when I felt a pain in my chest. It was like a mix between regret and embarrassment. “…Is today March 6th?” I asked after a long pause.
“Yeah,” answered Kyler.
The memory of my Mom saying, “Your father scheduled a repairman to come in on March 6th, that’s Friday. And please water my plants while we’re away.” as she and the rest of my family piled into her mini-van, played through my head.
That’s when we all had a moment of realization. We quickly glanced at each other, then Kyler and I stared at Ryan.
“Ryan, You’re a fucking murderer, bro,” said Kyler.
Ryan looked at me for some sort of comfort, but I had nothing to offer him. Then he started hyperventilating and passed out.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“Don’t ask me, bro. This is some fucked up shit.” Kyler held his chin for a moment and stared at Ryan. Then after what looked like a good deal of thought, he said, “Hey, at least your family didn’t get robbed. You know, silver linings and all.”
by 
Joseph Stryker
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