The Becoming - a novella by Allan Leverone Read Free Book Online Page B

asking permission, even when he wasn’t sick with
the flu, and this morning he had been burning up. His fever had been so high,
in fact, that Julie had momentarily considered taking her son straight to the
emergency room. He had been that sick.
    Or had he?
    She thought back
to her son’s strange behavior, how he had seemed nervous and jumpy, completely
unlike his usual cheerful self. She had chalked it up to the illness, but now
she was not so sure.
    The disappearing
thermometer.
    The sudden onset
of illness after seeming completely normal all day yesterday.
    His extreme
reaction to her suggestion on the phone that perhaps she would come home from
work early. She had expected him to be excited and happy and he had practically
bitten her head off.
    Tim wouldn’t be
the first kid to skip a day of school by faking illness—Julie had done it
herself a few times, now that she thought about it—but it would be so out of
character for her son, who was always so conscientious, she was having a hard
time believing that might be what he had done. He was growing up, though, and
he had changed since the move here to Tonopah last year. It hadn’t been
an easy transition for him, first losing his dad and then moving away from the
only home he had ever known, in Harrisburg. Maybe the sudden “illness” was
actually Timmy’s way of acting out.
    Julie turned away
from her son’s bedroom door and padded down the short hallway to the phone in
the kitchen. She would call around to his friends’ homes—it wouldn’t take long,
he only had a couple—and read him the riot act when she finally found him.
    The uneasy feeling
in her stomach grew a little. She knew she should be angry, but there didn’t
seem to be any room for anger in her body. The fear was taking up too much
space.
    ***
    Julie couldn’t stop pacing. Back
and forth, one end of the tiny kitchen to the other: Circle to the left in
front of the kitchen table then back across the well-worn vinyl tiles to the
oven, circle to the left again and start over.
    Timmy was missing.
He had now been gone nearly twenty-four hours. None of his friends would cop to
knowing where he was, and all of them had had their feet held to the fire by
their parents when they heard the panic in Julie’s voice. They claimed they didn’t
know his whereabouts and she believed them. One thing she did know was that he
hadn’t gotten dressed and gone to school after she left for work yesterday, not
that she really believed he would have. None of his friends had seen him all
day.
    “Honey, you need
to relax,” Matt said, and she ignored him.
    He tried again.
“Tim’s probably off smoking cigarettes or something, trying to be a rebel. He’s
a kid, remember?”
    She stopped pacing
abruptly. “I think I know my son,” she said curtly and immediately regretted
it. Matt was just trying to help. “I’m sorry,” she said with a weak smile, and started
walking again. Back and forth. Back and forth.
    Her boyfriend held
up his hand in surrender. “You don’t have to apologize, I know how upset you
are. And I’m not trying to say I know him as well as you do. The cops are
looking for him and by now so is pretty much everyone in town. Someone will
find him. He’ll show up. Let’s not panic.”
    The telephone rang
and Julie sprinted across the floor, reaching the receiver before Matt could
even move. She put her hand on it and then pulled back as if she had been
burned. “You get it,” she said. “I’m too nervous to talk to anyone.”
    She continued
pacing, chewing her fingernails as Matt answered the call. She tried to pay
attention to his end of the conversation but couldn’t seem to concentrate. Where
are you, baby?
    Finally her
boyfriend replaced the receiver and turned to look at her. His face seemed to
have paled a bit. “That was the police. They talked to all of his friends again
and one of them mentioned some crazy idea Tim had talked about.”
    He hesitated and
Julie wanted to scream.