44...

Frank blinked rapidly, trying as quickly as possible to place where he was. He realized it was the park, but he was confused, and more than a little frightened, at how he had come to wake up there. He looked up at this guy staring down at him.
“What?” he asked.
“Sorry,” the guy said. “Looks like the Frisbee got away from us there.”
Frank quickly straightened up. He looked around himself and realized that he was exactly where he had sat down to think things out. He had just been so tired that he had fallen asleep where he sat.
“No. No it’s all good,” Frank started to lean forward on the bench. “I sort of just dozed off there. I’m glad you woke me up.”
“Oh good,” the young man said, and as if realizing how lame he probably sounded, he let out a short laugh that felt warm.
Smiling, Frank quickly rubbed his eyes. “Enjoy your game,” Frank said. He put his hands down on the bench to push himself away when he spotted the other Frisbee player. Something about the guy’s stance and watchfulness worried Frank’s mind.
The younger man made a quick turn towards his partner and cleared his throat.
“Sorry about my friend there, he starts to lack the social graces when I hold up his game; forgets that it’s impolite to stare.”
Something about this young man’s tone seemed almost hurtful. Frank slowly turned to face him, feeling just a short, raw nerves feel of danger on the air. The guy’s smile seemed predatory at a side glance, but by the time Frank got all the way around, he had been won over.
“No worries, I’ll let you guys get back to it.”
“Tommy!” the older guy yelled as if on cue. “C’mon!”
Frank couldn’t see the guy’s eyes, they were pits of shadow in the high sunlight, and this made him nervous.
“Yeah,” Tommy said, slightly rolling his eyes. “I’d better.”
Frank grinned uneasily and began walking away.
“Hey man,” Tommy said in a clipped tone.
Frank turned towards him, his jaw tightening. Tommy stared at him intently. The older guy took a step towards the two.
“Do I know you from somewhere?” Tommy asked.
Frank took a heavy look at the guy, he wasn’t sure if he was being played here. Frankly, he felt menace on the air as if it were a precursor of some mad season. Every time he focused hard enough on this Tommy, the imagined menace disappeared. There was this cute guy with an erstwhile smile.
“Nope,” Frank laughed a little nervously. “I don’t think so.”
He began walking again. His breath caught when Tommy reached out a strong hand and grabbed his elbow.
“Hang on,” Tommy said with a smile. There were a lot of teeth in that smile.

43...

Tommy put his arms over his head and stretched. His thin, muscled stomach crept out from beneath a retreating T-shirt. It was a nice day, a good day, almost a shame to have to work today.
He liked the park and that medicinal smell of eucalyptus trees. He had always really been more of a West Coast guy and he kinda hoped he might be able to hang around here for awhile.
He reached down, grabbed the Frisbee and gave it a good toss back to Lester, who caught it with that same sort of uptight efficiency that he always did. Lester was okay, but he always walked around with this psychological stick up his ass. Tommy had been tempted to try to get him drunk and to get him laid this trip, but Lester was too much of a control freak for any of that.
Lester took a quick look at the bench again and then back to Tommy. Lester stood there for a minute with the Frisbee in his hands, looking blankly at Tommy. It was times like this that Tommy wanted to dredge up some kind of hatred for the guy. He wanted to hate him for dragging him into this ridiculous shadow world, but couldn’t. Up till this point in his life, Tommy knew his employment with the North Creek Sign Company was the best thing that could have happened to him.
Tommy clapped his hands together and pantomimed catching the Frisbee. Lester gave a quick jerk of his head towards the park bench. Tommy feigned tying a shoe and took a surreptitious look over.
The guy was still passed out on the bench, mouth hanging wide open. A bike sped past on the trail which sat between them.
Tommy nodded to Lester and Lester threw the Frisbee; he made it look like he was doing taxes. Tommy jumped up and caught it one handed behind his back, spinning on the way down so that he faced the man on the bench when he landed. He stared for half a moment.
Gauging the weight of the disc and the resistance of the air by slowly swinging the Frisbee back and forth, Tommy took a deep breath and held it. He lightly flung the object and it flew short, but beautifully. It landed with a soft bounce on the bike path and skidded to a rest at the tip of Frank’s shoe.
Tommy began jogging over, his loose curls bouncing around his head. He reached the Frisbee and found that the guy was still passed out, still breathing like an allergy plagued dragon. He gave the Frisbee a light kick against the sleeping man’s shoes and noticed, quite quickly, the jerk up to wakefulness.
“Sorry about that man,” Tommy said to Frank with a smile that was glorious.

42...

“I’m not really interested man,” Tommy said. He began rising from the park bench, but curiosity stayed him. “And how the hell do you know my name?”
“We know a lot about you,” Lester looked up at him, squinting his eyes against the late spring sun. He stood up from the bench quite easily. “C’mon. Let’s go get a drink.”
“What do you mean, ‘We’?” Tommy stammered. Lester was enjoying his shock on some level. Unfortunately for Lester, this would be one of the last times he would ever be able to shake Tommy’s cool. “And frankly, I gotta tell you man, I’m really not interested in working for a sign company.”
“It’s just the name of the place,” Lester sighed. “It’s not really a sign company. C’mon, let me buy you a drink. Nothing unsavory, I promise you.”
Lester took them to a small and empty bar a couple of blocks away. The place seemed just that much darker in comparison to the battering sunlight outside. Lester nursed a beer and told Tommy about how he had been watching him for weeks, about how his every move and conversation had been scoped, about how he had the right sort of morality that this group of his was looking for.
“And what sort of morality is that?” Tommy asked with a smirk.
“Ambiguous,” Lester answered as if he had answered the same question a hundred times.
“And how do you know that?”
Lester told him about the testing. Apparently the Pornography in Society class (or Dirty 230 as the students called it) was a set up, and the weekly tests given throughout were used to gauge students’ personalities against some shadow criteria.
“Seriously?” Tommy asked.
“C’mon, university credit for watching porn? We have the same sort of sexuality classes set up in a lot of other majors as well”
“So what about me fit your so called criteria?”
“Your anti-social, creative, you border on being a sociopath, you like blunt honesty… a lot of things Tommy. Frankly, we’ve gotten pretty good at spotting the right kind of people from a mile away.”
“What if I say no?”
“I drink this beer, pay the check and we never see each other again. But if you ever try to bring this conversation to the light of day, you will find your life in a mess you cannot even imagine. Well, maybe you can imagine.”
They sat and talked for another hour and a half. Tommy asked if he could think about it, and by that Friday afternoon he had walked off the university grounds, never to return.
To this day, he would be unable to graduate without both returning, and paying a hefty fine on, a copy of Lansing, Store Bought.

41...

Spring was about ready to burst open and toss summer out, flailing and burning, into the streets of New York. You could feel it in the air, this sense of excited anticipation, this moist and warm feeling in the air like the breath of lover that will eventually gut you and leave you for dead.
Thinking on it later, Tommy Williams (as he was known then) was sure he knew something life changing was going to happen that day. The feeling rolled in on that breeze of impending summer.
He walked out of the Bobst Library and began to head across the street to Washington Square Park. He looked around at the white light bouncing off of the buildings, off of the cars, off of the people. He removed his lightweight windbreaker and sat down on a bench in the park. There was the usual gaggle of skateboarders, junkies, tourists and students scattered around the place, but something seemed to be vibrating through all of them just slightly. Tommy could feel it himself, this tangible excitement, but he did his best to ignore it.
Glancing down at the back of the book he had just checked out, Tommy was looking at the black and white picture of Lawrence Lee McDonald. The author appeared to be looking at the viewer with a sense of strange sexual attraction and murderous desire. Tommy flipped the book over and stared at the cover that entranced him so much.
The cover of Lansing, Store Bought, was a deep blue with this sort of scratchy, yellow, impressionistic drawing of a dilapidated house in a field.
He couldn’t explain it, and frankly didn’t want to try, but something about this book had irrationally attracted him. He was glancing over the shelves and first the title hit him. Something about it just rang of comfort for him. He pulled it from the shelf and was immediately drawn to the cover. When he finally shook himself from a druggy daze, he realized he had been standing in the aisle and staring raptly at this book for several minutes. Without seeing what it was about, or even what genre of book it was, Tommy went downstairs and checked it out of the library.
Beginning to crack open this book that had only been loaned out twice before in its history with the library, Tommy sensed a man sitting next to him on the bench, staring intently. Tommy was shocked that the guy could get that close without him sensing it. Something about the guy made Tommy think to himself that showing any surprise would be a bad idea.
Tommy turned his head slowly to face the guy and gave him a sort of terse, ‘can I help you’ look.
“Tommy Williams?” the guy asked.
Heavy surprise crept in and Tommy failed to keep it at bay this time.
“Yeah?”
“My name is Lester Sparks. I’d like to talk to you about a job at North Creek Sign Company.”