The Culvert
14 Jan 2022Today’s prompt: “You are a teenager. Your friend asks you to meet him at a culvert everyone knows isn’t very safe. How do you get out of the house? What happens when you get there?”
“Hey,” Cory says. “Meet me at the culvert tonight. Eleven o’clock.”
“Okay,” you say. “Why? What’s at the culvert?”
“A bunch of us are going to be there,” Cory says. “No adults. It’ll be fun.”
“Cool,” you say, trying to sound like being out at night unsupervised by adults is something you do all the time.
Your parents are pretty used to you staying up late to work on homework, and they’re usually in bed shortly after ten. You try to tell yourself it’ll be easy to sneak out, but as it gets closer to ten, you find yourself looking at the clock every couple minutes and straining to hear what’s going on elsewhere in the house. The sounds of the dishwasher die out. You can hear the evening news wafting up from the living room. The minutes are crawling by. What if they stay up late tonight? What if they go to bed, but go back to the kitchen for some water and catch you just as you’re leaving? What if time just stands still forever? You swear the clock has said 9:48 for the last five minutes. You try to focus on your homework, hoping it’ll make time start again, but you’ve read the same paragraph three times in a row and it still doesn’t make any sense.
At last, you hear the TV switch off. You listen carefully for two sets of footsteps to walk past your room. You realize you’ve been holding your breath.
It should take about 25 minutes to ride your bike to the culvert – you don’t have your learner’s permit yet – and you need to wait in your room until it’s time to leave so you give your parents a chance to get to sleep and you’re more likely to make it outside without them noticing. So it’s another staredown with the clock, pretending to do homework. At last, the clock hits 10:30 and you start your stealth mission. You put on your jacket, shut off your light, and crack open your door. You peer into the hallway. Nothing out of the ordinary. You slowly open your door and almost step out into the hall – wait. Where’s that creaky spot? You panic for half a second before you collect yourself – of course, it’s right there close to the other wall – and make your way to the garage for your bike.
And now you’re cycling through the subdivision streets at night. The first frost was a few days ago and the air is brisk, and you’re biking through patches of dead leaves on your way to the culvert your parents always warned you about to meet a bunch of kids your parents would probably warn you about if they knew about them. The stars feel especially bright tonight. The very air feels alive. You know you’ll remember this night forever.
It took a little longer than you thought to get to the culvert, but that’s probably a good thing. Cory’s already there, and a few other kids. You recognize Melissa and Hector, but most of the others are older kids you don’t know as well but have seen around school. Some of the kids drove, and one parked his car so he could shine the headlights out over the culvert. Cory introduces you around. A few more kids arrive over the next few minutes. Several kids are already smoking cigarettes. Some pull cans of beer or hard seltzer out of their cars and hand them around. You take a Coors. It tastes terrible. You drink it anyway. Someone starts passing around some marijuana and you take a few puffs. One guy gets out a guitar and starts playing a few cords – no discernable tune, but right now you feel like it’s great.
Between the adrenaline and the beer and the pot, or maybe just the reaction you think you’re having to the beer and the pot, and the illicitness of everything, you’re all hyped up. You’re way too shy to say much of anything, but you want everyone there to like you, and there’s a rawness and eagerness to your energy that must be downright palpable, because people start messing with you a little. Before long you have a new nickname, Nerves. And you know what, that’s fine. At least, it’s fine until they really start messing with you.
“Hey Danielle,” this guy Jamal says. “Show Nerves that thing you can do with your eyes.” Cory is a few yards off, talking to the guy who brought the guitar. You and Jamal and Danielle and a few other kids are crowded around the culvert.
Danielle turns to you and blinks, and for half a second you could swear her pupils narrowed into horizontal slits like a goat’s. You gasp. Jamal laughs his ass off.
Was it the beer? Was it the pot? Did someone put something weird in your drink? That can’t have been real, could it?
“Hey Tanya,” Jamal says. “Show Nerves that thing you can do with your tongue.”
Tanya, standing just a few paces to the right of you, opens her mouth and a narrow tongue like a snake’s darts out. You step a few paces back. Jamal laughs and laughs.
“Hey Simone,” Jamal says. “Show Nerves that thing you can do with your teeth.”
Simone grins, and you could swear you see the glint of moonlight on bared fang.
You forget where you are. You step back. And back again. You hear Jamal saying, “Hey Nerves, wait, wait – no one’s gonna–” but you are falling, falling into the culvert, and the current pulls you into the pipe, and you drown.