We All Fall Down

  Suddenly, they were there again, flitting in and out of the shadows, running through the rooms, not yelling this time but silent, hurrying, tripping over themselves. The Avenger shrank back from the window. He could not afford to be seen. It was important to remain hidden. To bide his time. To wait.

  Wait for what?

  To wait for his revenge.

  “I am The Avenger,” he whispered to the night. “And I will avenge this house and what has happened in it.”

  He knew he would have to be patient. He would have to find out their names and track them down, one by one. He would have to plan a course of action. But he was expert at that kind of thing, had spent long hours observing, spying, witnessing. He was skilled at making plans and then carrying them out methodically, one step at a time. Like with Vaughn Masterson, blowing the right time and the right place to strike.

  By the time the trashers had left the house, the tears on the cheeks of The Avenger were cold and hard, like tiny pieces of glass.

  BANTAM DOUBLEDAY DELL BOOKS

  BY ROBERT CORMIER:

  AFTER THE FIRST DEATH

  BEYOND THE CHOCOLATE WAR

  THE BUMBLEBEE FLIES ANYWAY

  THE CHOCOLATE WAR

  EIGHT PLUS ONE

  FADE

  HEROES

  I AM THE CHEESE

  IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT

  OTHER BELLS FOR US TO RING

  TENDERNESS

  TUNES FOR BEARS TO DANCE TO

  WE ALL FALL DOWN

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Other Books By This Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  Part Two

  Copyright

  To Sam and Rosalie Chillemi

  for All the Years of Friendship

  PART ONE

  They entered the house at 9:02 p.m. on the evening of April Fools’ Day. In the next forty-nine minutes, they shit on the floors and pissed on the walls and trashed their way through the seven-room Cape Cod cottage. They overturned furniture, smashed the picture tubes in three television sets, tore two VCRs from their sockets and crashed them to the floor. They spray-painted the walls orange. They flooded the bathrooms, both upstairs and down, and flushed face towels down the toilet bowls. They broke every mirror in the place and toppled a magnificent hutch to the floor, sending china cups and saucers and plates and assorted crystal through the air. In the second-floor bedrooms, they pulled out dresser drawers, spilled their contents on the floor, yanked clothing from the closets and slashed the mattresses. In the downstairs den, they performed a special job on the spinet, smashing the keys with a hammer, the noise like a crazy soundtrack to the scenes of plunder.

  There were four of them and although their vandalism was scattered and spontaneous, they managed to invade every room in the house, damaging everything they touched.

  At 9:46 p.m., fourteen-year-old Karen Jerome made the mistake of arriving home early from a friend’s house. She was surprised to find the front door ajar and most of the lights on. The sounds of yelling and whooping greeted her as she stepped into the foyer.

  One of them, still holding the hammer that had demolished the piano, greeted her.

  “Well, hello …” he said.

  No one had ever looked at her like that before.

  At 9:51 p.m., the invaders left the house, abandoning the place as suddenly as they had arrived, slamming the doors, rattling the windows, sending shudders along the walls and ceilings. They left behind twenty-three beer cans, two empty vodka bottles, and damage later estimated at twenty thousand dollars, and, worst of all, Karen Jerome, bruised and broken where she lay sprawled on the cellar floor.

  The Avenger watched it all.

  From his hiding place.

  He watched in horror as they trashed the house he had come to love, ransacking and rampaging, the sound of carnage making him wince as if his own body were being ravaged.

  Tears stung his eyes, blurring his vision until he blinked them away. This house was his territory. He had staked it out and claimed it for his own. He had become a part of the place and the Jeromes who lived in it, like a son and brother to them all. He had observed the family’s comings and goings, had shared their daily routines, their good times and bad times.

  Leaving his hiding place, The Avenger scurried from window to window, flitting in and out of the shadows, protected by the trees and shrubbery that surrounded the house. But these same trees and shrubs also prevented anyone in the other houses on the street from seeing what was going on inside. What was going on horrified The Avenger. “Animals,” he muttered as he watched the trashers running from room to room, screaming and yelling, tearing the place apart.

  He did not know their names, had never seen them before, but he knew who they were. They were regular kids, not sleazies from Rock Point or the rough guys and dropouts who hung out at Bryant Bridge. They were nicely dressed. No leather jackets or black boots. They looked like high school baseball players or baggers at the supermarket or clerks at McDonald’s.

  The Avenger did not see Karen Jerome enter the house but he saw her being dragged across the front hallway. A moment later, the lights went out.

  A small moan escaped his mouth, a sound that came from a place deep and dark inside of him because he could not help her. That was the most terrible thing of all, knowing that he could do nothing at this moment. He was outnumbered, unable to charge into the house and rescue her.

  So, he waited. He was good at waiting. He closed his eyes and opened them again. The house was still dark. And quiet. Were they gone? Had they slipped out quietly while his eyes were closed?

  Suddenly, they were there again, flitting in and out of the shadows, running through the rooms, not yelling this time but silent, hurrying, tripping over themselves. The Avenger shrank back from the window. He could not afford to be seen. It was important to remain hidden. To bide his time. To wait.

  Wait for what?

  To wait for his revenge.

  “I am The Avenger,” he whispered to the night. “And I will avenge this house and what has happened in it.”

  He knew he would have to be patient. He would have to find out their names and track them down, one by one. He would have to plan a course of action. But he was expert at that kind of thing, had spent long hours observing, spying, witnessing. He was skilled at making plans and then carrying them out methodically, one step at a time, like with Vaughn Masterson, knowing the right time and the right place to strike.

  By the time the trashers had left the house, the tears on the cheeks of The Avenger were cold and hard, like tiny pieces of glass.

  Jane Jerome was still numb two hours after returning from the hospital where her sister Karen lay in Intensive Care, hooked up to all kinds of machines, beeping sounds like small squeals of anguish. Karen’s face and hands were the only parts of her body that had been visible. Her face, like a stranger’s face, shrouded in white, seemed to be floating in all that whiteness. Her hands were tiny, helpless, fingers curled slightly inward.

  Jane wanted to hold those hands, press them to her cheek, ask her pardon and forgiveness. Earlier on the evening of the assault, she and Karen had argued. The usual stupid argument Karen was a borrower, took Jane’s things all the time without asking permission, used her cologne, wore her blouses and sweaters. All of this was kind of humiliating because Jane was two years older and Karen should have been the small kid sister but there she was, fully developed, Jane’s size but more style-conscious, improvising, taking one of Jane’s sweaters, blending it with one of her own scarves, and tra la, a smashing outfit.

  Guilt assailed Jane as she scrunched herself into her father’s big leather chair in the den, listening to him
talk to the detective in the living room. A lot of guilt particularly because Jane had shouted at her: Will you please go have an accident? one of the favorite phrases at Burnside High this year. What had happened to Karen was much worse than an accident, of course, worse than being struck by a car. It was savage, brutal, personal. Made the damage to the house seem minor by comparison. Not really minor, though. Both attacks were devastating and she knew that life in this house would never be the same.

  Funny. At first, when her father had been transferred from Monument, she had hated this house along with Burnside High, hated leaving her old friends and classmates at Monument High, some of whom she had known since kindergarten. But in the months since, she had made friends at school—Patti Amarelli and Leslie Cairns, in particular—and they had shown her the sights, especially the Mall in downtown Wickburg, with its splashing fountain and stores like Filene’s and Brooks, and the wild store on the second level where she bought the posters that covered the walls of her room and the Pizza Palace where the guys and girls gathered to eat and hang out.

  The ConCenter was located across from the Mall and all the big stars appeared there—New Kids on the Block and Billy Joel and Madonna—and although she didn’t often attend performances, it was neat to be around early in the evening, watching the limos pull up, disgorging people from Boston and Worcester, but most of all knowing that the stars were staying at the Wickburg Hilton around the corner. She had caught glimpses of Billy Joel one night as he emerged from the Hilton and that brief look was more intimate, more personal than seeing him onstage from a distance.

  All of this meant nothing now. Not with Karen in the hospital, in a coma, and the house in ruins, her mother so stunned and heartbroken that Jane could barely stand to look at her. And her father simmering. That was the word. Not raging mad but simmering, anger swirling around inside of him, building to a boil.

  As he spoke now to the detective, her father was barely controlling that anger. Making herself small in the big chair, she listened, hardly daring to breathe.

  “Ever since we moved here, almost a year ago, it’s been happening. Small stuff, ridiculous in a way but …” His voice trailed off, muffled a bit.

  “What kind of small stuff?” The detective did not resemble a movie and TV detective. He was short and fat and had a squeaky voice, as if somebody were squeezing his Adam’s apple. Two cops in uniform had spent hours here yesterday, and today the detective in regular clothes had shown up.

  “Phone rings, nobody on the line. A stone tossed through the window last month. Marie, my wife, planted tomatoes last year and they got all torn up, scattered around the backyard. A dead squirrel in the mailbox.”

  “You never reported those incidents?”

  “No,” he said, biting off the word. Jane could picture his face getting red. She knew the symptoms, that tight voice, his words like firecrackers. He was getting ready to blow up, something that happened probably only once a year. But when he finally lost his temper, watch out. Yesterday, he had answered these questions patiently but today he was ready to explode.

  “Call the police?” he asked, his voice rising a bit. “About tomato plants, phone calls, a dead squirrel?”

  Then the detective asked a new question:

  “Do you have any enemies, Mr. Jerome?”

  Yipes, her father, enemies. The thought was ludicrous. He was Mister Good Guy. Business manager of the telephone company in Wickburg. Wore white shirts, striped ties, smiled a lot, played golf on Saturday afternoons, went to church with his family on Sundays, served on the United Way committee every year. Who could possibly be his enemy? Although she would never admit it aloud to anyone, her father was a sweetheart. He never gave her a hard time or any grief at all. Never grounded her, never ran out of patience with her or Karen or their younger brother, Artie, who was at the peak of brathood. As a result, Jane tried to do things to please her father, to merit not being grounded.

  “Do I have any enemies?” Her father’s voice was suddenly like a little kid’s voice, uncertain, puzzled.

  She had to get out of there, didn’t want to listen anymore, hated hearing her father being questioned, hated the way he sounded vulnerable, a little scared. It made her feel vulnerable and scared too.

  Out on the back porch, in the freshness of the April morning, she flung herself into the old wicker rocking chair. Ordinarily, she would have fled to her room, where she could always find comfort and consolation. But her room, too, had been ruined. She had loved that room, the predominance of blue, her favorite color. And all her favorite things. Her special glass menagerie of frogs and puppies and kittens. The posters on the wall—New Kids and Bruce and messages like AFTER THE RAIN, THE RAINBOW, so many posters that her father said he could have saved the price of wallpaper if he’d known about her poster madness. The room was her turf, her refuge, her hiding place. Where she could close the door and shut out the world, the C-minus in math—the worst mark of her life—the zits popping out all over her face, the agony of Timmy Kearns ignoring her completely after that first date. Her place of retreat to which she admitted only Patti and Leslie, with standing orders for everyone else to stay out.

  Standing at the door in the first moment of discovery, seeing the torn mattress, her precious animals spilled on the floor, the posters hanging in shreds, yellow veins on the wall which she did not immediately recognize as pee, the puddle of vomit on the floor, she had grown weak, watery, felt as if she herself had been assaulted. She wanted to flee Burnside, get out of there, back to safe and sane Monument, deadly dull but peaceful, where her father played golf with the chief of police and everybody knew everybody else, even the names of the dogs and cats. A few minutes later, Karen had been discovered in the cellar, and the anger she had felt in her room paled beside the horror of what had happened to Karen.

  “Damn it, damn it,” she muttered now, rocking furiously in the chair, filled with anger and guilt and—what? She stopped rocking suddenly, sat still in the chair as she caught a movement down near the hedges, past the cherry tree. Somebody or something moving furtively, a blurred image, not quite seen, and then gone. She shivered, drew her arms around herself, wondering if the trashers might be lurking in the vicinity, had returned to the scene of the crime like they said criminals did.

  When Buddy Walker broke the mirror in the girl’s bedroom, using the Statue of Liberty, a splinter of glass struck him in the cheek and he saw blood oozing on his face in the mirror’s jagged reflection. He stared at it drunkenly, dropping the statue to the floor.

  Actually, he did not know whether he was drunk or not. He was dizzy, yes, and giddy, and felt like he was floating, his feet barely touching the floor. The lights hurt his eyes, but otherwise he felt pleasantly willy-nilly, letting himself go, carried along by this terrific feeling of drift, thinking: the hell with everything and everybody. Especially home.

  The cut was minor, despite the blood. In the middle of all the carnage, the screaming and the shrieks of laughter and the sounds of destruction from the floor below, he made his way carefully to the bathroom and found a box of Band-Aids in the cabinet above the sink. He removed two of them, slipped one into his shirt pocket for later use and, after wiping away the smear of blood with a towel, calmly applied the other Band-Aid to his cheek. His hand was steady despite a sudden swirl of dizziness. The dizziness was pleasant, in fact, as he maneuvered himself back to the bedroom where he leaned against the doorjamb, scrutinizing the damage: the posters hanging in tatters, the collection of small animals scattered on the rug, the torn blankets and sheets, the yellow stains of piss on the wall.

  Suddenly, his earlier exhilaration vanished, replaced by a sense of despair, emptiness. He felt isolated from the others, separate from the howls of jubilation and the sounds of crashing and bashing below. I’m going to be sick. He dropped to his knees, almost in slow motion, as vomit rushed up his throat and streamed out of his mouth onto the soft blue carpet. The smell, acid and foul, invaded his nostrils. He retched, on
ce, twice, kneeling in the doorway, retched again and again, until nothing came up. His stomach hurt, his chest hurt, his throat hurt.

  He became aware of a sudden silence from downstairs, as if Harry and his stooges were listening to him being sick. Rising to one knee, he began to gather his strength, his arms and legs trembling. He averted his eyes from the puddle of vomit on the floor.

  Why so quiet down below?

  Pressing his hands against his stomach, he lurched toward the stairs, steadying himself against the wall. He wanted a drink. Was desperate for one, although he did not know how he would manage to swallow the booze with the taste of vomit still like acid in his mouth and throat.

  On the landing halfway down the stairs, he spotted a half-full bottle of vodka and giggled. He never giggled when he was sober, so he must be drunk. He placed his hand over his mouth to stifle further giggles and picked up the bottle. Still quiet downstairs. The lights out, too. He took a big swig from the bottle, grimacing as the vodka bombed down his throat, bracing himself for the lurch of sickness in his stomach. Instead, warmth spread throughout his body as if he were bathing in the glow of something beautifully soft and fuzzy.

  He heard a sound, a moan. Or a gasp. Not sure which. Cradling the bottle in his hand, he went down the remaining stairs, hesitating in the foyer, squinting, and saw, finally, what was going on in the front hallway.

  Harry Flowers had a girl against the wall. She was pinned there by Marty Sanders and Randy Pierce. They were holding her arms to the wall while Harry screwed her. Or was he screwing her? Buddy didn’t know if you could screw somebody standing up like that. But he was doing something. His pants and striped shorts were halfway down his legs, his ass gleaming in the light spilling in from the front porch. The girl’s face was partly hidden in shadows but he saw her frantic eyes, wide with horror. Randy’s right hand was like a suction cup on her breast.

  “Jesus,” Buddy said, the word exploding from his mouth like the vomit a few minutes ago upstairs.