Gwendy's Button Box

10

Sophomore year opens with a bang. Within a month of the first day of classes, Gwendy is elected Class President, named captain of the junior varsity soccer team, and asked to the homecoming dance by Harold Perkins, a handsome senior on the football squad (alas, the homecoming date never happens, as Gwendy dumps poor Harold after he repeatedly tries to feel her up at a drive-in showing of Damnation Alley on their first date). Plenty of time for touchie-feelie later, as her mother likes to say.

For her sixteenth birthday in October, she gets a poster of the Eagles standing in front of Hotel California (“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave”), a new stereo with both eight track and cassette decks, and a promise from her father to teach her how to drive now that she’s of legal age.

The chocolate treats continue to come, no two ever the same, the detail always amazing. The tiny slice of heaven Gwendy devoured just this morning before school was a giraffe, and she purposely skipped brushing her teeth afterward. She wanted to savor the remarkable taste for as long as she could.

Gwendy doesn’t pull the other small lever nearly as often as she once did, for no other reason than she’s finally run out of space to hide the silver coins. For now, the chocolate is enough.

She still thinks about Mr. Farris, not quite as often and usually in the long, empty hours of the night when she tries to remember exactly what he looked like or how his voice sounded. She’s almost sure she once saw him in the crowd at the Castle Rock Halloween Fair, but she was high atop the Ferris wheel at that moment, and by the time the ride ended, he was gone, swallowed by the hordes of people flocking down the midway. Another time she went into a Portland coin shop with one of the silver dollars. The worth had gone up; the man offered her $750 for one of her 1891 Morgans, saying he’d never seen a better one. Gwendy refused, telling him (on the spur of the moment) that it was a gift from her grandfather and she only wanted to know what it was worth. Leaving, she saw a man looking at her from across the street, a man wearing a neat little black hat. Farris—if it was Farris—gave her a fleeting smile, and disappeared around the corner.

Watching her? Keeping track? Is it possible? She thinks it is.

And she still thinks about the buttons, of course, especially the red one. She sometimes finds herself sitting cross-legged on the cold basement floor, holding the button box in her lap, staring at that red button in a kind of daze and caressing it with the tip of her finger. She wonders what would happen if she pushed the red button without a clear choice of a place to blow up. What then? Who would decide what was destroyed? God? The box?

A few weeks after her trip to the coin shop, Gwendy decides it’s time to find out about the red button once and for all.

Instead of spending her fifth period study hall in the library, she heads for Mr. Anderson’s empty World History classroom. There’s a reason for this: the pair of pull-down maps that are attached to Mr. Anderson’s chalkboard.

Gwendy has considered a number of possible targets for the red button. She hates that word—target—but it fits, and she can’t think of anything better. Among her initial options: the Castle Rock dump, a stretch of trashy, pulped-over woods beyond the railroad tracks, and the old abandoned Phillips 66 gas station where kids hang out and smoke dope.

In the end, she decides to not only target someplace outside of Castle Rock, but also the entire country. Better safe than sorry.

She walks behind Mr. Anderson’s desk and carefully studies the map, focusing first on Australia (where, she recently learned, over one-third of the country is desert) before moving on to Africa (those poor folks have enough problems) and finally settling on South America.

From her history notes, Gwendy remembers two important facts that aid this decision: South America harbors thirty-five of the fifty least-developed countries in the world, and a similar percentage of the least-populated countries in the world.

Now that the choice has been made, Gwendy doesn’t waste any time. She scribbles down the names of three small countries in her spiral notebook, one from the north, one from the middle of the continent, and one from the south. Then, she hurries to the library to do more research. She looks at pictures and makes a list of the most godforsaken ones.

Later that afternoon, Gwendy sits down in front of her bedroom closet and balances the button box on her lap.

She places a shaky finger on top of the red button.

She closes her eyes and pictures one tiny part of a faraway country. Dense, tangled vegetation. An expanse of wild jungle where no people live. As many details as she can manage.

She holds the image in her head and pushes the red button.

Nothing happens. It doesn’t go down.

Gwendy stabs at the red button a second and third time. It doesn’t budge under her finger. The part about the buttons was a practical joke, it seems. And gullible Gwendy Peterson believed it.

Almost relieved, she starts to return the button box to the closet when Mr. Farris’s words suddenly come back to her: The buttons are very hard to push. You have to use your thumb, and put some real muscle into it. Which is a good thing, believe me.

She lowers the box to her lap again—and uses her thumb to press the red button. She puts all her weight on it. This time, there’s a barely audible click, and Gwendy feels the button depress.

She stares at the box for a moment, thinking Some trees and maybe a few animals. A small earthquake or maybe a fire. Surely no more than that. Then she returns it to its hiding place in the wall of the basement. Her face feels warm and her stomach hurts. Does that mean it’s working?