"No."

"Good. That would be wrong."

"What if we just called him up and said 'I know where you buried the bodies.'? We could go on and on and say 'We know what you did, you sick twisted b.a.s.t.a.r.d' and at the end of the call just say 'We hope you get the part!' and hang up."

"He'd know it was us."

"How?"

"Because we live next door, dorkwad."

"We could pretend we were strangers from out of town who were peeking in his windows."

Roger grinned. "It might be kind of funny."

"Do you want to call him?"

"No, but you can."

"I might."

"Go for it."

"What's his name?"

"Dennis Catovin."

"Have you got a phone book."

"In the kitchen."

We tiptoed into the kitchen (well, not literally, we just walked quietly) to avoid waking up Roger's parents, although if they could sleep through the monster belches, they could sleep through anything. Roger handed me the phone as he looked up Dennis's number. "Make sure you disguise your voice," he said.

"Yes, sir," I said, disguising my voice.

"Disguise it better."

"Yes, sir," I said, disguising it better. I was going for something in a low, raspy, vaguely sinister motif, but thinking back, it probably just sounded like p.u.b.erty gone terribly wrong.

I dialed the number and waited.

"h.e.l.lo?"

"We saw the butcher knife," I whispered. "We know..."

"f.u.c.k!"

A click on the other end, and then a dial tone.

"Oops," I said.

"What happened?" Roger asked.

"He said 'f.u.c.k' and hung up."

"Why did he do that?"

"I dunno."

"Well, call him back. Let him know we were just kidding."

I dialed again.

No answer.

And then an answer: "Leave me alone! You didn't see it!"

"Uh, Dennis...?"

He hung up again.

"Okay," I said. "That was...weird."

"Did he know it was you?"

"He's never even met me!"

"Is he coming over here?"

"How should I know?"

"Let's go look!"

We hurried upstairs into Roger's room. He immediately peeked through the telescope. "He's there in his living room. He's lying on the floor."

"Is he hurt?"

"I can't tell. The knife is next to him. Oh, jeez, what if he killed himself?"

"Should we call the police?"

"I don't know...I don't see any blood..."

"Maybe we should go over there."

Roger nodded. "Yeah, let's go."

We hurried back downstairs, quietly opened the front door, and then rushed across Roger's yard over to his neighbor's house.

"Should we knock?" I asked.

"No, we shouldn't knock," said Roger, giving me a "You're a rather dumb person" look. He threw open Dennis' door and we walked inside. Dennis still lay on the floor. No pool of blood that I could see. The door swung closed behind us.

"Dennis?" I asked. "Are you okay?"

No response.

"Is he breathing?" I asked.

"I don't know. Why don't you ask him?"

"We should check his pulse."

"You check his pulse!"

"Fine." I cautiously walked over to the body, then knelt down beside it. I pressed my fingers to his wrist.

"Anything?"

"I'm not sure I'm in the right spot."

"Well...poke him with something."

"I'm not going to poke him!"

"Then breathe on him. Do something to wake him up!"

Suddenly Dennis sat up, arms outstretched, and shouted something that sounded approximately like "AAUUGGHHAAA!!!!"

I scooted backward at 37,916 miles per hour and shouted something that sounded approximately like "s.h.i.t!" Then I punched Roger in the shoulder as hard as I possibly could. I struck a particularly solid part of his shoulder and it felt like I'd smashed the bones in my hand into bite-sized chunks, but it was worth it.

"Ow! Why'd you hit me?"

"Because you're a jerk!"

"What'd I do?"

"You planned this whole thing! I almost wet my pants! You probably wanted to tell everybody at school that I wet my pants, didn't you?"

"It wasn't me!"

"Yes it was!"

"No it wasn't!"

But then I discovered something truly shocking. Roger had wet his own pants. Would somebody who had plotted out this scheme spontaneously urinate over the revelation of the surprise? Unlikely. So Roger was innocent. I'd struck the shoulder of an innocent man.

I turned my attention away from Roger and toward Dennis. The smug b.a.s.t.a.r.d who'd scared me half to death was looking...well, not particularly smug. Not smug at all, in fact. He looked somewhat depressed, and somewhat homicidal.

"Did I scare you?" he asked. I could see the butcher knife on the floor where he'd been lying.

Roger and I both nodded.

He wiped a tear from his eye. "I knew I could scare you. I was good, wasn't I? I can act, right?"

"You sure can," Roger said, eyeing me nervously as if to say "Did you perhaps notice that this gentleman is sounding depressed and homicidal?"

"I know I can! I spent days practicing for that audition! I spend days practicing for every audition! So why the h.e.l.l don't I ever get the part?" He picked up the butcher knife. "Huh? Tell me why I never get the part?"

I said the first thing that popped into my mind: "Because... you have...you've got...um, facial features...that...that...you know, they aren't traditional...and...and...and...you know how Robert De Niro doesn't really look like a movie star, but he's famous, but it probably took a long time because he doesn't...you know...he's got that mole and people who make movies took a while to figure out how good he was, but now they all love him...that's you...you're like Robert De Niro."

"Yeah," said Roger.

Dennis considered that. "De Niro is a G.o.d to me."

"He's a G.o.d to everybody," I said. "So you just have to keep trying and someday you'll be the next De Niro."

"But he won the Academy Award for G.o.dfather II when he was barely thirty years old! I'm forty-six!"

"Well, he probably had a better agent," said Roger.

Dennis raised the butcher knife. "I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to give the performance of a lifetime. They always say I should be more real. Well, I'll show them just how real I can be! They'll have a pretty hard time saying I'm not real when I gut one of you with this knife, don't you think?"

Though I admittedly couldn't find any holes in his theory, it wasn't a plan of action that I wanted to encourage. "Look, just let us go," I said, as Roger and I cautiously backed toward the door. "We won't say anything."

"If you don't say anything, that wrecks the whole point!" said Dennis, swishing the butcher knife through the air. "I can either go lie in the bathtub, slit my wrists, and die in obscurity, or I can kill one of you and go to prison a celebrity! I sure as h.e.l.l will get a role in the prison Thanksgiving pageant, that's for sure!"

He took a menacing step forward, and I suddenly relaxed. He was still acting. This was all payback for the phone call prank. He was just trying to scare a couple of whippersnappers, to teach us the error of our ways, to provide a life lesson that would suit us well as we entered maturity.

"I think I'll kill..." Dennis hesitated, looking back and forth between Roger and I, and then pointed the knife at me. "You."

He rushed forward. I still kind of thought he might be trying to help me with my development of a moral core, but my bladder disagreed.

There wasn't time to get the door open, so we rushed across the living room into the kitchen, screaming, with Dennis right behind us. "Does this seem real? Are you scared?"

Though of course we couldn't have known the floor plan to Dennis' home beforehand, it still sucked to discover that the kitchen was a dead end.

I grabbed the first available object to defend myself. In a kitchen that no doubt contained knives, forks, meat cleavers, tenderizers, cheese graters, and rolling pins, I felt a little silly trying to be intimidating with a plastic measuring cup, but, hey, sometimes you just have to make the best of things.

"My uncle knows a Hollywood producer," Roger said. "He can get you a big part, I promise."

"Oh yeah? What's his name?"

"Uncle Phil."

"The producer's name, jacka.s.s."

"Ummm..."