Vampires in the Lemon Grove

The story begins:

The scarecrow that we found lashed to the pin oak in Friendship Park, New Jersey, was thousands of miles away from the yellow atolls of corn where you might expect to find a farmer’s doll. Scarecrow country was the actual country, everybody knew that (203).

The narrator, Larry, and his friends find a scarecrow-like doll tied to the tree in their favorite part of the park. They consider this to be their tree because it’s where their gang, Camp Dark, always meets. Nobody knows where the doll came from or why it’s tied to their tree, but it looks eerie because it’s “five foot five” with a “doll’s wax head, with glass eyes and a sculpted face, but a scarecrow’s body—sackcloth under the jeans and sweat” (208). Almost immediately, Larry realizes that is looks exactly like Eric Mutis, a kid that he and his friends used to brutally bully. They had all almost forgot about Eric until now.

Larry remembers Eric as:

a mutant, sightless, incapable of shame. Mutant floated among us, hideous, yet blank as a balloon—his calm was unrelenting. He was ugly, most definitely, but we might have forgiven him for that.