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. His baffling lack of contrition—all that oblivion rolling in his blue eyes. Personally, I felt allergic to the kid (212).

Larry and his friends perpetually beat up Eric, but he never protested. Instead, he silently took the beatings. Then, one day, Eric stopped showing up to school.

The Eric doll is freaking them all out, so Gus takes a knife from his pocket and cuts the doll down; it falls into the steep ravine and lands “[f]acedown on an oily soak of black and maroon leaves. His legs all corkscrewed. One of his white hands had gotten twisted all the way around. He waved at us, palm up, spearing the air with his long, unlikely fingers” (216). The friends wonder if the doll was protecting them from something, like the way a scarecrow protects the crops from the birds. After this, Larry can’t stop thinking about the Eric doll broken in the ravine, and this makes him wonder where the real Eric must be.

As the friends visit their favorite spot, they realize that little by little, pieces of the Eric doll are going missing. The friends blame Larry, but he isn’t doing it. Larry protests, but he realizes that it’s easier for his friends to blame him than consider who is actually doing it, or where the doll came from in the first place. One day, when the doll is almost completely gone, Larry and Mondo are at the park alone. Larry confides that he knew Eric better than the others. Apparently, Eric’s caregiver almost hit Larry with his car one day. Eric came and apologized to Larry, and brought him back to his house. Larry was bloody, so Eric let him borrow his sweater. Eric had a pet bunny, and he confides in Larry that he stole it. The two share a bonding moment of laughter, and then Larry leaves. The next day at school, Larry acts like it never happened. Then, to make matters worse, he calls the little girl whose rabbit Eric stole, and she gets it back. Afterwards, Eric looks completely devoid of emotion, and then he disappears from school altogether.

Larry feels guilty about this, and he wonders if he and his friends somehow created the doll because of their bad deeds against the real Eric. As a way to make up for what he’s done, he decides to save what’s left of the Eric doll. He has Mondo help him into the ravine, and he takes a rabbit with him. The rabbit climbs into the Eric doll and eats the hay, and Larry decides that he will watch over the rabbit and doll to make up for what he’s done.