But she’s not paying attention. She’s looking over my shoulder. I turn to find out at what as the police cruiser pulls along the side of the road and two uniformed cops get out.
I cannot freaking believe this. I glance back at Mrs. Johansen as she’s pulling the dog back by its red rhinestone-studded collar and closing the door. Closing the door in my face.
My instincts scream at me to run, even though I haven’t done a damn thing wrong. But cops can shoot you for running, right? They can shoot you for standing still. I raise my hands.
They could shoot me anyway. Why are people wasting time being scared of me? If I hadn’t had to take a piss, Kirby could’ve killed me. If I make a wrong move—or even if I don’t—I could die on my favorite teacher’s doorstep. Nowhere is safe.
No wonder my mom has an anxiety disorder.
* * *
I call Dad from the police station for all of the obvious reasons. He’s a lawyer. I wasn’t a truant. Mrs. Johansen didn’t want to press charges for trespassing. Writing a horror story isn’t an admission of state of mind, and even if it was, having a state of mind isn’t illegal.
Since there was no reason for me to be there, I was on my way home in Dad’s Mercedes within an hour. “I have a lot going on at work today,” he informs me. “I had to cancel my four o’clock. Did you call your mother?”
“I texted her.” All’s well.
I’m impressed that he came to rescue me himself. That he didn’t send an associate to handle it for him. Maybe he was embarrassed that his kid was in trouble. Maybe he cares.
Dad swings into the drive-through at McDonald’s and we order some McNuggets and Cokes. He doesn’t send his support checks on time. He’s always a day late. Not so late that it gets him in trouble, just late enough to make a point. Mom tells me about it, every month the same conversation.
As we pull into my apartment complex parking lot, Dad says, “I read your story. The school faxed a copy of it to the police station.” He looks at me sideways. “I thought you wanted to be an artist.”
“I want to write,” I say. “I’m going to find an artist to do the illustrations for me.”
“For your comic books?”
Graphic novels. “Yeah.”
He ruffles my hair like he did when I was a little kid. “You’ve got genuine talent. You scared a bunch of grown-ups into thinking you’re really dangerous. That’s kick-ass writing, right?”
I hadn’t looked at it that way. But I can see where a lawyer would. “I guess.”
He ruffles my hair again. “Hang in there, son.”
Huh. Dad thinks I’m a kick-ass writer. I shut the front passenger door feeling better than I have all day and take the stairs to my front door two at a time.
My phone buzzes in my pocket and I expect it to be Mom. Or maybe Logan, wondering what happened to me. I forgot that we were supposed to walk home together.
Instead, it’s Misty. She writes: Mrs. J called Ms. W, said she’s sorry she flagged you.
That’s something, I guess. I write back: Thx. Lunch tomorrow?
I hit send before I can take it back.
Misty again: Sure. C U then.
I reach for the doorknob, but right then Mom opens it from the inside. “Why didn’t you tell me you had been arrested?”
“I wasn’t arrested,” I say. “It was all a misunderstanding. You can ask my counselor at school. You can ask Dad.”
But Mom’s not listening. The TV is on in the kitchen, just like it was this morning. Just like it was last night. There’s a screen grab of me shouting at this morning’s video reporter on YouTube. Meanwhile, Channel 6’s Carolee is saying, “. . . unconfirmed reports that sixteen-year-old Ruben Chase may have been a coconspirator in the school shooting that left—”
I grab the remote and punch the off button. “You were right,” I admit to my mom, surrendering. “I never should’ve gone to school today. I never should’ve gotten out of bed today.” I slip off the long coat, realizing that I can call Dad and he’ll make the station back off. Maybe even apologize, but it’s already out there. “Misty’s parents are going to see that and—”
“Misty.” My mom’s shoulders relax. A smile tugs at her lips. “You have a girlfriend.”
“A friend friend,” I say. “A maybe friend friend.”
This time I don’t mind when Mom hugs me for four Mississippis. I ask, “You’re not afraid of me?” She’s afraid of everything else.
“I’ve never been afraid of you,” my mother explains. “I’m afraid for you. It’s called being a parent. Someday you’ll understand.”
I disengage without pushing her away. “If you say so.”
Mom tightens her grip on my arms. “Just don’t get her pregnant. Or catch a disease.”
Just like that we’re back to normal . . . or at least the new normal.
All’s well.
BURNING EFFIGIES
When Kirby Matheson shot up the Middleborough High School gym, it had nothing to do with them.
They’d been in Dalton’s SUV, crammed six in the back with Carly sitting bitch between Dalton and Cranmer. By chance Alice saw Kirby walking through the lot. She’d watched him through a puff of smoke, rolling her eyes. When the shots started, she didn’t recognize them as gunshots. None of them did. They didn’t know anything had happened until the school began to empty and the cops arrived with sirens blasting. Then they pressed together and pushed their fingers against the glass.
After it was over, the parking lot swarmed with reporters for days. There were many recollections of Kirby on the news, quotes online breaking down his whys and his pain. Mics were shoved into every flushed, tear-streaked face that wandered too close to the news vans. Except for theirs. Freshmen, seniors, teachers, and cafeteria workers—hell, even friends of teachers and cafeteria workers. But not them. None of the reporters asked what they saw. What could they have seen, doped-up kids cutting class? Only Kirby, walking through the lot before it all began. It had happened at their school. It had happened to them, and not to them at all.
Kirby hadn’t shot anyone they particularly cared about. Billie Palermo, maybe. The new kid. The transgender transfer. She might have become one of theirs if she’d had more time and a little less sweetness about her. A little less big-boned softness. A little less of an obvious desire to fit in.
But she didn’t, and none of theirs would have been caught dead at that stupid first-period pep rally, listening to the cheer-morons try to rhyme while flashing their poms, their asses, and their bleached-white teeth. Go, Middleborough Muskrats. Go. Go fuck yourselves.
It was all too easy to slide out the side doors and into the parking lot, ignoring any teacher who called their names, and once they were beside Dalton’s dented maroon Explorer, draped across the hood with their boots kicking the tires, none of the chickenshits had balls enough to order them back inside.
How those teachers must have run when the shooting started. How they must have screamed.
“Only two news vans today,” Cranmer says, walking Alice down the hall. “By next week there’ll be none. How soon they forget.” He shakes a smoke from his pack and pops it between his teeth. As long as he doesn’t light it, faculty keeps their mouths shut. Too many unanswered notes sent home. Too many missed parent-teacher meetings. And Cranmer has gotten too fast at chewing and swallowing the evidence.
“How fast we’d forget,” says Alice, “if it weren’t for shit like that.”
She nods at the main entrance as they pass, where techs are installing new metal detectors while a freshly appointed and very stern-looking security guard stands supervising. Alice swipes the smoke from between his teeth and sucks air through the filter.
“They’re making it harder on us,” she says. “Harder to ditch to the lot.”
“Allie. Don’t be a pessimist. They only hired one guy, and he probably finished his gun training two days ago.” Cranmer throws his arm around her skinny shoulders. He calls her “Allie” now, and h
is fingers press into the skin where her sweater has slid down. She doesn’t know when they became Alice and Cranmer instead of Alice and Cranmer and everyone else, but they have. Jaime thinks it’s a brilliant idea, and Carly says she’s not jealous. Alice thinks it will be all right. Charlie Cranmer isn’t always just a stoner goof. Sometimes he’s sweet.
“It’s stupid, though,” Cranmer says, “the way they think. Like someone else is going to come in here with another gun and do the exact same thing. No way. Next time it’ll be a mass poisoning. Or a fucking crossbow. How sick would that be?”
“There won’t be a next time,” Alice says, and shrugs out from under his arm. “What school has more than one massacre? They’d shut us down.”
“What a loss.”
They stop at the crossway and Cranmer lingers. His blue eyes flit around. He has a nice jawline and nice lips, and he looks at Alice like he loves her.
“Jesus, Cranmer, are you going to ask me to prom or something?”
He raises an eyebrow.
“You want to go to prom?”
“Shut up.” She holds the cigarette up between two fingers. “I’ll meet you and Jaime at lunch to smoke this.”
“Okay,” he says, and backs away. “Have fun in Spanish. Learn some swear words.”
Have fun in English, she thinks. Learn anything.
* * *
Jaime’s taken to wearing her hair weird. It’s up in a high clip and stiff tips stick out the top like sprouts. The style makes her look perkier than she is, and since she’s still growing out the last round of green dye, it also makes her resemble a sarcastic turnip.
They’re sitting in Jaime’s car, Jaime and her boyfriend, David, in the front and Alice and Cranmer in the back, smoking cigarettes out of Cranmer’s pack that isn’t really Cranmer’s pack because they all kicked in for it. They’re close to the school, not far back in the lot, testing the limits of the new security guard’s glare. He glares and glares but does nothing. Not even when Dalton jumps onto the hood and Jaime flips him off and yells for him to get the fuck in the back. The guard thinks they’re trouble. Everyone thinks they’re trouble. But Kirby Matheson never hung with them; it wasn’t one of them who shot up the pep rally. So there.
Alice blows smoke against the window and watches it roll and swim lazily for the roof. Through the gray haze, most of fourth-period lunch seems to have migrated outside. The cattle think it’s safer there, where they aren’t boxed in. Not locked down. They think it will be easier to run and scatter should the need arise.
Don’t forget to zig, she almost says aloud, when you should zag.
Ten feet from the school doors, a group of girls has gathered. They stand closer to one another, closer than the rest of the groups. They stand in a circle, in rings like a tree or a sticky, stupid cinnamon roll, the least important riding the crust and the most important frosting the center. Directly in the middle is Elsa Loring. Tyler Bower’s perfect blond girlfriend.
“Christ, Elsa looks like shit,” Jaime says, reading Alice’s mind in that way that best friends can. “Her eyes are so red they might actually bleed.”
“She’s probably been crying a lot,” says Alice.
“Well you know it’s not from smoking weed,” Cranmer says.
“Don’t be so sure,” David adds, and both boys laugh.
“Well, whatever it’s from,” Jaime says, and ashes out the window, “you know she’s got to be loving all the attention.”
They stare at Elsa for a few moments. Her shoulders are pulled in tight and her hair is tied back in a simple elastic band.
“It does make me want to spit in her face a little less, though.” Jaime sighs.
Alice sucks her cigarette hard. She stares at pretty, perfect Elsa Loring, who doesn’t seem to be enjoying any of the extra attention. But then she wouldn’t need to. She had plenty of it to begin with.
They say that Tyler was shot twice. They say that he died right away and didn’t suffer. Alice heard whispers that you could see the blood and brains fly out of the back of his head, and when she thinks of that, her stomach clenches like a fist.
Elsa would have been near him when it happened. The players were always near the cheerleaders, Alice remembered that from the rallies she’d endured as a freshman. She wonders if they ran together. If he pushed through people to get to her. If Elsa had been holding his hand. She wonders if Tyler was holding her tight, and then suddenly not at all.
Alice stares at Elsa and, for a minute through the smoky glass, it almost looks like Elsa is staring back. But then someone touches Elsa’s shoulder and she drops her face into her hands.
Elsa Loring might have been the last person to be with Tyler when he was alive. He would have tried to protect her when he saw the gun. He was like that no matter what Dalton and David and Alice’s other friends said when they cut down the jocks.
At night in her bed, Alice whispers into her pillow as if she is whispering into his grave. As if she might hear him whisper back.
“Did you die for her, Tyler?”
“Would you ever, ever have died for me?”
* * *
Someone has the idea to toast Birdland. Alice isn’t sure who. She thinks it was Dalton, because it was his bottle, lifted from the back of his parents’ liquor cabinet. It doesn’t matter now. They’re on the corner of Heron, at the edge of the neighborhood where all the streets are named for birds. Birdland, where Kirby Matheson used to live before he blew his own head off.
“Here’s to Birdland,” Dalton says, and raises his bottle of soda. They all raise them, Coke and Sprite and Dr Pepper, with as much whiskey mixed in as they can stand.
“To Birdland.”
“And all your nests of vipers,” Alice says, and drinks long and hard, carbonation burn and sickly alcohol sting, and everyone laughs and looks at her like she’s said something clever.
They leave the cars, and for a few blocks Dalton takes them on a haunted tour, making up stupid shit about things buried in backyards and murders committed in ramblers. He’s full of wind, like he always is, and it doesn’t take long for Cranmer to join him, filling in the gaps of fake stories and glancing back at Alice so often that it’s embarrassing. He and Dalton are grand-gesturing fools even when they’re not drinking, and now they’re so loud some pissed homeowner is going to call the cops. She wishes she hadn’t worn her heavy boots. When the red-and-blue lights hit they’ll have to dart into yards, try to double back to the Explorer, and hope they don’t come up against a fence they can’t jump.
“Does anyone know,” Alice asks, “where Kirby lived?”
In the lead, Dalton and Cranmer slow.
“I don’t,” Cranmer says.
“Me neither,” says Jaime.
“I do.”
Alice turns to David.
“How do you know where he lived?” Jaime asks. Her words slur a little. Jaime always drinks too fast. Before they go much farther she’ll have to pee, and Alice will have to stand guard by whatever shrub she chooses. Fifteen minutes after that she’ll have to do it again.
“My parents used to know his parents,” David says. “But they’re not there now. My mom says they’re staying with family or something.”
“Take us there,” Alice says.
For a few moments they look unsure. Hesitant. But then they palm their bottles tighter and grin. Their faces under the streetlights are gaunt and orange.
On the way they whisper and giggle. They make jokes about Kirby. How the idiot had no school spirit or he would have aimed for faculty. How he should have shot his parents, too, for giving him such a stupid name. In the days immediately following the shooting, it seemed like everyone wanted to remember Kirby. To break him into pieces like a disassembled watch. People who never spoke to him at all had sudden recollections of foreboding eye contact. Even among Alice and her friends, they told what stories they had, giving in to the urge to be involved in something that seemed so important to everyone else.
But
eventually they ran out of pieces of Kirby to analyze. The shock and the mourning and the brief period of head-hanging gave way to ridicule. Laughter and shouts of “Too soon!” that were only followed by more laughter.
Some in town said that Kirby was in hell, but Alice hoped he wasn’t. She hoped he was right there beside them, listening to every insult. She hoped he knew what a joke he still was. That the biggest joke of all was he thought he could kill himself and escape it.
“That’s it,” David says, and points. It isn’t much. An average house, and in the dark and the shadows of trees it could be white or beige or blue. They stand for a minute where they are, a few houses down on Egret Lane. No one asks Alice why she wanted to come. Perhaps they don’t remember that it was her idea.
“Let’s go,” Jaime says after a while. “There are probably cops watching, and I have to pee.”
“We haven’t even gone that close yet,” says Dalton, but he doesn’t sound eager.
“So what? It’s just a house. I’m bored. And I’m out of drink. Let’s go back to the gas station and get more Coke.”
“Yeah,” David says. “Then we can sit around a fire at Carly’s place.”
Carly’s place. No more than two miles away. Her friends shuffle off, jeans and scuffed boots, but Alice doesn’t move. No one notices but Cranmer, and he doesn’t turn until they’re a good distance down the block.
“Hey, Allie,” he calls softly, and Alice darts forward, toward Kirby’s house, into the dark.
* * *
Alice doesn’t really know how long it took to get things done at Kirby’s and make her way to Carly’s backyard, but everyone is still there. No one has passed out yet, and no one is particularly worried about her absence. Such friends I’ve got, she thinks, but she won’t waste much of her disgust on them. Not when she has Kirby tucked underneath her arm.