Those drives in the car became like a ritual. Stuck with each other in search of the Cadillac Café, the Long Branch, Gravy’s, Cory Miners, Mother’s Bistro, and dozens of other breakfast meccas, there was nothing to do but get to know each other, mile by mile. We talked about food, the weather, sports, comic books, sci-fi novels, movies. We ate copious amounts of bacon, pancakes, waffles, omelets, and downed it all with cup after cup of strong coffee.
It was damn nice, no other way to say it. Just damn nice.
I miss the car rides, the smell of breakfast, the paper, the nothing on the surface sort of chitchat that somehow added up to so much by the time the waitress cleared the plates. We were both far too late to the game to become father and son. We were friends. And that, as it turned out, was enough.
I ended up at Holy Cross because of a conversation on the way to Gravy’s in Portland. The summer was about up. Three more weeks and I would start school in Salem. I was sure I’d be attending South Ridge like four hundred or so other freshmen.
It began with a surprising question from Mr. Fielding, as so many of our conversations did.
“Have you got any ideas about the Catholics?”
I took a deep breath and thought for a second. What did I know about Catholics?
“They invented the Pope. And racquetball. They’ve been around a while. How am I doing?”
“Not too good,” he said. “Look, I’ve got some money saved up and nothing much to do with it. Any chance you’d be interested in going to school with the Catholics? It’s small. A close friend of mine runs the place.”
“Really? Who’s your close friend, God?”
Mr. Fielding laughed. “Father Tim. He’s a good guy. We’ve known each other a while. I’m what you might call a backsliding Catholic, but him I like. He sort of… well, I guess he understands me better than most. And he knows how to run a school. I told him about you.”
“A private school sounds like a lot of work.”
“Try it for a week, and I’ll let you drive the car.”
And that’s how I ended up at Holy Cross. I was only fourteen, but Mr. Fielding pulled off at the next I-5 exit and we switched places. We took back roads all the way to Gravy’s and I drove the whole way. Three weeks later I stepped foot into Holy Cross.
If I trace the whole thing back, it was the food and the driving that led to the disaster. If it weren’t for the long lazy drives in search of each other and a crispy plate of hash browns, we never would have hit the tree.
TWELVE
DAYS TO
MIDNIGHT
3:00 PM
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 9TH
“Come on, Fielding. It’s like twenty minutes, is all. What’s your problem?”
This was classic Ethan. He had me cornered while I waited in the parking lot for Oh and Milo to show up.
“I told you already, I have plans. I didn’t even bring my racquet.”
“Don’t give me that crap. Walk three steps and you’ll trip over ten racquets in this place. Come on, man! The courts are filling up.”
“You don’t have any balls,” I said.
“Har har har. Never heard that one before.”
“Your balls are all wet.”
“Keep it coming, smart guy. If you’re too chicken to play me just say so.”
“I’m too chicken to play you. And your balls are yellow.”
Ethan let out a screech of laughter, and this time it had an angry edge to it.
Besides the howler, one of the most annoying things about Ethan is apparently he’s very good-looking. You know how when you see a girl and she’s thirteen, but if you see her from behind you’d swear she was twenty-one? I’d say something like that is true of Ethan. Sideburns, muscles, broad shoulders, not a zit on him. From the back I’d take him for twenty-five, easy. Plus he’s rich. He has a brand-new two-tone MINI Cooper for which he contributed not one penny and got the second he turned sixteen.
Good looks, decent athlete, tons of dough, hot car. It takes a lot of strikes to turn a guy with all that going for him into a pariah. If you add it all up, Ethan has two basic problems: very obnoxious, and full of himself. But around Holy Cross, that’s not nearly enough to knock him off the Prom King platform given all the pluses stacked in his favor.
“You know what this is like?” he went on. Once Ethan made up his mind he was like a pit bull clamped onto a turkey bone. “It’s like leaving a poker table with everyone’s money before they’re ready to give up. It’s a wuss move, Fielding.”
The last time I played Ethan, nobody at our school had beaten him all year. I don’t even like tennis that much, and I beat him four games to three. When it was over, he threw his one-hundred-twenty-dollar Prince in my general direction.
“Yo, Ethan! We need a fourth. Come on,” yelled Nick. He was standing on one of Holy Cross’s two courts with Phil. Marissa Barstow (hot, popular, decent backhand) was standing on the other side all alone. Ethan and Marissa were on again, off again. They were currently off again.
He pointed a finger in my face and started backpedaling. “Tomorrow—I’m serious. Don’t wimp out on me, Fielding. Rain or shine, you’re going down.”
Oh and Milo had finally emerged from inside the school. Milo’s plume of black hair and combat boots gave him a perceived height advantage over Oh of about an eighth of an inch. If you shaved his head and put him in bare feet he’d be a good two inches shorter than she was. Milo is a very interesting guy, but I had the height advantage with Oh.
“Is he always like that?” asked Oh.
“Ethan is just pissed Jacob beat him,” said Milo. “I hope Phil doesn’t take one in the face. YO KICK HIS ASS, PHIL!”
Phil gave us the thumbs-up as one of Marissa’s wailer backhands sailed over the net, missing him by about a foot.
“The rain’s stopped and I’m dying to ride,” said Oh. “Let’s get some food.”
Oh took her longboard out of the back of Milo’s car, and in the span of about sixty seconds transformed into something I liked even more. She unbuttoned the top of her olive green school uniform, revealing a Jack Skellington T-shirt underneath. Then she tied her hair back in a ponytail and pulled her red cap over her head.
I got in the car and rolled the window down.
“Nightmare Before Christmas,” I said from the passenger seat of Milo’s car, referring to her T-shirt. “Milo give you that?”
“Nope. Found it at that thrift shop downtown where me and Milo met. Can you believe people just give this stuff away?”
Milo pulled out and started driving at about five miles per hour while Oh held on to the door through the open window on my side and rolled along on her longboard. Her fingers peeked out from under the pink cast and I noticed she still hadn’t let anyone else sign it.
“Speed bump,” warned Milo.
“I’m not blind,” said Oh. “Take it up a notch, Grandpa.”
Oh took the speed bump like it was butter, looking out over the empty soccer field in front of the school.
“I love soccer,” she said. “I miss it.”
“Speed bump,” said Milo. He was going about ten, the legal limit on the school driveway.
Oh leaned down into the window and I caught the smell of her hair in the wind.
“Milo, I swear to God, if you don’t shut up…” The speed bump came under the board and Oh’s head hit the rim of the door pretty hard.
“Sorry about that, but you can’t say I didn’t warn you,” said Milo.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Didn’t hurt a bit.”
“You should wear a helmet.”
“Speed bump.”
Oh laughed, like a song that starts soft and ends in a whisper. Her hips moved up, then down as she crested the bump. I wanted to touch her fingers, the ones sticking out of the pink cast. I wanted to hold her hand.
Milo slowed as we approached the end of the drive. It sloped down and ended on Haysville Boulevard, a winding two-way road that was margina
lly busy this time of day. From the window of my science classroom, the cars on Haysville looked as if they were moving in slow motion, like they couldn’t hurt a fly.
“See you later, boys,” said Oh.
She had let herself roll back, closer to the side door, stretching her arms along the length of the back window. When Milo applied the brakes, she pulled herself forward and flew past like she’d been released from a slingshot. She smiled, invigorated.
“You’re crazy!” I shouted.
Everything was slow-mo. I could feel the cool, damp air in my eyes. I could smell the muddy soccer field. Oh was gliding, like on a surfboard, a beautiful girl riding a concrete wave toward a sidewalk beach.
Oh soared past the hood of Milo’s car. She’d had it in her head to veer in front of the car, keep going left, and catch the sidewalk along the road. She could have been perfectly fine, because she really had nailed the timing and the distance, fast and in control.
But a rock the size of a marble is the mortal enemy of a skateboarder. It’s why boarders hate skateparks that are shared by BMXers. Rubber wheels pick up rocks and carry them onto the glassy smooth surface, and that equals a face-plant if you’re riding and the pebble finds your wheel. I know, I’ve done it.
Oh pitched forward and sideways at once with distressing speed and threw her cast-covered arm out in front of herself. It was too much force for a broken limb, and her elbow buckled under her own weight. I heard her face hit the pavement, a loud crack, like a baseball bat against a telephone pole.
Then she slid on her hands. Her palms had to be shredding as she slid out past the sidewalk and into the road. These events seemed to take place in a vacuum, a timeless moment that could have been an hour or a split second.
I had my foot on the pavement seconds after Oh hit the rock. I yelled her name. It sounded peculiar, shouting Oh like that, an exclamation of surprise.
I arrived at Oh’s body first, Milo right behind me. She was badly injured, had to be, and I yelled at Milo to go back and slam on his car horn and yell for help.
Oh sat up slowly and looked at her hands, then turned and looked at me, awe in her hazel eyes.
I knelt down in front of her, shocked she wasn’t wailing or knocked out. She touched her own face and head carefully while we listened to Milo hit his horn over and over and yell for help. She clenched her hand into a fist and back out again.
“What just happened to me?” she asked.
Cars on the road next to the sidewalk slowed and rolled their windows down, asking if Oh was all right.
Of course she’s not all right! I thought. She smashed her face into the pavement!
But I couldn’t bring myself to say the words, because what I was seeing didn’t add up. No blood. No anything.
“What just happened to me?” Oh asked again.
“Don’t move,” I said. “Just stay still.” I reached out and touched her on the back and had an instant and totally inappropriate desire to kiss her. Tears were streaming down my face but I was laughing.
“This has to be a dream,” I said, touching her face and her hands. “This can’t be right.”
Oh smiled as Milo came alongside of us with a perplexed look on his face.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m fine… I think.”
Despite my protests, she stood up and wiped the dirt off her shirt.
“There’s not a scratch on you,” said Milo. And there wasn’t. Her pants had a rip in them at the knee and her shirt was wet and dirty, but there wasn’t a single thing wrong with Ophelia James. No broken nose, no shattered teeth, no missing skin on her palms, nothing. She was perfect.
The foursome who’d been playing tennis on the courts in front of the school ran toward us on the soccer field, Ethan out in front.
“Where’d my hat go?” asked Oh. Her cap had flown off her head and landed in the road where it was being run over by a passing pickup truck. I darted out into the road to retrieve it.
By the time Ethan and the rest arrived, breathless and expecting a scene, Oh had her hat back on and was looking as flawlessly beautiful as ever.
I remember feeling protective of Oh when she picked up her longboard and examined it for damage. I kept thinking we were dealing with some sort of post-traumatic event and any second she would drop dead in a pile of broken bones.
I once heard a story like that about a car accident. A mom and two little kids were racing through an intersection and got sideswiped by an SUV. This lady undid her seat belt, climbed into the backseat, and took hold of her two little kids. Then she opened the passenger door, got out, and set them down. About five seconds later she collapsed with a broken neck and a concussion. She never walked again after that.
“Ophelia James,” said Ethan, looking at her disheveled hair and torn pants. “What a piece of work.”
“Shut up, Anderson,” said Marissa, more than a little jealous.
“Don’t have a cow. I’m only stating the obvious—”
That did it. Marissa went after him with her racquet, and Ethan and Nick and Phil all laughed until she stalked back to the courts without them.
“Come on, M, don’t be so sensitive,” Ethan said.
Marissa yelled over her shoulder, “Don’t call me that!”
“The rain’s gonna start up again,” said Nick. He lined up a slow-motion backhand as he talked. “Just go make up with her and let’s play.”
The three of them wandered off, laughing and chatting as if there’d been no accident to begin with. The whole event seemed blurry to me already, like memories of my mom.
“You never answered my question,” said Oh, turning back to me.
“What question?” asked Milo.
She looked at me like I knew something I wasn’t telling her.
“What just happened to me?”
I stood there, confused and tongue-tied. Something wasn’t right, I could feel it. I still half expected Oh to drop dead.
“I’ve gotta go,” I said.
And then I ran like I’ve always run when the smell of danger gets too close.
8:00 PM: Where did you go?
The text message came from a number I didn’t recognize. Oh. Milo had already called and texted a half-dozen times and I hadn’t replied.
I sat on my bed in a kind of trance with Mr. Fielding’s Zippo, lighting it, running my fingers over the flames, slapping the metal lid shut. I had information they didn’t know about, facts that were important, but I wasn’t ready to face them quite yet. But in the last text, Milo had said they were coming over whether I liked it or not.
7:00 PM: We’re picking you up @ 8.15. parking lot. don’t be late
7:12 PM: Going to loft
7:16 PM: Bring homework. hahaha
7:21 PM: Don’t go dark on me again
7:48 PM: It’s raining. bring a hat
8:06 PM: Be there in 15. you better be walking
The phone rang in my hand. Father Tim from Seattle.
“You playing with that lighter again?” asked Father Tim. Dang. I snapped it shut. He coveted the lighter, I knew, and probably wondered if I was doing it harm.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to burn the place down.”
“That’s a relief. How are the old guys doing? Are they feeding you?”
“They’re trying. How can you eat Frank’s cooking? Scary.”
“The smoking helps. Kills the taste buds. Top shelf in my office has Pop-Tarts if you get desperate.”
I started down the hall, cell phone in one hand, lighter in the other.
“How’d it go at Holy Cross today?”
Turning into Father Tim’s office I caught the damp odor of spent cigarettes and old newspapers.
“Smells like a hobo has set up shop in your study,” I said.
“Took a long time to get it that way. Don’t clean up.”
I fished a pack of cherry Pop-Tarts out of a crumpled box on Father Tim’s shelf and returned to my room.
“So, how’d it go?
” he persisted. Did he really want dad duty now that Mr. Fielding was gone?
“It was fine, boring, nothing happened.” I heard the poorly concealed irritation in my own voice.
“You know,” he said, pausing to take a drag on his cigarette. I could imagine the smoke drifting out of his nose as he spoke, see him flicking ashes off his black polyester pants. “It’s okay to miss him. I miss him. I knew him about as well as anyone.”
“I doubt that,” I said, jealous at the thought of all the time Father Tim had enjoyed with Mr. Fielding. It also made me wonder just how much Father Tim knew. And what he’d tell.
Another long pause.
“He talked about you,” he said finally. “A lot.”
“I gotta go,” I said, sitting up and glancing at my watch, realizing I was going to be late meeting Milo and Oh.
“You’re sure everything’s okay?” he asked again.
“Yeah, honestly—school was fine. Same as it always is. Get back soon so we can figure things out.”
I pulled the phone from my ear, and heard him say, “Be careful with that lighter,” as I hung up.
I didn’t feel like packing up my stuff and running from Oh and Milo. The three of us had been involved in something we all knew didn’t make sense, and the only way I was going to sort this out was by talking to them, telling them the truth about what had happened. Or at least part of the truth.
There’s a shortcut through the woods between the church house and the school that is generally avoided by students. It’s not officially off-limits, but there’s a grim urban legend about the shortcut involving a student, two severed fingers, and an escapee from the state mental hospital. The hospital isn’t that far from the school and the story is pretty good, so it tends to keep the woods empty of people. Still, it’s twice as long to use the neighborhood roads, so I started up the soggy path and felt the wet branches wipe against my jacket.
8:12 PM: We’re here… where are you?
I passed by a rotting tree trunk and smelled the air thicken, tapping out a message that said: Be there in 3 min, minus 2 fingers.
Thick, tangled walls of blackberry enclosed the narrow path as I wound my way closer to the school. The rolling hills of snarled thorn had ruled the woods for decades, wrapping around moss-covered trees and rising a dozen feet in the air through gray fog.