Thirteen Days to Midnight

  “You said it, didn’t you?” she asked. Oh wasn’t staring at me, but I knew it was me she was asking.

  “Thanks a lot, bro,” said Milo. “Next time a little warning might be nice.”

  “I didn’t say anything,” I replied, thinking about what I had done.

  “God this is confusing,” said Oh.

  “I didn’t say it out loud, but I thought it.”

  “Interesting,” said Oh. “So you thought the words and now Milo’s thumb is broken.”

  “It’s not broken, not even close. It’s fine.”

  The loft isn’t that big to begin with, but Oh was closer than I expected. She looked up, and then she touched the side of my face with the fingers from her broken arm, sending my pulse into overdrive.

  “I think he’ll be okay,” she said, and smiled beautifully.

  I was a bit too mesmerized by Oh to see Milo pick up the book. He threw it at my gut like a Frisbee. It hit a little low, right where it counts, and I buckled over.

  “Why’d you throw it so hard?” yelled Oh.

  “I didn’t throw it that hard, just lower than I planned. Sorry, dude,” Milo said, laughing and wincing at once. It sounded like this was Oh’s idea, and she’d probably given Milo a wink and a nod while I wasn’t looking.

  I stood up straight and realized that the blow actually hadn’t hurt a bit. Such a strange feeling: expecting yourself to be hurt and finding you’re not.

  I could imagine how experiencing the world like this, a world where you couldn’t be damaged, could become addicting.

  “I have to be home by ten thirty or I’m in big trouble,” Oh said, interrupting our little torture-fest.

  “You’re kidding me,” said Milo.

  “You don’t know my mom. She’ll seriously ground me. We’re not going to make any progress figuring this out if I’m locked up at home after school.”

  “Well, this has been fun,” I said. “Let’s do it again real soon.” I got courtesy laughs all around as Milo started down the ladder.

  “Wait here a second,” Oh said. “We have time for one more test if we make it fast.”

  I waited at the top of the ladder as she raced down two rungs at a time. When she reached the bottom, she pushed the ladder on its wheels and it rolled away.

  “Um… a little help here,” I said.

  “Jump,” said Oh.

  From the loft to the floor in Coffin Books was maybe twelve or thirteen feet. Not the biggest jump ever, but high enough in the dim yellow light with all sorts of unsteady stuff to land on. Piles of books, tables, chairs—there wasn’t a clear space more than two feet square anywhere I looked.

  “Come on, Jacob, I gotta go,” said Oh, looking at her watch. “It’s twenty after. If I’m late, it’s your fault.”

  “Push the ladder back over,” I said.

  Oh just stared at me, smiling. There was nowhere to run. “You’re indestructible, remember? This should be a walk in the park.”

  “Just do it, man,” said Milo. “Worst-case scenario you’ll twist an ankle. Come on! We gotta go!”

  I took a couple of deep breaths, set my sights on a patch of open space next to a lamp and a chair, and went for it.

  There are at least two bummers about falling on a floor lamp. One, they can be sharp, a little bit like a spear with a shade on top. The lamp I fell toward was of the standing, gothic variety, with a thin post made of metal.

  The second bummer about falling on a lamp is they can be loaded with electricity. If a lamp is turned on and you’ve jumped in its general direction, then your IQ is probably on par with a block of cheese.

  I hit the top of the lamp with the inside of my arm, where the lightbulb exploded into sparks and glass. The sharpest part of the bottom of the bulb punctured right through my light jacket and touched my skin. The lamp tipped over and the broken glass ripped a long cut into the arm of my jacket. My head hit a thin old rug that lay over the hardwood floor, and I rolled into a neck-bending somersault.

  “Don’t touch him!” Oh cried out.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I think I’m fine.”

  But I could see by the way they were looking at me that something wasn’t right. I looked to my right and saw little sparks popping under my arm—and going into my body.

  “If you touch him he’ll conduct,” Oh said to Milo. “You’ll be just as fried as he should be.”

  I grabbed the middle of the lamp and pulled it free from my jacket. There was a popping sound and the whole room went dark. A dusty beam of weak light showed itself from the street as I stood up and started checking myself for damage.

  “I’m fine, you guys,” I said. This time, I heard the wonder in my own voice and realized for the first time how dangerous the situation had become. I felt the surprising touch of Oh’s hand on mine in the dark. It was trembling but warm.

  Milo stumbled around looking for a flashlight or a candle, mumbling a string of thoughts out loud. “This is crazy… makes no sense… my dad’s gonna be pissed… damn it!”

  “I’m sorry,” Oh whispered, shockingly close to my ear.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, because she sounded different, like she was the one who had been hurt in my fall. She pulled away and spoke out loud.

  “Nothing. It’s just… I don’t know, I don’t feel so good. I think I’m going to be sick.”

  “Hold on! Not in the store!” yelled Milo. He’d found a flashlight behind the counter and turned it on. “I’ve got enough explaining to do already!”

  Milo guided Oh outside and she threw up in the gutter, leaning heavily against the car on her bad wrist. We made small talk and tried to pretend like we weren’t paying any attention. What girl wants to be seen puking her guts out in front of two guys?

  Oh stood up and wiped her arm across her lips, turning to us.

  “Got any towels?”

  “Yeah, I mean, no,” I said. I peeled off my ripped jacket and draped it over her shoulders. I was wearing a T-shirt and she touched my arm on the inside near my elbow, where the skin is soft and vulnerable. Her fingers moved, searching for a gash or a wide cut, but there was nothing to find.

  Oh wiped her face with one of the dangling sleeves of my coat. “I think I’m okay now. Can you guys just take me home?”

  We got in the car and no one said anything for a long time. We just watched the lights change, listened to the tires on wet pavement. She lived in one of the older, run-down apartment buildings on the edge of town. I don’t know why I expected any different, but—maybe because she seemed so perfect to me—I was a little bit surprised to discover she was living in a less-than-ideal setting.

  “Ten twenty-nine,” said Milo. “Back to the castle with a minute to spare.”

  “You want me to walk you up?” I asked from the backseat.

  She didn’t answer my question, just shook her head as I jumped out and stood next to her.

  “See you tomorrow?” I asked. I had a sinking feeling our weird night together had changed things, maybe not for the better.

  “Yeah. Can I keep your coat?”

  “Of course, yeah, keep it. Maybe sew it up if you get a chance.”

  Oh smiled up at me and walked away, and I got in the front seat with Milo.

  “Why do I feel like a third wheel all of a sudden?” said Milo, pulling around the parking lot and scrolling through his iPod with one hand.

  “Couldn’t tell you. How’s that thumb doing?”

  “Hurts to find music, but I’ll live.”

  We drove in awkward silence.

  We’d started something none of us understood, and it was impossible to know where it would lead.

  ELEVEN

  DAYS TO

  MIDNIGHT

  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 10TH

  It felt like a month between the first and last class of the day, stealing moments between bells to pass ideas back and forth as secretly as we could. What little we whispered back and forth in the halls consisted almost entirely of useless sn
ippets.

  I’ve got an idea, something we should try.

  No texting about this, just in case someone sees and takes one of our phones.

  That would be a disaster.

  Meet in the parking lot after school.

  You still have it pointed on yourself, right?

  That last one came from Oh, who snuck up behind me with a sharp pencil pointed into my back. When I nodded, she pushed, softly at first, then quite a bit harder.

  “Still working?”

  “Nope. You’ve just given me lead poisoning. I think you pierced my heart.”

  “They don’t actually use lead in these things anymore. It’s graphite.”

  When she turned in the direction of her next class, her hand slid across my back and she glanced back, smiling. I started to think it was probably time to have a talk with Milo about how she wouldn’t come between us, because I was already planning out exactly where I was taking her for our first official date. Now all I had to do was get up enough courage to ask her.

  Holy Cross was too small for team sports to catch on big, because no one knew from one year to the next if we’d have enough good players to field a competitive team. Individual sports ruled and Father Tim loved tennis. It was like a blood sport at Holy Cross. Throughout the day, Ethan bugged me endlessly to get my ass on the court and give up the crown. He wouldn’t leave me alone at lunch, and I finally had to give in. Either I played or we’d be putting up with his harassing us every second.

  “Kick his ass and do it fast,” Milo grumbled as we parted ways before the last class of the day. “We’ve got more important things to deal with.”

  “Just let him win,” suggested Oh. She and I headed toward religion class, taught by Father Tim. We were all surprised to see he’d returned a day early from Seattle.

  “You were expecting an easy go of it with Father Blake,” he began, pacing back and forth in front of his desk. “No such luck today.”

  Father Blake was a retired priest from the church house who treated his occasional class sessions as study halls. He couldn’t hear very well and he cleared his throat into a handkerchief about ten times every hour.

  Father Tim, having had lots of time on the drive to and from Seattle to think, kicked off the class with a loaded question, which was how many of his classes began.

  “Who in this classroom is going to hell?”

  A few kids laughed, three hands shot up, and Ethan pointed at me.

  Despite Ethan’s finger in my face, Father Tim’s question had inadvertently made me wonder about my own mortality.

  If I was indestructible, could I also live forever?

  I didn’t know, but the idea of it was startling.

  The question itself was no doubt some kind of trick, had to be. Despite Father Tim’s standard priest garb of black button-down and white collar, the clothing, in my opinion, did not match the man. His theology was like a gray fog: nothing black and white about it. He never wanted an automatic catechism answer from his students. He wanted us to really ponder his questions.

  Who in this classroom is going to hell?

  Oh looked at me, I looked at her. We smiled. It was very distracting.

  “Is Mr. Bo Jangles going to hell?” asked Father Tim.

  This got a laugh out of almost everyone along with a lot of head nodding, because Mr. Bo Jangles was a huge orange library cat with a reputation campus-wide as a hand-scratching cuff-biter.

  “That cat is doomed,” said Ethan.

  Father Tim, pulling us deeper into the mire of the problem, wasted no time responding.

  “Why would you say that? What motivation would God have for sending a cat to hell?”

  “Come on, Father, Bo is a monster. He hates kids.”

  “Humans hate,” said Father Tim. “Animals do what they are designed to do, and the design does not include emotions.”

  He pointed to Oh, who had raised her hand unexpectedly.

  “I disagree. Our dog has emotions.”

  Father Tim smiled politely.

  “Scientific evidence suggests otherwise. You only think your dog is happy or sad or mean, but he isn’t really.”

  “It’s a she, and yes, she does.”

  “What’s the dog’s name?”

  “Clarisse.”

  “All right then, let’s talk about Clarisse. You pet Clarisse and she wags her tail and you think—ah! Look at that! My dog is happy. But what if she is only reacting out of instinct in a way that makes you think she’s happy?”

  “What does this have to do with hell?” asked Ethan.

  Oh pressed on. “If instincts and emotions have the same result, then what’s the difference between them? I come home and Clarisse is excited to see me. She’s happy.”

  “Do you think Clarisse could be angry with you? Would she want to hurt your feelings if you withhold the food bowl?”

  “There’s not a mean bone in her body. Mr. Bo Jangles got them all.”

  I was starting to see Father Tim’s point. I raised my hand and he pointed to me.

  “An animal doesn’t kill because it’s mad; it kills because that’s how it’s designed. So like a lion kills an antelope. It’s not angry, it’s just hungry, and for a lion that’s okay. Humans kill each other for totally different reasons.”

  “And lions don’t have a conscience,” said Ethan.

  Father Tim stepped to the blackboard and wrote the word conscience in white chalk. As the word appeared, I thought about how they probably didn’t have old-school chalkboards at South Ridge.

  “Does Clarisse have a conscience?”

  He pointed to the word, looked back at Oh.

  “Maybe.”

  “What if she and Mr. Bo Jangles were to have it out, claws and all, and the cat was killed. Would Clarisse care?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Your maybes aren’t very useful, I’m afraid, but I see your difficulty. You want Clarisse to feel things she cannot feel.”

  “I disagree. Clarisse feels some things, just not all things.”

  “Interesting. I hadn’t thought of that,” said Father Tim. He was a very honest priest, and he rubbed his white and red bearded chin thoughtfully, turning his gaze out the window to the courtyard.

  “So you’re saying animals don’t go to hell?” asked Nick. He was sitting next to Phil, who seemed to agree with an almost imperceptible nod.

  “We haven’t even determined if there is a hell,” said Father Tim. “We can’t be sending cats and dogs and children off to a place that doesn’t exist.”

  This was also common, a sort of circular reasoning that made us rethink everything we’d been talking about. Still, there were a few whispers in the room. Was a Catholic priest really telling us there was no hell?

  Father Tim came forward and sat on the front edge of his desk, looking out at the quiet group. “I don’t think God speaks to animals in the same way, and that makes us very special,” he began. “Our conscience tells us when we’re heading down the wrong path. Daisies, oak trees, ants, beetles, frogs, horses, and yes, even Mr. Bo Jangles and Clarisse, they’re fundamentally different. They don’t get to choose; only we have that privilege.”

  “But that still doesn’t answer the question of hell,” I said. “The Bible says it’s there. Are you saying it’s not?”

  Father Tim jumped up and took three great strides to the chalkboard. He wrote down a Bible verse. When this happened it was assumed that everyone would take the many-translation Bibles from inside the desks and find the passage, which we all dutifully proceeded to do.

  The verse was Colossians 1:20, which I found pretty fast because it’s in the New Testament and I’ve got the order of books down cold in that thing.

  By the time I’d read it and looked up, Father Tim had written a total of eleven more verses on the white board and he was still going. I’d never seen him do this—none of us had—and Bible pages were flipping like crazy at every desk.

  Philippians 2:10–11, Revelation 5:13, He
brews 1:2, 1 Timothy 2:6, Ephesians 1:22, John 3:36, Titus 2:11, and on and on until the board was filled with verses and we all sat staring, not sure what we were supposed to do.

  When Father Tim finally turned around, he looked as if he was winded by the effort and had to catch his breath. “I could go on,” he said. “But I think these will begin to answer our question about heaven and hell and who’s going where.”

  “Can you paraphrase?” asked Oh. “It’s a little overwhelming.”

  Father Tim looked back at everyone looking at him and began reeling off the verses by heart. He ran them together without looking at the board, speaking in a voice that was growing in volume around every scriptural turn, as if the words had been written specifically for us to hear and he was the messenger. He ended in 1 Timothy with his hands out in the air, suspended on an invisible cross: “He gave himself as a ransom for everything and everyone.”

  A moment of silence followed as he stared at a perplexed room full of students.

  “Are we going to be tested on this?” asked Ethan.

  I’m sure everyone felt like laughing, but hardly anyone did.

  “There are words in those verses that repeat and repeat,” Father Tim answered. “But the message of these passages is easy to miss. People have been missing or hiding or ignoring this message for a long time. It’s a shame how rarely we hear it, how much we try even to disguise it.”

  He looked directly at me, no one else, and I had a feeling then that no matter who else he addressed, the whole message was for me and me alone.

  “Here is your answer, Oh: All creatures, all men and women, all children, all dogs and cats and flowers and mountains, all of them are saved. If that’s not the truth, then I think the whole thing is probably a lie. Let’s assume for a moment that you, Oh, do not choose God. Does this prevent Him from choosing you? I conclude, from these many verses, that it does not. Either He saves everyone or He saves no one.”

  It was radical stuff, for sure. Some good Catholic parents were bound to be up in arms. The school was broke and the priest had gone bananas.

  I was beginning to wonder what Mr. Fielding had told Father Tim over the years. Did he know I might never die, might go on living forever, stuck on earth, unable to answer the question of hell for myself?