Just like Emily did.
He found his friend Kyle Goessel pulling to a stop in his twenty-year-old midnight black Mustang.
Kyle climbed out and tossed the door shut. “What’s going on, Dan?”
“Hey.”
“You okay? I heard about what happened at the funeral.”
“I’m good.” They started toward the school and Daniel said, “So you weren’t there?”
“I got there after you left.”
Ever since Kyle and his family had moved to town five years ago, he and Daniel had been friends, even though they were pretty much total opposites in a lot of areas.
Daniel was into sports. Kyle was all about his electric guitar, comic books, and working at Rizzo’s, their favorite local pizza place.
Kyle, English. Daniel, math.
Daniel, classic rock. Kyle, indie bands.
This morning, Kyle’s shoulder-length, dirty blond hair was still a little tangly damp from his shower, and he spread his hand across it to tame it.
Kyle was taller than Daniel, but lanky and a little uncoordinated—unless he was running. It was sort of strange. His limbs all seemed to move at different speeds as he loped through the school halls, but when he took off sprinting, he was fluid. Smooth. The kid could run, but even though the cross-country and track coaches were after him to join their teams, he refused, for reasons he’d never fully explained to Daniel.
In a way, it was like this other guy in their class, Jacob Lawhead, who stuttered when he talked, but when he sang, his stuttering completely disappeared.
Some people said it was all just in his head, but ultimately, what did that really matter? It didn’t make it any less real. Whenever someone says something is just in your head, they should leave out the word just, because whatever happens in your head also happens in your body. There’s no other way around it.
Some kid must have pressed the wrong button on his key fob, because as they approached the school, a car alarm started blaring. Kyle mumbled, “I’m really glad someone invented those things. What a brilliant idea that turned out to be—I mean, how many crimes have car alarms helped deter? Tons, I’m sure.”
They passed through the front doors and into the hallway that paralleled the office and led toward the science wing.
Kyle had his phone out, with the calculator app open.
“Not this morning, Kyle.”
“Just do one.”
“I’m not really in the—”
Kyle was already tapping at the keys. “1489 times 783 divided by 4.4.”
“264,974.318,” Daniel replied without missing a beat.
Kyle shook his head. “Man, I have no idea how you do that.”
“It’s the same as when you play guitar.”
“How’s it the same?”
“You read the music, you translate it without even thinking about it, and you know exactly what to do—which strings to press down, when to do it, all that. When I look at a sheet of music, I’m completely lost. I guess I could eventually translate which note is which, just like you could do the longhand in math, but only if I worked at it for a while. For you, music comes naturally.”
“And for you, math does.”
“Pretty much.”
Kyle slipped his phone into his pocket. “Hey, I need to grab something from my locker. Come on.”
They cut through the hall, navigating through the crowd of students heading to their lockers or their first-hour classes.
Five minutes until the bell.
Nicole Marten walked past on the way to their English classroom. “Hi, Kyle. Hey, Daniel.”
“Hey,” they replied.
When she was gone, Kyle gave Daniel a look.
“What?”
“Dude, she’s so into you. You should ask her to homecoming.”
Daniel stared at him blankly. It’d never occurred to him that Nicole might like him in that way. “She likes me?”
Kyle shook his head. “For being the class jock, you are staggeringly clueless when it comes to girls. No offense.”
“None taken.” They arrived at the locker. Daniel leaned a hand against the wall. “I was kinda thinking about asking that new girl, Stacy.”
“Yeah.” Kyle was digging through his things. “You keep telling me about her. When am I gonna meet her?”
Normally, when a new kid comes to school everyone talks about her, but no one seemed to be mentioning Stacy. Daniel wasn’t sure why—probably because they were preoccupied with everything that was going on with Emily’s death.
“I’ll introduce you.”
“The dance is—” Kyle began.
“Saturday. Yeah, I know.”
“You’re cutting it close, amigo. I mean, if you’re gonna ask anyone.”
“You taking Mia?”
Kyle nodded. He’d been going out with Mia Young since the beginning of summer—the longest he’d ever dated anyone. “You know it.”
He finished rooting through his locker, closed it, and said to Daniel, “Well, just don’t discount Nicole. She’s cool. And from what Mia tells me, she doesn’t have a date yet.” As they left for English, Kyle indicated toward a locker near the end of the hall. “That was Emily’s.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw her sometimes, here in the hall, getting her things. I heard they cleared it all out.” He paused. “I wonder what they found.”
Thinking about what might have been in Emily’s locker brought back memories of the funeral, and that was something Daniel did not want at all right now.
The place on his arm where she’d grabbed him began to itch terribly, but he resisted the urge to scratch it, and, merging with a group of other students, he and Kyle filed into their English classroom.
Everyone was quieter than usual today, almost certainly because they were still trying to sort through their feelings about what had happened to Emily.
A few people asked Daniel if he was okay, but thankfully most of his friends didn’t bring up anything about what’d happened at the funeral.
Emily’s body had been found on Sunday afternoon and on Monday morning the school administrators had brought in counselors to meet with the students.
Everything had happened so fast. Daniel’s dad had told him that typically the family wouldn’t have the funeral so soon after a family member’s body was found, but apparently in this case they wanted to have it as quickly as possible.
There weren’t enough therapists in Beldon for the school, so they called in some from Superior and Ashland. Most of the kids Daniel knew didn’t really feel comfortable talking to the counselors, and he wondered if maybe it was mostly underclassmen who ended up being helped by them. Hard to know.
The counselors all gave out their phone numbers and e-mail addresses and promised to be available if the students needed to contact them, and that was that. They’d seemed like they cared, seemed genuine enough, but, honestly, Daniel didn’t know how much good any of it was going to do.
Time might heal some wounds, but from dealing with his mom moving out, he knew that sometimes it just makes the pain fester even more, like an infected wound in your heart that refuses to heal.
Their English teacher, Miss Flynn, glanced at the wall clock and then shuffled through the myriad of papers spread across her desk. She was single, mid-twenties, and wore skirts that none of the other teachers at the school would have ever been able to get away with.
She wasn’t into the classics, but had an unsettling interest in stories about death, gothic horror, and the macabre. Although the students thought it was a little weird, admittedly, it did keep class interesting.
On the first day of the school year she’d told them that if they called their coaches “Coach,” they should call her “Teach,” which they’d done ever since.
Ky
le leaned across the aisle and said to Daniel, “How much you wanna bet she assigns us a story about overcoming grief? Something like that?”
“I’m with you there.”
For a moment he glanced at Nicole as she got out her books, then he averted his gaze before she could notice he’d been watching her.
The rest of the kids took their seats, the bell rang, and Miss Flynn stood up to begin class.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
“Today we’re going to take a look at a story from Richard Brautigan, a beatnik poet and essayist from the 1960s.”
Okay, that was out of nowhere. A hippie poet from fifty years ago—not exactly Teach’s typical fare.
She took a seat on her desk, crossing her legs in a manner that might well have been calculated to keep the attention of the guys in the class focused intently on the front of the room.
“The story is called ‘Greyhound Tragedy.’ It’s found in his book Revenge of the Lawn. Here’s how it begins: ‘She wanted her life to be a movie magazine tragedy like the death of a young star with long lines of people weeping and a corpse more beautiful than a great painting, but she was never able to leave the small Oregon town that she was born and raised in and go to Hollywood and die.’ ”
Long lines of people weeping at a funeral.
A corpse of a young woman.
That sounded uncomfortably familiar.
Suddenly, it didn’t seem so strange that Miss Flynn had chosen this story for today’s class.
She paused as if to let the image of the funeral sink in, then continued reading about the young woman who wanted to become a Hollywood starlet. In her hometown she was on a path toward a safe, generic marriage she didn’t want to a car salesman. At the climax, there was this really sad scene where she was at a bus station trying to get up the nerve to follow her dream, but couldn’t do it and ended up leaving without the ticket.
Miss Flynn read: “‘She cried all the way home through the warm, gentle Oregon night, wanting to die every time her feet touched the ground.” In the end, the woman married that Ford salesman and tried to forget about her dream, “‘but now,’” Miss Flynn finished, “‘thirty-one years later, she still blushes when she passes the bus station.’ ”
No one spoke. Hardly anyone moved.
She still blushes when she passes the bus station.
Thirty-one years later.
“Dreams and death come to us all,” Miss Flynn told them quietly. “What we do with the first before we experience the second makes all the difference. For Friday’s class you’re all going to write two blog entries—you don’t need to post them online or anything like that—but I want you to write about what you’d like to accomplish before you die so that you won’t have to blush when you pass the unopened portal to your dreams three decades from now.”
Death and dreams.
And final regrets.
For a moment, Daniel wondered what Emily had dreamt of.
Maybe being accepted for who she was.
Maybe—
One of the girls in the front row flagged her hand in the air. “Teach, are we seriously gonna be graded on our dreams?”
“I’m not going to grade this assignment.”
A few sighs of relief throughout the room. Someone behind Daniel whispered, “Then why do we even have to do it?”
“What was that, Mr. Talbot?”
He cleared his throat. “I was just wondering why we need to do it if we’re not gonna get graded on it.”
“I’ll give you a completion grade if I feel you’ve put forth an adequate effort. And as far as length, I’ll leave that up to you. I’d rather you express yourself succinctly than write something meandering and unfocused just to meet a certain word count. This unit is on creative writing, so keep that in mind. Oh, and I will be asking you to share one of your blog entries with the class on Friday.”
Oh, perfect.
Daniel didn’t mind a thousand people watching him when he was on a football field or basketball court, but for some reason reading his work in front of his class always made him feel like he wanted to climb into a hole.
Nicole glanced at him knowingly, as if she could read his mind and knew how apprehensive the assignment made him.
Miss Flynn handed out a photocopy of another story. “Now, let’s take a look at ‘The World War I Los Angeles Airplane,’ the last story in Mr. Brautigan’s book.”
As it turned out, that one was about death too, or about life, depending on how you looked at the ending.
The rest of the morning went pretty much like normal. For the most part everyone left the topic of Emily alone, but there were occasional hushed conversations about it, a few tears here and there. Rumors swirled around about how at Windy Point there’d been other deaths in the past, that it might be haunted or something, that if you got too close to the edge, someone—or something—would pull you over to your death.
Windy Point was the highest bluff in the area. Not a mountain by any means, but it did rise nearly a hundred feet above Lake Algonquin.
Daniel reassured himself that those were only the kinds of stories kids tell to try to make sense of something as senseless as all this.
It was just an accident that happened to Emily.
That’s all it was.
Maybe. But it was no accident what happened to your arm.
After lunch, he and Kyle were on their way to class when they saw a cluster of students forming near the doors to the gym. From the looks of it, a tall husky boy stood in the center of the group.
Daniel recognized him.
Ty Bell didn’t laugh much, and when he did, he didn’t laugh at the things other people thought were funny. It was more this distant, detached kind of laughter that seemed to drain humor out of the moment rather than add anything positive to it—almost like he was laughing simply because life had run out of humor and nothing was really funny anymore.
He was a senior, but had started late and been held back one year, so now he was a hardened, tough nineteen-year-old. He’d had a few run-ins with Daniel before, and also with Daniel’s dad.
According to what people said, Ty carried a switchblade to school, and everyone pretty much steered clear of him and his three friends—if you could call them “friends.” They were the three guys he made carry his books for him, open the doors for him, buy his cigarettes for him.
Daniel had always gotten the sense that they hung out with him because it made them feel more dangerous than they would’ve ever felt on their own—or maybe they somehow felt safer. He didn’t know them well enough to be sure.
They weren’t a threat by themselves, but Ty was a time bomb. Even the teachers seemed uneasy around him, as if they knew he was the kind of kid who might lose it at any time and show up the next day with a shotgun, ready to start picking people off, laughing that wild laugh.
A circle of students had gathered around him, and in mob mentality, some of them were egging him on. A couple of girls were telling him and his friends to “let the kid go,” but no one was taking any steps to stop them. Four against one were bad odds, especially when one of them was Ty Bell, and if he was in the middle of this pack, it could only mean trouble.
Daniel shouldered his way through the crowd.
By the time he made it to the center, he could see that Ty and his buddies had just shoved someone into a hall locker. One of the boys was sticking a pencil through the padlock hole to keep him inside.
Daniel could hear the trapped boy trying to jimmy the lock open, but with the pencil in there, that wasn’t going to happen.
Ty grinned and shook a can of soda to spray through the ventilation holes at the top of the locker.
“Put it down, Ty.”
He gazed at Daniel flatly with his slate gray eyes. “Oh, look, it’s Johnny Football Hero, here to save the day.
” His buddies seemed to think that was funny.
“You’re not going to spray that into the locker.”
He gave it another shake and held it closer to the vents. “What? Are you gonna stop me?”
“Yes.”
A pause as Ty considered that. His friends closed in around him but Daniel just eyed Ty coolly. He felt Kyle slide in beside him.
Ty sneered. “And here comes our local rock star. I heard all about you and Emily.”
“Nice,” Kyle said. “Two complete sentences in a row. I’m proud of you. The remedial classes must be paying off.”
Ty set his jaw.
Daniel said to him, “Back away from the locker.”
Okay, what was with the comment about Kyle and Emily? What on earth did Ty mean, he’d heard about them?
Ty shook the can again, then suddenly aimed it at Daniel and flicked back the pull tab. The soda exploded out and sprayed across Daniel’s shirt, face, and neck.
Smiling, Ty turned toward the crowd of students as if he were looking for affirmation, but the only people snickering were his three buddies. The crowd might’ve laughed, at least a little, if he had done it to someone else, but they didn’t laugh at all when he messed with their all-conference quarterback.
Daniel brushed gently at his shirt to rub the drops of soda off. “I told you that you weren’t going to spray that into the locker.”
Ty’s gaze hardened once again. “You get into a fight, you can’t play on Friday night, am I right? Miss the big homecoming game? How’d you like that, Danny boy?”
Daniel hadn’t been in a fight since middle school. That summer he and his family had gone to the East Coast, and he’d been down by the ocean one night when three boys cornered him.
He’d warned them to leave him alone, but they’d rushed him. He came away from that fight with a black eye and two bruised and bloodied knuckles. The other boys hadn’t fared quite so well.