That was Perry, back when Perry was a stranger.
His hair was shaved down to a millimeter of his scalp, and he was wearing khaki shorts and a fluorescent orange T-shirt that looked brand new, but which Craig would learn later wasn’t (Perry’s mother starched his T-shirts, per Perry’s request), that read, EVENT ASSIST, on it in alarmingly large black capital letters. What event? What assist? Craig would also learn later that this was the standard T-shirt worn by Perry’s Scout troop when they helped out in the parking lots of state fairs and Civil War reenactments. He just liked to wear it, whether he was assisting any events or not, and at the moment, it struck Craig as disorienting.
“Hello!” Perry said, closing his book.
“Hey,” Craig said, and then, “I guess I’m your roommate,” shrugging, feeling noncommittal, but Perry stood up quickly and offered his hand to Craig, shook it firmly, and then went around the room shaking the hands of each of Craig’s family members—even Scar, shaggy bangs falling across his face, who stood openmouthed before this new breed of human being. Had Scar ever seen a person under the age of twenty-five shake another person’s hand, except on television, or as a joke?
Had Craig?
“Welcome,” Perry said, and then, without a hint of irony, gesturing around, “Sorry the place is such a mess.”
They all looked at the room at once:
Four bare walls, a dustless linoleum floor, two closets with doors closed. Perry’s bed was made. (A green comforter. A pillow in a plaid pillowcase.) Where was the mess?
“Where are you from?” Craig’s mother asked Perry in a tone that suggested she fully expected Perry to admit that he’d been assembled in a laboratory, or that he’d grown up on the moon.
“Bad Axe,” Perry said, as if everyone would be familiar with “Bad Axe.”
“No way,” Scar said, sounding sincerely astonished.
“Yeah,” Perry said. He held up his hand and pointed at his thumb, as if that might explain something. “What about you?”
“New Hampshire,” Craig’s mother said. “Via Boston,” she added, as she always did, and Craig’s father stiffened, as he always did—but Craig could tell, by looking at Perry, that none of this meant anything to him.
Now, obviously, a year later, Perry had given Craig the better room in the apartment. The closet was large, and the window faced the backyard instead of the street.
“Don’t you think?” Craig’s father asked. “I mean, that it’s a great apartment? A lot better than the dorm?”
“Yeah,” Craig said, trying hard to sound appreciative. “It’s great.”
“We were pretty lucky,” Perry said. “Leaving it so late. It’s got a good view.” He walked across Craig’s room to the window and gestured out. Craig and his father followed, looked down into the backyard, where two girls of the bed-head-and-belly-button-ring variety were lying in bikinis on towels. Glistening in the sun. Their hipbones seemed to glow under their tanning skin. Craig looked away fast. His father and Perry looked at him, and then both cleared their throats at the same time.
“So. Shall we get something to eat?” Craig’s father asked. “Before I head back to New Hampshire?”
“You’re going back already?” Perry asked. “We can put you up for a night, Mr. Clements. Or for as long as you like.”
“No. No,” Craig’s father said, shaking his head, making the expression of someone who’d just been offered a lifesaving drug but who didn’t want to bother anyone to go to the cupboard to fetch it. Clearly he wanted to escape. “I really need to—”
Perry nodded, pretending Rod Clements had finished the sentence with something that explained it—although Craig knew that there could be nothing his father needed to get back to New Hampshire for so fast. His father was a writer. He was in the middle of writing a one-thousand-page sequel to his last novel. He hadn’t sat down at the computer to work on it since Christmas.
Craig knew precisely why his father wanted to get out of there as quickly as he could. If there was anything Rod Clements couldn’t stand, it was to see anyone he cared about suffer. Even as a child, Craig had intuitively understood that it would have been easier for his father to shoot him, like a racehorse, than to drive him to the hospital screaming in pain with a broken leg.
It had happened once—the broken leg—and Craig’s mother had done the driving, Craig’s father insisting that he should drive behind them, separately, just in case her car broke down, and even in his writhing agony Craig had picked up on the sneer of contempt his mother shot at his father’s back as he trotted away from her car, huge sweat stains spreading out in the armpits of his gray shirt.
This time, Craig knew, his dad would probably drive a couple of hours east, as quickly as he could, and take a room at a Holiday Inn.
“That’s a lot of driving, Mr. Clements,” Perry said. “But, okay.”
For the bite to eat, they went to the fanciest restaurant in town, Chez Vin. Chez Vin was where the Clements-Rabbitts had dined as a family the year before, overdressed and exhausted after their long drive, the four of them shoulder to shoulder at the hostess’s podium as Craig’s father announced to the toothy redhead that they were meeting a friend.
“Oh!” she’d said. “You guys are here to meet Dean Fleming!”
Craig’s mother rolled her eyes behind the hostess’s back and mouthed “you guys” to Scar. She’d been complaining about this phrase since they’d passed through Ohio, where, at every gas station and fast food place, someone addressed them as “you guys.” At a 7-Eleven in Dundee, Michigan, when the ponytailed twenty-something at the cash register chirped, “How are you guys today?” Craig’s mother had finally snapped and said, “Do I look like a guy?” She’d gestured toward the family she obviously thought looked far more dignified than they were being given credit for, and said, “Are we guys? What’s this you guys thing?”
Craig had turned with his Tic Tacs and hurried out the electric doors into the parking lot as quickly as he could, listening to the girl at the register giggle in panic. Hopefully, she thought it was a joke. Hopefully, Craig’s dad would get his mother out of there before she disabused the poor girl of that.
But, that first night at Chez Vin, standing at the hostess’s podium, Craig had looked away from his mother, away from Scar, and away from the redhead, and had stared hard at the side of his father’s face while registering for the first time that his father’s friend from college, the one they’d come to meet for dinner, this friend from way back, was the dean of the Honors College—the incredibly selective honors college they’d all been so astonished that, “with your low-achiever grades and unambitious test scores,” Craig had been so lucky, so honored, to get into.
“What?” his father had said to Craig, sensing his stare and turning around with both his hands up, as if to prove that there was nothing up his sleeve.
This year, the hostess was an older woman, who nevertheless said, “Hi, you guys,” to which they all three nodded as she directed them to a corner table. Only Perry had bothered to wear a long-sleeve buttoned shirt and dress shoes. They ate all the bread in the basket before the waiter arrived with their mineral water. Craig’s father and Perry talked about weather and the relative merits of certain kinds of mountain bikes as Craig watched the candle at the center of the table surge and recede—now a perfect diamond shape, now a teardrop, now a fluttering fingernail followed by a crescent followed by a dog tooth followed by a burning vertical eyelid.
“Perry,” Craig’s father said later, in front of the apartment house, pressing both of Perry’s hands in his own as the boy bid them farewell, “I’m so glad Craig’s—”
“Craig will be fine, Mr. Clements,” Perry said.
“Son,” Rod Clements said, turning to Craig, “I—”
“Be careful driving, Dad.”
They stood in the middle of the sidewalk. A few feet away from them a couple kissed with abandon under a dead streetlamp. A sad foursome of ugly guys parted around the couple,
and then around Perry, Craig, and his father.
“Love ya,” Craig’s father said, and clapped Craig to him, patting him hard on the back.
“I love you, too,” Craig said.
They held the embrace for at least three seconds, long enough for Craig to notice, just beyond his father’s shoulder, hanging above the couple kissing, far over the place where the streetlamp should have been shining, the moon, which appeared to be made of either solid rock or the softest of human flesh, floating in an ink-blue sky.
2
Shelly Lockes called the newspaper after the first article, full of inaccuracies about the accident, came out, and although the reporter to whom her call was forwarded assured her that he would “set the record straight on the details of the accident as reported in our paper right away,” no corrections ever appeared.
After that, Shelly asked to speak to the newspaper’s editor, and her call was passed on by a receptionist, who said, “Well, he doesn’t take calls from the public, but this person is one of our editors, and she could speak to you.”
On the phone, this person sounded like a child:
“You mean, like, you were the first one at the scene of the accident?”
“Yes. I was. Why hasn’t anyone spoken to me? My name’s part of the public record. The paramedics and the police took all my information. I’d like to correct the record.”
The editor stammered a bit before she said, “Wow. Okay. Well, I’ll have someone call you this afternoon.”
No one called, and the next day, again, there was a front-page story that described how the girl had been found in a “lake of blood” in the backseat of the car. How she’d been thrown there by the impact. How she hadn’t been wearing a seat belt. How she’d already bled to death before the ambulance arrived, and that she was unrecognizable. That her face had hit the front windshield, and then the rear window. That her roommate had identified her at the morgue from the black dress and jewelry she’d been wearing that evening, and that the boyfriend who’d been driving the vehicle was found hours later wandering down a rural road, covered in his girlfriend’s blood.
The newspaper said that medical professionals could only wonder at how he’d managed to stumble so far with a broken arm, a dislocated shoulder, a closed-head injury, and a ruptured spleen.
But Shelly Lockes had been there.
She’d called the ambulance herself within minutes of the accident. She’d waded through a ditch full of water and stood above the boy and girl. The girl had been thrown into the grass. She was not in the car. The light of the full moon had been plenty bright for Shelly to see it all—and she knew for a fact that the only blood at the scene had been her own.
The gash to her hand.
Admittedly, it was a nasty gash. She’d needed stitches, and bandages, and if she’d ever played handball or mandolin, she’d probably never be able to play again. The scar still surprised her every time she looked at it. How had she not felt the cut when it happened? It wasn’t until she was in the Emergency Room, holding it up, wrapped in her own sweatshirt, that her hand had started to hurt like hell.
But it had not created a “lake of blood.”
There had been no lake of blood.
“Maybe they’re all like this,” her friend Rosemary suggested. “Maybe every goddamn article about every event in the local newspaper is completely made up, but we don’t know because we didn’t witness most of them. ‘A lake of blood’ sells a lot more newspapers than no blood.”
The next article described the “first person at the scene of the accident” as a middle-aged woman who came upon it hours after it had happened, and made a call to 911 but left the scene before the paramedics arrived, and could not be reached by police. After that article, Shelly called the newspaper and the police.
“Not one word of what’s being reported is accurate. This needs to be looked into. For the record. There are implications here, for all of us.”
The officer in charge of the case assured Shelly that he had all her information, that her help with this was invaluable, that he himself would contact the newspaper and make the correction. But he also said, “It’s a rag, you know. I wish I had a dime for every time they slaughtered a story. I’d be a very rich man.”
The managing editor of the paper promised Shelly that a correction would appear the next day: “We have so many sources of information, ma’am. I’m sure you understand that with so much effort put into each story by so many people, mistakes can and do occur.”
Shelly waited for the correction—scoured the next week’s newspaper, every day—and never found it.
3
“Her name’s Nicole Werner,” Perry told his roommate, whose mouth was open, staring at her. Perry was hoping that if he distracted him with information, Craig would close his mouth and quit leering. “Her whole family’s from Bad Axe, for generations. She’s got about four hundred cousins. Our elementary school was called Werner Elementary.”
“Farm slut?” his roommate asked. “Dumb blonde?”
“She was our valedictorian,” Perry said, sounding more defensive than he felt. He had no particular stake in Nicole Werner per se, but everything Craig Clements-Rabbitt had said about everything since spreading out his high-tech sleeping bag on his bare mattress in their dorm room on move-in day had been either annoying or infuriating.
“Huh. Valedictorian? I thought that would have been you, Perry-my-man. What the hell happened?”
“She was the better student.” Perry nodded with what he hoped looked like sincerity, not bitterness.
There’d been, certainly, a period of bitterness. Nicole Werner, in addition to being valedictorian, had also gotten the Ramsey Luke Scholarship—the first time in Bad Axe High history that it hadn’t been given to the president of the senior class, which had been Perry. But Perry had told himself that they couldn’t really give the Ramsey Luke and the E. M. Gelman Band Scholarship to the same student, and he’d clearly been the leading candidate for the latter.
They were in the cafeteria. It was the end of their first week in Godwin Honors Hall. Craig was eating chili piled so high with chopped onion that every time he put his spoon in the bowl, onions fell onto the laminate table. “What do her parents do?”
“They own a German restaurant in town. Dumplings.”
“They make dumplings?” Craig let his spoon hover over the bowl for a moment, as if this were a bowl of absurdity itself. He shook his long dirty-blond rock-star bangs out of his face by whipping his face to the left—a kind of cool twitch Perry had seen on VH1 more than a few times.
“No,” Perry said. “The restaurant’s called Dumplings.”
Craig snorted loudly and leaned back in his chair. This was routine for Craig as far as Perry could tell. Everything about the Midwest was one big joke to Craig Clements-Rabbitt—the food, the trees, the names of the streets, the girls.
“It’s the most popular restaurant in Bad Axe,” Perry said, again sounding, and wishing he didn’t, as if he had some personal investment in this. Craig opened his mouth as if at news too astonishing to believe. Perry looked away, shaking his head.
One might think, from his attitude, that this Craig Clements-Rabbitt came from a huge city, but when pressed for the details it turned out that the town in New Hampshire he’d grown up in was, if anything, a bit smaller than Bad Axe.
“But it’s not the same,” Craig had said, sounding weary already, as if the whole subject would be too complicated to explain and he dreaded the task. This had been the first night in their shared dorm room, while they were still attempting to be polite to each other. Craig had left his duffel bag unpacked at the foot of his bed, and rolled out the technologically advanced sleeping bag onto his mattress. It was made of some sort of metallic material that even Perry, with a great deal of outdoor-gear expertise from the Boy Scouts, didn’t recognize. No pillow.
“The town I live in is small,” Craig said, “but nobody’s from it. Everybody’s got a place there beca
use they work on the Internet, or only have to travel to Boston or New York every couple of weeks. Or they’re independently wealthy, or they retired early. Except for a couple of people whose parents work at the ski resort. I guess they’re sort of like small-town kids. But not really.”
Perry imagined a few hundred families like Craig’s: Mothers in slim beige skirts, rolling their eyes. Fathers in corduroy jackets and jeans.
In fact, while Rod Clements had been wearing jeans and a corduroy jacket earlier that day, he’d also been wearing bright green Converse All Stars and a couple of hemp bracelets around his wrist, as if he were in middle school, while the little brother, Scar, already looked like an old man, if old men had ponytails. The kid’s face had appeared chiseled in stone, as if he hadn’t laughed or frowned in his whole life—and although Perry had not yet asked Craig why his brother was called Scar, he felt sure there was some story behind it. Perry had only been in the company of the Clements-Rabbitts for an hour before they’d managed to share several seemingly amusing stories about Craig.
(“Oh, Perry,” Craig’s mother had said, “I hope you can adjust to living with our son. We knew he was different when he was only three years old and asked, in all seriousness, if he could have for his birthday his own agent.”)
And the family.
(“Remember that time,” his father had asked, looking around the dorm room skeptically, “when we thought we were renting a cottage on the beach in Costa Rica and it turned out to be a storage shed?”)
“Dumplings,” Craig repeated, trancelike, as he watched Nicole Werner cross the cafeteria. She was carrying her tray ahead of her as if it had something radioactive on it. Perry knew her well enough, after thirteen years of sharing classrooms with her, to know that Nicole was walking that way because she knew she was being watched, and she didn’t particularly mind it. Her ponytail was swinging behind her like an actual pony’s tail, the palest of blond, just like the hair of all the other Werners—except Etta Werner, who was Nicole’s grandmother, a nice old lady who lived down the block from Perry’s family and who always had on hand the most incredible homemade cookies you could imagine. Her hair was pure white.