For a day, Chris has been thinking about ways he might kill himself. It seems like the next logical step. He’s thinking about doing it the hardest way possible—drowning himself, which isn’t easy when touching water makes him hyperventilate. He wants to do it the hard way so that, at the last minute, he doesn’t think about any good things in life and change his mind.
He’s not even sure if he should bother trying, though, when nothing works out for him. Not planning a murder, not trying to foil Harrison’s revenge. Now that he looks back, though, he has to admit it worked for a while. He still thinks of those ten minutes before they walked into the woods as some of the happiest minutes he’s had in his life.
For two weeks, Harrison had been talking about breaking Chris’s arm for calling the police, and trying to pin the fire on him. He told him people were going to pay him to do it, people who were sick of his ratting-out ways. Chris didn’t deny doing it—it was certainly possible that Harrison had set it, the way he’d been carrying lighters for years, flicking them at the bus stop, setting everything on fire: blades of grass, farts, the white thread fringe on girls’ miniskirts. Once Chris watched him burn a live cricket. As it turned out, though, Chris was wrong. Harrison couldn’t have set the fire because he was at school, doing detention when it started.
“I know it was you, and you’re going to die, you little piece of freakshit,” he said the day after Chris called the police. Harrison, more than the others, liked to drag things out, spend days talking about what he was going to do, which bones he would break, how he would break them. “First I’m gonna do your arm. It’s easier than you think.” The night before it was meant to happen, Chris stayed up late, making a plan. He knew he needed a weapon and an element of surprise. He decided this: he would agree to a face-off, and then he would control it. If he’d known anyone with a gun he would have used that, but as it was, he settled on what he had: his mother’s kitchen knife, wrapped in a sock, stored in the bottom of his backpack. He knew he couldn’t bring it into school, that if anyone found it he’d get suspended, so he left it in the woods still wrapped in the sock. Knowing it was there was like having a test you knew ahead of time you were going to cheat on, and get away with. It made him feel lucky; made him say “Fine” when Harrison said they should just get this over with and skip third period.
“Okay,” Chris said. “But we should go to the woods so no one tries to stop us.”
Harrison stared at him. “Seriously?”
“Sure. Why not?” Before this, he’d never done anything except beg for these boys to leave him alone.
“You want me to break your arm?”
“Maybe you can, maybe you can’t. I know a little judo.”
His eyes narrowed. “How much judo?”
“A little.”
Chris saw then how easy this was; that strength came simply from not looking afraid. Walking out to the woods, he talked the whole time, told Harrison about his hospital stays. “If you break my arm, I figure I might get a night, tops, but that’ll be good. They get some stations at the hospital I don’t get at home. They also have Nintendo. You’d be surprised what they have.”
Harrison stopped walking. “Are you a fucking freak or what?”
Chris shrugged. “I suppose so. You’re not the first person to ask me that. There’s one guy on the bus—Neil I think his name is—who asked me that once and I said, ‘Yes, is that a problem?’ See here’s the funny part. Well not funny, ha ha. But I’ve occasionally wondered if you like being mean or if you feel like you have to be so that no one thinks you’re a freak, too. But in a way, it’s too late, if you don’t mind my saying so, because the way you dress and your friends—well, a lot of people think you’re a little freaky, too, Hare. Do you mind if I call you Hare?”
“Yes.”
He was enjoying himself so much he couldn’t stop. It felt like the best time he’d ever had. “Hare! Hare! Hare!” he called, because in a minute, he’d reach down, pull out his knife, and be the last one laughing.
“Just shut up, freak show. Shut the fuck up.”
He didn’t, of course. He kept talking and talking until they got in the woods and then he stopped talking, because he knew, right away, something had happened. They weren’t alone. When he went for his knife, the sock was there, but the knife was gone, which meant none of this would work, that he would get his arm broken, and would also get in trouble for the knife.
Now he understands how much he did wrong, all the countless mistakes he made. If he hadn’t brought the knife, hadn’t stashed it in the woods, hadn’t egged Harrison on because it felt so good—if he’d done a dozen things differently, the girl might still be alive and not in his head where she sits, all the time now, wearing her pink dress and telling him what to do.
Cara stays at the station long enough to see Harrison Rogers when he’s brought in. He’s a red-headed kid, covered in freckles, dressed in a black T-shirt, black jeans, and black shoes, trailed by a mother who’s screaming about police harassment of a minor. “It’s the third time they’ve questioned him. Three times I’m talking about. Anybody does anything in this town, my son gets interrupted with living his life to talk to police. I’m telling you, I want to talk to whoever’s in charge around here.”
She is so loud that even her son seems embarrassed to stand near her. Matt steps forward, holding out his hand. “At this point, I’m in charge. Detective Sergeant Matt Lincoln, ma’am. We appreciate you coming down.”
“You the guy we talked to last time? About the fire?”
“I am. Yes.”
“’Cause he didn’t start no fire.”
“That’s correct, ma’am. We don’t need to ask any questions about that.”
While the mother huffs from side to side, her arms folded across the expanse of her large chest, her son seems to shrink at her side. He leans against the wall, picks at a thumbnail, shoulders hunched, one foot resting against the shin of his other leg.
“It’s persecution is what it is, and you better believe tomorrow I’m calling a lawyer.”
Matt lowers his voice to a whisper. “We told you, Ms. Rogers, that you should have a lawyer present. We told you what he’s here for.” Saying this, he makes it sadly clear: this woman is terrified and putting on a show. She’s heard one story and has told herself another—that this is nothing, more harassment because her boy wears too much black to school.
She waves a hand around. “No, no. Let’s just get this over with and get home.”
“No, Ms. Rogers, I can’t recommend that. We have a lawyer here who can represent Harrison for the time being and also answer any questions you have.”
To Cara it’s obvious: Matt doesn’t want to take a single step without this, no matter what the woman says. “I have to say, it’ll be much better for Harrison if someone is there, protecting his interests.”
She rolls her eyes. “Look, whatever. I don’t care.”
Cara watches the boy, and wonders if he hears this. His expression is dead, as if he long ago stopped listening to most of the things his mother says. The look creates a strange disconnect—his face seems much older, as hard as a streetwise twenty-year-old who’s seen too many things to register much, but his body is surprisingly small, with boyishly thin, broomstick arms and tiny feet. Registering this, she notices something else: he’s wearing slip-on sneakers, like the kind she buys for Adam, who still can’t manage shoe tying on his own. They’re black, a color she would never buy for Adam, but when she looks a little closer, she sees: they’re the same brand, with—she can tell by the way he’s standing—the exact same sole.
Here it is, she thinks. Here’s why it looked like only two sets footprints.
She tries to signal Matt, who has moved away from Harrison’s mother to deal with logistics—securing a room, locating the lawyer. Cara slips up behind him and whispers, as he reads a note in his hand. “He’s wearing the same shoes that Adam has.”
Matt nods over her shoulder, holds up two fi
ngers to a secretary in the corner. “Room two?” he calls and then turns to Cara. “I noticed that,” he whispers.
And a minute later, they’re gone.
There are parts Chris doesn’t remember at all. He remembers the girl showed up, said she needed to find a man in a wheelchair, that she was trying to help him and he had left. Harrison saw it first, that she was holding the knife.
“Give it,” Harrison said. “Give it here.” He held out his hand, and then Chris wondered if there was something wrong with her, because she didn’t do what Harrison said, didn’t hand over the knife. Instead, she stared up at the trees, smiling like she didn’t hear Harrison at all.
He remembers this: she started singing, which made Harrison scream, “Give me the motherfucking knife or I’ll hurt you,” which didn’t make sense because he was mad at Chris, not at her, but then he thought about earlier, how having a knife made him strong and not having it paralyzed him. And then it was like Harrison forgot all about Chris, forgot he was even there, because he was just mad at the girl, who wasn’t doing what she was told and wasn’t scared the way she should be. She was singing in his face, asking him questions that made no sense about people who weren’t there, dancing around, holding the knife up. One minute, she was worried about the man in the wheelchair, the next she was leaning into Harrison’s face, asking what he called those things on his skin. “Are they still freckles when there’s so many like that?”
Chris knew that if she wasn’t holding the knife, Harrison would’ve hurt her. He would’ve pushed her down to the ground and made her eat a piece of paper or perpetrated one of his other favorite tortures, but that long shiny knife meant she could do what Chris had just discovered. She could say anything at all. “Freckles are like dirt, only they don’t come off,” she said, touching his face and then—he still doesn’t understand this—she looked down at her hand, saw the knife in it, and dropped it.
Chris had no chance, he was too far away. Harrison grabbed the knife.
The girl floated away and Harrison’s voice changed to soft, like he’d gotten a new idea. “Hey, come here for a second. I want to show you something,” he called to the girl as he reached for his pants. Chris thought, Oh God, he’s going to pee on her the way he peed on my shoes.
He unzipped his fly and pulled his thing out. “Come here!” he said, waving at her with the knife. Chris looked away, started thinking of other things, like the English class he was missing, and how in math if they finished their work, they were allowed to read the comics the teacher kept on his desk, how there was one Chris loved with a villain named Viscous Liquid.
“Come here, girlie. I won’t hurt you, I promise. I just want to show you something.”
Chris tried to think about Viscous Liquid and his father, Venomous Hate, who set up the laboratory where he grew his only son, a villain who could go from human to liquid and back again in seven seconds.
“I know the guy you’re looking for. I’ve seen him. Come here, I’ll tell you where he is.”
Chris wanted to say No, don’t believe him. Don’t go, but he couldn’t speak, couldn’t open his mouth or say anything, because if he said anything Harrison would remember he was here and break his arm and maybe do worse with the knife. He thought about Viscous Liquid, who stuffed himself into people’s mouths to drown them, and then disappeared without a trace. Chris tried to picture his own mouth filling up, stuffed with needles and dirt from the forest floor, rocks and blood, and maybe his own sock. It didn’t matter what Chris said or didn’t say because Harrison went over to her, grabbed her around the shoulders, and whispered into the back of her head, “What did I just say? Do you see how I have the knife now? How I could hurt you if I wanted to?” He started pulling her. “I don’t want to hurt you, though. I want you to come over here. I want to be friends and you can see what I have. What it does. It’s like a surprise.”
She walked with him because she had no choice, and Chris hoped that maybe she was young enough that she wouldn’t know what was happening to her or remember it, anyway. And then he saw her feet dig in the mud, like maybe she could stop what was happening with her toes. “No,” she said and that’s when he knew she wasn’t too young, she was something else—crazy maybe, because she started calling really loudly into the trees, “I’VE BROUGHT HIM! IHAVEHIM! DON’T BE SCARED.
I’LL HELP YOU TALK TO HIM!” And saying all that, being so weird, making no sense, she somehow got away. Harrison had her for a minute, moving her where he wanted her to go, and then she flew away, no problem, like nothing, and he was standing there, alone, with his thing hanging out of his pants.
Chris doesn’t remember exactly what happened next. Harrison’s face went red like his hair and he exploded. Chris thought maybe it’s possible that real people can morph into other forms or energy forces. That they can get so angry they transform the landscape like volcano lava or a snowstorm. One minute everything is one color, and the next, it’s another color entirely, which is how it felt, when he had her and lost her and then lunged at her again, and Chris thought there was a scream, but no sound came, only Harrison’s mouth stretched open like a scream and everything went quiet, with only breathing and the sound of bodies colliding, and Chris squeezed his eyes shut the second he saw the knife disappear into her dress, inside a ring of blood, because he was scared that if he kept looking, he’d see organs slide out.
“Jesus fucking Christ. Look what you made me do,” he heard Harrison say. “You gotta fucking help me, this is your fucking fault.” And he knew that it was his fault, that he’d started it all by trying to speak up. That if he’d stayed silent and said nothing, they would have been fine. Chris didn’t need Harrison’s threats, or his talk when they walked back about killing him if he said anything. He already knew what he would do. He’d decided as he watched Harrison pull out the knife—his hands shaking—and wipe it off with the sock to stuff it in his jacket pocket. He knew when he closed his eyes and heard for the first time, what the girl had been listening to instead of Harrison—that somewhere else in the woods, a tiny flute was playing as if none of this had happened. Which is what he decided he would tell himself until he found a way to kill Harrison.
Morgan is pretty sure he’s stayed long enough. They’ve talked mostly about hobbies and all of Chris’s seem a little strange, to be honest. For a while he was into hot-air balloons, then tractors; now he’s mostly interested in antique outboard boat engines, which seems strange to Morgan given Chris’s feelings about water. It makes Morgan nervous to have so much in common with Chris, or at least this: old passions that don’t work anymore. He thinks, If Chris ever comes over, I’ll have to hide most of my stuff. Then he thinks of another possibility: Chris sitting in his room, looking over his notebooks, nodding and wheezing, pointing a bony finger at one of his gravestone rubbings and saying, “Wow. Where’d you get that?” Maybe his old life would look different with someone to show it to. Someone who understood.
“I should probably go,” Morgan says, and looks at the clock to see he’s only been here twenty-five minutes, that it just feels like two hours. “I’ll come back, if you want. I don’t mind.”
Chris looks out the window. “Do you want to know why I went to the woods? The second time, when I ran away?”
Morgan sits back down. So far as he knows, Chris has told no one why or how he did this yet. “Sure.”
“I knew Harrison would come out there eventually, looking for me. I was going to kill him and bury him so no one would find the body and no one would care because the world would be a better place without him. He’d just be a missing person.”
Morgan can’t believe he’s saying this. For a second it feels like Chris is telling him everything, and Morgan fears maybe his brain will explode with all this information. He takes a deep breath and remembers this: Harrison’s name was on the list he’d given Cara, and he’d put a star by it. “Wow. I have to say, I wouldn’t mind if that guy died.”
“Now I keep thinking—” Chr
is starts to say more, and then stops.
“What?”
“There’s a reason I can’t do it. It’s like that girl is inside of me.”
Morgan looks at the door and back at the clock. One minute has passed since the last time he looked. “Inside you?”
“It’s like she keeps talking about this man and how she’s trying to help him, but he ran away. I keep hearing her voice saying this stuff.”
Morgan tries this: “Sometimes when I keep thinking about something I just tell myself: Stop.”
“It was like she was in the middle of something and we stopped her. She kept saying, ‘He’s hurt and I need to help him.’”
Chris must be trying to imitate her voice, but he sounds like he’s doing a Snow White impersonation. Morgan wonders if he’s having a nervous breakdown or if this is what going insane looks like.
“I keep thinking, what was it she was trying to do? Like maybe I could help. It was something about this man.”
And Adam, Morgan thinks. Don’t forget Adam.
“Anyway.” Chris turns from the window, looks at Morgan, and seems to remember who he’s talking to. “You should probably go. If you want, next time, I’ll show you the rest of my origami. There’s a frog that’s pretty good, and a few more giraffes.”
It’s twenty-four hours before Cara gets the whole story from Matt, who calls her at home. “This kid is a real case. It took an hour and a half, but we got a confession. For a kid, that’s a long time. Usually they break down right away, but this one, he let his mother do all the talking, and then finally, in the middle of her going off on some tangent, he just exploded like a volcano. Started calling her a freak case who had no fucking clue what she was saying, that she should try shutting up for once in her life. Nice kid. He’s a real gem.”
This should be a relief, Cara thinks. It’s over, she tries to tell herself, but all she can think of is the boy standing in the hallway wearing shoes that reminded her of Adam, with a mother she can’t help feeling for; a mother whose life, as she’s known it, has just ended.