The Body of Christopher Creed

  A sensation came up behind me—breath on my neck. I stood there frozen, knowing somebody was standing there staring into the back of my neck. Just like before, in the basement. I didn't want to jerk around like an idiot this time. But I finally knew it was real because Ali jumped around.

  She flew behind me, and when I turned around, she was kissing Bo really big.

  I let out a sigh of relief and started to say hey, but they were busy kissing. I figured I would just go pass off my lie to the nurse. I started to move past them, but Richardson grabbed my arm. He gripped me like that until he finished kissing Ali and turned his black-eyed stare to me.

  "Your old lady, man. She's a rip. She walked into the lockup this morning and had Chief Bowen's 'nads in her handbag, like, ten minutes later." He laughed. "Goddamn. Next time I get caught breaking and entering, I'll know who to call."

  It was a relief to hear a loud voice. I grinned, shaking off my spooks. "So she had to get you out?"

  "Yeah. My old lady wasn't home. I lay down in a cell and crashed out."

  "Lucky thing she decided to come by," I said, looking him up and down. He was wearing sneakers and smelled like a shower. His hair was still kind of wet. Last night he was brought to the cop station in his socks. "How'd you get other clothes?"

  "Your old lady took me home before dropping me off here. She likes me, I think."

  She's just doing her job, I thought, but didn't want to say that. "So ... I guess you broke into the Creeds'."

  "No. I didn't break in. You won't believe what happened. You know ol Justin? Chris's younger brother?" He shook his head like a dog, like he couldn't get over something. "He came to the back window just as I jumped onto the ground. He heard me. I seen him and figured, Oh, shit. Well, you have not because you ask not. So I asked him. I said, 'Justin, how's about loaning me your brother's diary and not telling your old lady, huh?' He's got Chris's grin, but goddamn, it don't look the same on him. Looks evil. I think it is evil. He disappears up the stairs like lightning and comes back about ten seconds later. Guess what he's holding?"

  Bo was laughing in hoots, but I could only stand there with my jaw dangling. I couldn't get over this. "You mean, he got it out of Chris's picture frame?"

  "No. I mean, he had gotten the diary out of the room sometime before. He must have known about it somehow and was scared his mom would get it. He had been switching hiding places—"

  "Why would he give it to you?" I asked.

  "Because of his old lady! He says to me, 'Take it, get it away from my mom. Just don't forget to give it back to me somehow.'"

  Ali made this victory laugh. "Damn, he's got guts."

  "There's this pen in it, right? Already I'm hearing cop cars, but I'm thinking they're behind me—they think I'm jumping the fence to run out the next cul-de-sac. Instead of pushing the diary into the bush, where it could get rained on, I just whip out Creed's pen and write Ali's name on it."

  "What made you think to do that?" Ali breathed.

  "It just came to me." He shrugged like it was nothing. "I been lying for years. Then I wanted to get the book off of me and out of the cop station bad enough—I ain't never lied that perfect before, God Almighty. Hey. I was sorry to do a lie around your old lady, man, she is really juice. But I didn't know what else to do. If they found it on me, that was my life's end. There's no way I would spill on Justin, get the kid in deep shit with his old lady. So..." He knocked Ali's chin with his finger. "You're not all pissed at me for telling Torey's old lady about Albert the Wonder Schlong, are you? Where'd you sleep last night?"

  "At Torey's. Greg did, too." She looked kind of worried. "What did you say about my mom? Is she in trouble?"

  He shrugged, looking worried himself. "I don't know. You can't think about that, okay? Mrs. Adams is gonna talk to your mom."

  Ali rolled her eyes and looked panic-stricken. Bo grabbed her by the shoulders. "Look, I see this happening a lot on my side of town, and it sucks. Parents get all drunk and disorderly, do all these insane things, and the kids protect them like it's their duty. Maybe she'll face the music if she has to. You ain't her Jesus, okay?"

  Ali tried to nod, but all of a sudden it's like I was reading her thoughts, too. Where will we go? Where will my stuff be? Will we have to live in my dad's one-bedroom apartment in another state? Will everybody find out about my mom?

  I rubbed the back of her neck, and Bo lit a cigarette and handed it off to her. That seemed to make her feel better. She exhaled and stared at the trees again. She told Bo most of the stuff we had read in the diary, including the psychic she read about in the girls' room.

  "The psychic told him she saw that he would die in the woods?" Bo asked.

  Ali nodded with a shudder. "Something like that."

  He just shook his head. "I'm thinking we should find her. Or at least we should find that babe he was going out with and talk to her."

  I watched him stare across to the woods. He muttered, "I'm worried the body will show up. If there's a body, it can look like a murder. If he hung himself or shot himself or did something to himself that somebody else could have done to him, Mrs. Creed is going to howl murder until the sun is scared to come out. Maybe the girl knows something. Or maybe she's hiding him and we can all relax."

  I told myself I would have thought of that, except that I was really exhausted. The bell rang.

  Bo flicked the cigarette into the dirt and glared at me. "Listen, Adams. Whatever you do, don't come up to me in school. Don't even look my way, okay? Ali don't need that right now. If something happens—like you hear something from your old lady, or something awful comes down—just come out here. Inside, you don't know me from Adam. Got it?"

  I got it, but I didn't like it. I figured, Why should I be scared of all those morons passing judgment on me? But I remembered how I felt in homeroom, and I also knew how Ali would feel. She had enough to cope with.

  "I'm going home, anyway," I told them. I didn't feel like being forced into any of these retarded lying games.

  Ali shrugged, kind of wide-eyed, and said, "Thanks, Torey. Thanks for everything."

  I said, "You're welcome," but my voice kind of cracked.

  Fourteen

  I got in the car with my dad and faked sleep so he wouldn't ask me stuff. I'm sure my mother had told him that something came down the night before, but the nurse told him my story—that I puked in the John—which gave me an advantage. He wouldn't nag at me if he thought I was sick, but I could feel discomfort wafting off him like a horrible smell.

  I felt the bump of our driveway and opened one eye.

  "Your mother's not in her office, so if you need her, call her on her cell phone," Dad told me, and I nodded. "She'll be late. She's doing something for that Richardson boy after she gets out of court."

  I turned and looked at him. He was staring into the steering wheel, gripping it until his knuckles were white. He hadn't said it mean. He just looked like he was agonizing. I wanted to tell him I was sorry about getting hauled into the cop station. But I didn't want to admit to anything. I decided on something in the middle.

  "Bo Richardson's not all bad, Dad. He's got a good streak that ... runs really deep. It's just not ... wide." Whatever. I was tired.

  "Your mother said things like that." He let out one of his confused sighs. I grabbed my book bag, and as I opened the door, he let fly with another complete shocker. Up until this point, I had been ready to throw myself onto my bed and sleep. But what Dad said next changed my mind.

  He said, "Your mother told me being charged with murder is not the Richardson boy's worry at the moment. Apparently the police told him they confiscated the phone receiver at the ball field to have it fingerprinted. Before they went to the trouble, he confessed to making that phone call. That call could cost him dearly."

  I slammed the car door and headed for the house in a complete haze. I didn't even say good-bye. I figured that silence was the biggest lie I'd told so far.

  I paced around the house. Bo had
n't even mentioned anything when we were standing outside with Ali. He knew I would go nuts on him. But I should have known he wouldn't let me hang. Now I could only sit around or pace until Ali came over and we figured out what to do about this. Especially considering that phone call was your idea, Torey, you idiot.

  I went clomping down to the basement and picked up my acoustic guitar and headed back up the stairs. The basement was spooky. I hadn't spent more than three minutes down there since that night I thought I was feeling Creed's ghost. I passed the kitchen window and decided it was too spooky to be in the kitchen, too. I didn't want to sit in there playing guitar near that window, where you could see the Indian burial ground.

  I finally lay down on the living-room rug and stared at the ceiling, playing a bunch of scales and runs in that awkward position. I didn't care, the sound of my guitar made me calmer, somehow. Guitars are like "woobees." They're your security blanket. I lay there playing scales, trying to think about nothing at all.

  Clearing my head of the morning, I remembered something that happened the year before, which I hadn't thought about since it happened. The memory just came back to me. I'd had my guitar in the cafeteria, and I was fooling with it for my friends at the table. I got into playing this one thing I had heard on the radio not long before. That was like a gift for me, hearing music. Reading music was not my gift, it was a pain in my ass. It was too much hard work. But since I could hear something on the radio and, like, see chords in my head, that made reading music seem even more worthless. At any rate, I played this thing I'd picked up on the radio. When I finished I looked up and there were about thirty kids standing around watching me.

  They kind of applauded, and I felt dumb being caught off guard like that. My friends were used to me and didn't applaud—they usually just rocked and looked happy. But this weird thing caught my eye that made me forget about myself. These kids standing around weren't all from my neighborhood. Some were boons, some were from the middle-class neighborhoods like Leandra's, and some were from Steepleton. A couple were techies; one was a science nerd. I remember looking at all of them and feeling good about this guitar. It could bring people together, and it didn't matter where you were from.

  The part I'd totally forgotten about was Bo Richardson. He had been standing there, too. As we were leaving the cafeteria he shoved me in the shoulder and said, "'S a nice box, man. You let me play it sometime?"

  It's not like I was scared of him in that massive group of moving kids, but I remembered the time Creed picked up my guitar in sixth grade. I was funny about people touching my guitars, even Alex and Ryan.

  I said to him, "You know how to be careful?"

  He looked at me for a minute and then laughed. He said, "You know how not to be an asshole?" and he took off.

  I didn't give it a thought at the time because he was always calling somebody an asshole, and I was no different. It didn't occur to me at that moment to think, Bo Richardson plays guitar, too, or, He'd probably get a major thrill out of playing an Ovation because most people would, and I should share and just be cool. All I thought was, Sure, screw you, you're calling me asshole, well, what do you expect from that fool.

  I shut my eyes and felt them kind of filling up. That's something the guitar could make me do once in a while. I'd play something really sad, and it would fill up my eyes, God knows why, except the music got me.

  I sniffed and said out loud, "You know, it's a shame you can't write songs that aren't complete crap. You might be worth something, fool." But I was just telling myself some minor truth to try to get the bigger truth out of my head. Which was, there are all sorts of kids out there with bad luck. And I can't even consider them long enough to let them play my stupid guitar.

  I almost jumped out of my skin as the phone rang. I grabbed for it in a haze, thinking it might be Ali. It was Leandra.

  "Are you all right?" she asked me. "Somebody said you were throwing up. Y'all didn't look too good this morning."

  "Yeah, I'm ... just laying low for now," I muttered.

  "Are you crying?"

  "No," I said quickly, but she kind of set me off into my craziness. "Leandra, where are you?"

  "In the cafeteria. At the pay phone—"

  "Leandra," I begged, "do you see Ali anywhere in there?"

  I heard a long silence. Then, "No. She's not in here."

  I sighed, and she went off, "Torey, what is up with you today? Alex says he knows all this stuff he can't tell. He seems really mad at you. Renee and Ryan are, too. Everyone says you're being really frigid, and Ryan and Renee said their dad hauled you into the station last night and you won't tell them a thing—"

  "Leandra, this is really important. If you see Ali, can you tell her to call me? And then don't tell anyone I asked you that?"

  The silence was long enough for me to realize I was sounding like a total bastard. I was refusing to tell my girlfriend something and then telling her to get a message to another girl. Deep thinker of the universe, I was too busy panicking to think.

  "Torey, what is going on between you and Ali?" she demanded.

  "Nothing! Nothing at all!"

  "Torey, you cut out of school without even saying goodbye to me—after you've been at a cop station and you've been seen with Bo Richardson, Mr. Dirtbag. And then you can't tell me anything, but you send me off chasing after some turbo slut for you? What do you take me for?"

  She was sniffing up tears. I was in shock. How could the truth in life be so opposite from what it looked like sometimes? I couldn't go past that.

  It was pissing me off. I said, "Leandra, maybe, just maybe, Bo Richardson is not a dirtbag. And just maybe Ali is not a turbo slut. Did that ever occur to you?"

  "Not from all you're telling me! I only hear what other people tell me!"

  I don't know what came over me, but I flew out with, "So why do you waste your time running down to the Pentecostal church every Sunday if you come around on Monday calling people dirtbag and turbo slut?"

  I heard her gasp, but I was pissed and continued, "What, you think someday you're gonna tell Jesus, 'Well, I called people dirtbag and turbo slut, but that's okay, folks! I was a virgin!'"

  "You're crazy! You're ... insane." She hung up.

  I clicked off the phone and laid it down next to my guitar. She was right. I was insane. And I totally didn't care. I walked down to the basement and just sat there in the middle of the floor, hoping Creed's ghost would materialize and come mess with me, haunt me, push me over the line to where I would see things. I must have sat down there for an hour. I didn't see a blessed thing.

  Fifteen

  Ali walked all the way to our house after school, because she didn't want to get on my school bus and start more talk. She had on her army boots, which turned out not to be real leather. They were soaked through and sort of ruined, and she had these enormous bleeding blisters on her feet. While she sat on the bathtub ledge and soaked them, she told me that Bo had been charged with juvenile delinquency again, this time for making that phone call. I didn't think juvenile delinquency was such a big deal, then she explained to me that it is the only thing a minor can be charged with, even if he commits a murder. So, it could get bad. Depending on how Mr. and Mrs. Creed and the cops played it out, he could do up to six months in Jamesburg for the extortion part.

  I swore to her that I would tell the truth, and that just made her wig further. She swore that if I confessed, she would call me a liar and confess to making the call herself. I didn't know what to do. We went into the family room, arguing about it.

  Then the phone rang, and Ali was so wound up, she jumped ten feet in the air, then picked up without thinking. It was Leandra.

  "Is that Ali McDermott?" she demanded when Ali passed the phone off to me in total panic. I didn't say no, but I didn't say yes. It was along the lines of, "Leandra ... please..." I just watched Ali's eyes rolling back in her head almost, because this was too much.

  Leandra hollered through a sniff, "I guess I know who'
s been making Ali late for cheerleading practice every day!"

  It wasn't like I could say it was Bo Richardson and not me. I said, "Leandra, that's bullshit!"

  She just said, "Well, Ali's not here at cheerleading, and you're not at football practice, so—"

  "I came home sick!" I defended myself.

  "You went home guilty, that's what! No wonder you can't look your friends in the eye!" And she hung up.

  I got my football practice in, anyway, because I had to tackle Ali in the from yard to keep her from running off. I lay on her chest and shushed her while she screamed, "I can't stay here! I can't stay here!"

  After fifteen shushes, she cried a bunch, and I was afraid to get off of her until she stopped, for fear she'd take off into the woods. We lay like that for an eternity.

  When she was finally just sniffing, she turned her head from keeping her face halfway in the grass and looked at me. "Torey?" she asked. "Do you ... think I'm a slut?"

  I rolled off her on that note. I hadn't been wanting to think of her in terms of sex, but it's hard not to think that way when you're lying on some girl. I sat on the grass, staring at it, trying to catch a full breath.

  "No," I said finally. "I think you're confused and ... pissed off."

  She eased up some and sighed. "I don't know what I am. My mom has so many boyfriends, I wonder if it's genetic."

  I didn't have a clue. I finally said, "If it were genetic—I mean, if it were something like you just get incredibly horny all the time—then it wouldn't make sense. I mean, it seems like your mom could have taken out horniness on your dad."

  "It's got nothing to do with being horny," she told me. "God. I don't think I've ever been horny."

  I always thought horny and sex went together like hungry and food.