The Body of Christopher Creed

  To hear some people tell it, I saw Creed dead. I saw him dead, and it made me crazy. There are other people who add to that version of the story—that I actually helped kill him. They say I can't face what I saw, or what I did, depending on who's telling the story. They would all say I'm on this giant denial trip if they ever guessed I was trying to find him. Or they'd say that I'm trying to prove my innocence with a search that I know won't lead anywhere. I am looking for Creed, and I admit my bolts were not screwed in so tight for a while there. But I've never told myself any lies about it. And I'm sure Chris Creed is alive.

  I guess it's up to you to decide whether I'm nuts or normal, and since this is just the Internet, I don't give a rip what strangers think. It's bad enough to put up with what some of my neighbors think. Steepleton is like most other small towns out there, I guess. Small-town people live up each other's butts, and some people will tell stories about who stinks the worst. I wonder if small towns are America's final kick in the ass insofar as prejudice and judgment are concerned. There are black families in Steepleton, a Japanese family, a couple Saudis, one family of rich Pakistanis. It's not a racial thing like my mom coped with, growing up there. But it's there, part of the little-town mentality, that thing that makes people want to sniff out neighbors who are weird or less fortunate, and talk about those people's bad luck to establish their own goodness. There are also some people who are very sympathetic about what happened to me, and they have been pretty cool.

  So when I left, it wasn't entirely to get away from small-town smell-my-butts. I left to get away from death and the fear of ghosts. Small towns grow out of the woods, and the woods are dark and scary. I did see death, and I have seen a ghost. But neither of them was Creed. I will swear to that until I die, though there will always be those feebs who don't believe me. It's their problem, not mine.

  Alex Healy, if you are who I think you are, everything I have said in this letter and everything you're going to read in this story will make perfect sense. If it makes no sense, then just write me off as another Internet loony who '$ suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. That part has been medically established.

  Three people will bear up to the truth in this attachment. My mother—not that a mom counts for much while standing in her kid's defense. There's a girl, too, who's got a reputation as being, well, not so upright. And then there's the town's chief of police, an African American who walked the beat in Atlantic City for fourteen years before becoming chief in Steepleton. His name is Douglas Rye, and he became chief about two weeks after Chris Creed disappeared. He read this story and will vouch for every word.

  I dropped the window down again, took a breath of cool air, and hit "attach." I stared at the name Creed.doc. It was like the door to a tomb. All I had to do was hit "restore," double click, and the stone could get rolled away. Rereading it away from Steepleton might do a lot for me, but it wasn't as important as finding Chris Creed. I decided, Attach now, read later. You will find your peace when you find Creed out there somewhere.

  But I knew later was no further off than when I hit "send." I was ready to go back to death in the woods. It had taken me a year of being away, but I felt my sympathy rising for myself at sixteen, back when I hadn't written much more than a book report and a few dumb songs. I had to see what I was like back then.

  Alex Healy, I swear the following account contains no lies. It is one-hundred-percent accurate. People can love their lies, tell their lies, believe their own lies until hell pays a visit. But this whole story is true. That's the point of it.

  Victor "Torey" Adams,

  Formerly Mr. Ail-American Football Kicker,

  Blond Geeky Haircut for Little League

  and All That, Formerly of Steepleton,

  Southern New Jersey

  Two

  Being that Sunday is the first day of the week, I guess Sunday was a fitting day for my life to start to crash. I guess in some people's minds Sunday is an unusual day for bad luck because it's a religious day, and people's lives should get better on a religious day, or at least remain equalized until Monday. I guess those people's lives change on a Tuesday or a Friday or something.

  I like to think of it as starting on a Sunday. And that has always made me think it had something to do with God, though I still can't say what, for sure. I have my ideas.

  There are plenty of people out there who would probably ask, "How can you imagine God in a foul bunch of happenings, you pig?" I wouldn't like to answer that, except to say that I don't imagine He was up there asleep.

  I ended up in the front pew at church—me and my best friend, Alex Arrington. It was a small church, but most of the people in Steepleton went there and made their kids go there. We'd each had the standard argument with our parents—that while we had nothing against God, we didn't learn anything, because church was too boring, and they should not be forcing us to go now that we were juniors. I don't know how Alex's parents combated him. But my dad said he stood by his answer from when I had argued, "Now that I'm a sophomore" and "Now that I'm a freshman." I don't remember those arguments. But arguing with our families about any religious matter always seemed kind of purposeless.

  Around Steepleton people could quote scripture, and what do you say back to that? So, who says the Bible is true? I wouldn't even push it that far. But I would think, If the Bible is so magical that people around here quote it all the time, how come it can't perform the magic that would keep church from being boring? Whatever. We always waited until the last minute to go in. And since nobody likes to sit up front in a church, if you came in last, you were stuck in the front pew.

  I looked down the row past Alex to Ryan Bowen and the Kyle twins, Eddie and Pat. Sitting still for an hour was pretty much an endurance test for those three, probably more so than football practice. They're too crazy to sit still, and I don't think they know how to use their thoughts for entertainment value. I don't think those three ever had a thought that went much deeper than, What's to eat?

  Reverend Harmon started with the morning announcements, but my brain was already hooked into the stained-glass window beyond Pat Kyle's head.

  The stained glass had been there as long as I could remember, but recently it had started bugging me. I had heard somewhere not long ago that Christ was crucified naked. But in this stained glass, and in every other crucifixion picture I had ever seen, Christ was wearing this little cloth, like a loincloth. It was as if the story had been added to, so as not to disgust people too much. I just got to thinking about that, I don't know why. I wondered if it was a good thing to change a story because the truth was too disgusting. I even asked Reverend Harmon when he came over one night to visit my dad. He said that the truth was less important, in this case, than the impact the truth would have on people.

  I remember it gave me a twitch when he said that. I'm not sure why, I mean, it was bad enough to see Jesus hanging there, without Him being naked. But it struck me that the Church is always saying you shouldn't lie, and here was one. Pastor Harmon makes dumb puns all the time, and he said to me, "Torey, it's not a lie. It's a cover-up."

  Alex's church bulletin caught my eye. He was writing on it: You 're staring at my ear.

  He handed me his pen, and I wrote on mine, Above your ear.

  He glanced over the Kyle twins' heads, at the air, at the stained-glass window, at the ceiling, and he sighed.

  He wrote next, What are you thinking about, O abnormal one?

  After a minute I decided on, Band. Who's coming over to strum 'n 'drum?

  My friends had some clue I was abnormal, though they didn't know the full extent of it. They knew I could stare off into space sometimes and not be hearing them until they shoved me. But they didn't know I could have long conversations with myself about whether Christ should be wearing a loincloth or not. I handed Alex back the pen, thinking I was a fine one to talk about the Church lying.

  He jerked his head three times down the row, to mean Ryan, Pat, and Eddie. Ryan was the drum
mer in our group. Pat and Eddie doubled on synthesizer and lead guitar, whichever we needed, and Alex played bass. I was better at acoustic guitar but could switch off to lead. We were almost good enough to have gigs, but not quite.

  "We had, uh ... something has happened," Reverend Harmon said over our heads, and I guessed he was finished with the announcements. My eyes floated up off my sneakers as he went on. "Some of you know already that the son of Ron and Sylvia Creed—Christopher Creed—disappeared from school on Thursday and hasn't been seen since."

  I felt myself, like, float and drop for a second. There had been some talk in school Friday morning—because a cop car had showed up ourside the main entrance, and two police officers were seen going in with Mr. and Mrs. Creed. No announcements had been made over the loudspeaker, and gossip came down from who-knows-where-it-started that Chris had run away. It was just kids talking, along the lines of "Where did that twerp get the nerve to take off?" "With his el-strict-o parents, who would have thought he had the guts? " "If I were him I would have run away from this school ten years ago, man. Nobody ever cut him a break."

  Reverend Harmon went on: "The Creeds have asked to say a word to all of you this morning, and I certainly think that's appropriate ... very appropriate."

  I heard the clicking of high heels on the tile floor. It was loud. But Mrs. Creed always had that loud, here-I-come sort of stepping. I saw out of the corner of my eye that Mr. Creed was with her, but his rubber soles hardly made any noise. He was a silent-but-deadly type of grown-up you would no sooner speak to than kick. He was stiff and stern, almost like an old man caught in a middle-aged guy's body. Mrs. Creed did all the talking, usually. He did all the frowning.

  Even that day, she came up to the podium while he stood behind her. She cleared her throat a time or two.

  "First we'd like to thank all of you who helped search the woods and the creek area yesterday," Mrs. Creed said in this quieter-than-usual voice. "We thank you for ... putting our worst fears to rest. We still believe our Christopher is out there ... somewhere...

  Meaning he wasn't dead. I tried to look at her, but it was hard. By Friday afternoon this rumor had leaked out that he might have committed suicide, not run away. Probably a lot of kids thought that was really sad, but you heard loudly from the ones who thought it was a riot. At football practice guys were placing bets on how he might have done it. It ran the range of taking an overdose of cafeteria food to swallowing a bunch of plastic explosives he made with his chemistry set. Someone said he had sex with Mary Carol Banes, who could stand to lose about four hundred pounds, and systematically crushed himself. Stupid stuff. It's like there were too many one-liners about it, and I wondered if I was the only one who kept wanting to flinch. I had this thought as I came out of the locker room that night: This kid who's been around since kindergarten is, like, missing, and it's this matter of principle that we have to laugh? What is up?

  "We really appreciate all you've done, but we still need your help. If anyone knows of any reason why ... Christopher would run away..." Mrs. Creed paused. The silence was followed by this huge shifting of bodies in the pews. I guess it was because even Mrs. Creed was circling around the circumstances, which were more than weird.

  Chris had supposedly been in the library on Thursday, using the Internet. After school, when the principal, Mr. Ames, was downloading his e-mail, he got a note signed Chris Creed. At first they thought it was a runaway note, but by Friday they were saying it could be a suicide note. The note had been very unclear. The grown-ups got together and searched the woods on Saturday, but nobody could find so much as a hair from Chris Creed's head. So, Mr. and Mrs. Creed were hanging on to the term runaway with hope.

  I got the feeling, seeing the grown-ups squirm, that they wanted to believe the Creeds. In Steepleton parents constantly hagged on their kids about how expensive it is to live here, and how parents make sacrifices so their kids can go to a school where they aren't exposed to violence and terrible stuff. In Steepleton you could ride your bike to the Wawa—our only convenience store—and leave it out front without a padlock. You could always meet your girlfriend after dark because there wasn't any reason for a mom or dad to say that a girl couldn't walk around outside after dark. Even the boons, the really bad kids, went back to the boondocks after school and kind of stopped existing to us until school the next day. Kids from Steepleton played sports, joined clubs, applied to out-of-state colleges, got cars for graduation. There wasn't much to commit suicide over ... if you were looking at surface stuff like that.

  But even Steepleton had its weird kids, and Chris had been one of them. I think the worst thing about him was his undying combo of big mouth and huge grin. He seemed to forget from one day to the next who he had pissed off. He'd come bounding up to the same kids who had told him yesterday to get lost like he was their best friend. Like his entire track record as an annoying person didn't exist. In my whole life I had never met another person like Creed.

  "We ... certainly don't have any reason to believe that Chris would run away." Mr. Creed had taken his wife by the shoulders and spoken over her left ear. "But that thought is, er, a preferable alternative to anything more pressing, and, er, sinister..."

  His mouth was dry or pasty so that every syllable had this m'yam-m'yam-m'yam sound behind it. I watched his mouth, feeling kind of grossed out yet hypnotized.

  "...though any decision Chris made was always grounded, quite normal, not a radical type of this, er, nature."

  "That's right." Mrs. Creed nodded.

  Reverend Harmon put his arms around the Creeds' shoulders and bowed his head to pray. I was supposed to have my head bowed, but I forgot, studying Mr. and Mrs. Creed with their bowed heads.

  I was thinking, This hard-stepping mom and this pasty-mouthed father are as clueless as two aliens. Chris Creed is about as "grounded" and "normal" as a chimpanzee. How could people live their whole lives with their kid and not know this?

  By the time high school rolled around, most of us had grown out of beating kids up because they were obnoxious, and we hadn't beat on Chris in a year or so. But we had a new group of kids to deal with when we got to the bigger school.

  The boons are the kids who come to our school from a certain area in the Pine Barrens on the Mullica River, which we call the boondocks. I'm sure there are lots of boondocky places in the continental United States, each with its own version of boons. In our boondocks, the kids are generally the pickup truck, long hair, muscle shirt, and motorbike crew that we just try to look through in the halls.

  The boons weren't above busting somebody up still, if the kid was weird and had a big mouth. One really scary boon—an enormous dude named Bo Richardson—had pushed Chris off the top bleacher in the gym the year before and set him on crutches for a few weeks. Those boons could be scary, but we still blamed Chris as much as we blamed them. He was as weird as they were charged up.

  Reverend Harmon went right from the prayer into the Apostles' Creed, and the voices behind me started with the usual droning echo.

  I believe in God, the father Almighty,

  Maker of heaven and earth...

  And in Him, Jesus Christ, His only son, our Lord ...

  I might have gotten stuck on the crucifixion, but I had never given any thought to the Apostles' Creed or why we said this thing week after week. It was just something "normal" that we said. And the normalcy of it got me looking at the Creeds like they were normal people again, and if they could watch their kid for fifteen years and see him as normal, I guessed it didn't matter. It's just the way things are. Things don't have to be sane when they're normal.

  Three

  Alex and Ryan came from church with me, and we hung out in my basement, waiting for the Kyles to show up for practice. My dad had stopped at Wawa and gotten a bunch of "shorties"—that's a six-inch hoagie—and we were mowing down on them in silence. Ryan sat at his drum set. He would take a huge bite off the hoagie, put it down on my amp, pick up his drumsticks, and go ba-ba-dee-b
a-ba-dee-bay-bo-bam-boo-ssssssttttt, ending with the cymbal.

  It grated on my nerves. With one huge mouthful, he got up, then crouched and tiptoed toward the game closet. He grabbed the knob and jumped back as the door flew open. He stared at the games and then turned to us, swallowing food.

  "Uh. He's not in there." He cracked up and then looked miffed as I rolled my eyes. Ryan's dad was chief of police. Sometimes I wondered if he hadn't heard too much gore from his dad, which left him kind of heartless.

  "Dudes," he went on, "aren't you scared he's going to, like, show up hanging by the neck on your property? Or you're going to open the laundry chute and watch him spill out, all bloody from a bullet through his brain? He did it somewhere. Somebody's going to find the spoil—"

  "My dad says something about very sensitive people committing suicide in water," Alex put in. His dad was a shrink. "You watch. Next spring sometime, somebody's going to whip back the tarp on their swimming pool, clear away the brown water, and see Creed with a cinder block roped around his chest. His eyeballs, like, totally rotted through."

  "I think he jumped off the dam, and that's why nobody can find the body. It hasn't bloated up, risen to the surface yet," Ryan said enthusiastically. He made some laugh that went, "hck ... hck ... hck."

  Half of me wanted to laugh because it made the whole thing seem less mind-blowing. But the other half couldn't get rid of this thought that a kid I knew might have slashed his wrists or hung himself. It was making me want to call my girlfriend, Leandra, and tune these dudes out. Leandra went to a holy roller church, which could be a pain, because she could go off about things like the devil being real and stuff that could make you twitch. But I knew in this case she'd go on about kids who died, going up to heaven, and how Creed was probably very happy—if he had died.