I kept getting this picture in my head of Creed in the sixth grade, the one time I truly whaled on him. I had only hit about three kids in my whole life, so I remembered it. He stared at me right after. Then blood came gushing from both his nostrils, like two spigots. I kept reliving those seconds between him looking so unglued and that blood gushing. I kept wondering if he felt pain. I wondered if I'd left him wishing he were dead.
"I've got it!" Ryan leaned forward enthusiastically. "He hung himself in the woods. And all those searchers were so busy looking on the ground that they never bothered to look up. Oh my god. His Converses were probably dangling, like, six inches above one of those searchers' heads, and they just never bothered to look up."
"Yo, we're eating here," I reminded them. "You guys ever hit him?"
"Yeah, once," Alex said.
"Yeah," Ryan muttered. He'd probably lost count. "I think fourth grade was the big year for me. I remember noticing in fourth grade that Creed still sucked his thumb if he wasn't thinking of where he was. We used to catch him doing that, then torture the guy until he cried. It got to be a game with some of us, to see if we could make him cry. Hey, maybe getting hit all the time that year, like, knocked his brain sideways. I think that's what started it."
"Mm-mm, you're wrong," Alex said, staring at his half-eaten hoagie. "I hit him in second grade. He was on people's nerves even back then. I brought my Matchbox cars into school. Remember how I had, like, two hundred of them, all in the compartmentalized boxes?"
We grinned, and I rolled my eyes remembering all those cars. Alex used to line them up in the compartments by make and model.
"I remember feeling like King Popularity that day, doling out cars to all my little race-car fans. We were going to make this huge track around the blacktop at recess. Creed kept standing there going, 'You know, there's lead poisoning in those cars. You know, what you're doing is dangerous. You know, you should really seek a more winsome pastime.' I remember he used that word. Winsome. God. We got, like, five minutes into this broken-record routine, and I just nailed him."
Alex shrugged like it was the only acceptable thing to do. This sort of thing was always going on around Creed.
"I hit him in sixth grade," I told them, feeling some sort of relief at finally letting fly. "I had brought my new guitar to school. After gym I walked into class, and he was standing on a desk doing this Elvis routine with it. I saw the desk starting to rock under his sneakers. I took the guitar, calmly put it in the case, turned around, and just pounded him."
I looked from Ryan to Alex—mowing down on the hoagies around these stupid snickers—and I felt a little pissed off.
"You know, maybe we could talk without laughing about it?" I suggested. "I think we tortured the guy enough when he was alive, If he's actually dead."
"Dude, you're like a walking conscience." Ryan cackled. "Don't be so glum. Maybe he just ... ran away. Truth is, can you even see Creed doing something like sticking a gun to his head? Or knocking a stool out from under himself? He was obnoxious but such a wimp. It makes for a much more boring story, but maybe he just ran off. But damn. Wouldn't you just love to know what that note said?"
"Of course," Alex and I both mumbled. Everyone and their brother was dying to know what all Chris had written, so that you couldn't tell whether it was a runaway note or a suicide note.
Ryan got to laughing harder. "Who but Creed would send a suicide e-mail? A suicide ... e-mail." He was cracking up so much, he didn't notice that Alex wasn't.
"Duh, idiots. Did you ever stop to think? If it was an e-mail, we can probably get at the thing."
As Alex plopped down in front of my terminal and turned it on, Ryan and I automatically sucked up behind him. Alex was one of those brainiacs you could almost mistake for stupid because he was also a class-clown type. He had been fooling around with the school computer since the beginning of freshman year and regularly read us our grades three days before report cards came out. I watched him click on a program called Reach Over, which he had installed for me but I had never used. He said it hooked into the library files and, since only gleeps and nerds actually spent more than fifteen minutes in the library, I could sit here at home, access the library's on-line encyclopedias, and do my papers without hauling my can in there. I could still get As without appearing socially inept, he said.
I hadn't thought much about this program because, for Christmas, I had gotten two different encyclopedias on CD-ROM. One from each grandmom.
"Does the library know you're hooked into them?" I asked.
"No way. I installed the thing with Mrs. Peacock putting books on the shelves not ten feet from me, but she wouldn't know an installation from an assassination. Ooo. I hear the pitter-patter of connectoids."
The modem was ringing and shrieking. Ryan had quit laughing. "Dude, you really think you can get at that note?"
"If he sent it from the library, it might still be in the library's outbox ... Ah... Library Windows Explorer, how do you do..."
I recognized the sight of the Explorer and smiled with my jaw half hanging. Ryan and I watched Alex scan down to the Indora file, complaining all the while that the school should get a security system. He clicked on "out.tok" and scanned down a list of dates and times. His eyes lost their funsville look and he sighed. "There's nothing here from Thursday at all. We're sure this note was sent from the library?"
"My dad said the library." Ryan nodded hard. "In fact, my mom asked him why a kid would send an e-mail like that from a public place. Creed had a humongous computer system at home. But my dad said, nope, the return address said the library."
"Anal-retentive moron, he probably sent it from a disk," Alex mumbled. "Let me check the recipient."
Even Ryan kind of gasped as Alex clicked all the way out to "Network" and moved easily down another passage that showed the last names of teachers next to these little file icons. Right at the top was Ames, the principal. Alex clicked in there, and I crunched my head into Ryan's shoulder, casting a glance up the stairs to make sure my dad wasn't coming. Not like he would have any clue what we were doing, even if he saw it with his own eyes. Here's Alex virtually marching into the principal's office, opening his file drawer, and rooting through it. Yet, if some parent came down here, all we would have to do was act normal and make up some lie. On-line stuff was awesome in my mind, though I wasn't Alex the Master.
"Ah. A smorgasbord of e-mails," Alex noted. "Shall we set ourselves to discover if our illustrious principal is having an on-line affair? Or something of a darker nature?"
"Dirty e-mails. From Mr. Ames. Oh my god." Ryan cackled. "Would that be the end of the universe?"
"Forget it. My dad has been playing racquetball with him twice a week for ten years," I said. "No friend of my parents is a pervert. It's physiologically impossible."
Ryan seemed to buy that. My dad owns an engineering firm, and my mother is a prosecutor for the district attorney's office. Throughout my life the words had floated around me from people in church, or other parents in Little League—I had the perfect parents. I just sort of believed it. And that makes you automatically think their friends are perfect, roo. Alex's dad was a shrink, and his mom was a housewife. Ryan's dad was the local chief of police and his mom used to be a systems analyst, until Earl, Ryan's older brother, came along. Earl was always in trouble—so much trouble, he made Ryan and his sister, Renee, look like angels, which they weren't. Mrs. Bowen decided to be a full-time mom eons ago—or, in the case of the Bowen kids, a full-time enforcer.
I jumped as my printer started to haul a sheet of paper through. I looked from its blinking lights to Alex, who was grinning with electric eyes.
"I should leave Mr. Ames a reprimand for cleaning out the library file but saving his recipient's copy as a souvenir reminder of better days."
I hadn't even seen the note come up on the screen, but Alex's brain worked, like, ten times faster than mine. He reached for the paper and turned to face us.
"Dear Mr. Am
es," he read, and I watched his face drop the victorious look.
"I have a problem getting along with people. I know that people wish I were dead, and at this moment in time I see no alternative but to accommodate them in this wish. I have a wish. Not that anybody cares, but if anybody cared over the years, it was you. Here is my wish. I wish that I had been born somebody else."
Alex started reading the names of a couple of kids I played football with, a couple he played basketball with, "Mike Healy, Jose DeSantos, Tommy Ide, Evan Lucenti..."
Then, "Torey Adams, Alex Arrington..."
My heart jumped and left my chest on fire as I heard my own name come out of this note, with Alex's. It went on to name a few other guys we hung with because of sports. But our names were in there. I listened in a haze as Alex read the rest.
"I don't understand why I get nothing and these boys get everything—athletic ability, good personalities, beautiful girlfriends. I'm sure their parents will be buying them cars next year, while I will still be riding my bicycle until my parents decide I'm old enough. Quite possibly, I'll be twenty-five. I wish to understand life and luck and liberty. But I will never do that confined to this life, the personality defects I've been cursed with, the lack of abilities, the strain. I wish no malice on anyone. I only wish to be gone. Therefore, I AM.
"Yours respectfully, Christopher Creed."
Ryan's voice was echoing some bull. "... kid's about to end it, and he's still talking like he wants to impress someone with his enormous vocabulary. And, yo, he mentions you guys but doesn't mention me. Doesn't he think I'm lucky?"
"You guys, he actually spell-checked his suicide note." Alex laughed in amazement. "He might have gotten malice right, but he would not have gotten accommodate—"
"Gimme that." I snatched the sheet of paper from Alex, completely sick of all their jokes. I think my life changed as the words in that note bounced around my head. I might have felt a little weird before over something so unusual happening. But I hadn't been involved personally. Creed involved me; he used my name. He all but admitted he might kill himself because he wasn't me. And he had been so damn honest. I have a problem getting along with people ... I know that people wish I were dead... I'm not sure how many people would have actually wanted Creed dead, but still, if he heard, Why don't you drop dead? once, he probably heard it a thousand times.
I wanted to be pissed at someone. I just didn't know who. Chris sounded pissed at his parents. Creed's mother was a retired naval officer who used to fly jets, before she made a drill school for her own kids as a stay-at-home mom. Mr. Creed taught archeology out at Stockton State College and had inherited a lot of money from his mom or something. They lived in a big house, like, two cul-de-sacs over, had a big car and a van, and they had bought Chris a great Pentium twenty-three-gig with Surround Sound. I guessed a great computer system like that couldn't replace friends. I kind of wanted to blame the parents. They had to be part of this creating-a-weirdo process.
But I also wondered why none of us ever picked up that Creed was so down on himself. Whatever it was that he admired me for, I figured I could have helped him. I would have, if he had just let us know he was thinking of offing himself. That made me pissed at him.
"Dudes, he mentioned our names." I looked at Alex, who was nudging Ryan to stifle it and show some respect.
"Calm down, Torey." Alex had quit laughing, but he gave me the time-out sign. "We're not the Pittsburgh Steelers, okay? The guy is making a mountain out of a molehill. We have a normal life, and the only thing we have that he didn't is friends."
I wanted to say that was a big deal in his mind, obviously. We could have been more chill toward the guy.
Ryan started chuckling again. I got this feeling in my gut that most people would miss the fact that Chris felt he had reason to do this. Even his own fool parents weren't being understanding toward the guy. If they really wanted to understand their kid, they would not have been standing in front of a church full of people going, Doyee, we're here to tell you that Chris was grounded in reality.
Ryan went on happily, "The operative question to me is, What did the guy do? I just want to know ... Is he alive, or is he dead? If he's alive, how did that little prick find the nerve to leave home? And if he's dead ... where's the body?"
I said something like, "Bite me," under my breath, but not loud enough for them to hear.
Four
On Monday the third-period honors-chemistry teacher was sick, and there was no substitute. That meant Alex and I could go to the cafeteria and stay there right through fourth-period lunch. Leandra had third-period lunch, so we could hang with her. Life was good. Until I saw Mrs. Creed.
She was in school, hanging these "missing" posters on all the bulletin boards and taping them to walls in all the corridors. We caught sight of her taping one on the wall just outside of the cafeteria. She was pressing the paper against the wall so hard it was turning her fingers purple. Then she stood up and smacked her fingers against her legs, like, to get the blood flowing again.
The poster had a picture of Chris, scanned from the freshman yearbook, plus all this information, like day last seen, on it. It also had HEIGHT: 5' 8"; WEIGHT: 135; HAIR COLOR: BLOND; EYE COLOR: BROWN.
"Hey, Torey." I heard a girl's voice and felt a slight tug on my varsity sweater. I turned, and Ali McDermott was standing behind me, grinning all friendly. Ali had been a friend of ours since kindergarten. She lived on Creed's street. Last year she started to drift a little, didn't hang out with us as much. All I knew was that she didn't show up at as many parties, and at dances she would hang with us for about ten minutes and then circle around and talk to lots of other people.
I guessed that was okay, except rumor had it that Ali was, as the saying goes, "passing through high school on her back." A lot of the guys on the football team claimed to have been with her. It gets a little harder being around a girl like that once you have a girlfriend, and I hadn't hung out with her much since the spring, when I started going out with Leandra.
"Hey," I said, "no chemistry. Cool, huh?"
"Yeah, cool."
I watched Alex wave to Renee Bowen, ahead of us, and move up to walk with her. I sighed, thinking, There goes another band practice tonight. Renee was Ryan's sister and Leandra's best friend. About three weeks earlier, she had started getting Alex to hang out in front of the Wawa with her at night, and he would just not show for band practice. I had gone out with Renee in eighth grade, and we stayed friends afterward, but at this point she was starting to bug me.
I sighed again and turned my thoughts to Ali. I wanted to ask her if she knew anything about Creed, but didn't want to sound like a gossip hag. I didn't remember ever hearing her say too much awful stuff about Chris, growing up, though she could roll her eyes a lot. Ali was nice like that.
"Mrs. Creed's all hanging her posters," I said, finally. No arguing that.
She just rolled her eyes, the usual.
I tried again. "Everybody's wondering what's up with him."
"You know, I really don't want to talk about it," she snapped.
I thought that was pretty saintly of her and felt embarrassed. But then I thought, Wait a minute. I'm not running around school all, "Where's the body?" like half the fools are.
"Ali, I'm not out looking for bad stuff to spread around about Creed. Maybe I just want to understand the thing."
She cast me a sideways glance, like maybe she was sorry. "Well, you're in the minority," she muttered. "You should hear the stuff people have been asking me. 'Has he got any poison in that chemistry set of his? D'you hear anything strange coming from his place last week? Like gunshots?' People who can't even stand me have been coming up to me all morning."
"Who can't stand you?" I asked, confused. Yeah, guys joked about her sex life. But there's a difference between saying a girl is easy and saying you hate her. Nobody said that.
"Everybody," she muttered, with her eyebrows all scrunched together.
"You're imagin
ing it," I told her. Her parents had split up over the summer. I wondered if it was stressing her.
"I'm not imagining it." She sighed. "I'm not like you guys anymore. You all ... have perfect lives. And when something happens, like a suffering kid turns up missing, it's like the joke of the century. Because your lives are perfect."
I guessed I would be pretty freaked if my parents split, but she didn't have to take it all out on me.
"Well, thanks a lot for clumping me in with all the buttheads," I muttered. "You're being really judgmental of me, especially considering how you hate it when you think people are being judgmental of you."
I was ready to break away from her. She grabbed me by the elbow and hurried to walk along beside me.
She sighed. "I'm just in a foul mood from playing the butt end of twenty-questions all morning. I'm sorry, okay?"
"Whatever." I looked around the cafeteria for Leandra.
Ali kept pulling my arm, and when I looked, she was searching my face. "Don't let's go in here. Let's go somewhere else. I want to tell you about Mrs. Creed."
It's the unwritten rule that if you have off the same period as your girlfriend, you find her in the cafeteria and spend the period with her. I followed Ali out again, but glanced nervously around to see who had spotted me and might tell Leandra they saw me leaving with Ali McDermott. It sounded like Ali really needed to spill.
I trailed her down the long hallway until we hit the stairwell. There was an emergency exit, and I sucked in my breath as Ali put her hand on the bar and pushed.
"Emergency alarm hasn't worked since the first week of school. Don't tell anyone, okay? This is my great escape, where no hall proctors can see."
We stepped out into the sunlight. You could see straight across the lawn to the edge of the woods. It was a calm, pretty sight, and I could see why she wanted to come out here sometimes.