* * *
How can William Lyt feel anything but hatred about this?
* * *
When he turns around, he sees Leo standing at the other end of the corridor. The twelve-year-old has just seen William Lyt’s weakest point, and the little bastard’s grin pierces the eighteen-year-old’s skin all over. William goes into a bathroom and punches his own thighs until tears spring to his eyes.
* * *
When school is over for the day, Maya and Ana change into tracksuits and run into the forest. It’s Ana’s idea, and a weird one, because Maya has always hated running, and even if Ana has spent almost all her life running through the forest, she’s never done it specifically as exercise. Never in circles. Even so, Ana forces Maya out this autumn, because she knows that even if Kevin is no longer in Beartown, they still have to reclaim the things he stole. Twilight. Solitude. The courage to wear earbuds when it’s dark, the freedom to not look over your shoulder the whole time.
They run only where there are lights. They don’t say anything but are both thinking the same thing: guys never think about light, it just isn’t a problem in their lives. When guys are scared of the dark, they’re scared of ghosts and monsters, but when girls are scared of the dark, they’re scared of guys.
They run a long way. Farther than either of them thought they could. But they stop abruptly some way from Ana’s house, beside the running track that coils around the Heights. It’s the best-lit patch of track in the whole of Beartown, but that’s irrelevant. That was where Maya held the shotgun to Kevin’s head.
* * *
She’s hyperventilating. Can’t bring herself to take another step. Ana puts a comforting hand on hers.
“We’ll try again tomorrow.”
Maya nods. They walk back to Ana’s. Outside the door Maya lies and tells her friend that she’s fine, that she can go home on her own, because Ana is fighting hard to make everything normal again and Maya can’t bear to disappoint her.
* * *
But when she’s alone she sits down on a stump and cries. Sends a text to her mom: “Can you pick me up? Please?”
* * *
At a time like that, there’s no mother in this forest or any other who drives faster through the trees.
* * *
No one knows exactly where violence comes from; that’s why someone who fights can always find a reasonable justification. “You shouldn’t have provoked me.” “You know how I get.” “It’s your own fault, you deserved it, you were asking for it!”
Leo Andersson is twelve years old and has never had a girlfriend. When a girl two years older comes up to him at his locker in school, he feels a rush of intoxication that he will never experience so strongly again.
She smiles. “I saw you on the beach when you stood up to William Lyt. Pretty brave!”
Leo has to hold on to the locker door as she walks off. When he has lunch, she sits down at the same table. That afternoon, after his last class, she appears in the corridor and asks if he wants to walk her home.
Leo is usually picked up by one of his parents so he has time to get to hockey practice. But his parents have been in their own little worlds recently, and Leo isn’t planning to play hockey this autumn. He wants to be something else now, he doesn’t know what, but when this girl looks at him he thinks, “I want to be the sort of person she thinks is brave.” So he texts his parents to say he’s going over to a friend’s. They’ll just be relieved they don’t have to pick him up.
The girl and Leo take the path that runs through the tunnel under the main road between the school and the residential area on the other side. He takes a deep breath and summons up the courage to reach out his hand and take hold of hers. The tunnel is dark, and she slips from his fingers and runs. He stares in surprise as he hears her shoes patter on the concrete. Then there are other sounds, from other shoes. They’re walking into the darkness from both directions. One of them is the girl’s older brother. Leo didn’t notice the red top under her jacket.
The council installed this tunnel many years ago after years of campaigning by parents saying that children shouldn’t have to cross the busy road. The tunnel was supposed to keep children safe. But now it’s a trap instead.
* * *
When Kira picks Maya up, her daughter pretends that everything is fine again. She’s starting to get good at that. She says she twisted her ankle while she and Ana were jogging, and Kira is happy. Happy! Because a twisted ankle is so normal. It’s part of normal sixteen-year-old life.
“Do you feel like doing something? We could drive to Hed and go for a coffee,” Kira suggests, with all the training in rejection of a mother of teenagers, so her heart skips a beat when her daughter unexpectedly replies, “Okay.”
They drink coffee. They talk. They even laugh, as if this were all normal, and of course Kira is the one who spoils it. Because she can’t help asking “How are you getting on with . . . counseling? Or with the psychologist? I don’t know the difference, but . . . I know you don’t want to talk to your dad and me, but I just want you to know that you . . . that you can if you want.”
Maya stirs her coffee. Clockwise, anticlockwise, in turn. “It’s okay, Mom. I’m feeling good.”
Kira dearly wants to believe that. She tries to keep her voice steady. “Your dad and I have been talking. I’m going to cut my hours for a while, so I can be home a bit more . . .”
“What for?” Maya blurts out.
Kira looks confused. “I thought you’d be pleased! If I’m . . . home more?”
“Why would I be pleased?” Maya wonders.
Kira squirms. “I haven’t been a good mother, darling. I’ve been so focused on my career. I should have spent more time with you and Leo. Now your dad has to focus all his effort on the club for a while, so—”
“Dad’s always focused all his effort on the club!” Maya interrupts.
Kira blinks. “I don’t want you to remember me as an absentee mom. Especially not now. I want you to feel that you’ve got a . . . normal mom.”
Maya puts her spoon down at that. Leans across the table. “Stop it, Mom. You know, I’m so damn proud of your career! Everyone else had a normal mom, but I had a role model. All the other moms have to say to their kids that they can be whatever they want when they’re older, but you don’t have to say that, because you’re demonstrating it every day.”
“Darling, I—” Kira begins, but her voice breaks.
Maya wipes her tears and whispers, “Mom. You taught me that I don’t have to have dreams. I can have goals.”
* * *
Perhaps William Lyt doesn’t want to hurt anyone. There’s a particular type of person who enjoys harming other people, but it isn’t clear if he’s one of them. One day he might wonder about that himself, how we end up the way we do. Unless he becomes the kind of person who goes through his whole life surrounded by excuses for violence: “You shouldn’t have provoked him.” “You know how he gets.” “You were asking for it.”
His friends are with him, but he doesn’t have their unconditional support. They’re not with him out of love or admiration, the way they followed Kevin and Benji; they’re just going along with him because he’s strong. So he needs to crush everyone who challenges him, because a lack of respect is like sparks in a summer forest: if you don’t trample them out at once, the fire spreads until you find yourself surrounded.
His guys stand at the ends of the tunnel. William goes in. It didn’t need to get out of hand, because William starts by saying “Not so tough now, are you?”
If Leo had looked frightened, it could have stopped there. If the twelve-year-old had just had the sense to tremble and sink to his knees and beg William for mercy. But it isn’t William who sees fear in Leo’s eyes, it’s Leo who sees it in William’s. So the twelve-year-old says mockingly, “How tough are you, little Willie? You wouldn’t even dare fight Benji! Are you going to wear a diaper when you play Beartown or what?”
Leo may not really kno
w why he says this. Unless he doesn’t care. The girl tricked him; he’s going to carry a lump of black fury in his gut forever to remind him of how he felt when she ran and he realized that they’d planned this and how they must have laughed when they did. And there’s something about violence, about adrenaline, about the different frequencies in some people’s hearts.
Leo takes something out of his pocket and throws it onto the ground in front of William Lyt. A cigarette lighter. William lashes out instantly, and his fist hits Leo’s face as hard as a block of wood. Leo collapses and rolls around on all fours to keep the blood out of his eyes. He knows there’s no way he can fight William and win. But there are many ways to avoid defeat. He sees that William has tears of rage in his eyes as he gets ready to kick him. He manages to dart out of the way in time, and in the same movement he kicks out as hard as he can and hits William in the crotch. Then he gets to his feet and hits as hard as he can.
That might have been enough if he’d been bigger and heavier and William smaller and lighter. But Leo’s punches are weak, half of them miss, and William merely sways. The boys at the ends of the tunnel stand motionless. William’s fingers grab hold of Leo’s top and close like a claw. Then the eighteen-year-old head butts the twelve-year-old in the nose. Blinded, Leo falls to the ground. And then? Dear God.
* * *
Then William Lyt doesn’t stop stamping.
* * *
Mother’s Song
You asked “Am I a good mother?,” always the same, the same . . .
. . . answer that you were seeking, when you should have known that
You were the strength inside
You were all that I could become
You taught me the value of “sorry,” but the only time you retreated was when you were taking aim
You taught me the humility of tears but never let me apologize for existing
You didn’t dress me up in fragile garments, you gave me armor
You taught me that daughters don’t have to have dreams—we can have goals.
* * *
The boys at the ends of the tunnel stand silent. Perhaps some of them feel they should intervene, call out that that’s enough, that the kid’s only twelve, for God’s sake. But it’s easy to become desensitized; you can see something happen right in front of you without it having any greater effect than if you were seeing it in a film. Perhaps you have time to feel scared, think, “Good thing it isn’t me,” unless you’re so shocked that you feel paralyzed.
* * *
Could William have killed Leo in that tunnel? No one knows. Because someone stops him.
* * *
Jeanette, the teacher, has lots of little bad habits that she does her best to hide from both the pupils and the other staff in the school. She cracks her knuckles when she’s nervous; she started doing that when she played on Hed Hockey’s girls’ team. When she got older, she took up boxing, then martial arts, and she has plenty of strange habits left from those days. She stretches when she feels restless, warms up before classes each morning as if she were preparing for a game. For a while she was good, really good. Maybe she could even have become the best. For a single wonderful year she was a professional fighter, but hardly anyone in this town knows that because she got injured and things went the way they always do: either you’re the best, or you’re everyone else. She studied to become a teacher, lost the fire in her heart, the killer instinct. She had a coach who told her, “Jeanette, you have to want to go into the ring and crush another girl’s dream, because if you don’t, you’ve no business being here.” That may have been true, she wishes it weren’t, but perhaps sport really is precisely that merciless.
She doesn’t miss the pressure and stress, just the adrenaline. There’s nothing in normal life that can replace it, that life-affirming fear when she climbed into the ring and there was just her and her opponent. You against me. Right here, right now.
She tries to find other ways of getting kicks. Working as a teacher often feels hopeless, but every now and then there are tiny, shimmering moments that make the long hours and humiliating wages worthwhile, when she manages to get through to someone. Maybe even save something. There aren’t many jobs that give you the chance to do that.
In the afternoons, after the end of the school day, she goes up the hidden access ladder onto the roof. And up there, behind a ventilation drum above the dining room, a teacher can stand and look out across almost the whole of Beartown and have a cigarette without anyone seeing. That’s the worst habit of all.
She can see the tunnel from there, the one built under the main road to keep the children safe. She sees Leo and the girl go in. Only the girl runs out. Jeanette sees William and his guys approach from both directions. She drops her cigarette and runs for the ladder. This is a small school in a small town, but the building feels endless when you’re running through it in panic.
* * *
Kira and Maya arrive home. When Maya goes into her room, Kira sees the concert tickets on her wall. She can still remember the very first one, possibly more clearly than her daughter, and how Maya and Ana carried the tickets in their pockets for weeks. They secretly bought eye shadow and put far too much on, then cut off their denim shorts until they were way too revealing. Kira dropped them off outside the concert and made them promise to come straight out the moment it was over, and they promised and laughed, and they were only children but Kira knew she’d lost them, ever so slightly, at that moment. They ran off toward the stage hand in hand, along with hundreds of other screaming girls, and that first taste of freedom is something you can never take away from someone. Music transformed Maya and Ana, and even if they chose completely different styles of music later in life and did nothing but argue about what was “junkie music” and what was “bleep-bleep music,” they still had that in common: music saved something inside them that might otherwise have been lost. Imagination, power, a glowing spark in their chests that always reminded them: “Don’t let the bastards tell you what to be, go your own way, dance badly and sing loudly and become the best!”
Now Maya is sixteen years old and she kisses her mom on the cheek and goes into her room. Her mom sits in the kitchen thinking about all the stories about girls being trampled and crushed at concerts in recent years, about terrorists bombing arenas. What if she had known all that back then? Would she have let the girls go? Not a chance. How can you ever do that again when you know that the whole world wants to hurt your child?
* * *
Jeanette will always wonder what would have happened if she’d gotten there faster. Would William have found it easier to back down then? Would Leo have been less full of hate? Would the guys at the ends of the tunnel have been able to admit to themselves that things had gone too far?
She yanks William’s heavy body out of the way. He’s lucky; he recognizes her quickly enough to stop himself taking a swing at her, too. There’s a wild look in her eyes; they’re a fighter’s eyes, not a teacher’s. William gasps for breath and doesn’t even look at Leo when he splutters, “It was him who started it! He was asking for it!”
Jeanette will always feel ashamed of what she does next. She has no excuse. But everything that happened in the spring, the rape and silence toward one of the girls in Jeanette’s own school and the vile behavior that this community demonstrated afterward filled Jeanette with shame and anger. She’s not alone; the whole town is angry. She sees the same thing in William Lyt; he’s just angry at different things than she is. We rarely take out our anger on those who deserve it; we just take it out on whoever is standing closest.
“What did you say?” Jeanette hisses.
“He was asking for it!” William Lyt repeats.
Her kick hits him so hard in the side of his knee that his body disappears; he falls as if he’s been shot. Her balance is so perfect that she’s already standing on both feet by the time he hits the ground, so relaxed that she could have started whistling.
But when she realizes what she’s
just done, her lungs tighten. Her martial arts coach always used to stress, “Never lose control! Never let your feeling grab the wheel, Jeanette. Because that’s when you do really stupid things!”
* * *
Kira is sobbing helplessly in the kitchen, hiding her face in her sweater so her daughter won’t hear her. On the other side of the door her daughter is lying on her bed beneath walls covered with concert tickets, crying hard under the covers so her mom won’t hear her. She’s grateful that it’s so easy to fool your parents. That they’re so desperate for you to be happy that they believe you even when you’re lying.
Maya knows that her mom and dad need to be allowed to regain control of their lives, in their own ways. And take back what Kevin took from them, too. Her mom needs to feel that she’s good enough, her dad needs to rescue his hockey club, because they need to feel they can succeed at something. Stand up, hit back, win. They mustn’t end up afraid of the dark, because it won’t be possible to survive together then. Their daughter can hear them arguing, even when they aren’t saying a word. Where there used to be two wineglasses in the kitchen she now sees only one. She knows her dad is getting home later and later, sees him stand outside the door for longer and longer before coming inside. She notices the envelopes containing invitations to conferences that her mom never asks if she can attend. Maya knows that if her parents split up they’ll say it wasn’t her fault. And she’ll know that they’re lying.