I stopped and whipped around to face her. That was almost a mistake. I felt so guilty—I could see hurt in her face—but knew I had to get away from her. To get away from Student Council. To get away from Meghan. Away from Alex Gold who wanted me gone so bad he had Josh babysit me and Troy threaten me at his party. Away from all the confusion and hurt.
I couldn’t tell Jessica the truth about what had happened with Troy at the party. She’d already strong-armed Meghan into accepting me. She would probably go breaking down Troy’s door and put him under citizen’s arrest. I could imagine her making me her cause, forcing everyone in Garvin to accept me again, whether they wanted to or not. I was sick of being Garvin’s charity project, always under scrutiny, always in the spotlight. I just couldn’t do it anymore.
“Well, you were wrong. We’re not friends. I was only doing this because I felt guilty about the notebook. They don’t want me there, Jessica. And I don’t want to be there anymore. Nick couldn’t stand your little crowd and neither can I.”
Her face reddened. “In case you haven’t noticed, Valerie, Nick is dead. So it doesn’t matter what he thinks anymore. And for the record, I don’t think it ever did except for a few minutes in May. But I thought you were different. I thought you were better. You saved my life, remember?”
I squinted my eyes and peered right into hers, pretending I had confidence to match hers. “Don’t you get it? I didn’t mean to save you,” I said. “I just wanted him to stop shooting. You could have been anyone.”
Her face showed no emotion, although her breath started coming in harder rasps. I could see her chest rise and fall with it.
“I don’t believe you,” she said. “I don’t believe a word.”
“Well, believe it. Because it’s true. You can finish your little StuCo project without me.”
I whirled around and continued walking.
Just as I was about to reach the double doors, Jessica’s voice rang out at my back. “You seriously think this has been easy for me?” she called. I stopped, turned. She was still standing where I’d left her. Her face looked funny, almost writhing with emotion. “Do you?” She dropped her backpack on the floor and started walking toward me, steadily, one hand on her chest. “Well, it’s not. I still have nightmares. I still hear the gunshots. I still… see Nick’s face every time I look at… you.” She had begun crying, her chin wrinkling like a little kid’s, but her voice was steady and strong. “I didn’t like you… before. I can’t change that. I’ve had to fight my friends to include you. I’ve had to fight my parents. But at least I’m trying.”
“Nobody told you to try,” I said. “Nobody said you had to make me your friend.”
She shook her head wildly. “You’re wrong,” she said. “May second told me. I lived, and that made everything different.”
“You’re crazy,” I said, but my voice was wobbly and uncertain.
“And you’re selfish,” she said. “If you walk away from me now, you’re just plain selfish.”
She got within just a few paces of me and all I could think about was getting out of there, whether that made me selfish or not. I plunged through the doors and into the open air. I fell into Mom’s car and sank back into the seat. My chest felt heavy and cold. My chin spasmed and my throat felt full.
“Let’s go home,” I said as Mom drove away.
35
“Still not talking?” Dr. Hieler asked, settling into his chair. He handed me a Coke. I said nothing. I hadn’t said a word since he came out into the waiting room to get me. Hadn’t said a word when he asked if I wanted a Coke, nor acknowledged him when he told me he was going to step out to get us both something to drink and would be right back. I just sat, sulkily, on his couch, slouched back into the cushions with my arms crossed and a scowl darkening my face.
We sat in silence for a while.
“Did you bring me that notebook? I still want to see your drawings,” he said.
I shook my head.
“Chess?”
I moved from my seat on the couch and sat across the chess board from him.
“You know,” he said, slowly, making his move on the chess board. “I’m beginning to think something’s upsetting you.” He tipped his eyes toward me and grinned. “I read a book about human behavior once. That’s what makes me so adept at recognizing when someone’s upset.”
I didn’t return his smile. Just looked back down at the board and made my move.
We played for a while in silence, me promising myself all the while that I wouldn’t say anything. That I’d just go back to that friendly place of quiet and solitude that had cradled me in the hospital. Just curl up into myself until I disappeared. Never speak to anyone again. The problem was, it was so hard to be silent with Dr. Hieler. He cared too much. He was too safe.
“Want to talk about it?” he asked, and before I could do anything to stop it, a tear rolled down my cheek.
“Jessica and I aren’t friends anymore,” I said. I rolled my eyes and swiped at my cheek angrily. “And I don’t even know why I’m crying about it. It’s not like we ever really were friends anyway. It’s so stupid.”
“How’d this come about?” he asked, abandoning the chess game and sitting back. “She finally decide you were too much of a loser to be her friend?”
“No,” I said. “Jessica would never say that.”
“So who did? Meghan?”
“No,” I said.
“Ginny?”
“I haven’t even seen Ginny since the first day of school.”
“Hm,” he said, nodding his head. He looked at the chess board thoughtfully. “So you’re the only one talking then, huh?”
“She still wants to be friends,” I added. “But I can’t.”
“Because something happened,” he said.
I glanced at him sharply. He had crossed his arms and was running his forefinger over his bottom lip like he always does when he’s ferreting out information on me.
I sighed. “It has nothing to do with why I blew Jessica off.”
“Just a coincidence,” he said.
I didn’t answer. Just shook my head and let the tears roll. “I just want it to go away. I just want all the drama to stop. Nobody would believe me anyway,” I whispered. “Nobody would care.”
Dr. Hieler shifted, leaned forward in his chair, and leveled his eyes so they looked deeply into mine. “I would. On both counts.”
I believed him. If anyone would care about what happened at the party, about what happened with Troy, it was Dr. Hieler. And holding it all in, what felt comforting just a week ago, suddenly felt heavy and almost physically painful. Next thing I knew, I found myself, unbelievably, talking. Like even the silence wasn’t friendly to me anymore.
I told Dr. Hieler everything. He sat back in his chair and listened, his eyes growing more and more vivid, his body growing more tense as I talked. Together we called the police to report Troy’s threat. They’d check into things, they said. There probably wasn’t much of anything they could do. Especially if you’re not even positive it was a real gun, they said. But they didn’t laugh at me for telling. They didn’t say I deserved it. They didn’t accuse me of lying.
When my session was over, Dr. Hieler walked me out to the waiting room, where Mom sat alone reading a magazine.
“Now you need to tell your mom what happened,” he said. Mom looked up, startled. Her mouth made a small o shape as she looked from him to me. “And you’re going to work your ass off to get better,” he warned. “You don’t get to just check out now. I won’t let you. You’ve worked way too hard. You have more hard work ahead of you.”
But I didn’t feel like working hard, and when I got home all I could think about was flopping back on my bed and sleeping.
I told Mom everything in the car, including Dad’s threat on the side of the highway when he picked me up. She looked impassive, disinterested while I talked, and said nothing when I finished. But as soon as we got home she called Dad. I climbed the
stairs to my bedroom, listening to Mom’s voice ratchet up notch by notch as she talked, blaming him for knowing and not telling. For picking me up without calling her. For not being at home where he belonged in the first place.
After a while I heard the front door open, followed by Mom’s murmurs again. I opened my door and peeked downstairs. Dad was standing in the entryway, his hands on his hips, his face lined with annoyance.
I noticed he was in street clothes, which I found odd because it was a work day and Dad never left work before dark. But then I noticed some splotches of paint on his shirt and realized that he must have been at home today, painting Briley’s apartment. Making it theirs. I quietly closed my door and paced to the window. Briley was sitting in the car at the curb waiting for him.
I heard my mother’s anxious voice mumble again. Heard him thunder back at her, “What was I supposed to do?” A pause and then his voice again, “Send her back to the damn psych ward, that’s what I think. I don’t give a shit what that shrink says about progress!” And then I heard the front door slam. I paced to the window again and watched him get into the car with Briley and drive away.
Not long after Dad left, I sensed movement around the door and opened one eye. Frankie stood leaning tentatively up against the doorframe. He looked somehow older, with his hair buzzed short and glistening with gel and his button-down shirt buttoned loosely over an Abercrombie T-shirt and his factory-faded jeans. His face looked unnaturally smooth and innocent and he had these permanent little pink patches over his cheeks that made him look constantly embarrassed. Maybe he was always embarrassed. Look at the life he had to deal with.
Ever since Dad moved out, Frankie had pretty much gone to live with his best friend, Mike. I’d overheard Mom telling Mike’s mom that she needed some time to get things straight with her oldest and sure appreciated Mike’s family for taking Frankie in. I figured it was this time spent with Mike that accounted for Frankie’s transformation. Mike’s mom was one of those perfect moms who wouldn’t ever have a kid with spiked hair, much less one who shot up a school. Frankie was a good kid. Even I could recognize that.
“Hey,” he said. “You ’kay?”
I nodded, sat up. “Yeah, I’m okay. Just tired I guess.”
“Are they really gonna send you back to the hospital?”
I rolled my eyes. “Dad’s just blowing off steam. He wants me out of his hair.”
“Do you need to go back? I mean, are you crazy or something?”
I almost laughed. In fact, I did chuckle just a little, which made my head ache. I shook my head no. I wasn’t crazy. At least I didn’t think I was. “They’re just upset right now,” I said. “They’ll get over it.”
“Well, if you go…” he started and then stopped. He picked at my bedspread with chewed fingernails. “If you go, I’ll write to you,” he said.
I wanted to hug him. Console him. Tell him it wouldn’t be necessary because there was no way I was going to go to some stupid psych ward. That I’d just stay away from Dad and he’d eventually calm down. I wanted to tell him our family would be repaired—would be better, even.
But I didn’t say any of those things. I didn’t say anything at all, because somehow saying nothing seemed more humane than giving him all these reassurances. After all, how was I supposed to know anything at all?
He brightened suddenly. “Dad’s getting me a four-wheeler!” he said excitedly. “He told me on the phone last night. And he’s going to take me out and show me how to ride it. Isn’t that awesome?”
“That’s awesome,” I said with as much conviction as I could muster. It was cool to see Frankie smile and get excited again, even if I didn’t believe for a minute that Dad was going to buy him anything. That would be so… dad-like… and we both knew that our dad was totally not dad-like.
“You can ride it, too,” he said. “If, you know, you come over to Dad’s sometime.”
“Thanks. That’d be fun.”
He sat around some more, looking uncomfortable the way boys do when they’re sitting somewhere under extreme duress. If I were a good sister I would have told him to go ahead and do something more fun. But I didn’t mind sitting there with him. He radiated something that made me feel good inside. Hopeful.
But pretty soon he got up. “Well. I gotta get to Mike’s. We’re going to church tonight.” He ducked his head, as if church were embarrassing. He walked toward the door. “Well… see ya,” he said awkwardly. And he was gone.
I sank back into my pillows and watched the horses on my wallpaper go nowhere. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine myself on one of them again, the way I used to do when I was little. But I couldn’t see it. All I could see was the horses bucking me off time and again, dumping me on my butt on the hard ground. They had faces, too—Dad’s, Mr. Angerson’s, Troy’s, Nick’s. Mine.
After a while, I rolled to my back and stared up at the ceiling, realizing at once that there was something I had to do. I couldn’t change the past. But if I were ever to feel whole again I would have to say goodbye to it. Tomorrow, I told myself. Tomorrow is the day.
36
Even though I’d never been to Nick’s grave, I knew exactly where it was. For one thing it was on the news about every ten seconds for the first two months after the shooting. For another I’d heard enough people talking about it to get a pretty good idea.
I hadn’t told anyone I was coming here today. Who would I tell? Mom? She’d cry, forbid me, probably follow me, screaming at me out the open driver’s side window. Dad? Well, we weren’t exactly on speaking terms. Dr. Hieler? I would have, but I didn’t exactly know I was going to do this the last time I saw him. I probably should have; Dr. Hieler probably would have driven me, and right now my leg wouldn’t hurt so much from walking all this way. My friends? Well, I had kind of kicked all of them out of my life, one way or another.
I walked down a few rows of neatly kept graves with polished new headstones and unweathered bouquets and found it between his grandfather Elmer and his aunt Mazie, both of whom I’d heard of, but neither of whom I’d ever met.
I stood and stared for a minute. The wind, which had only begun to shake off the winter, played around my ankles and made me shiver. It all felt right—my desperation, my chest aching from exertion, the chill, the wind, the gray. This was how graves were supposed to be, right? It’s how they always were in the movies anyway. Cold, murky. Did the sun ever shine when you visited the eternal resting place of someone you loved? I doubted it.
Nick’s grave gleamed just like those around it, the light of the overcast sky playing great gray shadows across the words. Still I could read them:
NICHOLAS ANTHONY LEVIL
1990–2008
Beloved Son
The words “Beloved Son” took me by surprise. It was small, italicized, almost hiding in the grass. As if in apology. I thought about his mom.
Of course I’d seen her on TV, but it never seemed like the real woman. I knew her as “Ma,” just as Nick had called her, and she was always so laid-back and nice to me. Always sort of in the background, intent to let Nick and me do our own thing—never suffocating, never issuing edicts about proper behavior. Just cool. I liked her. I often thought of her as my mother-in-law and enjoyed the fantasy.
Of course Ma would have wanted Nick remembered as a “Beloved Son.” Of course she’d do it in the most laid-back way possible—whispering it to him in tiny letters on his headstone. Just a whisper. You were beloved, son. You were my beloved. Even after all of this, I still remember the beloved you. I can’t forget.
There was a bouquet of plastic blue roses sticking up from a built-in metal vase at the top of the headstone. I bent and touched one of the brittle petals, wondering if Nick would’ve been the type to want flowers on his grave, and then I was taken aback that I had never bothered to know that about him. Three years together and I’d never bothered to ask him if he liked flowers, if his favorites were roses, if he found the unnatural color of blue on plastic ros
es to be absurd. And suddenly that felt like a great tragedy in itself, my not knowing.
I lowered myself to my knees, my leg screaming under me. I reached out with my forefinger and traced Nick’s name. Nicholas. I smirked, remembering how I teased him about his name.
“Nicholas,” I had sung, dodging around the corner between the kitchen and dining room, holding the framed photo I’d just snatched off the fireplace mantel in my hands. “Oh, Nicholas! Come here, Nicholas!”
“You’re going to regret it,” he said from somewhere in the living room. There was a smile in his voice and, even though I was teasing him over a given name that he truly hated being called, I knew he wanted to catch me not to punish me but to be playful. “When I get my hands on you…”
He jumped around the corner with an “Aha!” I squealed and ran, laughing through the kitchen and up the stairs toward the bathroom.
“Nicholas Nicholas Nicholas!” I yelled through my laughter. I could hear him laughing and grunting behind me, just on my tail. “Nicholas Anthony!”
“That’s it!” he cried, lunging for me and catching me around the waist just short of the bathroom. “You’re gonna pay!” He’d knocked me to the floor and flopped on top of me, tickling me until I cried.
Seemed so long ago now.
I traced the name on his headstone again with my finger. And then again. Somehow it made me feel like the old Nick—the one tickling me on the hallway floor outside the bathroom on the second floor of his house—was more alive than he’d ever been.
“I don’t hate you,” I whispered, and then I repeated it, louder. “I don’t.” A bluejay answered me in a tree off to my left. I searched the leaves and branches with my eyes, but never found it.
“It’s about time,” said a voice behind me.
I jumped and whirled around, falling off my knees and onto my butt. Duce was sitting on a concrete bench behind me, leaning forward, hands dangling between his knees.
“How long have you been sitting here?” I asked, trying to slow my heart by resting my palm on my chest.