"Do you remember who else was wearing those hats?" Cheryl asked.
I shook my head. I remembered the hats, but not a single face beneath them. "I'd better just start with Jodi."
"Do you know where she lives?"
"No, but I can find out."
Cheryl paused for a second. "Maybe you should ask Tyson. He'll know."
"I don't like the idea of bringing this up to Tyson. He'll think I'm accusing him."
"What if he's involved?"
"No—he's not violent like that."
"You don't call setting fires violent?"
"Yeah, but it was always a reaction to something someone else had done to him. It's like he's allergic to abuse from other kids and has a violent reaction to it. He wouldn't just go out and trash people's lives."
"But his girlfriend would."
"So did mine." It came out before I had the chance to hold back. Cheryl reeled as if I had slugged her in the face. "I'm sorry I said that."
"No," she said. "Never be sorry for telling the truth."
The next few moments were awkward and uncertain. Cheryl and I had never discussed Austin's broken ankle and the rocks she had spread out in the field. Although she made a full confession, I was the one who took the brunt of the blame. I didn't realize how much I had resented that, until now.
"I'm sorry about what happened to Austin," she said. "I still can't believe I could do something so horrible."
I took her hand and gently squeezed it. "You're not doing anything horrible now. But there are others who are."
She nodded, then she slipped her hand out from mine, and we got back to work.
"Did you hear about what happened down at the Gazilliaplex?" Jodi asked me when she answered her door not half an hour later. The Gazilliaplex was our local movie theater. It claimed the capacity to show more movies than were actually in release on any given day, but they usually just showed four or five movies on a gazillion different screens.
"When they opened today," she continued, "they found cows in the projection rooms chewing up the film and smashing all the equipment. Weird, huh?" Well, maybe not so weird, considering the fact that the owner of the Gazilliaplex was hated by kids because he ejected anyone who got caught trying to theater-surf and was fond of calling the people waiting in line "cattle."
"Tell me, Jodi, how could you know what happened when the theater only opened fifteen minutes ago?"
"Well, I just heard."
I paced a little bit on her porch, a bit unnerved by howcalm she was.
"So why are you here?" she asked. "It's not like you can ask me to the movies now." She giggled. "Not unless they're showing Steer Wars."
I turned to her sharply. "I want names," I demanded. "I want to know who it is—every last one of them, and how many there are."
She twisted her lip in a disgusted snarl. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Yeah, sure you don't. You're just as innocent as can be."
"You're acting too weird, Jared." The honesty in her expression was the most unnerving thing of all. How could she lie and lie and still not show it in her eyes? As for me, I couldn't imagine what my eyes must have been like by now.
"You're involved, and we both know it."
"I'm not involved in anything. I was at a sleepover with my friends last night."
"Swear it," I blurted.
"I swear."
"Still not good enough."
"OK, I swear on my grandmother's grave."
"Not good enough."
"Do you want me to put my hand on a Bible?"
"Yes," I said. "Yes, I do."
And she said without any hesitation, "Fine, I'll go get one." But before she went inside, she thought for a moment,and said, "Just because there're some people in town who are finally getting what they deserve, that doesn't mean me, or any of my friends are involved." Then she added, "Nobody wanted to see you expelled, Jared, but when you think about it, isn't it more likely that you and your friends did it?"
That left me speechless. "But . . . but the hats."
"They're just hats," she said, shrugging the whole thing off. "What does a hat prove?" Then she smiled at me. "I'll go get that Bible."
She went inside, but I left before she came back, because I knew that no matter what she had done, she would put her hand on that Bible, look me in the eye, and swear.
I went home after that. My mind was trying to roll into self- preservation mode by now, trying to convince me of all the things I'd rather be doing. Watching videos, playing computer games, net surfing, I'd even be happy to do homework now. But when I got home I couldn't bring myself to do much of anything at all. Tyson was gone, my parents were out, and I found myself just staring at the blinking light on the answering machine. I didn't want to hear any more bad news, so I just sat there, tossing that seashell of mine up and down, putting it to my ear, wishing I could hear a voice in there that might magically solve all my problems.
Finally I went to the answering machine and hit the button.
"Hi, Jared . . . this is Darren." I took a deep breath. Of all the ex-members of the Shadow Club, I figured Darren would be the least likely to call me. His voice sounded shaky. Scared. I hit the pause button, took a few deep breaths, then let the message continue.
"You gotta get down here," he said "It's Mr. Greene. See, I live on his block and . . . well . . . just get down here." And the message ended.
I left the house and made the long run alone to find out what had happened to Mr. Greene.
Silver
Bullet
Theory
IF THE OTHER things had been mean-spirited, what they did to Mr. Greene was downright evil, Darren was nowhere to be found when I got to his house. The curtains were drawn; no one answered the door. Clearly the only part he wanted in this was to be the messenger. He expected me to be the one to do something about it. Giving up on Darren, I made my way down the street toward Mr. Greene's home.
Sometimes houses are eerie. Their windows can be eyes, their door a mouth. Today Mr. Greene's house didn't just resemble a face; it looked like a corpse. The police had already come and gone, leaving behind the paint-splattered house, with broken windows. When I saw it I wanted to leave, but I knew I couldn't. I knew I had to go in there and see it for myself. Not the way you have to see an accident by the side of the road, but the way you sometimes have to sift through the wreckage of a storm to see if some part of your own life is lying there, too.
He was inside, slowly picking through the wreckage.
There was a lot of it. Anything breakable was broken, and the things that would not break had heavy dents that could only have come from a baseball bat.
Mr. Greene was being careful with the debris, gingerly picking up pieces of a broken plate, as though it still could be used, carefully placing it into a plastic trash bag. His motions were deliberate, respectful. He was so wrapped up in the task, he didn't notice me there.
"This looks worse than my room," I said.
He turned toward me, but didn't appear to be surprised to see me.
"And you thought you had no friends."
"What do you mean?"
Mr. Greene shook his head bitterly. "Don't you see? This was retaliation. Your plan worked, Jared; we convinced the whole school that you and the Shadow Club were expelled. So your secret admirers decided to retaliate."
Until that moment it hadn't occurred to me that any of this had been done for my benefit—as if it were something I wanted.
He returned to his task. Now he was trying to piece together the shredded fragments of a canvas. The empty frame lay in pieces on the exposed springs of an easy chair that wasn't so easy anymore.
I knelt down to help, as if anything we did could actually fix the painting.
"It's an original Thomas Kinkaid," he said. "We had always talked about getting one. My wife got it for our anniversary one year."
"I didn't know you were married."
"Was. My wife died some ti
me ago."
I looked down. "I'm sorry."
But he just waved it off. "It was a long time ago—before I even moved here."
It's funny, but I never imagined my teachers having a life outside of school. I mean, sure I know that they did—but knowing and being able to imagine that life were two different things. I couldn't picture Mr. Greene doing anything but trying to get inside kids' heads to figure what made them tick. Knowing he had a past was an unexpected challenge to what Mr. Greene would call my "comfort zone."
I pieced two of the colorful strips close together and blurred my vision to make the rip go away, but that illusion didn't last long.
"I'm sure whoever did this didn't know," I said.
Mr. Greene only scoffed. "Do you think it would have stopped them if they did know?"
Mr. Greene took one more look at the fragmented landscape, and sighed. "What turns kids into monsters, Jared?" It was a strange thing to hear from a guidance counselor.
"Is this a multiple choice or an essay question?" I responded, holding up a strip of the torn canvas. "Because if it's an essay, I'm gonna need more paper."
He actually laughed at that. Not much of one, but at least it was something.
"I don't know," I said. "Maybe some kids are born that way." But even as I said it, I knew it wasn't that easy—because I had been a monster for a while. I wasn't born that way. I didn't stay that way either. So maybe I didn't know where the monsters came from, but I think I did know how to get rid of them.
"Silver bullets," I said before I even knew what I meant.
"Excuse me."
"You need a silver bullet to get rid of a monster. That, or a stake through the heart."
"Is this a joke?"
"No . . . What I mean is that it takes something really sharp and painful to kill that monster once it shows up in a kid—otherwise the monster will keep on going."
Mr. Greene nodded, realizing what I was saying. "Painful like almost drowning Tyson?" he reminded. "Like driving him to burn down his own home?"
I grimaced at the thought, and mimed pulling a stake out of my heart. "Yeah." Watching Tyson's house bum down was like receiving a silver bullet and stake at the same time. Living through that was more than enough to kill my nasty little monster.
Mr. Greene looked at me then in that vice-principalish sort of way. "One problem with your silver bullet theory," he said. "When Tyson almost died, it truly was your silver bullet. But this time, none of it stopped when Alec almost died. It only got worse." He didn't have to say anymore for me to know what he meant, and it was too awful to say aloud—as if mentioning it would make it so.
If this new armor-plated Shadow Club was resistant to silver bullets, it would take a mightier blow to kill it and make these kids see reason. Yes, someone had almost died, but for this new improved Shadow Club, almost wasn't good enough.
I didn't go home after that—Tyson might be back, and I couldn't face him. Did he have any clue that his girlfriend was a monster? Did it ever cross his mind that the girl of his dreams was at the heart of everyone else's nightmare, along with who knew how many others? I wanted to tell my parents, and have Jodi brought to justice, but my imagination began to twist all my thoughts. What if my parents didn't believe me? What if Jodi and her conspirators told better lies than I told the truth? I was the one acting shifty, not her. Who would anyone believe? Sure, my parents had been set straight by Principal Diller, but that didn't matter. They had been convinced I was capable of pure premeditated evil. That was different from what happened back in October. Back then, the evil snuck up on me—I never knew it was there until it ran its course and did all its damage. But I knew better now. To know better but to still follow that path would put me in a different class completely—a path my parents had believed I had chosen.
With so much hanging over my head at home, I decided to go to Cheryl's instead. I'm sure she had heard even more stories of cruelty racing through the well-worn gossip lines. She would be feeling much the same way I was. They say misery loves company, but I don't think that's true. I wasn't looking forward to sharing Mr. Greene's plight with Cheryl, I just felt I had no other choice.
I fought my instinct to run to her house. I was always running. Mostly I just ran in circles, but lately my pace had become erratic, my goal uncertain. I was no longer running a circuit, but a maze. So today I walked, forcing my feet to conform to the slower pace.
All the way to Cheryl's house, I kept having the uncanny feeling I was being watched. Paranoia, I told myself. So much unwanted attention had been thrown in my direction lately that I figured it was just my mind playing tricks on me. If I had listened to my intuition then, things might have come out a lot differently. I'm still not sure if that's good or bad. But the way it happened, I never saw it coming. I never felt the blow to my head before it was lights out.
There are a lot of things about being knocked unconscious that you can only learn from experience. Like that strange sense of disorientation when you come to, and losing the memory of how and where you got knocked out to begin with. That's how it was with me, when I woke up in a swiveling bucket seat in a van that stunk to high heaven.
"Welcome back, loser," said a voice that I only dimly recognized. "How was dreamland?"
I tried to move my arms and legs but couldn't. At first I thought it was me—that I had somehow been paralyzed-- but then I realized my arms and legs were tied to the plush leather seat by safety belts that had been cut from the van. It was hard enough to get out of those things when they were just tangled—but tied, there was no hope of freeing myself.
My mouth tasted like blood, and the putrid smell in the air made me want to gag. It smelled of disinfectant and air freshener, but underneath it all was the unyielding stench of skunk. I thought it was dark outside, but then I realized the van was in a garage—Alec's detached garage, far enough from his house so even if I screamed no one would hear me.
"I gave you the best seat," Alec said. "The one that swivels." He kicked my seat, turning me sharply around to face him. He sat in the bench seat in the back. The moment I saw his eyes I knew something was horribly wrong.
"Of course, that's also the seat that the skunk sprayed, but only the best for Jared Mercer."
"Alec—what are you, nuts? What am I doing here? What do you want?"
He didn't answer. He only smiled, but it was more like a grimace. A leer. Suddenly I felt like I was being crushed under the wheels of the van rather than sitting in it.
"The school might think expelling you was punishment enough, but it's not enough for me," Alec said, kicking my chair again. I spun around and around until he caught the chair with his foot.
"Expelled? What are you talking about?" But one more look at his face and I knew. The pain throbbing in my head now beat a faster, heavier rhythm. "Principal Diller never told you?"
"Never told me what?" The contempt in his voice was proof of how bad the break in communication had been. It all made sense now—how well Alec had played his part during the debate, how his voice had quivered with anger, how his face had turned red. He hadn't been acting! He had thought it was real! It was widely known, even among the students, that Principal "Diller Do-Wrong" was an occasional screwup. But he never screwed up when it really mattered. Until now.
"It was all an act," I tried to explain. "It was an act to flush out the person who really did all those things to you! You were supposed to know. How could you not know?"
"You'd lie to get out of anything, wouldn't you? You're so pathetic."
I was light-years away from reaching him—he was so far gone in his hatred and need for revenge that nothing I could say would convince him. I was scared now. As scared as I was in that burning lighthouse, because I knew that Alec was tipping over the edge.
"Alec," I said calmly, burying my fear as deep inside as I could, "you have to let me go. This is a misunderstanding, Whatever you're going to do, you'll be sorry you did it. So untie me, and let's just walk out of here."
"Forget it." He hopped up and grabbed something behind the seat. Something big. It was, of all things, a big empty water jug—a clear plastic twenty-gallon bottle, the kind they use for watercoolers. We used to use those things to bat tennis balls—grip the neck, swing away, and tennis balls would fly for a mile. But the neck had been sawed off this water jug, and the hole was covered with duct tape.
"How about a taste of your own medicine?" Alec held up the jug so I could see inside. Few things in the world could have frightened me more than I already was—but what I saw in that jug brought me to a new level of despair.
The jug was full of bees.
"How allergic are you to these things, Jared?" he asked cheerfully.
"A single sting . . . could kill me." I tried to show him my med-alert bracelet, but as usual I wasn't wearing it.
"A single sting, huh? What happens? Does your head swell up like a balloon and pop? Does your tongue turn purple and your eyes explode?"
I swallowed hard. "Something like that." Everything I said just goaded him further. He was loving this, and he didn't care. At this moment he didn't care how sorry he'd feel tomorrow, and by then it wouldn't matter to me either, because I'd be dead.
"Please, Alec," I begged. "Please, I'll do anything. ANYTHING you want. I'll leave town. I'll run away. You'll never have to see me again—just please don't let the bees loose."
"I wasn't planning to let the bees loose."
I breathed a shuddering sigh of relief, until he said, "If I let them loose, they might sting me, too." Then he pulled a single strip of duct tape from the opening, leaving a slit about eight inches long. "These bees are just for you." He lifted the jug in both hands, turned it upside down, and in a single swift motion, jammed it down over my head.
Instantly I was on the inside. A dozen bees swarmed around my head, bumping into my cheek, my neck, my eyebrows, as lethal as bullets. I wanted to scream but couldn't. I didn't dare open my mouth, because they'd fly inside and sting my throat. I would suffocate on my own swollen tonsils. I tugged my hands, but the bonds wouldn't give. I rolled my shoulders, but still the jug wouldn't come off. It just tilted left and right, forward and backward.