“Should we talk about it?” she asks. “It’s got to be eating you alive.”
I let go of her face but suddenly some part of me wants to push my palm against her cheek and keep pushing until she falls off the steps.
“Nothing to talk about,” I say instead, getting to my feet. “I’m going upstairs.”
She follows me like I knew she would, and then we’re in my bedroom and she’s on top of me, her head tilted back, her long hair cascading over her shoulders, past her bare, milk-white chest. She unzipped her dress but didn’t take it all the way off, so it sits around her middle and over my hips. I only took off my pants. She digs her fingernails into my scratchy black shirt, pretending to be into this, even though she’s not. It doesn’t matter. I don’t really need her to be.
I’m no better anyway, if I’m being honest. I keep thinking about history class last fall. Ms. Leeland teaching us about Kennedy’s assassination. She played it on the television and we watched, all of us leaning forward and holding our breaths, waiting for that moment the president went down. Leeland turned it off just before it happened, said we didn’t need to see it. There was a tiny uproar and I was part of it, pissed enough to call the whole thing a tease. Leeland didn’t like that, judging by the look she gave me for it. But I YouTubed it later, like I figure everyone else did. I’ll never forget that spray of blood from Kennedy’s head or Jackie flailing in her pink dress, desperate to make it all end differently somehow. I couldn’t imagine what that was like, having someone die in front of you in that way. Now I know. What’s really fucked up is they still have that bloody dress locked away somewhere, preserving the gore.
I didn’t understand it then, why someone would do that, but I understand it now. It actually makes less sense to throw something like that away, the last part of someone you have.
Katy gets off me and I let my gaze drift out the window beside the bed. At first there’s nothing out there, just my reflection faint in the glass, and then I blink and there’s something, someone—this wiry thirteen-year-old boy materializes out of nowhere on the sidewalk.
I know you, I think, and as soon as I think it, my heart flattens out and goes still.
The boy’s back is to me, his head tilted toward the basketball still floating in the puddle where we left it. The basketball Jackson gave me. I sit up and that dead feeling in the center of my chest gets worse. I know you.
“You were so mean to him,” Katy whispers.
“What?” I turn back to her. She hasn’t pulled her dress on. “Katy, what the hell did you just say to me?”
“Nothing.”
Her eyes are fixed on a point beyond me, some point through me. I don’t know. I look back out the window and the kid has disappeared. So has the basketball.
* * *
After Katy’s gone, I hit the shower and then I hit the fridge, and then I hit the couch because the cold leftover spaghetti I finished off isn’t sitting right. I stare at the blank TV screen and think about all the television Jackson isn’t watching, will never watch, which is stupid because he likely wouldn’t be watching it anyway, the fucking bookworm. I’d be watching it with my phone in one hand while he told me all about whatever book he was reading because I’m so tragically under-read. Which I guess is true. But the thing is, Jackson didn’t know what it was like to stare at pages and have to untangle the letters on them into words, and by the time you’ve got the words to make a story, you’re exhausted. It drove me nuts, him and Matheson going over all the old Goosebumps books Matheson’s mom stockpiled from thrift stores. A whole world of killer dummies and scarecrows they never let me in on. I can read, even though it’s hard. Hell, I even like doing it. I just choose what I read carefully because it takes me a while and there’s plenty else I can fill that time with, and with more of it too. Jackson acted like it was his God-given duty to catch me up on the world of books, and he wasn’t too bad at it either. I could tell you everything about Game of Thrones before it hit the small screen.
I wonder who’s going to catch me up now.
“Nate. Wanna play?”
I blink and Ian’s there, waving one hand in front of my face and holding an Xbox controller in the other. I can’t believe I didn’t hear him because he stomps around the house most days like someone’s paying him to do it. He reminds me of Jackson when he was young, kind of. You get the sense the boy he is isn’t too far off from the man he’s going to become. I tell him to fuck off because I’m busy and then I sink deeper into the couch. He scowls.
“Fuck you,” he snaps back, but the vehemence is lost in how shrill his voice gets, how it splits right over the fuck. He turns beet red and faces the television. Puberty’s not been so kind to my baby brother. He’s going through this stage where he reminds me of the Xenomorph in Alien, and by that I mean he looks like a weirdly elongated dick most of the time.
I close my eyes for a while until Ian curses and then I open them to check his progress. I’m a better player than he is. He’s in an alleyway, cornered by zombies, which is how it usually ends up happening in this game. Melee is his preferred method of combat, usually, but when there’s this much of a horde, the only thing you can do is shoot your way out. He pushes a button and his baseball bat disappears, swapped out for an assault rifle, and then zombie heads are exploding everywhere, a massacre. He works his way through and then he heals himself from what little damage he took before moving on, a pile of corpses in his wake. A cold sweat breaks out on the back of my neck.
Is that Matheson?
Ian’s character slowly moves down an alleyway, a telltale sound cue alerting him to a special infected nearby. He crouches and then creeps his way to a weapons cache and finds a sniper rifle. He looks through the scope and everything seems to recede, the living room disappearing itself for a different place, a different time.
What the fuck is he doing?
What’s he got in his—
Crack. Ian fires the gun. The bullet meets its target. The weirdly soft thud of its body follows, falling from the top of a building onto the ground.
JacksonJacksonJacksonnomanpleaseno—
I lean back into the couch, swallowing hard and breathing heavily. Too heavily. That must be what gets Ian’s attention because next thing I know, his small hands are on my shoulders, a tight, yet somehow still weak grip. He says, “Nate.” And he sounds just scared enough that it clears the fog in my head. He stares down at me and I want to tell him he’s a baby, but not in the way I would to piss him off. Just that he’s fucking young is all, and his hands are so tiny. He relaxes a bit when I finally register him and says, “You went, like—weird.”
“I’m fine.”
“I’m supposed to tell Mom and Dad if you act weird.”
I glare at him, daring him to do it, to carve out a spot for himself on my shit list. He knows better than anyone else that that’s the worst place in the world to be. But he doesn’t crack, the little pissant, so he just might risk it. I push him away.
“Don’t be a fucking dick,” I tell him. “And get lost for real this time.”
He turns the game off and stomps out of the room. I smirk after him, but as soon as he’s gone, that goes too and I’m sorry for all the silence that’s left behind. Ian’s not so bad, really. It’s just—something’s bugging me. I mean more than everything else that’s bugging me. I walk over to the window and stare out of it, my gaze skimming the street, but it’s empty.
* * *
When we were kids, I used to dream about Matheson. The same dream, over and over. And the weirdest part is he never did anything to me in it. He was just there, like I didn’t want him to be.
* * *
When my parents come home, I’m still on the couch flipping through the channels, and the strange thing is, I don’t remember getting up. At all. I don’t remember Ian signing off for the night, but he must’ve. I just feel like I’ve been sitting and my index finger has been pushing the channel button for a while before the front door opens and the couch cushions on
either side of me depress. Dad claps a hand on my shoulder but he doesn’t leave it there, would never leave it there because he doesn’t really know how to dad. Also, he’s got to make room for Mom, who has to put both her arms around me, no matter how awkward a position she forces us all in to do it. She’s so bony the comfort she thinks she offers feels more like a punishment.
“How are the Parkers?” My voice crackles. How long has it been since I used it? My eyes drift to the clock on the wall. After midnight. Jesus.
“Not too good,” my dad says, just as useless as he always is when it comes to the more human stuff. Maybe his lack of being able to say the right thing is where I get it from. I’m sure Mom did all the Parker-consoling while he just sat there. “Not too good at all.”
“How are you?” Mom asks. I shrug. Part of me wants to throw Dad’s words back in their faces—not too good, not too good at all—so they could hear how absurd they really sound, but I won’t. Mom’s hand skims my hair. “Tell us what you need.”
“Nothing,” I say. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine, Nate,” Mom says, which doesn’t really leave me much to follow up with. I shrug again and she persists. “Tell us what’s on your mind. Don’t bottle it up. You know what happens when you do that.”
“I don’t know.” But they’re not satisfied with that. I keep my eyes on the television, some infomercial about a fancy blender. I clear my throat. “I was thinking about—about when we were kids. Me and Matheson. Remember that?”
Like they would ever forget. I feel the two of them look at each other over the top of my head. I lean back a little, waiting, because somebody owes me an apology, I think, and I would be okay to start with them. We’re sorry we doubted you, Nate. We’re sorry we didn’t understand what you were trying to tell us at the time. You were right all along. You knew.
“You can’t blame yourself,” Mom tells me.
But that’s not what I meant at all.
* * *
I open my eyes to Ian bitching about how I liked Jackson too, so why don’t I get to stay home? He shouts it in the hall right outside my room just to wake me up. I guess that means no one’s going to force me to go to school. I don’t know how many days you get off after your best friend’s insides end up all over your outsides, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to take them all.
I roll onto my side and close my eyes but sleep doesn’t find me again, so I wait until I’m sure Mom and Dad have left for work and then I crawl downstairs. My stomach’s too uneasy for something solid, so I grab one of Mom’s protein shakes. My mother is obsessed with her weight; she can’t trust herself to eat a meal, so she drinks them all. I down it in two swigs and it’s chalky. If this is what she’s living on, no wonder she’s so fucking sad-looking all the time.
I lean against the kitchen counter and stare out the window. It’s gray. It’s been gray a lot lately, the weather in some weird synchronicity with everything going on. I move from counter to kitchen table, sifting through the mail. I get cards just about every day. Lots of them are from people I don’t even know, all of them telling me how brave I am because I had a body on top of me and a gun pointed at my face. Sorry, sorry your best friend is dead. My mom’s keeping them all, like these are the kind of mementos you want to look back on. I don’t know. Maybe they would be, if they said the thing I really want to hear. I wonder what kind of cards Jackson’s parents are getting. Matheson’s.
I pace the kitchen until I spot an open letter next to the phone. I don’t think anything of it until I see the signature on the bottom. Miri Howard. It makes me feel something like—not nostalgia, but a turning inside out. Like my body is smaller than it actually is. Some fucked-up mental reversion into a previous self.
Dr. Howard.
This is how I remember Miri Howard: dumpy and middle-aged. So she’s got to be even dumpier than that now. Definitely older. I was only thirteen when I saw her, and even then I couldn’t understand why she was in such a rush to be so damn geriatric. How can you trust somebody like that enough to tell them whatever’s in your heart? That’s what she said to me that first day. Tell me what’s in your heart. I was hungry because I hadn’t eaten lunch yet—my parents promised me McDonald’s after the therapy session was over—and my knuckles hadn’t healed up, is what I think I said. Dr. Howard didn’t like that at all.
You really hurt that boy, Nate. Aren’t you sorry?
I pick up the letter—it’s dated last week—and skim over it because what the fuck does Dr. Howard want with any of this. Extend my condolences. . . . Given our history, I thought I’d let you know I’m here for Nate. . . . After a trauma like this, if he needs to address anything he’s feeling—fear, depression, guilt. . . . Guilt?
I laugh and it echoes hollowly around the room.
“I didn’t kill anybody,” I say to no one.
She closes out her condolences with Call if you need anything.
Her letter next to the phone.
Goddamn it.
* * *
Time for some recon. At lunch, I get in my BMW and I drive over to the middle school. I sit in the car and stare at the building. How do you trust a box like that now? Pressure cooker of kids, all of them hating or loving each other too much. And then those special few, the Kirby kids. Just give me five minutes, and I could weed ’em out. I know I could. Because I knew Kirby Matheson before he knew he was Kirby Matheson.
And I really hurt that boy.
It’s fifteen minutes before I drag my feet out of the car and walk them into the school. When I push through the front doors, the smell is—all schools smell the same, I think. Sweat and cleaner and paper. It turns my stomach enough I’m afraid that if I take one wrong step, I’ll vomit. I swallow hard, tugging at the collar of my overshirt, pulling it away from my neck and adjusting the collar of the T-shirt underneath it. For a second I think I smell blood. I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth—all that stuff they tell you to do that’s supposed to help you when you’re panicking but doesn’t really help at all. A locker slams shut and the sharp, surprising cut of sound makes me flinch like a pussy.
When I find my feet again, sweet-talking the faculty is easy. Maybe easier now because of Jackson. I don’t have to work so hard at charming; all I’ve got to do is make them feel like their worthless condolences mean something to me. I tell them I’m here for Ian and Didn’t my parents call, let you know I was picking him up? They were supposed to call. This whole thing with Jackson, it’s just thrown them, I guess. . . .
It works but it kind of feels like something I should apologize to Jackson for. Then again, I hope if I were the one who bit it, he’d use my name to open as many doors as he could for himself because he needed all the help he could get. All the help I could give him. Sometimes I wonder if I hadn’t picked him whether or not he’d have been next to Matheson in the school that day, a gun in his own hands.
Sometimes I think I saved him.
I stand in front of the open doors to the cafeteria, trying to hear myself think over the swell of voices—the talking, laughing, shouting, shrieking—of mouths chewing, bodies navigating the spaces between each other. The clatter of trays and cutlery hitting the tables. My feet are stuck again, don’t seem to want to direct me forward. I search the room for my brother but at first, it’s like everyone looks alike. Moving targets.
Ian and I catch sight of each other at the exact same moment. His eyes widen in disbelief and his pimply face gets all flushed. I nod and he stumbles over to me with all the grace of someone who’s only just discovered they’ve got feet and they’re thinking too hard about how to use them. As soon as he reaches me, he says, “What’s wrong? What happened? Are Mom and Dad okay?” Ian’s like that. Doesn’t see the point in having one thought at a time when he could have a million.
“Jesus, relax,” I tell him. “You were bitching so much about having to come here today, I’m busting you out. Get your shit and let’s go.”
His eyes get even
wider. “Where?”
“Does it matter?” Jackson and I used to bail and do whatever all the time. The point is, you’re not in school. But Ian starts making this bitch-face, like school is the only place he ever wanted to be when he got up this morning. I roll my eyes. “You gotta come with me, man. Your teachers thinks this is a Mom and Dad–sanctioned field trip. You don’t go, they’ll start asking questions. If you blow this for me, I’ll make you live to regret it.”
“But,” Ian whines, and his voice somehow manages to break over one syllable. Impressive. Before I can drag him out by his freakishly large ears, this girl sidles up, like a girl-version of my brother. All legs and arms and pasty skin, interrupted by swathes of irritated whiteheads. There’s something familiar about her I can’t totally place. She says, “Ian, I’m saving your seat. Are you coming back . . . ?”
She notices me then and I smile at her, that winning smile Katy always tells me she likes because it gives her all sorts of dirty thoughts. The girl—whoever she is—turns red, her eyes growing as wide as Ian’s. She steps back. That’s all Ian needs. Next thing, he’s practically dragging me out of the school.
“You asshole,” he mutters.
I glance back at the cafeteria just to wave at her and piss him off, but I stop dead in my tracks because he’s there again. In the corner. That kid from yesterday, the one who took my basketball. That flash thought—I know you—is in my head again, and when I blink, he’s gone and all that’s left is the unsettling question of whether or not he was there at all. I know I didn’t see a ghost. I didn’t see a ghost of a ghost. Didn’t see that boy I knew years ago, didn’t see his scrawny arms and legs and baby face before he grew up into a killer.
I didn’t see Kirby Matheson.
* * *
I ask Ian when the last time he got drunk was and he tells me he’s never been drunk and that settles that. I drive us down to the Hyland River’s edge and take out the two six-packs in my trunk and it makes me feel depressed as hell because this was for celebrating. This was for Jackson and the presentation he was supposed to make in English Lit, what was it, a week after he died? About some book that was so boring he didn’t even think it was worth telling me about, and he could usually find something good in anything or anyone. (Like Matheson. Stop it.) He always got nervous when it came to that shit, talking in front of people, convincing them he was worth listening to.