Fade to Black

by Alex Flinn

  Mom sends her in to blow her nose. “And wash your hands too,” she yells after her.

  When the water starts running, Mom faces me.

  “Now are you going to tell me where you were this morning?”

  Jeez! She knows I was out.

  “No. You just have to believe I wouldn’t do what they’re saying.”

  Monday, 2:30 p.m., bus home from school

  DARIA

  One time,

  I was on my bench at lunch,

  listening to my most favorite CD

  which is

  Pink.

  Kids say NO ONE

  listens to Pink

  anymore.

  But I do.

  I like her.

  I was dancing

  a little,

  to “I’m Coming Out,”

  and Alex Crusan

  was there.

  He said,

  “You like Pink?”

  “Yeah,” I said,

  “her hair.”

  “Me too,”

  he said,

  “she’s not afraid

  to be different.”

  Then he said,

  “Would you ever

  dye your hair

  pink?”

  And I laughed

  and couldn’t

  even stop

  laughing.

  All the days

  after,

  he said hi

  just hi

  and I

  liked him.

  Mama worried that

  I liked Alex Crusan.

  She thinks

  I am a baby.

  She asked Mrs. Taub,

  my counselor,

  was it okay,

  okay, me liking Alex Crusan?

  I felt

  stupid.

  But Mrs. Taub said yes!

  Mama said

  I can like him

  but not go

  to his house.

  “Don’t bother him, Dari.”

  Mama would be mad.

  But last night,

  I went.

  I didn’t do anything,

  anything wrong,

  just looked

  at his house

  in the dark.

  Then

  I saw him.

  Not Alex, the other boy,

  the fat, mean boy.

  He threw a rock.

  I wanted to tell

  but

  I

  didn’t

  tell

  anyone

  about

  that

  rock.

  Monday, 2:30 p.m., Memorial Hospital

  ALEX

  Now that they stopped the medication, my head’s clear. Unfortunately, that only helps me remember what happened this morning—in real time and surround sound.

  Old Mr. Khan at the donut shop says he could set his watch by me. He opens at six Mondays, and that’s when I get there. I have to go early to make it before school. Other mornings I work out with weights in the garage. Just because you’re terminal doesn’t mean you can’t be buff. I’m getting better about mornings. When I was first diagnosed, I could barely get out of bed some days. Like, what’s the point? That’s what I thought. Now I make myself. But I still don’t use a seat belt when I drive—what’s the point when you’re going to die anyway?

  This morning I left the house around ten of, maybe even a couple minutes earlier because I was so worried about Mom coming down on me. I saw that girl, Daria, this Down Syndrome girl who lives on East Main, about a block from our house. She’s always there Mondays when I go by. Maybe she’s there other days too, or maybe she’s waiting for me. I think she has a crush on me. I talk to her at school sometimes, just say hi, like whatever. No one else does, really. They let the disabled kids (differently abled they said in Miami, like the word made a difference, like it changed who they were) go to the regular schools—mainstreaming, they call it. It’s supposed to make them fit in the real world. It seems like a bad idea to me if people are going to be mean to them. And they are. They’re mean just like they are to me, call her retard or, at best, ignore her. I don’t know if she notices—if she’s smart enough to notice—but I think she does. First time I said hi to Daria, it was at lunch, and she was listening to music on her headphones, dancing in her seat. Everyone around was staring like she was from Mars, when she was only having a good time. So I walked up to her and said hey. Talked to her. And she looked like I was Ed McMahon with one of those big Publishers Clearinghouse checks. Since then I always say hi to her. I feel good seeing her smile.

  None of which makes me a saint or anything, and I was probably worse before. But things look a lot different when you’re seeing it from the other side.

  Anyway, today Daria was out there, hiding in the trees like she does. It was barely light out, so I could just make her out in my rearview. While I was at the stoplight, I saw her. I was almost thinking about opening the window and asking her if she wanted me to bring her back a donut, just to be nice.

  That was when I saw the guy.

  He was on the other side of the car, in my right side mirror. He had on a Pinedale letter jacket. He was in the bushes, waiting too. I couldn’t see him well.

  What I noticed was the baseball bat. Now in Miami, you might carry a stick or something out walking in case a dog attacked you. But probably not a bat. And with the rednecks around here, dogs are practically like their children, so you definitely wouldn’t, so it was weird.

  But before I even had time to process that, I heard the crash. Like an explosion all around me. Then another. I looked up at the spiders covering the windshield. Then, it was like slow motion, something—glass—falling around me. It cut my cheek, then my hand, and I didn’t know where to go, so I sat there. Frozen. Staring at the glass, the light, the colors, almost like it was pretty. Then I was down on the seat, trying to get out of the way. I could feel the wind in my face, hear the whiff of the bat, then more crashing all around me, and there was nowhere I could go.

  The smashing stopped a second, and it dawned on me: I have my foot on the brake. I can drive. Even if I hit something, who cares?

  I was still down on the floor, but I stomped the gas and drove away. I must’ve driven a quarter mile, not even seeing where I was. Then I managed to sit up, and I drove to Dunkin’ Donuts. I was bleeding pretty bad, and I couldn’t touch anything without getting hurt worse. Glass was everywhere, hanging from the broken window and on the steering wheel. But I stumbled up to the store and said, “Please,” before I collapsed. I guess Mr. Khan called an ambulance. My mom said he called them, too, so he must have gone through my pockets and found my last name. I don’t think anyone from school would have done as much for me.

  The worst thing about this is, it’s like the beginning of the end. Whether we stay here or move back to Miami, my parents are scared now. They’re right to be, but now I’ll be even more of a prisoner. They’ll let me do less and less from now on.

  I hear someone at the door, probably Mom, and pull my pillow over my face to pretend I’m sleeping again. I don’t want to talk about moving or how crummy everything is. Or God. It only makes me feel worse.

  But from my vantage point under the pillow, I can see it’s not Mom. It’s Jennifer.

  Monday, 2:35 p.m., Cole residence

  CLINTON

  “Look, I said I didn’t do it,” I tell Mom again.

  We’re still in the front hall. I’m talking real soft so Melody doesn’t hear us from the bathroom.

  “You’re making it very hard for me to believe that, Clinton. I know you weren’t in bed this morning.”

  “But you do believe me about Alex. Don’t you?” I hear begging in my voice.

  Hers, too. “I want to. I want to believe that no son of mine would do something so cruel to a boy unfortunate enough to have this disease. I want to believe it, Clinton.”

  “Then believe me.” I feel like screaming it. Believe me!
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  “I’m trying. There was a witness who says she saw you.”

  “What witness?” I didn’t see anyone when I was out this morning.

  “A girl. Daria something.”

  “I don’t know any Daria.” Then I remember and laugh. “She’s a retard, a dummy.”

  “Please don’t use those words, Clinton.”

  “But…” Then I decide not to argue. Why get her madder at me than she already is? “Sorry.”

  Mom sighs. “It would be easier for me if you’d tell me where you were this morning. Otherwise, I have to assume—”

  “I can’t,” I say. Telling her where I was will make her feel bad.

  She starts to say something else, but the phone rings and she goes to get it. I watch her, feeling like I’m up a creek and a gator ate my paddle.

  Thing about my mother is, even though we don’t always agree on things, she stands by me. Like today, with those cops. Or when I was little. Like I said, I was never long on friends as a kid—not like now. Once, in fourth grade, I got beat up by this kid, Tyler Grendi. My parents really got into it then. Mom wanted to call Tyler’s parents and the school. Dad told her she was making me a mama’s boy and what I really needed was karate lessons. They argued for hours. I guess both of them lost, ’cause Mom never called the school. I never got karate lessons either (though Dad did give me a talk about setting my feet when I threw a punch. He even let me hit him some and pretended it hurt). But at the end of the day, it was Mom who came to my room and said things would get better.

  And it was Mom who got custody of us when they split up. Dad said the courts always give custody to the mother anyway. He didn’t have money to fight her about it. But, thing is, he didn’t even try.

  I hear Mom in the kitchen, winding up her conversation. She’ll be back here any second, and I can’t face her. It feels bad, having her think I could do something like that. Yeah, maybe I’m harsh on people, like Crusan or that Daria girl. But I’m only being honest. Isn’t that supposed to be a good thing? That doesn’t mean I’d hurt someone like that. Like, doesn’t she know me any better? I want her on my side, like she always used to be. But I can’t have that if I don’t tell her where I was this morning. And I don’t want her to know. I was at the Gas-n-Sip, calling Dad on the pay phone there. I didn’t tell Mom because she’s real mad at Dad about the child support thing. So it would sound like I was going behind her back, which I kind of was, or taking his side, which I was not. Best thing I can do, probably, is avoid her completely by helping Mel with her homework.

  I hear the phone in the kitchen go click on the receiver thing, and I head for the stairs as fast as I can without running.

  Melody’s homework is pretty hard. She may only be in fourth grade, but she’s in all these brainiac classes. It’s social studies, which should be simple. I mean, you just flip to the questions at the end of the chapter, then flip back, looking for the answer in the reading. And it’s not like I haven’t learned about Benjamin Franklin five hundred times already. But today I can’t look at anything long without getting all frustrated. Soon it’s like she’s showing me how to do ’em instead of the other way around.

  “I guess I don’t remember this easy junk as much as I thought,” I say.

  And I’m glad when she says, “It’s okay. I’ll do it myself.”

  But I’m less glad, a few minutes later, when she puts her pencil down completely and says, “Clinton, do you know what happened to Carolina’s brother?”

  I look at my trig book. I’m not sure what the assignment was, exactly, since I wasn’t in class. But Mr. David usually assigns the page after the one we just did. So I figure I’ll do that one.

  “Clinton?”

  “I think someone smashed his car window.”

  “But he’s in the hospital. They had to do something else.”

  “Well…” I pretend I’m figuring a problem in my head. “I think he was in the car.”

  Melody looks at me, and her cheeks seem sort of pinker than usual, but she doesn’t say anything. I go back to the math book.

  After a minute Mel says, “Is Alex going to die?” in that honest, nosy way kids say things.

  Eventually, I think. But when I look at her, she looks really scared, so I say, “I don’t think so. Not from getting his window smashed.”

  The cops would’ve probably mentioned if Crusan was that bad.

  “Carolina called last night. She told me someone threw a rock through her window. She thought her parents might take her out of school.” The phone rings again, and I hear Mom answer it. “Why would someone do that?”

  I don’t want to go there since that one was me. I look over at Melody’s bookshelf, at her doll collection, because I can’t look at the book anymore. I’m good at math. I tell myself that—You’re really good at math, doofus. But if Melody’s homework was hard to concentrate on, mine is impossible. “I don’t know. I guess maybe they don’t think her brother ought to go to school here ’cause he’s sick. He could get other people sick.”

  “But that’s not fair. Alex is nice. He lets us play with his computer games. And he can’t help being sick. It’s just ’cause he had a trans … trans…”

  “Transfusion,” I say, though I wonder if he really got it from a transfusion. Most people who have AIDS are homos, right? Crusan doesn’t look like a homo, but sometimes you can’t always tell. He talks like one sometimes with those big words he uses, acting like he’s better than everyone.

  “Right. What’s a transfusion?”

  “It’s when you get in an accident or something, and you lose a lot of blood. So they give you some blood that someone donated.” I remember last year, before the Crusans moved here, they had a blood drive for homecoming at school. A lot of people didn’t want to donate ’cause they were afraid they’d get sick. You don’t always know where those needles have been, no matter what they tell you. I was glad it was only seniors and alumni who could donate. Otherwise, I’m sure my friends would’ve been on me to give. And I’d have given … given in, that is. They aren’t having a blood drive this year. I’m glad.

  “Like when Dad and I were in that accident?”

  She’s talking about when Dad hit a tree last year, just before him and Mom broke up … which Mom said was why her and Dad broke up.

  “You didn’t need a transfusion,” I say. “It wasn’t that bad an accident.”

  “But if I had, would everyone be mad at me, like they’re mad at Alex?”

  “They’re not mad at Alex.”

  “They’re mean to him.”

  “They just don’t want to get sick by being around him. That’s different than being mad. It’s a really bad disease he has. No one wants to take any chances.”

  “Carolina’s around him all the time, and she’s not sick.”

  That we know of.

  “But it’s a risk,” I say. “People don’t want to take the chance.”

  “If I got sick like Alex, would you still want to be around me?”

  “Sure I would. I’m your brother.”

  “Then, why—”

  “Look!” I’m yelling now. “I’m trying to do my homework. I don’t have an IQ of one-fifty like you. I need to concentrate.”

  “Sorry.”

  We sit in silence a few minutes, but the numbers swim before me, and I can’t do the problem.

  Monday, 2:35 p.m., Bickell residence, out in front, near the trees

  DARIA

  I saw

  Clinton

  on a bike,

  riding by.

  I saw

  Clinton

  in a blue jacket,

  riding by.

  I saw

  Alex Crusan’s

  red truck

  riding by.

  I saw

  the baseball

  bat

  a blue

  jacket

  the crash-smash

  glass.

  I saw

  darkness

&
nbsp; no face

  the blue

  jacket

  smashed glass.

  I knew

  who

  it was.

  I told them so.

  Monday, 2:35 p.m., Memorial Hospital

  ALEX

  “More flowers?” I ask.

  “You’re awake.” Jennifer examines my face, and I wonder for the first time how bad I’m going to look. Now that the painkillers have worn off, I’m conscious of the pain. I have a ton of stitches, and my face probably looks cut up and scary. I still haven’t looked in the mirror. It’s a game I’m playing at this point, to see how long I can not look. But I wonder if it will heal or if I’ll have scars on top of everything. I can be like Freddy Krueger, that guy in the horror movies, with the burned-up face.

  I don’t want to look scary in front of Jennifer. I don’t know why. It’s not like girls have any interest in me. And it’s not like she’s a supermodel or anything, just an average girl with—sheesh—freckles on her nose. But I just—I don’t know—like the idea of someone to talk to. She’s the first girl I’ve met in Pinedale who’s acted normal around me.

  The first week at school, I was by my locker and this girl with long blonde hair walked by. Now I know her name was Kendall Barker, and she was way out of my league—especially now. But that day the planets aligned, and she was (I’m pretty sure I’m not flattering myself here) checking me out. I’m not bad looking. I’m tall, tall and skinny, actually, but usually I can hide that by wearing baggy clothes. I always thought I had okay eyes. They’re grayish. I started to say hi to her. Then some other girl whispers something, and Kendall looked at me like I was a leper and one of my fingers had fallen off and rolled down the hallway. That was the first sign I had that people here knew about me. The school isn’t supposed to tell the students, but they did. I guess she was afraid I’d get her sick. But you can’t get infected by talking to someone.

  I could chalk it up to her being a bitch … but they can’t all be bitches.

  “You are awake, aren’t you?” Jennifer says.

  “What? Um, yeah. I’m awake. I was pretending to sleep in case you were my mother.”