Golden

by Andrea Dickherber

  “Let’s just do it in here,” Rudy said, unzipping the black backpack she held beside her. “It’ll still be funny. We have all the stuff anyway.”

  We all huddled over five bags of supplies: toilet paper, plastic wrap, foil and multi-colored streamers. I grabbed two rolls of toilet paper and began draping the front panel of windows, the ones that opened into the lobby hallway. Beside me, Teegan Westings climbed onto a desk and started hanging streamers from the ceiling fan.

  “We should have brought glitter or confetti to put on the tops of the fans,” Teegan snickered.

  “Agreed.”

  “They probably wouldn’t have turned them on until spring though.”

  “That might have made it even funnier,” I said.

  When I finished the front windows, I helped Travis Phelps plastic wrap over the doors to each administrator’s office. Thirty minutes later, when we went back for more supplies, the bags were empty; only cardboard tubes and boxes littered the floor. We scooped them up and dumped them into the candy bowl that sat between the secretaries’ desks.

  “I think we did good work, kids,” Michael said when we had finished.

  “As long as they don’t come in early, they should still be cleaning this up when school starts in the morning,” Sam Willoughby laughed.

  We were standing, pressed shoulder to shoulder in a huddle around the shrine of the empty backpacks, wearing identical sweatshirts and identical smug expressions on our faces. I had never felt closer to my classmates than I did in that moment; in that hour of exhausted exhilaration, feeling like we’d really accomplished something great together.

  I thought about all the knowledge I’d collected about this group of people over the last four years. Kate Yearinger, standing across the circle from me, was the star of the girl’s tennis team. She was best friends with Ashley Waters, a pretty junior, and in March of our sophomore year her boyfriend had cheated on her and the Monday morning after it had happened, he made an announcement on the intercom to the entire school asking for her forgiveness. They were still dating, even though he had gone off to college two years ago, and every time I saw Kate I thought about how embarrassed she must have been, and I wondered how she could have forgiven him and been able to trust him miles away. Beside Kate was T.J. Turner. Secretly, T.J. terrified me because he was loud and obnoxious and liked to flirt with girls by embarrassing them; though, in his defense, I don’t think he knew he was doing it. Next to T.J. was Sam Willoughby, who had blue eyes and wavy brown hair and a high-pitched voice, for a guy. He had lent me his sweatshirt at a bonfire party back in the fall of our junior year, and I had forgotten to return it. It smelled like outdoors and expensive cologne and for a few weeks after the party the smell and his kindness had been enough to convince me I had a crush on him. But he was dating Yardley Bishop, and even if he wasn’t, it was widely known he was a virgin and was saving himself for marriage and the thought of explaining to him the loss of my own virginity made me feel ashamed and dirty. There was Deena, sweet, annoying, Deena, whom I had met the first day of cheerleading tryouts our freshman year when, while we were stretching, she had poked me in the back and asked, desperation in her eyes, if I had a tampon she could use. She had changed since then, I realized suddenly. She had gained weight, but it had made her prettier. She was friendlier and less critical of the people around her and, probably as a direct result, more people seemed to genuinely like her now.

  Had I changed, I wondered? Surely, in three and a half years, I had. The physical transformations I had noticed; my boobs had finally materialized, the baby fat had thinned from my face and I was two inches taller, but what about my personality? I wondered what my classmates thought of me. Was I friendly? Did I come across as someone they wanted to know? I was less shy than I had been as a freshman, but I still sometimes felt intimidated, even by these people I’d gone to school with for years. I could know the most intimate things about someone – Michael Denalby had scored a 19 the first time he took the ACT, Teegan Westings’s parents met when her father began having an affair with her mom, LeAnn Tyler had cried the first time she hooked up with a guy – and still, the entire time I was having an interaction with them, I would be terrified of how they were perceiving me. The contradictions baffled me.

  In just a few months, I thought in that moment, I will probably never see most of these people again. The idea felt strange. It felt sad.

  Just then, we saw lights flash in the windows that faced out to the street.

  “Shut the light off,” someone grunted. We stood silent – rigid – in the pitch dark.

  Justin Patridge peeked through the blinds.

  “Shit.” He turned. You could see the wide whites of his eyes below his hood. “It’s the cops.”

  Abruptly, everyone around me was squealing and wriggling all at once.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Michael hissed. He shoved his own face into the blinds. “They’re in the front parking lot. Everybody go out the cafeteria doors, they’ll be unlocked.”

  How he knew this, I could not fathom.

  Like spooked deer, my classmates scrambled out of the office and sprinted down the hall. I stood still for a second, sickening dread sinking into my stomach.

  “Where’s Rudy?” Deena whisper-shrieked in my ear. “Are you coming?”

  Rudy had been missing for the last half hour. I knew what she was doing.

  “I have to find her first.”

  “I’m leaving. Sorry, I’m leaving.” Deena hardly glanced back before she took off down the hall toward the cafeteria. She was our ride; so much for the sense of camaraderie.

  The last one left in the office, I snatched Rudy’s backpack off the floor and left. I paused in the empty hallway before turning and running to the East stairwell. I raced up the steps, my footfalls echoing behind me.

  “Rudy?” I hissed as I entered the second floor corridor.

  No answer.

  I slunk along the wall and the shoulder of my sweatshirt got caught on the edge of a poster board, someone’s American history project. I jerked my arm free and peeked into the first classroom. It was empty. I checked the entirety of the second floor, even the girls and boys bathrooms, before I ran – quietly, fearfully – up the stairs to the third floor, panic building in my chest. This was just like her, I thought, always having to go one step further than everyone else. Always making me chase after her. But this was too far. This was reckless and stupid.

  At the third floor landing, I thought I heard muffled human noises. I paused, listening, and I heard what was unmistakably the scrape of a chair leg against the floor.

  They were in the yearbook classroom. Naturally. I should have checked there first.

  “Rudy,” I hissed from the doorway.

  Through the darkness I saw her head pop up on the other side of the room, behind her photo editor’s desk. I couldn’t see Thomas at all.

  “The cops are here. Come on.”

  They already had their clothes back on, and they followed me out of the classroom without saying a word, though the look on Thomas’s face was one of deep embarrassment. I paused again in the empty hallway, weighing my options. If the police came in the front door, there would probably be one of them waiting there outside. I turned and led us down the central staircase, down toward the cafeteria; the way the rest of our co-conspirators had gone. I knew I’d made the wrong choice when I saw lights at the bottom landing of the stairs. I stepped backward, up the staircase, bumping into Rudy, whose momentum was still carrying her forward.

  “Stop.” I saw a bald white head above a dark blue uniform. “Don’t move.”

  Two police officers came around the edge of the staircase into full view. My knees trembled.

  “Put your hands up.” The second officer shined a huge flashlight into Thomas’s face. “I said hands up, son!” His hand was at his waist – it was clutching the butt of his gun. I cringed and thrust my arms into the air.

  The first officer pushed Rudy and I aside, w
hile the second pulled Thomas to the bottom of the stairs.

  “Get down on the ground,” he said. “Are you armed? Down on the ground!”

  Thomas lowered himself to his stomach on the tile floor, his arms still held out from his body, his hands spread.

  “He didn’t do anything,” Rudy said, her voice thick with tears. “Stop! Please.”

  “Don’t, Rudy,” Thomas mumbled into the ground. “Don’t.”

  My face was scalding hot, and my hands were ice cold. The bald officer patted Thomas down while the other stood watch, hand still poised over his gun.

  “Do you all know you’re trespassing on private property?”

  Rudy and I nodded, and I felt a lump building in my throat. I will not cry, I will not cry, I will not cry, I chanted in my head.

  “You all go to school here?”

  Again, we nodded.

  “Is there anybody else in here? How’d you get in?”

  There was a brief pause when none of us was willing or able to speak. I could hear my own ragged breathing. Thomas was still lying on the floor, his cheek against the bottom of the stairs where everyone stepped, the officer towering over him. Thomas cleared his throat but I couldn’t look down at him, not like that.

  “We had a key, sir,” he said. “It was only us, no one else is here.”

  The men exchanged looks, and they seemed to consider this information. The bald officer turned and walked down the hallway, reaching for the radio in his back pocket.

  I worried what my Dad would say as I was led out the front door of the school building, the bald officer holding one hand on my shoulder. I should have left with Deena, I thought. Or the three of us should have ducked into a bathroom and hidden until they left.

  In the back of the police car on the ride to my house, Rudy and I didn’t speak, but I think she could feel my anger. I stared straight ahead at the crisscrossed pattern of the metal bars behind the passenger’s headrest, and a barrage of thoughts coursed through my brain. At that point, I didn’t fear specific consequences – I wasn’t thinking of being suspended or expelled from school, of being ineligible to run track in the spring, of losing college scholarships (not that I expected to rack up many of them in the first place). I just felt a pressure in my chest and a weight on my shoulders; the knowledge that I’d done something wrong and I’d been caught. I was afraid of the negative opinions of me people might be forming.

  As frightened as I was though, I was curious too. The seats in the back were hard plastic, which I hadn’t expected. The back windows were tinted. It smelled like vanilla, which was a far cry from what I might have thought the inside of a cop car would smell like. Nothing about my presence in the vehicle made sense.

  When the officer pulled into my driveway, Rudy turned toward me. I could feel her eyes on the side of my face but I didn’t turn to meet her gaze.

  “Jillian,” she said when the policeman got out of the driver’s side and walked around the car. “I’m so sorry.”

  “What for.”

  She paused. “For going upstairs. You could have left, but you didn’t. Thank you.”

  Then, the back door opened beside me, giving me an excuse to step out of the car without answering her at all.

  We weren’t arrested – Ogden decided not to press charges. There was probably parental intervention (e.g. money was exchanged) but at the time I wasn’t aware of any of the particulars, I was just glad to have exited the whole mess unscathed. No one else was punished; just Thomas, Rudy and I, who were given two days of in-school suspension, where we sat in a windowless room along with two other students – guys who were caught cheating on a math test – and silently completed the work our teachers had sent down to us at the beginning of the day. Thomas and I weren’t speaking to Rudy anyway. On the night of the prank, the police had brought Thomas in to the station and held him there until his parents came to pick him up. It wasn’t fair, and yet it could have been much worse.

  The mess in the office was cleaned up before any students could set foot in the building, but word of our senior prank spread fast. Some of our fellow pranksters had taken pictures before we left, and those made it online. Half of the school criticized us for our failed attempt, and the other half lauded us for our valiant effort at bringing back the senior prank tradition. The junior class was rumored to have already begun planning their own prank, though they had months to go before they were even senior class members. We became quasi-legends before we even left the school for good.

  In addition to our in school suspension, my parents grounded me for two weeks, which was fine with me because it meant I had an excuse to stay away from everyone, to hide in my room and stew. For the first three days of my detainment I was still pissed at Rudy, but by the time the long two weeks were up, I couldn’t wait to hang out with her again.

  On a Saturday night in January, I sat on the couch in Skyler Warren’s living room, picking chipped polish off of my thumbnail and just barely pretending to be interested in the never-ending story the guy beside me was imposing upon me. I had had just one beer – I was driving, and Rudy said it would be a short visit.

  It was that point in the year where winter seems particularly cruel and the school year seems especially daunting. Christmas was over – the decorations and music, the cheer and gifts and festivities were gone and you could still feel their absence in the blank space over the fireplace mantel, the bland streetlights where no more holly hung and the absolute darkness of the neighborhoods around us at night – our community strictly enforced a policy of removing all Christmas lights by the end of the first week of January. All that remained was the bitter cold of winter and five more months of classes, both of which weighed upon me like a dense, suffocating fog.

  Next to me, the guy was still going on and on – something about video game graphics – and he mimed the actions with his hands as if he were holding a game controller. I didn’t know him from Ogden – he wore expensive jeans and a nice jacket, but his chin was scruffy with dark stubble and I couldn’t imagine he was in a class below us. I wondered if he knew Skyler from post-high school life. Skyler had graduated from Ogden the year before. He had enrolled in a community college, which was so far beneath the expectations of an Ogden student that even I felt genuine shock. But he was working a nominal amount of hours at his Dad’s company and it was only a matter of time before money and connection improved his circumstances. For Skyler Warren, as for many of my classmates, there were few lasting consequences, just temporary impediments.

  I stood up, feeling warm and puffy and irritated. I had left Rudy in the basement playing a game of quarters – it had been nearly an hour (I was counting the minutes), and of course she was nowhere to be found now. The kitchen was empty, the basement was full of stoners and the dining room was a revolving game of beer pong as usual.

  As I trudged up the stairs to the second floor, I thought to myself that maybe I was over this – and briefly I marveled at how quickly that moment had arrived, how quickly the things I’d so desired had become unimpressive.

  I peeked into room after room, but Rudy was nowhere to be found. As I pushed the last door open, my nostrils filled with the smell of weed and something else, sweet and smoky and chemical. My eyes landed on two shadowy bodies, one straddling the other on top of the overstuffed duvet cover in the dimly lit room – that same dimly lit room where years and lifetimes earlier I’d caught Skyler Warren in the middle of a drug deal - and I got a rush of embarrassment so strong and so familiar it almost knocked me off my feet. The person on top lifted his head and flicked hair away from his face as he glanced up at me. In the dark, my eyes met with Skyler Warren’s for a split second.

  “Oh sorry, I’m sorry,” I mumbled louder than I needed to. I was pulling the door shut again when a muffled voice rose from the bed and stopped me in my tracks.

  “Who was that?” I heard Rudy whisper. The door was cracked just wide enough to fit my ear.

  “They didn’t see anything,�
�� Skyler said, his voice thick.

  “Are you sure?”

  “It was no one.”

  I heard her sigh, but she didn’t say anything more.

  I pulled the door shut without a sound and rushed quietly back down the hallway. At the bottom of the stairs, I went straight to the living room couch and let my knees buckle beneath me as I sunk into the cushions. I didn’t breathe until the video games guy had started speaking again, and then everything was so much as it was before that it was almost possible for me to believe I had never gone upstairs in the first place.

  At two in the morning, we sat next to each other in the front seat on the way back to Rudy’s house. My knuckles gripped the steering wheel – ten and two – and I stared ahead at the dark pavement, hoping my concentration would be mistaken for diligent driving and not my reliving what had happened a few hours prior. My mouth was full of half-formed questions and vague concerns, but I just kept pushing forward, my foot heavy on the gas pedal.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?”

  When Rudy finally opened her mouth, I was so used to the silence - the soft rumble of the car and the low whoosh of the heater - that my ears almost didn’t register her voice.

  “What?”

  “Was it you?” She repeated. “Did you go up to Skyler’s room tonight?”

  So she knew. I had no idea what to make of that.

  “Yes,” I answered quietly.

  She fiddled quietly with the passenger door lock. Locked, unlocked, locked, unlocked.

  “It’s just temporary, you know.”

  What was temporary? The drugs? The sex? Why wasn’t she speaking in full sentences? Skyler had always left a lingering bad feeling in the pit of my stomach – he was friendly and polite, a good host and a people pleaser, but it seemed there was something darker beneath it. Then again, I was never really a good read of people.

  “Does Thomas know?” I asked.