by Spencer Baum
When she was done I asked Sunny what she was going to do with all those chemicals.
“You have to promise never to tell,” she said. “You and I are partners in crime now.”
“I promise,” I said.
She told me she had connections, that the next day she was meeting a black-market buyer who would take everything off her hands. She promised to give me a cut. She told me I’d earned it.
I pressed her for info on her connections, I really did, but she never told. She said she liked that her past was a mystery to me. She said she felt sexier that way.
She got me home before dark. When Jenna came home and asked me what I’d done that afternoon I said, “Nothing.”
The following Friday, Sunny met me after school and gave me a thousand dollars in cash.
Ninth Entry – March 25. 4:40 pm
Carson Chemical. Have you heard of it? I bet not. Nobody has. Not even in Albuquerque. Not even in the days after we robbed them blind. I know, because I was checking all the Albuquerque news sites daily, and they never mentioned the place.
At the time, I thought it was a weird bit of good luck that our robbery didn’t make the news. Now that I know more about what we took, I expect it wasn’t luck so much as strategy. I expect the FBI took a big interest in the robbery of Carson Chemical and kept it off the news on purpose.
If you’re reading this, and you know something about chemistry, you may have looked at the names of the chemicals we stole and figured out where this story is going. As I knew nothing about chemistry, and had blind faith in Sunny, I had no idea. Not that I thought things were on the up and up. Thousands of dollars in cash obtained in the black market for a truck full of chemicals—I knew full well we were playing a game that could land us in jail for many years. I just assumed that game had something to do with the drug trade. You know, a Mexican cartel making meth or something. And if not that, maybe the Russian mafia. Didn’t all roads in the black market eventually lead to the Russian mafia?
I didn’t know and I didn’t care because I was getting laid by a woman with amazing eyes, incredible charisma, big boobs, and a grown-up kind of confidence that I found sexy as hell.
She was a chemist, you know. I say ‘chemist’ rather than ‘chemistry major’ because she was so beyond the immature realm of the student. She had a chemistry lab in her apartment. Darndest thing you ever saw. A beautiful woman living in a two-bedroom apartment in Albuquerque’s Southeast Heights, and one of those bedrooms was an actual chemistry lab where she did actual chemistry. Beakers and piping and test tubes, burners and hot plates, a fume hood with a hose she ran out the window.
I can’t believe that Jenna thought she could tell the truth about Sunny without mentioning her chemistry lab! It’s crazy that she even tried. So much of who Sunny was, so much of what defined her, was what she did in that mad scientist’s laboratory she’d built in her apartment.
Jenna didn’t want to talk about Sunny’s chemistry because she thought it would be damaging to me and she thought it was immaterial to the crime that landed her in jail. She couldn’t have been more wrong. Sunny’s chemistry lab, the connections she had because of that lab, the things she could do in that lab…
I’ve seen Sunny make a liquid in a test tube that changes colors every few seconds. I’ve seen her cover her lab in plastic sheets and create a volcano of foam that explodes out of a beaker. She built her own distiller using a pressure cooker and plastic tubing. She used that distiller to turn cheap grocery store wine into a tasty brandy that Jenna, Sunny, and I drank, and the next day, when we all had a wicked hangover, we took aspirin Sunny made herself (and it worked!).
Sunny made drugs in that laboratory. She might have sold them. She probably sold them. But not to us. To us, far and away the coolest thing Sunny did in her lab was make fireworks. Me, Sunny, Jenna, Rudy, and Seth (and by spring the five of us were a gang that hung out together all the time), we’d go way out into nowhere on a Friday night, get drunk, and put on our own fireworks shows. It was so fucking fun. Sunny made colorful fountains of sparks using old mouthwash bottles. She made bottle rockets that went into the stratosphere. Not kidding, these things just went up and up and up and up. She made them by rolling craft paper into tight little tubes that she stuffed full of potassium nitrate and powdered sugar. In the early days, she’d let me pound the powder into the tube, although she took that job away from me after an incident where I smashed the thumb on my left hand with the hammer. She started letting me mix the smoke bomb fuel instead, which I liked better anyway, because the smoke bombs were my favorite of all the fireworks she made.
The first time we lit one of Sunny’s smoke bombs we were in an open field behind Taylor Ranch. That smoke bomb, made from the skeleton of a plastic deodorant stick, was a little more robust than we’d planned. When it kept going…and going…we buried it in a mound of dirt, but a minute later the mound exploded in a burst of smoke! Laughing at how insatiable the smoke bomb was (we were all pretty drunk) we decided to run away and let it smoke itself out.
The next morning the news reported that all of Taylor Ranch had spent the night consumed in smoke from an unknown source! I don’t know why—it really seems mean-spirited now—but for whatever reason, we thought that was hysterical! We thought we were the cleverest little shits for burying an entire neighborhood in stinky smoke.
Tenth Entry – March 27. 9:58 pm
I don’t know if I’m going to tell you about my adventure at Mary Nolan College.
Jenna’s memoir is full of omissions meant to ensure the world is never able to trace what happened at Mary Nolan College back to me. Already, the things I’ve told you might be enough for some enterprising reader to figure it out. Smoke bombs made out of Speed Stick containers. Radicals from the Blue Brigade. A chemistry genius among us.
What’s funny is that even Jenna doesn’t know every worm that’s in this particular can. If the world found out the Mary Nolan Stink Bomb incident was me…
Fuck. The thought of it takes my breath away. There was a person who helped us that day at Mary Nolan College, a person who is connected to Sunny, a person Jenna doesn’t know is connected to Sunny…
Eleventh Entry – April 3. 11:00 am
The road trip felt spontaneous at the time.
But it wasn’t. Sunny had been planning it for months.
Sunny presented it to us as an impulsive, spur-of-the-moment decision to gather up the gang and just drive, and the reason she tried to sell it that way was she knew Jenna wouldn’t want to go otherwise.
Sunny always knew what buttons to push, and on that day, she was pushing my sister’s button that was labeled Live in the Moment.
Or maybe Make a Memory With Your Friends.
Hell, it might have even been labeled #YOLO. It seemed like everyone was saying ‘YOLO’ in those days.
My sister, like everyone I guess, is a mix of motivations and personalities. In her day-to-day life (when she was a free woman), Jenna was all about being responsible and productive. She set schedules for everything. She had to be organized to free up two or three hours every day for clarinet practice.
But even though she lived her life as a regimented planner, a part of her, a big part I think, wanted to be spontaneous and free. I’m convinced that’s what drew her to Sunny in the first place. That’s also what got her to go on the road trip.
I know this because I was there.
Me, Jenna, Rudy, and Seth, all of us at my house. Sunny arrives, says we need to get in the car and go somewhere. “Leave right now,” she says. “We need to pile into the car and hit the road with no idea where we’re going.”
Jenna could hardly resist. Soon enough, we had a bag packed. Soon enough everyone was in the car. Then we were at a gas station buying snacks. Then we were approaching the freeway.
“Where should we go?” Sunny asked us.
Denver, Phoenix, and Mexico all got suggested, but as we neared the entrance ramp, it seemed like the flow of traffic wa
s pushing us towards the eastbound lanes.
Like fate was making us go to Texas.
I knew, even then, that it wasn’t fate. Sunny doesn’t let fate dictate where she goes. Sunny always does what Sunny wants to do, fate be damned.
Sunny made it seem like traffic was pushing us east as we approached the highway, but she had also put her car in the far right lane, the one that feeds the eastbound ramp, long before traffic grew thick. When traffic pushed us onto the highway heading towards the mountains, Sunny could have said let’s go to Edgewood or Tijeras or Santa Rosa or any number of places.
But what she said was, “We could go to Texas.”
To which Rudy, predictably, said, “I have a cousin in San Antonio. We could stay with him.”
Done. Decided. And even though we were going exactly where Sunny wanted to go, it seemed like the random winds of fate were what took us there.
Sunny knew that if she locked the five of us in a car, that if she took us on a weekend of fun and adventure, if she drove us ten hours away from home, the camaraderie and shared sense of purpose we were sure to develop would be more than enough to overcome any resistance to her big plan once it was unveiled. She knew that a two-day adventure would bring us close and put Jenna, Rudy, and me in the right frame of mind to say yes when she asked us for help.
We got to San Antonio. We went to the Riverwalk. We went bar-hopping (Sunny had scored fake ID’s for me and all the underage members of our group long before this particular trip). We stayed out late, we drank, we danced, we slept on the floor of Rudy’s cousin’s apartment. We wore the same clothes on Saturday that we wore on Friday. We went to the Alamo and an amusement park. We ate big Texas burgers and fries at a steakhouse. It was everything a group of friends could have wanted in a weekend road trip, and so, on Sunday morning, when Sunny suggested one more stop before we started the drive home, all of us, including Jenna, were happy to go along.
Sunny’s ‘one more stop’ took us farther east rather than homeward bound. When we got to the stop, a college town half-way between San Antonio and Austin, Sunny said, “Doesn’t this place look cute?” and everyone was like, “Yeah, this is a neat little town.”
We were in the Village of Lakewood Hills, coming up on the campus of Mary Nolan College. This was four years ago. You do the math. If you haven’t already figured it out, Google what happened at Mary Nolan College four years ago.
Twelfth Entry – April 5. 9:22 pm
Sunny killed Rudy. I’m the only one who knows.
Thirteenth Entry – April 7. 6:53 am
I’m a silent domer. For years, I’ve secretly enjoyed watching The Tetradome Run. Even after I started my marvelously perverse sexual relationship with the most rabid antidomer you can imagine, I still watched the show, in secret. Not live, of course, but after the fact, when the whole broadcast was available on the Internet and a silent domer like me could watch it on a tablet in his bedroom with the door closed. What can I say? I like the show, and not just for entertainment value. All the domers who defend the show’s moral value in a civilized society? I totally get what they’re saying. Antidomers like my sister think they have the moral high ground, but do they really? In the wake of the Redemption Act, did violent crime plummet or didn’t it?
Has public execution been a part of civilized societies for centuries or has it not?
This is the thing about antidomers like my sister. They all come from the safest, most privileged, most coddled backgrounds in the history of the earth. They think the Run is vapid and gross because violence and crime and war and death is all an abstraction to them.
They don’t understand, on a visceral level, how cathartic that show can be. How can they? If you’ve never had your whole being consumed by the desire to act out in violent rage against someone who has wronged you, if you’ve never had a need for true vengeance in your life, if no one’s ever violently forced themselves into your body or your space, or assaulted you, or assaulted your family, or made you fear for your safety, or killed someone you love…if you’ve never experienced utter helplessness in the wake of someone more powerful than you having his way with your body or your life or both, you can’t understand the mindset of someone who has.
For those of us who like the show, The Tetradome Run is a public spectacle of vengeance that gives an outlet for our rage to the millions of us who need it.
I know what you’re thinking. What business does a white kid who graduated with honors and lettered in basketball have talking about fearing for his safety and needing an outlet for his rage?
Wouldn’t you like to know?
There’s so much shit Jenna didn’t write about in her memoir. Shit about our dad.
Now she’s going to be on the show. Fucking Christ.
Fourteenth Entry – April 7. 4:10 pm
The Qualifier race is tomorrow. My original plan was to be far away when it happened. Like across-the-ocean far away.
But here I am, sitting at my computer, a part of me hoping I might find the courage to fulfill Jenna’s dying wish and publish all this ugly truth for the world.
Fifteenth Entry – April 7. 9:50 pm
Rudy was the only person in our gang who wasn’t afraid of Sunny. In fact, I kind of got the feeling that Rudy knew a big throw-down between him and Sunny was coming, and he was laying the groundwork to prepare all of us for it. I think he planned to break up our group and get Jenna away from Sunny for good.
The poor guy had no idea what kind of a psycho he was dealing with in Sunny Paderewski.
Little fights at first, Rudy and Sunny butting heads, then one big fight—in the weirdest setting ever—Sunny had brought all of us out into the desert to do a dramatic reading of the final scene from Spartacus Jones…
But the setting of that fight isn’t important. What the fight was about isn’t important either. What matters is the fight happened, and less than a month later, Rudy was dead.
The night Rudy died started with a gathering at my house. Sunny, Rudy, Seth, Jenna, and me—the fab five who hung out together every weekend. On that night, Sunny and Rudy were acting like they had both moved on from their fight, but if you knew Sunny like I did, you knew she was still mad. Sunny is the kind of person who would hold a grudge for years.
We were eating pizza, playing video games, and drinking beer—except Rudy. He wasn’t drinking any alcohol that night. He was about to go on one of his road trips to El Paso. On road trip nights, Rudy abstained from beer and drank Spitfire energy drinks instead. Jenna kept a case of Spitfire in the fridge just for him.
Rudy finished one of his energy drinks at the house. He had some pizza too. He played a couple rounds of Wild Stallion Dog Fight on the Xbox with me. It was a normal Friday. It all felt good. We were having fun. Then, when it was time, Rudy kissed Jenna, announced he was leaving, and grabbed another can of Spitfire from the fridge.
This was a routine he had. A routine that Sunny had clearly observed and counted on him repeating on this night.
I remember that Sunny, Jenna, Rudy, and I were all standing in the kitchen together when Rudy opened that second can. Rudy took a drink like he was going to head out, and then realized he didn’t have his phone.
Here’s an important point, and yet another secret I never shared with Jenna: I saw Rudy leave his phone on the mantle when he came in. Rudy always left his phone on the mantle. But that night, when Rudy, ready to leave, went to get his phone from the mantle, it wasn’t there.
“Have you guys seen my phone?” he asked.
And then, wouldn’t you know it, Jenna and Rudy both were off on a mission to look through the house for a missing phone. It turned out the phone was in Jenna’s bed, wrapped up inside the comforter, and I remember, crystal clear I remember, that Rudy and Jenna were both surprised that the phone was there.
How did your phone get there? Do you remember bringing it there? No, I don’t remember bringing it there.
No one in the house accused Sunny of picking up the phone and
moving it to the bedroom, but I got the sense from Rudy that he suspected. That he knew something was off.
He just didn’t know how far off.
This was the genius of Sunny Paderewski. She always had an attack brewing on somebody, and whenever she decided to let her attack proceed, that somebody, whether it be Senator Lomax, the Desert Ridge Hotel, or Rudy Salazar, never saw it coming.
So many secrets I’ve been hiding from Jenna and the world. So many things I wanted to confess to Jenna when I thought she was about to be executed. I got a few of my secrets out, but not this one. This one was just too hard to say.
While Jenna and Rudy were searching the house for Rudy’s phone, and Seth and I were playing Xbox, Sunny was in the kitchen, where Rudy had left his open can of Spitfire energy drink on the counter. When I decided to go into the kitchen to grab another bottle of beer, I caught Sunny doing something to that energy drink. She turned around when I entered. She looked nervous—and I should mention that I’ve never seen Sunny look nervous like that before or since—but then she relaxed when she saw it was me.
“What are you doing?” I asked her.
She had something in her hand, something she was hiding in her fist. I can kind of see the edge of it in my mind’s eye. I think it was a glass vial.
She looked at me with an intensity in her eyes, and said, very deliberately, “I wasn’t doing anything, Kyle.”
Her tone of voice was domineering. With that sentence, she was giving me a command. Trained little puppy that I was, I not only understood the command; I followed it. Yes ma’am I understand mum’s the word I saw nothing.
His phone now found, Rudy grabbed his energy drink from the kitchen and left.
A few hours later Jenna got the phone call from the state police. They had found the wreckage. They had found Rudy’s body. They had dialed the emergency contact in his phone, and it led them to Jenna.
I wish I could end the story there, but if I’m really going to purge the whole truth from my mind, I have to write about one more thing. I have to write about something that happened in the hours after Rudy left the house but before the police called.
