The Yearbook

by Peter Lerangis

  In the bathroom’s misty silence, questions continued to pound me: What next? Should I call the police? How would I explain the body to them?

  If I were a cop, who would I suspect?

  Me. I was the only person at the scene. I had no weapon, but I could have ditched it somewhere. At the very least, I’d have to explain what I was doing in the Ramble.

  I could see the headlines now. Seventeen-year-old Peeping Tom from Nice Family Caught in Bizarre Killing. The TV news would show cops escorting me up the courthouse steps in handcuffs with a windbreaker over my head. Neighbors would insist I was a good kid, a gifted boy, but with a suspicious quiet streak.

  As I slipped upstairs to my bedroom, I could hear Mom coming out her bedroom door. “David — ?”

  “I’m beat, Mom. See you in the morning, okay?”

  I heard her exasperated sigh. I plopped on my bed, looking up into the blackness. All I could see was the face. The hollow, spongelike person who’d been left to die. He’d come home with me and wasn’t going to leave me alone.

  I jumped out of bed and felt my way across the room to my closet. Pulling the door open, I flicked on the overhead light. Years ago, after my dad died, I became scared of just about everything. I turned on that light every night for months. It had made me feel safer then, and it did now.

  Still, I had terrible insomnia. But I know I must have slept. Because that night I had yet another bizarre dream.

  Part Two

  Mark

  Chapter 6

  “… GHOULISH STORY … BODIES discovered side by side … possible double suicide … both sought cures for neurological disease… retired police chief … cannot explain disappearance … police incompetence … county-wide search … possible vandalism.…”

  Marky hears the words in his sleep.

  They are grown-up words but he understands some of them yes he does because he is a smart boy a gifted boy Miss Cramer his kindergarten teacher said so.

  VANDALISM is what some kids did to the car and INCOMPETENCE is what the checkout people have at the A&P, plus he’s heard of NEUROLOGICAL, which has something to do with Mommy and Daddy’s sickness and

  Mommy and Daddy have the TV turned up too loud.

  But no, silly Marky, Yiayia is downstairs, sheesh don’t you remember? Mommy and Daddy are at the faraway doctor’s in New York for treatment Oh and YIAYIA is a Greek word he knows, too, which means grandmother. He can call her that even though she’s American Greek and not Greek Greek.

  And he knows POSSIBLE and GHOULISH (Mommy Daddy) and SUICIDE and (Mommy Daddy!) and DISAPPEARANCE and

  “Yiayia!”

  Marky wakes up with a scream. The TV is blasting in the den downstairs, and Yiayia is crying. Much worse than the time she got a phone call from Greece when her mommy died. It sounds like she is watching the news, which he hates, and besides it’s TOO LOUD. He gets out of bed, even though he is not supposed to after bedtime. But this is an EMERGENCY so Mommy and Daddy would say it was all right. Yiayia could call them in New York to ask them if she wanted.

  “Yiayia?”

  She doesn’t hear him. Her cries sound like big gulps now. Marky feels nervous. He walks into the den and sees Yiayia doing her cross. Her shoulders are shuddering up and down. On TV he can make outa familiar-looking office building. It looks like the place where Daddy and Mommy work. Then Yiayia turns to him. Her eyes are red and wet and scary. She says his name and holds out her arms to him.

  Marky wants to turn and run. He knows what has happened. But his body cannot move. Instead, he bends over and gets sick right there on the den carpet.

  Part Three

  David

  Chapter 7

  “NO!”

  I sat upright in bed. The closet light was still burning. Outside my bedroom window a bird skittered by, looking almost liquid in the silver-gray morning light.

  My body felt clenched up, my legs ached where they’d been cut. The dream was fading, but pieces of it still clung to a cobwebby corner of my brain. I shook my head, as if I could fling the dream away like droplets of water after a shower. I was actually shivering with fear. But why? I didn’t know the people in the dream. Did I?

  Marky.

  Who was Marky?

  Mark Rosenthal? As a kid? Impossible. For one thing, his grandmother is Jewish, not Greek.

  Maybe the kid was me. I sure felt close to him, and I do call my grandmother Yiayia. But she’s in Greece, and nothing else in the dream happened in my life. It wasn’t even my house. Nothing looked right. The TV was kind of a strange, long shape, and the clothes were some ugly style I’d never seen.

  Hmm, maybe Marky was an alien.

  The dream fragments were breaking up now, like a radio station in a car speeding too far from the signal. Last night’s reality shoved itself back into my mind.

  Or was Gumby a dream, too? I hoped so. Desperately.

  “Are you okay in there?”

  My mom was outside my door. Her voice was thick with early morning grogginess.

  “Fine,” I replied.

  She took that as an invitation to come in. In her robe, flannel nightgown, and bare feet, she seemed small and fragile. She hardly ever looks that way, and it was kind of refreshing. “Hi, sweetie. You had a nightmare, huh?”

  “I guess.” I plopped my head back on my pillow, trying to look as if I needed to go back to sleep.

  The truth? I was wide awake and flying.

  “David …”

  My mom has about seven hundred ways of saying my name. This was Number 359: the suspicious “David.”

  “Your pants in the sink? They’re full of mud and grass.”

  This threw me a little, because I thought she’d been upstairs sleeping the whole night. “Oh, sorry,” I said.

  “You had a little outdoor proofreading?”

  “Mom … I’m tired.… It’s Saturday.”

  She let out a sigh and stood up. “Look, David, I know you’re not a boy anymore. But as long as you live in my house, you follow my rules. One: Come home when we agree, or call if you’re going to be late. Two: Don’t do anything … foolish you cannot take a man’s responsibility for.”

  A man’s responsibility! Suddenly, in her mind, I’d turned into every mom’s nightmare. My Son the Stud. I wanted to burst out laughing and say, “Thanks for the compliment!” I didn’t know who was the worse wishful thinker, her or me.

  “I didn’t, Mom,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

  “All right … if you say so.”

  As she shuffled back out of my room, I couldn’t stop myself from blurting out, “Mom!”

  She turned around. “Uh-huh?”

  No.

  I couldn’t tell her. It was too gruesome. She’d get hysterical. She’d call the cops. The school. The FBI. And what if I had dreamed the whole thing?

  “Nothing,” I said.

  She gave mea weird glance and left. I caught a glimpse of my digital clock: 5:28.

  I got dressed quietly. No way was I going to sleep. I also had no intention of sitting there thinking about Gumby. I had to get my mind off it … him.

  No one had proofread the yearbook the night before, but Mr. Brophy had told Mr. DeWaart it could be done early this morning. I didn’t know what time Someday My Prints Will Come was open, but I’d find out.

  And I would take the overland route to get there, as far from the Ramble as I could go.

  “Aaagh! Someone hold me up! I’m seeing things!” Mr. Brophy said, clutching his heart and staggering backward on the print shop’s front steps. His gray, shoulder-length, aging-hippie hair fell across his pasty face.

  He was joking, I assumed. But on this particular day, that particular kind of joke made me nervous. I smiled to humor him.

  “It’s … it’s a high school senior awake before noon on a Saturday!” he gasped.

  “Hey, some of us have to work hard,” I managed.

  Mr. Brophy put his key in the front door. “Yeah, to make up for the other sl
obs, huh? Come on in. I have the mechanicals laid out for you. The photos aren’t pasted down yet, but you’ve got them marked on the back, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Matching pictures to names is something I can do pretty well,” he said. “It’s the names themselves that get me. My eyes cross after six letters.”

  I followed him in, feeling queasy, thinking about what lay in the river a few hundred yards away. I vowed not to say a thing about it. If Gumby was a dream, I’d forget it eventually. If he was real, somebody would discover him. There would be an explanation, and I’d be able to forget the whole thing.

  I went through the motions of proofreading. I vaguely remember correcting a few last names and skimming over some quotes, poems, and captions. But my concentration was shot. The letters on each page seemed to swarm like ants. Under the circumstances, I did the best I could do.

  On my way out, I saw Mr. Brophy racing around the shop. Employees were straggling in, and machines were whirring. “Thursday okay?” he shouted.

  “This Thursday?” I asked. “To print them and bind them?”

  “What do you think I run here? A bunch of Benedictine monks with quills? I do everything in-house — and you guys ain’t the only school I’m doing. I’m like an accountant at tax time. I need to get you out of the way for the crunch, that’s all.”

  “Thursday would be great,” I said.

  He rummaged around a pile of papers and pulled out an envelope small enough to hold a yearbook photo. “This is the weird shot. You want one copy for each absentee, right?”

  “Yep,” I said.

  Mr. Brophy gave me a sly half-grin and shook his head. “You guys are sick, man. Worse than we were at your age.”

  “They had photographs back then?”

  “Out!” Mr. Brophy picked up an X-Acto knife and held it like a dagger. “Out, brazen child!”

  I ran from the shop, surprised I had any sense of humor left.

  Over the weekend, no one said a thing about a body. I listened to the local news each evening and kept my ears open in town.

  On Monday morning, as I approached Wetherby High, I noticed three police cars parked in front.

  Inside the lobby, students were gathered near the office doors of our principal, Mr. Dutton. I could see Ariana, Smut, and a friend of theirs named Monique Flores.

  Monique is blond, wispy, smart, and very emotional. (When she found out she was class salutatorian, she burst into tears of disappointment.) Ariana and Smut were on either side of her, arm in arm, as if they had to support her.

  “What happened?” I asked them.

  “Rick Arnold’s … missing,” Monique said gravely, between sniffles. “The police are talking to Mr. Dutton about it.”

  “His parents are in there,” Ariana added. “They’re hysterical.”

  “Wow,” I replied. “When did they notice he was missing?”

  “They’ve been looking since the weekend,” Smut said. “But they didn’t want to make a big deal about it. You know Rick. They figured he hitched down to Vanderbilt to camp out at his brother’s college dorm. He does that sometimes.”

  “And he didn’t?” I asked.

  Smut shook his head. “They’d have known by now. They think either he hitched with some wacko kidnapper, or he’s hiding out around here.”

  “Did they mention anything about him, like what he was wearing?” I asked.

  Ariana looked me in the eye. “Black shirt and black pants. Why?”

  That confirmed it. I pictured the face in the Ramble and mentally filled it in with a skull and some cheekbones.

  Gumby was Rick Arnold.

  And I was the only one who knew where he was.

  The door to the principal’s office swung open, and a stocky, youngish policeman stepped out.

  “Uh, please disperse,” he shouted. “Come on, let’s decongest the egress.” (I never have understood why cops talk like that. This guy sounded like a taxidermist who took a wrong turn.)

  I looked beyond him and caught a glimpse of Mr. and Mrs. Arnold inside the office, their faces streaked with tears.

  I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I stepped forward, staring at the policeman. He looked at me as if I were approaching the President of the United States with explosives strapped to my body.

  “Move along, pal,” he said with a steely glare. “Ain’t you got homeroom?” His fingers instinctively perched near his billy club.

  That I understood. I froze in my tracks as he disappeared back into the office.

  Chapter 8

  WHACK!

  The door to the yearbook office, heavy and wooden and stained with decades of student fingerprints, slammed shut.

  I’d thought I was alone. I was sitting at Mr. DeWaart’s long desk, trying to calm my jitters. Even though the yearbook was finished, the desk was still piled so high with papers, a sneeze would bury anyone within five feet of it. At that point I found it the most comforting, private place in the school.

  Until I looked up and saw Ariana.

  She was staring at me with a mixture of annoyance, suspicion, and rage.

  In a moment, my mind flashed with a ridiculous idea. She and Smut had killed Rick.

  “So …” My voice was like sandpaper. I had to swallow before going on. “Three more days till the shipment, huh? Do you think Mr. Brophy will come through — ”

  “You know something,” Ariana interrupted.

  I stared at her, slack-jawed.

  “Come on, David, you can’t lie to me. You really had no idea Rick was missing until this morning?”

  “No! I found out from you, remember?” I lied beautifully. If we were in a movie, I’d have won an Academy Award.

  “Then why was your first question ‘How long was he missing?’? And why did you turn the color of plaster when I mentioned the clothes he was wearing?”

  “Did I? Clothes? I don’t remember that. …”

  Whoops, forget it. My Oscar was flying out the window.

  “Talk, David. And talk fast. First period begins in five minutes, and you never know who’s going to pop in here for a morning chat.”

  I took a deep breath. I had to tell someone.

  “Okay,” I said. “But I think you should sit down.”

  Ariana’s eyes didn’t waver from me as I slowly told her everything. (Well, everything except the part about the Chevy with the steamy windows.)

  By the time I finished, she was grimacing as if she’d just bit into a hunk of moldy bread. “This isn’t like some late April Fool’s thing, is it?”

  “I wish, Ariana.”

  She let out a breath and buried her face in her hands. “If you’re telling the truth, David, you’re a coward. If you’re not, you’re a nut case. I’m not sure which one I believe.”

  “I’m not a nut case.”

  “And I’m not a coward,” she replied, looking up. “If you don’t go straight to the police, I will.”

  Her eyes were firm and frosty. “Don’t,” I said softly. “I’ll go.”

  Ariana stood up and headed for the door. “Good luck, David.”

  After a moment I went into the hallway. The police had left Mr. Dutton’s office, but they were gathered by their cars outside. I recognized Chief Hayes, a tall, gray-haired black man solemnly barking orders to a younger cop.

  “Chief Hayes!” I called, stepping out the door.

  “ ’S’my name,” he mumbled over his shoulder.

  “I — I can show you where Rick Arnold is.”

  He turned to face me, with what might have been a tic of interest in his stony expression. “Get in my car.”

  I obeyed. He did some last-minute ordering around, then climbed into the driver’s seat. “What’s your name, kid,” he said, starting up, “and where are we going?”

  “David Kallas,” I replied. “And … the Ramble, near Cass and River View.”

  Chief Hayes’s face remained unmoved. But his hand yanked the automatic shift straight past Drive and all t
he way to L2. Murmuring a curse, he flicked it back up again. “You … saw the missing person in the Ramble, son?”

  “Yes.”

  “Am I correct in assuming, since you say this person is still there, that he is not presently alive?”

  I felt absurdly guilty. I think if he’d asked me to confess to the murder, I’d have done it. “Yes.”

  The car screeched away from the curb as he said something under his breath. I believe it was “Lord, have mercy.”

  I was seized with violent chills as Chief Hayes parked by the Ramble. He noticed right away.

  “You don’t have to come with me, you know,” he said. “As long as you give me the location of the body.”

  “Okay,” I replied, but I was shaking so badly, it came out more like Kuh. “T-to the left of — of the car p-path.”

  “Near the big drainpipe?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Stay here. Take deep breaths and put your head between your knees. If you feel sick, for God’s sake, get out of the car.”

  Chief Hayes wasn’t going to win points for sensitivity.

  I watched him plod into the woods. I figured he must have been about sixty, but he was still a bull of a man. He had a slight limp, which somehow made him look tough and heroic.

  Chief Hayes was gone about a half-hour, I think. When he came back, he looked as if he’d aged ten years. His taut, wary features had gone droopy like a basset hound’s, and his eyes were glassy.

  Neither of us said a word as he plopped into the front seat. He stared at a spot just above the steering wheel.

  “I — I didn’t do it,” I said weakly.

  Chief Hayes nodded. “I know.” He took his radio mike from its holder and put it slowly to his mouth. “Sergeant Kinsman, do you read me?”

  “Yeah, Chief,” a voice crackled back.

  “We have located a male corpse matching the description of the Arnold boy.”

  As he gave the details in a dull monotone, he rubbed the back of his left hand against his eyes. I noticed a wet sheen along his thumb when he pulled his hand away.

  If I didn’t think such a thing was impossible, I’d be convinced Chief Hayes was crying. He slammed the mike down after he was done and muttered something about hay fever.