by Andrew Smith
Conner was sitting on the edge of his bed, shoeless, leaning his chin toward the video game on the television in front of him, when I came into his room.
He looked the same, sounded the same. And I felt so relieved seeing him, like he’d been missing for years. I could have hugged him, but I knew what he would have said if I did.
This is real, isn’t it?
I pushed the door shut behind me, and Conner turned off his game. It was one of those ones where you kill an enemy army. Nice.
“I got stopped by a cop.”
Conner laughed. “Shit. Did you get a ticket?”
“No. I talked him out of it.”
Keep it up, Jack.
And I could feel that business card in one pocket, the glasses in the other. And here was Conner, sitting all loose and comfortable in front of me, with one of his knees bent sideways on the mattress, propping an elbow on it. All of it, pulling me in different directions, tearing me apart.
No matter what, Conner Kirk never lost his composure. He was a kid who’d only break a sweat if he wanted to. And it would look cool when he did it.
I sat down on the desk chair, swiveled, and stretched my feet out on top of his bed.
The breath I exhaled made me slump down, deflate, relax. I was safe here.
It felt better just being in his room, smelling that Conner Kirk smell that made me know this was real. This was home.
Right?
“You okay?” Conner turned around on the bed and faced me. And I found myself staring at him, looking to see if there was some indication that things really weren’t okay. I couldn’t shake the idea that something was different about Conner.
“Uh. Yeah. Sorry about the weird phone call, dude.”
“You were, like, on another planet.”
“Yeah.” I could tell he really didn’t know anything about it—Marbury, Griffin, Ben. “Let’s go get something to eat, Con.”
“Dude. Jack.” Conner got one of those wide grins. “You reek. How long since you saw some deodorant?”
I don’t know, Con. Gee … Last time I took a shower was at Quinn Cahill’s firehouse. For all I know, that could have been a year ago.
“Sorry.”
“Jeez.” Conner let out a sigh and launched himself up from his bed. “I seriously don’t know how you’d ever make it through a day without me looking out for you. Here.”
Conner began pulling out clean clothes for me to wear. His stuff was always nicer, more expensive than mine. Not that I couldn’t have whatever I wanted. I guess I just never cared about price tags and labels.
He threw his clothes into my lap and pointed at the ice-block wall separating his room from his own personal bathroom. “Get in there. Rinse off. Wake up. Snap the fuck out of it, Jack. You have three minutes and then I’m going to come in and drag you naked into the street if you don’t get your shit together. Now. Come on.”
* * *
I’d kept those glasses and the cop’s card twisted up inside my dirty clothes. Conner was right. He was always right. I smelled like a locker room. Worse. I threw my clothes behind the seat in my truck, but stood there, looking at them for just a moment.
Wondering.
Conner and I had identical trucks. Things were like that with us. We’d known each other and been best friends since we were babies, and nothing would ever change those things. Or, at least, that’s what I hoped.
But ever since I broke that lens in Ben and Griffin’s garage, things had been changed, moved around, and that was scarier than anything I had ever seen since my whole fucked-up journey started, back on the night of Conner’s end-of-school party.
He drove.
I sat.
And I couldn’t help but look back, one time, to see if maybe there was a black Cadillac following us, or maybe if we had Freddie Horvath’s body tied up in the bed of Conner’s truck.
I hadn’t gotten away from anything.
We didn’t have to say the first word about where we were going. We always ate at the same places: Chinese food if we went to the mall, or Uncle Herb’s, a twenty-four-hour pancake diner, if we didn’t. And we weren’t going to the mall.
“Dude. Turn right up here,” I said.
Conner glanced at me, shrugged. “Why?”
“I want to go by this place where some kids I know live.”
“You don’t know anyone that I don’t know. And this is the crackhead part of town.” He laughed.
But Conner turned at the corner. We drove around the park. I looked up at the Little League light stanchion, saw our initials. “You remember when we climbed up there, Con?”
“Huh? Oh. Yeah.” Then he sounded a little perturbed, but it was just Conner. “You are tripping out on some shit today, aren’t you Jack? That doctor really did pop you some pills, didn’t he?”
I tried to laugh.
“Okay. Where am I going now?” he said.
“Here. This street. Forest Trail.”
Forest Trail Lane was a cul-de-sac of older homes that had been built twenty years ago. This was the only neighborhood in Glenbrook that had apartment buildings, too, and every kid in town knew that if you wanted weed or meth, you could find it here.
“Go slow.”
“Dude. What the fuck?”
Conner looked at me like he thought I was trying to score a rock or something. I lowered the window and put my arm out.
“Please, Con. Just go slow.”
Ben and Griffin’s house was at the end of the cul-de-sac; nice, tile roof, a gate on the side leading around to an old L-shaped swimming pool. I swam in it with them. So did Conner.
Just the way it was supposed to be.
Their station wagon was parked in the driveway. The back door on the driver’s side stood open and Griffin’s mom bent inside it, looping plastic Walmart bags onto her fingers.
“Stop here.”
Conner put on the brake. We sat in the middle of the turn and I watched Mrs. Goodrich as she closed the door on her car.
“You never been here before?” I said.
“You’re scaring me, Jack.”
I waved my arm. “Excuse me! Mrs. G?”
And Mrs. Goodrich turned and looked right at me.
Let me tell you something. You know how sometimes you’ll run into a person—at the mall, waiting in line for movie tickets, stuff like that—and you know you recognize the person? But then, when you make eye contact, you can plainly see that you’re a complete stranger to them. That’s exactly how Mrs. Goodrich looked at me. And there was no reason for it. Of course she knew who I was. She had to. I’d been over to that house plenty of times. I could tell you every detail about what was inside it.
She almost seemed angered, frightened, like she thought Conner and I were just a couple of punks who were screwing with her, or maybe we were going to rob her. She pushed the car door shut with a knee and turned toward her house, swinging her bags, ignoring me.
“Whoa.” Conner laughed. “Ladies’ man. What the fuck was that all about?”
I slumped down into the seat, put the window up.
I sighed. “I don’t know. Nothing.”
* * *
This is real.
I am sitting here in the front seat of my best friend’s car in the town I grew up in.
This is all real.
And nobody knows anything about me.
We hardly say another word on the way to the diner. Conner asks what that was all about again and I lie to him and say it was only a bad joke. I say the names again.
Ben.
Griffin.
My friend thinks I’m insane.
I want to ask him about the lens, the garage. I want to tell him about the glasses I left in my clothes, but I am afraid.
I am afraid of what Conner will think of me.
This is real.
Welcome home, Jack.
* * *
“You’re staring at me.”
“Huh?”
“You keep staring at
me, Jack. It’s creeping me out.”
Conner never ate syrup on his pancakes. He liked to roll them up and eat them with his hands. There were things I could always count on, always wanted to count on. But sometimes things slipped away and then came back as something else, too.
I felt myself turning red, getting ready for another one of Conner’s Dude-you-are-so-gay jokes.
“Sorry.”
“Well, quit it.”
But I couldn’t. I saw something in his eyes. Something that wasn’t the same as before. So he kicked my foot under the table.
“There are these things that have been happening to me, Con. It’s real. I thought I had it figured out, I mean, how it happens. So you have to believe me. I can prove it.”
I drew circles with my fork in the syrup on my plate. Circles inside of circles; a line cutting through all of them.
Conner shifted in the booth across from me. “This is like a fucking horror movie.”
I took a deep breath.
He looked around, guiltily, like he wanted to be certain nobody was listening to him and his crazy friend. The kids who killed someone. “Okay. So tell me.”
“That woman getting out of the car on Forest Trail. Her name is Ellen Goodrich. She has two sons named Ben and Griffin. You could probably check in a phone book or something. I know who they are.”
“And she knows you, right?”
I didn’t say anything.
Of course she didn’t know who I was.
Nobody did.
“So let me tell you what I think,” Conner began. I eyed him over my cup of black coffee. How anyone could drink Coke with pancakes and eggs was beyond me, even if it was evening in Glenbrook.
If this was Glenbrook.
“Okay. I want to know what you think, Con.”
He watched me lift a forkful of pancakes into my mouth.
“I have a feeling you were thinking about talking to that doctor. Weren’t you? Really talking to him, about that Freddie guy and what we did to him. Then you couldn’t do it. You couldn’t talk about it. That’s what I think.”
I swallowed. Picked up my coffee. “So?”
“So, then you started tripping out on all this other stuff. This nonsense about things we never did and people you don’t even know. A lens thing, these kids, whoever. That lady you scared over in Cracktown. Just to get in the way of what you need to do.”
“What do I need to do, Con?”
He always made everything so simple. That was Conner.
He crossed his fork and knife on top of his empty plate. “I figure you only have two options: You either forget about it and move on, we take off for England in a few days and it’s done; or we go tell someone, Jack. But you got to get it over with, once and for all.”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah.” Conner smiled and kicked my shin under the table. “Was I right?”
Conner’s always right.
This isn’t Conner.
I left him in Marbury, and he’s trying to find me.
I was scared.
I looked my best friend straight in the eyes. “This isn’t you, Conner.”
Conner looked shocked, tried to laugh. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Jack?”
I pulled out my wallet, left a twenty on the table, stuck inside the ring of sweat made by Conner’s Coke glass.
The center of the universe.
“You remember Blackpool?”
Conner shrugged. “What about it?”
“You remember having a fight?”
“Did I kick your ass?” He laughed.
“I’m not joking, Conner. Do you remember when we got into a fight on the beach?”
Conner shook his head. “Over what?”
“Nothing. Never mind. You’re right, Conner. You’re right. Let’s forget about it.”
I stood up and started to make my way out of the diner.
Conner followed. “What’re you doing? Will you cool it?”
I didn’t want to look at him. I pushed for the door, almost knocked down one of those cheap wooden stands with free Glenbrook real estate magazines in it. And Conner stayed right on my heels all the way out into the parking lot.
The sky was gray.
It looked like Marbury, but the sun had just finally dropped below the mountains to the west and a white-hot sliver of moon hung in the thick furnace of evening.
Marbury: (noun) Third planet in order from the sun. No natural satellites. This planet, as the only in the Solar System which is inhabited by humans.
I think, standing there at the front of Conner’s identical-to-mine truck, facing away from him, at that moment I realized that I was totally alone.
There’s nobody home, Jack.
It was like being dead, or standing in the center of an endless cemetery.
THIS WAS THE HARDEST TO GET OUT OF.
I was done.
So I made a list in my head—first, second, third—the things Jack would do; the last things Jack would ever do.
Fuck this place.
I needed to get out.
“I’m sorry, Con,” I said. “I think I better go home. Maybe I need to sleep or something.”
Conner opened his door and started the truck.
“I don’t want you to do anything weird, Jack. Maybe you should just spend the night at my place.”
I got in.
“Oh. I’d never do anything weird.”
That made Conner laugh.
That was good.
I had to get away.
nine
It wasn’t completely dark yet when I left Conner’s house.
I promised I’d bring his clothes back in the morning, and he joked that I didn’t need to bother returning them—because seeing them on me, he realized how gay they looked.
Before I drove away, I shook my head and rubbed my eyes. I felt like everything I ever knew was gone. I was just so tired.
I believed it was the last time I’d ever see my best friend.
But it wasn’t Conner.
* * *
I left my truck in the lot at Steckel Park and then I found the bench—the same one where I’d passed out the night Freddie Horvath took me and drugged me. I thought it was the same bench, but I couldn’t be absolutely certain.
I couldn’t be sure anything was the same anymore.
I knew what I was going to do. I had that cop’s business card in my hand. I was just trying to will myself to hit the SEND button on my phone. I’d already punched in the numbers, after I’d double-checked to be sure there was no contact listing for Ben or Griffin—like I’d almost convinced myself that I was just fucked up, that my friends would appear again out of nowhere, and everything would simply go back to being the way it was all supposed to be.
I’d talk to him and then I’d leave. I just needed to know one thing, and then Jack could pop out of this Glenbrook and not come back. And I didn’t care where I ended up.
The glasses were wrapped up in my stinking clothes, sitting under the seat in my truck.
And I thought, Maybe I just need to go find a dictionary, so I can see what words have been wiped out of this universe.
I swallowed, gritted my teeth.
SEND
“Avery Scott.”
“It’s Jack Whitmore.”
There was a pause. Maybe five seconds. And I heard him switch the phone in his hands, like he was putting it down so he could write something. Maybe he had to switch off the remote from the football game or the porn he was watching.
“Don’t put me on a speakerphone,” I said.
Another pause.
Things being moved again.
“Okay. You’re not. You want to talk? I can come to you. Where are you?”
“What’s wrong with doing it like this?” I said.
“If that’s what you want.”
“Okay.” I snapped my face to the side. The lights overhead in the park flickered on and a moth nearly flew into my mouth. “I just want
to ask you how you know about me.”
“Look, Jack. I really think we should talk. Why don’t I come there, wherever you are?”
And I wondered if maybe he had some way of pinpointing where I was calling from.
“I don’t want to do that.”
“Nobody’s going to know anything about you. Is that what you’re scared of? The newspapers, the TV, they’ll never know your name or see your face. I just want to find out if you’re okay, kid. I need to know more about that guy. For the other kids. You know, their families. That’s all. I promise.”
It was the second promise Avery Scott made to me that day.
“What can you tell me?”
“I can show you what I got, Jack. What I got about you.”
He was lying.
There was nothing.
He couldn’t have anything about me.
My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my throat.
“Jack?”
“What?”
“Where are you?”
I don’t know where this is.
“The park.”
“Five minutes.”
END
* * *
Avery Scott sits beside me and hands a flat yellow envelope to me.
I can tell the envelope has never been opened; the edges are sharp and it smells like an office supply store.
He asks if I’d like to grab some coffee.
Or something.
The closest place is Java and Jazz, and I can hear the music.
Or maybe I only think I do, but I tell him no.
I’m not going to let him take me on any more fifteen-minute rides.
I flip the envelope in my hands, open the shining flap. My fingertip tacks across the adhesive. I can smell the glue, and it seems to say, Put me in your mouth.
Inside, there are papers. Stacked. Some are wrinkled.
“He had this remote file server,” Scott says. “Do you know what that is?”
He thinks I am stupid.
Fuck you.
“It took a while to track it down. He was very organized. Different folders for every one of … you kids. All kinds of information. Medical stuff—weight, blood type, blood pressure, temperature.” The cop watches me. My face.
The top sheet is a color scan of my driver’s license.
Jack is smiling. His hair is down in one eye. A sixteen-year-old kid who nothing ever happened to.
The next two are color photos of me.
