Blood on My Hands

by Todd Strasser

  Back on the sidewalk, I have one more stop to make—the hardware store—but walking through town is nerve-racking. Every time I pass a person, every time someone glances in my direction, I wonder if he or she can see through my disguise. With every step, I have to fight the urge to bolt.

  Inside the hardware store, I select some small brass-colored key rings and take them up to the register, once again aware of the video camera mounted in the corner. I’m so busy trying to position myself so that the camera doesn’t see my face that I don’t focus on the person at the cash register until it’s my turn to pay.

  We’re practically eye to eye. Oh my God! She’s a punk with hot pink streaks in her dirty blonde hair and tattoos and piercings. We stare at each other for a moment. Soundview isn’t exactly a mecca for punks. Is she wondering why she’s never seen me around before? Does she know why I’m buying those small key rings? She calculates the price and I feverishly dig into my pockets for the money. The change slips through my shaking fingers and clatters on the counter.

  “Oh, sorry!” I blurt.

  She cocks her head curiously and stares as she picks up the coins she needs. “New around here?”

  “Uh …” I slide the rest of the change into my shaking hand, trying to think of an answer. “No. I mean, yes!”

  She frowns. Terrified that I’ve blown it, I shove the change into my pocket and turn to go. I’m just pushing through the door when she calls, “Hey, stop!”

  Katherine might have been right about one thing: maybe three years is a long time to date someone. I was almost always happy with Slade, but that doesn’t mean it was always easy. Sometimes he grew glum, withdrawn, and depressed; a few times it was so deep that it scared me. A couple of times I suggested he speak to Dr. Ploumis, the school psychologist, or find a psychologist outside school to speak to, but he always said he’d think about it, which was his way of saying no.

  Once when I pressed him about why he wouldn’t seek help, he said his father wouldn’t understand. I said that was silly. This was the twenty-first century. Everyone understood that sometimes you needed help and that was what psychologists were for. Look at how many kids we knew who were on some kind of medication. But Slade would insist that his father was too old-school for that. You manned up and toughed it out. Shrinks were for wimps and the only medication a man needed came in an amber bottle with a black-and-white label.

  One night last spring, just before Slade went away for National Guard training, he got really, really low. A bunch of us were at Dog Beach, a small strip of rock and sand squeezed between two fancy beach clubs. It was a place where people could look for sea glass or bring their dogs for a swim. At one end of the beach, a long, tall metal pier stretched into the Sound. The pier was high enough that sometimes guys would climb through the metal crosshatched supports until they were over the water, and smoke or drink out there just for a change of view.

  On this night I’d been talking to some girls when I realized I hadn’t seen Slade for a while. It wasn’t like him to vanish without telling me, and I began to feel anxious. I looked around and noticed the silhouette of a figure perched in the crosshatching under the pier. I knew at once that it had to be Slade, but I couldn’t imagine what he was doing out there. I thought of walking to the water’s edge and calling to him, but something told me he didn’t want everyone’s attention.

  Instead, I climbed up into the supports and started to make my way under the pier. It wasn’t easy. The way the supports were staggered, you needed pretty long arms to get from one to the next, and being under five feet tall, I had to take a few leaps of faith. But I didn’t think twice. Going all the way out there by himself was unlike Slade. I knew something was wrong.

  He heard me when I was about a dozen feet away. I saw his head turn and knew he was looking, even though in the dark under the pier, I couldn’t see his face. I paused, planting my feet in the V of the supports, and waited for him to say something.

  It was a while before he said, “What are you doing here, Shrimp?”

  “What are you doing here?” I replied.

  He looked away, at the water. It was a cloudy, dark night with only a pale outline of a quarter moon appearing from and disappearing behind the clouds. I climbed closer, but the way the supports were set up, there wasn’t room for me to sit beside him. I had to stop about three feet away. Just out of reach.

  “Slade?” I said softly. “What is it?”

  “I don’t want to go,” he said without looking at me, his voice breathy, almost breaking. He was talking about the National Guard.

  “Let’s go back to the beach,” I said.

  He didn’t react.

  “Slade?”

  “Why do I have to do all these things just because my father wants me to? You know they’re sending Guard units overseas? Every week guardsmen are getting killed? And for what?”

  “Maybe you won’t get sent.”

  “Oh, great. And then I get to look forward to spending the rest of my life working in drywall. Whoop-de-do!”

  I was surprised to hear him put into words what I’d sensed he’d been feeling for a long time. “You don’t have to.”

  I heard him exhale slowly, and then he tilted his head down. “It’ll kill him. I mean, first my mom. Then that stupid second marriage. Then my brother moving to Boston and my sister moving to Florida. And what about Alyssa?”

  Slade’s mom had died of breast cancer when he was five. A failed second marriage had left Mr. Lamont with joint custody of Alyssa. Since then, Mr. Lamont had resigned himself to single fatherhood, and many lonely nights in front of the TV in the company of a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Sometimes it worried me that Slade seemed to be following in his father’s footsteps. The solitary drinking and solemn, silent moods during which he didn’t want to go anywhere or do anything.

  “It’s your life, Slade,” I said. “If you don’t want to work with him—”

  “Might as well,” he muttered, cutting me off. “Don’t know what else to do … unless it’s to just end it all.”

  “Slade!” I hated when he talked like that. “Please, let’s go back.”

  But he didn’t answer. Below us, small waves splashed against the rocks and pilings. I knew he was upset about leaving me, because that was how I was feeling about seeing him go. The longest we’d ever been apart was maybe four or five days.

  “I love you,” I said. “We’ll talk every day, I promise.”

  He looked away into the dark. “I have news for you, Cal. We won’t talk every day. I read the regulations. For the first two months of basic training, you’re allowed just one phone call—to your parents.”

  That took me by surprise. “Two months isn’t that long. You won’t believe how fast it’ll go.” It was strange. He’d just turned nineteen and I was still a month from turning seventeen, yet there were times when I felt like I had to fill in for his mother. In my own dark moments, I sometimes wondered if it would always be this way. Would I have to struggle to get him out of these moods for the rest of my life?

  Under the pier Slade turned to me again and for a second I thought his eyes were glistening, but then a cloud covered the moon and it was too dark to be sure. “You promise?” he asked.

  “Yes, all of it. I promise I’ll always love you, and after those first two months, we’ll talk every day and it’ll go fast. Now come on, let’s go back to the beach.”

  Slade nodded and reached up toward something. It was only then that I noticed the belt. It was hanging from one of the supports as if it had been tied there. At the other end the belt looped over on itself through the buckle. I didn’t know if Slade meant it seriously or just as a symbol, but it looked like a noose.

  Chapter 16

  Sunday 4:54 P.M.

  WHEN I HEAR the punk cashier in the hardware store yell, “Hey, stop!” my first inclination is to bolt through the door and down the sidewalk as fast as I can. It would be the natural, logical thing to do in my situation, right? So I don’
t know where the guile and wherewithal that keeps me from running comes from. Maybe I just know that once I start to run, I’m bound to be caught. So somehow, even though my heart is racing and I feel like I want to jump out of my skin, I force myself to stop and turn to look at her.

  She’s holding out a small brown paper bag. “You forgot this.”

  I force a smile and take the bag. “Thanks.”

  And then I’m out of there.

  At the bus stop, despite my hunger, I’m too wound up to eat the sandwich I bought. So I sit and stare down at my black fingernails. Thank God the bus comes soon and it’s almost empty. Sitting near the back, I wolf down the sandwich and wish I’d bought a second one. Then I get to work on the key rings, snipping them with the wire cutters to leave just enough of a gap to squeeze some flesh into. One goes on my lip, two on a nostril, one on an eyebrow, and the rest on my ears. Jeanie once told me something funny about piercings: When you have them, people don’t focus on you. They focus on the hardware.

  I got on the bus with no piercings. Thirty-five minutes later, at the stop by Fairchester Community College, I get off in full metallic regalia.

  I’ve come to FCC to find Tallon Marx, who is studying for a degree in math with a minor in physical education. Last year she was a teaching assistant at Soundview High, helped coach the girls’ cross-country team, and worked in PACE. Because she was cool and smart and only a few years older than us, she became a confidant and a go-to person when someone had a problem or needed the kind of advice she didn’t feel comfortable going to a friend or an adult for.

  At a house that has been divided into units, I ring Tallon’s bell and wait, praying she’s there. A lock clacks and the door opens a few inches, but it’s not Tallon; it’s her roommate, Jasmine, who has freckles and spidery red dreadlocks. “Yes?”

  A cold shiver runs through me. She’s staring right at me, at my fake piercings and spiked dyed hair. If she’s watched TV or been on the computer, will she recognize me? But there’s more confusion than recognition in her eyes.

  “Hi,” I say. “You’re Jasmine, right? Is Tallon around?”

  Jasmine frowns, as if she can’t quite figure out how I know her name and why someone who looks like me would be asking for Tallon. But the good news is that she’s treating me like a stranger, not like a suspect in a murder. “She went to the library, but she should be back soon. Is … there something I can help you with?”

  “I—” I almost say that I’m a friend of Tallon’s from Soundview High, but I catch myself. What if Tallon’s told her about the girl she knew from last year who the police are looking for in connection with a murder? “I’m here for tutoring? In math? Tallon said if she wasn’t here, you could let me in.”

  Jasmine scowls but opens the door a little bit wider. “She didn’t say anything about tutoring.”

  “Oh, yeah, she put a sign up in my school.”

  Jasmine bites a corner of her lip, obviously still uncertain about what to do.

  “I can wait out here in the hall if you’d like,” I offer with less-than-complete sincerity. I’d much rather wait inside, where there’s less chance of being spotted.

  The ploy works. “Oh, no, you can come in,” she says.

  I go in, glad to get out of the hall. Jasmine gestures to a couch covered by an Indian-print spread. The couch creaks and feels lumpy. To my right is a tiny standing-room-only kitchen.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” Jasmine asks.

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  She twirls a dreadlock around with her finger and gestures to a door with an art poster on it. “Well, uh, I have to study. I’m sure Tallon will be here any time now.”

  “Thanks.” I give her a wave.

  Even in the apartment I feel nervous. What if Jasmine did recognize me and just pretended not to? What if the next person through the door isn’t Tallon but a police officer? Being tense and alert all the time is draining, and that is coupled with the little sleep I got last night. My senses are dulled and sketchy, as if I could easily miss something important because my brain can’t process as quickly or as thoroughly as normal. I try to practice what I’ll say to Tallon but I’m so woozy and sleep-deprived that it’s difficult to put words together.

  The door opens and Tallon comes in, carrying a green backpack with a peace symbol on it. Her dark hair is longer than it was last year and she’s wearing lots of silver bangles and rings. She sees me on the couch and gives me an uncertain smile. “Hi.”

  “Hi, Tallon.”

  She cocks her head and furrows her brow, as if she’s trying to figure out what her connection to this small punk girl could be. I stand up and the perplexed look on her face gradually morphs into one of astonishment.

  “Callie?” she gasps.

  I press a finger to my lips. “I have to talk to you.”

  Tallon’s eyes dart left and right, as if she’s wondering what to do now that she’s discovered a killer in her apartment.

  The door with the art poster opens and Jasmine sticks her head out. “Tallon, can I speak to you for a second?”

  Tallon’s head swings back and forth between her roommate and me. My insides clench. They know something’s wrong. I have to get out of here.

  “You know she hates her,” Jodie once said. We were sitting in Dakota’s backyard, watching her play Katherine in badminton.

  “But they’re best friends,” I said.

  “You know what the Chinese general said? ‘Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.’ ”

  I thought about it, but didn’t see how it related to Dakota and Katherine. “What makes you say that?”

  “Watch.”

  I watched. To me they looked like two red-faced girls careening and swinging and trying to win a silly game that involved hitting a strange little bally thing over a high net. Katherine, with her compact, boyish body, was a model of deft movement and quick reflexes. Dakota, with her heavy, bouncing chest, often appeared off balance and seemed to lurch from one shot to the next. Neither girl smiled, whereas I imagined that I would have had a hard time not laughing at the absurdity of it. But if there was one thing Dakota and Katherine had in common, it was how serious and determined they were about almost everything.

  “They just look like they always do to me,” I said.

  Jodie turned and studied me for a moment, as if searching for some clue to why I couldn’t see what she saw. Then she lowered her voice and said, “You can’t see that Dakota is one inch from smashing her racket into Katherine’s face?”

  “Ahhh!” Just then Dakota yelped in frustration as the shuttlecock fell to the ground on her side. On the other side of the net, Katherine grinned triumphantly, red-faced and panting, with her hands on her hips.

  “I hate you!” Dakota cried, picking up the shuttlecock.

  “No, you don’t,” Katherine said.

  “Oh, I so hate you!” Dakota insisted, and served. Once again they started batting the little ball back and forth. And almost immediately Katherine hit it just out of Dakota’s reach.

  “Grrrrr.” Her face glistening, Dakota gritted her teeth and kept playing.

  “Did Dakota say something?” I whispered to Jodie.

  “No. She never talks about Katherine. Ever. Even that’s a sign. It’s like she knows she can’t trust herself to say the right thing. I mean, think about the family she comes from. They’re all politicians. It’s all about saying and doing the right thing.”

  That might have been true, but it also meant that Jodie had no real evidence of animosity between the two girls. Meanwhile, Dakota and Katherine were once again absorbed in thrashing at the shuttlecock. Still whispering, I asked, “I know what you said about the Chinese general, but seriously, if Dakota hates Katherine so much, why does she want to be her friend?”

  “Because they both want the same thing.”

  Before I could ask what that thing was, Katherine balled her hand into a fist and cried, “Yes!”

  On the oth
er side of the net, Dakota took several determined steps toward a large potted plant nearby and swung the racket down as hard as she could. Crack! I jumped at the sound of the frame shattering against the edge of the clay pot. Dakota tossed the broken racket away and purposefully stood with her back toward us, as if she didn’t want us to see how furious she was.

  Katherine smiled, as if she enjoyed causing so much anguish. “I’m getting something to drink,” she announced, dropping her racket in the grass, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand, and heading toward the house.

  Dakota stood by the badminton net—her face red and glistening, her eyes narrowed, her jaw clenched—glowering as if she were ready to kill. I felt an elbow touch my arm and turned to find Jodie with one eyebrow raised as if to say, See?

  Chapter 17

  Sunday 5:08 P.M.

  THE FRONT DOOR of the apartment is across the room. I’ll have to get past Tallon to reach it.

  Once again Jasmine says insistently, “Tallon?”

  “Can it wait?” Tallon answers, clearly uncomfortable about taking her eyes off me.

  I decide to take a step, to see how she reacts.

  “I’d appreciate it next time if you’d ask before you use our living room for tutoring,” Jasmine says in a huff, and closes her door.

  Tallon turns and stares at me, clearly bewildered.

  “For God’s sake, Tallon,” I whisper, “do you really think I could kill anyone?”

  “But the pictures …”

  I start to whisper fast, desperate to make her understand before she screams for help. “She was dead when I found her, and someone took a picture that made it look like I did it.” I just hope Jasmine doesn’t have her ear pressed to the door. “Can’t we talk someplace more private?”

  Tallon stiffens. Does she think that maybe this is my way of getting her alone so that I can stab her, too? Callie Carson, serial maniac killer. Tallon has definitely been watching too much CSI. I pat my pockets and turn my palms out, showing her that I’m not carrying any weapons. “Tallon, please. This is serious. I’m desperate. You have to listen.”