Spontaneous

by Aaron Starmer

  “No. I mean, probably not. I guess there are worse fates. Even Tess has the hots for that dude and she usually goes for the cerebral types. It’s just . . . I could explode at any moment and is this what I should be doing? Getting all wrapped up in you?”

  “You should be doing what makes you happy. That’s what I’m doing.”

  I pushed the pillow down toward the bottom of the bed and scooted closer to the wall. “Lie down next to me,” I told him.

  He did, with his face pressed into my shoulder.

  “This is the part where you put your arms around me,” I said.

  He did, and grasped one of my hands. His hand was still cold from being outside. My hand was shaking a bit.

  “How many?” I asked. “Girls, I mean. Besides me.”

  He stroked my fingers. “Well, I guess you could count Jane.”

  I tried not to wince but I’m sure I winced. “Yes. Jane certainly counts.”

  He kept stroking my fingers and didn’t say anything else.

  “And?” I asked.

  “And that’s it. Jane.”

  Now it was me who was silent. At least for a few seconds, which is about as much silence as I can stand.

  “Don’t you want to know my number?” I asked.

  “Yes. And no.”

  I lifted his hand and rolled over so I could look him in the eye. “Three. Do you want to know their names?”

  He bit his top lip, then said, “Probably not. Do any of them have neck tattoos? Any of them immortal beasts of indeterminate age?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “Then I’d rather not know.”

  I sat up, pulled my phone out from under my pillow, and set an alarm for five thirty a.m. “You can sleep here tonight, right? Slip out early before my parents get up? Is your mom expecting you back?”

  “There aren’t exactly curfews at my place.”

  “Maybe that’s it,” I said with a forced chuckle. “Kids who break their curfews go boom.”

  “Makes as much sense as the drug thing.”

  “What do you mean?” I said as I settled back in for the cuddle. “It’s pretty obvious that’s the link. Someone posted pictures of Wonderman’s house in Florida. Did you know he has a mansion down there?”

  “So? So do a lot of people.”

  “A lot of shady smuggler types. Who knows where this stuff originates? Who knows what was put in it? Who knows anything?”

  “If you’re going with scientific explanations, then you have to look hard at the science. And I don’t think the science can possibly hold up.”

  “If you’re not looking at the science, then what do you look at?”

  “Spiritual answers,” he said, kissing me on the head. “Karma.”

  “What goes around comes around, huh?” I asked. “Well, I’m not exactly a saint.”

  “It’s okay if you get high and all that,” he told me. “I don’t love that you do, but it’s okay.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. You know what I worry about more? Jennifer Lawrence.”

  “Don’t we all? Never hear about that poor gal, anymore, do we?” I deadpanned, assuming, like anyone would, that he was joking. Even though I didn’t get the joke.

  “Fact is, a lot of us have it coming,” he said with a sigh. “I don’t know if we can be forgiven.”

  Then I kissed his neck again, as if the kissing would fill his veins with forgiveness. And immortality. Turn him into an enduring man-beast of indeterminate age. “Promise me that it won’t ruin you and your whole life if it happens to me first.”

  “It won’t,” he said. “Not because I don’t care about you, but because I’m lucky to know you at all.”

  “It would ruin my life if it happened to you.”

  “It wouldn’t. You’re tougher than that.”

  “You don’t have any idea about how weak I am.”

  “Because you’re scared? That’s not weakness.”

  “No. Because I’m weak. And impulsive. And foolish.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says me.”

  “Well, you’re not the best judge of yourself.”

  My head was spinning again, so I put it on his chest and said, “As much as I want this to happen tonight, it can’t. It’s a lame excuse, but I’m using it. I have a migraine coming on. Maybe the worst one ever.”

  He twirled my hair in his fingers and said, “Don’t worry. We have all the time in the world.”

  Really? Because it sure as hell seemed like our world was already on borrowed time.

  where our world was headed

  I’m usually a deep sleeper, but that night we slept the broken slumber of two people who aren’t used to sharing a bed, and Dylan was out the window before my parents got up. A quick peek at the news got me up to date.

  Dr. Wonderman had been denied bail. The DA claimed he had foreign bank accounts and every reason to flee what could end up being seven individual murder charges. A lab was still analyzing the drug samples found at Wonderman’s home, in the Daltons’ car, and what was now known as “the tree house of horror” (née “the crack tree house”). The war on drugs had hit our shores and was raging. All over town, police were kicking down doors. Well, knocking very forcefully on doors, at least.

  Meanwhile, the FBI was gently ringing my doorbell. Special Agents Carla Rosetti and Demetri Meadows arrived at our house around eight a.m., accepted Dad’s offer of a “cuppa mud” (really, Dad, that’s what you went with, “cuppa mud?”) and we all sat on kitchen stools as Rosetti supplied more updates.

  “I had a look at your lab work this morning, Mara,” she told me. “And the doctors assured me there was nothing abnormal.”

  Dad was a bit too angry to notice the happy surprise that slapped my face. “Wait, wait, wait,” he barked. “We’re thrilled to hear the news, but medical records are confidential between a doctor and a patient.”

  “So you’re saying Mara’s healthy?” Mom asked and put a hand on Dad’s shoulder.

  Rosetti gave her a curt nod and turned to Dad. “Mr. Carlyle, I do respect that confidentiality, but I’d be disingenuous if I pretended we didn’t have full access to medical records as part of our investigation. Besides, I figured Mara would want to hear the news from a friend.”

  Now she was using the word friend. Voicing it out loud. In public! It felt like I was being asked to the prom. I almost fainted. Still, I managed to squeak out a thank-you.

  “It makes me as happy as it makes you,” Rosetti said. “But let’s move on to the task at hand. You were close to the Dalton twins?”

  “I was friendly with them,” I said.

  “Shouldn’t we have Frolic here?” Dad asked, which seemed more a rhetorical question than anything. No doubt he was sick of the guy too.

  Meadows finally piped in. “Mara is not under investigation for anything,” he said as he swigged his cuppa mud. “In fact, she might be the best thing that’s happened to this investigation.”

  I turned to Rosetti for confirmation and she nodded confidently. “Okay, then what can I do?” I asked.

  “We’ve got a list of Wonderman’s contacts,” Meadows said. “Now we need to know who the Daltons were selling to. We don’t have time to sift through all their social media chums.”

  “You’re asking me to be a narc?” I said.

  “We’re asking you to save some lives,” Rosetti said. “No one will be arrested. Everybody will be thanking you when this is through.”

  Mom reached across the counter and grabbed a pen and a torn envelope to write on.

  “No need,” Meadows said, holding up an iPad displaying the yearbook pictures of all my classmates. “She can tap faces.”

  I tapped thirty faces, give or take, which made them disappear from the screen. Talk about ominous. For
each face I tapped, my parents either nodded knowingly or they sucked in little wincing breaths. At this point, I don’t remember all the faces that I tapped, but I can confidently say I never tapped Billy Harmon’s face.

  Because why would I tap Billy Harmon’s face? How could I tap Billy Harmon’s face? If Kamal Patel was a plague on our school, then Billy was the antidote. May all gods of all religions bless Billy Harmon. Which is all a roudabout way of revealing that when Rosetti and Meadows took off to go rescue the owners of those thirty tapped faces from their tainted pills and poison pot, I got to enjoy a few days of concussion headaches, long naps, and genuine hope, before the unthinkable happened.

  Tess sent me the world’s most devastating text on the morning of November 15, a previously inconsequential day on the calendar that I guarantee will be remembered for decades to come. The news that kicked things off was so bad that all I could do was throw my phone across the room (at the couch, mind you—it was still another year until I qualified for an upgrade). And things were only going to get worse.

  “What’s the matter?” Mom asked.

  “Billy Harmon,” I said with a shaking head. “Billy Harmon.”

  The incredulity must have echoed for hours through our increasingly empty town.

  the calm

  Tripping over half-full cardboard boxes, I made my way through Tess’s house later that afternoon. Mom had driven me and had stuck around to talk to Paula, who was in the kitchen emptying the fridge of everything but the condiments.

  “Mara can come with us if she likes,” I heard Paula say as I looked for Tess in her room. All I found were packed bags and a wall covered with maps and drawings of flowers, animal anatomy, and chemical compounds. The names of the deceased, along with numbers and symbols, were scrawled on multicolored sticky notes in Tess’s looping, elegant handwriting. The notes were on nearly every surface. Now, I was no dummy (I was in pre-calc, after all), but I wasn’t even going to try to figure out what this mess was all about.

  Side note: If it’s the left side of the brain that determines someone’s abilities with numbers and logic, then it was a wonder Tess could hold her head up straight. Stuff like computer code and sudoku came naturally to the girl. Pre-calc? Pshaw! She’d placed out junior year and was already taking college courses. It was one of the few aspects of Tess’s life that she didn’t share with me, which was okay by both of us. Once her mind got spinning, she needed someone who could keep up, and she was always better off picking one of her online friends or the kids she knew from the Rubik’s Cube cotillions and whatnot.

  The window by Tess’s bed faced the backyard and that’s where I eventually spotted her, swinging in a sap-stained hammock strung up between two pine trees. We’d spent many an autumn day in that hammock, watching videos or reading books side by side, howling at the moon when it rose in the evening sky. So when I went outside that afternoon, I didn’t even have to invite myself up. I climbed in beside her and snuggled.

  “I loved that little guy,” Tess whispered.

  “We all did,” I said, and I kissed her on the forehead.

  “He wasn’t a saint, you know?”

  “He was the closest thing we had.”

  “He swore. He made dirty jokes. There were people he didn’t particularly like.”

  “Like who?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Point is, he was human. Still, it makes no sense that this would happen to him.”

  “Did anyone see it?”

  “His dad and Tyler sorta saw, but they were spared the goriest parts, thank God. They were wheeling him over to the porch to have breakfast and he was hiding under an orange quilt, joking around, pretending to be a pumpkin. The quilt puffed, and fell, and that was that. I guess they knew his days were numbered anyway, but they couldn’t possibly have expected this. Connie called me before she even called the police. Said she considered me family. She was so friggin’ calm. Like she always is. I don’t know if it’s even sunk in yet.”

  “What sort of pills was he on?” I asked.

  “I thought you knew. The Harmons are Christian Scientists. They don’t vaccinate or take medicine of any sort. Billy was as clean as they come. The whole family believes in the healing power of God.”

  “If God blew up Billy Harmon, then God is the goddamn devil.”

  With a sigh, Tess held her phone out so we could both see it. A video of Billy Harmon was cued up, one of his daily vlog posts. He didn’t have tens of thousands of followers, but he had enough that there were already a few comments asking about the delayed upload of the latest installment.

  “This was his last post,” Tess said. “From yesterday.”

  In the video, Billy was smiling as wide as he could, which wasn’t very wide considering that he barely had control of his face. At the age of six, he’d been diagnosed with a rare degenerative nerve disorder that made his muscles clench in different configurations throughout the day, which meant it looked like he was constantly in pain. And he was in pain, but it was pain he could bear, apparently. Unfortunately, the condition also meant that he could do very little for himself, was confined to a wheelchair, and had a life expectancy that didn’t reach much past his teens. There were something like twenty other people in the world with this condition, which had a tongue-tying scientific name, but ended up being known as Billy Harmon’s Disease because he was the only sufferer with a YouTube channel.

  “Good morning, friends,” Billy said in his slow, devastatingly tender voice. “A lot of people have been asking about what it’s like to live in Covington during these dark times and they ask how I can keep smiling. All I can say is look out the window. Is it sunny where you are? Rainy? Snowy? Does the weather make you angry? Does it make you sad?

  “The weather gives me joy, to be honest. Rain feeds plants. Snow blankets the world in beauty. Hurricanes, tornadoes? Sure they destroy, but they’re moods of the earth, aren’t they? The earth is moody like any of you. And I love the earth like I love all of you. Even if you’re moody. Especially because you’re moody.

  “I don’t know what’s causing my friends and classmates to explode. And while I mourn their loss, I also accept that this is part of the weather now. I hope that doesn’t sound callow. I’ve wept as all of you have wept. But I’ve also laughed because I have memories of these wonderful people that no one can ever take from me. And I look out of my window and I smile. Because after the hurricanes and tornadoes, the sun always comes up, the plants always grow, the world spins on.

  “And as long as the world spins on, we can still dance. No matter who we are, we can always dance.”

  A jaunty jam kicked in, animated confetti fell over the screen—along with a flashing Dance Party! insert—and Billy Harmon danced.

  Dancing for Billy Harmon consisted of twisting his lips and struggling to move them back and forth. It was sincere, schmaltzy, and sad. In other words, quintessential Billy Harmon. We loved the kid in the same way we love inspirational quotes photoshopped onto pictures of sunsets over the beach. Not because they’re profound. But because they assure us, temporarily at least, that life is simple, that an aw-shucks attitude paired with a splash of color can defeat the sting of tragedy, no matter how tragic that tragedy is.

  Which is bullshit, right?

  Still, consider the messenger. Fate basically said, “Let’s totally fuck with this guy!” and the guy shook fate’s hand and bought it lunch. Along with his YouTube channel, Billy had self-published an e-book called Harmonese, featuring fifty life-affirming haikus. I never had the stomach to read the thing, but no matter what Billy said or did, you had to respect him and you had to love him. And no one loved him more than Tess did.

  Billy’s jam was still jamming, but Tess had had enough. She tossed her phone to her feet, hugged me, and said, “We’re going to Uncle Andy’s tomorrow. Mom’s working remotely. Now that Billy’s gone, she’s afraid that it’ll happen to me.�
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  “You can’t leave me here alone.”

  “Mom said you can join us.”

  “And leave my parents?” I said as I chewed on my thumbnail. “I don’t think I could do that. But aren’t we supposed to be together forever, you and I? Isn’t that written in the stars?”

  “I won’t ever question the stars,” Tess said as she kissed me on the forehead. “But for now we’ve gotta do what’s right for our families. And it won’t be that bad for you. At least you’ve got Dylan.”

  “I hardly know Dylan. I’ve known you my entire life. You can’t go anywhere. You’re Tess McNulty. You’re Covington’s finest citizen. You’re invincible.”

  “I seriously doubt that. There are some quant guys I’ve been trading data with online and—”

  “You talk so sexy sometimes.”

  She pinched me to scold me and said, “I’m serious. There are some compelling patterns in the numbers. Birthdays. Moon cycles. I may be as susceptible as anyone.”

  “Moon cycles and birthdays? So it’s like a period?”

  “Have you ever thought that maybe you shouldn’t joke about stuff so much?”

  I considered invoking Billy, saying, “Didn’t we watch the same video? Billy wants me to joke, right? Kids blowing up is like the weather. We should joke about the weather, shouldn’t we?”

  Instead, I muttered a baby-voiced “sorry.” Because while I might have known what Billy said, I had no idea what he really wanted. That was Tess’s department.

  Since sixth grade, when she first volunteered to help around the Harmon home, she’d been Billy’s confidant. They’d had tons of private conversations to which I’d never been privy. And yes, that made me jealous sometimes, but I also knew it was something Tess needed—a friend who expected nothing but her presence. Sometimes people teased her and asked her if she and Billy were dating, but that didn’t offend Tess. Not one bit.

  “If he survives until his twenty-first birthday, I’ll marry him,” Tess told me once. “Gladly. I’d be lucky to call a guy like that my husband.”