Spontaneous

by Aaron Starmer

  “Excuse me,” Jennifer replied.

  I pointed at her butt, and said, “The engine. The old brownie baker.”

  The look on her face cannot be adequately described. Waves of shock crashed onto a beach of disgust and left a coastline of shame. In other words, she was devastated.

  “Go suck a dong, Marigold,” Jennifer Lawrence snarled.

  I looked over my shoulder and asked, “Who’s Marigold?”

  Now add some confusion to the mix and her face nearly disintegrated. Tears streaming, she asked, “Isn’t your name Marigold?”

  I shook my head. She wept some more and stumbled away into the cafeteria. I haven’t spoken to her since.

  In the months that followed, other websites went live. JenniferLawrenceEatsHerOwnBoogers.com and JenniferLawrencePicks AWedgie.com, to name a couple. The pictures that appeared on them weren’t nearly as salacious or as incriminating as advertised. Most of them were fuzzy, taken from a distance with crappy phones. But it didn’t really matter. It became a contest in seventh grade to see who could capture the most unflattering pictures of Jennifer and post them online. I will readily admit that I got caught up in it and snapped a few shots. I never posted any of them, but I know it didn’t help matters each time Jennifer spotted the girl she thought was named Marigold holding a phone up at the far end of the hall.

  By spring, she was gone. Perhaps it was a coincidence. Perhaps one of her parents got transferred to a new job somewhere. But somehow I doubt that.

  So yes, I was complicit in that patch of awfulness. Many of us were, maybe even Billy Harmon. Tess did say he enjoyed a good dirty joke, after all. But guess who was the ringleader, the web master? Gayle Heatherton, that’s who. Our hapless talent-show-loving fugitive, my favorite debater, the most recent notch on the bedpost of the Covington Curse. She never publicly admitted it, but the domain names were all registered to an address that turned out to be her uncle’s lake house. In Ohio, the same state she would later flee to and die in. And when that other Jennifer Lawrence became a big star, I heard Gayle made a few bucks by selling the domain names, which now host Tumblrs dedicated to pictures of the movie star’s flatulent faces, nose-picking, and underwear-repositioning. I feel for you, Jennifer Lawrences of the world. I’m sorry that even your greatest embarrassments have been usurped.

  So that’s what Dylan and Tess were going on about. As for our Jennifer Lawrence, I figured the reason she wasn’t rounded up with the rest of the former classmates is because the government was no better at Googling than anyone else, and she was still out there somewhere having a good laugh at our misfortune.

  Or she was dead, blown to pieces like the others, and her obituary was buried so deep in the search results that it’d be almost impossible to find it. Which would be the ultimate slap in the face for the poor girl.

  marigold and memoreasi

  At Katelyn Ogden’s memorial service we watched a slideshow created by her friend Skye Sanchez. Created is actually a strong word, because an app called MemorEasi had done most of the heavy lifting. It worked like this:

  Enter someone’s name into MemorEasi and the app would perform an image search. You could filter the results using hometowns, schools, etc., and once an image of the specific person you were looking for popped on the screen, all you had to do was tap and then the app would take the reins, using facial recognition software and sifting through social media accounts and databases to create a minute-long slideshow that featured pictures of that person and was scored to something corny and Josh Grobanish. All in about ten seconds flat.

  After exhausting every other search engine to locate our old punching bag Jennifer Lawrence (okay, I only tried Google), I downloaded MemorEasi to my phone. I didn’t have any information to filter the results other than the fact that she used to live in Covington. So I was graced with endless images of the movie star, the movie star, and, you guessed it, the movie star. But right when I was about to give up, one of these things was not like the others. A grainy photo of an entirely different person filled the screen.

  I hadn’t seen her in almost six years, but I was sure this was the same girl we had tortured, the same one who had thought my name was Marigold. She was smiling back at me. Older. Happier, I hoped, though there was no text to confirm that or tell me where she was or if she’d lived quite as long as I had. Only the photo. So I tapped it and MemorEasi did its thing.

  Voilà, instant in memoriam.

  The app found at least ten more photos, and a minute later, after Jennifer Lawrence’s adolescence and its various haircuts had flashed before my eyes, I was crying. I’m not kidding. I was an absolute mess, mourning someone who probably wasn’t dead, shedding more tears than I’d shed for all the victims of the Covington Curse combined. Ask me to explain it and all I can say is technology may be heartless, but that doesn’t mean well-designed technology can’t knock the wind out of you.

  Of course, this is not to declare I was on board with Dylan’s karma theory. (Because, come on, cosmic punishments for fart jokes? Ain’t exactly sound reasoning.) I was still solidly Team Rosetti. But after hearing Tess’s doubts, I needed a little reassurance. And after remembering what we did to Jennifer Lawrence, I needed someone to tell me things could still work out for us cowards and assholes.

  Wiping the tears from my face, I pulled out the burner and called the special agent. “Do something,” I told her.

  “What?”

  “Stop them. Catch them. Fix this.”

  “Mara,” Rosetti responded calmly. “It’s not as simple as that. It will take some time. It will—”

  “Bullshit! Did you hear about what’s happening at the Shop City Mall? Everyone except us gets to move on. No one cares about us anymore. We won’t be able to live our lives, get a yearbook, go to prom, and do all the shit that we were supposed to do. It’s like we’re already dead. Roll the slideshow.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line for a moment and then Rosetti said, “I never got a yearbook. I never went to prom.”

  “Fine. So those things aren’t big deals, but to me—”

  “They are big deals,” Rosetti snapped. “If only I still had the chance to experience them. But I was too wrapped up in growing up when I was your age. You still have a chance. Stop whining and take control of your life. That’s what’s happening at the mall. Initiative.”

  “But—”

  “The people who did this to you expect you to wait around for the next thing to happen, for the next stage in their operation. Fight back by doing the opposite.”

  Once again, the woman surprised me. There was emotion in her voice, not all that different from the emotion that colored Dad’s voice when he had told me that I needed to get to graduation, that I would be safe as long as I walked across a stage and picked up a diploma.

  “So what do you expect me to do?” I said. “Make a few calls and open school next week? Easy peasy.”

  “That’s the problem,” she answered. “There are more than two hundred of you. Have you even tried?”

  “No.”

  “Make an effort.”

  Her point was valid, and yet making efforts was not exactly my forte. I always had great ideas, of course. I would have been perfect for a think tank. Think tanks are a thing, right? Organizations where people sit around and come up with solutions to the world’s problems? I would have been a shoo-in for one of those. However, if do-tanks are also a thing—as in, organizations that actually do shit—then you would have had to count me out. On account of, well, laziness.

  I said an embarrassed “you’re right” and “thank you for your advice” to Rosetti and I hung up. Then I tapped the fluffy pink icon for the MemorEasi app and watched the Jennifer Lawrence slideshow again. Ten times, with Rosetti’s voice echoing through my head, in rhythm with the sappy background tunes.

  “If only. If only. If only.”

&
nbsp; On the eleventh viewing, an idea struck me: Together we had the power to chase someone from our school, so maybe together we could have the power to bring people back.

  I popped off a text to Laura Riggs—you know, the proprietor of the crack tree house and the basement of dark deeds?

  Me: How long would it take to put together a soiree at your place? Invites, booze, all that.

  Her (instantaneously): 4 hours.

  Me: How bout a funeral?

  Her (almost instantaneously): 5? Which am I hosting?

  Me: Both I guess. Do you have room for a cauldron?

  Her: Don’t know what that means but probably.

  What that meant was a big cast-iron pot that was collecting dust in the Covington Kitchen storage room. My parents used to mix their Oinker Oil in it when they were making small, artisanal batches of the stuff. Now I needed to mix up something else.

  Reincarnation.

  if only

  Invitations were sent via Snapchat. The self-destructing image was of Laura Riggs’s house—the front yard riddled with tombstone doodles—and the caption read Your . . . Time . . . Has . . . Come . . . 8PM.

  Fear is a powerful motivator and I knew if anything was going to get the other seniors off their asses, it was an ominous reminder of their existential dilemma.

  There was no way we’d be smuggling the cauldron out of Covington Kitchen without my parents noticing, so I had to ask Dad for a ride to Laura’s. He dropped me, Dylan, and the cauldron off at seven, but not before saying, “Mom wants me to tell you to—”

  “Be safe,” I replied. “I know, I know.”

  “Have fun,” he corrected me. “You guys deserve a night to let your hair down.”

  “We do indeed,” I said. “But that’s not what this is about. We’ll call you in a few hours when we need a lift home. Or sooner if it backfires.”

  Dylan and Laura were the only ones who knew my plans, and while they were both willing to help because they didn’t have anything better to do, I doubt they believed I’d actually accomplish my goals. Laura, dressed entirely in black, met us at the car and helped us wheel the cauldron on a dolly through her garage and down a makeshift ramp into her basement.

  “Your parents don’t care about stains and all that?” I asked her.

  “OxiClean does wonders,” Laura said. “Besides, my folks are down the shore for at least three days. A lot can be fixed in three days.”

  The cauldron was the size of a large beach ball and we filled it to the top with cheap vodka, peach schnapps, pineapple juice, and seltzer. We hung a tray with dry ice inside the rim to give it a smoky effect and tossed an aquarium pump in the liquid to whip up some bubbles.

  “Hey, if anyone’s down with Wicca and all that shit, it’s me,” Laura said. “But I don’t know why we can’t do a bunch of Jell-O shots and let the night lead wherever it leads.”

  “A bit of theater goes a long way,” I said. “Remember Katelyn’s memorial service? The pictures? The music? The spectacle?”

  “Not to mention the crying,” Laura said. “I hope that’s not the scene you’re going for.”

  “The reason the memorial was so effective wasn’t because people loved Katelyn,” I explained. “It’s because they loved themselves, and the drama of the event made them confront all their lost potential. You know what I mean? ‘If only I was a better person. If only I was a healthier person.’ That sorta thing.”

  “If only I had been there when it happened,” Dylan added.

  “Bingo,” I replied.

  “Fine, fine, whatever,” Laura said. “Tell me exactly what you want me to do again?”

  “Light some candles and fetch me your father’s robe.”

  party hardy

  Was it a wild party, the wildest in the annals of teendom? Were kids jumping from the roof into the pool? Were there flames, nudity, pissing on antique furniture?

  Not even close. When the guests arrived, Laura greeted them at the door and told them, “Only one person goes in at a time.” Then she texted Dylan the name of whoever was about to enter. Meanwhile, Dylan was down in the basement with his phone queued to MemorEasi.

  Now, not all of our classmates were overexposed, but there were at least a few shots of everyone out in the ether. And MemorEasi was equally effective using only a handful of images. It panned and zoomed over faces in slo-mo. It applied smoky filters for an old-timey vibe. When combined with the tickling of ivories, the results were sufficiently tear-jerking.

  So that’s what our classmates confronted when they entered Laura’s house: themselves.

  Dylan would check the text from Laura, enter a name into MemorEasi, filter, tap the image, and then, as saccharine sounds wafted from the stereo and the next guest stepped in the house, a slideshow depicting his or her life appeared on a massive TV in the Riggses’ candlelit living room.

  “Welcome to your own funeral,” it all was meant to say.

  While a sign stuck to the basement door promised REINCARNATION THIS WAY.

  When the slideshow was over, that’s where each guest went. Down, down, down, to an even darker room, where the music was best described as aggressively ambient and Dylan was waiting to shush anyone who was audibly weeping and then usher them to a seat on the floor, before shooting off a text to Laura that read:

  Next Victim?

  In front of the befuddled guests and next to the smoking cauldron, I sat on a stool wearing a brown hooded bathrobe and wielding a large stainless-steel ladle. I did not speak.

  “Is this an orgy or something?” Clint Jessup asked when he arrived, and he rubbed his hands together like he was about to get down to business.

  “Where the hell did you get that idea?” Dylan replied.

  “I don’t know,” Clint said. “That chick is wearing a robe. An orgy robe, I figured. My life flashed before my eyes, so this must be heaven.”

  Dylan flicked Clint’s ear with a finger and said, “Sit down and be quiet. That goes for everyone.”

  By nine o’clock, the guests stopped arriving, so Laura locked the front door and came downstairs, bringing the total attendance to about thirty kids scrunched together on a giant rag rug and circling the cauldron like a coven frocked in Anthropologie and Uniqlo. It was enough for me to begin.

  “You are all pathetic!” I hollered.

  Given the raised eyebrows, this was not what they were expecting, but they were willing to hear the robed weirdo out. Not a peep from the crowd.

  “That’s right,” I went on. “Pathetic! Think about what you saw upstairs. Is that what you want? Your entire life summed up and declared over? Because that’s how you’ve been acting. You’ve been bullied into thinking it can’t get any better. Meanwhile, this was supposed to be our senior year. Our senior fucking year! Our final shot at being young and dumb. Sure, I realize a few of you have applied early decision, but do you think any college will admit us now that we’re tarnished goods? They can’t discriminate because of race, religion, or gender, but how about combustibility? As far as I know, a can of gasoline has never been admitted to Princeton, let alone Rutgers. Which means this is the last gasp. And what are we doing with it? We’re sitting at home and acting like we’re already dead. If an asteroid was bearing down on us, we wouldn’t be cooped up and alone, would we? No. We’d be spending our last days together. So let’s be together, enjoy each other, make a stupid yearbook, and go to prom. Let’s reopen the goddamn school!”

  Go ahead and shoot a spitball at this uber-nerd if you must, but I’m not ashamed to admit I was demanding a return to academia. And wouldn’t you know it? My classmates were on board.

  “Huzzah!” Dylan shouted in solidarity, because apparently people shout “huzzah” from time to time.

  “Fuck yeah!” Laura seconded, though I think it was mostly because she likes to swear.

  While I’d love to say
the rest joined in with a chorus of “damn skippy” and “amen,” that isn’t exactly the truth. The truth is, they nodded the sounds-a’right-to-me variety of nods, and then Gabe Carlton asked, “What’s in the big pot?”

  “That, my friends, is the elixir of let’s fucking live again,” I said, and I dipped the ladle in and took a sip.

  “If you want to help us reopen the school, then you drink,” Dylan added as he grabbed the ladle from me and gulped.

  I welcomed his enthusiasm, not only because it was the first time in a while that it was directed somewhere other than my body, but also because it was the first time I’d ever seen Dylan taste the forbidden fruit of alcohol. It assured me he was dedicated to my cause, even if it worried me a bit about what sort of drunk he might turn out to be.

  “If you want to be reincarnated and join our wasted squad of geeks,” I said as I kissed Dylan’s ear, “then you better drink.”

  Claire Hanlon raised a hand. “Would it be totally lame of me to ask what exactly is in the elixir of let’s fucking live again?”

  “It would,” Laura said as she snatched the ladle and took her sip. “Trust me. It’s delicious. And gluten free.”

  Becky Groves, the same girl whose scream still echoed in my ears from our pre-calc and group therapy days, stepped up to the ladle next. She closed her eyes, took a sip, and said, “I will join you. I think a return to the normalcy of school will give me some well-deserved peace.”

  This caused Claire to jump up and seize the ladle. “And this will give me what I deserve,” she said as she dipped it in the cauldron. “I’m graduating. As valedictorian. As was always intended.”

  As soon as Claire sipped, a line formed behind her. Imbibing commenced and cowards were reborn as heroes, or at least as kids who were willing to give up their permanent vacation and go back to school.