Spontaneous

by Aaron Starmer

  Up onstage, Jane’s hand shook and water spilled from the glass and onto her lap as she moved it to her lips. As nervous as she was, she still managed to fill her cheeks with water and hand the glass back to Krook.

  “Ommmm.”

  Krook passed her the pill and rather than examine it, Jane jammed it in her mouth, like a kid enduring the last vegetable on the plate in order to get an ice-cream reward.

  “Ommmm.”

  Then Jane swallowed. And squinted up at the lights above her. Then gazed down to the crowd. She smiled and mouthed, I love you, to her three little boys.

  There was an explosion of clapping and cheers. Jane stood, thrust her hands in the air. Krook grabbed one of the wrists and held it like Jane was a prizefighter. Together, they walked offstage.

  Namaste, motherfuckers.

  the next morning

  School on Friday was full of an apprehensive excitement. At the end of the previous night’s presentation, Krook had come back onstage and announced that she’d be providing Snooze-Button™ free of charge for a thirty-day trial to any student who wanted it. The Daltons would have been proud of this typical drug-dealer move. Get ’em hooked and then gouge the price. Make boom-boom-bonkers bucks.

  Clearly, she was playing the odds. The last spontaneous combustion was Gayle Heatherton, all the way back in November. Nearly five months had passed, our longest stint without an incident. It was possible that the threat was over, even though there was no obvious reason. Krook was trying to fill the reason void. Because if this never happened again, she would receive credit and not only would she have two hundred customers who’d be paying her for the rest of their lives, she’d also have the world’s attention. FDA approval would quickly follow. She’d be hailed as the next Jonas Salk.

  Or that’s what I assumed she was thinking. The satisfied smile she wore that morning when she arrived at school with Jane spoke volumes. The two walked the hall together like they were the friggin’ homecoming court. And yes, there was applause. For what? Because Jane had taken a pill and survived one more day on earth, I guess.

  Now, I wasn’t a total monster. I could sympathize with the girl’s predicament. I certainly hoped that I was wrong, that Krook was not a crook and that the pill was our salvation, but we’d been down so many dead-end roads already. I was tired of it and I couldn’t believe I was the only one.

  Dylan and I were on our way to Livin’ 101 during Jane and Krook’s triumphant procession. Seeing Jane so happy made him so happy and I loved his capacity to love, but I wasn’t thrilled about his capacity to be public about it. Still, he tolerated my admiration of Rosetti, so it was only fair that I extend an olive branch to Jane.

  “Go congratulate her,” I said. “Or whatever.”

  “I should,” he replied, and he ducked under a few arms that were distributing high fives and he approached Jane. He gave her a big hug and she whispered something to him. Krook could obviously hear what she said, because it made that shit-eating grin even wider. Dylan whispered something back. And then she was gone.

  Pop. Blood. Gone.

  No more Jane.

  Only one person made a sound: Krook. It was one of those primal, horror-movie shrieks. She jumped backward, slammed into the lockers, and flailed like she was walking through spiderwebs. The rest of us stood there, stunned, but not exactly surprised. Dylan’s arms were still curled in embrace but he was embracing nothing but air and the blood that dripped from his clothes.

  As Krook’s racket faded to a whimper and she cowered on the floor, Becky Groves, our former scream queen turned yoga junkie, stepped from the crowd with arms outstretched, offering a hug of comfort. But instead of giving it to Krook, she gave it to Dylan.

  “There, there, kiddo,” she said. “We all—”

  Then Becky was gone too, splattering all over Dylan and commingling with the remnants of Jane.

  That was more than enough for Krook. That was plenty. She leapt to her feet and tried to haul ass out of there, but she slipped on the blood, hit her head on the floor, and knocked herself unconscious. Or she pretended to be unconscious. She lay motionless on the ground, in any case.

  “What the hell is wrong with you!” Claire screamed at Dylan. “You did this! You brought this back!”

  Dylan didn’t respond. He hardly moved at all. His face was bathed in blood and regret. These were the only explosions he’d actually witnessed, and I instantly thought back to the original texts that had brought us together.

  Invigorating. Invigorating. Invigorating.

  Was this invigorating for him? Not by a long shot.

  “Let’s get out of here, sweetie,” I said softly. “There’s nothing—”

  “Take him down,” Clint called out.

  “No,” Steve Cox replied. “Don’t touch him. It’s touching him that did it.”

  I spun and stuck out a finger at Steve and said, “If touching him did it then I would have been dead a long—”

  Then Steve was gone too, his splatter shooting down the hallway like a burst of confetti from a party popper. Now there were screams. Now there were swears. Now there was slipping, grasping at the lockers and walls for support, like novice ice skaters at a rink. Now hell was upon us.

  Krook’s body shot up like a reanimated corpse and she bulldozed down the hall through the pack of students. I desperately needed someone to blame, so I abandoned Dylan and started my chase. I slid across the slick terrazzo floors like a socked kid on hardwood. When I reached a dry patch, I broke into a sprint.

  Boom! More screams.

  It was another one, behind me, so I didn’t see it. I’d find out later it was Taylor Ventner, a guy with a Broadway-quality voice and kennel-quality BO. RIP and so sorry, Taylor. I wish I knew you better. I wish that day didn’t go down the way it did. But it did, and I was too furious to think of anything but my fury.

  I kept moving, focusing on the blur of khaki. Yoga had made me nimble, so I caught up quickly.

  “You’re the one who brought it back!” I screamed as I plowed into Krook, slamming her into the lockers.

  “What in the—who in the—how in the—?” Krook said, her face spasming in confusion.

  “She had kids,” I shouted, my nose pressed to hers. “She was a kid!”

  Krook tried to push me away, so I grabbed her shoulders to hold myself in place, but then suddenly someone was tearing us apart.

  It was Rosetti, fresh from the bathroom, her hands wet and her shirt half tucked in. “What the hell is going on?” she asked.

  “Who the hell is going off is more like it,” I said. “Jane, Becky, Steve. God knows who else.”

  Around the corner came a mob of blood-drenched kids. They streamed past us like they were at a Black Friday sale. Mad eyed, taking no prisoners. Rosetti tried to shield us from the stampede, wrapping her arms around us and pressing us against the lockers until they passed, but Krook slipped away from her and into the crowd. When the pack was gone, so was the doctor.

  “Are you okay?” Rosetti asked.

  “We have to go,” I said, breaking free. “We have to arrest her. We can’t—”

  “To my vehicle, now!” Rosetti commanded as she grabbed my wrist.

  No amount of yoga could have helped me out of her iron grip and she started dragging me like a delinquent to juvie. Before I knew it, we were in the parking lot and at her Tesla. She pushed me into the backseat and climbed up front. The motor automatically hummed as soon as she sat down. She turned on the radio to drown out exterior noise. The music was thick with jangly guitars.

  Leaning back over the center console, she whispered to me, “Gordon Laramie basically predicted this in his manifesto. This is the next stage in the false flag operation. Don’t be surprised if the executive orders that follow make a mockery of the Constitution. We were at a precipice here. Krook pushed us off. Don’t touch her. Don’t even
talk to her. You do not want the attention of her superiors.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You think she’s . . . ? What exactly do you think is happening here?”

  Rosetti shook her head, as if pitying me. “This woman’s work with the Wooli? You really think it was observation? No. It was experimentation. Of course SnoozeButton doesn’t work. It’s a smokescreen. Build up hope in private enterprise, then strip it away. So that trust turns back to the government.”

  “That’s not what it seems like to me at all. To me, it—”

  Rosetti put up a finger. “Phase One of the false flag was most likely instituted decades back, during World War II, deep in the jungles where the human experimentation wouldn’t be noticed. Phase Two was set into motion four years ago in Washington, DC, when they secretly implanted their detonators in our country’s most prized and privileged resources: upper-middle-class, northeastern, liberal-leaning, suburban adolescents. Phase Three occurred in the tents when they added tracking devices to make sure none of you could escape and seek out the truth. Now we’re in the thick of Phase Four, where all hope is lost and all rights are surrendered to the government. Before you know it, we’ll be in Phase Five, and everyone you know will be implanted with detonators and trackers and there will be two countries: one with the people who can afford to stay whole and one that is a wasteland of death. If you don’t believe in the power of the Illuminati, then—”

  “Slow down!” I yelped. “I can’t follow any of this.”

  Rosetti gulped, as if swallowing her vomit of words. Her eyes settled and she whispered, “First thing that will happen is they’ll close it down. And then where will we go? Then what will we do?”

  “Close what down?”

  Rosetti reached into the back and opened my door. “You should go. So should I. It was a failure. They’re coming. They’re coming.”

  I still wasn’t sure what she was talking about, but I knew it made me uncomfortable. And I agreed with her on one thing: I didn’t want to be in that car. I slipped out without uttering a word and took a few paces across the lot. The car moved slowly past me as Rosetti mouthed a wide-mouthed go! And then she was gone, sliding silently away without giving me a chance to ask her anything else.

  Since students weren’t allowed to drive, the only vehicles left belonged to Krook and the four teachers, but the lot was now full of kids who’d fled the building. It was like that first time with Katelyn, only this time was much, much bloodier.

  Dylan was part of the crowd, stumbling toward me in a daze. He was like an oasis in this endless expanse of horror. I ran to intercept him, and when I hugged him, he basically fell into my arms.

  “I love you,” he whispered.

  “I’m so glad to see you,” I replied as I held him up.

  “Jane is gone. I’ll never see her again. They’re gone too. I’ll never see them again either.”

  Thank you very much, Captain Obvious. I know these should have hardly been revelations, but it really did take all that death for the implications to sink in. With Dylan, at least. At that point, I wasn’t sure if they’d sunk in with me. Because as much as I’d wept and hurt and shivered and worried and tried to bury my feelings in all varieties of bullshit, I had never really gotten to the point of feeling bad for the ones who’d lost someone they loved.

  “You’ll get through this,” I told Dylan. “I promise.”

  “They need . . . someone needs to tell their stories,” he said. “Honest stories. The good and the bad. Or else, they’ll be forgotten. Or worse. Remembered for the wrong things.”

  “Of course,” I said as I stepped back and put my hands firmly on his shoulders. “We can do that. Me and you. We’ll be like historians. We’ll chronicle their lives. We’ll honor Jane and all of them and we’ll be good people. Both of us. Heroes.”

  “I’m not a hero. I’m not anybody. I’m nothing.”

  It was an interesting choice of words. As I stared into Dylan’s lost eyes, did I see “nothing”? Is this the moment when I reveal that Dylan was merely a figment of my imagination, the moment when you rethink everything I’ve told you and you say, “Holy shit! She’s right! He never had a conversation with anyone but her! He didn’t even touch any objects!” Is this the moment when I admit that Dylan wasn’t real, and never was?

  No. This is the moment when I tell you he was realer than he’d ever been. When I tell you I saw everything. Holding him, staring at him, I could hardly remember what I used to think of Dylan all the way back in the fall. When he was a redneck, a hardened soul, an arsonist, a father. A mystery.

  He wasn’t a mystery anymore. I knew him. Which was, I’m ashamed to admit, rather heartbreaking. Though not as heartbreaking as what happened next. For as I was touching him, thinking about who he was and what he meant to me, and feeling all the feelings that such thoughts inspire, Dylan disintegrated. He blew up right before my very eyes. Exactly as I always feared he would.

  this is what happens

  Yes, this is what happens when your boyfriend spontaneously combusts in front of you.

  You fall to your knees. You press your face into the pavement as the blood drips, thick and languorous, off you, as if it were ice cream in the sunlight. You howl like you’ve never howled before, and the howl confirms that there are things deep inside you. Things darker than the darkest things you’ve ever imagined. And you believe in those things. Entirely, without question.

  You send a three-letter text—SOS—and your parents come to fetch you and you sit on plastic bags in the back of their Durango and you stare out the window at the apple blossoms. You wear nothing but your bra and panties because you can’t possibly keep those bloody clothes on your body. When you get home, you rush to the bathroom and lock the door. You shower sitting down and you cry. When the hot water becomes cold water, you shiver and you know you deserve to shiver. When you can’t bear the shivering anymore, you put on pajamas and you crawl into bed.

  You pull the shades on the window that your boyfriend once crawled through. You smell the sheets that haven’t been washed in at least a week, that hold his scent. You cradle your phone in your hand. You open the novel you started once upon a time, the one called All the Feels. You read a passage from it:

  Ever since his seventeenth birthday, Xavier had a power. Whenever he touched someone, he took all their feelings. He absorbed them, sopped them up like he was a paper towel and their feelings were a spilled beverage. Then the people died. Because you can’t live without any feelings.

  You rewrite the passage:

  Ever since her seventeenth birthday, Mara had a power. Whenever she felt something, she gave her feelings away. Her feelings leaked out of her like propane from a furnace and people inhaled her feelings. Then the people exploded. Because no one’s body can handle such noxious shit.

  Then you look at what you’ve written and you realize something you should have known all along. You’re not a hero. You’ll never be a hero, or even a good person. You’re a villain, always have been. You know now that All the Feels was never about a boy who’s afraid of his own feels. It has always been about you and how the world should be afraid of yours. That’s right. Because all your fucking feels are tearing the world apart.

  Like any villain worth a damn, you delete every trace of evidence. You wipe your cloud, your hard drive, your phone. You destroy that book. And you vow to keep your secrets to your grave. You decide that you will never tell anyone, not even Tess, that you killed your own boyfriend, that you killed all of them. That you, Mara Carlyle, are the Covington Curse.

  fallout

  No one blamed me for that particular patch of madness. They pitied me, just as they pitied the friends and families of the day’s other victims: Jane, Becky, Steve, Taylor, plus two kids I haven’t mentioned yet because I didn’t witness their demises.

  Karl Gunderson, a bony guy who ran cross-country and seemed to have an endless sup
ply of egg-salad sandwiches on his person, blew up while he hid in Room the First. And Teresa Thompson, class treasurer and the only black girl I’d ever known who was a card-carrying member of the Young Republicans, blew up while heading to a back exit of the school, carrying her friend Kacey Neilson, who’d broken her ankle during the melee.

  Scientists didn’t visit and take samples. Rosetti didn’t investigate, though apparently her partner, Demetri Meadows, walked the halls and jotted some notes. Then he passed the baton to Sheriff Tibble, who gave things a cursory look and told our janitor, the affable and always-available widower Mr. Garvin, to “go about his work.” As Garvin mopped up our seven dead classmates and hosed down the halls and parking lot, Tibble informed the victims’ families that they could each collect a bucket of assorted remains. If they were so inclined.

  The nearly empty middle and elementary schools cleared out completely. Across town at the Shop City Mall, they canceled classes. Even though we had very little contact with the other students, our predicament was still a “major distraction” to them and the school board decided to, in the words of President Mender, “take a mulligan.” They’d start over next year when the legacy of the senior class could be forgotten.

  Meanwhile, the legacy of the senior class was determined to soak itself into the architecture.

  That’s right, we didn’t cancel a single day of school. We returned the Monday after the bloodbath. What other choice did we have? Nowhere else to go, we could hardly give up now. Even though things were destined to change.

  It won’t surprise you that I was a wreck. I didn’t attend any classes that first day back. I sat in the hall, leaning against a locker and I watched my classmates come and go. Their eyes were sympathetic, but the only person who chose to talk to me was Elliot Pressman, Cranberry Bollinger’s former flame.