Come Sit By Me

by Hoobler, Thomas

  Caleb didn’t say anything to me. Usually he just looked at me for a while, and then he was gone. One time, he stood up and pointed out the window just before he faded away.

  I realized I was supposed to go look, so I did. It was night, but there was a street light outside our house, and as I watched I could see a car drive by. Slowly. It was a Hummer. I remembered that the Colonel had a Hummer.

  That made me paranoid, of course. I sat by that window almost every night, and sure enough I kept seeing the Hummer go by. I couldn’t see the driver, but I was sure I knew who it was.

  After that, I sort of brought up with my Dad the idea that we should move. Out of Hamilton. Very far away. But I couldn’t tell him why.

  He tried to reassure me. We couldn’t leave in the middle of my senior year. I was doing very well, according to all my teachers. The counselor said I was coping nicely with my feelings of guilt. (I should have been. I didn’t have any.) And besides, Susan had made a lot of friends. I knew that, because they always gathered in her bedroom and giggled hysterically, except when they happened to see me. Then they stared.

  I was the killer.

  So I studied. And studied. I was getting As or A pluses in every course. I realized that I had to get into some college so I drove myself crazy with the test prep books and aced the SATs. The counselor said I could probably get into an Ivy, but I didn’t want to.

  They were all in the East.

  Too close to Hamilton.

  I applied to Stanford and a bunch of other places on the West Coast. They all accepted me. Apparently nobody had told them I had killed the star of our football team. Not a good extracurricular.

  Spring came, and the Senior Prom, which I had no intention of going to at all. Then one day after school, Terry asked me, “You ever think about going to the Prom?”

  I looked up from the article I was writing. “The Prom? When is it?”

  “Next Saturday. I think you’ve been working a little too hard. Might do you good to go out.”

  I nodded, though Terry telling me I had been working too hard was like the Kardashian sisters telling me I was getting too much publicity. “The thing is,” I said, “I haven’t got anybody to go with.”

  She gave me a long look, and I woke up. “Um, would you like to go to the Prom?” I said.

  “Thanks for asking,” she said. “Yes, I would.”

  That meant I had to rent a tux, but my Dad was happy to see me going out with somebody, so he paid for it. Terry insisted that we take her car. At the time, I figured that was because it had no back seat. I drove to her house and met her parents, the Schwartzes. Their home had a lot of books in it, no surprise. Her father gave me a handshake with a tight grip. He looked me straight in the eye and said, “Terry tells us you’re a fine young man.” I had the impression that was the seal of approval for him. I remembered the Colonel telling me the same thing. I must have that effect on people. Just goes to show how wrong they can be.

  Terry came downstairs, dressed in a mint-green prom dress with two spaghetti straps holding it up. The first thing I noticed was that she had freckles on her shoulders. I had never noticed that before, and then I realized I’d never seen her shoulders before. My eyes started downward from there, until I realized her parents were noticing every move I made. I remembered that I was holding a box with a corsage in it, and handed it to her. She opened it to lots of approving sounds from her mother, who fastened it to Terry’s dress.

  Terry got her red hair genes from her mother. That was clear. It went well with her green dress. Mrs. Schwartz asked me if I drove safely. I said that Terry was driving us, putting a slightly amused look on her mother’s face. “Have you ridden with her before?” she asked. After I replied that I had, she said, “Then you know you should fasten your seat belt.”

  I smiled and nodded. “Her father bought the car for her,” Terry’s mother said, as if that explained a lot. “I hope you won’t be too late,” she said, turning to Terry.

  “We may go to an after-party at somebody’s house,” Terry said. “But we’ll be safe.”

  “Better there than out on the roads,” her father said.

  The Prom itself wasn’t bad for a dance in a high-school gym. They had rigged up colored lights that moved slowly around the walls, meaning the gym itself was pretty dark and almost romantic. I think they must have used a few hundred cans of air freshener. Some of the music was live, put on by a local band that was trying hard to sound like the Black Eyed Peas, even though all its members were white. I danced with Terry a few times, and we weren’t any worse than anybody else. When we sat down for a while, I got her a soft drink—the only kind of beverage served, although I noticed some people had brought flasks of something else that they poured into their drinks when no chaperones were looking.

  One of those with a flask was the guy called Hack, North’s friend. He was sitting with Colleen, and making sure her drink was well fortified. She’d be ready for action by the time they left the Prom.

  Terry saw who I was looking at. “Would you like to ask Colleen to dance?” she said.

  “I don’t think she’d want to,” I said.

  “I happen to know that she would,” Terry said.

  Well, Terry was a good source of information. But somehow I still didn’t want to dance with Colleen. It would be like gloating over North’s body. We were alive and feeling sexy, and he wasn’t, and never would be.

  “Whose house are we going to afterward?” I said, to change the subject.

  “I’ll let that be a surprise,” she said.

  It was.

  Around eleven o’clock, people started drifting out, probably eager to get to the real business of the evening: last chance to get laid in high school.

  Terry’s friends were mostly kids who were aiming to get to college, like her. I didn’t have any expectations that the after-party we were going to would be a drunken sex orgy. There would be some couples sitting around with beers and maybe copping a feel or two in a dark corner.

  I was wrong. Terry drove us to a house in one of the nicer sections of town and parked in the driveway. One thing was wrong: all the lights were out.

  “It doesn’t look like anybody’s home,” I said as we walked toward the front door.

  “They’re not,” she said, putting a key in the lock. “They’re in Florida. Friends of my parents. I promised to feed their cat while they’re away.” And, sure enough, as she opened the door and flicked a light switch, a gray cat with a black tip on her tail appeared. Terry reached down and petted her.

  I sat down on a sofa as Terry went into the kitchen and tended to the cat food. From the furniture and the art on the walls, I figured the owners were pretty well off. But not exactly my idea of a post-Prom wild party, I thought.

  Terry took her time. I saw her leave the kitchen and go down a hallway. Finally she came back and stood in front of me. “Not here,” she said. She reached for my hand and pulled me to my feet. “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “I thought I didn’t want to go to college as a virgin and then have sex for the first time with a total stranger,” she told me.

  Bump.

  We went down that hallway and into a bedroom with a large king-size bed covered with a quilt. On a bureau there was a silver tray that held a bottle of champagne and a couple of stemmed glasses.

  “Do you want to open the bubbly?” Terry said.

  I started untwisting the wire that held the cork, slowly getting the idea, but not really believing it. My hands were sweating, I noticed. “How’d you get the champagne?” I asked.

  “Opal bought it for me,” she said. She reached into a little purse and pulled out a couple of square foil packets. “She got me these too,” she said.

  The cork popped out of the bottle at just that moment, and we both laughed. Kind of nervously. I didn’t think she ever got ner
vous.

  We didn’t finish the bottle. A couple of glasses each was enough to get us to start pulling each other’s clothes off. I managed to get the straps and zipper down on the prom dress and she stepped out of it. But the bra gave me trouble until she reached up and unfastened it. How can they do that backwards and without looking?

  Anyway, I didn’t stop to figure it out. I was looking down at her breasts and thinking that even though they weren’t as huge as Colleen’s they were so nice to see, and then I was holding them in my hands and feeling from the way the nipples got hard that Terry was enjoying this too.

  We kissed for as long as we could before getting so excited that we had to go farther. I was first to get naked, turning my back to her as I got into the bed. I already had a pretty good boner and I covered myself up with the quilt. She pulled it off me. “I can wash the sheets,” she explained, “but not the quilt.”

  Just as she was tossing the quilt onto a chair, I saw Caleb at the doorway.

  I jumped out of bed, startling Terry, who was slipping out of her panties. I don’t know what she thought I was doing, because she couldn’t see him. Maybe she figured I was running away.

  The closer I got to Caleb, the less visible he seemed. When I got to the door, he was gone. I shut it firmly and headed back to the bed.

  As I turned around, I saw Terry lying on the bed, face up, wearing nothing but a smile. She looked a lot better naked than I had expected. Pretty damn beautiful, if you ask me. “There’s no reason to shut the door,” she said. “I told you, everybody’s in Florida.”

  I didn’t explain. I knew why Caleb was there. He still wanted to know if Terry had red hair on her pussy.

  But she had shaved.

  Plan ahead.

  We used both the condoms. It was probably a good thing we didn’t have more, because we would have stayed all night and would have had to explain why to our parents. On the way back, Terry seemed to be driving slower than usual. Maybe because of the champagne she was being cautious, but I think we had pretty much worked off the alcohol. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?” she said.

  I was replaying every moment of the evening in my head, and found that thinking about it still gave me a hard on. The memory would probably be useful for years. But of course I said, “Sure. What?”

  “How did it feel?”

  I turned my head and stared at her. “You mean…tonight?”

  “Oh, not the sex,” she said. She looked at me and smiled. “You gave me a pretty good idea how that felt. And I had a good time too, by the way. As you probably noticed.”

  “So what then?”

  “I mean…maybe you don’t want to talk about it, but they say it’s a good idea. To talk about it, I mean.”

  I knew what she meant. I didn’t want to talk about it. I had talked about it with the school counselor, and didn’t like it. It was what everybody thought about when they saw me at school. I didn’t like that either.

  “It happened so fast,” I said. “I don’t really remember.”

  For a little while, she didn’t say anything. She just concentrated on driving. The headlights of the car lit up the road ahead of us. But beyond their beams was still darkness. All around. I was never afraid of the dark before, but I was thinking of Caleb and North.

  Her voice jolted me out of my thoughts. “Was it really an accident?”

  I could feel my balls pull up high. A defense mechanism. I knew what she meant. I didn’t have to tell her, because she probably knew already.

  Finally she broke the silence and said, “I didn’t tell you this, but one time I noticed Cale looking at North. It was in the lunchroom, and they weren’t even at the same table. But it struck me as strange because Cale looked almost like he was in love with him. With North.”

  “Yeah,” I said. Sounded right.

  “You found the USB drive,” she said. She knew it. No sense in me denying it.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “And North was in it?”

  I nodded. She was smart. She would have guessed.

  “And he was afraid you’d tell?”

  “He liked to take care of details,” I said. “Loose ends.”

  “Nobody ever understood how Cale could have gotten those guns,” she said, figuring it all out. “But why would North have done it?”

  How could I tell her that North had talked poor dumb Caleb into killing seven people just because he wanted to be quarterback of the football team? That North played with their lives? And because I had found out, he was going to kill me too, without any more emotion than he had killing turkeys? And that the only way I could stop him was to kill him.

  “He had reasons,” I said. “But they don’t make much sense.”

  “But it was Cale who did the shooting?”

  “Yes. And then North shot him.”

  She was silent for a while, taking it all in.

  “And so…” she said, putting it all together, “He was going to shoot you.”

  “Right.”

  “Why did you go with him?”

  “I don’t know. I wanted to get it over with.”

  “I see,” she said, so quietly that I could hardly hear her. “Well, you were brave.” She glanced at me.

  “You know,” I said, “I think really I didn’t want to go around for the rest of my life knowing North’s secret. What he’d done. I’d always be afraid of getting shot in the back.”

  After a while she asked, “Did Cale write about me?”

  It took me a few seconds to decide what to say, and then because I had hesitated, I figured she already knew the answer: “Yes.”

  “And if I had helped him with his book, would that have…changed what he did?”

  It seemed too crazy to tell her yes, and I wasn’t sure myself if that was the answer. North was so evil, and the evil was so strong. Could just a little bit of kindness have overcome it?

  “No,” I said firmly. “I don’t think it would have changed anything.”

  “You shouldn’t feel guilty,” she said, trying to return the favor by comforting me as well.

  That’s what we told each other.

  I’m here at a college on the West Coast now. I don’t think I’ll mention which one. Terry got into Harvard, where she’s doing well. We emailed each other for a while, but now not so much. You know how it is. She has a lot of new people on her Facebook page. Some of them guys. You know how it is.

  I still see Caleb from time to time. My roommate Scott thinks I’m a little crazy, because I keep jumping up and moving around whenever Caleb appears. I told Scott I have restless leg syndrome. If I told him the true story, he’d be afraid of me.

  I think the reason Caleb followed me is that I still have the USB drive with his book on it. I never read it more than just that one time. If I was going to show it to anybody, I would have shown it to Terry, but I didn’t.

  Really, I ought to just throw Caleb’s book away. I went to the ocean once with it in my pocket, thinking I’d throw it in. But I didn’t do it. If I had, Caleb would be all alone again.

  I couldn’t do that to him. He needs a friend.

  So do I.

  I saw a Hummer go by the other day. Same color as the Colonel’s. I didn’t catch a look at who was driving.

  I was thinking I ought to get myself a gun.

  Just in case.

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