Bang

by Barry Lyga

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Barry Lyga

  Cover design by Marcie Lawrence. Cover art copyright © 2017 by Sean Freeman.

  Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

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  First Edition: April 2017

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Lyga, Barry, author. Title: Bang : a novel / by Barry Lyga. Description: First Edition. | New York ; Boston : Little, Brown and Company, 2017. | Summary: A new friend and their YouTube cooking channel help fourteen-year-old Sebastian move on from accidentally shooting his infant sister ten years earlier.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016019843| ISBN 9780316315500 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780316315531 (ebook) | ISBN 9780316315524 (library edition ebook)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Guilt—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Family problems—Fiction. | Single-parent families—Fiction. | YouTube (Electronic resource)—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.L97967 Ban 2017 | DDC [Fic]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016019843

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-31550-0 (hardcover), 978-0-316-31553-1 (ebook)

  E3-20170304-JV-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  History

  The Present My Mom

  My Sister

  My Father

  History

  The Present

  Tomorrow

  Acknowledgments

  Special Thanks

  Resources for Help

  For M & B,

  loves of my life

  And the thing is this:

  I don’t even remember doing it.

  History

  My sister is in the memory hole.

  She has been disappeared, vanished, eliminated, eradicated. The memory hole is a conceit from a book they made us read in school, 1984. Even though the story takes place in the past, it feels very much like the present or the near future. It feels like something incipient, imminent, pervasive. Like a fog so cold it’s a thousand needles in your skin, just barely breaking the surface.

  1984 is a full-body tattoo that’s about to start, and it bestowed upon me the memory hole, which swallowed my sister bodily ten years ago.

  There are no photos of her in the house.

  There is no scrapbook. No baby clothes or stuffed animals or bright, crocheted baby blankets.

  She’s been extinguished. She’s been erased.

  My sister is in the memory hole because I killed her.

  I’m told it was a Tuesday. I’m told it was June and it was hot and there’d been no rain for weeks, no respite from the heat that pressed down on Brookdale. I’m told Mom was in the backyard, hanging laundry on the line, that my father was in the garage.

  I’m told I leveled my father’s .38 Magnum at her as she sat in the little bouncy chair with the stuffed birds hanging overhead. I’m told she would only nap in the bouncy chair, that she loved the stuffed birds and the birdsong that the chair played for her.

  I’m told it was point-blank range and that I shot her one time.

  Which, really, is all it takes.

  She was four months old.

  I’m told.

  I’m told Mom got there first, the back door being close to the nursery. My father arrived a few seconds later and I was on the floor, blacked out from the kick of the pistol, which knocked me across the room. I’m told Mom screamed and screamed, clawing at her face at the sight before her. Local legend has it that my father, fearing she would gouge her own eyes out or tear her face to ribbons, deliberately punched her out cold.

  I have no reason not to believe any of the things I’ve been told.

  I’m told so many things.

  I was a child. It was an accident. It wasn’t my fault.

  I’m told.

  I was four years old.

  It was ten years ago and it’s June now, again, as it is every year, but it’s not a Tuesday, but it is ten years to the day, and it’s going to rain, my phone tells me. It’s going to rain.

  Good.

  Good.

  I like the rain. I like it ferocious and I like it gentle. I like sudden showers that last the afternoon and sprinkles that don’t last the time it takes to run to the car.

  Rain is clean.

  It’s Sunday and the last week of school starts tomorrow, so I stare out the window and ignore my homework, and I think of lightning, and of thunder, and of the rain.

  There’s no indication it’s been ten years, no sign of the morbid anniversary. Mom is no more or less morose on this day—she wears her sadness always, an unseeable, unavoidable mantle.

  She goes to bed early this night, but Mom frequently goes to bed early, a glass of wine in her hand or—sometimes—a too-sweet scent drifting up from under her closed bedroom door.

  Every night before bed, she seeks me out wherever in the house I happen to be and kisses the top of my head. These days, this requires that I be sitting or that she take my face in her hands and tilt my head down. Tonight is a tilting night, as I’m standing at the window.

  She pecks at my hairline and says, “I love you.”

  I don’t know when this ritual began. Some nights, she says it perfunctorily; others, sweetly; still others, dully. Tonight, she says it with difficulty, as though she’s a child who’s broken a neighbor’s window and has been forced by a parent to apologize.

  “I’m sorry,” I want to say, but don’t. Every time my mother tells me she loves me, this is what I want to say.

  That night, after dark, before the rain, I sneak out of the house. I’ve mastered this particular skill over the course of many dead nights, when the silence is too loud and the solitude too confining. Mom sleeps soundly and well and without break. I sneak out of the house, but the truth is, I could simply leave.

  I ride my bike out of the neighborhood, out to where Route 27 intersects Brook Road. The night is overcast, but the streetlights and a gauzy blur of moonlight show the way. The remnants of the day’s heat and humidity linger like party guests who stubbornly refuse to get the hint.

  The streets are empty, except for the occasional rumble of a big rig dinosauring from out of the darkness back into the darkness. I sail through intersections, the traffic lights gone blinking red after midnight.

  Halfway there, the rain timidly speaks up, beginning as a hanging mist. Moisture wicks by; jewels grow on my eyelashes, distorting the meager light. I wipe at them; they grow back like Hydra heads.

  Soon, the mist breaks, maturing into a light tattoo of soft, nearly soundless droplets. Sweat mingles, a
nd a thread of moisture runs cold against the warm skin of the back of my neck, beneath my shirt collar and down my back. Lifting my feet from the pedals, I coast onto the shoulder, then bump and jostle onto the grass, gliding down a grade. My tires, rain-grass slick, slip and jitter under me. I wrestle them under control almost unconsciously.

  Through a stand of trees, I see it. Drifting to a halt as the grade levels, I lean my bike against an aging poplar, its branches bent, gnarled, as though arthritic and melancholy. I pick my way through an undergrowth of sticker bushes and brambles.

  Above, the rain patters on the leaves.

  Ahead, it crouches in the dark, a deader dark, cloaked in dirt and rust.

  The old mobile home seems to tilt just slightly to the left, but this is an illusion caused by a dent in the roof and the natural slope of the land here. It is still and silent, save for the clink and ping of raindrops, audible even from here.

  This is where.

  This is where it will happen.

  This is where I will do it.

  When the time comes.

  I’ve fired a gun once in my life.

  I’ll do it again.

  When the time comes.

  The Present

  My best friend is Evan Danforth. “Of the Brookdale Danforths,” he likes to joke, speaking through and down his nose. His parents are absurdly rich, “offensively rich,” Evan often says, snorting as though money is something to be ashamed of, something to hide and conceal. His parents hate that he takes the bus to school, and they hate that he’s friends with me.

  Sometimes I wonder if Evan does those things in spite of his parents or because of them.

  We’re a sort of yin and yang of rich and not-rich. Randomly assigned to a homework project together in the bygone days of elementary school, bonding over a mutual love of Power Rangers and Hostess apple pies. On such flimsy foundations are best friendships built.

  My therapist, Dr. Kennedy, once told me, “That’s what makes them best friendships.”

  As usual, Evan is saving a seat for me on the bus, and I slide in. Another year down. Ten years. No one said anything. No one ever says anything. Nothing online. Nothing in the Sunday edition of the Lowe County Times—“the Loco”—that Mom still has delivered every week.

  Memory holes are efficient.

  “One more week,” Evan groans. “If we didn’t have all that snow, we’d be out by now.”

  “It’s just a week.”

  “A week out of our young lives,” he says. “We’ll never get this week back.”

  “Your parents can buy you another week.”

  He splutters laughter. Evan’s laughter, even when surprised and uncontrolled, is musical and clear, unlike my own, which is rare and snorty and mucus-y.

  Rich people can afford anything, even better laughter.

  “Even Richard and Myra can’t buy time,” he tells me. “I bet they’d try, though.”

  Richard Danforth is a hunter. A “gentleman hunter,” Evan’s mom says. He owns expensive rifles and shotguns, stocks inlaid with silver and mother-of-pearl. Titanium triggers and blued steel barrels that he polishes twice a season. He’s NRA. He votes Republican. “For financial reasons.”

  Myra Danforth is patrician and WASP-y, with an immaculate coif of frosty blond hair that comes just to her chin and breasts that she holds high and enhanced. “Fortieth birthday present,” Evan muttered to me once. I’ve never seen her smile—the closest I’ve ever witnessed is a slight upturn of one corner of her mouth. I don’t know if she’s extra-reserved in my presence or if she’s just incapable of smiling. Botox or genetics or disposition—who knows?

  She’s not a MILF. Because I wouldn’t want to go anywhere near her, even though I admit I’ve fantasized about her more than once. There’s a difference between what you’ll do in your mind and what you’ll actually do for real.

  I think of those perfectly sculpted breasts and I realize Evan’s wrong—rich people can buy time. Or a decent replica. They can stall it, put it off, freeze it, while the rest of us just lurch along with our snorty laughs into our inevitable futures.

  “You should come over today,” Evan is saying while I’m silently judging his family. “Downloaded the demo for Stark Weather this morning.”

  “I have some stuff I have to do,” I tell him.

  “Like what?”

  I invent an excuse—something about a dentist appointment—and he drops it. A few seconds later, I happen to catch his reflection in the bus window as he drops his eyelids and grimaces. He’s my best friend, so I’ve seen this before, and I know what it is—silent recrimination. He’s making the connection. Shooting games. Me. Guns. He’s figured it out, and he’s angry at himself for not thinking it through beforehand.

  Not his fault, though. It’s not as though I wear a sign saying, I killed my sister with a gun, so don’t ask me to play your super-realistic first-person shooter. No one else needs to feel bad about what happened. Only one person.

  I wish there were a way to assuage him, a way to tell him, It’s all right. You don’t have to step around the rusty nails and broken glass of my past. Don’t beat yourself up. But the only way to do that would be to acknowledge it in the first place, to say it happened, and I can’t do that. When I try to talk about it, everything goes haywire. In Dr. Kennedy’s office, I was okay, for some reason. He made it okay. But otherwise…

  But Evan is my best friend, so I do what I can, which is give him a way out.

  “Besides, you know me—I’m no good at the new games.”

  “That’s true,” he says with a small grin.

  But for the rest of the ride to school, Evan sits in silence, kicking himself. I, too, sit in silence, letting him.

  I’m no good at the new games because I rarely play them.

  I like old things.

  Old books.

  Old movies.

  Old TV shows.

  It’s not that life seemed simpler “back then.” It’s that it was more complicated. When no one had a cellphone, it was harder to get in touch with people. You called a phone number, and you might get the person you wanted to talk to… or her dad. Or mom. Or brother. And without the Internet, simple questions could mean a trip to the library, hours in the stacks.

  Life was more complicated, but it was quieter, I bet. Slower. And the distractions were not the ephemeral flash of an Instagram as it scrolled by or the blurt of a tweet. No endless chattering of Facebook status updates and Snapchats and notifications pushed to your tablet, your computer, your phone, your watch.

  The distractions then were card catalogs and dust and the smell of old paper and ink. The distractions were deep.

  I wonder what it would be like to go back in time, to live as long ago as the 1980s, or even further back.

  To know what was to come.

  On the way home that day, I stare out the bus window. Evan has been dropped off already, and I am alone in my seat as the bus wends its way slowly toward my bus stop. I catch sight of a large truck—a moving van, I realize—parked in the driveway of a house that has been on the market for so many months that I assumed it would never sell. Two dark-skinned men—one in a dress shirt and a tie fluttering in the breeze, one in blue coveralls—argue, gesturing angrily at each other, at the house, at the van. On the porch, a slender figure in black watches, and I think I notice something, but then we’re farther down the road and whatever I thought I noticed is gone.

  Mom is still at work when I get home, so I go to what had been my sister’s room, the nursery. I only go in when Mom isn’t home.

  In movies and on TV, when someone’s child dies, they almost always show the room preserved, frozen in time. In English class, I learned that this sort of thing is supposed to be symbolic, that the room’s unchanging appearance reflects the inability of the parents to move on, the rigid, frozen horror and pain that cannot thaw.

  This is why I’ve come to the conclusion that symbolism is bullshit. Because my sister’s room is not pre
served, but no one has moved on. We’re all still stuck in place.

  The room serves now as storage. There are boxes and bags of things here, most of them belonging to my father, things my mother won’t throw out. Not out of sentiment—out of spite. “I won’t do his dirty work for him,” she said once. “His things will rot in there before I lift a finger to get rid of them.”

  It made no sense to me then and makes no sense to me now, but I try to avoid asking my mother to explain herself.

  For a time, I thought the boxes and the bags might contain mementos of my sister—photos, old toys, old clothes. But, no. There are books and magazines, old drawings, bits and pieces of model airplanes and HO scale trains. I have a vague, flickering memory of a Christmas tree scraping the ceiling and a model train platform that took up half the living room floor, the chug and click of the train cars in unison with sparks that delighted me. One engine almost politely burped puffs of smoke. The smell of pine, the stab-crunch of needles underfoot through winter-thick socks. A giggle-laugh that must have been mine.

  A broken chunk of old memory, adrift in a pool of blood.

  I don’t want to remember it. Memories go into the memory hole. That’s where they belong. Dr. Kennedy thought that if I could remember the shooting, I could move on from it. I told him I didn’t want that in my head, just like I don’t want my father’s trains and the smell of pine.

  Our Christmas tree for the past few years has been a four-foot-tall plastic and aluminum facsimile of a fir that Mom has me haul out of the attic shortly after each Thanksgiving. It looks as fresh each year as the year before. My sister’s room is not frozen in time, but the Christmas tree is. It’s still not symbolic, though—it’s just crappy Chinese plastic. It’s chemistry class, not English.

  There may be symbols and symbolism in books and movies—sometimes it’s even fun to find them—but in real life, we only have boxes and bags, old sagging shelves, and attics with fake Christmas trees. And none of it means anything. It’s all just the detritus of life, our own jetsam, heaved overboard, then washed back to us by the waves and the tides.