The Reading Buddy

by Bryce Gibson

  I was holding an icepack to my swollen, black eye. Unfortunately, the fight hadn’t ended with Cade’s bloody nose. After swinging the first punch, I had learned right away that Cade was far more experienced at rough-housing than me. He only stayed down for a few seconds before standing up without his crutches. He balanced on one leg and slammed his fist into my face. It was like he was some kind of demented super-villain or something.

  “What happened?” Dad asked.

  Mr. Ruff spoke up from where he sat behind the desk. “Your son got into a fight.”

  “Blake, what the hell...” Dad spun his attention from Mr. Ruff so that he was facing me.

  “Language, sir,” Principal Ruff said.

  “Sorry,” Dad apologized. “Who were you fighting with?”

  I didn’t answer him. I knew that once he found out that it had been Cade, things would only become a thousand times worse.

  “It was Cade Williston,” Principal Ruff spoke for me.

  I winced at the words and sunk lower in my chair.

  Dad didn’t say anything. He looked at me with a look that was equal amounts disappointment and anger.

  “I’m suspending him for the rest of the week. That means no homecoming dance.”

  Needless to say, the ride home from school was terrible. Not only because of the fact that Dad was pissed at me, but there was also the added confusion that I was feeling—I felt bad for making Dad miss work.

  I knew that he was worried about being able to make enough money to be able to provide for me. Now I was screwing everything up. And there was also the fact that I would hurt Lisa’s feelings once she found out that I couldn’t take her to the dance.

  “I can’t just drop everything that I’m doing to come rescue you out of this kind of bullshit, Blake. And Cade Williston of all people?”

  I sat in silence for a moment before speaking.

  “That’s probably why mom was given custody over me instead of you.” I regretted my words as soon as I said them.

  Dad slammed on the brakes and swerved the truck over to the side of the road. “Listen to me...” He unbuckled his seatbelt so that he could lean closer to me. I couldn’t tell if he was angry, sad, or...like me, there must have been several different emotions running through his body all at once. He was carefully contemplating his next words. “Just because she and I couldn’t be together does not make me love you any less.”

  We sat that way, staring into each others eyes for too long. The tension was thick.

  Finally, he flung his body back onto the seat. He bent his head backward so that it was leaning against the headrest. He closed his eyes.

  “I am trying so hard,” he told me. “Whatever it is between you and Cade Williston has got to come to a stop, you hear me?”

  I wanted to ask him why Mayor Williston had such a grudge against him, but I didn’t want him to know that Lisa and I had been snooping.

  Once home, I immediately went to my room, and texted Lisa.

  I MESSED UP. I GOT IN A FIGHT WITH CADE. SUSPENDED NOW. WON’T BE ABLE TO GO TO THE DANCE. I AM SO SORRY!

  LATER, DAD WOKE ME from a nap by tapping on my bedroom door.

  He eased the door open. “I made you some chicken noodle soup,” he said. “I thought it might make you feel a little better.”

  I was laying on my side, facing the wall. I didn’t respond, and after a few seconds, I heard him begin to walk away. “It’ll be on the stove when you’re ready,” he said.

  chapter twelve

  SUSPENSION. DAY ONE.

  “Here’s something else,” Lisa said. “Take a look at this.” She handed me a thin stack of papers.

  Because of my being grounded, Lisa wasn’t supposed to be there. Dad wouldn’t be home from work until eight-thirty; what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

  The midday sun beamed down onto where we were sitting on opposite ends of the wide porch steps. We each had a glass of tea; hers with a lemon slice on the rim. Wolf and Zee were lying in the grass in front of us. More than ever, I wanted to help Lisa get even with Cade. Now it had become personal.

  I immediately recognized the papers as black and white printouts from a game camera. Hunters often mount the battery operated cameras on trees and deer stands. The cameras take pictures of anything that moves letting the hunters see what deer are coming to the field during the overnight hours.

  Every time that I’ve ever looked at pictures from one of the cameras, I’ve flirted with the idea of what if I saw something else on one of them. Some weird, unexplainable creature lurking in the night; something like Big Foot, South Carolina’s Lizard Man, the ghost of Becky Cotton, or a man in a rain jacket.

  “Where did you get these?” I was flipping through the stack. There were deer on almost every picture. The camera used night-vision, and the eyes of the deer seemed to glow.

  “There’s a camera in the field where the hunt club was located,” Lisa explained. “It’s where Cade and his dad used to hunt.”

  She reached into her front pocket and pulled out her phone. She tapped her finger against the screen a few times and then held the phone face forward toward me. I was looking at a page from Cade’s social media. “Look at his cover photo,” she said.

  I did. It was a green-tinted image of a deer with glowing white eyes. It was another picture from a field camera.

  “Okay,” I told her. I didn’t see what any of this had to do with trying to find something to pin on Cade and his father.

  Lisa turned the phone back around and tapped the screen again. “Last night I was thinking about it, and I started to put two and two together.” She flipped the face of the phone back toward me. The cover photo was larger than it had been before. She pointed at the time and date in the bottom left corner.

  By then I had reached the end of the printed pictures and had seen nothing out of the ordinary. I set the papers on the floor between us and leaned back against the porch railing. “I’m sorry, Lisa. I just don’t get it.”

  Lisa picked up the papers. “Well, in the background...,” she held the top photo up so that I could see, “in this corner there’s a building. The Williston Hunt Club.” She placed that picture down and showed me the next one. “This one, same thing. And again.” She flipped through several of them and then stopped. “Now this is where it gets interesting. On this one, the building is demolished.”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to see where she was going with the whole thing. The building had been torn down during the timeframe that we were looking at.

  “But, here’s the kicker.” She placed the photos flat into two stacks, one where the building was standing and the other where it was a pile of rubble. She turned both stacks around so that they were facing me. “Look at the dates.” She pointed to the bottom right corner of one of the pictures and picked up her phone again. She pointed out the date on Cade’s page.

  “Yeah, so there’s a big gap in time. So what?”

  “A gap in time of like two weeks. I haven’t mentioned this to you before, but something happened out there a few weeks ago. There were a lot of flashing blue lights. I could see them from my house. It was all kinds of ruckus, but nobody ever knew what it was.”

  So this event that she was talking about, whatever it was, happened during the gap in time. I finally began to see what she was suggesting—like everything else on the land, the incident would have been photographed with the camera. The pictures were missing.

  “But they could have been deleted,” I suggested and shrugged my shoulders.

  “I thought about that, but look.” Beside the time and dates was the name of the manufacturer of the camera. “They’re different. It’s two cameras. The Willistons are hiding something, Blake. What we are looking for is on that camera.”

  Now, I got it. “Dad won’t be home for another five hours,” I said.

  “And Cade has FFA meetings on Wednesday afternoons. His parents are at work.”

  “We’ve got to go get it.”

&
nbsp; THE WILLISTON HOUSE stood in steadily increasing darkness. The place was surrounded by ancient oaks and towering magnolias that caused the late afternoon sun to cover the house in shadow. My stomach turned into knots. I was already in enough trouble, and if I got caught doing this...

  I looked at my watch. We had exactly one hour before Cade’s meeting would be over. It was four hours till Dad got home from work. We had plenty of time.

  We were sitting in the cab of Lisa’s truck. She had parked across the road from the house, deep in several acres of pine trees.

  “I’m willing to bet that the camera is in the barn,” she said.

  I had been so focused on the house that I hadn’t even seen the barn until she mentioned it. I looked to where Lisa was pointing. The old, ramshackle building separated the Williston’s back yard from the field that was behind it.

  I took a deep breath. “I’m ready when you are.”

  We left the truck hidden in the pines and ran across the road. With Lisa in the lead, we slipped around the side of the house and made our way across the back yard.

  Finally, the barn loomed in front of us. Up close, the building looked ancient. It was a tall, lopsided structure that had each side stacked full of old lumber and tin. There were two doors. One door was at ground level and the other was higher up in the loft. The white paint on the bottom door was chipped and peeling. Three big letters had been cut from rusted tin and nailed above the entrance—WHC. It was the same letters that had been carved into the picnic table at school. At that moment, I realized with a jarring clarity what the trio of letters stood for—Williston Hunt Club. I felt ignorant that it hadn’t occurred to me until now.

  Lisa climbed the cinderblock steps. I was disgusted by the implications of what we were about to walk into. My stomach felt sick. Lisa flipped the latch, and the door swung open on its own.

  I followed her inside. It was dark, but the wide gaps between the weathered boards let beams of sunlight through. Dust motes floated in front of us.

  It was obvious right away that the barn wasn’t used for farm related storage or use. A long piece of plywood rested on two sawhorses. The plywood was painted with two large triangles at each end. It was a makeshift beer pong table. An old, leather couch was pushed against the far wall. On the opposite end of the space was an old wardrobe and a short cabinet that held several drawers. Posters of half-naked girls were tacked to the walls. This was Cade’s space.

  Lisa and I were looking for the wrong thing. All we needed to pin on Cade was right in front of us. If we could prove that he and Tristan, collectively known as the WHC, had made a game out of hooking up with girls...

  “I’ll look in here. You get the cabinet,” Lisa instructed and swung open the doors to the wardrobe.

  I pulled open the top drawer of the cabinet. The metal wheels screeched against the old, rusty track. A sturdy, black cardboard box was inside. I removed the lid and could hardly believe what I was looking at. It was the camera.

  “I’ve got it,” I said. My heart was hammering in my chest as I picked up the camera and shoved it into the front pocket of my hoodie. After replacing the lid on the box, I slammed the drawer so forcefully that the whole cabinet shook. “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  We were almost to the door when we heard the unmistakable sound of truck tires on the other side of the wall. Lisa stopped walking and put her hand over her mouth. “Somebody’s driving up.”

  From where we were standing, I could see through one of the large knot holes on the wall. I recognized the vintage truck. “It’s Tristan.” My heart skipped. “What is he doing here?”

  “I don’t know, but we’ve got to skedaddle.” Lisa was looking around for somewhere to go. She grabbed my hand with hers. The skin contact sent sparks flying through my body.

  A second later, I followed her up the stairs. The old, wooden steps creaked and shifted under our weight. We moved as quickly and quietly as we could.

  The floor of the loft was scattered with loose hay. We stood still, careful not to make a sound. The gaps below our feet were wider than those on the bottom level. I could see Tristan enter the barn. He walked to the cabinet and pulled open the top drawer. I felt my jaw go slack. He opened the black box and reached his hand inside. He put something in his pocket and then shut the drawer.

  Neither Lisa or I moved a muscle until we heard the sound of Tristan’s truck starting up and driving away.

  THE IMAGE OF CADE THAT I was looking at on the computer screen gave me goose bumps.

  In the grainy, green-tinted night vision of the photo, Cade was kneeled down on the ground.

  A large buck was laid across Cade’s raised right knee. Each of Cade’s hands grasped onto each side of the deer’s antlers. The deer’s tongue was lolled out in a disgusting and sad display of death.

  An arrow was buried deep into the deer’s side, and a dark trail of blood, black in the photo, ran from the entry point of the arrow all the way down the deer’s side. Cade was smiling. Another boy that I recognized as being Tristan stood across from Cade. Tristan was holding a camera. He was taking a picture of Cade and the deer.

  What we were looking at was from the hunting camera. The fact that it was the picture of someone taking a picture made the whole thing seem overly voyeuristic. I could see in the background, behind where Tristan stood, the rubble of the old building that was in the clearing.

  Lisa and I were sitting at the desk in my room. She had removed the SD card from the camera and put it in the drive of my laptop. She had flipped through the pictures until she found the one that we were staring at.

  “Like father like son,” I said in reference to Cade’s dad’s prior record of being arrested.

  “Yeah, but Cade wasn’t caught. I think that’s the thing...” Lisa was flipping through the photos on the computer and stopped abruptly. “O...M...G.”

  The picture that was now on the computer monitor explained it all...

  Cade was standing next to Tristan. The deer was on the ground. A cop car was in the background.

  Lisa flipped to the next photo.

  A deputy was talking to Tristan and Cade.

  “So they were caught,” I said.

  “But they weren’t charged. Heck, nobody even knew about it, and around here that is an anomaly on its own.” Lisa spun around so that she was looking at me. “I bet Cade’s dad paid off this cop so he wouldn’t talk. Just imagine the shit storm that would have happened if the mayor’s son was charged with a crime.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  Lisa shook her head. She clicked the X at the top right of the picture and closed the window. Cade, Tristan, the deputy, and the deer disappeared. “I’ll figure something out. I promise.” She removed the SD card from the computer. “Just imagine if this goes on social media... the scandal!” She waved the card in the air. “It could go viral.”

  I didn’t like the idea of what she was suggesting. As much as I disliked Cade and what he had done, somehow this seemed wrong.

  Lisa stood from her chair. She flung herself toward me and wrapped her arms around my neck. “We did it,” she said. “Thank you.”

  I followed her downstairs, and, before she left, she turned around to face me again. “By the way, there’s this thing Sunday night at the drive-in if you want to go. Since it’s a full moon, they’re showing a werewolf double feature. I thought of you as soon as I saw it.”

  Saturday would be the last day that I was grounded, and we didn’t have school on Monday because of Labor Day. There was no reason that I shouldn’t go.

  “Sure,” I said. “What time?”

  “THERE’S SOMETHING WE need to talk about,” Dad said.

  We were sitting at opposite ends of the table. We were eating take-out. I was sure that he had found out about Lisa being at the house.

  “I was offered a job,” he said. “It’s in Columbia. It’s the same company I’m with now, but this will be better for both of us. We’ll be leaving here in two we
eks. I hate to do this to you now. I see you’re making friends and all, but it’s the choice I have to make.”

  I took a moment for everything to sink in. This was exactly why I hadn’t wanted to make new friends. For months I had put a wall around myself to not let anybody get close, and, as soon as I let my guard down, something like this happens.

  “What about Destiny? Is she moving with us?”

  Dad shook his head. “We might be splitting up.” I could see the disappointment in his eyes. “She thinks you don’t like her anyway.”

  People with social anxiety often come across as standoffish, snobby, or uninterested. Since it isn’t easy for us to interact with others, sometimes people think that we don’t like them.

  I left Dad by himself and went upstairs to my room.

  Since I knew I would be leaving in two weeks, was there really any point in continuing my relationship with Lisa? The truth of the matter was that I would probably never see her again. I knew that it would have probably been for the best to stop before I fell in love with her, but it was already too late.

  But there was a way, I realized. In less than a year, she would be going to college. If I got accepted to the same school, we would only have to make it through eleven months of being apart.

  chapter thirteen

  THE NEXT DAY, DAD WAS at work, and I was home alone. The doorbell rang around lunchtime. The sound caused Wolf to go into a barking frenzy.

  I stumbled through the house and made my way downstairs. Wolf had her front paws resting on the lower window panes of the door. Zee was trying to do the same thing but wasn’t tall enough to reach. Each time that Zee tried to mimic the older and much larger dog, his paws just slid down the smooth wood. From the floor, Zee would start all over again. It was a display of sheer determination that I couldn’t help but admire.