Bloody Bloody Apple

by Howard Odentz

  Seconds later, I hear a voice, high and lilting. “Jackson?” it says.

  It’s Ms. Hutch. Her white-blond hair is curly and pinned up today, and her lipstick is the color of Hollywood blood—fake, just like her. She stares at a point somewhere past my head, roughly around where some bulletin boards are decorated with college pamphlets and trade-school brochures—all places that most of us will never go.

  I make an effort to stare right at her, to see if she really can’t look directly back. Maybe it makes her feel uncomfortable, like she might catch whatever I have if she stares right into my eyes. Maybe she thinks my eyes are like Claudia’s, but then I realize that can’t be it because, you know, Claudia doesn’t have any.

  I mumble something that’s barely audible and hand her the yellow slip of paper.

  She takes it from me, smiles, and says, “Thank you for coming.” Ms. Hutch looks down and mouths the words on the piece of paper as she reads it over, as though it’s brand new to her—like she’s not the one who filled it out in the first place. Then she spins on her heels and starts walking back into the depths of the guidance office. “This way, please,” she chirps, so I follow her.

  We walk down the opposite hall from where Newie and Mr. Colton went, make a quick turn, and go into Ms. Hutch’s corner office. There’s a big window there that looks out on the parking lot, and I make a mental note that Chief Anderson’s cruiser’s gone.

  “Sit down,” says Ms. Hutch as she slides by me and closes the door almost all the way, but leaves it open a crack. That’s a trick that teachers use these days to make sure that they don’t get blamed by students for doing inappropriate things—leaving their doors open a crack—but inappropriate things happen anyway.

  The same old story goes around each year about one of the senior girls and the band director, Mr. Russo, or the personal tutoring sessions Miss Fricke, the art teacher, conducts because she’s just like that and all the jocks know it—or Coach Johnson who likes to grab the crotches of quiet underclassman boys who seek him out for help in the weight room.

  Newie says Johnson likes his johnsons. I guess he thinks that’s funny, but I don’t.

  It’s sad.

  “I’m so sorry,” Ms. Hutch says in a plaintive, mewling voice as she maneuvers herself around her desk and sits down. Of course, I know what she’s talking about, but I don’t say anything right away. She’s still not looking at me. Instead, her gaze is oddly positioned to the right of my head. It gives me the uncomfortable feeling that she really is looking at me, but has something really messed up with her eyes.

  “Whatever,” I finally say to her. It’s amazing how much of a prick you can be with just one word.

  I expect her to get the hint that I’m not in the mood to talk, but she doesn’t take the bait. Instead she says, “How are you holding up?”

  She stops and waits. The silence pushes in on me, and I know that I have to fill it with something, or I’ll be sitting here all day—or worse, she might make me go to the school nurse.

  “Okay,” I mutter, but it doesn’t seem like it’s enough to shut her up. I search for something else to say, but what comes out sounds a little worse than it did in my head. “I mean, it’s not like I knew her or anything.”

  She bends slightly forward, like I’ve suddenly said something that’s vitally important. Then I realize where she’s going to go with it, and my stomach begins to twist itself into knots. Still, when she says what I know she’s going to say, I’m not prepared. Her words feel like I’ve been punched in the nuts by Newie.

  “You mean it’s not like your grandmother?” she says.

  Yup, she went there, and the memories come flooding in.

  18

  MARGO FREEMAN had been dead for under a month. Becky had gone batshit crazy and was freaking everyone out.

  My mother wasn’t quite doing laps in a pool of black depression yet, but my father was starting to go nuts about the religious crap, forcing the entire family to read passages from the Bible every day. He took off time from work and spent hours on his knees asking God what was wrong with his little girl.

  He even had creepy Father Tim come over to the house and pray with us, which was a stretch for my dad because I knew he didn’t like Father Tim very much. My dad thinks that a man of the cloth should know more about the Bible than his parishioners. That’s a tall order, because my dad knows a lot. Besides, Father Tim looks shifty, like the kind of guy who judges everyone else then goes home and yanks his chain to pictures of little boys on the Internet.

  I hated praying with them. It meant nothing to me. To be honest, I was pissed at Becky for being so weak. In some ways, I still am, because I don’t quite get “crazy.” You’d think in a place like Apple I would, but the truth is, letting yourself go FUBAR is taking the easy way out. Big deal, your best friend got chopped into pieces and left all over town. Shit happens. Grow up.

  I remember my dad telling Father Tim that something sinister was happening in our house. That’s the only time I ever thought of Father Tim as anything other than creepy. He actually did everything he could to try and steer my parents clear of the belief that there was something demonic going on with Becky. He told my parents that there were services available to her—for low income people—for mentally ill people.

  It didn’t do any good. The best that Father Tim could do was to tell my father to have faith, so my dad did—all over the house.

  My father spent weeks in the garage building and painting crucifixes. He even hung an extra big one in the living room over the television and forced me to get on my knees to pray for Becky’s salvation, like it was my fault—like I’m the one who did something wrong.

  The night that everything happened with my grandmother, my parents brought Becky up to the second floor to talk with her. Grandma was convinced that she would be able to soothe the hurt that was making my sister so mental, and my parents were about at the end of their ropes.

  It was after Halloween, and Apple had simmered down into normalcy, because the murders were through for the season. Of course, no one really knows for sure, but Halloween always seems like the end—like the license to kill has expired.

  It was raining out that night. I only remember the rain because I wanted to be anywhere other than home, but the world had gone cold and soggy, and there was no place to go that didn’t feel fungal.

  My parents were sitting in the living room, nervously doing nothing. My father was lost in thought, and my mother was slowly turning the pages of her Bible and reading the words with her mouth slightly open and her lips moving—like Becky’s nun.

  Upstairs there was screaming. We hadn’t quite got used to Not-Becky’s mouth just yet. It was foul. Its words made my face turn red, because my sister never really swore like that. Other people in town did, like Margo Freeman, but somehow, Becky never weaved that kind of language into her vocabulary. She confined herself to words like “jerk” or “crap” or maybe the occasional “slut,” only when she was joking around, like she did with Margo the day she was killed.

  I sat at my father’s desk in the corner, reading a comic book. I can’t remember which one—I think Wicked Dead, maybe. I’m not sure. I do remember it was filled with blood. I don’t know why guys like that kind of stuff, but we do. Who cares about Archie and Veronica? I want to see gore and body parts, and maybe a little skin.

  Anyway, I was fake-flipping through the pages because I couldn’t concentrate on the story. What I was really doing was concentrating on the commotion upstairs. They were being so loud, like it wasn’t just the three of them up there, but a whole bunch of people who had somehow snuck past us through the front door and crept up the stairs.

  Something thumped heavily across the floor in my grandparents’ apartment, and we all stopped what we were doing—my father, my mother, and me—and looked up at the ceiling. None of us knew wha
t it was, but it sounded like something big. It was followed by more screaming and moaning from Not-Becky, but now my grandmother and grandfather had joined in.

  “What the . . .” my father had time to say before there was another jolt. This time, a small piece of plaster let loose from the ceiling and crumbled to the floor in front of my mother. Her eyes grew big like saucers, and she gave my father one of those soundless looks that conveys volumes. My dad clutched the arm of the couch, as though he was getting ready to propel himself off the orange print and dash up the front stairs to the second floor.

  Then the upstairs door slammed open—hard. Later, after everything happened, we found a dent where the doorknob hit the wall.

  “Stop it,” I heard my grandmother wail.

  My grandfather cried, “I expel you. I expel you. I expel you.” His words were followed by a coarse laugh like the one that comes from Not-Becky.

  “Heaven help me,” screamed my grandmother. “Noooooo . . .”

  The next thing I knew, someone was cartwheeling down the stairs and slamming into the front door.

  I’ll never forget the horrible sound that came out of my mother’s mouth when she saw who it was—my grandmother—all bent and broken, with her head twisted almost completely to one side and her legs contorted like legs should never be contorted.

  My father ran to my grandmother, but it was too late. Her eyes had glazed over as her life spilled out of a deep gash in the back of her head. Only it wasn’t a gash, it was worse than that, because there was pink and white stuff, too—bits of brain and bone. A chunky, soupy mess pooled around my grandmother’s gray hair

  My heart pounded in my chest. I wasn’t sure what to think or what to do. All I knew was that my grandmother was dead for no reason, and now Not-Becky wasn’t screaming anymore. It was alternately laughing and cackling and wailing like my mother—the painful sound of a wounded cat that had lost a fight with a stray dog.

  My father’s face was twisted in agony. He took the steps three at a time, leaving bloody shoeprints on the treads. “No,” my mother screeched. “Don’t.” Her words tore through me as surely as a hot knife tore through Margo Freeman when she lost her head and her legs and every other part of her.

  Somehow, I found myself outside, dashing across the street to Chief Anderson’s house. The next thing I knew, I was in Newie’s foyer, babbling incoherently to his giant father. The chief’s shirt was off, and a huge tattoo of a skull with a snake crawling through its eye socket was inked around his arm and shoulder. Newie stood there with a bag of chips in his hands and that vacant look on his face that he always has when he doesn’t know what to say.

  Chief Anderson grabbed his shirt off the bannister and pushed past me, down the front steps, and across the street to my house. As I watched him go, I saw my sister glaring at me from the second-floor window with a face that wasn’t her face, and a stare that wasn’t her stare.

  She wore the face of the thing that I came to know as Not-Becky.

  She wore the face of evil.

  19

  MS. HUTCH STARES at me, waiting for me to respond, which really means that her googly eyes are probably staring at a point on the wall somewhere off to my right.

  “No,” I tell her. “This wasn’t like my grandmother.” I look out the window and chew the skin on the inside of my cheek. I can feel my insides beginning to boil. Who the hell does she think she is?

  Ms. Hutch reaches down, opens up her desk drawer, and pulls out a bag of lollipops, the generic kind with the chocolate in the center. She pulls a purple one out of the bag, which is probably the grossest of all the colors next to green, and noisily peels back the wrapper.

  “Want one?” she offers and holds the bag out to me. I shake my head. I’m not in a lollipop mood.

  She shrugs and sucks on the purple head for a moment. I can only imagine what Newie would have to say about that. Finally, Ms. Hutch clears her throat and says, “How are your friends holding up? Newton Anderson and”—she opens up a manila folder on her desk and quickly rifles through some notes—“and Annie Berg? Aren’t you two dating?”

  I don’t know why, but I say, “Do you keep track of how many times I jerk off, too?” My nostrils flare, and I look down at my feet. If Newie can be a fuckwad sometimes, I guess I can be a prick.

  Ms. Hutch flinches slightly, like she’s been slapped in the face by a hummingbird.

  “That’s inappropriate,” she says thinly.

  I sigh and shift in my seat. “Look,” I say. “It’s been a really long day, and it’s only like nine in the morning. I just want to go to my classes and see my friends and pretend that I never found Claudia Fish in the woods.” It’s about the longest stretch of words I think I’ve ever spoken to Ms. Hutch.

  She sucks on the purple lollipop some more. Yeah, baby, yeah, I hear Newie’s voice in my head.

  “That’s understandable,” she says.

  My shoulders, which I didn’t even know were tense, let loose a little. I reach down for my backpack and pull myself to my feet.

  Ms. Hutch closes the folder in front of her and folds her fingers together in that weird “here’s the church, here’s the steeple” sort of way, but her fingers crisscross over each other instead of under, and her thumbs touch together like a little spire, which means if she opens the door to see all the people, no one will be there.

  That’s fine by me. It’s not like the church has ever done anything to help me, anyway.

  I pause for a second, because she hasn’t given me the mental nod that I’m dismissed. Ms. Hutch takes the opportunity to ask another humdinger that I don’t want to answer. “How are things at home, Jackson?”

  I let my backpack drop to the floor and clench my jaw.

  “It’s my job to ask,” she says, and I realize she’s right. Somewhere buried in her files is that fact that my grandmother, who lived with my family, died two years ago, and my sister has some sort of grave medical condition—but Ms. Hutch doesn’t really care.

  She’s just doing her little job, in her little office, in her little life, in this little messed up town. She’s going to go home tonight to her little apartment, where she doesn’t even have a cat. She probably has a goldfish named Frank or Joe or Steve or the name of any number of losers who picked her up at The Gin Mill, said they loved her while screwing her brains out, then never called again. She’ll take a frozen dinner out of the freezer and pop it into the microwave and spend the remainder of the night in a housecoat that she probably sewed herself, crying at sappy movies on cable.

  Ms. Hutch doesn’t care about me. She cares about checking my name off her to-do list.

  “Fine,” I say. I don’t offer her anything more than that, which is just as well.

  She sucks on the lollipop a few more times, probably mentally counting how many licks it actually takes to get to the Tootsie Roll center. “That’s it, then. Do you need a pass for class?”

  I do, so she scribbles one out on her pass pad and hands it to me. “You know if you ever need to talk, I’m right here,” she says.

  I don’t even give her the courtesy of a nod. How can she help? How can I possibly tell her what’s really going on at the Gill house? What skills did she pick up from her guidance counselor correspondence course that can give me a leg up on dealing with my family?

  As I turn to leave her office, I notice the bag of suckers still sitting on her desk. “Any brown ones in that bag?”

  Ms. Hutch stares off into space for a moment, like she’s not sure what I’m asking, but something brings her back to reality, and she says, “Oh. Let’s have a look.” She reaches her painted nails into the plastic bag, rummages around, and pulls out two lollipops. “Today’s your lucky day,” she says and stretches out her arm.

  I take them from her. Then I’m out the door, down the hallway, and out of the guidance o
ffices all together.

  As I shove the lollipops into my pocket, I mumble, “Yeah, today’s my lucky day all right. La-de-freaking-da.”

  20

  I DON’T SEE NEWIE and Annie until lunch, but I do see eyes everywhere, because everyone knows by now that the three of us found Claudia Fish in the woods, and no one has a problem staring me down like I’m the one who killed her.

  Between classes, I walk with my head straight down, praying to avoid any idle conversation that will inevitably lead to death, but prayer has never been my strong suit.

  “Is it true?” asks Mark Zebrowski as he catches up to me in the hallway between second and third period.

  “Not now,” I say to him.

  Mark’s annoying, but he has his uses. He always has weed because his sister’s screwing Ziggy Connor, so he doesn’t have to pay for the pre-rolled crap Ziggy’s selling.

  “No probs,” he says and lifts his hand to high-five me. Only then do I notice that he’s got a flat spliff between his fingers. Like I said, Mark’s annoying, but he has his uses. I high-five him and quickly palm the joint and slip it into my pocket. “For Crawdaddy,” he says. “Stay cool, man.” Mark winks as he turns down the hallway toward the library.

  When the 11:40 bell rings, I head straight for the cafeteria. Annie and Newie are already there, sitting at a table by themselves with their heads hanging down. I’m guessing they’ve had about as much fun today as me.

  I slide in next to Annie, and she pushes up against me.

  “Fun times?” I say to both of them.

  “It’ll be over soon,” says Annie. “They’re like lemmings—all of them. Something new will happen, and everyone will forget about us and go jump off a cliff after someone else.”

  Newie stares at her like he doesn’t understand, because he probably doesn’t. I half expect him to ask what a lemming is, but then I feel bad for thinking he’s as dumb as he is. Maybe he’s just been tackled one too many times on the football field, and he’s got a dent in his head.