Clearly, I realized, this was no way to start the year.
The only person out of the hundreds who was not glaring at me like I was the son of Satan was the chubby, bespectacled, jittering little Asian kid who knocked me over in the first place. His eyes pleaded with me for help, as if everyone was really horrified at him for knocking me over, and I was the only one who could save him.
Unfortunately, such salvation was beyond my power at the moment, but I did manage to wrangle myself to standing, and offer a hand to help him up.
“Thanks,” he mumbled.
“Don’t mention it,” I mumbled back.
And with that, the two of us scuffled off to the top row of the old wooden bleachers, doing our best to find a place well hidden behind some of the taller kids in the class.
I should probably mention here that while my brother was a veritable athletic god at St. Soren’s, none of those sports-related genes made their way into my DNA. On the contrary, I take almost solely after my mother’s side of the family, who, though perfectly “fit” by any standards, have the unfortunate tendency to have zero coordination and never grow—male or female—a solid hair’s width over five feet five inches.
Needless to say, at fourteen years old, I still had a few inches to grow to reach even that modest height.
The second thing I noticed about the kid who’d knocked me down, other than that he was the only representative of any minority group whatsoever in the class, was that he was also, perhaps, the only person in the room who was shorter than me.
So obviously, I liked him right away.
As soon as the opening prayers began, I whispered, “Hey, sorry about that. You didn’t get hurt, did you?”
He had these thin little, oval-shaped, wire-rimmed glasses, and he glared at me through them as if I’d just insulted his mother. He put his finger to his mouth, let out a sharp “Shhh,” and then closed his eyes, bowing his head in silent prayer.
“Oh,” I stammered. “Right. Sorry. We’re…uh…praying.”
He glared at me, clearly attempting something like anger, but he only achieved a sort of comical frown. So I laughed (I couldn’t stop myself), but I guess I was a bit loud, because the whole row of kids in front of me gave me the same angry stare…which just made me laugh even harder, until a teacher pointed a menacing finger right at me, and I bit my lip to stop.
After the assembly, they released us to our homerooms, and as the mob of freshmen walked through the halls, I got to take my first real look at my classmates. The only thing different about this group than the one at my old school were the uniforms—plaid skirts for the girls, khaki slacks for the boys, and SSA-emblazoned Oxford button-downs for everyone—but even these couldn’t hide their utter sameness to everyone else I’d ever met from every school everywhere.
They all sickened me a little, so I turned up my music, pretended to be looking at something important on my phone and made a beeline for room 209, trying not to think about how I was now sure to spend the next four years of my education the same way I’d spent every other one of the past nine: alone.
Room 209 was the homeroom for students whose last names fell between Roberts and Turkleton. It was a science room, and there were posters of Einstein and Newton beside the chalkboard, shelves filled with Bunsen burners and beakers, and a row of shiny new silver computers on a long, black table by the window. Once inside, we were all arranged alphabetically into rows, with myself sitting firmly between Wendy Spooner and, quite fatefully, my new little Asian friend.
He seemed downright frightened to see me (or else just frightened in general), so I leaned over, extended my hand, and said, “Sorry, man. For…you know…back there. I’m Jonathan Stiles.”
He eyed my hand cautiously. “Henry,” he said, finally taking it. “Henry Sun. And I’m not religious.”
“Um…okay,” I said, unsure how to interpret this. “Well, you looked like you were praying pretty hard back there in the gym.”
“I was respecting the opinions and authority of my high school,” he whispered.
“Alright, alright. Whatever you want to call it.”
“All religion is unbound by empirical data and therefore inherently unscientific and therefore absurd.” He sounded like he’d been practicing this for months.
I couldn’t help being amused by his earnestness. “If you say so, man. I just think it’s stupid.”
He glared at me again, as if trying to work out whether I was mocking him or not. “Well, yes. But it’s only ‘stupid’ because it can’t be proven through observation and the scientific method.”
“I guess,” I replied. “Did you need observation and the scientific method to prove to you that the Tooth Fairy wasn’t real either?”
“Well, no.”
“What about the Easter Bunny, or Zeus, or SpongeBob SquarePants, for that matter?”
Henry blushed a bit, stifling his laughter. “Of course not.”
“Right. Because that would be stupid.”
He took a beat. “Essentially, then, we agree…right?”
“Right. So we can be friends.”
Henry let an awkward, unpracticed smile make its way across his face, as if it hadn’t occurred to him that I’d ever want to be his friend, or that anyone would ever want to be his friend. “Good,” he said. “Okay. Yeah, good.”
After homeroom they gave us a tour of the school, which was followed by another assembly (this one thankfully less eventful than the last) before they freed us for the day just after lunch. Nearly nauseated by all of the praying (made tolerable only by sharing snickers with Henry), I decided to take a little tour of the woods behind the school, having been told once by my brother that this was where the upperclassmen went to smoke, drink, make out, and engage in all of the other activities that just might make St. Soren’s bearable.
Henry followed me for about fifty paces beyond the milling crowd of freshmen before asking where I was going.
“Exploring,” I told him.
“Umm…why?”
I turned around to stare at him, wondering how sustainable our friendship would turn out to be. “Why not?”
“But what about the bus…,” he began, though I’d already turned to walk away. If we were going to be friends (and I hoped we would), he’d have to step up to a little mischief, and fast.
In all honesty, I expected to make my little exploration alone. But to my great surprise, a little further along, I heard the shuffling of Henry’s gargantuan backpack come speeding up behind me. “So what’s back here?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I think it’s where everybody does drugs.”
Henry stopped so fast he almost tripped over his feet. I’m positive that if I told him we were going to attend a virgin sacrifice by a Satanic coven, it wouldn’t have elicited such a horrified response. “You’re…going…to….”
“I’m joking,” I lied. “Relax. This is just where the upperclassmen hang out.”
His attitude didn’t change; not much, at least. Whatever small amount of his trust I’d earned was, at this point, all but lost.
“Whatever,” I said. “Go back and wait for the bus, if you want.”
Henry clenched his jaw, clearly upset by my challenge. But he was unable to stand up to it. “So, there’re no drugs back there?”
“Come on now, man, there are drugs everywhere in this corrupt world of ours. Are you coming or not?”
After a moment more of consideration, he dropped his guard and followed me. We both smiled as he matched my pace across the lawn, neither of us aware in the slightest of what we were getting ourselves into.
***
So let me preface this next scene by saying that, at this point, my general view of humanity was that it was all a useless, phony, hypocritical cancer upon the Earth, providing nothing of any good to anyone, while it went about causing e
ndless pain and suffering to every living species on the planet, itself included. Out of the six billion of us walking around on this wretched stretch of sand, there was only one exception in my mind: Ryan.
It didn’t matter that I hadn’t actually seen very much of him in the past few years (since he’d started St. Soren’s, he just seemed to get caught up in the whole high school thing). I mean sure, he was my older brother, and I loved him. But more importantly: I trusted him. I knew him. So when Henry and I stepped into the hostile situation we were about to find in those woods, it was Ryan that I first thought of. It was Ryan that I hoped would save me.
This was how it happened:
About twenty feet inside the tree line we rounded a small stone wall to find a group of four football players, padded and uniformed and covered up and down with grass stains and dirt, standing in a little clearing and looking nervously all around. At their feet, just a few yards from me and Henry, was a textbook—a math textbook; trigonometry—on top of which was piled a small (though significant) dusting of white powder.
We stopped in our tracks. To be honest, my first instinct was just to smile and keep walking, as if nothing were odd about the whole scene. But Henry, being the spaz that he was, made the intelligent and judicious decision to scream like a little girl, yell, “Shit! Drugs!” and run madly back toward the school.
Then everything started to happen very fast. One of the football players—this hulking blond giant with squinty little eyes—yelled, “Get him!” which caused a different hulking giant to literally pick Henry up and throw him in the dirt, while yet another one started frantically dumping the coke (or whatever) into a tiny plastic bag.
I tried to make a run for it, but someone screamed, “Alistair, look!” to the squinty-eyed blond one, who promptly jumped at my legs, taking me out below the knees.
And then, a second later: there he was—Alistair—his face mere inches from mine. His hands were on my throat and he was growling: “This all never happened, you understand? You were never here, you never saw this, you’ve never seen me before—get it? get it? get it?”
I was struggling to breathe. I jerked my head to the left and saw Henry getting similar treatment, but from an even bigger asshole.
“Yeah,” I tried to whisper. “I get it. Sure.”
Alistair was enraged, furious, and scared. His eyes were bloodshot and dilated and jerking all around. His whole body shook as if possessed. He screamed, “What?!? What?!?! Do you get it? Say it louder, if you get it! Say it louder!”
Well, I could barely breathe at that moment, so being loud was not an option.
And it was right at this point that I first thought about Ryan. He was a football player, after all; he’d know these kids; he could help me. Silently, I wished for him to appear. I pictured him strutting through the brush, in full football gear, as big as the biggest one of these guys (Ryan was over six feet tall—nearly a foot taller than me). He’d kick the first one right off of Henry, smack the second to the dirt, throw the third against a tree, and then take Alistair by the neck….
A few seconds later, just as I felt myself coming dangerously close to losing consciousness, my wish came true…sort of.
Ryan did come strutting through the brush, in his full football gear…but not the way I hoped. He was stumbling more than strutting, dazed and flushed as if he’d just been crying or running or both. And he was scratching furiously at his right nostril.
He squinted at me, confused, mumbling, “Now what the fuck is this, Al?”
Alistair leaned back, revealing me to my brother. He said, “A couple of little shit freshmen. The Chinese one was about to run for a teacher.”
It seemed to take a moment for Ryan to figure out who I was, and that Alistair was getting ready to beat me senseless. But as soon as he did, Ryan pounced. He jumped on Al, ripping him off of me and throwing him to the ground. He started swinging his fists into Alistair’s face and stomach and ribs and throat. Al flailed his arms, trying desperately to block and push Ryan away. And then the biggest one of the shitheads—who had been holding down Henry—jumped right into the middle of it, yanking at Ryan’s hair and his jersey and his neck. Ryan pushed Alistair’s face into the dirt and stared straight into my eyes. He said, “Jesus, Jonathan. Take your little friend and get the fuck out of here.”
These were the last words my brother ever said to me.
Three
It’s strange. For the rest of that day, I went over and over what happened back in those woods, but I never once thought about the worst and most shocking part of it all: the moment when Ryan first appeared in the brush, scratching his nose, stumbling and red-eyed like the rest of them. Somehow, that image temporarily vanished from my memory. There was just me, getting pummeled, and then Ryan coming to save me. That was all I remembered. Or at least, that was all I allowed myself to remember. Ryan had no guilt, none at all. Not in my mind.
In fact, it didn’t occur to me that Ryan, my steadfastly health-conscious and anti-drug brother, was snorting cocaine at school directly after football practice until the next day…until well after I learned of his death at the bottom of the ravine. Until, to be exact, about two hours after I left Jesus Jackson on the fifty-yard line of the football field.
This is what happened:
After saying good-bye to Jesus Jackson, I stumbled in a daze from the football field back to the crowd of people by the ravine. It was about a five-minute walk, and all the while I felt nauseous and weak-kneed and dizzy, as if each side of my brain were trying to get me to do something different, and my body just wanted to give up and fall over.
My parents were standing next to a police car, parked just at the entrance to the path that ran into the woods. They were talking to a uniformed cop. My father had his arm around my mother—a sight I hadn’t seen since their divorce three years prior. Dad looked haggard (which was to be expected), but my mother, more disturbingly, was completely composed. Her hair was blown-out, her makeup perfect, her tailored “weekend driving suit” (just a pair of khaki pants and a khaki shirt with big collar) clung to her, as always, without a seam so much as a centimeter out of place.
At any rate, when I finally reached my parents, the cop was giving them a rundown of what needed to happen over the next few days: an autopsy, an investigation (“just a formality,” he assured them), and he highly recommended counseling, at least for me.
My mother dismissed him with a wave. Then she whispered (as if I weren’t standing right next to her), “We’ll take him to Saint Christopher’s. He hasn’t been to church in ages, anyway, and they have a very nice young priest there.”
My father removed his arm from her shoulder. “Priest? His brother just died and you want to send the kid to a priest?”
I hate it when my dad calls me “the kid” (which he does constantly), but at least he was arguing my side of things, so I left it alone.
My mother, acting as shocked as she always did by my father’s blatant disregard for everything holy, shot him the evilest of her evil stares. “Of course, church. Maybe at least this will finally shake some sense into the boy.”
I hate my mother calling me “the boy” even more than my father calling me “the kid.”
“Sharon, I don’t want to hear another word about it,” snapped my father.
My mom was about to slap him, or so it seemed, but the officer intervened. “Let’s just take it easy, folks,” he said. “This is a hard time for everyone. Just focus on making it through the day, okay?”
My parents agreed begrudgingly. The officer continued, “We’ll be finishing up here in the next hour or so and when we’re done, one of the detectives will be able to give you some more information down at the station.”
The officer, seemingly satisfied that no one was about to erupt into a fistfight, gave a brief nod and walked away.
An hour and a half later my father and I were
in the waiting room of the detectives’ wing at the police station, my mother having gone home to cook, or clean, or pray (or more likely, all three).
I found myself surprised by the atmosphere of the station: It felt more like a doctor’s office than the kinds of dirty, bustling police stations you see on television. It was just a boring old office building with white fluorescent lights and dull gray cubicles and men in ties and women in suits and all of them walking around with coffee and paperwork and very pleasant expressions on their faces. I mentioned how strange I thought it was to my father. He was jittering almost spastically in his seat—shifting his weight around and shaking his legs and tapping his phone over and over on the armrest—but he just shrugged, saying, “What do you expect? It’s the suburbs.”
After a few more minutes of waiting, a secretary called him into some room somewhere in the back. I watched them walk through the maze of cubicles, wishing I could go with him, but only because I didn’t really want to be alone in that waiting room.
I sat there for almost an hour, strangely unable to think about Ryan, or my family, or much of anything. The only thing I could focus on was Jesus Jackson, and how strange it was that he was out there all alone, playing imaginary football in a white linen suit. For a moment I tried really hard to imagine what kind of a god I would choose, if I were to take him up on his offer. But I couldn’t come up with anything. It just seemed so pointless. I mean, why have someone make you a god if you know it’s going to be fake, right? But then again, if you have one hundred percent faith (as was his guarantee) would it really matter that it’s fake? At least someone would know why the fuck I was sitting in this goddamned waiting room.
I thought about all this, just sort of zoning out in my head for what felt like hours. When I finally looked up, I saw my father and this other man staring down at me, all furrowed brows and concerned frowns, as if they’d been standing there for a while.
Jesus Jackson Page 2
