by Jeff Nesbit
Yet I wondered if it would ever work with us. Sandy didn’t want to go too deeply into the world. She liked to skate on the surface, and she was awfully good at it. She could dance, twirl, and socialize with the best of them. And me? I was profoundly uncomfortable on the surface. The smoldering fire and intensity of my life hovered beneath that surface, waiting to devour anyone who came too close.
“I have to go,” I said finally.
Her hazel eyes pierced mine. “You don’t have to go. You want to.”
“I’ve been lobbying my editor for weeks to cover this story in more depth. You know that. I’ve told you about it.”
“Sure, but why do you have to go now? Why can’t you wait a bit? Do it later in the year, after our vacation?”
“The ships are all sailing there. It’s now or never,” I added half-heartedly. There was some truth in this, but not enough to convince her, I knew.
“Whatever.” Sandy pushed her chair back from the table at Starbucks, grabbed her cup of coffee, and rose to leave. “I may not know what a PIOMAS chart is, but I do know this: I’m going on my vacation with or without you.”
“Sandy, please—”
“I’m serious,” she said firmly. “You know I am. If you go to the Arctic, I can’t promise I’ll even return your phone call when you get back.”
She waited for a few more moments to see if I’d relent. When I didn’t, she turned and stalked out. I thought briefly about calling after her, telling her that, all right, I’d go on vacation with her to the Caribbean.
But I didn’t. Instead I chose to let the boyfriend cliff take a victim yet again.
Chapter Five
I never quite understood why Jude never worried about anything. He just didn’t. Somewhere along the line, I think, Jude simply decided that the world had thrown its worst at him, and he’d absorbed it. Now he meant to deal with the world as he wanted, as he saw fit, and he didn’t care what anyone else thought. He was the master of his own fate.
There is a certain freedom in not caring what others think about you. Don’t get me wrong—Jude went out of his way to cultivate a circle of people who considered him a friend or acquaintance. But they weren’t really his friends or acquaintances. They were props. And he truly didn’t care what they thought—about him or anything else.
“Why do you worry so much?” he once asked me. “How does it help? What does it get you? Does it make our situation better? Does it bring us parents who love us, a family that supports us? No. So there’s no need to worry. Just get on with it, and do everything that’s under your control.”
“But life isn’t under our control,” I’d countered. “We’re trapped by our circumstances. There are things that happen to us that we can’t control.”
“So control it. Take charge of your own destiny, and quit worrying about everything that’s outside your own control.”
“But we can’t,” I’d pleaded. “No one can. Things happen that are outside of us, outside of anything that we can directly control.”
“Yeah?” Jude had said. “Well, for those instances that we can’t directly control, then it becomes necessary to bring other forces into play that can extend your reach.”
“That’s crazy. Even those things can’t keep truly awful circumstances away from you. They can’t protect you.”
“Why not?”
“Okay,” I’d offered. “Let’s say a family is driving along at night, minding its own business, and some drunk guy veers over the center line and smashes into them. Everyone dies. Tell me how that family could have controlled that situation.”
Jude had shrugged. “That’s easy. If I was part of that family, there’s no way that drunk guy hits our car. Not now. It wouldn’t happen. Those things—as you occasionally refer to them—would make sure I was protected.”
“How?”
Jude smiled his knowing smile. “The drunk guy would overcorrect at the last minute, right before he hit us. He’d yank the wheel back in the other direction viciously, careen off the side of the road on the other side of us, flip his car, and smash himself into a million pieces. We’d drive on, unscathed.”
“And those … protectors, or whatever you call them, would take care of that? They’d make sure that drunk guy turned away?”
“If it’s a question of him or me, and I called on them to make that choice, then, yes, that’s what would happen. That which you demand is yours.”
“As opposed to ‘Ask, and you shall receive’?”
“No need to ask,” he’d said. “There’s only one way to make absolutely certain you get what you want.”
At some point, I quit arguing with Jude about this sort of thing, largely because he was telling the truth as he saw it. Somewhere along the way, Jude did start to learn how to control circumstances beyond himself when the need arose. What he demanded, he got.
My first understanding was early in our high school years. We were freshmen at our second high school, living with our eighth set of foster parents. Neither of us knew how long we’d be with this set of foster parents or at this particular high school. But I knew, right off, that Jude wouldn’t sit still for very long at the bottom of the social heap.
Jude hated everything about that setup—being a freshman, I mean. He hated hierarchies with a passion. And that’s what high school was—a hierarchy, with freshmen at the bottom. It was only later that he decided to stop fighting them and just rise to the top of those in his path.
It was much worse for boys than for girls—at least for the cute girls. If you were a freshman girl, and you were pretty, then you had little trouble socially. You had lots of friends, and the older boys in high school flitted around you like hummingbirds. It was so wonderful, nice, and delicious for the cute freshman girls. They simply had to be themselves, smile, flirt, be coy and cute, and their social network expanded exponentially.
Jude and I, on the other hand, were almost instantly relegated to the social-outcast wing of high school, along with most of the freshmen boys. We had barely any hope of talking to—much less dating—any of the cute freshmen girls. Sophomore, junior, and senior girls, of course, were off-limits. And had we been interested in sports, we’d have run into much the same thing—those who were older than us ruled and served as captains and commanders of their various teams by virtue of their birth dates and nothing more.
Jude had seen enough of this after a couple of weeks.
“We need to change things up,” he said mysteriously. “Time to burn the social order to the ground. Literally.”
It was an ordinary Friday-night party at someone’s house at the end of a suburban cul-de-sac. Word had spread, as it generally did when kids gathered at McDonald’s. Parents gone for the weekend, kid left home alone, and a party was born.
Jude talked me into joining him in attending, against my wishes. I knew I’d likely spend the party hanging out at the fringes, unable to talk to anyone. It would be miserable.
“Upstairs,” he said when we arrived. “I want to see the layout of the house.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “Why?”
“You’ll see.”
We worked our way through throngs of kids gathered at the bottom of the stairwell. I knew what we’d find upstairs, and it wasn’t pretty. I recognized at least six of the cute freshmen girls who were in various close encounters. I’d never talked to any of them, but I recognized them.
“Okay, good,” Jude said after he’d walked through each of the bedrooms on the upper level of the modest suburban house. Jude paused for a bit at the last room, what looked like an alcove storage room that had been converted into a fourth bedroom. There were two freshman girls—and the two upper-class boys they were making out with—inside this fourth bedroom. He was thoughtful as he closed the door behind us on the way out.
I couldn’t help but be puzzled. “What’s good about any of that?”
“The way the house is laid out,” he explained. “That last room, the alcove storage room with the two freshman girls, is perfect. The door only locks one way, from the outside, from the hallway. It clearly used to be a storage closet and only locks with a key. And there are no windows in the room itself. They’ll be trapped there when the smoke starts.”
“Smoke? What in the world—”
Jude held up a hand. “Relax. It’ll make sense. Just follow my lead when it’s time.”
Had I known what Jude had planned—what he’d already set in motion by calling on his forces—I would most certainly not have followed Jude’s lead. Had I known that he was planning to call on forces to actually threaten people lives simply for better social status, I would never have played along. But by the time I’d realized what he was up to, I didn’t have much choice.
I trailed behind Jude as he worked his way back downstairs. He didn’t say a word to a soul at the party. He was grimly determined to some as-yet-unexplained task. He went to the kitchen and looked around, spotted a number of key rings hanging beside the refrigerator, grabbed one, and then headed back upstairs.
Once we were back upstairs, Jude rummaged through a closet at the end of the hall until he found what he was looking for. He pulled two blankets out of the closet, handed one to me, then joined the line outside the one and only upstairs bathroom. But he quickly grew impatient at the wait.
“Follow me,” he urged.
I did. We went back down the stairs a second time and made our way outside. Jude walked around the hedges and bushes at the side of the house until he spotted a green hose. He grabbed the end of the hose and turned on the water.
“Put your blanket on the ground,” he ordered. He tossed his blanket on the ground beside mine and doused both with water, then switched the water off. Reaching down, he started to wring some of the water out of his blanket. Not knowing precisely why I was doing it, I followed his lead and wrung the water out of my blanket. We left the blankets slightly damp.
We walked back into the house and up the stairs yet again. Jude glanced around and, satisfied at what he saw, took the set of keys he’d brought with him from the kitchen, chose the one labeled “upstairs bedroom,” locked the door from the outside, and stepped back.
“Showtime,” he said enigmatically.
We waited for a minute or two before we heard the shouts coming from the kitchen below, followed by even more shouts, then screams of terror, and finally, the word that Jude was clearly waiting to hear.
“Fire!” someone yelled, racing out of the kitchen. “The house is on fire! Get out!”
Mass hysteria ensued. Every kid pushed and shoved to get down the stairs and out of the now-burning house. Doors slammed. Windows were smashed. Smoke—lots and lots of it—billowed out of the kitchen in black streams. Within a minute or so, all of that black smoke had created a haze upstairs.
Jude waited calmly at the end of the long hallway, outside the room he’d locked moments earlier. He positioned himself so he could see the downstairs living room as well. As the smoke and cries of terror reached the bedrooms, I heard pounding from the other side of that locked door.
“Let us out! Let us out!” one of the freshmen girls screamed from the other side of the locked door. I could hear the boys on the other side pounding frantically. Smoke billowed heavily. It was getting hard to breathe. I wondered if perhaps Jude hadn’t turned loose something that he couldn’t control.
Jude didn’t react until the first licks of the fire emerged from the kitchen and caught the drapes in the living room. Then he moved into action. He grabbed the wet blanket and motioned to me to grab mine.
“Remember—follow my lead,” he hissed. Jude unlocked the door, turned the knob, and crashed through the door as violently as he could manage. The swinging door knocked one of the two boys over as we raced into the bedroom. The smoke billowed upstairs, thick and hazy all around us.
“I have you!” Jude called to one of the girls. He took his wet blanket, wrapped it around the girl, and started to lead her out of the room. I followed Jude’s lead and wrapped the second girl in my own wet blanket.
Jude looked over at me, his eyes blazing cauldrons of intensity, saw that I had my prize, and then charged back out of the room. “Let’s go!” he yelled. “Follow me!” He held on to the girl in his arms, inside the wet blanket, and hurried through the smoke and down the stairs. We followed as swiftly as we could.
We ran through the small but growing blaze of fire and smoke that was rapidly enveloping the living room.
All six of us raced out of the house and joined the group of kids gathered on the front lawn. They stood watching the inferno take over the house.
“You saved my life!” the girl told Jude. He unwrapped the wet blanket from around her as we reached the safety of the front lawn. She collapsed into Jude’s arms, sobbing uncontrollably.
“I can’t believe you risked your lives like that,” someone said in awe.
“Yeah, you brought them out of that burning house,” said a second.
“You’re heroes,” said a third.
Word spread quickly about the two freshmen boys who’d risked their lives to save the four kids trapped in an upstairs bedroom during a raging fire. We were no longer faceless freshmen in a hierarchical world ruled by birthright elders. We had status, thanks to Jude.
People love heroes. Becoming one changes everything about your life and your world almost instantly. Jude and I were no longer at the bottom of the heap. No, at least for now, for as long as we were in that particular high school, we were afforded a different social ranking.
Just as Jude had planned.
Chapter Six
The park had been unoccupied for quite some time when my brother arrived in force to announce his campaign. I appreciated the irony. I’m not sure anyone else did.
The Occupy Wall Street movement had been on the cusp of redefining American politics once. Fueled by the anger at the “1 percent”—the people like my brother (and yes, myself) who commanded unseemly amounts of wealth compared to the other 99 percent of the American population who lived paycheck to paycheck—the movement had begun in New York at Battery Park in the shadow of the Twin Towers and then spread from city to city across America.
And then, in the blink of an eye, it had largely gone away. Unlike the Arab Spring revolutionary movements that had unseated governments around the world—and continued to disrupt democracies in those same countries—the Occupy Wall Street movement had gradually become a distant memory for the fickle national media.
The beginning of the end came as winter approached Battery Park at the southern end of Manhattan, when Mayor Bloomberg—a card-carrying 1-percenter himself, despite his populist tendencies as a politician—brought in the police to arrest the protesters there and tear down the “city” that had grown on the city block.
What had once been a staging ground for protests, news blasts, clarion calls, and various media targets on the steps of Battery Park by the folks who used the Occupy Wall Street movement for their own purposes once again became a tourist attraction for folks wishing nothing more than to eat their Burger King hamburgers as they stared up at the new tower that had been built on the site of the greatest terrorist tragedy in US history.
As I arrived at Battery Park, however, I couldn’t help but marvel at how iconic the location still was. My brother was a genius. If he could pull off his Senate campaign launch from here, the locus of populist protest against the uber-wealthy in American society, then he could achieve almost anything.
The word had clearly gotten around. The park was jammed with curious onlookers, tourists, potential campaign volunteers, well-wishers, and of course, the usual New York street crowd that drifted anywhere action appeared.
But there was also a number of police in riot gear spread around the park. I wasn’t entirely sure
what they expected, but it was obvious they didn’t want to be surprised by anything.
I was surprised at the bank of cameras that had shown up for the campaign announcement. There were already three tiers of cameras directly in front of the podium. I counted at least fifty cameras total. All of the national broadcast networks were there.
Seriously? I thought. Jude was running for Senate, not for grand emperor and pooh-bah of the known universe. If he won, he’d be one of one hundred senators, all of whom harbored thoughts of running for president someday … merely one of many in the nation’s capital vying for power and attention.
But I also knew Jude’s race wasn’t ordinary. There were only a few big states in the US—New York, California, Massachusetts, Florida, Illinois, and Texas—capable of producing a governor or senator who could go after the White House at some point.
And Jude clearly had it all—wealth, fame, charisma, and a track record of facing down big, daunting challenges. He only had to turn it into a platform that people could get behind—and deliver something tangible if he did manage to win the Senate seat.
“Over here, Thomas!” a voice called out over the din that filled the park.
I looked up. My brother stood behind a wall of people, all seemingly talking to him at once.
But Jude, at that moment, ignored them and looked down directly at me. Our eyes locked. In the middle of a sea of humanity in one of New York’s most crowded, historic, and iconic places, it was just the two of us. I could deny it as much as I’d like, but I couldn’t truly avoid the truth.
I smiled grimly, waved, and edged my way up the steps through the crowd. I paused at the solid wall of police at the edge of the makeshift platform where the podium rested and explained who I was to one of them. I was prepared to argue my case, but Jude appeared by my side.
“He’s my twin brother. Can’t you tell?” Jude said to the policeman. He pulled me close and positioned me so we were both facing him—and the wall of still photographers who’d been milling around.
