He laughs. "I told you these things wouldn't kill me."
"Yes you did," I say, remembering. I glance back over my shoulder, up at the rampart along the roof of the school. A dizzy déjà vu floods through me. It passes, and I laugh.
"You going to the Serenity Tavern tonight?" he asks.
I nod. "Just like last year. Just like next year."
"Drink to life, and drink to death," he says, reciting the toast that we've given fourteen times already. The toast that we will give until every last one of us has crossed that mythic brink.
"Drink to remember," I finish. "Drink to forget."
He smiles. "That's what I like to hear."
I laugh at that. I can't help myself. An arctic breath races across the courtyard, and I hear that muffled beeping.
It's been here the whole time, since this morning, since I woke up with dawnlight splashing through the blinds. I'm sure of that, but I can't remember hearing it before. Ethan looks up at the tree and into the sky, and cuts me a sidelong glance, blowing out smoke and twitching his impossibly knowing grin.
As if he's known all along. I laugh. Of course he has.
I pull my jacket tighter around myself as the snow churns in a shifting haze, beating its fury against the world, and I can't hear anything but that lethargic bleating. A car alarm, pleading its monotonous tone from the student parking lot. Running off a dying battery from the sound of it. Seconds pile up in the space between those plaintive beeps. A child mashing a button on a telephone pad, over and over again. The sun burns too bright, and that beeping glides out of the morning over the horizon beyond the student parking lot. The only sound for miles.
I turn to ask Ethan if he hears that sound, because surely he must, and I find myself alone. Of course I am. Ethan never really came here, and the girl with the caramel eyes never really came here. I did not come here. My own name lines that chunk of soapstone in the mulch at the base of the conifer.
I am certain of it.
Frozen sunlight reflects blindingly off the snow, and terrible whiteness engulfs me, standing alone at the center of the universe beneath a towering Scot's Pine whose boughs hold up the heavens, whose roots burrow down through the earth into the deepest catacombs below the darkest pits of Tartarus.
And that doesn't trouble me. Doesn't even really surprise me. Because a moment later all that blinding light erupts, and there is nothing left to hold out the creeping darkness that wraps itself around me like the delicate breath of my own mortality.
8.
Then the tree and the snow and the courtyard disappear.
And that didn't trouble me. Didn't even really surprise me. I listened to that plaintive beeping. I laid in a hospital room. I remembered that now. I blinked. I dreamed the medicated dreams of a dreamer that is dreaming.
I woke into shadows. A braying spotlight swept past the window again, flooding the room with the unfiltered light of a supernova. Then it disappeared, and the windy pulse of a helicopter thumped off into the darkness.
A nurse sat in a chair at the foot of my bed, reading a battered magazine. "Am I going in for surgery?" I slurred. My voice sounded hoarse and impossibly far away.
"You're done," she said. "The operation took a little less than four hours. You've been out ever since then."
I barked out a haggard laugh that promptly broke apart into a gravelly cough. The nurse closed her magazine. She stepped to my bed, hovering over me, her face intimately close to my own as she checked my pupils and pulse.
"How'd it go?" I asked. The enthralling scent of vanilla drifted around me. I ignored her dizzying curves, refusing to watch her breasts rise and fall with every breath.
She wrote on my chart. "Like clockwork. Dr. Chandler is the best cardiothoracic surgeon in the Northeast."
"That's what I like to hear," I said, closing my eyes. A dizzy déjà vu struck me, and I coughed up another laugh.
Her scribbling stopped and she returned my chart to its binder. "We just need to make sure that the anesthetic has completely worn off and your plumbing is working."
I opened my eyes and stared at her. After a moment, she told me, "We need to make sure you're urinating."
I sighed, swallowed. "What if I'm not?"
"If you're not," she repeated, tucking my binder under her arm, "then we'll have to administer a catheter."
I blinked blankly. "What's that?"
"A tube inserted up the urethra into the bladder to—"
I cut her off: "A hose up my dick?"
She nodded.
"Oh, no," I said, fully lucid. I fought off a woozy wave of vertigo as I pushed myself up. "I'll take care of it."
Then next evening, Ben and Phil visited before dinner.
I muted the television bolted to the ceiling in the corner of the room. Ben crossed to the chair at the foot of my bed, grabbed the battered magazine, and dropped into the seat. Phil glanced out my fourth-floor window to the highway below, then turned and leaned back against the sill.
"How'd you two degenerates get in here?" I laughed.
Ben flipped the pages of the magazine without looking at me. "I had to work my charms on one of the nurses."
Phil rolled his eyes and grinned. "Your mom signed us in." I glanced back toward the door. Phil shifted, crossing his arms over his chest. "She said she had to meet up with a couple of coworkers, but she'll be up afterwards."
The magazine crackled as Ben turned another page. I coughed once, then hacked out a humorless laugh. Phil smirked. I said, "At least I don't have to listen to her bitch about how much this is going to cost her insurance."
Ben snorted a short laugh. Phil glanced up at the silent television, watched Steve Wilkos struggle to separate two brawling transvestites for a moment, shook his head. "So," he said, looking at the TV. "Just a bruised rib, huh?"
I shrugged, smirked. "Nothing serious."
"Your mom said the surgery took seven hours."
I laughed, inhaled, enjoyed the simple pleasure of a full breath. "My mom tends to exaggerate," I told him.
Phil nodded. He thought a brief moment, and grinned. "You missed Ben trying to pick up a 31-year-old redhead at the Morris this afternoon. It was a sight to behold."
I shook my head. "Giving up on Erin already?"
Ben flipped the magazine forward and glanced over the pages at me. "This girl and I have common interests. She teaches creative writing at The Hill School."
"Guess what her name was," Phil said, grinning.
Ben shot Phil a slanting glare as he told me, "No, don't guess what her fucking name was."
Phil strained to hold his laugh. "Go ahead. I'll give you three guesses, and the first two don't count."
Ben laid the open magazine against his chest. "What's in a name, really? Would a marigold by any other name smell any less like the honey of morning's breath?"
"Her name wasn't Marigold, was it?" I asked.
Phil shook his head. "Sherry Redmond."
I blinked at him, then laughed. "Shut the fuck up."
"I shit you not," he said, and his laugh spilled out.
"Both of you can get bent," Ben said, grinning. "`Cause I got her fuckin number. How you like them apples?"
"You let me know how that goes," I told him.
"Vaffanculo," Ben told me, his grin widening.
I laughed. "You missed me kneading at my bladder through my abdomen with my fist for forty-five minutes just to squirt three ounces of piss into a cup so some nurse wouldn't have shove a hose into my dick."
Ben went silent. He turned to me, and blinked. Then he barked out a loud laugh. Phil jumped at the noise, and that made him laugh, and the sound of the two of them got me laughing hard enough that the steel strap tightened against my chest again, just a bit and just for a moment.
I flinched, coughed until the feeling vanished again. Phil watched me, his laughter falling away. Ben's smirk didn't falter as he made a point of watching the sky outside my fourth-floor windows. I drew a long breath, held it,
then blew out the hot grit that had collected in my lungs.
We sat in silence for a long moment. The transvestites continued their wordless pantomime on the television in the corner until one tore off the other's wig and they threw themselves at each other again. Phil watched them.
The door opened. A nurse wheeled a table across the room to my bed and slid it into position so that my dinner hovered over the bed in front of me. She smiled warmly at me, regarded Phil, ignored Ben, and left without a word.
"We better get out of here," Phil said at last.
Ben stood from the chair at the foot of my bed, dropped the magazine into the seat. He stretched, yawned, glanced to the television as Victor Estes gestured mutely about the deals on new and used vehicles at Victory Chevrolet.
Phil stood from away the windowsill and stepped into the bathroom. Estes gave way to a trailer for the Spawn film, and Ben took three steps up the side of my bed. The toilet flushed in the bathroom, and the faucet ran.
"Get better, man," Ben said, clapping me on the arm.
Five days after that, Regina and my mother helped me out to the Jeep Wagoneer for the first time in a week. I blinked against the brilliance of the midmorning sky. The sun was too bright, and the heatwave hadn't broken.
9.
Now, standing on a rooftop at eight-thirty at night, March darkness tumbled overhead like so many of my own half-wrought thoughts. I never thought to ask for the name of the seraph in my operating room. I regretted that.
Glacial night air swept through my lungs. I felt a faint itching under my right armpit, and in two pinpricks on the starboard side of my back. A car door slammed across the blacktop. I shook my head. The Dodge Neon squealed across the parking lot and emptied onto Creek Drive.
Another moment later, a dark BMW rolled up the access road from behind the football field at the far side of the asphalt. Its headlights were out. It drew no attention to itself, and that caught my interest. The car pulled into the main parking lot and started a slow circuit around the periphery. It passed the courtyard, as close as it would get to me. I couldn't see a driver, but the BMW paused briefly as it passed the dozen cars clustered near the gym. Then it rolled by and made another lap around the lot.
The car passed the courtyard a second time, then sped up, slipping into an empty spot between a Chevy Tahoe and a Volkswagen Corrado. I leaned against the rampart, squinting through the darkness, and managed to make out the vanity plate on the back of the BMW. DUKE419.
The driver sat in the car for another thirty seconds, and when he got out, he left the engine running. He moved with confidence, not rushing. He rounded the front of the BMW toward the passenger's side, crossed to the driver's side door of the Porsche 930 parked nose-to-nose with the Beamer. He threw one quick glance back toward the gym exits and the courtyard, then ducked to one knee at the driver's side door to the Porsche and out of my sight.
I turned to cross the roof again, reached the door and pulled the handle, letting myself back into the warm air inside the school. I found the phone tacked to the wall at my left, grabbed the receiver off the hook, punched 9 to get an outside line, and dialed up information. I gave the automated voice my city and state, and when asked for a listing, said, "Prophecy Creek Police Department."
The automated voice found the number and offered to connect me. I punched 1 and waited. The line rang twice before Officer Benjamin Schechter answered, identified himself, and asked me how he could direct my call.
"I'm at the high school," I told him. "There's somebody out in the parking lot messing with people's cars."
"Prophecy Creek High School?" Schechter answered.
I blinked. "Is that the only one in Prophecy Creek?"
"Yes," he confirmed.
I paused. Then I said, "He rolled up in a dark Beamer. It has a vanity plate. Dee-You-Kay-Ee-four-one-nine."
"Duke-419?" Schechter asked, and I heard typing.
"Yeah," I confirmed. "Like the Nigerian scam."
"Okay," he said. "And what is your name, sir?"
I didn't even hesitate. "Jack Hart."
He repeated the name back to himself as he typed it.
"Those are some expensive cars out there," I told him.
"There's a patrol car in the area," Schechter assured me. I hung up the phone, stared at it for a second, then lifted the receiver and wiped the plastic with my sleeve. I hung it back on the hook, looked at it again, and wondered why I had bothered to do that. I shook my head at myself.
I took the steps two at a time back to the first floor. As I crossed the lobby outside the theater, I heard someone say, "A hickey from Kenickie is like a Hallmark card!"
I angled toward the auditorium and leaned against the door to watch the rehearsal. Stage hands crossed through the action as Donovan Blake got the most out of another verse of Kenickie's dialogue. Charlie Carmichael, Dawn Hillard, and Amber Chandler stood nearby. I had seen Amber on stage twice before, both times by accident.
Dawn had emerged as the celebrity of our class. She had starred in the last two school productions, playing Lola last December, and Maria back in May. Winning the role of Sandy in Grease would make the trifecta. But right alongside her, carrying her own share of the story, was Amber. As Meg Boyd; as Anybodys; now as Betty Rizzo. Doing all of the work for less than half of the credit.
I was still thinking about her by the time I pushed through the heavy door into the newsroom.
But I finally had an idea how to fix my story.
CHAPTER TWO
1.
The next morning, I pushed through the heavy door into the newsroom as Mrs. Kraven packed the last of the March layout sheets into a broad portfolio. I fumbled to the center table and signed in, then wove a path to my locker, heaving my bookbag back inside and stowing the brown bag that contained my lunch on the upper shelf.
"—all the way back from Schenectady." I glanced to my left. Gale and two other girls stood near the advisor's desk in the corner, engaged in animated discussion.
Gale's brunette friend started to respond, but a crash drown out whatever she meant to say. To my right, Ethan flung open his locker door, flashing an absurd grin as he tried to stay the surge of papers spilling from inside.
"—until after midnight," Gale told her friends. "With all the paperwork, he sat in that cell for five hours."
"It's an atrocity," the brunette announced. I laughed, and Ethan grinned to himself as he shoved pages back into his locker. Gale glared at me from between her friends.
I nodded, told them, "Nelson Mandela disagrees."
The brunette looked thoroughly confused, but the shorter blonde had caught a full dose of Gale's outrage. "They're just targeting Roy because his dad criticizes the Police Chief." She glanced quickly to Gale, who nodded her encouragement. The blonde added: "it's politics."
"I don't want to close the polls early," I said, "but that may be the dumbest fucking thing I hear today."
"What do you call it," Gale demanded, "when a kid's just waiting in a school parking lot to pick up a couple of friends, and a police car just happens to show up, and he just happens to get dragged in on a trumped-up vandalism charge that is completely—"
"This all happened last night?" I interrupted.
"Yes," Gale said, exasperated. I laughed.
"That was Roy McCleary doing laps in a Beamer?"
The brunette looked confused again. The blonde looked to Gale, who watched me suspiciously. She looked like she might be trying to put something together in her head.
I grinned, turned back to my locker. "I called that in."
"You did what?" Gale demanded loudly, her hazel eyes flashing dangerously.
I turned back to her, my grin widening. "Called. It. In," I repeated, this time accompanying each word with the appropriate sign language gesture. "And if he got busted, then he's a shittier car thief than I would have guessed."
Gale bristled, and I had the decency not to laugh. I closed my locker, catching a glimpse of the flyer ta
ped to the inside. The school was hosting its first annual Poet Laureate competition, and students were allowed three poems. Entries had been due yesterday afternoon.
I dug through the small shelf at the top of the locker, found a translucent plastic case. I crossed to the computer, snapped the case open, slid the disk into the slot, brought up Word, printed a file labeled "bardpoems."
I grabbed the three pages off the printer and checked that my information was printed on each, then slipped the pages into my World Lit folder. A moment later, a sharp triple-chime signaled the end of homeroom, and I stuffed the folder into my bag, slipping out of the newsroom.
I headed up the hall toward my first class, and spotted Amber Chandler on her way from her own homeroom. We shared World Lit, and I caught up with her, adjusting the strap on my bag. "So did you finish reading the play?"
She cast me a sidelong glance. "You strip from me the laurel and the rose?" she recited. "Oh yeah, I got this."
"I'm not particular to French theatre," I admitted. "But I've read worse. To be fair, I'm more of a sci-fi kinda guy. Put Cyrano and Cristian in charge of a ragtag fugitive fleet searching the universe for the long-lost thirteenth tribe of humanity, and you'll have me from the word go."
"Only if Maren Jensen plays Roxane," Amber said.
We turned a corner. Locker doors clanked around us like the bowels of some vast industrial machine. "Any idea what you might do for the midterm project?" I asked.
Amber shook her head. "No fucking clue."
I cocked an eyebrow. "No worries," I said, smirking. "You've still got, what: three whole weeks, right?"
We reached our class and slipped in through the door at the back of the room. Amber dumped her bag into her seat, and corrected me, "Three-and-a-half, actually."
I grinned. "Plenty of time."
"An eternity," she agreed. "What about you?"
I suppressed the smile this time. "I think I'm going to adapt a scene from Cyrano, but with a sort of postmodern, existentialist flavor. Probably a huge departure from the original narrative. I just don't have a hook yet."
The Danger of Being Me Page 5
