The Danger of Being Me

by Anthony J Fuchs

  Phil snorted out a laugh before he could stop himself, then coughed to cover it up. Ethan finally looked up from his game, saw the look on Ben's face, turned to Amber and gave her his most welcoming smile. "Mára aurë."

  Amber's eyebrows shot up at that. "Rim hennaid."

  Now Ben rolled his eyes. "Fucking fantastic."

  It was the best of times. The worst of times were coming.

  If there is any truth to reincarnation, then the eight of us must surely have been a tight-knit clique in another lifetime. The Bloomsbury Group, perhaps, or the Notion Club. Amber was soon debating the merits of Sindarin versus Quenya with Ethan and Phil, and even managed to win back some of Ben's affection by complimenting him on his review of Good Will Hunting from last December.

  The evening progressed in a pleasant blur, like a home movie found in the garage after a summer heat wave. As one o'clock neared, Amber and Helen played a round of nine-ball, and I heard Phil tell Ethan and Ben, "—talk to this guy tomorrow morning at the ass-crack of dawn."

  Ethan drank an Irn-Bru, asked, "On a Sunday?"

  "Only time he was free," Phil said with shrug.

  Ethan's brow creased as he considered. "Because his fingerprints were on the John Doe two-dollar bills?"

  Phil nodded. "That's what my dad told me."

  "I'd love to see the birthplace of America," Ben said.

  Phil stared at him for a moment before realizing that Ben was sincere. He laughed. "Are you fucking stoned? America wasn't born in Washington, D.C."

  "Of course it wasn't," Ben insisted, as if it had been Phil who suggested it. "I was just saying if I got the chance—"

  I lost the thread of the conversation as Winnie returned from the restroom. She caught my eye and angled to me, climbing onto the high barstool between me and Phil. She watched Helen take an awkward shot at the four, missing while leaving Amber with no options. Still watching the game, she told me, "You missed the luncheon."

  I hadn't thought about the Laureate competition since deserting the library. I watched Amber line up a bank-shot, and a grin creased my lips. "Slipped my mind."

  "It was good," Winnie told me. Then she turned to me, and apology flashed across her face. "You placed third."

  I laughed. "Good enough to get me into Strophe."

  Winnie smiled. "Yes it is." Then she laughed. "Incipit."

  "How'd you do?" I asked, leaning back against the wall.

  That look of apology flashed in her eyes again, but then it fell into the taller shadow of her satisfaction. "Second."

  "Good," I said, and meant it. "So who won then?"

  This time she didn't answer me, and I watched her eyes shift from our table to the one next to ours. I saw that Rob McCall had joined his classmates, and I picked my sister out of the group, laughing at something one of her friends had said, leaning a little too comfortably against a kid in a Save Ferris t-shirt. I looked back to Winnie.

  "Regina?" I asked, and my voice carried enough that she heard it. She cast a glance around the room and found me, paying me no special attention, which was just as well. I regarded this girl who lived upstairs from me, this girl I really knew nothing about, and I was mostly surprised that I was not at all surprised. My kid sister had beaten me to win the title of Prophecy Creek High School's first Poet Laureate. And I didn't mind. Not even a little.

  Her eyes came back to me then, for just a second, and I smiled and nodded. She flashed me a curious look, just for a second, and then she nodded back and smiled.

  An hour later, as the night gave way to early morning, I hunkered over the pool table lining up a shot on the eight ball that would complete an historically lopsided victory. Ben had sunk the two on the break, then missed his next shot, and I had run five shots in a row before missing a corner-shot on the ten. Ben had sunk his six ball into a side pocket, then missed again. I had dispensed with the nine and the fifteen, and was poised for a dramatic win.

  I sighted the angle of incidence, needing to beat Ben on something more than a technicality. As I leaned across the baize, setting the cue-stick into the V of my thumb and forefinger, I caught a glimpse of Ethan and Amber to one side, sectioned off toward the front window as the lights from the street caught their profiles. They watched me as they conversed, and when I caught them at it, they didn't even bother to conceal it.

  Ethan leaned closer and whispered to Amber. She laughed softly, glanced to him, then glanced back to me, and nodded. That complicated and unfathomable smile flickered across Ethan's features at that, and he broke away from Amber to join Phil and Helen.

  I shoved my curiosity back and out of arm's reach, and leaned over my shot. "Corner," I said, and drove the pool stick into the cue-ball. It struck the eight-ball precisely and stopped dead on the felt, all of its momentum transferred to the black ball that shot across the table. The eight-ball thunked heavily into the corner pocket, and I stood.

  Ben glared at the table, disgusted. He shook his head, then looked at me. "Well played," he said, which was as close to a compliment as Ben Kelerick was apt to give.

  I accepted the praise without comment, and Ben set about the work of returning the sixteen billiard balls to the rack. Winnie was on-deck, but I wanted to end my streak on this high note, so I offered the cue-stick to Amber as she came around the table. "You want in?"

  Amber looked to Winnie. "You mind?"

  Winnie shook her head as she chalked up the tip of her cue-stick. Amber moved in to take my place, pressing against me and laying a soft kiss on my mouth as she took the pool-cue from me. A hazy smile shifted across my lips, and I crossed to the seats against the wall in time to hear Ethan tell Phil and Helen: "Politics gives me hives."

  "Ain't that the fuckin truth," Helen laughed. She drank her soda, then turned to me. "You done good, kid."

  "Ben just needs to be reminded that he's human."

  Helen flashed a knowing smile and screwed the cap back onto her bottle. "That's not what I mean."

  I paused, listened to the distinctive vocal stylizations of Art Alexakis. I started to ask what exactly she did mean, and was cut off when she shot me a wink. Ethan laughed gently beside me: "If you have to ask, you'll never know. But when you know, you'll know." He tapped the side of his nose. "And you'll never have to ask."

  I shook my head, feeling drunk. Ethan laughed at the look on my face; I laughed at the absurdity of the whole conversation. Then I asked, "What was that about?"

  He smirked. "I'm sure I have no idea what you mean."

  "You and Amber," I told him, smirking back.

  Ethan glanced to Amber, who was too busy analyzing the break to return his look. He smiled again, and it wasn't complicated or unfathomable. It was just sadness all the way to the bottom, like the look of a man with impossible work to do and the infinite will to do it.

  He thought for a long moment, and I decided that he wasn't going to answer me. Then he shook his head, and he told me, "maybe I'll tell you about it later."

  3.

  Or maybe not.

  Because on Monday morning, Mr. Flythe flicked on the public address during homeroom. But instead of reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, he searched for words before clearing his throat. "I've learned this morning that ... we've lost one of our own to a terrible tragedy."

  The room went silent like someone had hit the mute button. The book flipped shut in my hands, and I lost my page. I stared at the yellow bar of soap on the cover with the novel's title carved into it, blinking, thinking.

  Then I glanced around the room to take a head-count. I spotted Phil shuffling a deck of playing cards at the center worktables, and Helen sitting at the computer station, her fingers hovering over the keyboard. But I didn't see Ben, and Winnie was missing, and even Gale was absent.

  Then words burned brightly in my mind for a moment, flashing like heat-lightning. Someone else's tragedy.

  "Ethan Gibson and his father were killed in a car-crash late last night on their way back from a Flyers game," Mr. Flythe told us, sw
allowing so hard that his throat clicked through the entire school. He paused again, and said, "Let us take a few moments now to honor their memories."

  A steel strap tightened itself around my gut. My lungs burned. I couldn't breathe. My fingers clamped down on the book in my hands, and I felt that sweltering scarlet veil swirled around me like a bloody thunderhead, threatening to crush me under its terrible weight. I sucked in a hard breath that tasted like honey and death in my throat.

  It wasn't possible. It made no sense. Ethan wasn't dead. Of course he wasn't. He couldn't be dead. Ethan was the one of the few among us capable of exceeding the escape velocity of this town. He was an uncommon man with the audacity to turn his back on the machinery of the world to chase after his own improbable ambitions.

  He moved, and the universe bent to his infinite will.

  And then all at once it was true, because it had to be true. Ethan was an uncommon person, and this world was not built for people like that. People like him. Except there were no people like him. There was just him, and now his tragically short lease had reached its date.

  Two minutes later, Mr. Flythe cleared his throat again. "Counselors will be on-hand throughout the—"

  Before he could finish, the murmur of conversation flooded back in to drown him out. Those voices washed around me, crashed against me, and I heard them though I did not hear them. They spoke the frantic alien words of a gibberish language that I understood but did not know.

  I felt like rotting driftwood in a tsunami.

  On Wednesday afternoon, I pushed through the double doors of the school and emptied out onto the wide cement forecourt in front of the building.

  Ten inches of snow blanketed the campus. The sky had ruptured on Monday night, emptying itself out relentlessly across the world. The flag outside the school was lowered to half-staff by Tuesday morning . Mrs. Kraven pulled Phil and Helen from their regular duties on the paper in order for them to concentrate on a memorial for Ethan.

  On Wednesday morning, three dozen students held a prayer group around the flagpole before classes. Phil and Helen and Ben and Winnie and Amber and Dr. Lombardi and I watched from the edge of the wide cement forecourt, shielded by an awning as snow churned in a shifting haze. The storm beat its fury against the world, touching down like the whispering of a madman, layers on layers like fresh and unending insanity. And we said nothing.

  Because there were no words.

  Now the nor'easter was finally beginning to subside. Two-foot-high stacks of plowed snow lined the curbs, but the sprawling white sheets stretched across the grass had been left unspoiled. I drew in a breath and cringed. The air tasted stale, like the morbid breath of winter. It tasted dead. I laughed at the thought, and the sound came out hollow, humorless. It made me think of black ice.

  I stood there in that frozen moment, and watched the flag snap curtly as a bitter breeze sliced across the open grounds. I watched the sky pressing itself down on the world, the color of brushed chrome, like a massive expanse of dented sheet metal. I sighed into the grey afternoon, and watched the pale patches of my breaths circle my head in the snow like wraiths from a world-from-before.

  I don't know how long I stood in that arctic March air next to a massive stone bench with the words PROPHECY CREEK carved into the back. The bench was just a few months old, a replacement for one that had occupied the spot for six years before Ethan had noticed that the school's name had been misspelled PROPHCY CREEK.

  I stared at the flag like a patient etherized upon a table. Then I heard a sharp breath at my right and turned to find a short redheaded girl. I knew her. Of course I knew her. I couldn't even guess how long she'd been standing there. She stared up at the flag with me, the collar of her jacket flipped upon against the cold, her trembling breath streaming in a steady mist from her flushed nose.

  Winnie Donne didn't look at me. "This fuckin sucks."

  I almost laughed, but settled for a quiet, "Yeah."

  Then she turned to me, and I felt myself tumbling into the fragile eternity of her mesmerizing emerald eyes. A cold teartrack glistening on her face, a kamikaze streak down her cheek. I doubt she ever knew she'd shed it.

  I reached to her, took her hand in mine, interlaced my fingers with hers. I don't know if I was seeking comfort or offering it. But I smiled, and said, "the text is in italics."

  She looked down at our hands, then up to my face, and blinked at me. Then she smiled, and it was sadness all the way to the bottom. "I don't know what that means."

  I looked back to the flag snapping curtly at half-mast. I laughed, but it came out sounding like a thick sob. "I don't think it means anything," I told her, shaking my head.

  She said nothing. Her fingers tightened on mine.

  I don't know if she was offering comfort or seeking it.

  4.

  Phil drove his rickety Chrysler Newport in silence. Regina and I said nothing, because there were no words.

  Phil twisted the steering wheel to the left. The sedan rolled across the two opposing lanes of Worthing Street, coasted down the gravel driveway to the Transcendence Unitarian Universalist Church on Worthing Lane.

  Ethan's mother had thought enough of her son's friends to hold a wake Stateside before returning to Scotland to bury him and his father on a yellowed hill in Meadowbank with nine centuries of Clan Gibson. I had borrowed a suit from my grandfather, and Phil picked me and my sister up in his an hour before the viewing.

  Now I stared out the passenger's side window as we passed by more cars than I possibly could have imagined. They filled the parking lot, huddled along the shoulder of the driveway, spilled over onto the grassy field behind the building. Phil parked near the treeline at the far end of the field, and we hiked back to the church.

  We found Winnie outside the doors, looking lost amid a cluster of teenagers, wearing an amethyst scarf and a lilac sundress. Her eyes burned a furious crimson that matched her hair. She wore no makeup. She saw us approaching and blew out a thin and trembling breath. She nodded to us, and we nodded back. There were no words.

  The four of us slipped into the modest nave crowded with more than a hundred teenagers. Many sat in pews, while others lined the left side of the dais, along the aisle running the length of the building. I scanned the room, and felt icy nausea churn inside my stomach as teenagers mingled like patrons at a macabre cocktail party.

  I spotted all-state quarterback Dean Holliday and class president Zarina Stevens waiting along the left wall. I saw Roy McCleary, flanked by his eight bandmates in a cluster near the far doors. I saw the state-championship chorale positioned on high bleachers to the right of the dais.

  Most of these people hadn't known Ethan in life. Now they had turned his death into a grotesque social event. I blew out a hot breath and glanced to Phil. I saw him look across the crowd, and when he turned back to me, I found the same silent disgust in his eyes that I felt in my gut.

  Winnie scratched her name into the registry. Regina followed her, and then Phil signed his name. I took the pen from him, steadied my hand, and scribbled my name in a tilted handwriting that I didn't quite recognize.

  The four of us passed through the open double doors, and walked by the window that looked into a soundproof room designed for parents with noisy children. The room was dark, but I spotted a figure on the far side of the glass, sitting in the far corner, little more than a shadow against the darkness. Ben sat alone, unmoving, just staring out of into the crowd filling the church. I shuddered.

  The four of us settled into the queue along the left side of the building. We waited, and said nothing. I watched Winnie's shoulders under her sundress and the amethyst scarf draped around her neck, ignoring the conversation and occasional laughter that rippled around me.

  The procession advanced, and I suddenly I stood before Ethan's bereft mother. Her eyes burned a furious crimson. She nodded to me, and I nodded back. Because there were no words. This woman had woken up one morning with a family and gone to bed the same night with
nothing. There were no words for that. None.

  She watched my face, and nodded to me again, and seemed to understand all of the things that could not be said. She leaned to me, and wrapped me up in a hug. I hugged her back, and she squeezed my shoulder before standing away again. "Thank you," she tried to say, but no sound came out. Because there really were no words.

  "In the meadow by the river, my love and I did stand." I heard the chorale now, singing softly from their high bleachers, and I looked at them. The girls all wore white dresses with black sashes at their waists; the boys wore white shirts and white pants and black neck ties. I spotted Amber to the left in the second row, her eyes burning a furious crimson as she looked at me. I saw Gale beside her, and Dawn behind them, and Rose and Bellona.

  "And on my leaning shoulder, she laid her snow-white hand," they told me, and I looked down at the body.

  This wasn't Ethan. The mannequin in the box bore a passing resemblance to the kid I knew, but its features were too gaunt and waxy and pale. Someone had cut his hair, and I had to close my eyes. They had cut his hair.

  The body in the suit in the box was not Ethan, but it was all that was left of him now that the most important piece had been taken away. "She bid me take love easy, as the grass grows on the weirs," Dawn sang to me.

  I shook my head. Winnie stood beside me as I looked at the body, at all that was left, and I knew. There was nothing else. Nothing further. There was nothing more.

  "There has to be more," I hissed, because I needed there to be more, and I knew that there wasn't. All roads lead here. To the deep and terrible End of the All. Winnie drew a trembling breath beside me, and Amber's voice reached out across the church to me like the sighing of an angel. "But I was young and foolish," she told me softly, and I heard her crying. "And now am full of tears."