Us Kids Know

by JJ Strong

  Eventually, Cullen said, “So. How about teaching us how to meditate?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Really? It’s easy.”

  I crossed my legs and straightened my back. Somehow my muscles cooperated. Held me upright and steady. This, I thought, I can do. This I’ve practiced.

  “Straighten your back,” I told them. “And hold it.”

  Amir and Cullen sat up like I was doing.

  “Now you close your eyes and focus on breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Sometimes it helps if you have a mantra.”

  “You have one?” Amir asked.

  “Yeah.”

  I looked at Amir and then at Cullen and then out at the skyline. Wind knocked the tops of the trees together. Somewhere a stream of cars was whirring. The mantra always felt real heavy for me in the moment, but saying it out loud was different.

  “Well?” Cullen said.

  “Bloodfire.”

  Amir nodded, looking out into the darkness, not at me. “Cool. Why that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You don’t know the reason behind your own mantra?” Cullen said. “Isn’t that the whole point?”

  “It’s hard to explain. I don’t know what it means. I don’t even know where it came from. But when I say it, it helps me focus. Bloodfire.”

  What I didn’t tell them was that I didn’t only say it—I saw it too. I’d inhale and visualize a lake of boiling blood—a lake so big you couldn’t see the other side and with the sun shining on it so intensely that the red was as bright as a melted crayon—then exhale and ignite the whole thing with my mind and watch the flames sweep across the bloody surface.

  Cullen and Amir sat cross-legged, and we all tried it.

  Usually I closed my eyes, but tonight I kept them on the skyline. Bloodfire. Bloodfire. The buildings appeared shaky from this distance, glowing orange like they were on fire. Those “Never Forget 9/11” stickers were so dumb, when you thought about it. Because the truth is that everyone forgets so quickly, even if they don’t realize it. We watched videos of the buildings going down over and over. We had a few days off from school. The president talked. There was a war in some faraway place. But for the most part, everyone had gone on with their lives by now. Work resumed, school started up again, and on and on.

  It was the same thing with those kids in Columbine a few years ago. They killed fifteen people—one teacher, twelve students, and themselves. And we all mourned. We all talked about how horrible it was. CNN showed a funeral for one of the girls—just about the saddest thing you could possibly show on television. And while the families and the people who lived there weren’t likely to forget anytime soon, everyone else in the country got wrapped up in their own lives again. Focused on their own families, their own kids. The news stopped talking about it. The kids in school who had delighted in joking about which freaks were most likely to shoot up the class moved on to new stupid jokes. Whenever there was a national tragedy, no matter how many times people said, “Never forget,” it seemed like what everyone was most interested in doing was, in fact, forgetting.

  But not me. I thought about those kids all the time: Rachel Scott, who played the lead in the school play; Kyle Velasquez, who had a stroke as a baby that left him mentally disabled; Steve Curnow, who liked soccer. They were all dead now. Same went for the people in the towers. That’s why I was watching those videos that morning Cullen found me in the library. That’s why I wanted to be here, in the woods with Cullen and Amir, doing what we were doing, thinking: Bloodfire. Bloodfire. Because all around us was horror and death and the worst kinds of pain. It was so hypocritical to pretend to care for like a week, or even a month, and then go back to ignoring it all.

  I listened to the three of us breathing. There was a light inside me that most people—people like parents and teachers and priests—didn’t want to see. It was an explosive light, powered by the burning of all the things I was pissed off about, and Cullen was the one who showed me what to do with it.

  I balanced on the rock, felt its cold come through my sweatpants, straightened my back, held my head steady, closed my eyes, breathed my mantra—Bloodfire . . . Bloodfire . . . Bloodfire—and watched as I lit that lake up again and again and again.

  Cullen

  THE DEAN OF MEN—a bald guy in a wrinkled suit who was also the JV track coach—took me out of last period to greet two police officers in his office. One of the cops—Esposito, the same guy who’d come to see me and Ray—was twiddling a pair of cuffs while staring at a painting on the wall of St. Michael stomping on a demon. The questioning that followed at the police station wasn’t at all like I thought it would be—like it is in the movies, where the detectives shake the guy down and toss around threats and lies to get a confession—but it still required a basic amount of restraint.

  The whole thing lasted all of ten minutes. I was lying on a bench in a bulletproof, glass-enclosed cube—some sort of holding cell before I’d be transferred to the real deal—when one of the guards escorted me into a gray room at the end of a gray hallway. Esposito sat across from me with a manila folder. He flipped through a mess of documents and photos—the guy had huge, dirty hands and a face that was all jowls and permanent five o’clock shadow—and said, looking at a photo of the totaled car, “Banged up that Chevy pretty good, huh?”

  He almost had me, I have to admit. He grinned at how I caught my words just before I corrected him.

  “Oh, that’s an Oldsmobile. That’s right. Heard you did a pretty nice piece of driving. For a while, anyway.”

  He eyed me, then scribbled something down. I demanded to see a goddamn lawyer, hoping to sound like I’d done it before.

  His grin came back again. “You’re in school, right?”

  I nodded.

  He read from his folder. “No priors. No gangs. We’ll expedite your case to the judge so he can get you home to your guardian. You want a lawyer, we can probably have one here by this time tomorrow, if you’d rather spend the night.”

  “Okay,” I said. “The first one.”

  “I’m not required to tell you this, but since you’re seventeen, you can have a parent or guardian here with you, if you want.”

  I shook my head. “I’m good.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  He rose and rocked a fist against the door, which was opened by another officer in blue. “Don’t get me wrong,” he told me, as I shuffled past him. “Most definitely, Mr. Hickson, you will need a goddamn lawyer.”

  ***

  Six hours later I stood before the judge who, noting my age and—just like the detective had predicted—the court’s desire to return school-aged first offenders to their homes, set my bail at $5,000. I asked the jail guard if I could make two phone calls.

  He looked at me with absolutely no expression. “Never seen a movie, asshole?” he said. “One call.”

  I dialed Nana. I knew it would take her a while to get to the phone, so I hung up after three rings, just before the machine would kick in, and called back.

  “Hi, Nana.”

  “Daryl,” she said.

  “It’s Cullen, Nana.”

  “Daryl, where are you?”

  “Nana, it’s Cullen, your grandson.”

  Daryl was my father. Seven years ago, he and Mom had taken a trip to High Point State Park in northern Jersey, which offered bikers a winding strip of blue-and-green heaven. Dad took one corner too fast and spilled himself and Mom into the path of an oncoming minivan. Mom was dead at the scene. Dad passed out with a nasty head wound but first handed the EMT a sheriff’s card with his cousin’s name on it. Cousin Sal was a sergeant in Nutley who sped to the scene just in time to bury the suspicion that alcohol was involved in the wreck, which it most definitely was. Once he was out of the hospital, Dad lasted twelve weeks under the strain of the guilt before he took enough of his new
ly prescribed painkillers to dial his heart down to zero. I was ten years old. Since then it had been me and Nana.

  “Nana,” I said. “Did you eat dinner?”

  “Not hungry,” she said.

  I could hear the television in the background. Some old sitcom on Nick at Nite—Cheers, maybe.

  “There’s a sandwich in the fridge.”

  “Tired of those.”

  “I’ll be home late tonight. I need you to eat a sandwich.”

  There was a long silence. Canned laughter from the television. Nana’s gravelly breathing.

  “Nana, please, will you eat?”

  “Fine,” she said.

  “Right now?”

  “Fine.”

  “I’ll be home later. I love you.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said and hung up.

  I pushed the hook down, keeping the receiver near my ear. I was hoping the guard had caught enough of my conversation with Nana to reconsider his stance.

  “One more?” I ventured.

  He nodded—or rather, he moved his head the absolute least amount a person could move his head in order to indicate a nod—so I called my buddy Roman. After a few minutes of begging him to cough up the required 10 percent of my bail, Roman finally agreed to dig into his pot-selling stash and come get me.

  Roman was a tall, gawky kid with big, twitchy eyes and two overgrown, rat-like front teeth. He never looked you in the eye and was always rubbing the back of his neck like he couldn’t figure out what to do with his hands. Nobody trusted him, and very few guys would even talk to him. People didn’t fuck with him, though, because he was tough as hell. I saw him fight his older brother once. The brother smashed Roman’s head into a radiator, and Roman paused for a moment, shoved a shaky fist into the wound, and mashed his teeth together before exploding his brother’s nose with a furious elbow. I liked Roman. Hanging out with him was like trying to stay on your feet during an earthquake.

  Roman wasn’t the kind of guy to give up large sums of money quietly, and he bitched at me the whole ride back to school, where, at nine P.M., my car was the last one in the lot. He insisted that we drive back to my place so he could be paid, but it’d been a long, lonely, shitty day, and I was facing the prospect of an upcoming court date and a maximum five years in county. Promising Roman that I’d get him back, I climbed into my car and tore away with his figure silhouetted in my headlights, his arms extended in appeal.

  At home, Nana was in bed. I checked the fridge for the missing sandwich and, satisfied that she’d eaten, climbed upstairs. I peeked into her room to make sure she’d put her oxygen mask on, which she had. In my room, I sat on my old, sagging, dusty mattress. It was too early to sleep. I had some homework, but that was never at the top of my to-do list, least of all tonight. I wandered back downstairs, hearing the steps creak under my feet, suddenly overwhelmed with the feeling that the house was too big and empty and quiet. I couldn’t stand to be there anymore.

  I slipped out the back door and walked through the woods to the O’Dell yard, where I stood staring at the hot white light glowing from Brielle’s window. The five-legged dog appeared across the yard, galloping toward me, barking with no sound. He halted, bared his teeth, and growled his sad-as-hell mute growl.

  I crouched and offered my palm. He circled me once, then approached.

  “What do you think, Lincoln?” I let the mutt lick my hand, and he muzzled his head against my leg. “Think she likes me?”

  I stepped up onto the banister of the porch and then shoved my hand once more into the muck and grime of the gutter. I crawled on all fours across the gravelly surface of the roof. The sound of a screen door squeaked, and I froze. A man stepped out of the house next door, spotlighted by a motion-sensored lamp on his deck, where he crouched beneath a purring gas grill to kill the flames. My foot slipped and sent a drizzle of gravel down the roof. Not startled, but curious, the man studied me on his neighbor’s roof.

  I waved. “Howdy, neighbor.”

  His hand rose into the air—a slow, confused wave—and then he drifted back into his house.

  “Jesus Christ,” I whispered. “What are you doing, Cullen?”

  I scrambled up the rest of the way to Bri’s window and tapped on the pane.

  The neighbor’s back door squeaked open again, and a head poked out—a woman this time, phone held to her ear. I waited until she ducked back inside and then knocked again on the window.

  The curtain peeked open, and a face appeared that wasn’t Brielle’s at all but her mother’s. She, of course, screamed like hell. I flinched from the shock and lost my footing, skating down the slippery roof on my ass, scratching at the shingles with my fingernails. At the end of the roof I stomped my foot in the gutter, but the rest of me kept coming and my foot popped out, so I wheeled to my belly, which scraped against the grating surface as I slid right off the roof. I hooked myself into the gutter with one and then another hand, hanging there four feet above the deck. When I dropped, I stumbled briefly, then rose just in time to stand eye to eye with Charles O’Dell as he opened the sliding glass door with a look of curiosity stamped on his pale and very cleanly shaven face.

  Brielle

  DAD WAS STANDING in the yellow light of the kitchen, an unpaid bill in one hand and a cold pork chop in the other, when the phone rang. “Gina,” he said into the phone. “You want to talk to Karen?”

  Gina Russell lived next door. Dad peeked out the window as he listened to her. I sat at the computer desk in the living room. I was meant to be reviewing material for tomorrow’s test on Greek civilization, but in typical Bri fashion, I’d read and memorized all the material on democracy, senators, and city-states a full week in advance, so instead I was on the computer messaging with Katie. This was my most comfortable form of socializing—wearing sweatpants, leaving my lifeless hair in a lifeless ponytail, and, most importantly, having the chance to think about what I wanted to say before typing it out. Katie was complaining to me that she was on the phone with Scarlett, who apparently couldn’t sustain a full minute of conversation without singing along with the NSYNC CD playing in her room.

  That music is so insipid, I typed.

  Thank u! Katie wrote back. INSIPID! That’s exactly the word.

  Even as I was delighting in having won this nod of approval from Katie, I was simultaneously missing Cullen and despising myself for feeling so. My thoughts flipped from longing to shame and then back again in what I feared to be an endless loop—one I would simply have to learn to live with the way some people learn to live with chronic illnesses.

  Scarlett’s awesome tho, Katie typed. Love that girl.

  A scream from upstairs—Mom. And then a scraping sound, like someone had taken a rake to the roof. Dad was off the phone and moving into the living room, stepping toward the sliding door to follow up on what must have been one troubling neighborly report. He didn’t look afraid. Didn’t look angry, or worried, or even brave. He was a man opening a door. Calm and composed as always.

  There, in the threshold, appeared Cullen—standing on the deck, as tall as Dad and almost as broad-shouldered. They met each other’s eyes for a brief, silent moment. I clicked the computer screen to black. My insides quivered.

  “Good evening, sir,” Cullen said. “Have you heard the Good News?”

  Dad shifted where he stood and said nothing.

  “Sorry,” Cullen said. “A joke.”

  “Can I help you with something?” Again a slight readjustment of Dad’s stance, slightly off-balance but knocking back Cullen’s volleys, holding serve. He was the adult here.

  “Oh, umm, I wanted to ask if I could talk to Brielle.” Cullen snuck his eyes over Dad’s shoulder and found me. Fresh cold air crept into the house and nipped at my toes.

  “You wanted to see my daughter, so you climbed up on my roof.”

  “Yes.”

 
“You climbed on the roof with the intent of crawling into her window.”

  “Yes.”

  “Frightening the neighbors and my wife in the process.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “And then you fell off the roof.”

  “More or less, yes.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Physically speaking? Yes.”

  “You’re Cullen, right?”

  Cullen nodded.

  “Cullen Hickson,” Dad said.

  Cullen ran a hand over his chin and tilted his head down. The way Dad said his name like that—as though the name itself was guilty. Guiltier than Cullen would ever actually be, no matter what kind of terrible misfortune he brought upon himself or his friends.

  Mom held her hands against her chest at the doorway to the living room. I watched Cullen smear his hair away from his eyes.

  “Bri,” Dad said. “Do you want to see Cullen?”

  I looked again at Mom at the far end of the room. She scratched her nail against the wood paneling of the wall. I thought about how, in the upstairs closet with our winter coats and boxes of old shoes, there was a photo album of a vacation we’d all taken to the Outer Banks in North Carolina. Ray and I were very little—he was still a baby; I was maybe three or four. I don’t remember much of the trip, but I remember one moment. Somewhere in the middle of the book there’s a picture of Mom and me. She’s standing at the surf holding me up by my hands. My arms are stretched above my head—so thin and extended they look like they might tear at the shoulder—and my feet dangle a foot above the sand and water. A thigh-high wave has just splashed into Mom, and the picture captures her face in a perfect, frozen moment of pure elation. Her smile seems to take up the whole picture. And even with the wave almost knocking her over, she looks beautiful in a brilliant, sky blue bathing suit, her hair gleaming crimson in the beachy light. I’m laughing so hard, my eyes closed behind a pair of goggles, mouth wide, crooked teeth shining.