Crush

by Stefan Petrucha

  He paced faster and ran his hands through his hair, scratching his scalp furiously to release a tingling shower of anxiety down his back.

  6

  Tuesdays were always quiet at the bookstore. Usually Jonathan liked it when the place wasn’t busy, but tonight the time just seemed to drag. Everything was pretty well stocked and shelved and the few customers roaming through the store apparently knew what they were looking for, because he’d only had one older woman ask him to look up a title: Clive Barker’s Abarat. They were sold out.

  David was acting strange, adding to the night’s unease.

  On break they sat at the back of the café. David guzzled his coffee and barely said a word. Jonathan knew his friend was distracted, but he also seemed frustrated, like he’d lost his wallet and was trying to figure out where he’d left it.

  “What’s up with you?” Jonathan asked.

  “Mmmm…,” David hummed, looking into his nearly empty cup. “Nothing. Just tired.”

  “Up all night planning world domination?”

  “No,” David said. “Just had some things to take care of. Didn’t sleep much.”

  Jonathan debated telling David about his own sleepless night. He didn’t have a clue how he would explain the shadowy thing in his window. There was no way to without sounding like a total loon, so he kept his mouth shut.

  “How was school?” David asked, still looking in his cup.

  “Good,” Jonathan said. And it was true.

  Toby the Scab didn’t show up for classes (Tia Graves probably wore him out last night), so Jonathan was spared a locker hug. It was actually kind of funny seeing Ox and Cade in the halls. They saw Jonathan coming, whispered to each other, shrugged. It was like they couldn’t figure out what to do to their smaller classmate without Toby’s direction. Jonathan found himself grateful for their limited imaginations.

  “Did you see Kirsty?” David asked. Now he peered up from his dwindling coffee supply.

  “Barely,” Jonathan said. “We said ‘hey’ before class, but I didn’t see her the rest of the day.”

  “Really?” David asked.

  His friend sounded cold and annoyed, as if he thought Jonathan was lying to him. What the hell?

  “Yeah,” Jonathan said, cautiously. “Really. What’s going on, man?”

  “Nothing. You’re paranoid.”

  David again looked up at him, or rather past him. For a second David’s eyes lit up, then the spark in them was snuffed out. They went cold.

  “Your girlfriend is here,” he said.

  Jonathan turned, expecting to see Emma O’Neil stepping onto the mezzanine. Instead, he saw Kirsty Sabine, walking toward the table. She wore the long beige coat and tight black jeans with a plain white sweatshirt. Her hair was brushed smooth and pulled back into a neat ponytail. She smiled and lifted her hand in a low wave.

  Jonathan nodded and said, “Hey.”

  “Hi,” Kirsty said.

  It was when Jonathan turned to introduce a pouting David to Kirsty that he understood his friend was totally jealous. He was really into Kirsty, and it pissed him off that Jonathan had spent time with her, even though it was totally random. Crap!

  “Kirsty, this is my friend, David.”

  “Hey,” David said. “What’s up?”

  “Just shopping.”

  The silence that followed, filled with turmoil and discomfort, weighed a few tons, and all of them rested on Jonathan’s shoulders like a couple of marble gargoyles. He looked at Kirsty and then back at David, then back at Kirsty, who looked totally confused and suddenly a little embarrassed.

  “Do you need some help finding a book?” Jonathan asked. When he heard his own voice, it sounded full-on rude, so he quickly added, “Or do you want to hang here and have some coffee with us? We’re only on break for another five minutes, but…”

  “Coffee sounds good,” Kirsty said.

  “I’ll get it,” Jonathan said. “We get a discount.”

  “Thanks. Black is fine.”

  With that, Jonathan walked away, and the gargoyles shifted a bit on his shoulders, felt slightly less heavy. Maybe David and Kirsty would hit it off or David might discover he wasn’t really interested in her. Jonathan had to do something. David was his only friend, and there was no way he was going to sacrifice that, especially not for a girl he barely knew. Even if he were attracted to her, even if she were Emma O’Neil hot, David was a bud, and you didn’t screw a bud over.

  Jonathan felt better by the time he got Kirsty’s coffee, which was actually free because Myrna, the café cashier, was a burnout and didn’t want to calculate the discount and make change. He saw David and Kirsty talking. David was smiling. That was good. Very good.

  He put Kirsty’s coffee on the table. She thanked him.

  “So what are you guys talking about?” he asked.

  “David was just telling me how you two met.”

  “Oh man, don’t tell her that,” Jonathan said.

  “I have to,” David explained. “The wheels are already turning and can’t be stopped. It’s a momentum thing.”

  “It’s an ass thing.”

  “Perhaps we should let Kirsty decide.”

  “I want to hear it,” she said, grinning from ear to ear. “Unless you’ll be totally pissed?”

  “Not totally,” Jonathan said.

  “Well then,” David announced, “like I said, it was early in the school year, and Jonny Boy here had just transferred in. Back then, all of the cool kids used to go to this place called Coffee. Perky’s wasn’t open yet, and the place was just a few blocks from the school. In front of Coffee, there was this kind of patio with half a dozen tables, and the Specials—that’s what the popular kids call themselves—well, they used to take over that area, and it became this orgy of coffee and cell phones and WiFi, like an office for kids whose job it was to be dickheads. Every day the Specials sent Naomi Mattis ahead to kind of reserve the area.”

  “I totally forgot about Naomi,” Jonathan said. “God, she was their full-on slave. Whatever happened to her?”

  “She’s at Melling now,” David said. “She had about a million dollars’ worth of makeover done, and the last operation, which was some kind of chin implant, went wrong. This all happened before I transferred, but people told me she looked totally Resident Evil there for about three months. Everybody slammed on her, but then when her face got fixed, she was excruciatingly hot. So she put together her own group of Specials, and the nightmare continues.”

  “So superficial,” Kirsty said. “Why do people have to make each other so miserable?”

  “Because if people were happy,” David said, “advertising wouldn’t work.”

  “Kids would be jerks without advertising,” Jonathan put in.

  “True,” David agreed, arching his eyebrows, giving his round face a strange, surprised expression. “But they now have a hundred new things to be jerks about. Clothes, palm devices, televisions, hair-cuts, cell phones—even water. If you don’t have the latest, you’re a loser and therefore a target. Advertisers know it. They want us to be unhappy so we’ll buy their crap. It’s totally documented. But I digress from my story.”

  “Our break is just about over,” Jonathan said.

  “He thinks he’s going to be spared,” David said right to Kirsty.

  She laughed.

  “Anyway, the Specials were gathered at Coffee, another typical day for the rich and popular, when who should appear on the sacred patio?”

  “Jonathan,” Kirsty said.

  “Number-one answer,” David replied. He lifted his cup and poured the last drops of coffee onto his tongue before continuing. “He was a gazelle wandering into a pack of lions.”

  “They call that a pride,” Kirsty said. “A group of lions is a pride.”

  Her remark startled David for a moment. Jonathan could see the confusion flash across his face, and he understood it. David was used to being the smartest guy in the room. He wasn’t used to being correcte
d, and though he didn’t seem angry about it, he was certainly perplexed.

  “A pride,” David said. “Right. A pride. Anyway, Gazelle-Jonny wanders into the Specials’ pride. And as they say on Animal Planet, there could be only one tragic outcome.”

  “What happened?” Kirsty asked.

  “They tore me apart,” Jonathan said, trying to make light of it, though the memory felt fresh and painful. He remembered those strange, cruel faces circling him—Toby Skabich, Ox and Cade, and a dozen others—asking him questions about where he lived, where he got his clothes, what bands he liked. Their expressions varied from mock interest to rude amusement, and under it all Jonathan felt the hostility of the Specials, felt their ridicule and their superiority.

  “It was like a game show of abuse,” David said, sounding a little too happy about it. “They’d ask him something like ‘Where’d you get those shoes,’ right? Making it sound like they were really cool shoes and they wanted to buy a pair. Then Jonathan would answer and they’d all break up laughing.”

  My cousin shops there, Tia Graves said. He loves it because it’s close to the trailer park where he lives.

  “God, that’s so mean,” Kirsty whispered.

  “Yeah, well, that’s what the Specials are all about,” David said. “Anyway, next door to Coffee was this electronics store where they got all the new games at least a week before anyone else in town. I’d just picked up one of the Silent Hill games and was walking past Coffee when I heard all the laughing. And there was our poor Jonathan literally backed against a wall with all of these kids around him. He looked scared as hell. He was in over his head. We had geometry together, so I knew his name and I said, ‘Hey, Jonathan, come on, we’re going to be totally late.’ He didn’t know what to make of that, but he saw his escape and he took it.”

  “You saved him,” Kirsty said.

  “I’m a hero like that,” David said with a laugh.

  “Then what happened?”

  “We went home and played Silent Hill for about seven hours.”

  Embarrassed by the story, Jonathan felt the flush on his cheeks. He wanted to talk about something else…anything else. “Hey, we’re way late getting back to work,” he said.

  “Stewart’s out back having a smoke,” David said. “It’s all good.”

  “Nobody says that anymore.”

  “And yet, it was just said, which totally negates your argument.”

  David’s cell phone rang then. His ringtone, Johnny Cash singing “Hurt,” filled the café.

  “Hello. Yeah, mom,” David said. “Who?…No way…Are you kidding? What happened?…How?…No, but Jonathan does. They go to school together…Are you sure?…Yeah, okay…OKAY! I’ll come right home after work, don’t freak out. You don’t have to pick me up…Knock it off. Jesus…Okay…Okay. I’ll see you at ten.”

  David hung up the phone and set it on the table. He looked dazed. He kept blinking like he had something in his eyes, but the corners of his mouth were turned up slightly. It was almost a smile.

  “What?” Jonathan asked.

  “They just pulled Toby Skabich out of the lake,” David said quietly. “It looks like he drowned.”

  First Mr. Weaver and now Toby, Jonathan thought.

  Two of his high-school tormentors—two in a week—were dead. It was just too weird. And Jonathan felt surprisingly bad about it. Toby was a kid, and yeah, he was mean and rude and totally self-absorbed. But he was just a kid. He was familiar, a part of Jonathan’s life, albeit a full-on unfortunate part. Same with Mr. Weaver. He was also part of Jonathan’s life. A page in a book. A brick in a wall. An element mixed into the formula of Jonathan’s being. Now, there was emptiness, the page torn, the brick removed, the formula incomplete.

  Jonathan sat on the edge of his bed. His mom was on the phone in the television room, crying to her sister. His dad did something again. Jonathan didn’t know what it was. He’d stopped paying attention a long time ago.

  He stood up from the bed and went to the closed curtains covering his window. He wouldn’t pull them back, didn’t want to see what nightmare might be waiting beyond the glass. He was nervous. He didn’t know what to do or feel.

  You thought about killing them.

  So what? Everybody thinks about that kind of junk.

  You won’t be insulted in class again. You’ll never get thrown into another locker. Your life just got a whole lot easier.

  That doesn’t matter.

  It’s all that matters.

  Jonathan shook this disturbing voice from his head. It was late and he should have been trying to sleep, but after the dark phantom the night before and the news about Toby, he’d never get to sleep now. He wanted to take a walk, to get out of the house. His mother’s teary voice bled into his room. But outside wasn’t safe. Not these days.

  Mr. Weaver was murdered and hung over a tree branch.

  Toby was murdered…

  You don’t know that. He could have killed himself, put his perfect life behind him.

  …and dropped in a lake.

  It could have been an accident.

  But it wasn’t an accident, and Jonathan knew it. Tomorrow, maybe the next day, the news would report that Toby had been murdered and discarded in the lake. No accident. No suicide. He knew it.

  And he was afraid. Who would be next?

  From The Book of Adrian, Wed. Oct. 12:

  Look at me. Look at me, the pretty ones shout. Like birds ruffling their colorful feathers to draw attention, those blessed with fine bone and skin parade about as if they controlled the genetic material randomly bestowed upon them. They deride those not so blessed. Express false pity. All the while absorbing adoration like a drug.

  And they need that fix. They long to be wanted. Though unless they approve, they ignore completely the source of this regard, wholly uncaring of the damage total indifference does.

  Isn’t that right, Emma?

  7

  Thursday morning, Jonathan stood at his locker. It had already been two days since Toby’s body was found. Jonathan stared inside at the stack of books and notepads absently, wondering what it was he needed. He felt lost this morning. Distracted. Entering the school was like entering a funeral home, the faces of Toby’s mourners surrounding him. Everyone looked so sad. He hadn’t attended the candlelight vigil for the boy last night. The service was held at the city park on the far side of the lake, and he had no way to get there. Even if he had managed a ride, he didn’t see how he could attend the bully’s vigil without feeling like a total hypocrite.

  Instead he’d stayed home and studied for tests in geometry and English lit, both of which were being given tomorrow. He’d talked to David on the phone for a while and gone online briefly to look up some information on Shakespeare, but mostly he’d just read through his notes and checked the textbook. Studying hadn’t been easy. Concentrating on anything was tough these days.

  Mr. Weaver. Toby.

  Damn.

  “Hey, Jonathan.”

  The voice broke his reverie, and he turned away from the contents of his locker and faced the first pleasant surprise he’d had in a long time. Emma O’Neil stood next to him.

  “H–hey, Emma,” he said. With her face so close to his, Jonathan could hardly breathe. She put his mind in shock, made his pulse double.

  “Look, I know this is lame,” she said, “and I really hate to ask, but you know that test we’re having tomorrow?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “I can’t make any sense of my notes,” Emma said. Then she laughed and lowered her head, pointing the nest of spiky hair at him. “Okay, the truth is, I didn’t take any notes.”

  Jonathan laughed too loudly and then bit the inside of his cheek to staunch the unflattering tide of chuckles. “It happens,” he said.

  “Well, I’m not usually such a flake, but after what happened to Mr. Weaver…jeez, and then Toby…I just couldn’t get my head on straight, so I know like nothing about Macbeth. I mean, I’m totally
good through Othello, right? But if I could snag your notes for the last couple of classes, I’d totally owe you one.”

  “Sure,” Jonathan said, already ducking his head back into the locker to find the right notebook. “My notes should be good.”

  “They’d have to be better than mine,” Emma said.

  “I just don’t answer questions in class,” he explained. “I mean I know the material.”

  “I know you do,” Emma said. “That’s why I asked. Look, I have to bail, but could you email them to me or something? I could pull it into my PDA, and that would totally help.”

  A knot formed in Jonathan’s throat. He hadn’t transferred any information to his computer. It was all handwritten. Besides, he had no idea if he’d be able to get online at home. His mother might be in a mood. Plus he had to work.

  “I…uh,” he muttered. “I just have the handwritten ones.”

  Emma’s smile faltered a bit. A cloud of disappointment passed over her brow. “Well, that’s okay.”

  “I could make some copies in the library and get them to you later.”

  “Jonathan,” Emma said with a laugh, “you’re doing me the favor by letting me use your notes. I’m not going to put you through the lameness of sharing your lunch period with a Xerox machine. I can copy them and get them back to you fifth period, if that’s okay?”

  “Sure,” he said, handing her the notebook with his lit notes. “No problem.”

  “You’re the best,” Emma said, placing her hand on Jonathan’s shoulder. “I owe you a coffee or ten.”

  Then she was rushing away. Jonathan watched her go, dazed. She was so nice. God, she was just so amazing. He leaned back against the lockers and breathed deeply, hardly noticing the throng of kids passing him in the hall on the way to their first period classes.

  Was she serious about coffee? he wondered. No way! he thought, absolutely ecstatic about the idea.