Before Kyle could start the car, Joe sparked the blunt again using his most prized possession, a Zippo lighter with a pot leaf design in the colors of the Jamaican flag. He had only let Kyle drive his Audi once before.
Of all the many ways their lives were different because Joe’s family had money and Kyle’s mom did not, Kyle had never noticed it more than when he drove Joe’s car. His eighteen-year-old Sentra would buck and resist at every opportunity as he pushed it closer and closer to a quarter of a million miles.
Joe’s brand new Audi felt like it was bred from a champion racehorse and a rocket ship, ready to serve his every whim behind the wheel. It was damn fun to drive, and if Kyle was ever going to cut the ten-minute drive to school in half, he was in the right car to do it.
CHAPTER 2
March 13, 2014
* * *
Moments later
As the ‘Cheese Bus’ hit another pothole, Scarlett looked around at each of the eighth graders and one-by-one thought to herself: “Moron,” “Bully,” “Racist,” “Psycho,” “Wimp.” Scarlett hoped every day that it wasn’t her turn to be singled out by the assholes in the back, especially stupid Lisa Cartigliani.
Scarlett faced backward, sitting on her knees, watching the cruel stupidity of the day unfold around her. This time, Lisa and her cousin Tiffany were using a ruler to measure poor Marlon’s lips while he slept. They were rank-and-file members of the popular clique at school, but the unopposed Queens of Bus #17.
“Holy shit!” Lisa called out, laughing. “One and seven eighths wide, and two inches tall. His lips are, like, twice as plump as mine!”
Etan Rachnowitz laughed louder than anyone else. He must’ve liked Lisa, Scarlett thought, because he laughed at every dumb thing she said. “Even you gotta admit that’s crazy, Snodgrass!”
Tom Snodgrass looked more like a menacing 20-year-old than a middle-schooler. Broad-shouldered and tall, he had decisively opted out of the Cheese Bus’s social strata in favor of quietly reading Star Trek novels. Nobody bothered him.
When Tom refused to look up and give Etan the moment of validation he craved, Etan looked at Scarlett and pushed out his lips, imitating the way Marlon looked as he slept. Afraid her moment would come sooner if she didn’t, Scarlett smiled.
Etan took a piece of gum out of his mouth and rolled it into a ball. “Check it out,” he said. He held the chewed gum above Marlon’s lips and looked at Lisa for approval.
“No way!” Lisa said, with a giggle.
“No, dude,” Tom called out, barely looking up from his book. Then, louder: “Do not do it.”
Poor Marlon slept, unaware of any of this, his lips pursed into a perfect little pocket just right for an asshole like Etan to ditch his gum there.
Etan gave one last look at Tom, who kept reading, but was clearly monitoring the situation. Everyone else on the bus was glued to the proceedings by the time Etan gently placed the chewed-up gum right onto Marlon’s lips.
“We gotta wake him up,” Lisa said cheerfully, climbing over the seats in front of her. She put both hands up to Marlon’s face and started alternating slaps. Gently at first, but then harder as he barely stirred. She pushed the gum further into his lips, so it was mostly inside his mouth.
Disgusting, Scarlett thought.
Lisa was growing impatient. Finally, she reared back her hand and laid a full-on skin-stinger to his cheek.
She backed away as Marlon’s eyes opened. He chewed the gum for a second, then pushed it out of his mouth with his tongue. He looked confused, as everyone just stared and laughed.
Marlon looked down at the gum on the floor.
“Your lips looked lonely, bro,” Etan said. “My gum fit there perfectly.” Marlon looked up at Etan, and Scarlett could see the tears well up in his eyes, and then quickly overflow. He buried his head in his lap.
“You’re crying, bro?” Etan said. “It was just a joke.”
While everyone watched Marlon break down, Scarlett noticed out of the corner of her eye that Tom had gotten out of his seat and was standing right behind Etan now. Tom quickly threw his arm around Etan’s neck and put him in a chokehold from behind. Etan’s stunned face quickly gave way to a panicked look. He grabbed at Tom’s adult-sized arm and tried to pull it off of him.
“You don’t fucking listen,” Tom said quietly in the direction of Etan’s ear, pulling his own wrist with his free hand to tighten up the pressure of the chokehold. Within a few seconds, Etan’s face turned bright red as he struggled to get Tom off of him. Scarlett wondered how long he could handle being choked without getting seriously hurt.
She turned to look at Bruno, the driver, and noticed him watching the boys through his rearview mirror. He generally let the kids do whatever they wanted, but she was scared that this could get out of control. She was relieved to feel the bus pull onto gravel and slow down.
Bruno stopped the bus, stood up, and walked toward them. “Are you sick in the head?” he screamed at Tom in his heavy accent. “Put him down!”
By now, Etan’s face was a shade beyond the worst sunburn Scarlett could imagine. He lifted his legs in the air, trying to kick himself out as Tom stoically held the chokehold in place, his face completely void of emotion.
“Get the hell off of him!” Bruno screamed, grabbing Tom’s forearm now. Tom held on for a couple more seconds before letting go. Etan crumbled to the ground and quickly pulled himself up to Tom’s seat as he gasped for air.
“Sit down,” Bruno said to Tom. Then, he bent down to Etan. “You alright, kid?”
Etan didn’t even acknowledge Bruno. Instead, he stood up and pushed past the crowd to take his usual seat in the back, across from Lisa and Tiffany’s row. Now, it was Etan who looked close to tears.
“Listen, all of you,” Bruno said. “Let’s just get to school without any more, uh . . . stupidity, okay? No more fighting.” His Italian accent made it sound more authoritative, which was good, because Tom’s blank stare made it look like he wanted to finish what he started.
What a bunch of assholes, Scarlett thought to herself, ashamed she didn’t have the courage to say it out loud.
CHAPTER 3
March 13, 2014
* * *
Moments later
Kyle slowed up just a tiny bit as he passed by his old middle school. He knew the cops could be real hard asses about speeding in school zones. He wished he had five extra minutes to spare. Since he didn’t, he pushed the Audi up to sixty on Avanti Drive.
“We get pulled over, you’re paying,” Joe said.
“We’re not getting pulled over,” Kyle answered. Slush kicked up from under the tires as he accelerated through the middle stretch of each block, only to come to one stop sign after another. When he saw the time, he felt panicky. It was 8:53—he had seven minutes until he had to be in his seat in class.
They usually saved drinking for weekends. And even though Kyle didn’t feel that much more fucked up than most mornings, he hoped being drunk, too, wouldn’t impact his math test—assuming he made it to school in time.
He turned onto Canarsie Road and felt the tires skid just a little on the slick ground. He had no choice but to floor it. He saw someone three blocks ahead crossing the street with a dog.
“You think it’s messed up that I don’t care if we get to school for first period?” Joe asked. “I think my priorities may be all wrong, man. That’s what my dad says.”
Kyle looked at his friend. “This is what you always do, dude,” Kyle said, trying to half-focus on Joe’s existential crisis. “We smoke, and then for a little while you’re happy. And then you get all paranoid and self . . . self-something. Take a deep breath. You’re fine.” When Kyle glanced back at the road ahead, the person with the dog was still in the middle of the road. It looked like they were crossing in slow motion.
“No, Kyle. You’re fine. Somehow, it always works out for you. You can party, and hang, and do whatever, and you still get A’s and keep your mom off your ass. Sometimes I
wish I was the one without a dad.”
Kyle had no patience for Joe’s spoiled self-pity. He tried to catch his eye with a look. Sometimes that was the best way to remind his friend that he was talking crazy. When he turned to glance back at the road, the person with the dog was still in the middle of the street, but all of a sudden they were only twenty feet away. Kyle switched lanes without looking over his shoulder and pressed on the accelerator. It wasn’t quite a full swerve, but it was enough to get his heart racing. As he passed her, the woman with the dog looked at him and just shook her head in that disapproving old lady kind of way.
“What the fuck, bro?” Joe asked.
“Sorry,” Kyle said with a relieved laugh. “You’re just saying such dumb shit, I got distracted.” Kyle didn’t talk very often about the fact that he had no memory of ever meeting his own father, but Joe being so oblivious still pissed him off.
Kyle slowed down, realizing he was going close to seventy now on residential streets. Now, he just had to drive up and down the hill on Nairn Boulevard and over Banditt Drawbridge and they’d be cruising into the Silverman High parking lot. He estimated that this was about three minutes away if he pushed it, which he had to, because it was 8:56.
Kyle loved that he barely had to press the Audi’s gas for it to climb the large hill. “This is so much better because I’m high,” he said to Joe. “I feel like I’m a pilot right now. That weed actually wasn’t so bad.”
“Don’t forget the tequila, dude,” Joe answered. “That shit is like seventy dollars a bottle. Te gusta, eh?”
They came to the top of Nairn Boulevard, the highest point in Flemming, New York. Normally, they might stop for a few extra seconds up here, taking in the view of the Hudson, but not today.
The school itself was obscured by oak trees, but Kyle could see the Silverman High baseball diamond in the distance as he came down the hill. Even his Sentra could get going a little too fast on the way down Nairn, but today Kyle put his faith in Joe’s Audi handling the slick pavement. He needed a miracle to make it to class in time. It was 8:58, and he still had to cross the drawbridge and park.
He sped down the end of the hill and onto Banditt Drawbridge, tapping the brake as he felt the car jerk a bit when it rolled onto the metal grating. A small school bus—probably on its way to the middle school—was at the other end of the drawbridge about a hundred yards ahead.
He saw the bus up ahead swerve into his lane. As it continued rolling toward them, Kyle saw it wobble slightly over the yellow line a second time, then correct itself. He gripped the wheel tighter as he neared the bus. There was an older man behind the wheel. The bus’s number was 17—Kyle’s lucky number. A good omen, he thought, for his odds of making it to his math quiz.
He looked down at the clock again: 8:59. Then he pressed his foot against the gas pedal, and spoke quickly, “Joe, listen, when we get to school, I’m driving up to the main entrance and jumping out. Park it yourself.”
Joe scrunched up his face and looked offended. “Why? So I can be late for first period?”
“You don’t even care, man! You were ready to skip the whole day,” Kyle shouted, giving Joe a look.
Joe reached over and grabbed Kyle’s sleeve to get his attention, clearly pissed off. “Just because you get straight A’s and I don’t, doesn’t mean that you getting to first period is more important than me getting to first period. You are so fuckin’ selfish, Kyle!”
Kyle yanked his arm away. “I’m selfish? Joe, you don’t even—”
Joe cut Kyle off, “Squirrel!”
Kyle barely caught a glimpse of the fluffy tail before he swerved sharply left, over the double yellow line.
When the car first went airborne, Kyle thought it was just a small bump from running over the squirrel. He even got an ‘ooh’ out of his mouth before the roof of the car slammed into the east guardrail of the drawbridge. The Audi flung the other way now, flipping over again as it bounced from one side of the drawbridge to the other. The car went side-over-side three times in what felt like only a second or two before skidding to a stop, with its tires in the air and its roof against the ground.
Kyle hung upside down, still strapped in. He looked around, trying to figure out where he was, what side of the bridge, the squirrel, Joe, the bus? He checked the clock and felt a pang of disappointment to see the digital numbers change to 9:01—officially late for his quiz. Kyle touched his body and face. There was blood splattered everywhere, and he felt sharp pieces of glass all over him. He couldn’t be sure, but he seemed okay. He felt a great sense of relief until he looked over at Joe. When he saw his best friend, Kyle let out an audible gag.
Less than a mile away, Paul Meltzner stood up to lock his classroom door and hand out his logic quiz to the class. Kyle Cash is late again, he thought to himself. Smart kid, but he needs to get off the Mary Jane.
CHAPTER 4
January 31, 2016
* * *
Two years later
Kyle held Ochoa’s long, curly hair back behind his head as his huge cellmate puked over the toilet.
“I never shoulda drank that stuff, bro,” Ochoa said, practically in tears. “I feel like I’m gonna die.”
Kyle helped guide his head toward the toilet again. The last thing he wanted was for their cell to smell like puke for the next month. Another orangey spew shot from Ochoa’s mouth toward the water. Kyle winced as a drop from the toilet splashed out onto his arm. He quickly wiped it off with toilet paper and wiped off the seat as well.
“Just get it out, Och.” He was eager for this to be over. Ochoa had been bragging about making his own prison wine, or pruno, for months. He took apples from the Stevenson Youth Correctional Facility mess hall and fermented them in plastic bags under his mattress. Kyle had a feeling he wasn’t doing it right the first time he saw him squeezing a few drops of juice out of a moldy apple, but Trevor Ochoa wasn’t one of those people you could convince when he got his mind onto something. So now, Kyle played nursemaid to the grumpy giant.
Kyle had been terrified when, right after receiving his eight-year manslaughter sentence, he arrived by bus at Stevenson Youth Correctional in New York City and found himself sharing a cell with a six-foot-four Puerto Rican with neck tats and arms thicker than Kyle’s legs. It took a few weeks, but Kyle realized that Ochoa was a decent person—like him, a guy who had made a mistake.
Kyle was in the middle of a dream when Ochoa’s retching woke him up this morning. It wasn’t the crash dream—the one where he manages to avoid hitting the bus altogether. It was one about Billy and Frankie Costello, or maybe it was Patty Marshall. All of the kids Kyle had killed on Bus #17 had shown up in his dreams more times than he could count. The kids he knew more about, from the newspaper coverage of the crash and from stalking their dormant Facebook pages, tended to show up in his dreams most often. The more details he knew, the easier it was to torture himself and imagine them as the living, breathing people they’d all been before the crash.
Ochoa spewed violently once more, then took a deep breath. “That’s a little better,” Ochoa said, wiping the corners of his mouth with the inside of his khaki, state-issued shirt.
“Wash your hands real good, Och . . . Your grandma comin’ today?” Kyle asked. “She hasn’t seen you with a hangover since you got sent up, huh?”
Ochoa stood up. He stretched his arms and shoulders above his head and then got down into pushup position. “Think you could beat me today?” he asked with a glint in his eye.
“Stop showing off, Och,” Kyle answered. Kyle could do fifty, on a good day. Ochoa wasn’t only built like a strong safety, but he would knock out two hundred and fifty push-ups at least twice a day. It was his way of getting out some of that extra energy one tends to have when cooped up in a ninety-six-square-foot cell for eighteen hours a day.
“Grandma’s got something with my little brother today,” Ochoa said, starting his pushups. “Math Olympics or somethin’ . . . One . . . Two . . . Three . . . Four . . .
”
Kyle laid down, hoping he might be able to fall asleep again. There were no classes on Saturdays, and no rec time until later in the afternoon. Usually, Kyle tried to sleep through morning visiting hours. He looked at the one picture hanging above his bunk—a shot of him and his mom playing on the beach from a vacation they’d taken to the Jersey shore when he was seven. Looking at it calmed him, and reminded him there was more to the world than what went on inside of Stevenson Youth Correctional.
“Anyone coming to see your bitch-ass today?” Ochoa asked, barely winded as he continued his push-ups.
Before he could answer, Kyle heard a rapping on the door, and then the lock turning over. Officer Radbourn stepped inside and both boys stood up—a regulation of the detention center.
“Seventeen years I been working here, since the day the place opened,” Radbourn said. “And still, I can’t get used to how scared you little pricks look whenever a guard comes in for inspection. Almost makes me feel bad.”
Radbourn was kind of an asshole, but he was the only guard at Stevenson Correctional who didn’t make a habit of robbing the inmates of their dignity or their possessions.
“Trevor, donde esta abuela y hermano this week?” Radbourn asked. “They finally give up on your sorry ass?” He laughed loudly while Och just stared at him.
“She’s with my brother,” Ochoa said. “She ain’t comin’.”
“Cash Man, your father comes to visit all the way from . . . ” Radbourn stared down at the clipboard in his hand, “all the way from Jacksonville and you don’t even comb your hair? C’mon kid.”
Kyle’s dad was so far out of the picture that the image of him in Kyle’s head was of a guy in his early twenties holding Kyle as an infant—the one photograph his mother had kept of his father. He isn’t here, Kyle thought. There’d be no reason. “Eat me, Rad.”
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