Random

by Tom Leveen

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  ONE

  They’ve been pounding on the front door for more than an hour, which is exactly how long it took for Dad to make his famous garlic mashed potatoes. He’d slammed the masher down time after time, BAM! BAM! BAM! with his lips drawn tight as Mom took measured steps between the stove and sink while making Italian meat loaf.

  It feels like a last meal.

  “I just want to ask a few questions, Victoria!” this one reporter keeps shouting through our closed door. Her name is Allison Summers. I’ve never met her face-to-face, still don’t know what she looks like, but I know what she thinks of me, and what she made the rest of the world think of me. So she can stay out there and melt in the rain like the witch she is, for all I care.

  None of us inside speaks. We just do our routine jobs, but without saying a word. Normally Mom would be singing R.E.M. singles, or Dad would be reciting a stand-up routine from some dead comedian, or my brother, Jack, and I would be debating about whether or not Olympic athletes were “superhuman.”

  Tonight: a vast silence, like standing in an empty gymnasium.

  Jack, in particular, makes it a point to not even look at me. I’m not used to this treatment from my older brother yet, even though he’s been doing it for weeks. Mom and Dad are letting him do it too. That doesn’t make me feel any better.

  “Jack, where’s the green napkins?” I ask as he pulls down plates.

  He doesn’t even point. I can see his jaw muscles working as he clenches his teeth, making his deep, pitted acne scars look like pulsing lunar craters. Jack had cystic acne all through high school, and people always called him all kinds of terrible names, even up till he graduated last year. Krakatoa, Pus Factory. Even Zit Face.

  I never called him anything. He doesn’t seem to remember that.

  “Please, Miss Hershberger, this might be your only chance to set the story straight,” Allison-the-reporter calls, pound-pound-pounding on the door some more.

  “Check the other cabinet for the napkins, Tori,” Mom says. She tries to make it casual, as if there aren’t a bunch of reporters on our lawn in a light spring rain, but her voice is tight and strained.

  So I check the other cabinet, and there are the green napkins, just where I knew they’d be. I’d asked only to see if maybe Jack would forget he wasn’t talking to me and say something.

  With Dad’s potatoes done finally, we sit down around our small dining room table just off the kitchen. It’s more of a nook than a room. We eat here six nights a week. Even now. Mom tries to smile at me as she gestures to the meat loaf, urging me to serve myself first.

  “Victoria?” Allison Summers calls. “I’m on deadline. I’m filing a story tonight whether you talk to me or not, so you might want to think about telling people your side of things.”

  Another voice, male, shouts, “Have you decided on a plea?”

  Dad’s chair flips backward when he stands up. My stomach contracts and pulls me taut against my chair, and Mom drops a fork. Jack doesn’t move, just sits there staring at his empty plate.

  Dad races to the front door. I hear him fling it open.

  “Get off my property!” Dad shouts. “Now! Every single last one of you, out!”

  “Mr. Hershberger, I just want—”

  “Out! I’ll call the police on all of you, get out!”

  “Mr. Hersh—”

  “Go!” Dad roars, throwing a giant mother-F-bomb out with it. “You’re nothing but a bunch of bloodsucking vultures! Get off my property and leave my family alone!”

  I’ve never heard Dad swear before. Or yell. He’s a grumbler, not a screamer.

  “Thought we were supposed to ignore them,” Jack whispers, not lifting his eyes.

  “Easy for Mr. Halpern to say,” Mom says, her voice wrenching a bit tighter. “He’s probably having a quiet dinner.”

  I hear muttering at the front door, and a moment later it slams shut. Instead of coming back to the table, though, Dad stalks past us and goes down the hall and into he and Mom’s bedroom. Another slammed door twists my stomach again.

  At least the knocking has stopped. After a few more minutes I hear a couple of car engines start up and drive away from the front of our house.

  I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. Jack takes his napkin from his lap and tosses it on the empty plate.

  “Are you even sorry?” he says.

  I look up at him, blinking. These are the first words Jack’s spoken to me in weeks. So of course I screw it right up.

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “A simple kind,” Jack snaps. “Just answer it. Are you?”

  “Jack,” Mom says, “maybe now isn’t—”

  I’m too angry to let her even finish. I shout back at him, “Of course I am, Jack! God!”

  Mom says, “Kids, please . . .”

  Jack leans over the table, resting his forearms on the top. “Sorry you did it, or sorry you’re in trouble?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  Jack snorts and pushes his chair back. He stands up, takes one step, stops.

  “God, Vic,” he says. “I don’t even recognize you anymore.”

  I try to come up with something to shoot back and come up empty. Plus, I kind of know what he means. I haven’t felt much like myself.

  “Jack,” Mom says again.

  “I’ve got homework,” he says. “Might as well do some while I’m still enrolled.”

  “It’ll work out, Jack,” Mom insists. “Don’t overreact.”

  Jack shrugs sarcastically. “Maybe overreacting is exactly what we should be doing,” he says. He shoves his chair back under the table and goes down the hall to his room. He doesn’t slam his door, but it doesn’t latch quietly behind him either.

  I look at Mom. She’s rubbing her temples with two fingers each.

  “Mom?”

  Outside, a car passes by, going fast, it sounds like. Someone in the car performs a drive-by cussing, screaming out an open window before disappearing down the block.

  “Biiiiiiitch!”

  Mom’s forehead, already creased, tightens.

  “What, Tori.”

  “Um . . . nothing,” I say, and get up. “I’m not very hungry.”

  Mom doesn’t say anything. So I go to my room and close the door.

  Maybe I should just plead guilty tomorrow. Maybe that’ll make everyone happy.

  Kevin Cooper wrote on your timeline.

  August 26, two years ago.

  Something tells me high school is going to suck, Hershy.

  Tori Hershberger Maybe. But maybe not. Do NOT call me Hershy at school!!!

  Kevin Cooper likes this.

  Kevin Cooper Your a jock. Jocks always have more fun. :) And I won’t call you that.

  You like this.

  Tori Hershberger Yeah, well, we’ll see. ;) How’s things with Rachel?

  Kevin Cooper likes this.

  Kevin Cooper Good.

  Tori Hershberger Just good?

  Kevin Cooper Just good. ;)

  You like this.

  TWO

  “It’s been six hours since dinner,” I tell my friend Noah over the phone, “and I haven’t eaten anything since lunch. I’m going to lose all my muscle if this keeps up.”

  Part of me wants a chicken burrito, and another part is like, Yeah, right! Good luck keeping that down.


  “You gotta eat, Tori-chan,” Noah says. “Jock need food, badly.”

  I don’t answer. I know a bazillion girls who’d kill to have no appetite.

  I feel myself wince. That was a poor turn of phrase right now.

  “I wish I could sleep,” I tell him. “Or do homework, even.”

  “You’re definitely not feeling very good if homework is a reasonable alternative to sleep,” Noah says. He’s full of it. He gets straight As.

  “Hard to do English without a computer,” I say.

  “True,” Noah says. “But you could always use one of those, what do you call them . . . pencils?”

  I’d probably laugh if tonight wasn’t the night that it is. Still, Noah has a point. Maybe I could handwrite some things. Except I don’t think my English teacher accepts anything less than twelve-point Times New Roman with one-inch margins. Mom promised to find a laptop from her work that would have an Office suite on it or something, but so far she hasn’t. We’ve all been a little preoccupied. But if I don’t start turning some things in, there goes junior year.

  Speaking of next year . . .

  I’m sixteen now, which means if things go badly, I won’t get out of prison till I’m twenty-six.

  I don’t say that to Noah as I sit at my empty desk, holding my phone to my ear and listening to him eat something. Probably popcorn. It’s not crunchy enough for chips. I’d hear it if it was chips.

  I hate my new phone.

  Wait; I should be careful using a word like hate right now too. In fact, I’d be happy to never hear it used again.

  I should also use quotes around the term “new” phone. It’s not new-new. Mom had been meaning to recycle it for more than a few years now. It’s been sitting on the kitchen counter, in a little clay dish I made in first grade, along with a stew of paper clips, rubber bands, and an outdated Burger King coupon nobody’s bothered to throw away. The coupon is so old, it’s a family joke. “Hey, buy one, get one free at Burger King!” we’ll say whenever someone asks Dad what’s for dinner. Mom always sighs and says she knew Canyon City was getting too big when we had two Burger Kings instead of one.

  Well, at least I’ve got a phone. They didn’t completely take away my ability to communicate with the few people who still care to acknowledge me. Which, can I just say, is so hypocritical. As if my teammates didn’t give Kevin Cooper a hard time at school. As if the entire coaching staff didn’t have it in for him during PE. My God, if ever there was a person who gave Cooper a bunch of crap, it was Coach Scordo, who runs the baseball team and all the boys’ PE classes. Any guy who couldn’t run a lap got ostracized; I’d seen it. And did administration or the rest of the staff do anything about it? No. Why aren’t they in trouble too?

  Whatever.

  I sigh out loud and trace a finger on top of my desk. In addition to switching my phone, my parents also confiscated my laptop, and thus, my lifeline to the wider world. There’s still a rectangular dust pattern on my desk from where it used to sit. I should clean that up.

  Maybe tomorrow.

  “So, Tori-chan?” Noah says on my new/old phone. “You’re being awfully quiet. Dare I ask what’s on your mind this fine evening?”

  “Don’t you watch the news?” I ask back. “You know what tomorrow is.”

  I almost tell him to stop calling me “Tori-chan” instead of just Tori, but right now anything other than Victoria Renée Hershberger is a relief. The TV reporters insist on using all three names, like they do with assassins: Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wilkes Booth. . . .

  Hershberger. There is one word to describe this surname: ghastly. It looks god-awful beneath last year’s freshman Canyon High yearbook photo the news uses all the time. It crowds across my shoulders on my jersey. And it definitely didn’t sound any better coming from that stupid reporter during dinner.

  “Of course I’ve been watching,” Noah says. “But I don’t expect them to tell me the truth.”

  “I love you,” I say.

  Noah laughs. “Don’t let your mouth write checks your heart can’t cash, Hershy.”

  He’s the only person left on planet Earth I’d ever let get away with calling me something like “Hershy.” But we go back a long time. Sixth grade. That’s virtually an eon. We hung out a lot more back then, in junior high. Even last year. We sort of drifted this year, though. Which makes me all the more grateful that he’s sticking by me now.

  I lie flat on my bed, staring at the ceiling. “Hey, can you eat a popcorn ceiling?”

  “The question is, why would you want to?”

  “Because it’s popcorn. Duh.”

  “Pretty sure it’s not real popcorn, Tori-chan.”

  He loves to hear himself say that. Noah wants more than anything to live in Japan. He has this whole spiel about the difference between -chan and -san. It’s cute, but also stale. He’s been in love with all things Japanese ever since he first saw Fullmetal Alchemist. The obsession grew from there.

  “More important, would it taste good with butter and salt?” I say, and answer my own question. “Yes. Everything tastes better with butter and salt. I’d eat my own feet with butter and salt.”

  “Your own feet, huh?”

  “I mean, I’d wash ’em first, obviously.”

  “That’s good, ’cause I’ve smelled your cleats after a game, and man. . . .”

  “Shut up.”

  “Seriously, you guys need to clean up better.”

  “Says the man crushing on our entire infield.”

  “Just the infield?” Noah says, feigning shock. “It’s the whole team, Hershy.”

  “I was trying to keep you from sounding like a man whore.”

  “Yeah, well, man whores get dates,” Noah says. “So when’s your next game—”

  He cuts himself off. I won’t be at a game for quite some time. Like, next year, maybe. If I’m lucky. Apparently he forgot.

  Or is it allegedly he forgot? I can’t keep track anymore.

  “Well,” Noah says after a pause, “I guess, whenever you come back, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Sure.”

  I hear him sigh. “So why’d you call me? To talk about eating your ceiling?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Look, Tori, if you’re so totally opposed to talking about it . . .”

  “Sorry,” I say, very bitchy—bitchily? “Forget it.”

  I hang up, closing the flip phone. A flip phone. A cheap and outdated substitute for my iPhone. May as well be chiseled out of granite. I dump the flip onto my nightstand and fling an arm over my eyes to block out my overhead light. Feels like an interrogation room in here with that blazing corkscrew bulb. “Soft white light,” my muscular ass.

  I didn’t mean to be bitchy to Noah, but God, I need a distraction, not more talk about the case. I’ve been living and breathing nothing else for like a month now. Can’t we just talk about dumb things like . . . like popcorn ceilings? Or how hot he thinks Alexis and Alyssa and Taylor and Megan and the rest of the team are?

  I wish they’d call me.

  Anyway. For all the terrible things about to happen to me, it’s kind of a relief to be cranky about my phone or that the light is too bright in here or that my name is so dumb. It’s comforting. Reality. Such normal things to be pissy about.

  The phone rings, vibrating on the nightstand. Reeee. Reeee. Reeee.

  I look at my clock. The red digital letters blink from 11:53 to 11:54. A single red dot illuminates the p.m. window. It looks so lonely out there on its own, that little red dot. Doing the same old job, day in, day out. The time is currently post meridiem, the little red dot says. Just so you know.

  Am I getting weirder? Is this what happens when you can’t leave the house? Maybe it’s cabin fever or Stockholm syndrome or something. Wait, no, that’s kidnappers. Whatever.

  I pick up the phone and check the teeny-tiny LCD screen. It’s Noah on the ID. He’s one of the few people whose number I have, and that’s only because he called me. If he hadn’t, I�
�d have lost his number forever. It’s not like I had it memorized. I didn’t have anyone’s number memorized. Mom and Dad didn’t even take me to the Apple store to try to download my contacts onto the flip before they took my iPhone. They just took it and came back later with this piece of crap.

  A contact number transfer probably wouldn’t have worked anyway; the technology is too dated on the flip phone. It would’ve been like teaching Neanderthals to drive a sporty coupe.

  “You shouldn’t hang up on people like that,” Noah says after I open my phone back up.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s rude,” he says.

  “I’ve been called worse,” I say.

  “Don’t start that,” Noah says.

  “Sorry,” I say, not bitchily this time. “Can’t much help it.”

  The next words that almost come out of my mouth are, Noah, I am so scared. But I don’t let them. It won’t help.

  “So what’s your plan tomorrow?” Noah asks, trying very hard to make it a casual question when it is anything but.

  My stomach clenches from the inside out, like a series of fists doing a hand-over-hand on my softball bat.

  “Try not to pass out, I guess,” I say.

  “Man, I’m sorry, Tor,” Noah says, sympathizing instead of pushing me to divulge my plan for court like those reporters tonight. Like the rest of the world. They can wait a few more hours, all of them.

  Noah’s willingness to let me not talk specifics is one of the reasons I’m friends with him. He doesn’t go straight for the gossip, straight for the big scoop, like the girls on the team would have. Maybe it’s better they haven’t called, after all.

  “I know it’s probably a long shot, but is there anything I can do?” Noah asks.

  His voice is calm and gentle. I’ve never kissed Noah, but I would totally make out with his voice if that were possible. His voice and Lucas Mulcahy’s arms. Perfect.

  I yawn. Finally. I would’ve gone to bed an hour or two ago except I can’t get my mind to stop trampolining. Or, is that a word? Did I just make up a new word? Cool.

  “I don’t think so,” I say to Noah.

  “You sure?”