Right Behind You

by Gail Giles

  “You shut up, Wade. None of this is your business,” Brandon said.

  I guess it wasn’t my business. But maybe it was time I helped someone. I’d fought plenty of people. I’d done worse than that. Could I be a friend?

  I stood up. “It is my business. Brett is my friend and he just asked me to support him. I said yes. What the hell is your problem?”

  Brandon pushed me away with the back of his forearm, not even looking at me.

  “Brett, you had sex with that . . . that . . . slut? That embarrasses Brendan and me. It shames your parents and our parents. If you know what’s good for you, you won’t ever, ever see or talk to that . . . whore.”

  And Brett launched like a rocket. His head slammed into Brandon’s stomach and both were rolling on the ground, yelling, punching, and kicking each other. Brendan reached in and pulled Brandon upright. Brett scrambled to his feet and landed a roundhouse left into Brendan’s face. Blood erupted from Brendan’s nose.

  Dave was still laughing. “They’re still not cussing. Can you believe it?”

  Jay and I moved in to break it up. Jay locked in on Brandon and I grabbed Brett. Brendan decided to tend his gushing nose.

  We got them down to heavy breathing and an agreement not to rush each other, so we let them loose.

  “Brandon, he’s your cousin,” I said. “Why can’t you let him be happy?”

  “Just because your life is perfect, don’t think you can tell everybody else what to do.”

  I was drunk and stoned and my head pounded, but I couldn’t have heard that right.

  “My life is perfect?”

  Brandon said nothing. I stepped closer and said again, “My life is perfect?”

  Brandon stepped back but jabbed his index finger toward me. “You don’t know what it’s like to have parents that are so strict. To feel guilty about any little thing you do that your parents or everyone in your church might not approve of. There’s no future for the three of us — except marry somebody that’s a member of the church and then run the family nursery. You don’t know what it’s like for your life to be over by the time you’re old enough to shovel dirt.”

  Brandon picked up a beer bottle and slung it against the rocks that ringed the fire. And what he said next set my hungry ghosts loose and gave them control.

  “You’ve got it all. You’re smart, the big swimming hero with parents who let you do what you want. Nobody made you play football because your dad and your granddad did. You lived out in the boonies where you were free as a bird. What any of us would give for your life.”

  What he would give for my life? I didn’t know what it was like for my life to be over before it really got started? The ghosts were screaming. Not for guilt, but for destruction. I gritted my teeth hard so I wouldn’t, couldn’t let the words out.

  Brandon pushed up into my face. “So don’t tell me what to do. You have no idea what we go through while you float around being the swim-team hero. You don’t know what kind of fallout all of us will suffer for this Kelley thing Brett’s done.”

  He planted his palms on my chest and pushed me again. “Just step off.”

  I stepped away from Brandon and stared him down for a long minute. “You want my life? I’ll trade.”

  A switch had been thrown.

  “Wow, you have to go to church? Well, I showered with a guy that used to dismember his neighbors’ pets as a hobby.”

  Dave stopped laughing. Jay’s roach had burned down to his fingers, and now he dropped it without a sound.

  “I ate lunch with a ten-year-old that stabbed his father who pimped him out to other men. Stabbed one of the johns, too.”

  Their faces all showed a combination of confusion and horror.

  I drained my beer, reached into the cooler, and grabbed and uncapped another. “But you think I don’t know what your life is like? You don’t have a clue about my life. How about this? You don’t even know my name.”

  I spun unsteadily and pointed to Dave. “You’re my best friend. What’s my name?”

  “Wade. You’re drunk. You’re creeping me out, dude.”

  “You want to be creeped out? Listen up. My name isn’t Wade. I’m Kip McFarland. I went to school in a mental ward for violent juvenile offenders. I was the youngest, and guilty of the most violent crime the Anchorage unit ever had. I was there for almost five years.”

  “You’re making this shit up,” Brett said. “And it’s not funny.”

  Jay looked like he was searching his memory. “He might not be.”

  “Sure he is,” Dave said. “He’s just drunk.”

  “Yes, I’m drunk all right, but have I ever talked about a friend I had in Alaska? Do I talk about what I did there? Did I fish or hunt or have a snow machine? Do you know where my grandparents live or if they’re alive?”

  Dave looked like I’d slapped him. The B’s looked at each other. Jay still seemed deep in thought.

  “I showed up like a new-laid egg and you never asked anything except did I see a frickin’ polar bear?” My voice was thick with disgust. But underneath it I was holding back tears. I knew where this was going. I wanted to throw myself in the fire and put an end to it.

  Jay interrupted my rant. “My dad constantly rags about school violence and gun control, and I’ve heard him say that name: Kip. But it wasn’t a shooting. And the thing about him being really young . . .”

  All I could hear then was the wood popping in the fire.

  Brandon finally broke the stunned silence. “What did you do?”

  “Do? When I was nine, I doused a seven-year-old with gasoline and set him on fire.”

  Dave hung his head and wouldn’t look at me. The B’s moved closer together. Jay’s eyebrows lifted as if he’d solved a puzzle. “That’s it. That was the story. Dude’s not lying, guys.”

  “Did he die?” Brett asked.

  I made my voice hard. Defiant. “Yeah, but it took him three days.”

  I felt it then. The change, the knowledge that I no longer had friends here. I had plowed under and scraped my life bare like the desolate field in which we sat. The air grew so heavy it felt like I was underwater again. Sounds muffled, pressure on my chest. Unable to breathe.

  “Shit,” Jay whispered.

  “That’s . . . evil,” Brendan said.

  “Don’t you mean I’m evil?” I said. “Maybe you should pray for me.”

  From the dark glares all the B’s shot my direction, I didn’t think prayer was going to be an option.

  “Why?” Dave asked, talking to the ground. “Why would you do it?”

  I pushed them over the edge. “He had a new baseball glove and I didn’t.”

  I clutched my beer by its longneck and slung it sideways off into the field. I was done here.

  It was probably four miles to my house. Not a problem when sober, but a pretty long walk when accounting for the staggering and falling down.

  Dad was still up when I got home.

  “Wade?” he asked.

  “Nope, Kip’s here and by tomorrow everybody will know it.”

  “What?” Dad threw his book down and strode over to me. “You’re drunk. What did you do?”

  “I told them. I told them the whole story,” I said.

  “No,” he said in disbelief, but when I didn’t reply, his face flushed red and anger strummed in his voice as he grabbed my shoulders and shook.

  “Don’t you know that what you do affects all of us?” He let go of my shoulders and paced the room. “It was bad enough when it was just me, but it’s Carrie now, too. It will all start again. All of it. The papers. The hate. Wade, you could be in danger. There are people who believe you got off too easy. People that believe in an eye for an eye. They could come here and . . .”

  And Dad morphed from furious to scared.

  When I saw that, my defiance sailed away. Dad must have seen the bare pain in my face.

  He strode to me in two quick steps and pulled me into a deep, hard hug.

  �
�Ah, son, it’s time to let it go. You don’t have to hurt yourself. It doesn’t help anyway.”

  I didn’t put my arms around him. I sagged in his arms, Dad supporting most of my weight. Had it been like this when I came out of my coma? How many times would we have to repeat this?

  “Why did I do it? Why did I tell them?”

  “Because you think you don’t deserve to be happy.” Dad pushed me back, but held me by the shoulders. “You have to learn that you do. You owe me that. I have never asked you for anything. I am asking you for your own happiness.”

  He guided me to bed, removed my shoes and jacket, pushed me down, and flipped a blanket over me.

  “You’re going to feel bad on so many levels tomorrow,” Dad whispered. “And you’re going to deserve some of it. I’ve seen the stashed bottles. It stops now, Wade. It stops or you go back into a hospital.”

  He reached and pulled one of my feet out and put it on the floor. “That might keep the room from spinning.” He moved the wastebasket next to the head of the bed. “That might come in handy, too.”

  He headed for the door.

  “Dad.”

  He stopped and turned toward me.

  “I’m sorry. I’m always the one that screws up, and you’re the one that has to suffer.”

  Dad was quiet for a beat. “Wade, the fact that you think about that is what makes believing in you a possibility.”

  Chapter 18

  GO AGAIN

  Dad was right. The next day was a horror show on lots of levels. Inside my head and out. The morning was quiet outside my head. Inside my head were steel drums and screeching things. A madman playing a violin? I hung over the toilet for a good part of the morning, too. Between heaves, I heard Dad and Carrie whispering. It sounded urgent.

  Carrie brought me juice and aspirin when she figured I could hold something down. “So you punched the self-destruct button?” She stood with her arms crossed over her body. Not a good sign.

  “I did. Just like the shrink said I would.”

  I took the aspirin with one swallow of the juice. I put the glass on my nightstand. “I don’t think any more juice is a good idea right now.”

  “I kind of think hangovers are poetic justice,” Car-rie said.

  The grim details of my heaving came to mind in full color. “Justice, maybe. But I can’t find any poetry.”

  “Try not to stay in bed all day.” Carrie turned to leave.

  “Carrie, I think there’s going to be collateral damage that goes along with what I did last night. I’m sorry.”

  She tried for a smile. “Maybe it won’t be so bad. It was a long time ago, in another place. These people know you as someone completely different. Let’s hope for the best.”

  Hope started to collapse a few hours later. Usually my phone rang constantly on Sundays. Today it didn’t ring until three. Dave.

  “Hey, Dave.”

  “Hey.”

  It was the first time he hadn’t called me “Siberia” when I answered the phone. He didn’t call me anything.

  “I sorta need to talk to you,” Dave said.

  “That’s sorta what you’re doing,” I said, going for cool and missing by light-years.

  “Face time. Private face time.”

  “Sure, come on by,” I said. I knew what was coming, and I would make it as easy for him as I could. Dave had been good to me from minute one, and I had lied to him from that same minute.

  I waited on the porch until he drove up.

  Dave waved me over to the car. “Hey.”

  “You can still call me Siberia.”

  Uncomfortable silence.

  “Can we sit in my car to talk?”

  I slid into the seat of his Jeep Cherokee.

  “Was it true?” Dave gripped the steering wheel, his knuckles white. “Or were you just drunk and . . . I don’t know . . . spouting shit to keep the B’s from killing each other?”

  He wouldn’t look at me, but his voice begged me to give him an answer he could live with.

  I pushed my hands under my thighs and my head back against the headrest. “You know the answer, Dave. Don’t make me lie to you any more than I have.”

  He released the wheel and rubbed his hands against his face, then against his jeans. He didn’t know it, but The Frown had taught me well. He was wiping me away.

  “You . . . you’ve been lying to me since we met?” He banged the steering wheel with his fist, then looked out his window, still unable to look at me. “You’ve never even trusted me with your real name?” His voice came close to cracking. He cleared his throat to cover.

  I gave him a minute, then talked like I was trying to get a stray dog to come to my outstretched fingers. “That was to protect my folks as well as me. You don’t know what people did to my dad in Alaska. Our neighbors burned our house to the ground. The house Dad built. The house where my mother died. Where I was born. Dad forced out of his job. He had to change his last name to get another one.”

  “Because you murdered a little kid.” Dave stumbled on the word “murdered,” almost whispering it, like he was showing porn to a priest.

  “I was nine years old.”

  Dave leaned his head back and stared at the car’s sunroof. I didn’t say anything.

  “But you did it on purpose, right?” Dave voice was defeated.

  I wanted to explain it all to Dave, how it had been about the glove, that it was an accident. But if I did that, and he supported me, he’d be cut off from the world he’d known. He’d become an outcast along with me. The hate meant for me would overflow onto him, like it would to Carrie and Dad.

  Dave wasn’t strong enough to fight this and he didn’t deserve to have to.

  “Yes, I did it on purpose.” No apology. No expla-nation.

  “You were in jail before you came here.”

  I waited a beat.

  “Sort of. It’s complicated. It’s a mental hospital ward. But it was a lockdown ward for violent juvenile offenders. I was committed there. I couldn’t leave until the court let me.”

  Dave looked straight ahead. Away from me. Down the road. “I don’t hate you. I don’t. I’ve loved you like a brother. But . . . I’ve turned it upside down and inside out. And I know that . . .” Dave stopped. His hurt had sound and texture.

  “I guess you’re, like, rehabilitated or something now.” He stopped again. Sighed. “But I can’t be the best friend of a murderer.”

  Another awkward pause.

  He rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. “I don’t think you’re some kind of crazed killer. But I can’t chase the picture of you burning a little kid out of my head. I can’t look at you without seeing that picture.”

  “I get that,” I said.

  Dave closed his eyes like he was in pain. I wondered if arguing with him, acting like an asshole would have let him off the hook easier. All I’d left him with was sad and it stripped him raw. If I were a real friend, I’d pick a fight so he could push the sad out and let the mad fill up the hole. But I was too worn-out right now to fight.

  “Just so you know,” Dave said. “Jay ran his mouth. He called Lindsey. She’s, like, hysterical. Brandon told everyone at church and there’s trouble. I’m not going to be part of the trouble. But I can’t hang with you anymore, either.”

  “You were cool to tell me face-to-face. Thanks for that.”

  Dave cranked the ignition. “I have to go.”

  I got out and walked to the house without look-ing back.

  Carrie drove me to school Monday and I arrived to see an assistant principal spraying the interior of my locker with a fire extinguisher. Furious, his face was red all the way into his receding hairline. I could see my papers and notebooks were burned; the books were scorched, then ruined with foam. Atop the whole mess, there was a partially melted plastic doll. The AP slammed the locker door and BABY BURNER scrawled across it in heavy black marker made the whole thing clear to the slightly stupid among the crowd.

  “My off
ice, Wade — now!” the AP barked. “The rest of you, get out of my sight. Get to your classrooms and learn something.”

  The AP parked me in his office and left. When he came back, he waved me into the conference room. The principal, Ms. Martin; Coach Redmon; Dr. Eastland, the superintendent of the district; and a guy in a suit were there.

  “Sit down, Wade,” Dr. Eastland said. “We’ve called your stepmother and father and they’re on the way.”

  Dr. Eastland, Coach, and the Suit talked in low voices for a bit and then openly about school-board elections until Carrie and Dad arrived. Everyone was introduced and seated.

  Coach Redmon started. “Wade, your relay teammates came to me yesterday afternoon. They’ve refused to swim in the Bi-District meet if you’re on the relay team.” Coach looked at me as if he’d hoped he’d said enough. I wasn’t going to make it as easy for him as I had for Dave. I stared at him.

  Coach cleared his throat and continued. “The team realizes that you won that event for them and would probably do it again, but they also realize that you’ll be getting scholarship offers from colleges later for swimming. They don’t want to support you in that kind of reward.”

  I always thought it was just the lane and me out there, but I was wrong.

  “Are you throwing me off the team?”

  Coach looked at the principal and then Dr. Eastland rather than at me. “The boys have their parents’ support.”

  Carrie moved forward in her seat. Dad put his hand on her shoulder. I guess he knew when the battle was already lost. Dad and I exchanged a glance.

  I looked at the guy in the suit. “He’s a lawyer, right?”

  Nothing. Asked and answered.

  “You can’t throw me off without threat of a lawsuit my parents might win. So you want me to make it easy.”

  “Wade,” Coach said. He closed his eyes and sighed. When he opened his eyes he stared at the tabletop. “If you swim, you’ll be the only member of the team.”

  I thought back to when Coach Tulling had called me a whole different kind of fish. Well, I wasn’t a fish anymore. I’d never swim again.

  “Coach, keep your team. I won’t be back to the pool.”