“Who says I’m joking?” He takes a drag and looks out to the road below. “Nah, I’m staying around here. Figure someone will always need a mechanic, you know? Especially if everybody’s broke and driving around broken-down cars.”
“So you don’t mind this place?”
He looks at me as if he’s wondering why I’m asking. “Remember—people leave people like me alone.”
“Yeah.”
“Any more stuff going on with Staunch?” Brick asks. “I know you and the hot chick asked me all about the dirt on him not long ago.”
“Nothing going on. Nothing now.”
“You ever check out what I told you about?”
I think of the pit in the woods not far from the Staunch house. I think of the remains of the hand I found in the woods.
“Yeah. But they got rid of whatever you saw.”
“A lot to get rid of,” Brick says.
“They burned it.”
Brick goes “Hmm.”
“Hey—if I needed your help sometime, would that be cool?” I ask.
“What kind of help?”
“Just—actually, I don’t know. Just help—maybe watching my back or something like that.”
“Yeah. From who? Gus?”
“No—he’s laid off. Ever since his father attacked him with a serving spoon in front of the town. Just from other people.”
“Yeah, sure. You just tell me when.”
How about Memorial Day weekend when something big is going to happen?
“Thanks,” I tell Brick.
At least I know someone who is willing to help with no questions asked.
But Brick does surprise me with a question.
“You ever think of Lily?”
I’m not sure what to say at first. So I just tell him the truth. “Yeah. Pretty much every day.”
“Man, she was fine, wasn’t she?”
I nod.
She probably didn’t realize how fine she was.
“It’s just a mess, isn’t it?” Brick says.
“What?”
“This world.”
Maybe this is a chance for me to share some hope and inspiration with Brick. But I have no idea where to start without sounding lame.
“Yeah, it is” is all I can say.
The world is a mess. Doesn’t mean it’s God’s fault.
But it does mean that He can save us from it. And from ourselves.
I’m heading back to class when I see a tall guy walking down a hallway all alone.
I stop for a second and feel a weird sense of déjà vu.
A tall kid walking in sweatpants and a sweatshirt.
He turns to look at me, and I see what I didn’t want to see.
It’s him. It’s the guy again.
I saw him last summer at school. The same exact kid. He has a bloody neck and cheek, as if they’ve been eaten away by something.
Or shot.
I almost put my hand in front of my face, but I can’t stop looking. The guy just turns and looks at me, then he keeps walking toward the end of the hallway.
I look around me, but nobody else saw him.
I bolt down the hallway just to make sure that there’s not really some guy there who’s shot and wandering.
I go into the room at the end of the hallway; it’s dark and I quickly turn on the lights. It’s cold in here, and I know that any second he’s going to jump out and make me give him a big kiss on his missing cheek.
But no.
The room is empty and silent.
Like my head. Like my sanity.
I’m going to leave, but then I glance at the chalkboard. It’s not empty.
The writing is large.
In big, thick letters, the message is pretty clear.
Marsh killed me and killed Jocelyn and will kill Kelsey too so be careful
I look around the room again and then sneak a peek back outside the hallway. Nobody is around.
Even after everything that’s happened, I still feel like someone’s playing a prank on me.
Surprise! This whole last year has just been one big reality television show trying to freak you out!
The kid I saw …
Was that Stuart Algiers?
I’m going to ask, but I have a feeling what the answer will be.
I go to the chalkboard to wipe the message away. I touch it, expecting the chalk not to be there, but it is. It’s very real.
It takes me five minutes to erase it all.
As I’m heading out of the classroom, I see Miss Harking waiting for me in the hallway. Almost standing at attention, her narrow eyes and face judging me in an instant.
“Do you need help, Chris?”
The way she asks this isn’t like someone asking another person if they need assistance. This is more like someone who thinks the person is trying to hide something.
“No, I’m good.”
“Are you sure?”
I see her eyes staring at me with guilt and judgment.
“No. But thanks.”
I smile and then walk away.
I have to hide the fact that I want to take off in a sprint. My back feels watched by the rigid lady.
When I’m finally seated in my next class, I can’t get the message out of my head.
It’s not so much that I question whether Marsh is bad or not.
But does this mean he was the one to physically kill Jocelyn and Stuart and others?
Is he planning to do the same to me maybe? Or is he using Kelsey as bait?
This is the reason I’m not doing particularly well in my classes. It’s hard to concentrate when you’re contemplating a message a ghost sent you about how he died.
63. The Sun and the Rainfall
Things must change.
This seventeen-year-old stuck in this cabin glancing at an image of a pretty blonde on the computer screen while A Broken Frame by Depeche Mode plays.
This cabin stuck on this road stuck in this town stuck in this nightmare.
He looks at the pictures and knows he has to save her.
If it wasn’t for you don’t know what I’d do.
He breathes in and wonders about the darkness. He wonders if the light can force the darkness to go away. He wonders what doors there are to open to let the light in.
Things must change.
He’s supposed to be doing homework, but he can’t.
He’s just thinking how to save her.
What comes next?
He tries the Zippo lighter, but it refuses to ignite. He plays with the leather band he still doesn’t want to wear around his wrist. His eyes wander to the picture of himself smiling in the sunlight. Then they find the image of the road in the woods with the handwritten quote from the poem underneath.
Random pieces of an unfinished picture. The real true broken frame is me.
The rain falls on the roof, and he longs for spring and sun and light and hope.
He prays.
And deep down, he believes.
We must rearrange them.
So the song says and so he believes.
Shuffle the deck and let them suffer.
What if he’s able to open the door and bring light back into this town?
But how?
Things must change.
The Crag’s Inn is gone.
But maybe there’s another doorway. Another lock and key. Another bridge to go over or under.
Another way.
Iris isn’t there to ask. So who else can he ask?
Mr. Meiners might know.
64. What Comes Around Goes Around
“Do you know of any pl
aces around Solitary that are, like, holy places?”
Mr. Meiners glances at the doorway to the empty class, then looks back at me. “Holy?”
“You know—something opposite of haunted?”
He raises his eyebrows as he starts collecting the tests on his desk. “There’s nothing around here that seems to fit that description.”
“Anything. Like an old church or maybe an old house. Somewhere that you know good was done.”
He thinks for a minute, sticking the tests in his faded leather briefcase. “Well, they say Marsh Falls has a magical quality about it.”
Yeah, I know that. Come on.
“Okay. But anywhere else?”
“You want more than one place?”
“Yeah, sure,” I say.
I don’t know what I want.
Yeah, you do. You want the opposite of that Indian Bridge. Or what’s underneath it.
Even though he’s wearing glasses, I can see the dark rings under Mr. Meiners’s eyes. As if he hasn’t been getting enough sleep.
He’s got his bag ready, and for a second I think he’s not even going to answer me.
Which is pretty typical of what he’s done the last year or so.
“The Corner Nook.”
I don’t expect to hear this. I might have thought of many places, but the bookstore and café on the main strip of stores in downtown Solitary?
“Really? The bookstore?”
“Used to be an old general store. One of those you might see in a movie or a television show.”
I shake my head. I don’t get it.
“I know—sounds crazy, huh? But that place—the owners of that store helped more people out than probably the entire town of Solitary.”
“Let me guess,” I say, thinking I got this. “They were an elderly couple. Kind of like a Mr. and Mrs. Mother Teresa?”
“Um, no,” Mr. Meiners replied. “They were actually a couple named Joe and Sara Evans.”
Everything suddenly stops.
There’s no way.
I blink and remember the field where Jocelyn showed me her parents’ gravestones.
Joseph Charles Evans.
It can’t be the same, can it?
“They came to this town and did some great things and really made that general store almost a safe haven. They were a godly couple.”
I shake my head, and all of a sudden these things seem to pop up in my eyes, making my vision all blurry. I wipe them away quickly.
“Did Jocelyn ever tell you about them?” he asks.
And of course it’s them.
Of course.
What comes around goes around. The circle of life. The gift that keeps on giving.
All the circular clichés my silly little mind can think of go off like fireworks.
Like the fireworks I was never able to see with Jocelyn.
“She didn’t, did she?”
I shake my head. “Her parents owned that place, right?”
Mr. Meiners nods, again looking at the doorway. “The place was bought and sold—gutted, more like—after they died. About ten years ago.”
“She never told me.”
“I can understand. She didn’t know how to grieve them when she was six. So she ended up spending the rest of her life trying to find a way.”
I want to say more to him, tell him how I miss her and ask how he helped her. But as I go to say something, he shakes his head.
“Check it out sometime,” Mr. Meiners says. “Let me know what you find.”
He leads me out of the room, and I know our brief conversation is over.
For now.
65. A Brief Lull
I don’t know how these things go, these guy-girl things. ’Cause honestly I haven’t the best of luck with them.
But the apocalyptic snow doesn’t come, at least not this year. Warmer weather comes to thaw the ground, and Kelsey is there to thaw my heart.
And she continues to make me believe.
Believe there is hope in today and tomorrow.
Not in anything grand she says, but in the small things she does.
Waiting at my locker in the morning as I come to this grave of a school. Kelsey can raise the dead, because I feel alive every time I see her.
Sometimes she’ll hold my hand at the oddest and most wonderful times. For no reason except that I have a hand and she wants to take it.
This little girl that I considered a mouse in my art class is now a roaring tiger who leads me around on a leash.
March arrives, and with it comes something bigger and heavier and harder and more real.
Is this love? Is it strong enough?
I don’t know. I think so, but I don’t know and I’m not going to say it.
I don’t want to ruin this.
I don’t want to overshadow the times I make her laugh for stupid reasons. I’m not that funny, but she laughs easily and blushes even easier.
She comes to my track meets even though I tell her I’m not that into them.
But I’m into her.
And yeah, she’s into me.
And sometimes when I think of it all, I think that we’re going to make it out of here okay.
That’s when I don’t think of anything else.
The storms aren’t always raging.
Yet when they come back you realize you’ve been lulled by the warmth and the softness and the smiles.
When they come back, they seem to hurt you even more.
66. Bummer
I finally get an invitation the first week in March. It reminds me of the bad old days when I was first here and kept finding random thing after random thing in my locker. The notes. The gun. The clipping from the magazine that was once in Jocelyn’s locker, with the Robert Frost poem underneath it.
Still don’t know where that came from.
Maybe my long-lost son will show up saying he sent it to me from the future.
This time it’s a yellow note with a day, time, and directions in handwriting:
Sunday 10 a.m.
North on Sable ten minutes. Look for logging trail on left by tree cut in half. Head down it until you reach the barn.
The last word gives me goose bumps.
Barn.
I think of the place Jocelyn led me to, where she was hiding Midnight.
Did she tell them about this place? Or is it commonly known?
I know—well, I’m about 99 percent sure—that this is from Mr. Meiners.
This is the group he’s meeting with.
I crumple up the note. I know how to get to that barn without directions.
“I have some bad news,” Kelsey tells me.
This is one of the rare days she’s wearing her glasses. They’re a different pair than when I first met her, a stylish pair, and I love them on her. She wears them when she doesn’t have time to put in her contacts or the lenses are bothering her for some reason.
“You failed a test?”
I’m joking, because Kelsey is a straight-A student. She gives a mild laugh.
“We’re going to see my brother next week.”
Next week is spring break, and Kelsey had said that they might be visiting her brother at the University of South Carolina. Making a family trip out of it. She even asked if I wanted to come along, but I said no.
I mean, even if things are okay, there’s the reality of everything. Like Mom. And, well, yeah, everything else.
“That’s okay,” I say. “I’m heading to Cancun, so I’ll be busy.”
“Could you take me?”
“I’d love to. I’m riding my bike there.”
“Is that even possible?” she asks.
“Wel
l, maybe technically, but I don’t know. Either the bike or my butt would give out before we’d make it.”
This gets a pretty big laugh out of her.
“The week will go by fast. I’m going to try and get my license. Can you believe it?”
“I can’t believe you’ve been driving your motorcycle all this time without getting a ticket.”
“Do they give tickets around here?”
She shrugs, and I know she’s the last person around who’d ever get a ticket.
“I’m bummed.”
I put an arm around her and squeeze her tight. Kelsey is tall and still growing, it seems, but she has such a slender waist. Sometimes she seems so easy to break, like a long, thin glass vase sitting at the edge of a kitchen counter.
“I’m really going to miss you,” she says.
“I know. It will be tragic for everybody.”
“You’re in a weird mood today.”
“No, this is the real me. I’m just not freaking out about anything.”
“Any more word on college?”
The warning bell rings for class, so we start heading toward the classrooms. I usually walk Kelsey to her class after lunch.
“Not really,” I say, giving her a soft nudge. “And you’re not my mom.”
“Well, you need someone responsible taking care of things for you.”
“Is that a proposal?”
She smiles and says she’ll see me later, then heads into her classroom.
The thought of spring break actually bums me out now too. I didn’t want to tell her because I want her to have a fun time. But I wanted Kelsey around.
Now I’ll just have—well—
Don’t think about it.
Yeah. I don’t want to break my mood.
I know something’s going to do that for me any day now.
Any day now.
67. Action
Ever since Jocelyn showed me the group of people meeting in the woods under Marsh Falls that one day, I’ve been curious about them. I’ve thought they were some kind of weird cult that meets and passes around a bowl and mutters strange things to each other.
But that’s when I let my imagination run wild. Because the group meeting is nothing like that. They’re just people getting together to sing and share and listen to somebody give a message. Just like any other church.
Hurt: A Novel (Solitary Tales Series) Page 19
