What We Kill

by Howard Odentz

  Barry’s been itching for revenge ever since.

  Now, Anders looks like he’s holding a fistful of Barry’s face, and Barry’s eyes are burning with deadly fire surrounded by spongy meat.

  Shit. Anders really has done a number on him. What’s worse, it looks like Anders isn’t finished. He has his bunched up knuckles held high like he’s going to rain down on Barry’s head again until the rest of his face slips off, too.

  “Anders,” screams Marcy and rushes forward before I can stop her. She grabs onto his arm, like Myers grabbed onto hers while we were still in the Coles’ kitchen and she was about to slap Anders silly.

  That simple act—Marcy and Anders together at The Stumps, with me not far behind, and her grabbing onto Anders’ arm, is enough to suck the wind out of all the spectators.

  A deafening hush falls over everyone.

  All we can hear is Barry Kupperman breathing and hissing, and spitting a bloody mash onto the ground that may or may not have teeth in it mixed with snot. Barry’s chest heaves up and down as Anders’ bloody fist is raised high and Marcy hangs on.

  Finally, Barry spits again, falls back on both knees, and starts laughing. He slaps the ground, guffawing with his mouth open and blood dripping down his chin. “Now that,” he laughs as he gestures towards the two of them. “That makes perfect sense.”

  Barry keeps laughing harder and harder until a couple of other people in the circle start laughing, too, but I can’t tell if they’re laughing because they think laughing makes them sound cool, or if they’re laughing because they’re scared and don’t know what else they’re supposed to do.

  “Screw you, Kupperman,” Anders spits out, then wrenches his tightened fist away from Marcy with such force that she almost topples over.

  “Anders,” she cries again. “Stop.”

  “Screw you, too,” he growls at Marcy, then turns to me. Only then do I see his full face and realize that the guy I knew yesterday—the one I knew a week ago, a month ago, last year or even ten years ago—has changed as surely as if he was drawn with a pencil and someone took a nubby pink eraser and rubbed away the good parts.

  My friend is gone. Whoever this person is in front of me, broken and bloodied, with anger seeping out of his pores, he’s not the Anders I know.

  He’s broken.

  I think we all are.

  33

  “LOOK AT ALL THE pretty colors,” I hear a voice say, and my stomach falls to the very soles of my feet. “Wowee.”

  Anders, with anger streaming out of his body, pulls his eyes from me and gawks at the strangest thing I have ever seen, even stranger than the four of us waking up this morning in Prince Richard’s Maze.

  It’s Myers.

  At The Stumps.

  His bad eye is covered in my coconut pirate patch and his other eye, so big and dark and round, makes him look like a cartoon instead of a real, live person.

  “Look,” Myers says again and giggles. “There’s red all over Kupper-nose and there’s red on the ground and there’s red all over Anders’ fists . . . and . . . and . . .” Myers looks up at the sky and twirls around and around in a circle. “Look at the blue.” A gust of wind shoots through the trees and a pile of leaves flies off in a dozen different directions.

  “Myers,” I hiss at him. Is he out of his mind? Is he as ‘cray-cray’ in the way Penny Fisk said that Anders was cray-cray?

  Myers stops spinning, wobbles a little, then falls to the ground and begins rolling around in the middle of all the dead things. “Pinks and purples and yellows,” he sings as he flops this way and that, scooping up great piles of leaves and throwing them in the air. “Browns and oranges and bloody, bloody reds.”

  “What the hell?” Barry Kupperman laughs, although he should be crying as his face turns all shades of puffy. “He’s wasted out of his mind.”

  A bunch of people begin laughing and the circle starts to break apart.

  “What a freak,” someone chuckles.

  “Damn weirdo,” snorts another, and more laugh.

  Still a third says, “Fly high, man. I wish I had me some of that.”

  And all the time that they’re talking I’m feeling this incredible sense of deja-vu, like everything that is happening has happened before and not all that long ago. I remember being in the woods, and I remember Myers there with me, along with Anders and Marcy, and I remember a sinking feeling that something bad is happening but I can’t control any of it.

  “Myers,” I hiss again as Barry Kupperman laughs some more.

  Anders suddenly clenches his fists and whirls around. Bloody Barry Kupperman, with the big nose, who has nurtured an Anders grudge since the tenth grade, sits on the ground, snorting and wheezing and laughing his ass off. What’s more, I’m fairly certain a messed up Myers is the only thing keeping Barry from popping his thumb into his mouth and crying for his mommy.

  “Shut up,” Anders barks at him.

  “Anders, it’s over,” I say as calmly as I can.

  Marcy pushes past Anders, goes to Myers, and kneels on the ground. She looks so lost and afraid, that my heart breaks inside my chest. “Robbie?” she whispers. “Robbie, are you okay?”

  “Of course he’s not okay,” Anders snaps, still bristling at the sight of Barry Kupperman laughing away, blood pouring down his face and coloring the top of his tee-shirt.

  “Jesus Christ, Anders,” I say. “What’s Myers on?”

  Suddenly, my eyes grow wide. Something crucial has finally clawed its way to the surface of my brain and has started broadcasting in the same amount of Technicolor that Myers is probably imagining inside his addled brain.

  We were drugged last night. All of us.

  Now, somehow, Myers is having a flashback or something. He’s drugged again, and he’s not going to remember any of this like none of us remember any of last night.

  “Hey,” I snap at Barry Kupperman, not even a little like the meek Weston Kahn who would never dream of showing up at The Stumps. Barry, still giggling, wipes his sleeve across his bloody face and tries to stand, but wobbles because his head has almost been bashed in.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Barry says.

  I take a step forward, Anders now at my side. I don’t know if I look scary or not. I’ve never looked scary before. I’ve looked fat, and I’ve looked doughy, but scary has never been a look I’ve ever perfected. Still, Barry Kupperman flinches a little, like I might hit him every bit as hard as Anders hit him, and I’ll make him hurt as much as Anders made him hurt.

  In his mind, I may very well make him bleed even more.

  “What?” he says.

  I lick my lips. “Were we here last night?”

  Kupperman gets a weird look on his face like I’ve asked him a monumentally stupid question. “What?” he says again. “Like you don’t know?”

  “Dammit, Barry,” I snap. “Did you see us here last night or not?”

  “Shit,” says Barry. “Everyone saw you here last night.” He raises his hand and points a shaky finger at the four of us. There’s blood dripping from it because he’s used his hand to wipe the gore away from his face. “The four of you and your friends.”

  Anders’ head tilts sideways.

  Marcy looks up at Barry while Myers continues to blow spit bubbles like a toddler.

  I squint my eyes.

  “You were fucking stoned shitless,” says Barry. “You all were out of your fucking minds.”

  34

  FOR A FEW SECONDS that seem to last forever, we all stare at Barry. His words are both fantasy and reality. They’re fantasy because he seems to be talking about something that happened in a barely-remembered dream. They’re reality because I’m absolutely positive he’s telling the truth.

  After what feels like a lifetime Marcy stands and walks over to An
ders.

  She holds her palm out.

  She doesn’t say anything.

  She doesn’t have to.

  Anders stares at her outstretched hand but never at her. A couple of tense moments tick by before he quietly reaches into his pocket and pulls out her car keys. Half out of embarrassment and half out of feigned indifference, he drops them into her palm. Then he takes a giant step backwards and we both watch as she goes back to Myers, somehow gets him to stand, and leads him out of the woods.

  There are a few people still left who saw Barry and Anders fight. This enormous girl named Val Buenavista, who looks like she’ll someday win Olympic gold for dead-lifting free weights, is sitting with Kurt LaPierre and Ebon Ross on a log, passing a bottle of something really disgusting like green apple vodka between them. They are mostly ignoring us and bloody Barry.

  Theo Andropolous and Mario Fragga are behind a tree, leaning up against each other. They’re both on the baseball team and both out of the closet since puberty. No one bats an eye over their overt displays of public affection. People don’t care about stuff like that.

  What’s making me a little queasy is that Theo and Mario are making out after watching one jock beat the crap out of another. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t care that they’re making out. I think I care more about mixing violence with sex.

  For a moment, my thoughts go back to Covington Circle and a certain doctor who probably liked that disturbing blend, too.

  Anders hunkers down on his haunches and begins poking at the carpet of leaves on the ground. I just stare at Barry until he opens his mouth and starts talking.

  This is what he says.

  Last night, around ten or so, Anders, Marcy, Myers, and I show up at The Stumps. We aren’t alone. There’s this hot girl that nobody knows hanging all over Anders, trying her best to crawl inside his pants. Barry says she looked like she’s from Springfield, or Holyoke, or maybe even some of the bleaker parts of East Meadowfield.

  We’re also joined by two guys who are about a year older than us. They’re wasted, too, but in a normal way, if anyone can be wasted in a normal way. Neither of them is nearly as close to the moon as the rest of us.

  The hot girl is dancing and grinding around Anders and one of the guys is pawing at Marcy like she’s a piece of meat.

  Lots of The Stumps crowd thinks that Marcy having a guy all over her is pretty interesting, but not interesting enough to care too much.

  As for me, Barry tells me that I only hang out in the trees, nursing a beer. Myers, on the other hand, is being all weird and crap, not much different than a little while ago. Mostly, people understand that he’s tripping out on something and leave him alone.

  However, it’s a little bit of a novelty that Anders Stephenson and his pet freaks decide to crash the popular crowd’s hangout wasted, so nobody starts anything with us. We’re not worth the time. We’re more like mild entertainment.

  Kupperman says that the girl with Anders starts getting all pissy. Anders doesn’t seem to want anything to do with her. She ultimately ditches him and the rest of us and starts climbing over this older dude who’s wearing a hoody and circling the fringes, but never getting too close.

  Older people at The Stumps is nothing new. They’re only looking to party like everyone else.

  Meanwhile, the dude with Marcy starts looking really cozy, so more people are taking interest but not enough to do anything about it.

  Mostly, they think the whole thing is sort of funny.

  Finally, we all leave, but Barry says it’s more like we’re led away because we’re too shitfaced to wander The Stumps by ourselves.

  “That’s all I got,” says Kupperman as he pinches his nose and holds his head back. Anders has really done a number on him. I don’t know why, but it seems like my best friend is all about blood, blood, and more blood.

  “Yo,” says Val Buenavista after Barry spills his guts. She heaves her bulk off of the log she’s sitting on. Val’s holding the neck of the bottle she’s been sharing in one hand and her phone in the other. “Last night, when you guys were all wasted and shit, I thought it was funny,” she slurs as she takes a step forward and holds her phone out to Anders without looking at me. I’m dirt to her, or less than dirt.

  “So?” mutters Anders.

  “So I recorded some of it,” she says. “I was gonna post it online. Wanna see?”

  35

  THIS IS WHAT IT must feel like to die. You float up and out of your body, hovering above everything, but you can still see what’s going on. In the little square window of Val’s phone is my life from last night. Anders and I drift above it all, fascinated and confused, and probably a dozen other adjectives that can’t come close to describe the insanity that we’re seeing.

  When Val recorded us, she didn’t hold up her phone to advertise to everyone what she was doing. The picture in the video she shot is dark and grainy, and I can tell that she was holding her hand down when she took it, so we’re all sideways.

  Everything is sideways.

  “Look at Master Baiter,” says one of the guys that supposedly came with us. “He’s a trip, dude. For sure.” The guy isn’t black, but he has an afro. People from Meadowfield don’t have afro’s—even the black kids. They straighten their hair or braid it, but never an afro. Our town is too country-club for that.

  Myers slowly twirls as he looks up into the night sky. “They’re out there,” he keeps saying over and over again, every once in a while grabbing at empty air with his outstretched fingers. If I had to guess, I’d say there isn’t the teeniest part of him that knows he’s at The Stumps or being filmed at all.

  He’s someplace else.

  The video abruptly swings to the left and pans across everyone who’s partying. There’s a barrel fire going, so every time Val points her camera in its direction, the image goes bright, and we can’t see anything.

  Up close I hear Val say, “Do you believe this shit is for real?” I don’t know who she’s talking to but I hear someone close to her say, “Wicked.”

  The thing is, what I’m seeing on her phone isn’t ‘wicked’ at all. If anything, it’s a little sick and twisted, like porn is sick and twisted but draws you in anyway.

  I reach out and steady Val’s phone in Anders’s hand as the video pans back to me. I barely recognize myself. Last year, I would have filled up the screen. This year I’m only half filling up the screen. I’m in the trees, in the background, and I’m holding a beer. I don’t know what’s more strange—seeing myself as a shadow of what I used to be, holding a beer, or not remembering a single thing about either.

  Nothing on Val’s little video is familiar. Everything is happening for the first time.

  I’m jolted back to the here and now by a rapid swing of the camera. Val takes a little time with this next shot. She probably thinks this is the important part of her video—the one that’s going to get her hundreds of likes on the Internet, even if they’re only from other kids at Meadowfield High School who know Marcy Cole and think it’s funny that some dude has his hands all over her.

  He’s gross. His hair is greasy and he has really crappy skin. He looks like any number of burnouts who hang out down in Springfield under the highway with all the street kids. Frankly, he looks a little bit homeless himself. His clothes are dirty and his long, dark hair is matted to his head.

  “What are you going to do for me, Sweetness?” he purrs to Marcy as she floats on air in his arms. He’s touching her in all sorts of ways that would make most girls go ape shit, but Marcy’s just letting him.

  Everyone is half-staring at the two of them and snickering, waiting for something more interesting to happen. The suspense is probably killing them.

  “Anders?” Marcy slurs and looks like she’s struggling, but so slightly and so effortlessly, that no one would even notice that she doesn
’t want to be in the greasy guys arms at all. Anders isn’t on the screen yet, but real Anders with the phone in his hand is starting to breathe heavy. Out of the corner of my eye I can see that his nostrils are flaring and his eyes have narrowed. If anger were palpable it would be seeping out of him right now and ruining his dirty laundry.

  “He’s busy,” purrs the greasy guy on the screen, so Marcy closes her eyes and tilts her chin up to the sky like Myers.

  In the background, I hear a girl’s voice. I can’t make out her words at first, then the audio on the little video corrects. Obviously Val is trying hard to catch everything that’s going on. I guess we must be really interesting. She’s now being extra careful to film us, sideways or not.

  “Come on,” a girl’s voice says in a sultry, seductive way that comes out more sluttish than anything. “I’ll be nice. Promise.”

  “Oh my God,” Val says in the audio. “Stephenson’s going to get a hummer for sure.” Suddenly, I realize that the girl who is talking is the one that Barry Kupperman said was hanging all over Anders, like the greasy guy is hanging all over Marcy.

  “Let’s go,” the girl’s voice whines, but I can’t really see anything. The camera is pointing in all sorts of directions, but never at her.

  “I don’t wanna,” I hear Anders slur through the phone.

  Then the video goes black, and I hear a voice, loud and muffled and really close. “Put that fucking phone away or I’ll mess you up,” someone barks at Val on the video. He must be standing right in front of her. All the action is blotted out. I don’t see Anders or the girl who is talking to him. I don’t see me. Thankfully, I don’t see Marcy being fondled by the greasy guy. I don’t see anything anymore.

  On the little video, Val says, “What’s your problem, dude?”