That ship sailed years ago.
“Asshole,” whispers Marcy under her breath, and I flinch.
“Listen,” says Anders. “I need a phone number.”
As Anders continues to talk, I stare hard at the to-do list that I wrote. My stomach roils. This has to be done. This one thing is at the tippy top of that list.
Anders holds his hand up and makes a scribbling sign in the air. I take one of Marcy’s flair pens off her desk and hand it to him. It’s dark pink, but he doesn’t even look at the color. He pops the cap off, cradles the phone under his square jaw, and writes a number down on the palm of his left hand. Marcy watches him do it with a painful expression on her face that’s drizzled in sorrow. If she could cry, she would, but I don’t think she has any more tears left to give today. I don’t think she has any more tears left to give this lifetime.
Anders hangs up from Grafton Applewhite, takes a deep breath, and makes another call. This one is even harder than the first call. This time Anders has to ask a huge favor—a monumental favor. Furthermore, he can’t act like a prick when he’s doing it. Being a prick won’t work.
I hear him talking slowly to the person on the other end of the phone. He waits and listens then finally hangs up.
“Happy?” he says to the air in front of him. He still refuses to look me in the face. I don’t know what I’m feeling at the moment, other than a quickening of my heart and sweat beading up on my forehead.
“I don’t think being happy is important right now,” I tell him, and Myers moans from Marcy’s mess of a bed. I take a deep breath, fold my arms, and stare at the floor. After a moment I murmur, “It must be nice to forget.”
Thirty minutes later, still feeling clammy and rushed, the three of us sit in Marcy’s kitchen, drowning in silence. I keep staring at the glowing blue numbers on the oven clock. I want this part of our day to be over. Frankly, I want this entire day to be over, but I have a sinking suspicion that today may never end. The minutes will keep ticking on and on forever but the clock will never strike twelve.
When the doorbell rings, we all jump, even though we’ve been waiting.
“Shit,” whispers Anders, then swears again under his breath. As for me, a swarm of butterflies swirls around my insides, and I think I might actually be sick again.
“I got it,” Marcy says and slowly lowers herself off of the kitchen counter. She walks around Anders, who is sitting on the floor. He doesn’t look at her when she walks by. He doesn’t even move. I watch her leave, chewing my lip the whole time, wondering if what we’re about to do is the right thing or the wrong thing. When you’re lost, there are only so many twists and turns you can make before you have to pick one and follow it to the end.
That’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to follow one little wrinkle in our day to the end and tie it off like a surgeon ties off a vein so it won’t bleed all over the place.
The only thing is, I’m not sure blood ever really disappears for good.
45
UNLIKE THE REST of Marcy’s house, her mother’s office is pristine. I don’t understand how that one room can be so perfect, so studied, when the rest of the place is a wreck. If someone way smarter than me tried to analyze the cause, they would probably say that Marcy’s mom is as messed up as everybody else in Meadowfield, but she fakes it really well.
We all have public faces but private truths.
The thing is, a façade is just that—a façade. However, if you look behind the perfect surface, you’ll find disaster. Dr. Pavlovich is a prime example. His studied-to-perfection appearance hid madness beneath its sleek surface.
Mrs. Cole’s office is on the main floor of the house. There is a separate entrance from outside, up a flight of stone stairs. Marcy’s front lawn is a hill, with tall bushes lining those stone steps. The bushes are there so no one can see her patients come and go and mark them as messed-in-the-head.
Inside, Marcy’s mom’s office sits behind a stark, white door that we hardly ever open. In all the long years that I have been in this house, playing in the basement, crawling on the stairs, raiding the candy drawer that I now know has always been filled with bad things, I’ve only seen her mom’s perfect workspace a few times.
Marcy quietly slips through that door, and Anders and I wait. Seconds tick by while he broods, and anxiety claws at my insides until I actually start biting my nails.
“Don’t,” says Anders.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?” I ask him. I should be happy he’s talking to me at all.
“Biting your nails. It makes you look weak.”
“Oh. Okay, Kurt,” I say. Kurt is Anders’ father’s name. It rhymes with dirt and hurt, but more importantly, calling Anders by his dad’s name is just plain mean. I know he’s right, though. Biting my nails is a sign of weakness, and I’ve worked too hard at transforming myself to slip up now. I stare at my hand, alternating between holding my fingers stretched out in front of me as though I am admiring a manicure and curling them into a fist like an ape. The little half-moons on my nails where they touch the skin are big and translucent. My mother would call that a tell-tale sign of a vitamin deficiency. I’d call it a small price to pay for shedding copious amounts of fat.
Anders is right though. I do have to stop. Unfortunately, that desperate yearning to have something in my mouth to counteract the stress won’t go away, and for the first time in a long while, I crave something bad.
Chocolate, bread, macaroni and cheese—I don’t care. I want a food pacifier to quell the waves of tension washing over me.
Thankfully, the cravings rapidly recede when Marcy comes back through the door of her mother’s office followed by two people.
The first is Ebon Ross. He watched Anders and Barry Kupperman go at it this afternoon at The Stumps. Ebon has been around our whole lives, in our schools, in our classrooms, but has had a wildly different experience in Meadowfield than most of us.
Ebon’s black, surrounded by an ocean of white faces. His father is a doctor and his mom’s a lawyer, which is a surprisingly common combination in Meadowfield. They live on top of Pill Hill—High Tower Court—where all the really rich doctors live, but that still doesn’t erase what he can’t hide.
I don’t think Ebon has ever met overt racism here in town. We’re all too polite for that. I do, however, think he’s acutely aware that there’s a difference between him, the few other black kids in school, and the rest of Meadowfield. I’m pretty sure he counters the fact that he sticks out here by sticking out even more. He’s one of the smartest kids in school. He’s a top athlete. He’s been the lead in all of the school plays for the last three years, and he’s vice-president of the student body council.
No wonder he drinks.
Ebon stumbles a little when he follows Marcy. I know for a fact that he’s been nursing a bottle all day.
The other person behind him is lumbering Val Buenavista. I made Anders call her because she has something important in her pocket. Right now it’s about the most important thing in the world to us and we desperately need to see it.
“I can’t believe I’m here,” Val mutters, staring at Marcy with a look that is equal parts disdain and curiosity. “If you tell anyone I was at your house, I’ll mess you up.” Hearing a girl talk like that always makes me feel wrong. Girls are supposed to be sweet, like Marcy, not oafish bruisers like Val.
I guess it takes all types.
“Chill out,” says Ebon. He knows how to be a voice of reason when he needs to be. Just like me, Anders, Myers, and Marcy, the two of them are part of a tightly bonded clique that has existed almost their entire lives. I wonder what they would be doing if they were the ones who woke up in the middle of Prince Richard’s Maze this morning.
Would they be broken like the rest of us
? Would they ever heal?
Val pushes past Ebon and Marcy and juts her chin out at Anders. “Yo, Stephenson,” she says. “Pissed off much?” Val slurs her words. She’s been sharing a bottle with Ebon all afternoon. She’s not completely blitzed. When you’ve been stealing from your parents’ ample liquor cabinet since you were old enough to reach the good stuff, you develop a tolerance. “You beat the crap out of Kupperman something fierce.”
“I’m good,” says Anders, which is another huge lie. Marcy stares anywhere but at him. I don’t give him that luxury. Anders almost broke Barry Kupperman today in hopes that Barry would hit him back. My guess is that he wanted to be consumed with real pain instead of psychological pain. Psychological pain hurts more.
I know firsthand.
“Uh huh,” Val says. “So, like, why am I here?”
I step forward. “We wanted to see that video again. The one you took last night.” I lick my lips. “Marcy never saw it.”
“Seriously?” snorts Val. “I could have texted it to you.”
I shrug. “I never thought of that,” I lie.
Val rolls her eyes and shoves her hands deep into her triple-x man’s sweatshirt. She pulls out her phone and stares at it for a moment. A viscous glint sparks in her eyes.
“Hey, Marcy,” says Val in a voice that that has never been the least bit feminine her entire life. “You get lucky last night?”
“Shut up,” hisses Anders.
Ebon pushes Val’s shoulder, but she doesn’t budge. “Don’t be a dick, Val,” he tells her. Saying ‘don’t be a bitch’ somehow seems wrong.
“Can I see it?” I ask again.
Val stares at the phone in her man hands for a moment longer, then tosses it to me. For a millisecond, the memory of Anders’ mother tossing me her key fob and it hitting me in the chest before falling to the ground sprouts in my head, then disappears.
I’m not going to drop Val’s phone.
I can’t.
It’s way too important.
46
I WATCH THE VIDEO three times, each time trying to reach as far as I can into the depths of my psyche to pull out any memories of last night, but there are none.
Pffft. All gone.
When I can’t stare at the face of Calista Diamond any longer, or any of her friends, I hand the phone to Marcy. She only watches the video once, the whole time Val saying stupid things in the background that bounce off the top of my head and float to the ceiling.
Marcy holds out the phone to Anders, but he doesn’t move. Instead, I take it from her hand and say, “I want to see it once more.”
“Whatever,” slurs Val. Thankfully she and Ebon are both buzzed. Thankfully they are both standing in Marcy’s kitchen, two against three, not really scrutinizing me or the rest of us. Not really watching what I have to do.
The first item on my to-do list appears in front of me, superimposed across the white cabinets, and an urgency forms in my gut, pushing me to do what needs to be done.
My heart starts beating faster and little beads of sweat pop out of my forehead.
“. . . and then you smashed Kupperman’s face in,” I hear Val say to Anders, like he wasn’t there the first time. “It was wicked awesome, dude.”
Quickly, my fingers scroll through Val’s phone to see if she sent the video to anyone. Thankfully, she hasn’t. The only people who know we were at The Stumps with Calista Diamond and her friends are the ones who were there—drunk, baked, or both.
I’m sure they’ve all found reasons to forget all about us. My friends and I aren’t high enough on their popularity scale to allow any more brain space than the bare minimum.
Besides, any story that will burn through Meadowfield High School on Monday morning will be about Dr. Viktor Pavlovich, or maybe Sandra Berman, if she’s among the bodies coming out of his house. A few people will talk about Barry Kupperman’s face and how Anders Stephenson almost caved it in, but that’s a story that’s been waiting to explode for years.
No one is going to talk about the four of us showing up blitzed at The Stumps, and no one is going to be talking about the people that we were with last night. Still, I have to be sure.
As I rapidly move my fingers across the little screen, with Val Buenavista spewing copious amounts of crap out of her mouth and Ebon Ross swaying back and forth because he’s probably even more drunk than I realize, I find the little trashcan icon on the bottom of Val’s screen, close my eyes, and press it.
The video disappears, gone for good the way bad memories slip away more easily than others, because we are wired to forget the bad and cherish the good.
“That video’s messed up,” I say to Val and hand her back the phone. “Thanks for letting us see it again.”
“Whatever,” she grumbles.
Before I can allow any time for her to reach down and check out her phone, or even think about it, I say “Have you been down to Covington Circle yet?”
“Huh?”
“The murder house,” Marcy says. She knows I’m deflecting. She’s practically reading my thoughts. “Have you been down there? It’s crazy.”
“Not interested,” says Ebon. “I’m a black dude. The police will probably try to pin the murders on me. We do stuff like that, you know.”
Val snorts and raises her open palm up for Ebon to give her a high five.
“Did you?” asks Anders. He sounds dead serious. Those icy fingers stroke my back again and all of a sudden I’m acutely aware that my triangle is burning.
“That’s not funny,” says Ebon.
“It’s a little funny,” laughs Val and then starts hacking because she’s already developed a smoker’s cough at seventeen.
“Besides, Stephenson,” he snaps at Anders. “If anyone has blood on his hands, it’s you. Kupperman blood.”
I swallow. Ebon’s words sound more truthful than I care to admit, and a picture of Anders, covered head to toe in blood this morning in Prince Richard’s Maze, swims before my eyes. What’s more, the air around me starts to get heavy. That familiar uncomfortable feeling I get when guys in the locker room used to call me lard ass, or whisper about Marcy behind her back, or even slap Myers’ books out of his hands while he’s running from one class to the next, settles around me like a dragon curling around a golden horde.
I stifle the urge to stare at my feet. The space between the right and the left has become a safe haven for me. When I’m there, in that space, no one can pick on me. No one can call me names. No one can plumb the depths of my isolation and pluck at it to make it worse.
Instead of staring down, I lock eyes with Ebon and lie. “Marcy’s parents are going to be home any minute. I think you should probably go.”
“West is right,” adds Marcy.
“Sure. Fine,” snarls Val, then narrows her eyes at the three of us. “You know what? You called me. What do I get out of the deal?”
“Yeah,” says Ebon, but it comes out drunkenly slurred even for a one syllable word.
Marcy saunters out of the kitchen with Ebon and Val both staring at her as she walks, and goes to the middle of the living room where there is a huge, brown globe on a stand next to a winged-back chair. With one swift motion, she pulls a handle up from the side of the globe, and half of the world slides open to reveal a dozen or so bottles. She turns around and crosses her hands over her chest.
“Help yourself,” she says as their eyes grow wide.
“You don’t have to ask me twice,” snorts Val as she pushes Marcy aside and starts pawing at the bottles.
Minutes later they are gone and Marcy comes walking back out of her mother’s office.
“What did they take?” asks Anders, almost as if he’s normal Anders instead of messed-in-the head Anders.
“I don’t know,” Marcy says. “I think it was b
lackberry brandy.”
“Hmpf,” grumbles Anders, still sitting on the floor. “I hope they choke on it.”
47
IT’S 5:47.
Myers woke up ten minutes ago. He came to Marcy’s bedroom doorway wrapped in the semi-floral blanket that he pulled from her mattress. His skin and the blanket are almost the same faded color and I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that he’s going to be sick.
He stands there for maybe ten seconds, opening and closing his mouth like he wants to say something, but can’t find the right words. Suddenly, his jaundiced skin seems to pale. He drops the blanket and dashes to the bathroom.
Even though he slams the door behind himself, we can still hear him retching, over and over again.
I know that feeling. We all know that feeling, but now there is an explanation as to why.
I sit on the floor with Marcy’s laptop, leaning up against one of the white cabinets in the kitchen. Anders is still there, on the floor too. His face is filled with a thousand angry thoughts all at once. Marcy sits cross-legged on the counter.
“Read it again,” Marcy says to me. “Please.”
I look at Anders. He drops his head even more.
I swallow hard, then clear my throat. Marcy is talking about the second thing on my to-do list. It involves research. It took me surprisingly little time to find what I was looking for.
Shockingly little.
“Flunitrazepam,” I begin, reading from the website that seems more informative than all the rest. “Flunitrazepam is another name for Rohypnol.” I look up at Marcy. Her eyes are closed. I’m pretty sure she’s wishing she is anywhere but right here, and for the best reason of all. Rohypnol is another name for roofies. We all know what a roofie is.
Isn’t the Internet a wonderful thing?
“Keep reading,” she whispers. “Just keep reading.”
What We Kill Page 16
