Suddenly I gasp. Another memory slams into me. This one is even more important than all the rest and it makes sense in so many of the right ways that I can barely breathe.
‘Put this in your mouth’ a voice whispers in my ear, and I don’t want to. I don’t want to put anything in my mouth. If I do, I’ll get fat again, and if I get fat again, I’ll surely die.
‘Put the goddamned pizza in your mouth,’ hisses the voice, but this time it’s menacing. Then the big black eyes appear, right in my face, and I know what they mean. I finally understand.
‘Do it,’ the greasy kid barks at me, his sunglasses inches away from me. ‘Do it or I’ll cut you.’
56
NO MORE LIES.
We have things to say to each other—important things.
It’s not like we’ve intentionally hidden them away. We haven’t had the words, or we haven’t remembered, or we have remembered but refused to believe our own minds.
Also, there are missing pieces that we might never understand, but we have to try. People are going to come looking for us soon, all of us, because we were at The Stumps last night with three runaways from The Bellingham School.
We don’t remember being with them. We barely remember anything. All we have is the fading image of Val Buenavista’s deleted video to prove that it’s true, along with random snapshots of memory that may or may not be real.
There’s no comfort in thinking that The Stumps kids won’t remember us from last night. Of course they will. When something bad happens, a mob mentality takes over and good people get thrown to the wolves.
When Grafton Applewhite was going to beat the fat out of me in middle school before Anders stopped him, a mob formed then, too. It didn’t matter that I had done nothing wrong. It didn’t matter that Grafton Applewhite was a douchebag. All that mattered was that people were going to see blood and mobs feed on blood.
No. There’s isn’t any comfort in thinking that everyone at The Stumps last night could care less about us or how doped up we were.
They’ll care.
As soon as they all realize that the girl on the news who blew her head off for all the world to see was hanging on Anders last night, fingers will point, and they’ll point at us.
God. We are so screwed.
At this very moment, Dr. Viktor Pavlovich’s murder madness is the most popular thing on television. His house of horrors is going to be front and center for days before focus is drawn elsewhere.
Until then, everything about Running Man is going to remain squatting like a big, fat toad, bloated with flies and hungry for more. Unfortunately, the four of us are the definition of ‘more’ and there is a swampy trail leading from Tate Cole to Calista Diamond and her friends, to Pizza Depot in Bellingham, Marcy’s kitchen, The Stumps, Prince Richard’s Maze, and for some random reason, Covington Circle.
Why are the four of us part of that trail?
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
It’s now 7:35 and the sky is dark.
The four of us are sitting in my truck in the empty parking lot of Meadowfield High School. It’s as good a place as any to talk. At least we’re not at Marcy’s house, or Anders, or Beryl’s, or under the fuckity-fuck-fuck-fuck nose of Myers’ mother.
If someone comes looking for us, we’re gone.
There is a lone streetlamp off in the distance with a neat and tidy trashcan underneath it. The pie of light that it casts makes the metal bin almost glow and it occurs to me that Meadowfield is so perfect that even our trashcans are polished and pristine.
Jesus. Look inside and you’ll still find used condoms and needles, empty beer bottles and cigarette butts. You’ll find the same things as you’ll find in East Meadowfield or Springfield, or even outside the back door of a sad little hospital up in Apple called Wang Memorial. That’s where some equally sad custodian is still scrubbing bright pink Calista brains off of the floor and the walls.
Just because a trash can looks nice on the outside doesn’t mean that what it holds is nice, too. Peel back the petals of the prettiest flower and there will still be tiny gnats eating it from the inside out.
Spiderlings.
Myers sits in the front seat this time. Anders and Marcy are sitting in the back. The darker it gets outside, the more Anders seems to mellow. The more hidden we all are, the more normal he seems to be.
Still, there’s something he has to say. There’s something we all have to say but none of us are willing to start.
Myers finally mumbles something.
“I can’t hear you,” I tell him.
He takes a deep breath. “I don’t know how to fight,” he says.
My mouth curls. “What does that have to do with anything?”
Myers sighs again and rubs the oversized sleeve of his shirt across his face. It’s dark in the car and all I can really see is his shadow, but the light from the lone streetlamp still manages to glint off his one good eye.
“No one ever taught me,” he continues. “That’s why people pick on me. There must be a target on my back or something that says, ‘Easy Pickings.’”
Marcy leans forward and puts a hand on his shoulder. “You’re not that bad,” she says. Marcy is always so good. Why does she have to be so good?
Myers sniffs again and says, “I remember trying to fight.”
My head tilts like a dog’s when it hears a high pitched noise from far away. Does a fight sound familiar? The idea that Myers was in some sort of fight seems so absurd that I want to burst out laughing. Still, beyond the absurdity is a tiny bit of truth.
His words seem right.
“You don’t fight,” says Anders flatly.
“I know, right?” continues Myers. “But there was some reason that I had to fight and I don’t remember what it is.” He gulps and taps himself. “It’s like that reason is sitting right here, you know? Right in middle of my chest, and it hurts, but I don’t know why. I just know that I had to fight or something bad was going to happen.”
“Like what?” I ask, starting to feel a little bit of a burn in my own chest because his words sound so real.
“I don’t know,” he sniffles. “I can’t remember.”
Again, there is a bubbly, burning sensation inside. It’s not the same type of burn that I feel on my arm. This one seems more fueled by emotion and mental pain.
“Try,” I prod.
Myers turns and faces in my direction. He sniffs and gulps at the same time, then takes a deep breath. “So, like, you know those pictures in the brochure back at Marcy’s house? You know the kid with the afro and the other guy?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t remember them,” he says. “I know you guys all say they were on a video that Val Buenavista had on her phone but I don’t remember that either.”
“Okay,” I say as evenly as I can. I can tell there are more words coiled in Myers’ mouth, and if I can quietly coax them out, maybe some truths will come along with them.
“I don’t remember them,” he says again. “All I remember is big black eyes.” Myers sniffs again and adjusts himself in the front seat, one leg folded under his body like we are sitting on Marcy’s bed in her disaster of a bedroom.
“The thing is, I don’t think what I’m remembering is big black eyes anymore.” I bite my lip. I know what’s coming next. Myers turns and looks in the back seat, trying to draw sympathy from Marcy and Anders, but they’re only shadows in the dark, quietly listening while struggling with their own demons.
“Then what?” I ask.
Myers licks his lips. I don’t see him do it. I hear him. “I think I’m remembering sunglasses.”
57
THIS IS WHAT MYERS tells us.
He doesn’t recall anyone coming
to the basement door at the Coles’ house last night. He doesn’t remember anything after we left his mother’s kitchen, her screams chasing us away because she thought we wanted to eat her cookies.
He doesn’t remember the pizza from Pizza Depot and he doesn’t remember eating it last night, or even today. Myers has had a double helping of Flunitrazepam. I’m surprised he remembers his own name.
He doesn’t remember Calista Diamond, the greasy guy, or the guy with the afro. It does no good to tell him that I do remember her, laughing at me, poking me in the face like a helpless marionette that’s lost its strings. That part of his memory is gone.
What he does remember is being in the woods at The Stumps, surrounded by a lot of people and not caring one bit. He says he remembers feeling naked like in one of those stress dreams you have about being bare-assed in the middle of the cafeteria, but instead of feeling ashamed, he likes the way it makes him feel—free and alive without a care in the world.
As we sit quietly in my truck, the only vehicle in the Meadowfield High School parking lot, Myers tells us that he remembers staring up at the stars in the sky and wanting to pluck them from the black expanse and cradle them in his arms.
For him, the heat of the barrel fires at The Stumps keeps coming back in an endless loop of memory that his subconscious thinks is important. All day long, he’s been thinking that he’s been kissed by the surface of the sun, which I know is crazy, but everything today has been crazy. He’s almost convinced himself that he’s touched the stars last night.
He didn’t.
None of us did.
His abstract memories are fueled by drugs. That’s what drugs do. They give you wings. They mess you up. They make you forget, or least that’s what Flunitrazepam does.
“There were animals crying,” he tells us. He remembers the sounds of sheep, just like me, but he doesn’t remember why or even how there could be sheep anywhere near Meadowfield. Then he remembers being in the woods again, and this is where Myers starts to cry a little when he talks. It’s not the kind of crying that always makes me angry. His face isn’t scrunched up into a ball. He isn’t gasping for breath or screwing his fists into his eyes to make the water stop. He’s simply crying, softly, as he tells us what happened next.
“Baaaaa,” he says. “That’s what I heard. Baaaaa. Baaaaa. Baaaaa. I don’t know where the sheep came from or why there were sheep in the first place. All I know is that I kept hearing the crying.” Marcy sniffs a little but Myers continues on. “And the laughing,” he says. “There was laughing.” I don’t tell him that I remember laughing, too. It’s the kind of laughter that sounds as though it’s coming out of a painted mouth with sharp teeth. It’s the kind of canned creepy laughter from one of those amusement park rides where they put you in a little cart on a track and send you into the dark. It’s the sort of laughter that makes you hope you won’t tinkle in your pants. “Yeah,” says Myers again. “Laughing.”
Marcy sniffs some more and says, “I remember laughing, too.”
“Oh my God, thank you,” he cries. “I thought it was just me. I thought I was the only one.”
“No,” I say, because I have the same memory. “You’re not.”
Instead of Anders chiming in and telling us that he remembers the laughter, too, he says, ‘What else?”
Myers has released so much darkness that he might crumble if he pulls out anything more, but he has to. He has to process this for himself as much as for the rest of us.
“Screaming,” he says quietly. “There was screaming, too, and there was me thinking I had to fight.” I am listening to everything Myers says, but in tandem, my thoughts are also back at The Maze, lying on my back on the forest floor, hearing the baaing and the laughing. Maybe even the screaming. “And then I think I did fight,” he says. “Not for long. Someone punched me in the stomach and then pushed fingers into my face and my eye popped out.” Myers gulps. “It popped out and whoever I was fighting went away.”
While I try to imagine someone’s hands in Myers’ face with big, fat thumbs, pressing hard into his eyes, I feel a heavy pressure on my chest, like stacks of lead weights, and the sunglasses are in my face again, along with something else.
A whisper.
“Fucking stupid sheep,” the voice says in my brain. “You do what I tell you to do, right? Because you’re a stupid sheep.”
I shake my head to try and make the voice go away but it doesn’t do any good.
“Are you okay?” Myers asks. “Weston, Are you okay?”
No. No, I’m not okay. There is someone sitting on my chest with his face so close to mine that I should remember the foul smell of his breath, but I don’t. He’s holding my arms down and I’m letting him while transfixed by his eyes. They’re huge and black and I can’t understand why they’re so big.
But I do understand.
They’re big and black because he’s wearing sunglasses.
What’s more, as his hands press my arms into the ground and I don’t struggle because I’m so drugged, he bends over until his mouth is right next to mine.
“Baaaaaa, you goddamned sheep,” he hisses. “Say it. Say you’re a sheep. Baaaaa. Baaaaa. BAAAA.” I don’t say it, though. I don’t think I can talk. I can barely even move my lips. I feel his grimy fingers pressing into my arms until he finally pushes them both above my head and pins me there with one hand. A bright light suddenly appears, and I think it’s the sun or the moon or anything bright enough to be blinding, then along with the brightness comes words that I will never forget as long as I live.
“Sheep are property. You’re mine now. And you know what we do with our sheep?” I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I barely even know my own name. “We brand them,” he hisses, and a searing pain burns into my left arm with such force that maybe I pass out.
Hopefully, I pass out.
Who would want to remember something like that?
58
“WEST?” SAYS MYERS. The light from the streetlamp is making my side of the truck glow. He can see my face. It must look awful. “Are you okay?”
“It’s nothing,” I lie.
“It’s not nothing,” he says.
“I’m fine,” I hiss at Myers, although he doesn’t deserve my anger. I don’t know where to aim it though, and he’s an easy target. He’s always been such an easy target.
“It’s just that . . . ”
“I said I’m fine, Robbie.”
Myers instantly shuts up. Calling him by his first name is a really shitty thing to do. Marcy sometimes calls him Robbie, but Marcy is sweet and she doesn’t mean anything by it, but me or Anders calling him that is barely an inch away from his fuckity-fuck-fuck-fuck of a mother flipping out and sending him to bed without any supper, or worse, washing his mouth out with soap.
She still does things like that. Christ, he’s seventeen years old and she still pulls the same old crap on him that she did when he was five.
Immediately, I regret snapping at Myers, but just like the scar that’s on my arm, the damage is done.
I now have to live with the consequences of my words, like I have to live with a half memory of a greasy escapee from The Bellingham School sitting on my chest, his nasty hair hanging down over his hatchet face, torturing me and burning me forever.
Branding me like I’m a sheep.
My nostrils flair and anger spills out of me in waves so dense and powerful that you can probably see them. Still, I don’t say anything. I don’t even know what I would say or how I would start.
I feel violated. I’ve never had this feeling before. Sure, I’ve been assaulted—verbally—by my indifferent mother or by kids at school, by anyone who ever made fun of fat people. The blubber always shielded me from the verbal stones that they hurled. Eating made the pain go away.
Now there’s nothing that c
an make this pain go away.
Not ever.
The four of us are quiet, smothered in Myers’ memories as well as our own, all different from each other yet all the same. I look out the driver’s side window and stare off in the distance at the Meadowfield High School flagpole planted in front of the circular driveway. The flag isn’t at half-mast yet. It’s only Saturday night. Come Monday morning if school is in session, which it may not be because the residents of Meadowfield will still be reeling with the amount of death found in Running Man’s house, the flag will surely be lowered halfway down the pole. It will stay like that for a long time—maybe a week or two—until someone’s parents, who are snobby and selfish enough to complain that the morbid symbolism is affecting their child’s education, will make the school raise it back up.
I wonder if Meadowfield High School will have special workshops on how to process the grief that Dr. Viktor Pavlovich caused.
I wonder if there will be armed cops at the front entrance and the exit by the library.
I wonder if metal detectors will be installed because of stupid people thinking that surgical scalpels might now get smuggled in by ugly, plain girls who are plotting to go postal on any perky, pretty cheerleaders they see.
I wonder how everything will change.
Wading in my own thoughts, I barely hear the click of the back door. The light in the cab of the truck blinks on and Anders steps out and pushes the door closed behind him.
I expect Marcy to call after him, but she doesn’t. I look through the rearview mirror and catch her shadow in the back seat. She’s not even looking at him. Her head is bowed and all I can see is the outline of her curly hair.
“What did I do?” says Myers. He’s so used to blaming himself for everything—the wrath of his mother, the cruelty of our classmates, that he naturally thinks he’s the cause.
“It’s not you,” I tell him. I try to be nice. I try to be compassionate, but I think I only sound angry—like Anders.
What We Kill Page 20
