by John Goode
“Don’t lie,” he roared, sounding like he was on the verge of crying. “You did this, so own it.”
I marshaled every ounce of strength I had and pushed back, kicking the chair out from under me as I stumbled back. I glared at him, both my hands balled into fists, ready to fight him if I had to. “What do you want me to say? I posted it? Fine! I did, but he deserved it!”
That was the exact moment I saw Kyle Stilleno move from disliking me to outright hatred. I can’t explain it, but there was something in his eyes that went dark, and I knew I was no longer a human being to him. I was something much, much smaller than that.
“He deserved that? He deserved the top of his head blown off because he couldn’t bear to come to school? His mother deserved to find brain matter falling from the ceiling because you thought he deserved it? Tell me, Jeremy, what does someone do to deserve this?”
His words painted an image that made me queasy again, and I felt my empty stomach do a barrel roll as I pushed past the feeling. “I didn’t mean for him to do that!” I tried to reason. “He was an asshole! He picked on both of us! You know that!” He had to know that. Everyone had seen Kelly push Kyle down in the quad, and there were stories that Kyle and he had a literal throwdown in the principal’s office. How could he not see it?
“So you decided to bully him?” he asked me, looking like he was ready to kill me.
“That was payback,” I shot back.
“Well, congratulations,” he said, clenching his own fists. “You sure won that one.” I felt sick again but refused to acknowledge it. “So let me see if I got this straight. If Kelly had bullied you to the point of suicide, then he would have been the bad guy, and you would have been the poor, helpless victim. But you bully him, and he kills himself, and it still isn’t your fault?”
I said nothing.
“You were no better than him. No, you were worse, because you know what it feels like to be picked on. You know firsthand what being singled out to be tortured feels like, and you still chose to do it to someone else. He was gay, you asshole! He was gay, and you bullied him.”
He grabbed one of the photos and forced me to look at it. “Well, take a good look, Jeremy, because this is what you did. And you can take these pictures, tear them into shreds, and light them on fire. But you will never get these images out of your mind. This is what you have to live with, Jeremy. You caused someone to kill himself. You.”
I closed my eyes, but the image still hovered there in the darkness, taunting me.
He began to walk up the stairs. “Have fun living with that. By the way, you asked if I would have ever gone out with you if you asked. The answer is ‘No.’ I don’t date bullies.”
As soon as he walked away, I broke down and began to cry.
SHERIFF ROGERS
THERE ARE a lot of reasons to become a police officer.
Some guys do it for the power it gives them; others like the thought of protecting people in general. I’ve heard just about every reason under the sun since I graduated from the academy, but in all that time, not one person ever said they became a cop to kill teenagers.
And yet that was what I was about to do.
Jim Kelly’s voice crackled in my ear. “I got eyes on the campus, boss.”
He had served two tours in the Army and could hit the wings off a mosquito at a thousand yards without blinking. He was the best shot within five hundred miles, so when we found the money in the budget for a Remington 700, he was the only person I allowed to take it home to practice with. I vividly remember watching him pack it up and giving a silent prayer we never had to use it.
Thanks again, God.
“Roger that. Stand by,” I said back, trying to shake those feelings out of my head. I didn’t have time for this kind of hesitation. I’d called this play; now I needed to run it before someone got hurt.
Mr. Raymond was talking to a couple of his teachers, looking like he was as close to falling over from a heart attack as the rest of us. It didn’t help that I had no love for this man already. Walking over to him, I said as uncurtly as possible, “I need you to call for a position check.”
From the look on his face, I could tell I was about as curt as I ever had been with him. “Very well. Do you have the remote set up?”
Foster High had a pretty expensive security system, about the only good thing that had come from a series of random shootings across the country. The teachers were trained to respond to a siren system to communicate. Two blasts meant they were in lockdown; three would mean all clear. One was the signal for them to say if their position was clear or not. We had set up a remote system so we could communicate outside the office. Again, another piece of hardware I had hoped never to use.
Raymond gave one siren call and waited.
There were buttons in each classroom. If the teachers were able, they would push their button to indicate they were in a safe zone. A diagram of the school was being displayed on my laptop. One by one the rooms began lighting up. Each light meant another safe zone, another place I could evacuate right now.
Each light meant the odds of me losing my daughter dwindled.
Stop, do not go there. Stow that shit and focus.
After two minutes the diagram was full of lights. There was only one place still dark—the library.
I asked Raymond, “We have any idea what was going on in the library today?”
He began to shake his head and then paused.
“What? What’s in there?” I prompted him.
“Fucking Stilleno and his club,” he answered.
Goddammit.
Turning away, I said quietly into my mic, “Okay, Jim, our target is in the library, East campus.”
About thirty seconds later, he answered. “Roger that. I have eyes on the library. Not a lot of access from where I am.”
I glanced over at the digital school on my computer. “Move over by East Street. There is a bank of windows there.”
“Eagle one is on the move.”
I couldn’t move anyone out of the school until I could see who we were dealing with. So I waited and counted down the last few minutes I had left to say I had never killed someone on duty.
JEREMY
IT’S PRETTY easy to see how I ended up here, right?
I spent a month or so watching my personal world crumble around me. Kelly’s death became a rallying point in the town, and people actually started talking about him like he had been a freaking saint when he was alive. Kyle used it to get his precious gay-straight alliance pushed through, and once again he was the golden boy of Foster.
While I remained the horrible and unnameable villain.
It was a harsh downward spiral, which of course meant nothing to anyone. I became despondent, stopped going to school, stopped caring about anything. I just sat in my room and tried not to think about the images of Kelly’s corpse. One particularly bad night, I ended up finishing a bottle of something my dad had left upstairs and found out two things at the same time. One, getting drunk numbed the pain slightly and two, I was a cheap drunk. I ended up alone in my room, pondering how I had gotten here and testing for myself how much courage it took to put a gun in your mouth.
Turns out a bit more than I possessed.
It became a morbid game for me after a while, taking the gun and placing it in my mouth. At first it was like a snake, something to gingerly hold, hoping it wouldn’t bite, moving to a more relaxed tone until it became just a bad taste on my tongue. I wanted to pull the trigger, wanted to so badly. The pain, the memories, the complete and utter failure that was my life made any chance of ending it sound like a good thing.
Yet my finger refused to pull the trigger.
Weeks turned into months, and one day I woke up, and Sammy was there in my room. I hadn’t been to school in over a week, and to be honest, it had been longer than that since I had taken a shower. How she got in my house, much less my room, was a mystery, yet there she was. At first I thought she might be some kind of
delusional image brought on by my cracking mind, but I quickly dismissed that, because if I was going to imagine people in my room, she wasn’t even on the list.
“Which ghost are you?” I croaked, looking over to my nightstand for my cigarettes.
“The ghost of ‘Jesus Christ, take a fucking shower.’” She handed me a cup of coffee from Nancy’s, which I cradled like a crack addict coveted their pipe. “Seriously, man, there is ripe and there is people complaining because there might be a dead body in here.” She walked over and cracked open the small windows that looked out to the street. The sunlight was almost as unbearable as the fresh air while I sipped the coffee. I liked the dank, dreary style of my pit, and she was fucking it up.
“If I wanted the window opened, I would have opened it,” I pointed out.
She glanced back at me with a pretty upset look. “Yeah, and if I cared, I would have asked.” She began to wander around my room, looking at everything casually like it was a museum. “You look like shit, by the way.”
“So I’ve been told,” I said finally, finding the almost empty pack of Marlboros under my well-read copy of Catcher in the Rye. “You done?”
She moved the mouse on my computer and woke it up. “Make any new music lately?”
Obviously she wasn’t.
“No, I haven’t made any music; no, I haven’t been to school; no, I have not showered in a while; and yes, I am thinking about killing myself. Did I cover the rest of your questions?”
She paused and just looked at me like I was an alien.
Ignoring her, I lit the smoke and took a long drag, the nicotine chasing off the last remains of sleep. “Yeah, I said it. I’m a hot mess, and that isn’t saying anything new, so anything else?”
“Your dad was right,” she said, marveling at the train wreck that was me. “You do need help.”
Ah, and the penny finally drops.
“So this is what it takes?” I asked her, flicking my ashes onto the floor. “Eighteen years and nothing, but have a nervous breakdown and suddenly he realizes he has a son. Of course, what does he do with that knowledge? Does he actually walk the fourteen stairs down to the basement to talk to him? Of course not. Instead he calls the person who rolled over on me and told Kyle everything I did.” Her eyes narrowed in anger, so I flicked the butt at her. “Don’t glare at me. You know you did.”
She took a good ten seconds before responding. “Only you could try to frame me for outing Kelly and then claim to be the victim when I tell someone about it. You’re….” She searched for the right word but never found it. “Fuck this. Enjoy your stink, Jeremy. It’s the only thing that will stay with you as you get older.”
She began to walk up the steps and out of my life for good.
I heard a voice call out to her. “Wait.” She paused and looked back down the stairs at me. I looked back, confused, not sure who had said that. Again I heard the voice. “Please don’t go. I don’t… I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.”
She took a few steps back down the steps as I tried to figure out who was talking. “I just sit down here, and all I can see is Kelly, and I ask myself what did he really do to deserve that, and I don’t have an answer. And then I ask, if he didn’t deserve to die, do I?”
She looked shocked and shook her head. “Jeremy, stop.”
I was about to ask her what she was talking about when I saw it.
There was a gun in my hand, and it was pointed at my head.
“Jeremy, put the gun down,” she said carefully, like I was holding a bottle of nitroglycerin, and if she shouted, it would go off. It took me a second to realize it was me and not the gun she was afraid would go off.
“Why?” I asked her. “Who would care? My dad would be happy he didn’t have another mouth to feed. I was horrible to you, so you wouldn’t. Everyone in this town either hates me or wishes I was dead. I mean, be honest with me, Sammy. Who would care?”
“I would,” she said, sounding like she was going to start crying.
“No, you’d feel guilty, but you wouldn’t care. We haven’t talked since the party, and even then I was a dick. You’d feel bad because another human being killed himself, but I mean, who would care if I was gone as a person? Who would miss me?”
She said nothing, which was an answer in itself.
“See, we’re all told we are special, unique people, but that’s crap. We are all the same stupid, self-centered pig of a person and only care about what we want. We wallow around pretending to be more than we are, but in the end, what’s the difference between a pack of wild animals fighting for the last scrap of food and a bunch of fat people fighting over a waffle iron at Walmart during Christmas? In the end, we all only care about what we want and are willing to do anything to get it.” I took a pause as my own words seemed to seep in. “Even cause someone to kill himself.”
Sammy took another step toward me and sat down slowly on the bed. “Jeremy, put the gun down. It’s not that bad.”
I gave her a hard look.
“Okay, it might be that bad, but we can fix it,” she amended. Holding her hand out, she suggested, “Let me help you fix it.”
I hadn’t even realized I was crying as I handed the gun over to her. She put it down and pulled me into a hug. I broke down as I hugged her back. I had cried a lot since Kyle threw those pictures in my face, but this was the first time I really let it all go. I just held on to her and wailed.
“I would miss you,” she said, whispering into my ear.
“Thank you,” I said between sobs, grateful I had at least one person in the world.
So, yeah, after that you kinda know. Sammy said she had asked Kyle if it was okay for her to bring anyone to the meeting, and he had said he didn’t care. I kept pushing her to ask about me specifically, but she said it was okay and that I should go. That I needed people to talk to, and that was what the alliance was all about.
It sounded more to me like she knew if she had asked, Kyle would have said no.
That Monday was the first time I’d been to school in almost two weeks. My father had talked to the school and seemed to convince them that I had been out on a perfectly normal medical problem and was coming back. In all my first days of class, I had never been as nervous as I was that day. I walked around campus expecting someone to see me and let out a scream as they ran away. Either that or just beat the shit out of me for good measure.
Instead, I was ignored.
It was like I was invisible, and I had to say, it was kind of cool. I gathered all the work I had missed in the past weeks, trying not to stress over walking into that meeting. Sammy met me outside the library as I paced up a storm, finishing my smoke down to the filter.
“Calm down,” she said, giving me a warm smile. “It’s going to be okay.”
“You don’t know that,” I said, rubbing the butt out under my boot.
“I have faith.” I looked over at her, and she burst out laughing. “Sue me, I don’t do Pollyanna that well.”
“Pollyanna if she was raised by the Addams Family,” I muttered back.
She paused and gave me a huge smile. “That might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“How sad is that?” I remarked, getting nervous all over again.
She must have noticed because she put one hand on the library door. “You ready?” I shook my head. “Too late now,” she said, pulling the door open and walking in.
I took a deep breath and thought about just turning around and running back home. Instead, I followed her in and readied myself. As I walked in, I could hear Kyle’s voice.
“No one is turned away.”
He saw me and froze in place. I saw the same look in his eyes that he had when he’d thrown the photos at me. I knew in that instant this was a mistake. “Get the fuck out,” he ordered. “Don’t stop. Turn around and get out.”
I could feel something sour in my stomach as everyone turned to look at me.
“Kyle,” Sammy tried to explain. “He�
��s sorry and wants to—”
That was as far as she got.
He came rushing at us. I really thought he was going to swing at me. “Sorry? You’re sorry? Oh well, then that makes it better, doesn’t it? It doesn’t matter what you did as long as you say sorry at the end. Is that how it works?”
He was talking to me, but my mouth refused to work. My heart was exploding in my chest, and I felt myself begin to shiver in a cold sweat. “I-I just wanted….” Between you and me, I had no idea what I was going to say I was sorry for and will now never know.
“I don’t care what you wanted, you dick. I mean, you didn’t care what he thought, right? So why should anyone give a flying fuck what you want?”
We both knew he was talking about Kelly.
The teacher, the weird one who liked cats, came up behind Kyle. “Kyle.” He ignored her, so she asked a little more forcefully. “Kyle, what’s going on?”
He never stopped staring at me. “Jeremy was leaving.”
Sammy’s voice sounded really pissed. “I thought anyone could be here. Wasn’t that what you were just saying?”
Kyle turned to gape at her. “Really? You want him to stay?” Before she could answer, he looked back to me. “Sure, he can stay. He can stay as long as he wants. As soon as he tells everyone what he did.” I heard people gasp all around me. “So go for it, Jeremy. Share with the rest of the class, and you can have a seat anywhere you want.”
I had never been so close to someone who hated me so much. I was unprepared for how unpleasant it was to see such raw emotion radiating off of someone like that and not flinch. Time began to slow, and I could see everyone looking at me with varying stages of confusion on their face. I looked back at Kyle and pleaded under my breath, “Please don’t do this.”
If he heard me, he didn’t show it. “Leave, or I will tell them what you did.”
There was a time when I would have argued with him. A time when I possessed enough arrogance to stand and shout back at him. I had admired this guy from afar for so long, but standing here, inches from him threatening me, I couldn’t honestly find a thing about him that I found appealing. Did I do this? Did I make this Kyle when I killed Kelly?
