Diary of a Witness

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  That’s when they caught me.

  It all happened fast from this point on.

  I ended up on the ground, but I’m not even sure how. And while I was rolling around on the ground, trying to get up, I felt the jacket go. It just got pulled right off me. There was nothing I could do. The ground was wet and muddy, and my jeans and shirt were getting soaked through, and it was cold. Without my jacket it was cold.

  Then I heard Will yell out loud, really howl, and I knew somebody had hurt him bad.

  That’s when we got the good news. A grown-up voice. It said, “Hey! What the hell are you boys doing?”

  All five jocks jumped over the fence and ran.

  I sat up and looked around.

  First I saw the five jocks running through the backyard on the other side of the fence. One of them had my jacket in his hand, flapping out behind him, and I could see the whole side of it had gotten soaked in the mud.

  Then I turned and saw a woman running out the back door of the house, headed in our direction. Will was sitting on the grass with his hands over his eyes. I thought he was crying. I thought he was just so upset that he was sitting in the mud, sobbing.

  Then I saw the little canister of pepper spray lying by his right leg, and I realized what must’ve happened. He must’ve tried to use it on one of the jocks. And gotten it turned around on him.

  “You boys okay?”

  The woman was helping me up. My hip was hurt from falling, but I was trying to convince her I was okay. I didn’t want more trouble. I just wanted to get to Will’s house and be safe. She tried to help Will up, but he couldn’t do it. He just sat there, huddled over, like all he could think about was the pain. Every couple of seconds a little noise would come out of him. It hurt to even watch.

  “You want me to call the police? Report this?”

  That got Will to his feet. “No, that’s okay,” he said.

  “Thanks, though. I just live down the street. We’ll just go home now. We’re fine. We just need to go home.”

  I had to lead Will all the way home. He still couldn’t hold his eyes open. He still couldn’t see.

  I stood in Will’s bathroom with him, watching him lean into the sink and run water from the tap into his eyes. At least, for a split second or two at a time. When he could bring himself to open them.

  “I’ll have to rat them out,” I said.

  “They’ll kill you.”

  “But I have to get it back. I can’t just let them keep the jacket. I can’t. I have to get it back before my mom notices it’s gone.”

  “What if they’ve already ruined it? What if you get to school Monday and find it lying in little shreds in front of your locker?”

  “Please don’t say that. It makes me sick to think about that.”

  “Well, we have to think what to do.”

  “There’s nothing to think about. I have to go to school Monday and tell the principal. She might even call the cops. They might have to look in those guys’ houses. They’re probably too smart to bring it to school.”

  “You’re taking your life into your hands.”

  “There’s nothing else I can do.”

  He didn’t say anything more then. Just turned off the tap. I helped him find his way to the couch, and then I brought him some ice from the freezer, wrapped in a dish towel. He pressed it onto his eyes with a little noise. One of those noises it hurts to listen to. We just sat there awhile, not saying anything.

  Then Will said, “I let you down.”

  “Stop it, Will.”

  “I did.”

  “There were five of them. What were you supposed to do?”

  “I told you I’d take care of things. And I totally blew it.”

  I had no idea what to say.

  The only thing that could be worse than losing my jacket was if Will took it on as one more thing he’d done wrong. Another terrible thing that was all Will’s fault.

  Just as I opened my mouth to try to talk him out of it, he said, “Could you go home now? No offense, but I just need to be alone right now.”

  “Okay, but I just—”

  He didn’t even let me finish. “Please? Don’t talk now. Just let me think about this by myself.”

  I walked out and left him like that.

  Nothing happened on the way home. They got what they wanted. They were done. They must’ve had enough victory for one day, even for them.

  I’m writing this at bedtime. I got home before my mom. If she leaves for work before I leave for school Monday, she won’t notice I’m not wearing my jacket. But that’s just one day. That’s just Monday. After that I don’t know.

  January 12th

  Monday morning, and Will didn’t come pick me up for school. I wasn’t sure whether to panic or not. I mean, after all, he only started picking me up at my house to protect the jacket. And the jacket was gone.

  Then again, I should have heard something from him. Right? All weekend? I called. I messaged. I e-mailed. But it’s like Will didn’t exist. Like I might’ve just made him up.

  I sat in my room, chewing my nails and the inside of my lip. Every now and then I’d press my fingers real lightly on my hip, just to feel how sore it was. Like I’d been doing all weekend. I think when other people fall, it doesn’t hurt them so much. I guess it’s just bruised. I just keep praying it’s something that’ll get better all on its own.

  I knew I had to go to school on my own. But I couldn’t leave until my mom left for work. Otherwise she’d notice the jacket was missing.

  Then I heard her get into the shower, and I knew this was my chance. My big window of opportunity. On my way past the bathroom I yelled, “Bye, Mom. I’m going to school.”

  I think she heard me. I heard her say something. But I don’t know what it was. I didn’t stop to listen. I just got out as fast as I could.

  Will was in his room when I got there. He didn’t even answer the door. I had to let myself in. His mom wasn’t around, either. His mom was never around. The only time I ever saw her was that night at the hospital. And I just sort of saw her hurry by. She never actually said anything to me. I wondered if she’d gone back to L.A. and left Will on his own. If she had, he wouldn’t have said anything anyway.

  Will was standing in front of the mirror, looking at himself. Just standing there for the longest time. It was weird. He looked different. He was too calm. And he was wearing really baggy jeans. Nothing like he’d ever worn before. Like he took them from his father’s closet and made them fit with a tight belt.

  I sat on the edge of his bed and watched him watch himself.

  “What are you doing here?” he said.

  “That’s a strange question. We always walk to school together.”

  “Not today.”

  He just stood there some more. He turned sideways to the mirror and looked at himself that way, too.

  I looked down at the rug by his bed, and something caught my eye. A hacksaw and some shiny metal shavings. Like he’d been sawing through metal, right there in his room. No newspapers, no drop cloth, just right on the carpet. Next to that was a thin metal tube. Well, narrow, I mean. It was made out of thick metal. I picked it up. You could tell which end had been sawed. The other end was smooth, and it had a smooth bump of metal sticking up right at the end. A little bump, like … It took me a second to think what it reminded me of.

  I looked up to see him looking at me.

  That’s when it hit me. Like the barrel of a gun. I looked across the room, and there was his father’s gun rack. Broken into, moved up from the basement. The two deer rifles were still there. But the shotgun was missing.

  The whole thing got so clear and so real that the world backed off and started feeling like a dream. I could feel my heart pound, and everything else was far off. Like the world switched to black-and-white and static.

  “Don’t follow me,” he said. “Think up a reason you’re late. Make it a good one, so they know you weren’t in on this. Give me at least an hour. Do
n’t be anywhere near the school for an hour.”

  “You promised, Will.”

  “This is the best thing for everybody. Believe me.” He patted me on the shoulder before he walked out.

  Maybe I should have stopped him. Tackled him or something. Sat on him until he listened to reason. But I didn’t think he ever would. And besides, I was afraid of him. I was too scared to try to stop him myself. It had gone too far for that. It was beyond my control now. Everybody’s control.

  I grabbed for the phone.

  Dialed 911.

  This time I was smart. I told them the exact nature of the emergency. Right away. I said, “There’s a boy named Will Manson, and he goes to the high school, and he’s on his way there now, and he has a sawed-off shotgun hidden in his jeans. And if you don’t get somebody down there to stop him, five people are going to die. I don’t know if he strapped it to his leg or what, but he’s wearing baggy jeans, and this is not a joke. He’s serious. He’s really going to do this thing.”

  “Did you see the gun?” she asked. “How do you know he’s going to do this?”

  “I’m his best friend,” I said.

  Then I started to cry, and I hung up the phone.

  I ran almost all the way to school. Kind of walking-running, walking-running. As fast as I could make myself go. I don’t know what to write about what I was thinking. Because, really, I don’t know if I was thinking anything at all. It’s like a switch in my brain was turned off. I just put all my energy into going fast.

  Well, that’s not entirely true. I did have one thought. I thought about what Uncle Max said, about how I would feel if I didn’t do enough soon enough. But it was a kind of numb thought. I don’t know how else to describe it. It hit my brain and felt cold, like ice, and then I couldn’t really feel myself have the thought anymore. I kept it away by saying it wouldn’t be like that. It wouldn’t. It just couldn’t.

  When I got there, I saw two police cars and a crowd of kids. It’s like nobody was going in. They were just standing there in this big, wide half circle. Nobody was saying a word, which was alien-planet weird all in itself.

  I had to push my way through to the front, but it wasn’t easy. Usually I’m not good at that stuff. Usually I would stand there and say, Excuse me, or some lame thing like that. But this was not any other day. I just elbowed my way through. I remember being really aware of the sounds people made. Like a grunt, because I pushed somebody. Or a noise that wasn’t even a word, but you could sort of tell it meant, How rude. The only real word was, “Hey.” I just kept pushing. My eyes were telling me the crowd was only about ten or a dozen kids deep, but it seemed like I just kept pushing. It seemed to go too slow. It felt like one of those dreams where the monster is after you but your feet are just so heavy. You feel like molasses, creeping along. Just when you want to go fastest, it stops working.

  Just before I pushed through the front row, I heard it again in my head. Uncle Max’s voice saying, “… if it turns out you didn’t do enough soon enough …”

  Will was lying facedown, flat out on the concrete sidewalk in front of the school, his legs all splayed out in those weirdly baggy jeans. Two of the policemen had their guns drawn and pointed at him, even though he was down on his face and his hands were cuffed behind his back.

  All these thoughts came into my head at once.

  I wondered how they knew which one was Will Manson. I wondered if they called ahead to the principal and made her stand outside or look out the window and tell them which one he was.

  Then I thought he looked really powerless, flat out on the ground like that. Handcuffed. And I thought how powerless was so exactly the opposite of what he wanted. I thought how he finally decided to take things into his own hands, and now he didn’t even have his own hands. I mean, he had them, but he couldn’t use them. So he might as well not have them at all.

  Then I realized I was the one who took his power away. Me. His very best friend. I betrayed him. Not that I really had any choice. But still. I betrayed my best friend.

  I know it sounds weird, because it was all in just that one or two seconds before he looked up at me. So it’s a lot of thinking to do in just a second or two. But it’s like all the thoughts came in flashes. They were just there, like on a screen in my brain, until something else flashed in and pushed it away. I don’t know how to explain it any better than that.

  I saw the shotgun lying a few feet away, all at an angle, like someone had kicked it out of the way.

  I saw two of the cops take Will by his cuffed arms and pull him to his feet.

  He looked up at me.

  This was one of the weirdest, most awful moments of my entire life to date. He looked right into my eyes, and I could see it hit him. I mean, it had to be me who turned him in. There was never anybody else it could have been. But I think he hadn’t really stopped to think about what happened until he looked into my eyes. He didn’t show a lot of what he was feeling, but you could see it anyway. You could see it change him. He kept a lot of it to himself, but part of it was there on his face.

  They marched him by, right in front of me, and he never once took his eyes away from my eyes. I wanted to look away, but I didn’t. I couldn’t.

  It’s a terrible thing to say, but standing outside myself like that, I saw him the way he really was. It’s like I wasn’t in my actual life or the real world, so he looked like a stranger to me. Partway. Halfway. Almost not like my best friend. So I saw him more the way a stranger would. The acne scars on his jaws, and the fresh red-and-white bumps. He had one on his nose, which is always the worst place. And the way his ears stuck out, one a little more than the other. And the way his hair went wild, like somebody had turned a big wind on it. Just for a second I thought I could see how it felt to not be able to look past all that outside stuff. Then I guess I blinked or something, and he was mostly my best friend Will again.

  Just as they marched him by in front of where I was standing, he said, “All you had to do was keep your mouth shut. One hour. They’d be gone. All five of them. All your problems would be over. You didn’t even have to do anything. Just do nothing, and all your problems would be over.”

  He wasn’t yelling at me. Really not raising his voice at all. But there was something about the way he said it. Something that let me see how big that dangerous thing in him had gotten.

  Then I wondered why it took me so long to see.

  One of the cops kind of jogged his arm, half turned him away from me, like to tell him to stop talking. Which he did.

  But as soon as he could turn back to me, he met my eyes again. This time I didn’t feel like I wanted to look away. You know why not? Because I wasn’t ashamed. Because I didn’t do anything wrong.

  They put him in the back of the squad car, the way you see in the movies and on TV. With one hand on his head. Ducking his head down so he wouldn’t hit it when they pushed him in. They slammed the door, and he just sat there in the back, looking at me through the window.

  Then I did feel bad about one thing. I felt like maybe I could have helped him more. I was his only friend. Maybe if I hadn’t pretended he wasn’t losing it. Maybe if I hadn’t pretended it would never come to this. Maybe there would’ve been something I could’ve done.

  They drove him away. I watched the car until it disappeared. I watched the street where it disappeared for a while longer. Then I couldn’t stare anymore, so I kind of broke my trance and moved again.

  That’s when I saw I’d been standing right next to Lisa Muller the whole time. And I didn’t even know it.

  She opened her mouth to say something to me. But it seemed to take a long time. I think the world was moving a lot slower by then. I had time to think that she was going to say something hateful to me, and also that I really didn’t care. When you’ve just sent your only friend off to jail, all that other stuff is small. Nobody can make you feel much of anything else for a while.

  What she said was, “Would I be dead?”

 
I didn’t quite get it. My brain was in a funny gear. I said, “Huh?”

  “If you hadn’t told on him, would I be dead right now?”

  Then I got it.

  “Oh,” I said. “No.”

  I turned to walk away. I thought I would just go home. I wanted to go home. But I only took a couple of steps. Then looked over my shoulder, and she was still standing there staring at me.

  I said, “But your boyfriend would be. And all four of his friends.”

  Then I turned to go home again, but I ran smack into a cop. Two of them were still there.

  He said, “Are you the boy who phoned this in?”

  I said, “Yes, sir.” Kind of quiet.

  “I’d like you to come with us and answer some questions.”

  Can you imagine having a cop say that to you and not feeling scared? But I didn’t feel anything. Not by then. I just said, “Am I in trouble?”

  “No, you’re our hero,” he said. “You’re just not quite done yet. We just need you to give us a little more help.”

  I told them everything, and you know what? It felt good.

  The cop I talked to was an older guy, maybe fifty or something. Kind of big and pretty heavy in the stomach, which made me like him a lot more. I didn’t figure he was looking down on me.

  I just sat there for more than an hour and told him everything. Finally, I got to tell somebody what those guys had been putting us through. I figured the more I told the truth, the better off Will would be, because I could make this guy see how much pressure Will had been under. I told him about Will’s homelife, too. All about life in the Manson family. Because part of me thought he’d still be judging Will, because I went through all the same stuff and didn’t try to hurt anybody. But I didn’t go through all the same stuff. I had my mom, and Uncle Max. What did Will have?