Every Inferno

by Johanna Parkhurst

  Dr. Ben chuckled. “I’m a pediatrician. I’m just doing a stint in the ER right now to help out. My real last name is Peragena, and most kids have problems with that.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Yep. It works. So, is your aunt gonna make it? She looked pretty white.”

  JJ sighed. “I’m not the easiest person to live with. She’s a wedding photographer though, so I think she deals with worse at work.” JJ considered that for a minute. Aunt Mags never got a break. Demanding brides all day, a juvenile delinquent at home….

  “You live with her?”

  “Yeah.” JJ hoped Dr. Ben wouldn’t ask where his parents were. It was always an awkward question, because JJ hated to answer it. Most of the time he stayed silent while the other person waited for a response. He and a stubborn shrink had once stared each other down for ten minutes over that question. Finally the shrink gave up.

  Dr. Ben didn’t say anything, though. He finished up the stitches and wrapped gauze around JJ’s hand before giving him a quick lecture about the proper care of suture wounds. Aunt Maggie came back just as he was finishing up.

  “I think Frankenstein here will be fine,” Dr. Ben told her. “I’m going to have him rest here for a bit, though, just to make sure we don’t need to add more blood to his system. That work for you, Frank?”

  JJ rolled his eyes. Sometimes when adults were trying to be funny they just ended up sounding so… stupid. “Sure, Dr. Ben.”

  JJ closed his eyes again. At least he’d have a break before Maggie started yelling at him again.

  “…It’s never been easy, but this last year or so has been particularly difficult. He isn’t a bad kid, he isn’t. He’s just always into something! There was the frog incident, and he and his friends stole all of the hand sanitizer out of the front office at school, and then I caught him smoking cigarettes in the backyard. I know he’s drinking; I smell it on him from time to time. I practically have to lock him in the house these days. Last night I think he’s gone to bed, and the next thing I know he’s at the police station. I’m at my wit’s end. My brother would kill me if he knew what I was doing to his kid.”

  JJ rubbed his eyes groggily. He was on the bed at the hospital, and he had a little more feeling back in his sore hand. He could actually feel it throb now. How long had he been asleep? And was that Maggie talking about him?

  “I’m sorry to unload like this, doctor, but clearly I’m reaching the level of needing medical help. The school has tried, but their psychologist can’t even get JJ to talk to her. They just keep telling me I’m doing the right thing to keep on him at home, and they’ll keep on him at school. They keep telling me he’ll ‘straighten out’ eventually. I don’t even know what that means anymore.”

  JJ rolled his eyes. The school psychologist was an idiot, just like all the other shrinks Maggie had made him see over the years. This one had even tried to get to him draw pictures. What was he, six?

  “Now the whole thing is drawing blood. We were arguing this morning about what he’s doing to his relationship with his sister, and he got angry and distracted and nearly took his hand off! I swear to you, my brother is rolling over in his grave right now.”

  Yeah, JJ had heard that before—he was a huge disappointment, and his parents would be horrified if they could see all the poor choices he was making… blah blah blah. He’d already heard it from Maggie at breakfast, and he’d been hearing it from people his whole life. Still, JJ couldn’t help but notice that a lump the size of a cherry rose into his throat at the phrase “rolling over in his grave.”

  “Ms. Dunsmore, I think you’re being too hard on yourself. You’re doing the best you can. How long have you been JJ’s legal guardian?”

  “They died when he was five. I’ve had JJ since he was six… nine years, I guess.”

  “Nine years is amazing! In nine years he’s a relatively normal teenage boy. You think you’re the first woman to have a troublemaking fifteen-year-old in her house?”

  “He isn’t normal, though. He’s so angry, Dr. Ben. I see it. I see it in the way he looks at me when he’s done something wrong. Like the world owes him anyway, and this is just his way of trying to even the score. Not with me, I don’t think… with God.”

  Well, that was just dumb. There sure was somebody JJ would love to settle a score with. But it wasn’t God.

  “Ms. Dunsmore, do you mind if I ask how JJ’s parents died?”

  The lump welled up in JJ’s throat again. If this had been his conversation, here the room would have gone completely silent. But Aunt Maggie wasn’t him.

  “They were killed in the Bijou Street Theater fire, Dr. Ben. JJ was with them. He was very lucky and managed to make it out alive.”

  A deep, heavy silence—the kind that JJ would normally have created—fell. Only this time it was apparently being created by Dr. Ben.

  “Dr. Ben? Are you all right?”

  It sounded like Dr. Ben was deeply clearing his throat. “I’m fine, Ms. Dunsmore. Just a little caught off guard.”

  “You’re sure you’re okay?”

  “I am; I’m fine. My daughter passed away in that fire. I just haven’t heard anyone mention it in quite some time.”

  “Oh!” JJ could hear Maggie’s sharp intake of breath. “I’m so sorry. I sometimes wish we kept more distance from it as well. We really never have, though. It’s mentioned almost every day at our house. I’m sorry I brought it up.”

  “No, no. It’s fine. Maybe it’s good for JJ that it’s not a taboo subject in your household.”

  “Maybe. Sometimes I wonder if we talk about it entirely too much. It’s not something we can just put in the backs of our minds, though. Not with JJ’s legs.”

  Even hidden behind the curtain, JJ squirmed uncomfortably as Dr. Ben asked his next question: “JJ’s legs?”

  “Yes. He was in the theater’s restroom that day. He made it out alive, but his legs caught on fire. He has horrendous scar tissue up and down his calves.”

  No one spoke for a few moments after that, and JJ thought they had walked away from the curtain, when he suddenly heard Dr. Ben’s voice again.

  “Your nephew—he was the boy who was rescued from the restroom that day?”

  “Yes. You remember that? I mean, I suppose he was all over the Moreville newspapers for a while. Still, that was so long ago.”

  “I… no, I didn’t recall the newspaper articles. I was the man who pulled him out.”

  JJ sat up quickly, looking for his clothes. He didn’t need a theater roof to figure out whether his dreams were real; the person who could help him figure it out was three feet away!

  But Dr. Ben was already saying, “Ma’am, I’m sorry, I have to run… other patients….”

  By the time JJ got the curtain open, only Maggie was standing there. She looked at JJ with wide eyes. “I guess you heard that, huh?”

  JJ frowned. He had a bad feeling he wasn’t going to see Dr. Ben again anytime soon. He knew from experience you didn’t go looking for things you were desperately trying to forget.

  ON THE drive home, JJ half expected Maggie to cluck and fuss over his hand, but she didn’t say much, except to ask if it still hurt. JJ said it just ached, mostly. They pulled into their driveway, and she announced that she didn’t think it would be difficult for him to dust and tidy with one hand. When he felt better, he could do the bathrooms.

  “And no leaving the house or using the Internet until I say otherwise. And I’m taking your cell phone. No texting or Facebooking or whatever else you do on there. Absolutely no contact with the outside world until I tell you that you are no longer a prisoner in this house.” She went down to her basement office with some line about “feeling his presence above her,” leaving JJ to stare around at the mess in the kitchen.

  And to think.

  JJ was a thinker. He was quiet. Teachers often complained that part of the reason he had the reputation he did in school, as a disrespectful slacker, was because he wouldn’t talk. He frequ
ently responded in monosyllables, and sometimes he was so deep in his own head when a teacher called on him that he just didn’t answer at all. He wasn’t trying to be a jerk. He just liked it better in his head than anywhere else.

  Right now, though, his head was buzzing, and he was having trouble keeping up with it. Dr. Ben had been in the restroom with him at the movie theater that day. Just thinking about it made JJ so anxious that he actually picked up the duster and attacked Grandma’s old kitchen hutch.

  When the dreams had first started, JJ had researched everything he could find that might tell him whether or not the dream was real. He’d read every newspaper and police report he could get his hands on. He knew that the tattoo he was seeing in his dream had never been brought up—at least not publicly—in connection with the case. He knew that almost every person killed had been in Theater Three, because the fire exit to that theater had been blocked. He knew that if Dr. Ben’s daughter had died, she must have been in that theater, along with JJ’s parents. He knew that a second blaze had been set in the theater’s restroom, and that someone had pulled him out of the fire in that restroom.

  But he’d never known who had pulled him out. In the chaos of the fire, the man who had rescued JJ had never been identified by the media, and he’d never come forward to accept public congratulations for saving a five-year-old from certain death.

  JJ knew that if Dr. Ben had been the one to pull him out of the bathroom, he might be the only one who could confirm if anything in JJ’s dream was real.

  Like the tattoo.

  JJ was tempted to slice into his other hand and send himself back to the hospital. At least with two damaged hands he wouldn’t be expected to do schoolwork. But that would hurt, a lot, and JJ hadn’t loved all the blood from his first accident of the day. Anyway, he could make sure he found a way to talk to Dr. Ben. The hospital was only a few blocks away from his high school.

  If Maggie thought JJ was out to settle a score with God, she really didn’t know him at all. The only score JJ had was with the person who had killed his parents. The person who had left JJ on fire, dying, in a restroom. The person who had eluded the police for almost ten years. That was the person JJ had a score to settle with.

  And Dr. Ben might be just the person to help him do that.

  Chapter 2

  THE NEXT day was Monday—school. JJ claimed his hand hurt too much for him to go, but Aunt Maggie was having none of that. She just reminded him that she’d signed the school’s waiver to give him Tylenol if he needed it and said, “If it becomes unlivable, you can wait in the nurse’s office until I can come pick you up.”

  “Infections cause death within a few hours, you know,” JJ called as he left the house. He had no idea if that was true, but it sounded good.

  Lewis was at the corner where they usually met, playing something on a brand-new PSP. Lewis had a lot of money. His father was some kind of stock trader, and his mother was one of the best-known lawyers in their town. Lewis spent a lot of time trying to “wreck their good names,” as he put it. JJ was sure that if anyone was angry at God, it was Lewis. Lewis wanted to be a video-game programmer, and his father wanted him to be the next football star of Warren Watkins High School. But they didn’t talk about that sort of thing much. JJ just took the liquor that Lewis got for him and let Lewis talk him into things like The Great Frogfest, as they liked to call it.

  Lewis glanced down at JJ’s hand. “What did ya do?”

  JJ knew Lewis wouldn’t really care unless the story involved JJ doing something that caused a lot of problems or got a lot of attention.

  “I just cut it making breakfast.”

  “Oh. Boring.”

  “Yup.”

  They walked to school, Lewis playing on his PSP and JJ lost in his head the whole way. That was how it usually went.

  SCHOOL SURE wasn’t motivating JJ to do what his shrink told him and become more “outgoing.” As he sat through first period—Geometry—JJ remembered why it would have been so convenient to use his hand as an excuse to miss this class. Math sucked at the best of times, but at this hour of the day, it almost fell into the category of pure torture. JJ spent the period staring out the window and wondering if Dr. Ben would be working that afternoon.

  At least Creative Writing was next. That was JJ’s favorite class; it was the only elective he’d actually looked forward to when he was signing up for it. So far he hadn’t been disappointed. They wrote in journals most of the time and read “model writing” or each other’s writing. That was the only part JJ didn’t like: reading his writing aloud, or “workshopping,” as Ms. Lyle called it. The rest of the class was supposed to critique it for areas of improvement; JJ wasn’t having any of that.

  He thought Ms. Lyle would throw him out of her class when he first refused to show his writing to the rest of the room, but she’d just shrugged.

  “Since it’s on the syllabus for the course, I’m going to have to dock you points,” she told him. “But if you don’t mind that, I sure won’t take the trouble to lose my temper over it.” JJ spent the workshop portions of the class in silence, critiquing other people’s writing in his head but refusing to say anything. Sometimes Ms. Lyle would raise her eyebrows at him, as though she expected him to, and JJ always just raised his right back. It hadn’t thrown her off yet.

  Today, though, they were writing for most of the class and then reading some examples of strong dialogue. Good. JJ eased into a desk and pulled his black marbled composition book out from between his other books.

  “Good Lord!” exclaimed Ms. Lyle, eyeing his injured hand. “What happened?”

  JJ shrugged, pulling a pencil out of his pocket and flipping the book open to write. Ms. Lyle just winced at the sight of the bandage wrapped around his skin and flitted across the room to start taking attendance. JJ smiled. This was why he loved Creative Writing and why Ms. Lyle was his favorite teacher. Other teachers were instantly pissed off by JJ’s nonresponses. They added other adjectives to the list they had running about him in their heads. Words like “passive-aggressive,” “depressed,” “defiant.” Then they either held his silence against him for the rest of the class, week, or year, or they made it a goal to get him to speak by asking him as many questions as possible. That always led to more monosyllabic or non-answers from JJ, which led to more mental adjectives stacked against him in their heads. It was a vicious cycle.

  But Ms. Lyle never perpetuated it. JJ was pretty sure the only thing he could ever do to get Ms. Lyle to start stacking adjectives against him would be to stop writing—which JJ wasn’t doing anytime soon. He had signed up for this class to write. All class period, if possible.

  Today he was working on a story about Detective Morris Finch. Detective Finch was a character JJ had been writing about since the fifth grade. He was an arson investigator. He always caught the criminal.

  JJ didn’t tell too many people about Detective Finch. A school psychologist in junior high had gotten hold of one of his stories once and made a big deal about how the stories showed that JJ had a lot of “repressed anger” about the person behind the Bijou fire not being caught.

  That was exactly what JJ had been trying not to talk about as they’d sat in his office at least two days a week for the month before that.

  Ms. Lyle could read Detective Finch, though. She probably knew about JJ’s history in Moreville’s most notorious fire, but she never mentioned it. For her, Detective Finch was just another character, another story, to grade JJ on. So far she seemed to like him. She said JJ’s plots were well paced, and she thought the character was strong. (JJ was glad about that; if you couldn’t get a strong character after five years, what hope did you have?) She just wanted him to work on Finch’s voice. She kept commenting that it was a little too shallow and not interesting enough.

  So JJ worked on Finch’s voice as he went over the last part of the story he had just written, pulling out a comma here and there and changing lots of words. Finding the exact word, JJ thought,
was somehow both the most exciting and most annoying challenge with writing. JJ just couldn’t quite nail down what kind of vocabulary Detective Finch would use.

  He could work on that, though. At least the plot was continuing to come together. Currently Detective Finch was on the trail of a corporate executive who had a lot to gain monetarily from the Alabastor Restaurant fire. JJ already knew exactly who the criminal was going to be—and it wasn’t the restaurant executive.

  “Journals… twenty minutes!” Ms. Lyle called. JJ settled back into the seat, happy to live in a world that wasn’t his own for a while.

  Six other excruciatingly long periods and one disgusting lunch later, JJ met Lewis on the north side of the high school. Lewis pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his back pocket and lit one up as they stepped off the high school property and onto the sidewalk.

  “Smoke?” he offered.

  JJ hesitated, then shook his head. He didn’t love smoking, and when Maggie had caught him last week, she’d threatened to make him smoke a whole pack if she ever caught him doing it again. JJ thought she might actually go through with it, and he sure didn’t like smoking that much.

  It wasn’t like he really enjoyed it at all, actually. It was just another thing he had started doing every now and then with Lewis because… well, he really didn’t know why.

  “Mike Keeball’s having a party in that field that belongs to his dad this weekend. We should go. They’re getting a keg,” said Lewis.

  That was good news, since JJ’s bottle of whiskey was basically empty. Drinking took an edge off that JJ could never seem to shake otherwise. He’d gone to his first keg party with Lewis during their freshman year, and JJ still remembered it as being the first time he’d felt truly calm in years. There was always a spring within him that seemed to be wound way too tight. A drink loosened the spring better than anything else. After that night, JJ had figured out that there were lots of ways for a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old to get booze. Especially if you lived in a corner of Vermont that had more cows than people, and there wasn’t a whole lot of entertainment around that didn’t involve drinking or pot.