by Lauryn April
“If this were a movie, this would be that part where the villain explains his evil scheme, wasting a valuable thirty minutes of the film to tell the audience what they already know… he’s just a…” he spun around at the sound of my voice, and that was when I saw his face.
He looked me over, obviously surprised to have his plan walked in on, but I was more surprised by who he was. I didn’t know him personally, but I knew of him. He was the head quarterback on the football team. He was a senior with, as rumor had it, scholarships to schools all across the country. He had friends, a girlfriend, people who looked up to him. Some practically worshiped him. His life was seemingly perfect. He was Kyle Allaway.
“You’re trying to blow up the school? But… why you?”
His eyes narrowed on me and he sighed. “You were expecting someone else? How do you even know about this?”
I ignored his second question, “I was expecting… I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t you. You have friends here, people that care about you, why would you want to kill them?”
Kyle scoffed. “You think because I have people around me that, what? Those people actually care about me? None of those people, none of the coaches, teachers, friends, teammates, none of them care about me. They care about what I can do on the field, they care that knowing me makes them more popular. I can have a dozen people around me listening to every word I say and feel more alone than any one of them. You think any of those people that float around me really agree with what I have to say? They just nod and smile because it’s what they think they should be doing. They’re all sheep.”
“So killing them is the solution? What good does that do?”
“It will end this bullshit. The way people treat people, how I get praised like a god, but Eric gets knocked down and beat on. It’s not right, not any of it.”
I shook my head, none of this really making sense. There was no good that would come out of this, no one would learn, no one would be punished, they’d just be dead.
“Kyle, the only people that this is going to affect are the parents of all these students. They’re the ones that are going to be hurt by this. It’s not going to teach anyone here how to be better people, they’ll all just be dead, what good does that do?”
“It’s not about teaching them anything, it’s about giving them what they deserve.”
“They don’t deserve this, none of them… every one of them feels the way you do. We all feel alone sometimes, we all feel like no one really cares about us. We all say bad things about other people to make ourselves feel better. Sure, it’s not fair and it’s not right, but we’re all trying to figure out who we are. None of us know yet, so we make mistakes. We don’t deserve to die for that.”
He shook his head ‘no,’ but there was doubt in his eyes and in his mind. He wasn’t sure about anything he was doing and I began to hope that I was getting through to him.
“You didn’t see what they all did to him,” he said in a softer voice.
“Eric?”
“They would torment him.” I knew he was talking about the football players, who Eric had gym with. “Make fun of his weight, harass him physically, Ryan broke his nose when he knocked him down.”
“So you’re doing this for him?”
He nodded.
“Don’t you see though? You didn’t help him either.”
“This is helping him, when everyone is gone, that will help him, and others will respect us for what we’ve done.”
“No, you’re wrong… and, you’re just as bad as everyone else. You think this is helping Eric, this is going to put you and Eric in prison. Being his friend would have helped him. Standing up to the rest of the football team would have helped him. You could have stopped their bullying, but you didn’t, and I know why… You don’t want to be alone, it’s because some of them would have looked down on you for doing the right thing, and for as alone as you feel when you have all these people around you, it’s still better than being like Eric and being alone with no one.”
“No, this means more…”
“This means nothing!” I shouted, and that time I knew I got through to him.
His hands reached up and tugged at his hair, pulling the light brown strands to their limit. His face contorted into a flustered and agonized expression. I watched him pace, listened to his thoughts as they flew around in his mind, one contradicting another. Then finally he came to a decision, but it wasn’t the decision I’d been hoping for. His fidgety movements became solid and his eyes locked on mine. Unlike Eric’s painful gaze, Kyle’s eyes were a dead stare.
Then I have to die too, he thought.
Hearing him think it only gave me a second more; one more second to process what was coming. One more second to move toward the door, to make a run for it, just one more second to try and escape before he set off the bomb. My feet seemed to move on their own accord as I watched him turn. For a moment, it felt like we were moving in molasses. His hands reached out, feet twisting on cold tile floor and squeaking. I turned, my hair flipping around my head, and I ran. Again my heart was pumping so fiercely I thought it might explode. My lungs were heaving as I breathed deep. One foot, two, three…I did my best to put space behind me but I knew it wasn’t enough. I rounded the corner and suddenly everything was silent. I’m sure there must have been some kind of sound. I assume explosions have a sound, but I heard nothing. I only felt the heat.
The heat propelled me forward. For a brief moment, I was floating motionless in the air, my feet off the ground. That’s the last I would really remember. That feeling when you’re falling and you can’t catch your balance, your feet falling out from under you, arms flailing but finding nothing to grab. It’s that moment of weightlessness before you hit the ground where your breath catches in your throat, all of it enhanced by the knowledge that a bomb had exploded and fiery torment was rushing my way. I remember thinking then that I was going to die.
28
All that I Am
Sometime later, someone would tell me that the bomb in the boys’ locker room hadn’t been as big as what was intended. It was a miracle that the explosion didn’t kill me, one of my doctors would say. Kyle, however, didn’t survive. Eric and Kyle had planned to have the bombs on timers. First, the basement bomb would explode. Then, as students tried to leave, the locker room bomb would go off. If anyone was still alive at that point, that is. They had brought their equipment in the night before, after the last janitor had left. That way they could move their explosives into the school in the safety of the night.
After I had left the basement, Charlie had called the police, and while I’d been trying to reason with Kyle, fire trucks had been filing into the parking lot. Brant had been able to keep Eric from doing anything until Charlie came rushing down the basement steps with Mr. Sumner and Mr. Beckman. Eric was put in cuffs soon after that as, by that time, the police had arrived. Brant and Charlie had tried to look for me then but Christy, Tiana, and Eliza were already helping get students out of the school and they were forced to make their way outside. Brant would confess that when they all heard the bomb explode, he’d thought he’d lost me. A lot of people had thought that.
At first, I didn’t remember. I woke up in the hospital not knowing how I got there or why. I had opened my eyes, squinting at first, into the bright light. I heard the beeping and whirr of machines, smelled the chemical cleanliness of the air. Eventually the memories would start to come back to me like pieces of a fractured dream, but for that waking moment, I was left with the fear of unknowing over how I got there. There was one comfort in that waking moment, however. Brant was there with me.
“Ivy,” he said as I began to stir.
After that was when the panic set in as I realized where I was.
“Hey, it’s okay… you’re okay,” he said and pulled my attention to him and away from the room.
“What happened?” I asked.
“You kind of got blown up.”
I fel
t my eyes widen and the urge to look over every inch of my body came upon me.
“You’re okay though, you’re all there. There’s just minor burns and you hit your head pretty hard.”
That calmed me some. I still didn’t remember the explosion, but I remembered going to school that morning, remembered Eric’s face, remembered the fear that I had felt.
“Where’s Charlie?”
“Ah, yeah, I kind of got her grounded.”
“What? Did you guys get in trouble for the bomb?”
“No… well, actually they thought I was in on it at first since they found me in the basement with Eric, but Charlie covered for me.”
“So why’s she grounded?”
A low chuckle escaped from Brant’s lips. “Because, to explain why we were all in the basement and just happened to stumble upon Eric, I said that we had all gone down there to have a smoke.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. With everything we’d been through, for Charlie to get grounded because her parents thought she’d been smoking was so trivial. A few months ago, being grounded or having one of my friends grounded would have seemed like a huge burden. Now it was something I could laugh at. If Charlie getting grounded was the worst thing to happen to any of us after this, then we did alright. It was then, however, that I realized that there may have been one other thing that happened, something that would be worse than Charlie getting grounded.
Brant was looking at me, smiling at me. The expression on his face made me blush and I wondered what he was thinking. As I tried to listen in on his thoughts, I found a void where there used to be an open gate into the minds of others. There was nothing, not his voice, not any other. I was alone with my thoughts, completely. It was what I had wanted, to be free of it all, but it didn’t feel that way. It felt like I had lost something that made me who I was, like I had lost a piece of me. I wondered if it was gone for good. Could I get it back? Would it return on it’s own? Maybe hitting my head during the explosion had just injured my powers and maybe they would return once I healed, or maybe it had killed my powers altogether.
“What’s wrong?” Brant asked.
I must have had a worried expression on my face. I quickly shook it off. “Nothing, I’m just tired, I guess. Tell me more about what happened.”
Brant sat and talked with me for a long while, filling me in on everything that I’d missed. He explained his shock when he saw on the news that the other bomber had been the quarterback of the football team. He told me that a memorial service was being planned for Kyle and school had been canceled for the next week. He said that the police would probably be looking to talk to me yet and that the school was making counseling services available for all students and families. I listened to every word he said, not so much interested in the information he had for me, but just glad to hear his voice.
At some point, my parents arrived and walked in with a nurse. The nurse made it clear that Brant wasn’t supposed to be there. Family only. I told her that I didn’t mind but, sensing the tension he’d created with the hospital staff by sneaking into my room, and maybe to give me some alone time with my parents, Brant left.
I was glad to see my parents, and surprised to see them together, but also comforted by the fact that they were both there. It reminded me that whatever happened between them, when I needed them they would be there. Sadie was apparently being babysat by the neighbor but Mom informed me that she was anxiously waiting for me to come home. Both Mom and Dad were not only happy but relieved to see me awake. Mom had tears in her eyes as she spoke, but did her best to keep them at bay. I assured them that I was feeling okay and tried to convince them that I wouldn’t have any lasting psychological damage from my ordeal but, like most parents, they were overprotective and worried about me regardless. Eventually I think it sunk in that I was alive and awake, and for the most part unharmed. By the time visiting hours came to a close, they left reassured that I would still be there in the morning.
I couldn’t go home that night. They wanted to keep me for observation. That night I lay in bed for hours, staring at the ceiling. Mom had left me a few magazines in case I got bored, but it was too dark to read comfortably and not dark enough to fall asleep easily. So I just lay there, staring at the white ceiling, listening to the constant beeping of the heart monitor and the low whirr of the other machines at my sides. I’d hear the soft squeaking of a nurse’s sneakers on the tile floor as she walked by my room, but I didn’t hear what I was listening for. I wanted to hear someone’s thoughts. The nurse outside my door, a patient down the hall, I didn’t care who or what, I just wanted to hear something. Instead I lied in silence, questioning if I was the same person without my ability.
Being able to hear the thoughts of others made me realize that there was more to people than what I once thought. It was what let me see the kind of people my friends really were, it was what let me see that there was a lot more to Brant than what everyone else thought. It was what allowed me to save the school from destruction, to save lives. Being able to hear people’s thoughts made me grow up, it made me a better person. Would I still be that person if I’d never fallen into the Lakefall Country Club pool? Could I continue to be that person now? I didn’t have any answers.
That night, I started to regret our decision to stop Eric the way we did. We should have talked to a teacher, the police. We should have passed the responsibility on. We thought we could be heroes, we thought we could be the ones to stop this. We thought that it was better to handle it ourselves for fear of others thinking we were involved, for fear of getting in trouble. Trouble was so trivial after all of this. We wanted the adventure, but it wasn’t a game. I also wondered if I had done things differently that night if Kyle would have lived. The last thought that entered my mind before I finally fell asleep was wondering if I could have saved him.
A few days later, after I’d been released from the hospital and Mom had seen me up and about at home enough to be assured that I was okay, I finally got a day out with friends. It was the day of Kyle Allaway’s funeral. We decided not to go. None of us had known Kyle personally and while we could see the tragedy in his death, it was still a strange concept to miss the person that had tried to kill us. We couldn’t resist staying away completely, however. Perched on a hilltop across the street from the funeral home, Brant, Charlie, and I sat in the grass and watched the precession of people make their way inside.
“School starts back up in a week,” Charlie said. “Think things will be different when we go back?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“Doubt it,” Brant said. “People will talk about it for a while, but eventually they’ll move on from it. Life will go on as usual.” He was pulling apart a flower that had been growing by his feet and I watched his fingers tear its leaves from its stem.
“It’s just weird; it feels like it should change more than that.”
“For some people it will.”
Brant was looking on at the funeral home and I followed his gaze. Kyle Allaway’s mother stood outside. She looked as if she’d walked out for a moment to get some air. She stood with her back against the brick wall and a white tissue was clenched in her hand. She hugged herself tightly and even from our distant view I could tell she was crying. This would change her whole life, and for that I was sorry. I wished that I could have saved Kyle. For a long time after that, I would dream about that day in the school and visualize all the different ways that I could have done things. Every night a different way, every night I saved him. But I hadn’t really, and the truth was that I couldn’t have. I felt guilty and at times I blamed myself but it wasn’t really my fault. I did what I could with what I knew then. Sometimes bad things happen, I was just glad that they hadn’t been worse.
That day was surreal and somber but it was good as well. That day, I saw that my friends were still my friends even without the intrigue of a murder mystery to bring us together. Brant wasn’t just hanging out with me because of the weirdness of
my abilities, and Charlie wasn’t just spending time with us because we needed her resources. We all cared about each other as people and we were friends for no reason other than that. I had told Brant and Charlie about how my telepathy seemed to have disappeared. It wasn’t something that was as interesting to them as I had thought. It didn’t matter to them if I could hear their thoughts or not, it wasn’t how they defined me. I realized then that it wasn’t how I should define myself either. I still hoped that once my body was completely healed from the explosion that my ability might return, but I was okay if it didn’t.
Brant put his arm around me and I saw Charlie look over at us and smile. For some things, you don’t need to hear people’s thoughts to know what they’re thinking about. Sometimes you can just tell when people are thinking that they care about you.
Epilogue
The three of us took advantage of not having school that next week. On Wednesday, we went down to the beach at sunset and had a fire. Skyler and Jason joined us and the five of us sat around the warm flames talking and laughing and overall having a good time. It was a little chilly that night, so Charlie had wrapped herself up in a blanket that she grabbed out of her car and Brant lent me his coat. We all sat in the sand and watched as Skyler did impressions of various teachers at our school. He had Mr. Varnez’s low lifeless tone down pat. He had us laughing hysterically.
Brant pulled me close and I snuggled into his side. I watched the orange glowing embers from the fire dance toward the sky as if they were hoping to be stars. My life was starting to feel normal again. When school did start back up, it would be just as Brant had predicted. People talked about the ‘almost school bombing’ for a few weeks, but then it was as if it had been forgotten.
