by Tim Floreen
They both glanced at me, startled. “There should be,” Tor answered.
“Great. Wonderful. Thanks.” I barreled through the kitchen and out the garage door. My face burned. So did my chest. My belly seethed like a washing machine. I leaned my elbows on the Agnarsons’ Range Rover, hoping I wouldn’t puke for the second time in three days. Although as much as I hated barfing, the thought of doing it all over the Agnarsons’ unspoiled pearl-white hood did have a certain appeal.
Then I noticed I’d defaced the hood without realizing it: my fingers, smeared in ketchup the same way they usually got smeared in paint, had left messy smudges on the opalescent paint. Like I had in the cafeteria a few days ago, I nudged the ketchup around on the white surface, mopping it into the shape of a blood spatter.
The door opened and closed behind me. “Are you okay?” Tor said. “Are you sick?”
“How could I not be after watching that?” I turned around to face him. “Tell me, Tor, does it not even enter your head how seeing the two of you together might make me feel? Or does it actively turn you on? Because I’m not into this new game you’re playing.”
He glanced over his shoulder, worried Lydia might hear. “I’m not playing any games.”
“Bullshit. You love that I’m jealous, and you love that I can’t say a thing about it because, unlike you, I actually care about Lydia’s feelings.”
“I care about Lydia too, Rem. I’m not perfect, but I do.” He stepped closer and gave my chest a few hard taps. “And just in case you don’t remember, I’m the one who should be pissed here, after the way you’ve been running your mouth about the tunnels. But since Callie died, I’ve been trying to honor her memory by forgetting about that.”
“Maybe you should honor her memory by not being such a dick.”
Tor’s face started to twist. For a second I glimpsed that rage I’d seen for the first time a few days ago, but he managed to recover himself. “I’m going to ignore that because I think you’ve had a little too much to drink.”
“I’ve had just enough.” I shoved my chest up close to his, not even caring the guy was twice as big as me. That burning feeling in my rib cage had roared into an inferno. “You know the thing about Callie? She totally had you pegged. She knew you were a pathetic closet case all along. And idiot me, I was always making excuses for you. ‘Maybe he’s really bisexual.’ ‘Maybe he’s just scared and confused.’ I was determined to put the most positive spin on everything you did. And that was my fault. I was just so smitten with you I couldn’t bring myself to think a bad thing about you. But you know what I’m starting to realize?” I reached past him and banged my fist against the button for the garage door. “Callie was right all along. You’re just a fucking pig.”
I started to turn away, but then I reached for him one more time.
“Hey!” he said, flinching away from me. Actually flinching. Away from me.
But I just swiped my palm along his cheek, leaving a satisfying streak of bright red ketchup glistening there like a bloody gash. Then I walked out into the cold night. “No more Mr. Nice Guy,” I muttered over my shoulder.
I needed to tell Lydia about me and Tor, just like Callie had said I should. I could see that now. And if that meant Tor never talked to me again, so be it. My fear of him rejecting me was the real reason I’d stayed quiet all along, even though I’d never admitted it to Callie, or even to myself, and that fear had made me a coward. Callie had been right: I needed to man up.
But first I had to deal with the Franklin Kettle situation.
At school the next day it felt as if the place, and everyone in it, had jumped backward one year. The halls had gone quiet, just like in the days following the Big Bang. Students and teachers walked around with stunned expressions on their faces. When they talked, they did it in low, careful voices, like they didn’t want to wake someone sleeping nearby. I passed by the cafeteria, but the entrance was locked, with brown paper taped inside the small windows in the doors. Yesterday we’d received an e-mail from Principal Chen saying we’d have to bring our own lunches and eat in the gym until further notice.
The e-mail had also mentioned we’d have to attend a special assembly first thing Monday morning instead of going to our regular first-period classes. We’d had an assembly after Pete’s death too. Our first day back at school—that time we’d had two days of class canceled, not just one—we’d all herded into the gym, where Mrs. Chen had droned on and on about the importance of processing our feelings. The speech had gone on for so long that by the end we’d all managed to fully process our grief into boredom.
Today, once again, all seventeen hundred of us tromped onto the shuddering bleachers. Lydia and Tor sat down by the front, but I chose a spot near the top. Ever since I’d let Tor have it the night before, my chest had continued to burn hot. It was like a voice in my head—a voice similar to Franklin’s when he described the emotions of characters in old episodes of Friends—had said, You are mad. You are mad as hell at Tor. And I’d finally realized it was true. I’d always assumed I loved Tor with the pure white of true love, but more and more since Tor had taken up with Lydia, I’d started to see all the other colors swirled in. Blue for misery. Green for jealousy. Red for rage.
I couldn’t help but wonder if Franklin had been describing something similar when he’d said his feelings for me before the Big Bang had been “complicated.”
Until I told Lydia the whole truth, though, I figured I should keep my distance from both her and Tor as much as I could without raising her suspicions.
When Mrs. Chen walked out and got us quieted down, she didn’t launch into a speech like she had last year. Instead she said, “Ms. Utter has asked to say a few words.”
The room got another notch quieter. Ms. Utter appeared, a tiny figure on the floor of the gym with a step stool under her arm, and crossed to the podium. I winced inwardly as I pictured a pixelated version of her slumped against the classroom wall with three bullet holes in her belly. Giving my head a little shake, I stuffed the memory away. She stepped onto the stool and cleared her throat.
“In two days,” she said, “it’ll be the one-year anniversary of the shooting that ended Pete Lund’s life. Callie Minwalla was going to give a speech for the memorial assembly. She was one of Pete’s best friends. And now she’s gone too.
“We still don’t know the details of what happened, so I don’t want to say too much about that, but one thing we do know for sure is that Callie’s death, like Pete’s, was shocking and horrible and senseless. All of us here are wondering how this could’ve happened. Again.”
Ms. Utter stared at the podium for a long time. When she started talking again, her voice had thickened.
“Callie was known around school for having a foul mouth and a sardonic sense of humor. But she had a big secret: at heart she was an optimist. She gave me her speech to read last week and asked me what I thought of it. I told her it was beautiful and hopeful. And I told her she had to get rid of all the swearwords.”
A soft murmur of laughter went through the gym.
“I’m not the optimist Callie was.” The edges of Ms. Utter’s words had blurred. Had she started crying? I couldn’t tell from that distance. “What I’m about to say isn’t hopeful or beautiful. Callie was going to speak about how much her friendship with Pete meant to her, and about how she hoped it would become possible to help Franklin Kettle and people like him, and about how she really believed our world was becoming a better place, even though awful things still happened.
“As a historian, I can tell you she was right. Right now we’re living in the least violent age in human history. But I have to say, knowing that doesn’t bring me much comfort on days like today.”
She stopped again. Swayed a little. For a second it almost looked like she might fall off her step stool. I tensed. Had she been drinking more than usual?
“Because there’s still too much violence,” she said. “As a historian, I can also tell you the kind of atrocit
y that happened here on Friday will continue to happen for just as long as we as a country keep up this bullshit love affair of ours with guns and violence and killing people.”
Principal Chen, standing off to the side of the basketball court, snapped to attention. Her footfalls echoed through the room as she speed-walked toward the podium.
“We spend our days watching movies and playing video games chock-full of killing,” Ms. Utter said, her voice growing stronger, but also more slurred. “We still administer the death penalty, even though the rest of the world rejects it as barbaric. Our police can’t seem to stop shooting innocent and unarmed people. And God forbid we ever pass a meaningful gun control law. We insist on keeping guns in our houses for hunting, for recreation, for self-defense. So how are we supposed to expect our criminals and psychopaths not to kill if we keep doing it ourselves? When are we going to pull our heads out of our goddamn asses and wake up?”
Mrs. Chen had reached the podium. She grabbed Ms. Utter by the arm, flashed a tight smile at the rest of us, and drew her down from the step stool. A ripple of murmurs flowed across the bleachers. My face burned just watching. I had to look away.
When I did, I noticed something I hadn’t earlier: Nil Bergstrom had sat down right in front of me. Somehow I’d missed her shock of radioactive-green hair. Her huge backpack slouched on the bench next to her, taking up the space of a whole person. The top of it had come unzipped a little, and inside, I could just make out the corner of a black notebook, the same kind I’d always seen Franklin scribbling in during class. My hot cheeks turned cold, and I forgot all about Ms. Utter. I glanced at Nil. Like everyone else, she had her eyes on the gym floor, where the assistant principal was escorting Ms. Utter away from the podium. Principal Chen had pushed the step stool to the side and started talking into the mike. I caught the words “processing our feelings” while, with a slow, careful hand, I reached for the zipper on Nil’s backpack.
“Because if we ignore our feelings,” Mrs. Chen said, “and keep them trapped inside, they’ll just fester.”
My fingers wrapped around the zipper pull. Bit by bit, I dragged the zipper to the side, every nerve in my body buzzing.
Mrs. Chen’s drone continued. “It’s okay to feel sad. To feel scared. To feel angry even.” This with an awkward gesture toward the door through which Ms. Utter and the assistant principal had just disappeared.
I bent closer, searching for the Son of War sticker or Franklin Kettle’s name written in red ink down the side, but I couldn’t see either yet. I reached for the zipper again.
Nil turned to her backpack.
I flinched away, praying she hadn’t noticed me. It didn’t seem like she had. She pulled her phone out of one of the smaller pockets and started playing a game.
“We need to talk about those feelings. Set them free. And always remember what our grief counselor taught us last year: breathe. Iiiiinhale. Eeeeexhale.”
I waited a few moments and focused on my breathing. Iiiiinhale. Eeeeexhale. Then my fingers crept toward the backpack one more time. Sweat beaded my forehead as I drew the zipper a little further, my movements steady and controlled. I still couldn’t see the Son of War mask, but maybe this was the back cover and the sticker was on the other side.
The next thing I knew, the gym had erupted with noise and movement. Everyone standing up, grabbing their things, talking. The assembly had ended. Mrs. Chen had dismissed us to our second-period classes. Nil swung her backpack onto her shoulder—without seeming to notice what I’d done, thank God—and headed toward the stairs, her head down and her shoulders hunched.
I edged along my row and fell in behind her. As the mob of students tromped down the bleacher stairs and funneled out of the gym, I made sure to keep her wild green tangle of hair in my sights. I trailed her through the noisy halls, weaving past other students, staying close but not too close. The Son of War patch on her backpack glowered at me.
We’d almost reached Ms. Utter’s old classroom at the far end of the school. The throng had thinned. Nil veered toward her locker and started fiddling with the combination. I tried to stop a discreet distance behind her, but with all the people jostling by, I had to stay pretty close to see anything.
Nil’s backpack landed on the wood floor with a thunk. She squatted down to unzip it. I bent forward, peering over her shoulder, straining to see.
She pulled out the notebook and tossed it into her locker. It landed on top of her other books, and this time I got a clear look at the thing. Black cover. Frayed corners. Son of War sticker. FRANKLIN KETTLE written down the side in red pen. A crackle of electricity went through me.
Nil shot to her feet and glared at me through narrowed eyes. Without looking away, she reached behind her to slam her locker shut. “May I help you?”
I shook my head, took a step back, and let the rush of students carry me down the hall.
I spent the rest of the day obsessed with that notebook. Why Nil had it in her possession wasn’t clear to me, but the fact that she was carrying it around made me more suspicious of her than ever. Plus, I wanted to get my hands on it. It had to be important. Otherwise why would Nil have kept it from the police, when they clearly would’ve wanted a piece of evidence like that? Why would she be walking around school with it a full year after the Big Bang? Maybe if I read it, it would help me understand Franklin and reveal all those things he wouldn’t talk about. Maybe it would somehow clear him of Callie’s murder.
But how to get it? Nil wouldn’t just hand it over if I asked her, would she? And she’d seen me see it. Would she even carry it around in her backpack anymore after today?
By the time I said good night to Mom and went to my room, I hadn’t come any closer to an idea. I also felt exhausted. A week of more troubled sleep than usual had caught up with me, so even though I had enough on my mind to fill ten Tattoo Atlases, I was out about five seconds after my head hit my pillow.
Then, hours later, I snapped awake again. I’d heard a clattering outside the window by my desk. I rolled over, adrenaline pounding through my body. A silhouette appeared, caught in the moonlight filtering through the roller blind. I grabbed my phone and held it to my chest.
But I didn’t dial. I didn’t yell for Mom either.
The window slid open. A cold wind blew the blind inward. As it batted back and forth, clacking against the window frame, I caught a glimpse of an orange hoodie.
I slipped out of bed, crept toward the window, and gave the cord one hard pull. Franklin appeared, his glasses glinting, a screwdriver in his hand.
He waved. “Oh, hi.”
I seized a handful of his hoodie in my fist. “What the hell are you doing here, Franklin? Again? No, wait, don’t tell me. This time you have some really interesting whale song you want to play for me.”
He tilted his head and squinted at me like I was the crazy one. His teeth clacked. His shoulders juddered up and down.
“For Christ’s sake.”
I helped him inside.
“Thanks,” he said, flopping on my desk chair and rubbing his arms. “It’s colder tonight.”
“So how come you didn’t steal a goddamn winter coat for yourself if you’re such a master thief?”
From out in the hall came Mom’s voice. “Rem? What’s going on? Are you okay in there?”
My heart’s frantic pace doubled now. I wrenched the window back down. “Fine, Mom,” I called. “I just couldn’t sleep. I opened the window for a second to get some fresh air.”
“Do you need anything?”
“Nope. I’m just fine.” I clutched the corner of my desk, my heart still tripping and stumbling, and waited for the sound of Mom’s bedroom door closing at the other end of the house. To Franklin I whispered, “What were you thinking? My mom’s just down the hall! And there’s a cop car on the street!” I gave a sharp tug on the cord to pull the blind down. “You beg me not to say anything because you’re terrified people will think you killed Callie, and then you do something like this.�
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“I wanted to see you, Rem.”
I stood gripping the cord and sighed. His shivering had subsided. I glanced at the window. “How did you get it open anyway?”
“It wasn’t locked. You can tell from the outside.” He got up and pushed the blind to the side to point at the window lock. “See? Every house has at least one unlocked window. It’s like a rule.”
I pulled him back. “For Christ’s sake, Franklin, get away from there. The cop’s going to spot you.”
“Don’t worry, he fell asleep. I already checked.”
I pointed at the screwdriver in his hand. “What’s that for?”
“I used it to push back the screen, and then I wedged it under the window frame until I could fit my fingers and pull the window the rest of the way up.”
“Why didn’t you just knock?”
“I wanted to surprise you.”
I dropped my head in my hands. “Jesus.”
“Plus I wasn’t sure you’d let me in.”
“Well, I did, didn’t I?”
He grinned. One of his eyebrows edged up above the chunky black frames of his glasses. “That’s true. You did.”
His eyes had landed on my bare chest. I’d completely forgotten I only had on a pair of boxer briefs. I grabbed a T-shirt from the floor and yanked it over my head. “I thought I told you if you did anything to test my trust in you, I’d tell.”
He stopped grinning. “Come on, Rem, what did I do?”
“You broke out of the lab again!” It took every bit of my self-control to keep my voice down. “Have you broken out any other times?”
“No.”
“Good, because—”
“Except last night.”
“What? Why?”
“Why do you think? To see you. But you weren’t here. I saw you leaving Tor’s house through his garage. It sounded like you two were having a fight. I figured you probably wouldn’t be in the mood to see me after that, so I went back to the lab. What did you mean, ‘No more Mr. Nice Guy’?”
