Bang

by Norah McClintock

  Bang

  Bang

  Norah McClintock

  Orca Soundings

  Copyright © Norah McClintock 2007

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  McClintock, Norah

  Bang / written by Norah McClintock.

  (Orca soundings)

  ISBN 978-1-55143-656-2 (bound)

  ISBN 978-1-55143-654-8 (pbk.)

  I. Title.

  PS8575.C62B35 2007 jC813’.54 C2006-907056-3

  Summary: A robbery goes terribly wrong, and Quentin

  finds he is left taking the blame.

  First published in the United States, 2007

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2006940639

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Cover design: Doug McCaffry

  Cover photography: Getty Images

  Orca Book Publishers Orca Book Publishers

  PO Box 5626 Station B PO Box 468

  Victoria, BC Canada Custer, WA USA

  V8R 6S4 98240-0468

  www.orcabook.com

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  Printed on 100% PCW recycled paper.

  010 09 08 07 • 5 4 3 2 1

  To Tiny, Skinny and Halftrack.

  Chapter One

  The way the day starts: Sweet. Perfect. Like a cool breeze on a hot day. Mainly because of Leah. She answers the door when I ring the bell and stays to talk until JD comes down.

  And then, before we take off on our bikes, she says, “Wait.”

  She runs inside and gets her camera. “It’s brand-new,” she says. “It’s digital. I saved up for it.”

  She takes our picture—JD and me with our bikes. Then she says, “Hey, JD, take my picture with Q.” So JD does.

  I ask her to make me a copy of it. If she does, I’ll put it up on my wall, right over my bed. These days, Leah is most of the reason I spend as much time with JD as I do. I’m trying to work up the nerve to ask her out.

  The way the day ends: Like a tornado, sucking my whole life up and spraying out the pieces all over town so I’ll never be able to put it back together again.

  The first thing we do when we get back to JD’s house is strip off all our clothes, right down to our shorts. JD wants those too, but I say no. There’s no way I’m going to stand there in his kitchen buck naked.

  He sends me up to his room to grab some clothes. When I come back down, JD has stuffed all our clothes into the washing machine, which is in a sort of closet off the kitchen. He pours in a ton of liquid detergent, turns on the water and punches “On.” I’m pulling on a clean T-shirt of his when Leah walks in.

  She looks at me, then at JD, and says, “What are you guys up to?”

  “We were riding our bikes in the ravine,” JD says. “Q had this idea we could jump the stream.” He gives me a look. “I should have known.”

  Q is me. My name is Quentin, Q to my friends.

  Leah shakes her head, like of course I would suggest something that dumb. Of course JD would want to give it a try. Of course that would explain why she’s just caught me changing into JD’s clothes in the middle of the kitchen.

  I stare at JD, trying not to let my face show what I’m thinking, which is: This guy is good. He can lie with the best of them. No, he can lie better than most of them.

  Leah says, “Well, I hope you didn’t total your bike, JD, because if you did, Dad’s going to freak.”

  I freeze. Our bikes. Geez, they’re in JD’s garage, but there’s nothing about them that would give people the idea that we tried to jump a stream with them, let alone that we ended up in a stream. They aren’t wet. They aren’t muddy. Nothing like that.

  “Don’t sweat it,” JD tells his sister.

  Even now I can’t help noticing for the millionth time how pretty she is. I wonder, How come I only started noticing recently? I’ve known JD since kindergarten, which means I’ve known Leah that long too. But for most of the time I’ve known her, she was like flowery wallpaper, always in the background, always kind of annoying.

  Not anymore. Now I can hardly take my eyes off her. She has thick brown hair and dark brown eyes that are the color of coffee, just like JD’s. She’s tall, like JD, and slender, and she makes my heart pound and my mouth go dry. Her lips are pink and soft looking and, boy, you don’t need much imagination to know how it would feel to kiss them. That’s been on my mind a lot—that and how JD would take it if I all of a sudden tell him I have a thing for his sister. Now, I think, I’ll never get the chance. Not after what we just did.

  “We’re going out to the garage right now,” JD says. “We’re going to clean everything up before Dad gets home. Our bikes will be as good as new. He’ll never know.”

  He flashes her a smile. She shakes her head again, but I can read in her eyes how much she loves him. They’re twins. They have this bond. He says it’s weird having a twin. He says when they were little, they used to finish each other’s sentences. He says half the time he’s positive she can tell what he’s thinking. I look at Leah now and wonder what she knows. I look at JD too. He’s grinning at her. I bet he’s confident that he’s snowing her. I hope he’s right.

  “Don’t make a mess out there while you’re cleaning up,” Leah says. Boy, does she ever know JD. “You know how Dad is.”

  We go from the kitchen to the garage. Our bikes are dry. There’s no mud on them, nothing at all on them that I can see. But JD fills a bucket with soapy water anyway and hands me a sponge. We set to work washing down our bikes. We rinse them. JD fills another bucket with soapy water. We wash them again and rinse them again. Altogether we soap and rinse three times before JD is satisfied. He looks at me and says, “It’s going to be okay. I already told you. Nobody saw. Nobody knows.”

  He’s forgetting one thing. I saw. I know.

  Chapter Two

  The guy died. I’m not surprised. Also, I’m relieved. I can’t believe I feel that way, but I do. I’m actually relieved because if he’s dead, that means he can’t say anything.

  I’m staring at the TV. The news is over. The guy’s death was the last item and now the weather guy is doing his thing. In the kitchen, the phone rings. A moment later, my mother appears and hands me the cordless. She says, “It’s JD.”

  The first words out of JD’s mouth are “You should get a cell phone.”

  Right. “You gonna pay for it?” I say.

  As usual, he doesn’t answer. Instead he says, “You heard, right? It’s like I told you, we have nothing to worry about.”

  I realize he’s talking about the dead guy. He must have seen the news too.

  “You’re okay, right, Q?” he says. “You’re cool, right?”

  “Yeah,” I say. I’m thinking, They said the guy is dead. But they didn’t say exactly when he died. Was it before the paramedics arrived? I can’t believe I’m thinking it, but I am—it would be best if he died before the paramedics showed up. But what if he didn’t? What if he was alive long enough to talk to them? What would he have told them? What could he have told them?

  “Hey, Q, you haven’t talked to anyone, have you?” JD says.

  “No,” I say. But JD isn’t satisfied.

  “Why don’t you come over here?�
� he says. “Spend the night.”

  “It’s all good,” I insist. “Really.”

  JD is...was...my best friend. We’ve slept over at each other’s places since kindergarten. Boy, the things we’ve done. But tonight there’s no way I want to go to his house. No way I want to be anywhere near him.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I say.

  “I’ll pick you up,” he says, meaning he’ll swing by my house on the way to school. “First thing,” he says.

  At first I can’t sleep. I keep seeing it and hearing it and even tasting it. How can you sleep when you’ve seen a thing like that? The next thing I know, my mother is hammering on my door, telling me to get up or I’m going to be late. Telling me my lunch is in the fridge. Telling me she’s leaving for work now and if I’m late and I get a detention—again—and have to be late for my after-school job and get fired and have no money for the stuff I like to waste money on, that’s not going to be her problem. In other words, telling me the same thing she tells me every morning before she rushes off to work herself. I yell through the door that I’m awake and I’m getting up. What I’m thinking is, I can’t believe I slept. I feel as guilty about that as I do about what happened.

  Five minutes later, I’m dressed and shoveling some Cap’n Crunch into my mouth. I can’t believe I can eat after what happened. I hear footsteps out in the hall and someone rings the bell. I peer through the peephole. It’s JD. The cereal starts to roll around in my stomach like it doesn’t want to be there anymore, like it wants to get out, now.

  “Hey, Q,” JD calls through the door. “Open up.”

  I unlock the door and swing it open. JD looks as calm and cool as he always does. It’s obvious he’s slept well. It’s obvious he doesn’t have a care in the world. He looks me over and says, “The main thing is you have to relax. If you relax, if you act normal, it’s gonna be okay. No one saw anything. We’re in the clear.”

  Act normal? The guy died, and JD wants me to act normal? I think he must be crazy. But you know what? Even though the guy died, I remember to take the brown paper bag containing my lunch out of the fridge and put it in my backpack. I remember to grab my geography homework off the end of the dinette table. I put it in my backpack too. And just as I’m going out the door, I remember that even though school started only two weeks ago, my history teacher has already planned a field trip to the museum. This is the last day to hand in the permission slip. So I go back into the kitchen and get it off the fridge door where my mother stuck it after she signed it. I lock up after myself. We take the stairs instead of the elevator because at this time of the morning, with everyone headed off to school or work, the elevator takes forever.

  At school I’m kind of surprised to find that no one is talking about the only thing that’s on my mind. I say that to JD when we’re at the far end of the football field at lunchtime. I say, “You don’t think it’s weird that no one’s even mentioned it?”

  He looks out across the field and says, “Why would they? I bet you no one here even heard of the guy. Stuff happens to people all the time and no one notices, not unless they know the person it happened to.”

  That’s when I start wondering about the dead guy. Someone must have known him. Maybe a lot of someones. And they’re probably talking about him. They’re probably wondering who did it and why. Some of them are probably crying. Was he married? Did he have kids? Maybe he was looking after his old granny. Or maybe his mother is sick and he was looking after her and now there’s no one to take his place. I think about all that and I start to shake.

  JD says, “What’s the matter with you?” like he can’t even begin to imagine. Then he says, “You better smile right now because here comes Leah.”

  And there she is, swinging along toward us, wearing a T-shirt and a short skirt. Her long legs are still tanned from the summer.

  “JD,” she says, smiling at him, “what are you doing way over here? Up to no good, I bet.” If she only knew.

  “Hey, Leah,” I manage to say, practically choking on the words because my mouth is so dry.

  “What’s up?” JD says as smooth as ever.

  “I had to pay Melissa back the money I borrowed from her last week, and now I’m broke. Can you lend me some money? I want to stop by the mall on the way home. They’re having a sale.”

  JD digs in his pocket and brings out his wallet. He’s got a few twenties in there, a few tens, and some fives. He always has money on him, and it’s always more than I make in a week. JD doesn’t have a job, though. He doesn’t need one. He has both a father and a mother. They both work, and they both make good money. JD is always telling me, “My parents say we have plenty of time to look for work after high school. They say in the meantime we should concentrate on school and have a good time. They say that, after high school, things get more serious.”

  We still have another year after this one. If you ask me, things are already as serious as they’re ever going to get.

  Chapter Three

  I’m restocking the soup aisle in the grocery store where I work after school, four to seven, five days a week. I stack the cans twelve deep, two high, two across— forty-eight cans of cream of tomato, forty-eight cans of cream of mushroom, forty-eight cans of chicken noodle, and so on and so on. There’s maybe fifty or sixty different kinds of canned soup. My job right now is to make sure that whichever one a customer wants, it’s there. And if they want two or three cans, it’s my job to make sure they’re available.

  I’m restocking the soup aisle, but I’m thinking back to how it started. I’m asking myself, Why did I do something so stupid? Answer: Because I wasn’t thinking straight. I can see it like it’s happening right in front of me. It goes like this: JD and I have just smoked up, I admit it, and now we’re horsing around. It’s no big deal. There’s no one else in the park. No one that I can see anyway. The playground is empty and we’re a little high. We think it would be fun to go on the swings and see how much higher we can get, if you know what I mean. So that’s what we do. We get on and we pump and pump until we are flying. Yeah, I know, we probably look stupid, a couple of sixteen-year-old guys flying on a pair of swings. But I’ve seen people a lot older than me on those swings sometimes. I’ve seen girls who are maybe seventeen or eighteen playing on those swings. I’ve seen moms being pushed by their husbands. And anyway, like I said, the park is empty.

  A couple of little kids come up the path that runs diagonally through the park. A little boy and a little girl. They look maybe seven or eight years old. They must live nearby because there’s no adult with them. It’s just the two of them. They go down the slide a few times each. Then they come over to the swings. They just stand there, watching, until finally JD says, “Scram!”

  The two kids look at each other. The little boy says, “We want a turn on the swings.”

  JD says, “Forget it. These are our swings.”

  The little girl looks like she’s going to cry. She whispers something to the boy, but I can’t hear what it is.

  “Get out of here,” JD says, his voice deeper than usual. “Otherwise I’ll have to come over there and grab you and lock you up in my cave.” He laughs a wicked-troll laugh, all evil and scary.

  The little girl’s eyes get big and watery. She tugs on the little boy’s arm. They run back down the path. JD laughs. I think, Geez, next thing you know, their father is going to show up and he’s going to be pissed at us.

  Then this man appears out of nowhere. He stops right in front of us, just out of range of the swings, his arms folded over his chest. He looks like a school principal, his face stern and disapproving.

  JD slows down enough so he can say to the guy, “Why don’t you take a picture? It’ll last longer.” And then, JD being JD, he starts to laugh at what a smart remark he’s just made.

  “Why don’t you act your age?” the man says. “Those swings are for little kids to play on, not for teenagers who have been smoking up.”

  That makes me stop pumping. The ma
n must have smelled us. Maybe he has been watching us for a while. Maybe he saw us pass the joint back and forth down by the big tree over on one side of the park.

  “Come on,” I say to JD. I drag my feet through the sand under the swing to slow myself down. “Let’s get out of here.”

  But JD is pumping his legs again.

  “There aren’t any little kids around,” he says. He swears at the man and tells him to mind his own business.

  The man’s stern face gets even sterner.

  “You talk like that,” the man says, “it only shows how ignorant you are and what a poor vocabulary you have.”

  That does it. JD jumps off the swing when it’s still pretty high. He lands right in front of the man.

  “What’s your problem?” he says. “You got nothing better to do than harass people who are using a public park?”

  “You’re right,” the man says. “It is a public park. Which means little children have a right to play here without some ignorant fool like you bullying them.”

  I get off my swing and go over to JD. “Come on,” I say. “Let’s get out of here. We don’t need any trouble.”

  “I see your friend has more brains than you,” the man says to JD. “Because if you don’t go, I will call the police and I will report you for marijuana use.”

  JD just laughs. “Get real,” he says. “The cops aren’t arresting anyone for smoking anymore.” It’s true. They’re still busting people for growing it and selling it, but they’re not making arrests for just smoking it. JD explained it to me one time. It has something to do with a Supreme Court case that happened, and now the government is taking another look at the law. While it does, the cops have stopped arresting people for simple possession.

  “If I call the cops, they’ll take your names and they’ll take your pot,” the man says. That’s true too. If the cops catch you, they write everything down with the idea that as soon as the law is clarified, they can charge you. In the meantime, you’re out your weed.