One Death, Nine Stories

by Marc Aronson

  Regina placed the pregnancy test, partially wrapped in a tissue, on the priest’s desk.

  “Ew. I peed on that,” Candy protested. She snatched it from the desk and put it on the chair next to her leg.

  “Candace, I don’t understand,” Father Holbrook started. “When you came to me and started lessons, you and I discussed how girls should act. I know you’ve been seeing Kevin Nicholas, and I hoped it was a friendship more than anything. Especially at your age.” He trailed off into thought. “I think our first step is to break it off between the two of you. It’s clearly not a healthy relationship if you’ve already begun doing things like this.”

  “I hate God,” Candy said. Out of nowhere. She wasn’t even sure if it was true. So she said it again. “There is no God.”

  Regina Lomack slapped her then. Father Holbrook leaned forward.

  Candy continued. “And you don’t have to worry. Kevin broke up with me today. He found another girlfriend.”

  She started to sob then, rehearing everything Kevin had said to her in front of the CVS: “You’re just always pissing me off, you know? Always talking. Great tits aren’t everything. Anyway, Laura has birth-control pills, and I can’t handle another week like last week. Jesus. How could you be so stupid to almost get pregnant? Everyone knows about that shit.”

  She didn’t know about that shit. All Candy was ever taught in school was how to not have sex. Abstinence education, they called it. Which was, as it turned out, no education at all—just the lack of it.

  “Good,” Father Holbrook said. “I’m glad you’re away from him. He’s trouble. It’s not my place to say it, but I think the boy needs counseling after what he’s already seen in his life.” Then he looked at Mrs. Lomack and said, “Regina, I think Candace needs to spend more time here. If she says she hates God, we need to make her understand that God isn’t the problem.”

  “Agreed,” said Mrs. Lomack.

  He looked back at Candy. “You’ll go to confession and get this sorted out. Then you’ll meet me here every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to clean.”

  “To clean?”

  “It’s time you learned your place in the world. Maybe more time in the church will remind you why you want to stay away from trouble.”

  “Agreed,” Mrs. Lomack repeated.

  “You get one chance at life, Candace. It’s a glorious and amazing gift. I’ll see you here at eight a.m. tomorrow.”

  Regina grabbed her arm then and the pregnancy test dropped onto the floor and Candy went to pick it up, but Father Holbrook said, “Leave it.”

  The drive home was quiet. They took Hempstead Ave., and it was crowded on a Sunday. Candy sat in the backseat again and stared out the window. She couldn’t believe it—the day had been so surreal. First Kevin, and then her mother and the used pregnancy test and Father Holbrook. The whole week had been unreal. Starting with telling Kevin about maybe being pregnant, to buying the pregnancy test at CVS with Kevin after telling him, to him being moody instead of happy when the line turned out to be a minus instead of a plus. She was so happy that it didn’t occur to her that he wouldn’t be, too. But it should have occurred to her after nearly nine months of being Kevin’s girlfriend.

  There was medication now for what Kevin had. For what his father had. Something to even out the ups and downs and make life less intense. She talked about it a few times with him, always getting the same answer. The Nicholases didn’t believe in that sort of thing, he’d said.

  “God cures all,” he said. “If you believe my mother.”

  And killing yourself cures all . . . if I believe your father.

  Four years later and Kevin Nicholas was dead. Candy still lived at home even though she had a full-time job at the local brewing company, serving food and beer. She didn’t go to church anymore. Not after the three months of cleaning toilets and floors and not after acting out penance upon penance at the altar and not after the just once of Sister Helen, who had taken her under her wing during the summer of atonement.

  She had stopped going by simply disappearing. It became a game. Her parents would lock up her windows, so she’d sneak out the door. They got deadbolt locks and hid the key, and she’d squeeze out through the bathroom window. They locked that, and so she took to not coming home on Saturday nights at all.

  Sometimes as she roamed the roads late on Saturday nights, she’d seen Kevin and his new girl, Laura. Smoking joints. Drinking cans of beer behind the shopping center. Then school started up again, and Kevin moved on to other girls. She saw him once in their old spot in the park, two figures on the grass with Kevin’s plaid blanket beneath them. She tried to look away, but she couldn’t. She watched until they were done.

  Then she looked at her phone and noted the time: 11:46. By 11:58 he was climbing the rocks by himself and whatever poor girl he’d just just onced sat staring into space, holding her knees and rocking. Probably trying to figure out the puzzle because she didn’t know yet that there were pieces missing. Probably wondering if he meant it when he said she was beautiful, Candy thought. He never meant it. To Kevin nothing was beautiful.

  She’d tried to stay friends with him. First love and all that. You stay friends. You help when he’s down. You pray some nights that he stops hanging around with the wrong guys. White and angry with no reason. Stuck on Hollis Ave. and listening to rap music with the bass so high you can hear them coming. You pray, but nothing happens—which is proof that she was right when she said it. There is no God.

  They made a crew. Not like any of the real gangs you see on TV, but maybe the same kind of mentality. And Kev was the perfect draw. Running star. Senior. Good-looking. Got the girls and knew what to do with them. Even Mick had joined in for a while until things started to get too heavy. She wasn’t sure what Mick meant when he’d said it to her. What could those boys do in this little place that would be so dangerous? So she asked, and Mick said, “Initiations.”

  Which made it no less of a mystery.

  A year after they’d broken up and Candy had moved on to the next dare—a kid named Tom who was in foster care—Kevin’s little sister, Lydia, approached her in school. She said, “I know you still love him, but I’m telling you, girl. You’re better off. He’s not right. We don’t know what to do.”

  “He won’t talk to me anymore,” Candy offered. “Not since the crew.”

  “The crew is so stupid,” Lydia said.

  “Mick got out,” Candy said. “I hear he likes you.”

  Lydia looked down at the newly shined public-school linoleum. “Not my type,” she said. “Anyway, he’s Kev’s best friend. Kev would kill us both if he ever found out. Like Scarface, you know?”

  Candy had never seen Scarface, but she nodded.

  That year Kevin graduated and tried to get himself together. Went to college a little. But he was still on the roller coaster. She could see it in the slumped way he walked sometimes. How simultaneously overconfident he was. How the two Kevins fit into one body. She could see it and she was sorry for his whole life. He didn’t deserve it—what had happened to him. It wasn’t fair that he was on a crusade to kill his own happiness. But things happen.

  Shit happens.

  The last time she saw him, she served him at the brewery. It was about a month ago. He brought in some friends from college and held court. He was nice, but every time she walked away from the table, the boys laughed and she knew he was talking about her.

  She smoked a joint outside the kitchen door with Caesar, the blue-eyed waiter.

  “That table of assholes giving you a hard time?” he asked.

  “Nah. I know them,” she said. “Or one of them, anyway.” I guess.

  When she stepped out of the shower, she toweled off and opened her computer again. Four more Facebook condolences. She tried to add one to make it five, but she couldn’t think of anything to say. This wasn’t a throwaway thing, Kevin Nicholas. He wasn’t an ordinary boy who just happened to die. He was damaged goods. Her first love. He was somet
hing special, even though he never saw it. He deserved something more than a stupid Facebook post. He deserved more than some inoffensive flowers her mother would send. He deserved a life. And who doesn’t make mistakes? Just once? Everyone makes mistakes. Just once.

  “KEVIN’S DEAD,” my dad said, slowly easing into the seat across from me at our dining-room table. “His mother just texted and asked me to tell you. She said he . . .”

  I stared up from my cell and watched my dad’s hand set his BlackBerry facedown. My eyes went to his lips. Words came out of his mouth but my mind hit mute on the rest of what he said.

  I didn’t go deaf on him because I was still tight from our earlier argument and wished he’d poof into a cloud of smoke and disappear.

  And I wasn’t tuning him out because of the earbud in my right ear blasting this sick beat over and over.

  He and everything in front of me just instantly went TV-screen-blip-black off because the words “Kevin’s dead” just couldn’t compute. They short-circuited my whole everything.

  How could Kev be dead? We just spoke the other day.

  Kev can’t be dead. That’s my boy since fifth grade.

  I interrupted Dad. “Kevin? Kev? As in Kevin Nicholas?”

  “Yes.”

  I mopped my face with my hand, slumped backward into my chair, stared at the floor, and blocked my old man out again.

  Kev was only nineteen. Who dies at nineteen? Poor kids in the hood who get merked in drive-bys or young people with medical conditions. Kev didn’t belong in either group.

  His family wasn’t balling out MTV Cribs rich, but they had loot. Kev was captain of our high-school cross-country team with diesel Spider-Man arms, abs, and crazy-dumb strength and speed. I still remember the time in our school parking lot when he sprinted, dove in the air, and front-flipped over the hood of Mick’s car.

  Dad’s face turned sadder as he reached for me.

  My body moved on auto, snatching my hand away from his, flicking my earbud out, standing, and leaving him behind as he shouted, “Will, if you need to talk, I’m here!”

  I headed upstairs and punched my bedroom door open. I suddenly felt I needed to see some of the SC with this news about Kev. I wondered if they knew about him already. If yeah, I bet they needed to see me, too.

  I walked to my bookshelf and slid Kev’s senior yearbook off and opened to page 23 to us and five other members of the SC in our team photo. We were bodybuilder posing and flexing in our tank tops and shorts after a race we’d won. We were smirking, nodding, and winking—all cocky—as if we were in that LMFAO video going, “Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle.” We all wore workout wristbands with our school’s name over the middle of our left forearms. People always asked why we wore them whenever we had on T-shirts. We never answered, and they figured it was some weird school-pride style of ours.

  We thought nothing could hurt us. I huffed and stared at him. What happened, Kev? You should’ve been the last of us to die, not the first.

  Back in the day, I used to feel everyone in the SC was the same: mostly white, some mixed (like me, Mick, Kev, and Vince), pissed with good reasons, jocks, and dumb enough to risk everything, sometimes our lives, doing dangerous stuff. I never told anyone, but I knew Kev wasn’t like me or any of us.

  He was . . . better—even though he was straight evil at times.

  He had something we didn’t: cult-leader charisma. Dude was half magnet, half sponge. Me, Candy, Mick, and a lot of kids couldn’t help but be drawn to Kev, and once we did we got sponged up.

  I flicked the yearbook to page 57 and saw me, Kev, and most of the SC in a photo where the school crammed us into the gym for a big, all-school shot. We all surrounded Kev, and almost none of our separate personalities were in this picture because we wore our hair, shirts, and jeans like each other—like Kev.

  I shut the yearbook and in the blink of an eye I flashed back to the night of that photo and our first blood initiation.

  “I’m out,” Mick said. “You doing this, Will?”

  I nodded.

  “You guys officially are clowns.” Mick stormed into the night.

  Jake nervously bit his fingernails. “I’m throwing Mick a beat-down if he tells anyone.”

  “Easy, J,” Kev told Jake. “Everyone here knows Mick’ll lay you out if you step to him. Mick’s a mutt, not a butt.”

  It bugged me a little when Kev called Mick and mixed people mutts, because I’m mixed. Besides, Kev’s mixed, too. But he didn’t say it a lot and I didn’t get bent out of shape about racist remarks the way Mick did. Maybe because I could pass for white; Mick obviously had an A-Rod look going on.

  As for Jake, he didn’t like hearing Kev say Mick would crush him in a fight (even though we all knew it was true), so he started posturing the way cops and cowboys do. He grabbed and jostled his belt buckle, shifting his eyes from left to right while thinking of a comeback. Kev took the hot air out of Jake’s balloon before he puffed up too much by saying, “J, chill.” He stared at me. “Mick’s no snitch. Right, Will?”

  I thought back to the summer in grade school when me, Mick, and Kev first met. “William Benedict. Michael Galindo. Candace Lomack. Kevin Nicholas.” Father H read our names off his clipboard. “Take a few seconds to introduce yourselves. You’re doing altar attendant training together.” From that minute to now, Kev and Mick had had a roller-coaster friendship, and Kev did a lot to turn Mick into a ticking time-bomb. Like my freshman year, when Kev rode Mick for being nice to his Latina house cleaner. “When your old man split for Jersey, you should’ve sent your Hispanic side with him. Stop relating to immigrants, comprende?” That and other moments should’ve made Mick explode, leak stuff, and crap all over Kev’s squeaky-clean reputation, but Mick never did. Maybe because he knew Kev had dirt on him, too. Maybe because Mick knew that airing Kev’s dirty laundry would mean hanging me and all the whole SC out for the police to scoop us up. I didn’t know his reasons, but Mick kept our secrets.

  I reassured Jake and the rest of the SC. “Mick’s good. He won’t say anything.”

  Kev flashed Jake his electric smile, which could light up all those buildings in those Manhattan skyline pictures. You could see Jake’s tension begin to melt off him as his jerky right shoulder stopped moving and he winked at Kev. Kev had this way of making people feel ant-small, like right now with J. Then he’d turn on his charm and people forgot their beefs with him.

  Kev turned back to the fireplace and, with both hands in grill gloves, pulled out two branding irons and stared at their red-hot tips as he twisted them super slow and smiled at the half-inch-square glowing initials on each end: SC. His dark basement, with window shades down and halogen lamps on low, made Kev’s intense eyes and smile seem wicked and made the sizzling S and C brands glow neon-bright. His basement had a bunch of branding irons, from A to Z in all sizes, from when his grandfather, Poppy Nicholas, branded horses in his stable. While eyeing the branding irons, Kev started talking loud enough for the whole SC to hear. He said everyone in our group had a broken family story that made us pieces of a puzzle that fit together. Kev’s dad had committed suicide. My mom had cracked up and spent the rest of her life in a mental hospital. All of us had demons, Kev said, and our crew was our haven, but as tight as we sometimes were, we still were only puzzle pieces that came together once in a while.

  “We need something that bonds us forever.” Kev stepped into the center of the room with the brands, and we formed a circle around him. I couldn’t take my eyes off the neon S and C, the way I was both attracted to and scared of the lava of that Hawaii volcano that my dad and I visited during our Big Island vacation.

  At the start of his senior year, when Kev told me his idea about branding ourselves with Ss and Cs, I thought he was kidding. Four or five months ago when he showed me the hot-iron brands, I still didn’t believe him. But now I knew he’d meant every word of it.

  As crazy as brands sounded, everyone in our crew wanted their brand more than they didn’t for a
few reasons. First, proving we weren’t punks was always on our minds. The SC had enough street connects to know who did illegal tattoos. We could’ve plopped the cash down and gotten tatted up, but tats were soft compared to manning up and letting hot iron press into your flesh without squealing like a baby. Second, every Joe, Bob, and guy in between on the planet, from mechanics to drug dealers to athletes to entertainers to presidents of countries, had tattoos. Tats were supposed to be gangster, but they were becoming boardroom: neat, pretty, and elite. Not brands. You knew in a room of thirty tattoo-wearing dudes that probably none of them had nutted up and gotten a brand. Plus, to get a brand, you couldn’t walk into a shop and buy one like a computer app or a pair of sneakers. The branding had to happen underground, and brands had underground swag. It was an initiation. We also agreed we needed to put the brand somewhere on our bodies that showed we lived up to the rep of our crew’s name.

  When we were younger, me and Kev had talked after his father blew his brains out, around the same time my mom had the nervous breakdown that broke my family apart.

  Me and Kev agreed, back then, that his father and my mother had tried pleasing people too much and that had led them over the edge. Right there, me and Kev made a promise not to play the people-pleasing game and live life in fear. We agreed to kill the part of ourselves that was weak, that played it safe and cared about people’s reactions. “We should make our little crew official,” Kev smiled his megawatt smile that made me feel good, “and give ourselves a name. How about the Suicide Crew?” I grinned back.

  Since that day, Kev and I had carefully invited kids into the SC who wanted to bury the worst parts of their families and themselves. Kids who could keep secrets, had big fight in them, and wanted to chump death and people who we felt were dying before they died. Every year we added a new guy who wasn’t a punk-ass to the SC. They proved themselves through two sets of initiations: death-defying dares and assaults on well-to-do jerks. Drinking parties with proof-through-the-roof bottles of alcohol plus break-ins to steal prized trophies of gopher-adults we hated were the softer felonies on our growing list of crimes. Every new badass in our group just made our crew even more hungry to do the next-level thing for us to get stamped 100 Percent Grade A SC-Approved Fearless.