by Hart, Callie
This year, it's the Weaving family pulling the strings, with their obnoxiously large donations to the football team and Mr. Weaving’s unwelcome presence on the school board, but Jacob will be aging out of Raleigh in a year’s time and Mr. Weaving’s interest in the school will graduate right along with his son. There isn’t a shadow of a doubt in my mind that there’ll be another meddling parent with deep pockets who’ll happily step into the breach once Caleb Weaving’s made his exit and taken his check book with him. It’s just the way these things go.
Regardless of how it happened, I’m glad Silver doesn’t have to sit in a classroom with Jacob. I, on the other hand, am not that lucky. We’re in History together, as well as Spanish, English and Graphic Design; I find myself sitting next to the sick bastard at least once a day, and it takes everything in me not to pile drive my fist into the sick fuck’s face.
Thirty minutes after I reply to Monty’s text, the bell rings and I make a fast escape. Silver’s on the other side of the building, so chances that I’ll see her between classes are slim, but for once she isn’t the reason I’m bolting from Math. There’s someone I plan on paying a visit, and I don’t want Silver knowing about it.
I find Cillian Dupris close to the boy’s locker rooms, talking to the Neanderthal who thought about starting a fight with me this morning for knocking into him. Cillian sees me charging down the hallway toward him, makes eye contact, and practically shits himself. Before the shooting, he might have tried to bail before I could reach him, but that’s not quite as easy anymore, given that he’s wheelchair bound.
He scrambles, trying to navigate his way around Bronson, but there are too many people bustling by, choking the corridor, and he isn’t able to bully a path through the crowd. His buddy doesn’t even give him a hand and get out of his way.
My hackles are up when I finally reach Cillian, a red-hot heat burning down my back. I ball my hands into fists, imagining how satisfying it would be to grind my knuckles into his face. “We’re going to have a chat, you and me,” I inform him.
Cillian works his jaw, eyes unsure as he looks up at me. He was a tall guy before one of Leon’s bullets hit him in the back and shattered three of his vertebrae. He used to use his size and his build to intimidate everybody around him. He used the fact that he was so much bigger than Silver to hurt her. It must be a real blow to him that he now has to look up to meet the eyes of every single student at Raleigh. “Go fuck yourself, asshole. I don’t have anything to say to you,” he spits.
Maybe he’s hoping that there’s still some sort of residual respect for him floating around the school. Maybe there actually is, and the people he trampled all over on a daily basis before he lost the use of his legs are still frightened of him, one way or another.
I, on the other hand, have never been afraid of him. If he thinks he can cow me with a bit of attitude, he’s going to be sorely fucking disappointed. “That’s okay. I don’t really need you to say anything. You only really need to listen.”
Quickly, I take hold of the handles at the back of his wheelchair, pushing him away from the locker rooms. “Hey! Hey, get the fuck off me, Moretti. You are making a big mistake. Jake’s gonna flip his shit when he hears about this!”
Hah. Poor bastard. I lean down a little as I push him toward the set of double doors by the technology block, heading for the exit. Only he can hear me speak above the chatter and the gossip of our fellow classmates. “You think Jake gives a fuck about you now, Cillian? You think you’re any use to him whatsoever now? You’re off the football team. You’d be useless in a fight if Jake got himself in trouble. The only purpose you serve to Jacob Weaving these days is that of a distraction. He’d push you into oncoming traffic if he thought it would benefit him somehow. Other than that…I’m willing to put money on the fact that he doesn’t even want to fucking know you anymore.”
Being paralyzed from the waist down would be an awful outcome for anybody. A small part of me wouldn’t wish this fate upon my worst enemy, but you know what? Fuck that small part of me. This is exactly what Cillian Dupris deserves.
Plenty of people watch as I wheel Cillian out of the school building, but no one does a thing to stop me. That piece of shit Bronson probably is running like the little bitch that he is to go and find Jacob, but that doesn’t matter. What I have to say to Cillian won’t take long, and even if it did, I am not afraid of Jacob fucking Weaving. Let him fucking come, if he can be bothered.
The sky is clear, so pale it’s almost white as I push Cillian down the ramp toward the stand of trees behind the tech block. Along a small pathway, beyond the line of the trees, there’s a steep siding that leads to a small gully if you have the stones to scramble down to it. Some of the students like to smoke pot in the little hidden gully, but with so much snowfall over the past few days, it’s impossible to even see where the drop off is, let alone a route to climb down to it.
The tires of Cillian’s wheelchair are rugged, with a deep tread that bites into the snow with ease. “Nice rig you’ve got here, Cillian. Folks really hooked you up, huh? This thing must have cost a pretty penny.”
“Fuck you, man. Where the hell are you taking me?” Cillian’s doing his best to maintain an outward display of dignity, but I can hear the frustration and the embarrassment in his tone, muddled in with a healthy dash of fear. It’s smart of him to be afraid. I’d be fucking terrified if I was in his position, and the boyfriend of the girl I’d raped was pushing me into a dim, eerie forest, where my body might not be found until spring.
I don’t supply him with an answer to his question. This isn’t my first time at the rodeo, after all. I know that fear is an entirely psychological beast. It festers and grows fat on the back of what might be far more than it feeds on what is. The longer Cillian’s left worrying about what I’m going to do to him, the better.
I only have to travel another fifty feet down the small snow-covered pathway that cuts through the trees before we’re out of sight from the main building, but I take him an extra fifty just for good measure. And the whole time I’m pushing him, Cillian is babbling like a lunatic.
“You don’t want to do this, man, I promise you. You’re gonna regret this, big time. My father’s gonna have you shipped off to fucking Stafford Creek for this. You ever been inside a supermax prison before, Moretti? They’re gonna eat you a-fucking-live. Alex? Alex! Fuck, come on, man. There’s no need to get this crazy over a fucking girl. They’re all insane, am I right? You know how they get. They drink too much, hook up, don’t wanna look like a slut, so they start slinging mud. You know what they’re like, man! Look, stop! Stop, stop, okay, okay! Jesus fucking Christ! All right. It wasn’t my idea. It was all Jake’s idea. Me and Sam, we didn’t even know what he was planning until he brought her up there. Neither of us touched her. Silver Parisi isn’t my type anyway. I—fuck! I like redheads! I didn’t touch her!”
I come to a halt, grinding my teeth together so hard it feels like they’re about to shatter under the strain. Slowly, I walk around Cillian’s chair, and the snow beneath my sneakers creaks.
There’s real terror in Cillian’s eyes. He tries to push himself away from me, back the way we came, but the wheels of his chair only sink into the looser snow that I’ve parked him in. Purposefully slow, my face purposefully blank, I crouch down in front of Cillian so that I’m at his level. The guy who hurt my Silver snivels, wiping at his nose with the back of his hand.
Still, I don’t say anything.
“All right, man. All right. Fine. I did do it. I did touch her. I did fuck her. But you don’t understand what it’s like, man. Jake’s a fucking psychopath. You go against him and it’s like signing your own death warrant. This place is no walk in the park. You’ve got to try and get ahead, to be better than everyone else, or—or you end up being walked all over. Without Jake, I’d have been left behind.”
“So. That’s it, then. Your reasoning? You forced your fingers up inside a girl…you brutally raped her because of social
standing?”
“No! No, you’re not listening to m—wait, wh—what the hell? Where are you going?”
I’m guessing there are about a hundred and forty feet, total, between here and the entrance back into Raleigh. It won’t be impossible for Cillian to make it back inside, but it sure as hell won’t be fun. His chair’s pretty much useless to him now. He won’t be able to wheel himself back along the path without assistance, and I sure as fuck am not going to be giving it to him. I’ve already started to make my way back toward the building. I pause briefly, turning back to face him.
“You raped a girl, and yet here you are, getting left behind anyway. And, from what I hear, you’re fully paralyzed from the waist down, huh, Dupris. I’m no doctor, but even I know that means your dick’ll never work again. I’d say that’s pretty fucking poetic, wouldn’t you?”
“C’mon, man, please! If you leave me here, I’m gonna fucking freeze to death!”
“Ahhh, don’t be such a defeatist, Cillian. What’s the point in giving up before you’ve even tried? There’s every chance you’ll make it inside before you freeze to death. You’re right, though. It is pretty cold. If I were you, I’d get crawling.”
11
ALEX
My conscience is like an underdeveloped muscle. It rarely gets used, so it’s atrophied over the years. It still kicks and twinges every once in a while, though, when I’m pondering something really terrible from my past…or when I’m plotting something truly fucking vile for the future. I feel absolutely nothing as I stalk back into Raleigh today, though, relishing the warmth as I head for statistics. The idea of Cillian sitting out in the cold, waiting for someone to come and find him, to rescue him and wheel him inside, so he doesn’t have to flop to the ground on his belly and worm his way back into school like the fucking snake that he is? I’m crowing with delight over that one. The temperatures are sub-zero outside. The students of Raleigh High aren’t stupid enough to go traipsing around out there for the hell of it in this kind of weather, which means the chances of someone stumbling across him are dismally low. He’s going to have to weigh his pride against his will to live, and eventually he’ll make the decision. He’ll crawl, and he’ll know for a second what it feels like to be vulnerable, degraded and humiliated.
What I’ve just done is definitely bending the rules Silver set out. I haven’t officially broken them, per se. At least I don’t think I have. I, personally, didn’t lay a finger on Cillian, so I can’t really be blamed for hurting him. Declining to assist someone if they find themselves in a tricky situation? Hmm. That one’s a bit of a grey area. There are two sides to that issue—a heads and a tails on a coin of morality that could potentially fall either way. I don’t give a fuck, though. I have zero fucking regrets.
It could be argued that the universe has already meted out justice to Cillian, taking his ability to walk, preventing him from ever having sex again, but I don’t believe in karma or the divine judgement of the universe. My mother believed in God and all the saints of the Catholic church. She chose to see the hand of divinity in her everyday life, attributing even the smallest coincidences and mishaps as the pleasure or disapproval of her almighty maker.
I don’t know if God exists. What I do know is this: if we were created by some higher power, and there is some sort of balance to be answered to for our actions, we sure as fuck aren’t asked to answer for our sins in this life. Good people die horrific deaths, while the evilest creatures imaginable walk around with the sun on their faces, fortune favoring them at every turn.
This life is chaos. Every path, action, decision, and consequence is a crap shoot, and there’s no one watching over us, stacking the deck, tweaking our outcomes, guiding the course of our lives one way or another. Call me callous. Call me wretched. Call me whatever the fuck you want to call me. It doesn’t matter. I won’t be relying on omnipotent deities, faeries, divine spirits, yin, yang or the ever-expanding universe to teach the bastards who hurt Silver that there will be consequences for what they did to Silver. No, one way or another I’m gonna take care of this one personally.
Statistics passes in a blur. The bell for lunch buzzes, and everyone charges for the cafeteria. I’m about to make my own way to the library—Ha! Me, in a fucking library!—where Silver and I have been meeting up for lunch every day, when my phone buzzes in my pocket.
SILVER: Music room. Five minutes?
Huh. Looks like she’s after a change of scenery today. A strange choice of location, though. I change course, going against the flow of bodies that are all heading in the same direction toward the cafeteria, a salmon swimming against the current. It isn’t difficult to push my way through. The crowd parts for me like the red sea, students hugging the walls, tripping over each other to get out of my way as I beeline for the stairway that leads up to the music rooms.
When I was first sentenced to finish out my high school career here in Raleigh, the other kids looked at me like I was a curiosity. A mystery box wrapped up in leather an ink, and they weren’t entirely sure what was inside. A couple of people poked and prodded at the box, shaking it to see if they could guess at what it contained, but all of that changed after the shooting. Now, people seemed to have decided that I am, in actual fact, Pandora’s box, and I should be left well alone at all costs lest I bring about the end of the fucking world.
Again.
Hah. Fucking. Hah.
I take the stairs three at a time. Having long legs is a blessing. Inside the music room, Silver sits by the window with a guitar on her lap, playing a slow, melancholy tune as she stares out of the glass at the white world beyond. I look at her and every single thought that was rushing around my head a second ago fades to black.
She’s bathed in cold winter sun, the profile of her face outlined in brilliant white. From this angle, the light’s refracted through the lens of her eye, picking out and illuminating only the faintest hint of blue. Stands of her hair catch at the light, glowing like fine filaments of gold around her head. The sight of her like that, playing so absently, fingers moving up and down the neck of the guitar, telling their sad story, the collar of her plain grey t-shirt hanging loose, exposing her shoulder…god, it makes my chest ache. I’m still getting used to feeling like this about another person. Love has been a stranger to me since I was six-years-old, and now it’s swept into my world like a goddamn hurricane, blowing the doors off my sanity and upending everything I thought I ever knew.
“You planning on just standing there, or are you gonna come play with me?” Silver asks softly. So much for her not realizing I’d arrived. I master a stern expression as I enter the music room properly, coming to a halt in front of the instruments, making a show of picking out the perfect one. Silver laughs quietly under her breath, her fingers still plucking at the strings of the guitar she chose for herself; she left her own at home today.
With a flourish, I take the oldest, most battered looking guitar from the wall, brandishing it like a trophy as I pull up a stool opposite Silver.
“Interesting choice,” she observes.
I test the strings, correcting their tuning one at a time. When I’m happy that it’s ready, I allow myself a tiny smile. “Old guitars are the best. The wood’s warm. It’s done all its shifting and warping. Old guitars like this have absorbed a lot of music. They always carry the sweetest notes.”
It sounds stupid, but Silver doesn’t laugh. She cants her head to one side, her eyes narrowed, like she’s seeing the instrument for the first time. “Show me,” she says.
My turn to laugh. “Yes, ma’am. Your wish is my command.”
* * *
SILVER
They say music runs in families, in your blood, but I don’t know if that’s particularly true. I’m the only musical person in my family. Dad waxes lyrical about playing the drums in a band with his friends in high school, but I’ve seen the man tap out a rhythm against his desk and trust me…I think he might have been the reason the band broke up their senior year.<
br />
Mr. Scott, the music teacher who originally taught me to play when I was a kid, gave me the mechanics of playing a guitar. The bare facts. Hold your fingers here to create this sound. Pluck here to make this sound. Now strum like this to create rhythm. What he didn’t give me was the longing in my veins whenever I heard something beautiful being played. That was already inside me. Over the years, I’ve relied on YouTube to find talented guitarists who made me feel that way when they played. I watched and I studied them, pausing, replaying, my fingers stumbling over the strings, until I finally figured out how they made their instruments sing and then I made mine sing along.
I have never seen someone make a guitar weep in person, the way Alex makes the scuffed, ancient old guitar in his hands weep, though, and the sight is breathtaking.
His posture is terrible, back badly bent over the guitar, head turned to one side as he listens intently to the music pouring from his fingertips. Mr. Scott always used to chide me if my back wasn’t ramrod straight, my head up, eyes forward instead of down on the strings. It’s clear that Alex isn’t watching what his hands are doing to ensure he hits the right strings. His finger picking and his fretwork are flawless. He’s watching his hands, as if he’s following along with them on a journey and the music is painting a picture that he wants to witness as it comes into being.
And the music itself...
God.
Dark. Rough. Complex and quiet in places, brash and furious in others. The ebb and flow of the melody isn’t what I’d call beautiful to the ear. It’s more than that. Better. It pulls at me, sinking its claws down deep into my bones, possessing me in a way that only happens once or twice in a lifetime if you’re lucky.
