Violent Ends

by Neal Shusterman

  “Alice!” Jaime half shouts. “Where did you go? I turned around and you were gone.”

  “I went to get these.”

  She holds up the clothes. A pair of jeans and a T-shirt with long sleeves.

  “They’re his.”

  It takes them a few seconds. Then their eyes light up. They crow and jump and make Christ-poses in her honor. Cranmer slides against her like a snake.

  “You broke into his house?” He grins. “You are a bad girl, Allie. You are a bad, bad girl.”

  She wasn’t. Not ever before. She smoked and drank, blew weed and ate a little molly, but she was never bad. She was good. She went to school and didn’t fail classes and in her wildest fantasies, one day not so far away, Tyler would have looked at her and said her name like he knew her.

  Alice throws the clothes at Dalton and David, and they toss them in the air. Dalton dances with Kirby’s shirt, mocking it like a joke date to homecoming. She lets them do it for a while, lets everyone get their digs in, before she takes the clothes back and strings them up on the wire clothesline, the shirt on top and the jeans pinned to the bottom of the shirt. A flat, empty Kirby.

  Even rifling through his dresser in the dark she managed to find a shirt that he wore to school often, so the ghost hanging there looks familiar. She can almost see his face rising over the line.

  No one has to tell them what to do. As if they’ve had it in their minds the whole time too. They spit on it and laugh. They shout insults. They shake up their precious whiskey sodas and spray it all over the jeans until flat Kirby looks like he pissed himself. They piss on him for real. They don’t need secret, murdered loves to hate Kirby Matheson. They hate him plenty, just for what he did. Lifting himself up over other peoples’ lives. Making himself the center of the universe. And for the fear that none of them admit to, that it could have been them, had they waved their hands in the parking lot.

  “That’s enough,” says Alice. “Where’s the lighter fluid?”

  She lets Cranmer douse him with it, but she’s the one who lights the match.

  “Burn, motherfucker,” she says, and it goes up in a rush, flames licking up the legs and onto the chest, down the arms that flap weakly. Almost as if they’re trying to defend themselves.

  * * *

  Tyler Bower was almost perfect. Perfect dark brown hair. Perfect warm brown eyes. He knew Alice’s name. He’d used it when he asked her what the reading assignment was in sophomore English. He sat two feet away for an entire semester.

  Alice has replayed their handful of moments many times. Now she sits on Jaime’s bedroom floor and replays them again, pretending to listen to Jaime complain about what a shitty anniversary present David got her. It was shitty. It was socks. Cool striped ones that Jaime liked, but not as an anniversary gift.

  “Who gets their girlfriend socks?”

  “David, apparently,” Alice says.

  “I blew so much money on those shoes for him,” Jaime says. “And I get ten-dollar socks.”

  Alice would like to tell Jaime about Tyler. But she’s never even hinted. Every time she watched him messing around on the football field and every time she left class hoping to catch a glimpse of him in the halls, it had been her secret. Once in a while he would smile at her. Alice never managed to smile back fast enough.

  She would never have told him how she felt. But now that he’s gone, it will always feel like they were the next words out of her mouth.

  Alice thinks about Kirby a lot now too. She thinks about him rotting in the ground, in that secret place his parents buried him so no one could piss in the dirt and crack his headstone like he deserves. Burning his clothes felt good. Breaking into his space felt good. She wants to do more things like that. Things that Kirby wouldn’t like. Maybe she’ll beat his sister black and blue. Maybe she’ll run down his parents. Sometimes she wants to stop, she wants to forget him, obliterate him, to make sure he doesn’t matter. But she can’t stop thinking about Kirby any more than she can stop thinking about Tyler.

  Tyler isn’t Alice’s only secret anymore.

  * * *

  The jocks are throwing a party. For once everyone is invited. They pass out flyers on bright yellow paper like joiner college kids recruiting freshmen for rush week, and the address of the big, expensive house it’s being held in is right there in bold. They mean it. In the wake of slaughter, all are welcome. The yellow of the paper is like a new day. Alice crumples it in her fist and it sits there, a beaten little sun.

  Cranmer comes by to take her out the night of the party, and her mom doesn’t ask where. She even sort of smiles at Cranmer, the same Cranmer she once told Alice looked like a coatrack covered in dirty laundry.

  “Try to have some fun,” her mom says. “Try to cheer up.”

  Nothing about curfews and no cautions. Whatever Alice gets up to, it can’t be worse than having the back of her head blown off.

  For a while they just drive around. Cranmer pulls into the park and turns the music up. He rolls a joint that a gentleman would have had rolled already, but Cranmer never thinks ahead. Cranmer never thinks.

  “What are we doing?” Alice asks.

  “I don’t know. What do you want to do?”

  Alice shrugs. Cranmer lights the joint and passes it to her. They smoke without speaking until it’s short and wet with resin and spit and she waves it away.

  “We could go to a movie,” he says.

  “What?”

  “A movie.”

  Alice stares at him and he laughs. The joint hit her hard and she’s almost anesthetized; she almost feels okay. It’s a chore to lift her arm and a chore to breathe and that feels about right.

  “Earth to Allie. What do you want to do?”

  Alice rolls her head against the seat.

  “Let’s go to that party.”

  Cranmer’s smile starts slow, but it spreads all the way up his cheeks. Stoned as she is it looks near cartoonish, that cat from Wonderland or like someone carved up his face like the Joker in The Dark Knight. She laughs. She laughs until her belly hurts, and Cranmer has to cover her mouth so he can speak the address into his GPS.

  When they pull onto the street they don’t have to wonder which house it is. It’s the biggest house on a block full of big houses. It’s the whitest one, with pale shutters and a long driveway packed with cars, a line of cars that spills down the sidewalk.

  “It’s so bright,” Alice says, watching the silhouettes of bodies talking and throwing their heads back. There must be two dozen windows, all lit up with people crammed inside.

  And on the lawn, too. Eight boys playing a screaming game of football, posturing like apes. They hit each other too hard for friends, and Alice suddenly wants to play. It looks like rage. Destruction. Grief with no place to go. It looks like fun.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t be here,” says Cranmer.

  “You got a flyer, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, so did I.”

  Alice opens her door and gets out. She walks up the driveway and doesn’t know or care if Cranmer is behind her until he bumps into her back once they’re inside.

  The house is big, but it’s still hot as she walks through the rooms. The people they pass are drunk to the last, obliterated, and it’s barely ten thirty. Cranmer taps her arm and hands her a cup of something. It tastes a little like fruit punch and a lot like vodka. When she drains it, he grins and fetches her another.

  “If any of us ever had a house party this loud,” he yells into her ear, “it’d have been busted up two hours ago.”

  Alice watches the disgusted, irritated way Cranmer looks at the people around them. They own things that he doesn’t. They get away with things that he won’t. And this is how they grieve.

  Elsa is standing outside on the back patio. She’s done her hair, but her cheeks are red from whatever she’s drinking and she stares down into her cup. She looks strange, all alone.

  “Why’d you want to come here?” Cr
anmer shouts.

  “I don’t know,” Alice says.

  He waits for her to say more, but she doesn’t, and he swipes a bottle from the kitchen counter and drags her back out to the car.

  “It was good for this at least,” he says, and takes a drink.

  Alice stares up at the lights. At the shadows. They all belong to Tyler’s friends. Tyler’s girlfriend. Up on that hill, loud and sad, is Tyler’s life without him in it.

  “Just don’t drive anywhere,” she says.

  “Why not?”

  “Just don’t.”

  She takes the bottle and drinks it down. More vodka, this time flavored like marshmallows.

  “Whatever you say.” Cranmer shakes his head. “You’re getting really weird, you know that?”

  It doesn’t take long for the alcohol to make her slow, and the weed is still stuffed into her head, soft as cotton. The house twinkles up on its hill. Sometimes it screams.

  “Do you think that was Elsa screaming?” Alice mutters as Cranmer’s hand slides underneath her shirt. Her seat lurches back and the world tilts.

  “I don’t know.” His mouth is close to her ear. His lips are dry. She thinks she can feel his teeth once in a while. He climbs over the center console and lowers down on top of her. She doesn’t look at his face and her mother’s words flicker through her memory—a coatrack piled with dirty laundry. She laughs once, and Cranmer smiles.

  “Maybe it was Jackson.”

  “Screaming like a girl?”

  “Maybe. Ow.”

  His hands twist up under her bra. It pinches and he’s heavier than he looks.

  “I can’t get this off,” he says, and abandons it to go after her jeans. He kisses her a little, but never on the mouth, and she hasn’t looked at him once. In her mind she’s up on that hill, under the lights, and Tyler is there. He would see her and think she was brave for coming. He would nod like they shared some great secret.

  In the car there is only cold plastic on the door handles and glove box, the stale smell of smoke sunk into the upholstery, and Cranmer’s breathing, heavy and excited. The tug of her jeans down her legs.

  “I used to have a crush on him, you know,” she says.

  “Who?” Cranmer asks without stopping.

  “Tyler Bower. Ever since I saw him on the first day of school.”

  “Yeah? That’s weird,” Cranmer says, and unbuckles his belt.

  “He had brown eyes. Brown hair. He moved like nobody else on that field. I watched everything. I saw everything.” Her shoulders bounce. Her hips bounce from being pulled on.

  “He moved like . . .” She can see him in her mind even though her eyes are open. Even though she’s still staring at the house full of his friends. She can see him, but the drink in her blood hides what she wants to say. “He moved like . . .”

  “Christ, Allie, will you shut up?”

  She does. She lies still underneath Cranmer and thinks about Tyler, lying still in a box underground in the cemetery. She thinks about Elsa Loring. She thinks about the dark, broken space of Kirby Matheson’s bedroom, and the dead smell of it. But mostly she stares up at the house, all of that sparkling yellow light, and thinks about how all of this is real. All of this is permanent, and none of it will ever go away.

  HOLES

  Let me just clear this up.

  I don’t go to Middleborough High. I go to Ashton, forty-six miles away (I looked it up). Too far to hear gunshots or sirens. We watched all the news coverage that night, and for days and days after, and everyone had a cousin or a friend of the family or an old babysitter who lived sort of close, but no one with any connections to my school was hurt. Someone who used to teach algebra here and transferred over there, like, ten years ago, but he was halfway across the school from the pep rally and is totally fine. That’s the most direct connection we have.

  Except, you know. Me.

  At least everyone else seems to think I’m a direct connection.

  I think if the boy in that picture they plastered all over the news didn’t have the same blankness in his eyes, the kind of hollowness I’ve never seen in any smile before or since, I wouldn’t even have recognized Kirby Matheson.

  But, you know. That’s just me. What I think on this matter isn’t important.

  I’m not being snarky, here.

  I would just really like everyone to understand that what I think on this matter isn’t important.

  * * *

  It was the Monday after the shooting when people started approaching me. I’d spent the whole weekend listening to my mom murmur about how she should call Mrs. Matheson when we all knew she wouldn’t, and putting on headphones to drown out the sounds of my stepsister crying as if this had anything to do with her. Our parents hadn’t even met back when my mom and I lived on Egret Lane.

  I don’t know how people at school found out. My guess is that my mom mentioned it to some parent and everyone gossiped about it until it got back to someone’s kid. You know Laura? The assistant Features editor for the Ashton Gazette? The tall girl on the swim team? Yeah, you know her. Right, that one. Sure, she’s nice enough. I never think about her much. She kind of keeps to herself.

  She lived next door to that guy who shot up Middleborough.

  Isn’t that interesting?

  And maybe this next part is in my head, but when I sat down in homeroom on Monday and everyone was looking at me and elbowing the people next to them and somehow convincing themselves I couldn’t hear them whispering, I swear I felt them thinking, Hey, didn’t that guy kind of keep to himself too?

  It was Nicole who actually came up to me first. She’s the editor-in-chief, a senior, so she’s four years older than me. She once told me that if I were two years older I’d absolutely be her pick to take over when she graduated. I never thought she really liked me much, and since she said that I’ve had this pathological fear of doing something stupid in front of her, which means that I’m constantly doing stupid things in front of her.

  Like dropping all my books all over both our feet when she sidled up to me at my locker. See, stupid things. It doesn’t help that she’s seriously pretty and has been the subject of more than one confusing dream. I don’t know why I’m telling you this.

  She crouched down to help me pick them up. “How are you doing?” she said.

  “I’m fine.”

  “I wanted to talk to you about a possible feature,” she said.

  “Sure, okay.”

  She stood up and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. I was still on the floor, looking up at her. “We were wondering if you’d feel comfortable writing . . . something about Middleborough.”

  “Some kind of follow-up to Anya’s piece?” Anya, our photo editor, called up the families and friends of people over in Middleborough and did this really gorgeous special edition of the Gazette that was just a bunch of pictures of all of the victims as little kids or with their friends or dressed up for homecoming, with some quotes about them from their friends—funny stuff and heartbreaking stuff and everything in between. It was seriously beautiful.

  I didn’t really think there needed to be a follow-up.

  She said, “Actually we were wondering if . . . I mean, if you would feel comfortable . . . writing about . . . you know. Kirby.”

  She was the first person I’d heard refer to him by just his first name—on the news it was always Kirbymatheson, like it was one word—and for some reason that really pissed me off. Maybe because it seemed like she was trying to imply some familiarity, like I didn’t even need a last name to know who Kirby was, which of course was incredibly stupid since it’s A) not exactly a common name and B) not exactly a name anyone with a pulse wouldn’t recognize now.

  So maybe being bothered by that was just me being stupid in front of Nicole like usual.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, I can do some research into profiles of people who do this, maybe talk about warning signs and copycat cri
mes and stuff like that. That would get us a lot of reads and piss off the school board, which is always fun.”

  “No, I . . . I was thinking more that you’d want to write about what you knew about him already, not like a research piece. You know, kind of . . . revealing him in a way, what kind of things might have influenced him, what he was really like.”

  I remember staring at her. “So you want me to memorialize a guy who just shot up a school.”

  I said that right to Nicole Kramer.

  Like I said. Stupid things in front of her.

  She squirmed her purse higher up on her shoulder and said, “Leo said you could just talk to him if you wanted. Tell him some anecdotes or whatever, and he’ll actually put the piece together. If you don’t want to write it, if that would be too hard, we’d understand.”

  “I lived next to him when I was younger,” I said. “He was just some kid and I was just some kid. We weren’t even friends.”

  She was quiet for a moment, then said, “That’s not what your mom said to Tasha’s mom.”

  “Who talked to your mom, I’m guessing.”

  “Talked to Stephanie’s mom, who talked to Rashid’s mom, who talked to my dad.”

  The bell rang. “My mom wants to be closer to a tragedy,” I said. “Doesn’t everyone?”

  “Look, if you don’t want to do it, don’t do it,” she said. But in her eyes I could see her ticking down a list. Moving me down lower. No longer sticking me right at the top of the list of people she’d want to take over for her if they could.

  I freed my chemistry textbook from the wreckage of my locker. “I guess I could do the interview,” I said.

  She reached out and squeezed my arm. Nicole Kramer touched me. “You’re so brave,” she said. And then she said, “Um . . . Laura? I’m really sorry for . . . you know. Your loss. Eesh, we’re going to be late.”

  She galloped off to class, and she probably couldn’t hear me by the time I found my voice to say, “I didn’t lose anything.”

  * * *

  At lunch, my best friend Priya and I lay on top of some unidentified senior’s car, like we always do, to eat our carrot sticks and crappy cafeteria pizza and something they were calling chocolate mousse. She had big sunglasses on that made her look like an Eastern-Eyed Click Beetle and was tilting her face up to meet the sun.