Twisted

by Laurie Halse Anderson

  Dad stood watch in the background, as if they might come through the door any second and try again. I guess that was nice of him.

  They argued about whether or not to call the police, then Mom had to leave to pick up Hannah from Mandy’s house.

  Dad sat in the chair across from the couch. “She’s gone,” he said. “Do you think this is related to what happened?”

  “What do you mean, ‘what happened’?”

  He pursed his lips. “Do you think this has any connection to your being accused of taking those pictures?”

  “Thank you for saying the word ‘accused.’”

  “Don’t start. Your mother wants you to stay calm.”

  I poked my fingers through the afghan. “Yeah. It was Chip and his friends.”

  Dad took a deep breath. “Why didn’t you say that before?”

  “Because we both know that Mom would insist on calling the cops. She still might, but I’m telling you right now, if she does, I saw nothing, I heard nothing, I am not going to say a word, so it’s a waste of time.”

  “All right, calm down. I agree. There’s no point in calling the police. It would just complicate things.”

  “Complicate.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I cocked my head to one side. I thought I heard something far away—a plane engine, or maybe a train. Dad didn’t hear anything. He was picking at the lint on the arm of the chair.

  “How come Milbury hasn’t fired you yet?” I asked.

  “Who knows? He’s doing everything he can to keep me out of the office. I have to catch a six o’clock for San Diego in the morning.”

  “That’s another reason not to call the cops,” I pointed out. “If I accuse Chip, you’re hosed.”

  He rubbed his hand over his face once but didn’t say anything.

  “I’m not going to school tomorrow,” I said.

  “No, of course not.”

  “I’m getting tired of all this.”

  No answer.

  “Dad? What am I going to do?”

  “I’ve been thinking along those lines. About your options.” He stood up and walked to the bookshelf at the end of the room. He took a handful of envelopes off a high shelf. “Your mother doesn’t want me to show these to you yet.” He waited while I sat up and then handed the envelopes to me.

  Each one had a brochure in it. Hargrave Military Academy. Fishburne Military School. Valley Forge. Uniforms. Drill instructors. Lines of teenagers at attention. Discipline, they all promised. Integrity. Excellence.

  “What are these?” I asked.

  He cleared his throat. “A boarding school, a military boarding school, is a good decision. A fresh start. I’ve already spoken to their admissions directors, explained things—”

  “Things? What things exactly?”

  He kept on like I hadn’t said a word. “—and they all said you could enroll in January. It’s in your best interest to enter as a second-semester junior; that will increase your college chances tremendously.”

  The noise grew closer. It was the avalanche, back to finish off whatever life was left clinging to the side of the mountain. Imagine a hurricane mating with a blizzard, then add gravity to the mix, and seat yourself at the bottom of it, chained in place, watching it head down the mountainside, straight at…

  “You’re sending me away.”

  “None of these schools are cheap, but it’s a sacrifice we need to make.”

  I stood up too fast and had to reach for the back of the couch to keep my balance. The afghan fell to the floor. Dad stood his ground, feet planted shoulder-width apart, jaw locked in position.

  “You’re sending me away because I’m an embarrassment,” I said. “It’s easier if I’m gone. You’ll keep your job. You’ll save on the food bill.”

  He didn’t say a word.

  Mom’s car pulled in the driveway, her headlights raking through the unlit part of the house.

  “We’ll discuss this later,” Dad said. “I’ve already completed the applications. They’ll be mailed off as soon as the police are willing to go on record saying you are not a suspect.”

  The car doors slammed outside; first Mom’s, then Hannah’s.

  I ripped the brochures with military precision into pieces that measured two centimeters by three centimeters. When Mom walked in, I handed them to her.

  The cage match, round 32,415, started up shortly after I got into bed.

  Mom fired the opening salvo. “For the love of God, Bill, can’t you leave him alone for one second?”

  “We have to face the reality of this, Linda. We have to deal with it.”

  “We agreed to wait another week. As usual, you bullied your way—”

  Hannah’s feet thumped up the stairs and down the hall to her room. She didn’t bother checking on me. I imagine she went straight to her computer. I know for sure she cranked her music to drown out the noise downstairs.

  I kept my door open to listen. Why? For the same reason you slow down when you pass a horrific car crash. You want to see the severed limbs and the blood.

  I didn’t need a computer or a pathetic role-playing game. Hell could be found at 623 Copeland Drive.

  64.

  When my eyes finally opened on Friday, it was past noon. I rolled to my side and pushed myself up to a sitting position. Sat there awhile, then bit the bullet and stood up and checked the damage in the mirror.

  I was bummed that the bruises weren’t more dramatic. The way I felt, I should have had black-and-blue baseball-sized lumps everywhere. My bottom lip was swollen and split, crusted with dried blood, but it looked more like I had walked into a door than been jumped by three guys. There were a couple marks on my back, a few bruises trying to surface on my arms. The best evidence was a huge black mark on my right butt cheek, strategically located so I wouldn’t show it to anybody.

  A long shower loosened up the knots in my back and arms. I wrapped a towel around my waist and wiped the steam off the mirror so I could shave. I leaned closer to the glass. The guy in the mirror looked like somebody had wrapped his heart in barbed wire and pulled. He wasn’t just a loser. He was lost, no-compass lost, don’t-speak-the-language lost.

  I have screwed up everything.

  No, that wasn’t the right way to say it.

  You have screwed up everything. You have a 0.00 GPA in Life. You are a useless fuck, a waste of carbon molecules. You are the spawn of a defective sperm and a reluctant egg. You do not deserve to live.

  You should die.

  I put the lid down and sat on the toilet. I had never put it to myself quite that way before, but once I had, there was no avoiding it. I had been thinking about this on and off for what—four years? No, five. In seventh grade I figured if I killed myself, everybody who treated me like dirt would feel awful. I used to picture them wearing black to my funeral, being forced by their parents to look into my grave and apologize for being such jerks. They were always crying. Sometimes I’d make them throw themselves on top of my coffin and beg me for another chance.

  But in seventh grade, in eighth, ninth, there had always been some hope, the ignorant feeling that things might be better the next day. This is not the worst thing, I’d say to myself. You can’t do it unless it’s the worst thing ever.

  From the toilet I could see the top half of my face in the mirror. A guy could only hate himself so much, could only get sucker-punched a couple million times before he’d finally get the hint that maybe the world didn’t want him around.

  Why bother trying? What was the point? So I could go to some suck-ass college, get a diploma, march out into a job that I hated, marry a pretty girl who would want to divorce me, but then she wouldn’t because we’d have kids, so instead she’d become the angry woman at the other end of the kitchen table, and the kids would grow up watching this, until one day I’d look at my son and he’d look just like that face in the bathroom mirror?

  If that was life, then it was twisted.

  There was
only one problem left.

  How.

  What would achieve the goals of a) a quick death, b) a painless death, and c) a neat death? Call me weird, but I couldn’t check out knowing I was leaving a nasty mess for somebody to clean up.

  The gun was the obvious choice, the nine-millimeter Beretta pistol in my father’s bottom drawer, wrapped in a moth-eaten red sweater that had belonged to Grandpa Miller. We weren’t supposed to know it was there. We weren’t supposed to know about the ammunition, either. We certainly weren’t supposed to know how to load and aim it. I had done it so often I could do it in the dark.

  Quick? Oh, yeah. Painless? Doubtful, but with the right aim, the pain would only last for a nanosecond. Neat? Hardly. In fact, a gun would make the biggest mess of all.

  Or I could drink myself to death. The tools were downstairs in the liquor cabinet. Not quick. I didn’t know about painless. If I started puking before my ticket was punched, it would be disgusting. It also presented a very not-cool exit possibility: I might get drunk enough to puke, then drown in my own vomit. Not an option.

  I’d have to think about this for a while. Killing myself was the one thing I couldn’t afford to screw up.

  I went to my room and put on a pair of jeans and an old sweatshirt. Putting the sweatshirt on took a long time. I was hurt more than I realized. The bruises were deep and would take their own sweet time surfacing.

  I made myself a plate of eggs, bacon, and toast with butter and raspberry jam, and ate while channel surfing. The only thing on was commercials. Buy our razors and be a man. Buy our pit stick and be a man. Spray this junk down your shorts and women will crawl all over you. Get a second mortgage. Buy a second car. Buy our razors.

  I chewed through the last of the bacon and licked the yellow strands of yolk off the plate. I chugged my juice and wiped my mouth on my sleeve and then it hit me.

  I knew the how and the where and the when.

  I knew the perfect place.

  65.

  Eight thirty P.M.

  Mom and Hannah at the mall.

  Dad? California or something. Not at home—that was all that mattered.

  I was walking, me and my feet.

  Me and my feet and a winter jacket, knit cap, and spare set of keys to the doors of Washington High School, Home of the Warriors. It was so cold that I pulled my arms out of my jacket sleeves and shoved my frozen fingers up in my armpits. The empty sleeves bounced like they were balloons. I reeked. I was sweating the sharp kind of sweat that doesn’t wash out. When the coroner dissected my body, she’d notice how bad my fingers smelled and she’d write about it in the autopsy report. Embarrassing, yeah, but not enough to make me put my hands into the frozen night air again.

  School was open late because of basketball practice and wrestling practice and volleyball practice, plus the stage crew was working on sets and there were lights on in a half dozen windows—those teachers who were crazy or dedicated enough to keep working at nine o’clock on a Friday night. I was willing to bet that Mr. Salvatore was one of them. I should have brought a note to slip in his mailbox. Even when he was yelling at me, I could tell it was because he wanted me to do better. Or at least to learn how to spell.

  As I walked in the front door, I hiked up my jacket collar, pulled down my cap, and tried to walk like I had a little bit of a load in my pants, the way the jocks did. Nobody noticed me except for two little girls who looked like they were waiting for their sister to get out of volleyball. Nobody stopped me.

  I turned left, away from the activity. I knew which halls were blocked off with locked metal gates, and which halls were open so that Dopey, Toothless, and Joe could finish up their night duties without going through the hassles of locking and unlocking them. There were some advantages to having been the janitors’ doughnut bitch all summer.

  I worked my way up to the fourth floor without being seen. I used my key to open the door that led to the roof. It was even colder up there. Higher altitude. The wind made my eyes water.

  Haloes of light pooled around the bottom of the light poles and spilled across the concrete that led to the front door. That was my landing spot, as close to the base of the flagpole as I could get. I closed my eyes to visualize: I’d take a deep breath, jump up and down a little to make the blood flow. I’d back up ten paces, take another deep breath, then sprint the final sprint, dismount, rocket through the air, fall like a comet. The end.

  If I landed at the base of that flagpole, I’d be a legend. The students of Washington High would think about me every time they entered the building. They’d erect a plaque, plant flowers or a memorial tree.

  But wait.

  If I splatted there, one of those little kids waiting for her sister to finish volleyball practice might find my body. Talk about your bad karma. Scarring an innocent kid for life like that might be such a heinous cosmic crime, my soul would be forced back here, and I would have to relive this pathetic existence all over again. So the flagpole was out. The whole front of the building was out.

  I walked to the north side. If I jumped there, I’d land in the pine trees that were growing too close to the building. I kept walking. Most of the west edge fronted the staff parking lots and the loading docks. I couldn’t make Dopey, Toothless, and Joe scrape me off the pavement. They didn’t deserve that. The south side was landscaped with bushes. If I landed on those, I’d be looking at broken bones, internal bleeding at best.

  As I paced the roof, the practices finished and the building emptied out. My nose hairs were icicles. My fingers were numb. Freezing to death—what was the word?—hypothermia. I could just lie down and go to sleep. What could be easier than that?

  It wouldn’t be quick, though. In fact, it could take hours. Days even, if it warmed up enough on Saturday.

  What I really needed was an ice-covered lake. A big one, the kind that you can’t see across except with binoculars, like they had in Minnesota. The ice would be thick at the edges but thinner in the middle, weak enough that it would crack open if I jumped up and down a couple times. If the water was cold enough, I’d fall “asleep” before the fear of drowning set in. My corpse would be a solid block of ice-nothing icky that would freak anyone out. They could even have an open-casket funeral if they wanted.

  They probably wouldn’t.

  I paced back and forth, rubbing my arms. You moron, you fool. What kind of suicide plan was that—death by ice fishing?

  A cracking metal sound made me jump. I turned around. Janitor Joe was standing under the light hung over the door.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “That’s my question,” he said.

  The cold was making my nose drip. I sniffed. “I thought I’d check the seams on the patches we did.”

  “In August.”

  “Yeah, those. First time the temperature has been this low. Wouldn’t want them to split, wouldn’t want any leaks.”

  “Come over here.”

  I sniffed again and walked towards him. He grabbed my chin and turned it for a better look in the weak light. “You get punched in the mouth?”

  I nodded. He let go of my chin.

  “You don’t learn so fast, do you, Miller? Didn’t your old man ever teach you how to fight back?”

  “No, that never came up.”

  He walked to the edge and looked over it.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Checking. Sometimes kids come up here, they throw stuff off.”

  “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “I didn’t think so, but it doesn’t hurt to check.” He walked back to me, zipping his jacket up high under his chin.

  “Have you ever been to Minnesota?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Ohio is cold enough for my wife. I’d never get her to move up there.” He flipped up his collar. “Is that where you’re going?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You always struck me as the kind of kid who runs when things get tough.”

  “
That’s not very nice.”

  “I’m not a nice guy. What can I say?” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “My advice? Pick someplace warmer. Texas. My wife would like Texas.”

  The parking lot below us filled with the echoes of friends calling to each other, car doors slamming, engines roaring to life. Somebody peeled out.

  I wiped my nose on my sleeve. “If I don’t go to jail, my dad is sending me to military school.”

  He hawked and spit into the dark. “No offense, Miller, but your father is a grade-A asshole. And no offense again, but so what? You gonna spend the rest of your days whining because your dad’s a jerk? I hate people like that. Don’t be a baby—live your own life.”

  He opened the door to the stairwell and waved me in. “Time to go home. My wife gets nervous when I’m late.”

  I headed down the stairs as he locked the door.

  “How did you get up here anyway? You have a key?”

  “No,” I lied. “The door was open.”

  66.

  I watched headlights skate across my ceiling as I turned eighteen.

  Happy birthday, Tyler John.

  It was magic. One minute I was a kid, then–poof!–minute I was an adult. Now I could vote, and join the army, and buy lottery tickets, and get married (if I lost my mind), and make a will, and sue, and buy porn (legally), and get a tattoo, and buy guns, and go to real jail, not juvie hall, and work as many hours as I wanted.

  I still couldn’t drink alcohol or rent a car. The birthday fairy wasn’t that clever.

  In elementary school, Mom always baked cupcakes for me to take in on my birthday. She also sent a bag of grapes for the kids who were allergic. I never had a party at my house. I knew it would be a total disaster, so whenever they asked if I wanted one, I said no. Secretly, I wanted a bowling party, but I was afraid to bring it up.

  You can’t kill yourself. You have to run away.