by ACF Bookens
I watched Damien move across the room for a few moments as I tried to figure out what was bothering me. He swaggered. He flirted. He acted like he was the reason for the party, and I cringed. I hated show-offs. I really hated show-offs who didn’t really have any reason to show off. And I really, really hated show-offs who got their attention on the backs of other people’s suffering. I decided then and there that Damien would finish out this season as Santa but that I wouldn’t be inviting him back again. He had seemed a nice enough guy, but clearly, a taste of fame had gone to his head.
I shook off the icky feeling his behavior gave me and made my way over to Mr. Green, who smiled, hugged me, and thanked me – thanked ME – for this opportunity. As if I didn’t already love him enough. I told him we were so grateful and then let him greet his adoring fans or hide in the bathroom, which would have been my option if I were him, while I headed over to see Mart.
She and Symeon were spiffing up the food and wine tables, and I took the opportunity to get a plate and steal a sip of Mart’s wine. I only had one hand, so I opted to use it for nourishment instead of wine-tasting. I felt confident in my choice when the bacon-cheddar mini quiche reached my lips. “That guy of yours . . . he is a keeper.”
Mart looked at me and smiled, “The quiche is good, right?”
“So good.” I waved and headed back toward my table, ready to sit again while I ate the four additional quiches I had shamelessly added next to the meatballs and two baby carrots, for roughage. Daniel was talking up a potential donor, so I shifted my chair slightly to give them the illusion of privacy and studied the room again while I ate.
It was a good crowd and growing all the time. The doors to the gym had just opened, so the lobby was starting to empty. But still, I figured we had a full house, which wasn’t always the case with big fundraisers. Sometimes people bought tickets to support the cause but didn’t come to the event. But for John Green, people did both.
I was just wiping the crumbs from the last quiche crust from my blazer when I heard a strange sound from behind me. At first, I thought there was a cat in the room . . . it sounded like a kitten’s yowl. But then, the sound got more persistent and louder. And it said my name. I spun around in my chair, trying to locate the source, but the din of conversation was disrupting my ability to locate where the sound was coming from. I touched Daniel’s arm and then my ear, and then I scooted off to the edge of the room in the direction I thought the voice was coming from.
The further from the crowd I got, the clearer the sound was. It was a woman’s voice, and she was definitely saying my name . . . but what was she saying after that? It sounded like “Harvey, big pow” or “whale sound.” I just couldn’t quite make it out . . . I eventually followed the woman’s voice until I came to a blue door next to the weight room off the gym lobby. I put my ear against the metal door and listened.
“Harvey, watch out!” she said just as someone knocked my scooter out from under me and dropped a towel over my head.
* * *
A few moments later, the towel fell away, and I saw I was now crammed, scooter and all, into a very small, very dark space with someone who had, apparently, eighty two elbows. I tried to push myself upright to get some breathing room, but I couldn’t get leverage without causing myself excruciating pain. So I said, “I’m sorry. I can’t stand up. My ankle is broken.”
The woman let out a huff of a laugh. “I know, Harvey. One second.” She shifted, and then I was sitting on the floor with my back against what felt like metal shelving. I still couldn’t see a thing, and while I recognized the woman’s voice, I couldn’t place it. “Thanks,” I said. “And I’m sorry. Clearly, we know each other, but—”
“It’s Cynthia.” I felt her wedge herself next to me on the floor. “Guess we know who killed Bixley now.”
“We do?”
“Well, yeah. Clearly, it was Damien, your Santa. He’s the one who threw me in here.” Cynthia sounded both angry and perplexed. “Isn’t that how you ended up in here, too?”
I thought about it, trying to capture any glimpse I might have had of Damien or his Santa suit, but I had nothing. “If he put you in here, then I expect he did the same to me. But I didn’t see him.” I put the towel, which I’d felt next to me, into her hands. “He put this over my head. I always keep my phone on me, but this one time, it’s sitting on the table. Ugh.”
Cynthia sighed. “Well, clearly, we need to get out of here and tell someone.”
“Clearly. You tried the door, I’m sure.”
I could almost feel her roll her eyes. “Clearly. It’s locked and heavy. I tried slamming into a few times, but all I got was an achy shoulder.”
I shuddered at the thought of me trying to slam open the door with my broken ankle. I’d just gotten over the blow to my head, and I didn’t want another pain to carry around. “Right. So then, we need to make some noise. I heard you calling for me, which is why I came over.”
“Okay, let’s try that again.” She raised her voice and started shouting help.
Between her shouts, I called out to Daniel, the person I knew who was closest to the door. We called for a couple of minutes, but no one came.
I took a deep breath, and that’s when I noticed I couldn’t hear any sound from outside the room. I pried myself off the floor and leaned over my scooter to put my ear against the door. I didn’t hear voices at all. I strained my ears to listen, and then, I could make out a steady hum of a single tone. “Oh no, Green has started his talk, which means no one will be out in the lobby to hear us.”
I sat down on my scooter and groaned.
“Okay, let’s think. Someone will look for us, right? I was supposed to sit with Javier, so he’ll probably be wondering.”
I perked up. “Right, and John Green is one of my favorite authors, so Daniel will definitely be worried when he doesn’t see me in inside.” I let my head roll side to side while I thought. “So we just have to help them figure out where to look.”
I heard Cynthia stand up beside me. “Alright, let’s do this.” I felt her slide something into my hand and realized it was a small, round piece of metal. “They must keep the extra weights here.”
“Ah, I didn’t recognize it because I do my best to avoid gyms and the like.”
Cynthia laughed. “I bet you can keep a steady beat, though.”
“Don’t you know it. I was the secret girl drummer for New Kids on the Block back in the day. They didn’t invite me on their recent tour, though, so I’m through with them.” I didn’t know why I was cracking jokes when my new friend and I had been locked in a closet, but I appreciated Cynthia’s laughter.
Then, we began to bang. Steadily and as loudly as we could. We slammed our metal pucks against the shelving again and again until after what seemed like thirty minutes, I heard a key in the lock.
The light blinded me, but I’d know Daniel’s silhouette anywhere. “You found us,” I said.
“I will find you,” Daniel quoted in his best Daniel Day Lewis voice, and then I felt him tug my scooter out of the way and half guide, half-lift me to the door. “Now, help me find who did this.” He wasn’t joking around anymore.
“It was Santa,” I said.
* * *
It was only a matter of minutes before we had, via text message, gotten all our friends out of the auditorium to help us look for Damien. Well, all of our friends except for Henri and Bear, who were on the stage with Green and whom we didn’t want to alarm, and Tuck, who was standing as a quasi-bodyguard near the stage. Green had made no request for such, but all of us agreed that it was better to have a presence of protection than to send a world-famous author onto a stage in a high school gym totally unguarded.
We did text Tuck, but he didn’t respond, and I didn’t think we could wait until he either heard his text alert or checked his phone, so we broke up into the group and spread out around the school, hoping that Damien had kept on his Santa outfit and would, thus, be easier to spot in the crowd. Ma
rt, Symeon, and Elle took the lobby and the exterior of the building. Pickle, Mom and Dad searched the school hallways, and Woody, Cate, Lucas, and I each took a quadrant of the gym bleachers while Daniel searched beneath them.
A quick scan of the auditorium revealed that Damien had decided going on as St. Nick was a bit too obvious for whatever nefarious thing he was about to do. That meant we had to search row by row and face by face until we found him. I had chosen the set of bleachers nearest the platform and to Green’s left, and I settled myself on the bench of my scooter just in the shadows beside the bleachers and began to look. I was on about the fifth row of faces when my phone buzzed in my pocket.
“Found Santa’s suit. And these,” Mart’s text said. I zoomed in on the photo and broke into a cold sweat. It was a box for bullets. Damien was planning to shoot someone.
“Any sense of where he went?” I replied, knowing that a pile of red velour and empty cardboard wasn’t much to go on.
“Your dad says these are rifle bullets.”
Alarm raced through my body as I tried to text Woody, Daniel, Cate, and Lucas as quickly as I could: “Look up!! Look at the back of the room, too.” I didn’t have time to explain, but I figured with the distance a bullet from a rifle could go, Damien wouldn’t be seated at close range.
I threw discretion to the wind and hauled myself up until I was standing on my scooter while I held onto the bleacher rails for support. My movement must have caught Tuck’s eye because he stared at me, and I waved my phone. He pulled his from its case on his belt and then looked at me again, this time with alarm in his eyes. Then, he steadied himself and climbed the bleachers with speed but not panic.
A second later, John Green was hunched behind the podium, and Tuck was shooing Henri and Bear off the platform. I was checking to be sure Green was safe when my phone buzzed again. Woody this time: “Catwalk above far basketball goal.”
I spun my head to the left and saw him, crouched with a rifle on the railing. “Get down!” I screamed as loudly as I could, and near me, everyone did . . . then, I heard the cry spread around the room, and like a horrific version of the wave, everyone in the room crouched low, trying to take cover behind wooden bleachers that were only a few inches high.
The sound of hundreds of people moving around was quite loud, but Damien’s voice cut through it all. “I’m not going to hurt any of you,” he said.
I peeked out from where I was now trying to squat one-legged on my rolling scooter and saw Damien with a bullhorn to his mouth. “I’m just here to take care of one bit of business, and then all of you can go back to your reading.”
“Sheriff Mason, please step out.” Damien’s voice was smooth and even. “ It’s you I would like to speak with.”
I tried to send Tuck telepathic messages to stay down, don’t walk out, but even before I thought those words, he was stepping out, raising his hand, dropping his weapon behind him.
My heart stopped, I’m fairly sure, as I watched my friend walk out and face the man with the rifle. I had known he would do that, that if his making himself completely vulnerable meant that he might save someone else’s life, then there was going to be no question that he was walking out. And still, I’d hoped he’d make another choice.
“You are responsible,” Damien said as his voice echoed through the now nearly silent gymnasium. “Because you didn’t catch him, I had to take action.”
I gasped, and then, like checkers falling into place in a Connect Four game, I realized what I had already known subconsciously: Damien had killed Bixley. The syringe by the sleigh. The bag of syringes in the back room. Even the pride Damien took in drawing so much attention for being the Santa Bixley died on. It was all because he had injected Bixley himself . . . and because he was proud of it.
“You mean because I couldn’t catch Bixley before he killed someone else?” Tuck’s voice was steady and clear, but I could see his hands shaking just slightly as he held them in the air. I swept my eyes from Tuck toward Damien, but they snagged on Lu, there in the front row, pinned down as she watched her husband face off, unarmed, against a man who wanted to shoot him. It was the look on her face that did it, that popped open the question that had been haunting me since Woody found the syringe.
Without thinking, I rolled out into the floor and turned toward Damien, who immediately trained his rifle on me. Only then, did I realize that, once again, my curiosity had put me in danger. Somewhere further toward the back of the room, I heard Daniel hiss, “Harvey, no!” But it was too late. I’d leaped in, and now, I might as well follow through.
“But Bixley was already slurring and stumbling when he came to the store? If you killed him, why was that?”
Damien’s face broke into a grin that reminded me, in the most terrifying way, of Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining. “Oh, that’s easy. He wasn’t just a murderer. He was also a drunk. Probably helped him sleep at night.” Damien sighed. “He kind of helped me out there, made it easier to hide the symptoms of the insulin overdose until it was too late.”
I nodded, not sure what to do now that I had my answer, but my brain had registered that Damien had just confessed. And unless he was the world’s most absent-minded murderer, that confession meant he didn’t think he was going to get out of here alive. I felt my heart sink. It wasn’t even a school day, and yet, we were going to have another mass shooting in a school.
I scanned the crowd quickly and tried to keep my eyes moving as I saw both Woody and my dad climbing the ladders to the catwalk where Damien perched. Why the oldest men available were doing this, I didn’t know. It felt like maybe Lucas or Daniel should have been the ones to attempt to wrestle a gun out of someone’s hands, but I wasn’t about to suggest a change of tactic right now. Although, I wasn’t thrilled anyone was going up there, let alone my dad.
A quick glimpse at Tuck’s face told me he wasn’t happy either, but since he couldn’t stop them, he drew Damien’s focus back to him. “What did you want me to do, Damien?”
“I wanted you to catch him before he killed my dad.” Damien’s voice broke as he spoke, and I felt just the tiniest bit of sympathy as I remembered him telling me about his father, about how he’d died before meeting his granddaughter. Now, to know that he died because Bixley killed him, I could begin to understand Damien’s anger. Not his actions, but his anger – that I could sort of get.
“Damien, you have every right to be angry. You can even be angry at me, but please, let’s not take this out on anyone here.” Tuck’s voice was firm but there was an edge of pleading to it. “Please.”
“No one needs to worry, Sheriff, as long as I get what I want,” Damien said, the megaphone in one hand and the rifle still trained on Tuck in the other.
I said a silent prayer that Tuck could keep him talking because I’d just seen that Daniel, Elle, Mart, Symeon, Lucas, and Cate had silently opened the doors at the back of the gym and were gesturing to the guests to leave. Slowly but surely – and so quietly I didn’t think I’d ever excuse the usual stomping on bleachers again, if I survived that was – the bleachers were emptying. I didn’t know what Damien would do when he began to see people leaving, but I hoped that Tuck – with my help – could keep his eye trained on the front of the room.
“What do you want, Damien?” I said, hoping that if I could keep Damien looking from me to Tuck at least more people would get out.
“I want him to issue a public apology, and then I want him to resign.” Damien’s voice was firm and clear, and I almost breathed a sigh a relief. Tuck could totally do that and then take his job back tomorrow. But then Damien continued, “And I want him to feel what my dad felt.”
I grimaced. I had been hoping this was some kind of stunt, that the rifle was more for showmanship than action, but apparently, that wasn’t the case. “You don’t have to do this, Damien,” I said.
“Oh, I know I don’t have to,” Damien said as he swung his megaphone and his rifle barrel back toward me. “I want to.”
> A cold sweat broke out on my body, and I wheeled closer to Tuck. I don’t know why. But I did it. “Damien, please. Come down. We can all talk.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tuck give a slight nod, and I took that to mean he liked that I was keeping Damien talking. “Everyone else can go. We can just sit and talk. I’ll even record Tuck apologizing and resigning, load it to the store’s Instagram page. You know we’re getting a lot of traffic tonight because of this event.” For a split second, I thought about John Green, crouched behind a podium, and felt immensely sorry that his kindness had left him in this situation. “Everyone will know what happened, Damien. Please.” I could hear the begging in my voice, and I hoped Damien could, too. I wasn’t ready to believe he was beyond hope, not yet.
For a second, his megaphone drooped, and I thought maybe we had a break, but then he raised it back up. “I like the idea of recording, Harvey. But I want you to record everything, including what I’m about to do to your sheriff friend there.”
I gasped. He wanted me to livestream him murdering Tuck. I could not do that. I just could not. I spun my head toward Tuck, and he held my gaze as he said, “It’s okay, Harvey. Do as he says.”
“No, Tuck, I can’t do that. I won’t.”
“Yes, you will, Harvey. You will.” Tuck’s eyes felt like they were boring holes into mind, and for some reason, I thought I saw something more, a message that I couldn’t quite get but that was saying it would be okay.
“I’m coming down, but if anyone tries anything, I will shoot up this room, and we’ll have an even more terrible Christmas story to tell in St. Marin’s.” This time, I didn’t have any doubt he meant what he said.
So we all sat still, the fifty or so people still in the bleachers, Tuck, John Green behind the podium, Henri, Bear, and I as Damien climbed down the ladder past Woody, who had made it to the top just as Damien issued his ultimatum, and across the floor to us.
“Take a seat, Sheriff. Let’s be sure that Harvey gets your whole face in the picture. Don’t want none of those half-face videos that people post, now do we?” Damien seemed jovial now, like he was returning to his proud self as a social media celebrity.
