Action Figures - Issue Four: Cruel Summer

by Michael C Bailey

  Staggering like a drunk, I cross the stage and lower myself to the floor. Sara stirs. I power up. I can’t possibly miss at this range, but range isn’t the issue; it’s my resolve. For all that’s happened, Sara is still my best friend. She’s my sister. I love her, and I don’t want to hurt her.

  “Sara...”

  She looks up. My heart stops. There’s nothing there but mindless animal fury. There’s nothing human left in her.

  My Sara is gone.

  She lunges, screaming a banshee scream. A panic blast goes wide. She hits me low, ramming her shoulder into my stomach. She drives me backwards. I stumble and crack my skull against the edge of the stage. The world flashes white. We fall to the floor in a tangle.

  Fingers dig into my hair. I feel myself rising, and then Sara throws me down, bashing my head into the floor. She does it again, and again, and again, all the while shrieking incoherently. I can’t think to fight back.

  Sara’s going to kill me.

  The assault stops. It takes my brain seconds, maybe minutes to grasp this fact. I open my eyes. The ceiling above me spins and dances. My stomach threatens to purge.

  Sara stands at my feet, trembling violently. Her hair is a mad, tangled nest. Spit and snot run down her face, drip from her chin. Her eyes are saucers of white with dark pinpricks in the center. She looks nothing like my friend, yet it’s Sara who speaks to me, my Sara, and what she says tears my heart in two.

  “Carrie,” she rasps. “Please stop me.”

  At this range, I can’t possibly miss.

  A blast of pure force strikes Sara square in the forehead, the impact causing her head to snap back. The thud is strangely hollow. She topples, falling into an auditorium seat as though she planned it. A thick glob of saliva spills over her bottom lip.

  “Sara?” I whimper.

  Nothing. There’s nothing there.

  Oh God...what have I done?

  TWENTY-SIX

  “Carrie? You okay?” Malcolm winces, regretting the question as soon as he asks it. “No, of course you aren’t. That was a stupid thing to say. I’m sorry.”

  I squeeze his hand. I can’t speak for fear I’ll start crying again.

  Malcolm revived, as Sara promised, with no memory of what happened after he got into his car. He woke up to find an EMT flashing a penlight into his eyes, and right away the chaos of the scene overwhelmed any questions he might have had as to how he got there — the chaos, and the sight of his girlfriend sitting on the bumper of a police cruiser bawling her eyes out.

  I didn’t call for an ambulance. That was Bart. I called him, and he came to the school to survey the damage. He carried Sara outside, laid her on the ground near the school, then ordered us not to speak to the police, let him do the talking. That was an easy order to follow, considering we were all in a deep state of shock and could barely remember our own names.

  Nothing’s changed since we got to the hospital. I glance up from the waiting room floor to see Stuart staring off into space, looking distraught, haunted. Matt is sandwiched between his mother and father, stuck in an unwanted group hug. Missy’s parents are here too, in her room, where she’s drugged up and in traction. She landed badly and broke her right leg in two places. She’ll be laid up here for several days and will spend at least half the summer in a full cast.

  I haven’t heard anything about Sara.

  Stuart’s parents show up and immediately crowd around him, hitting him up with the usual questions. What happened? Are you all right? He doesn’t answer. His expression doesn’t change.

  My mother is the last to arrive. Did I call her? I must have. I don’t remember.

  “Carrie. Oh, God, honey,” she says. I stand, so she can hug me. I’m moving on auto-pilot. I barely feel her arms around me. Her voice is a buzzing drone in my ear. I’m pretty sure she’s asking me what happened and if I’m all right.

  Bart appears over my mother’s shoulder. I pull away, practically throwing Mom off. “Bart?”

  “Hello,” Bart says to the room. Matt and Stuart’s father converge on him, barking questions in his face. He holds up his hands. “Gentlemen, please. If everyone would follow me?”

  Malcolm offers to wait for me. I send him home. He’ll have enough to deal with trying to explain his disappearance to his parents.

  Bart leads us to a small conference room. Once we’ve all crowded in, he closes and locks the door. He stands at the head of the table and folds his hands.

  “For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Dr. Bart Connors. I’m a family counselor and child psychologist, and I’ve been treating Sara Danvers for the past few years. I’m not sure how much of this your children have shared with you,” he says to our parents, “but Sara’s been dealing with some rather serious emotional issues, and unfortunately, that all came to a head last night.”

  Bart proceeds to spin an epic yarn that begins with Sara coming out to her father and jumps ahead to her decision to return home, where she discovered that her parents had succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning. Believing her parents were dead, a traumatized Sara ran from the house. Her whereabouts over the next fifteen hours or so are unknown.

  Worried that I hadn’t heard from Sara since the previous day and unable to contact her by phone, I walked over to her house and discovered her parents. I called for an ambulance, and soon after the EMTs arrived, I received a call from a hysterical Sara, who had taken refuge at the school.

  I then contacted Matt, Stuart, and Missy, and we converged on the school. Sara had somehow gained access to the roof of the building and was threatening to jump. While Matt kept her talking, I contacted Bart, who rushed to the scene. Meanwhile, Missy found a way inside and attempted to grab Sara just as she stepped off the roof. Missy was pulled off with her, resulting in her injury. Bart arrived in time to personally witness their fall. While Bart called 911, I called Malcolm in a fit of anguish, and he drove me, Matt, and Stuart here to the hospital.

  Bart sells the lie expertly, but the plot is riddled with holes. If anyone gives it more than a few minutes’ thought they’ll see the gaps, but knowing Bart, he’s betting everyone is too overwhelmed to notice the weaker details and, after time passes, everyone will either forget to question the integrity of the story or will find a way to rationalize everything that doesn’t make perfect sense.

  People have an uncanny knack for forcing things to make sense. Tomorrow, school administrators will wonder how Sara managed to break into the school without setting off the burglar alarm (faulty alarm system), how she got onto a roof when all the access doors were and still are locked (a janitor must not have shut a door all the way), and what caused the circle of charred carpeting in the auditorium (crazy Sara must have tried to burn the school down). Even Malcolm, who’s far from stupid, will find a way to explain the missing time preceding his arrival at the school.

  In the end, everyone will believe the lie. Everyone will believe that Sara had herself a good old-fashioned, run-of-the-mill nervous breakdown and tried to kill herself. She’ll be remembered by some as a good girl who was driven to a desperate act by a rapid-fire succession of personal tragedies. To others, she’ll be an emo basket case burnout whose breakdown was completely predictable, even inevitable. Either way, Sara deserves better.

  “Dr. Connors,” Mom says, “how is Sara?”

  Bart lets out a long sigh. “She suffered significant brain damage in the fall,” he says. “I spoke to the doctor. He thinks there is a chance of recovery, but it’s a small chance, and with this kind of injury...”

  He doesn’t finish the thought. He doesn’t need to.

  “Our immediate priority should be your children. I hate to state the obvious, but they’ve suffered a very serious trauma and will need to talk about this when they’re ready. I’m happy to make myself available to all of you, if you —”

  “Yeah, because you did such a great job treating Sara,” Mr. Steiger mutters, loud enough for everyone to hear.

  The first time I saw Mat
t throw a punch, it wasn’t impressive. Yes, it did the job and knocked Archimedes out, but I think that had more to do with Archimedes’ glass jaw than Matt’s ability as a fighter. I threw better punches when I played hockey, and I was ten years old.

  A lot’s changed since then. Matt springs out of his seat, moving with the speed of a striking cobra, and drops his father with a devastating uppercut. Matt looms over him for a moment, fists clenched, then shoves his way past everyone and storms out of the room. No one goes after him.

  Sigh. I have to do everything myself, don’t I?

  I chase after Matt, calling his name, but he doesn’t stop until he finds an elevator. “Matt, where are you going?” I say. He punches the call button (literally) but doesn’t answer. “Come on, talk to me.”

  “You are the last person in the world I want to talk to,” he says.

  “Huh? What did I do?”

  “What did you do?” He steps toward me, pushing me back against the wall. “Sara’s here because of you. Your best friend and you tried to blow her head off.”

  “What? I didn’t —! Matt, I didn’t have any choice!”

  “You didn’t have any choice,” Matt sneers.

  “I didn’t know what else to do,” I say, and maybe that’s closer to the truth. Sara rang my bell so badly I could barely think. I might have had a dozen other options I couldn’t see — hell, it doesn’t matter if I had a million other options, but in that moment, I only saw the one option in front of me.

  One option, and I botched it. I wanted to knock her out, that’s all. That’s all I wanted to do.

  “I didn’t mean to,” I say, the tears coming again.

  “Yeah, well, you did,” Matt says, stepping onto the elevator, “and I’ll never forgive you for it.”

  The elevator doors slide closed. I slump against the wall and sink to the floor, my eyes suddenly dry.

  There’s nothing left to cry over.

  Mom takes me home and forces some tea on me. She tries to get me to talk, but what am I supposed to say? I can’t tell Mom the truth without telling the whole truth, and this is not the time to lay that story on her. Not that it’s ever the right time for that bombshell...

  I head upstairs and spend the rest of the day in bed, stewing in my own dark thoughts until I fall asleep out of sheer exhaustion. I don’t stay asleep. I wake up repeatedly, usually with a start, as though escaping from a nightmare. I repeat the cycle until morning, and it takes an effort of will to roll out of bed.

  Getting ready for school today means stripping out of yesterday’s clothes, putting on fresh clothing, and applying deodorant like I’m spackling drywall. I power-chug a cup of coffee, and as I’m preparing a second cup in a travel mug, Mom comes into the kitchen and tries to convince me to stay home. It’s a nice offer, but there’s no point in it. All I’d do is beat myself up some more and think about all the ways I could have prevented this, everything I could have done differently.

  My route to school takes me past Sara’s house. From the outside everything appears perfectly normal. I pause at the end of the front walk, wrestling with a ridiculous impulse to go knock on the door.

  I second-guess my decision to go to school when I spot no fewer than four news vans parked in the small visitors’ lot near the front of the building. Cameramen have taken position at the edge of the lot so they can all get the school entrance in the shot. Only one of the reporters appears to be on the air; the other three are chatting on their phones or with their camera monkeys.

  Mr. Dent stands outside the main entrance, greeting students with a solemn expression. He blinks at me in disbelief.

  “Oh, Carrie, you should not be here today.”

  “I have nowhere else to be.”

  He makes an unhappy noise before whisking me inside. “Come on, I don’t want any of those reporters to see you,” he says. He puts a hand on my shoulder, a comforting gesture that fails to comfort, and shakes his head as if in defeat. “I don’t know what to say to you. I’m sorry feels so inadequate.”

  “There’s nothing to say, Mr. Dent.”

  “We brought in grief counselors for the students. Maybe you should talk to one of them.”

  “I’m already seeing someone.”

  He nods. “Good. That’s good. Are you sure you —?”

  “I’d like to get ready for class, Mr. Dent.”

  “Okay. Well, if you feel you need to leave, please let me know. All right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  That sets the tone for my day. Every teacher greets me with a sad pout, asks me if I should be in today, suggests I go talk with a grief counselor, offers to do whatever they can, all I have to do is ask.

  The teachers are the only people who talk to me all day. Most of my peers ignore me as they always do, others make hushed comments to their friends, no doubt speculating about what “really” happened to drive Sara to take a long walk off a short school roof.

  It all feels strangely familiar somehow. I realize why the déjà vu is strong with me while I’m sitting in the cafeteria, eating the loneliest lunch of my life: I’ve done all this before.

  It was one year ago, almost to the day, that my parents told me they were getting divorced. Once word of my pending status as a child of a broken home spread to the school at large, I spent one interminably awkward day receiving expressions of sympathy from the teachers and enduring the unwelcome spotlight of the rumor mill. My alleged friends showed me what shallow, self-centered asshats they were when they ostracized me at lunch, claiming that I was too much of a downer to share a table with, so I sat at a corner table, all alone, chewing mechanically on a cheese sandwich and feeling sorry for myself.

  The only major difference, and it’s an important difference, is that back then I didn’t have Malcolm waiting for me at the end of the day. We meet at the door to the computer lab, as usual, and he takes my hand before we walk in. He doesn’t ask me how I am, how my day’s been, if I’m okay. He slides his seat right up to mine and drapes an arm around my shoulder to hold me close. Normally Mr. Rose would step in and put a swift end to such a flagrant PDA, but he’s kindly cutting me a lot of slack.

  “Let me take you out for some coffee,” Malcolm says. “We can sit and talk if you want to. We can sit and not talk. Whatever you need.”

  “Could we do it another time? I want to see how Missy’s doing.”

  “At least let me drive you to the hospital.”

  “All right.”

  Malcolm offers to wait for me in the lobby, but I send him on his way with a long kiss and a longer hug. No need for him to waste his day sitting in a hospital, even though he would if I asked him to because he’s a good guy — the best kind of guy. I know he’ll always be there for me, no matter what. I can tell him anything.

  Maybe even that.

  Before I head to Missy’s room, I stop by Sara’s. Something tells me not to, but I have to see her. I have to.

  I wish I’d listened to that something.

  I open the door and freeze, my breath catching in my throat as I lock eyes with Sara. She’s staring right at me — or so I think. She doesn’t follow me as I step into the room and circle around to the far side of her bed. I say her name. She doesn’t respond. Sara’s utterly oblivious to my presence.

  Sara? I think. Can you hear me?

  Nothing.

  I sit for a few minutes, hoping against hope for some sign that she’s in there somewhere — a word, a sound, a stray thought entering my head, something, anything.

  Nothing.

  I dash out of the room before I start to cry. I duck into a bathroom to compose myself, clean myself up, then head to Missy’s room. It’s a somewhat cheerier sight in there, although the atmosphere is subdued.

  “Hey,” Stuart says, peering at me over Missy’s leg, which is encased in a cast and hangs by cables from a framework erected over the foot of her bed. Stuart has scrawled his name in huge letters down the length of the cast in black magic marker. It looks like the side
of an abandoned building in a bad part of Boston.

  “Hi, Carrie,” Missy says dreamily. “I’m on drugs!”

  “I can tell,” I say, mustering a smile for her. “How’re you doing, Muppet?”

  She blinks a few times, slowly and thoughtfully. “I’m on drugs,” she says again, adding in a conspiratorial whisper, “it’s not as fun as people say it is.”

  “I think in this case, it’s better than the alternative,” I say, motioning at her cast. She nods in agreement. “How’re you doing?” I say to Stuart.

  He shrugs. “You know.”

  “Yeah. I stopped by Sara’s room.”

  Stuart bristles. “So what?”

  “Well, um...I thought you’d want to know how she’s —”

  “I don’t.”

  “Can we not talk about her?” Missy says.

  “Why? Sara’s your friend,” I say.

  “Our friend? Look what she did to us!” Stuart says, jumping to his feet. “She hurt Missy, she hurt you, she made me —!”

  Stuart cuts himself off there and sinks back into his seat, that haunted look settling back onto his features.

  “What?” I say. “What did she do to you?”

  Stuart makes a strangled noise akin to a sob. Missy squeezes his hand.

  “She made me remember when Jeff died,” he says, his voice cracking. “It was like...it was like she pulled up everything I felt after he died and hit me with it all at once.” He looks up at me, tears running down his cheeks. “Sara pulled the worst week of my life out of my head and made me feel it all over again like it happened yesterday, so why the hell would you think I give a crap about how she’s doing?”

  “Stuart, I’m so sorry,” I say, “but she didn’t mean to — I mean, she wasn’t in her right mind. Come on, you know Sara would never intentionally hurt us.

  “But she did hurt us, and now you’re making excuses for her. Whose side are you on?”

  “There are no sides, Stuart. This mess has affected all of us, including Sara. I can’t abandon her any more than I could abandon either of you.”