by Barry Lyga
“It’ll change your life. Put you back in the spotlight. Do you really miss being on CNN that bad?”
His eyes alight with fame-lust, Weathers laughed a modest little laugh. “Well, I’m sure there’ll be some demands for my time and my insight. That’s usually how the game’s played.…”
Just then Helen arrived with the coffees. To go. Jazz and Howie snatched theirs up.
“It’s not a game, douche,” Jazz said.
“Yeah, and if it were,” Howie said, “you would seriously suck at it.”
They scooted from the Coff-E-Shop. Jazz shot one last look over his shoulder. Weathers still sat at the table in the window, glaring out at the two of them, his eyes lifeless and burning at the same time. He’d had a glimpse of the world beyond the Nod when Billy was arrested, and would spend the rest of his life doing anything to claw his way back to it.
But he wouldn’t get there by climbing up on Jazz’s shoulders.
Somewhere up the street, a dog barked. Jazz thought of Rusty. Great. An encounter with Doug Weathers and now thinking of Rusty. He knew that this was going to be a bad day.
Sure enough, school was torture.
Jazz wanted nothing more than to get back out to the field. With every hour that passed—with every minute that passed—the field was reverting to its natural state, losing any remaining evidence. If Howie hadn’t lost his nerve last night…
Well, no point thinking about that now. He wanted to get out there and poke around, ideally in the hours before sunrise. To see the field the way the killer had seen it.
But school dragged.
Jazz didn’t like school, but not for the usual teen reasons. He didn’t like school for the same reason that he didn’t like any situation where he was surrounded by people.
“It’s like this,” he’d explained once to Connie. “If someone gave you a single rose, you’d be happy, right?”
They had been sitting in Jazz’s Jeep at the nearby state park. Connie had feigned confusion, peering in the glove compartment, twisting to look in the backseat. “I don’t see a rose. There’s no happiness here.”
“Okay,” he went on, “now imagine someone gives you ten thousand roses.”
“That is a whole lotta roses,” she said. “That’s too much.”
“Right. Too much. But more than that, it makes each individual rose much less special, right? It makes it hard to pick one out and say, ‘That’s the good one.’ And it makes you want to just get rid of all of them because none of them seem special now.”
Connie had narrowed her eyes. “Are you saying when you’re at school you just want to get rid of everyone?”
It wasn’t that. Jazz wished he knew how to explain it. It wasn’t a matter of wanting to kill people. It was simply that when there were so many people, didn’t they seem, well, expendable? With fifteen hundred students at Lobo’s Nod High, would anyone really notice if a few went missing? The more people there were around him, the less personal they became. The less real.
People matter. It was a tough lesson; it was the opposite of what Billy had taught Jazz all his life. All these people, you see ’em, Billy would say at a ball game or at the park or in a movie theater or mall. All these people aren’t real. They don’t have real lives. They don’t have hearts. They don’t matter. Only you matter.
“Lots of people had crappy childhoods,” Connie had told him. “Some of them even grew up the same way as a serial killer, but they didn’t turn into serial killers. It’s not like there’s a manual you can follow and it makes a kid grow up to kill people.”
“If anyone would know how to custom-design a sociopath, it’s Billy,” Jazz had said.
“But you don’t want to kill people,” she’d said with finality, and Jazz had let the conversation die right there. Because the only honest response would have been:
It’s not that I want to or don’t want to. It’s just…I can. I could. It’s like…I imagine it’s like being a great runner. If you knew you could run really fast, wouldn’t you? If you were stuck walking somewhere, wouldn’t you want to let loose and run like hell? That’s how I feel.
Instead of saying any of that, he’d let it go and then sent Connie a dozen red roses the next day, with one rare blue rose at the center of the bouquet; money he could ill afford to spend, but it felt somehow necessary. The card read, “You’ll always be my special rose.” He didn’t know if the sentiment was romantic or corny as hell (he strongly suspected the latter), but Connie ate it up, and since the whole point of the gesture was to make her happy, Jazz counted it as a win.
Sometimes his programming simulated human emotions pretty well. And sometimes he convinced himself that it wasn’t programming at all.
On Mondays, between calculus and biology, he had five minutes to kill, five minutes when his schedule jibed with Connie’s. They connected outside her history class, as they always did on Mondays. Today she was wearing jeans and a pink T-shirt that stretched across her chest, reading, CONTAINS 0% PLASTIC. He moved in for a quick kiss on the lips.
“Dent!” barked Mr. Gomez. “PDA!”
Jazz threw his arm around Connie’s shoulders. “Aw, c’mon, Mr. Gomez!” he said with just the right amount of swagger in his voice. “Could you resist?”
Jazz could read people, and he had a pretty good suspicion that Albert Gomez entertained some R-rated—at the very least—fantasies about the girls in his class. So he didn’t outright accuse him of anything, just poked right at the tender spot.
Mr. Gomez cleared his throat nervously—music to Jazz’s ears—and wiped at an imaginary bead of sweat on his upper lip. “Just watch it, okay?” he said, and suddenly found something else to occupy his attention.
“That was mean,” Connie said as they found a spot against the wall to lean and talk. “He’s not a bad guy.”
Yeah, right. “I was just being honest. How could anyone resist?” He moved to run a hand through her cornrows, then pulled back, remembering the one time he’d tried that—Connie had lectured him on the Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not touch thy black girlfriend’s hair. Ever. He kissed her again instead, quickly and out of the visual range of any random teacher drones.
Hmm. Drones. Not good. People matter.
Especially Connie. Connie, with her soft lips, her wicked grins, her dark eyes that couldn’t see into his soul, but still made him jump a little inside whenever they roamed his way. Her hair—off-limits to touch, but not to his other senses—entranced him, jet black, shoulder-length, tightly coiled like powerful springs, smelling slightly of chemicals and cinnamon, the beads at the end of each braid clicking together as she walked. It was as if she bound up limitless energy in those braids, and he couldn’t imagine what it would be like to release it. Her skin was soft to the touch and the color of…
Well, who cared about color? She was the color of Connie. Beautiful.
For his part, Jazz knew he was handsome. It had nothing to do with looking in the mirror, which he rarely did. It had everything to do with the way the girls at school looked at him, the way they became satellites when he walked by, their orbits contorted by his own mysterious gravity. If attention could be measured like the Doppler effect, girls would show a massive blue shift in his presence. In the last year or so, he had even remarked the scrutiny of older women—teachers, cashiers at stores, the woman who delivered UPS packages to his house. What had once been a maternal flavor in their glances had taken on a lingering, cool sort of appraisal. He could almost hear them thinking, Not yet. But soon.
Despite his upbringing, despite the infamy of his father, they still watched him. Or maybe because of it. Maybe Howie was right about bad boys.
None of this mattered to him, except that it made getting his way fairly easy. Most guys were cowed by him, and most women were attracted to him. As long as he could exploit that, he had a pretty easy time of it.
Prospects are there for you and for me, Jasper. That’s what they exist for, get it?
“Howi
e told me what you guys did last night,” Connie said, shutting up Billy’s voice in his head. “Not cool.”
“I knew I should have killed that kid when I had the chance,” Jazz said lightly, then immediately regretted it when he saw the expression on her face. “Not funny?” he asked.
“Not when you say it. You don’t know how to joke like that.” She thought for a moment, her warm, dark eyes searching him for…what? He didn’t know. “You should probably never joke like that.”
“Okay.” Connie gave good lessons in being human. “But it needed to be done. We had to go in there.”
Connie patted Jazz’s shirtfront and frowned. “Nope. Not there. Let me see your wallet.”
Mystified, he put his wallet into her outstretched hand. She flipped it open. “Well, now,” she said, looking at the picture of her that he kept there, “that is one fine-looking honey, but…No. I don’t see it here, either.”
“See what?”
“The badge Tanner gave you when he made you a deputy,” she said, shoving his wallet at his chest. “Don’t do stupid things, Jazz. And don’t make me go all ‘psycho girlfriend’ on you. I don’t want to, but I will.”
The bell rang and Connie darted for her class. Jazz fumbled his wallet back into his pocket and hightailed it to biology.
Jazz didn’t see Connie again until the end of the day, when they met at the auditorium for rehearsal. The new drama teacher, Ms. Davis (she actually insisted that her students call her Ginny), was bringing The Crucible to life on the Lobo’s Nod High stage, and Jazz had been “encouraged” by Connie to audition. Result: He was now stuck every afternoon rehearsing with a bunch of kids he really didn’t care about, all to act out a role—Reverend Hale—that he found sort of annoying and wishy-washy. Not to mention hopelessly naive. There is a moment early in the play where Hale—an “expert” on witchcraft—haughtily brandishes his books and asserts that “Here is all the invisible world, caught, defined, and calculated.” As if it could be that easy.
Connie was no longer annoyed with him by the time they connected after the last bell; they spent the fifteen minutes between the end of school and the beginning of rehearsal feverishly kissing and groping back in the wings, behind a leftover matte painting from an old production of Grease. Or maybe she’d never been annoyed with him at all, he thought. Sometimes he couldn’t get a read on Connie’s emotions. Maybe it was a guy/girl thing.
He hoped that’s all it was. What if it was a predator/prey thing? A human thing? What if he was losing his connection to her? God, don’t let that be it. Connie was one of the few anchors that kept Jazz’s sanity firmly moored. Losing any one of them would be disastrous, but losing Connie in particular, he knew, would be catastrophic.
“Are you all right?” she asked, her fingers lightly stroking his cheek.
“Fine.”
“’Cause it’s like you’re not even here. Your tongue just stopped.”
“Sorry. I was thinking.” He kissed her again, and this time he forced himself not to think while he did it. This was how normal people kissed. Without thinking.
“Everyone onstage!” Ginny shouted from the house. “Come on, now!”
Jazz and Connie joined the rest of the cast onstage. Today they were running through the last scenes of the play, so Connie—who was playing Tituba—didn’t have to be there the whole time, but she always stayed through every rehearsal. Of the two of them, Connie was the drama geek, and would have watched rehearsals even if she didn’t have a part in the play. Now she sat in the front row with Ginny and watched Jazz in a scene close to the end of the play, as Reverend Hale argues and pleads with Judge Danforth to release the heroic John Proctor from jail and stay his execution. In the play, Hale starts out as one of the main proponents of the witch trials in Salem, but later comes to regret his part in them. As the play and John Proctor’s life near their end, Hale rants in the jail, begging Danforth to reconsider and spare Proctor so that he will not join the others who’ve died already at the hands of the Puritans. If Proctor can live, then maybe Hale can be redeemed.
“There is blood on my head!” Hale screams at Danforth, pleading with him. You won’t just be saving Proctor’s life, he’s saying. You’ll be saving my soul, too! “Can you not see the blood on my head!!”
It was a great moment, and Jazz and Eddie Viggaro (the kid playing Danforth) turned up the volume on it this rehearsal, really clicking for the first time. Danforth stood stone-faced and immobile, glaring out at the audience as Hale, a twitchy, fidgety mass of tics and guilt-induced pacing, roamed the stage, screaming, pleading, finally crumbling in a heap at Danforth’s feet.
“Really wonderful work today, Jasper,” Ginny told him when they broke for the day. “I really felt that. Nicely done. Everyone else!” She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Hey! All of you! Off-book next week on this scene. Take a few pointers from Mr. Dent and get those lines memorized, okay?”
“You’re awesome,” Connie said later, linking her arm in Jazz’s as they headed to the Jeep.
He shrugged. Pretending to be someone he wasn’t…That wasn’t the sort of thing he really wanted to be awesome at. But his being a part of the play with Connie seemed to make her happy.
“I can’t believe you’re playing Tituba,” he told her. “Like Ginny couldn’t have given you another role?”
“I wanted to play Tituba. It’s a great role.”
“But she’s a slave.” He opened Connie’s door and helped her into the Jeep. “Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Should it?”
“Well, you’re black.…”
“I am?” Connie looked at the back of her hand and feigned shock. “Holy crap! You’re right! I am.”
“Ha, ha.” Jazz closed her door and got in on the driver’s side.
“I don’t care about Africa,” she said suddenly.
“What?”
“Africa,” she explained. “I don’t care about it.”
Jazz stared at her. She had that expression on her face that told him that she had thought long and hard about what she was saying. So he figured it was best just to get out of her way and let her do it.
“I mean,” she went on, “I care about the people who are hurting there. The wars. The genocide. The famine. I care about that. But no more than people on any other continent who are suffering. And I don’t care about slavery, either. I know I’m supposed to. I know I’m supposed to be angry about it, like my dad is. But I care about the now, Jazz. The now and the coming. I don’t care about the past. Get it?”
He wasn’t sure where she was headed with this, and the expression on her face told him that she was trying to make a point beyond the obvious one.
She waited patiently while he thought about it. Lessons in being human. She told him something about herself and then turned it around on him, so…
“So, you’re saying maybe I should forget about my past and stop thinking about my father and serial killers and just get on with my life?”
She grinned and patted his cheek. “Aw, see? And everyone told me you were just a pretty face. But you have—”
Just then, a man appeared in front of the Jeep as Jazz was about to turn the key, making him forget all about race and Connie and The Crucible and the blood on Reverend Hale’s head. If not for his hangdog posture and the age in his eyes, Jazz would have thought him no older than forty. But the defeated, dragging stoop of his stance made him look more like sixty. He was a man crushed by the world, by life itself.
He was also right in front of the Jeep and not moving, staring at Jazz as though disbelieving his own eyes.
Jazz started the engine to give the guy a hint: Move it, pal.
The man put a trembling hand on the Jeep’s hood and left it there as he slowly made his way around the fender to Jazz’s window and grabbed hold of the side mirror.
Sighing, Jazz obeyed when the man motioned to him to roll down the window.
“You’re Jasper Dent, aren’t you?” the man aske
d, his voice hollow and quavering. “I’ve been looking for you.”
Now that he was face-to-face with the guy, Jazz saw that his eyes—muddy brown and bloodshot—were sunken, as though they had seen too much and retreated as far into his skull as possible. Heavy bags drooped under them—the man needed a week’s worth of sleep at the very least.
He wasn’t a reporter; of that much, Jazz was certain. Jazz had a lot of experience with the press, far beyond bottom-feeding morons like Doug Weathers. Reporters of all kinds made their way to Lobo’s Nod, interviewing residents, all of them trying to land the Holy Grail of torture-porn journalism: an interview with Billy Dent’s only child. Jazz could have been rich beyond his wildest dreams by now, just by accepting the offers from the sleazier newspapers and tabloid TV shows, or the seven-figure offer from a big New York publishing house for his memoir. (“We’ll get someone to ghost the whole thing for you,” they had promised him. “The only writing you’ll do is when you sign the check.”)
“I’ve been looking for you,” the man said again, stumbling over his words. “Just got to town today. Didn’t think I’d…So soon…” As if he’d just remembered what to do when meeting someone, the man extended a hand through the window. Jazz shot a look over at Connie, who was staring at the scene unfolding before her. He sighed and shook the man’s hand.
“My name’s Jeff Fulton. Hello, miss,” he said, as though just seeing Connie for the first time. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I don’t want to keep you. I just…Harriet Klein is my…was my daughter.”
Jazz stiffened and jerked his hand away from Jeff Fulton. Harriet Klein. Billy’s eighty-third victim in the official chronology (eighty-fourth in Jazz’s own chronology). White. Twenty-seven years old. Pretty in an unnoticeable sort of way—you wouldn’t stop to look at her on the street, but if you were in a room alone with her, you’d feel it.
Unbidden, images flashed before his eyes: the police photo of her body, nailed naked to the ceiling of a church in Pennsylvania (“Hoo-boy, that took all night!” Billy had crowed, flushed with triumph and pride), her head lolling downward, her limbs bearing the weight of her body. When the reverend who found the body called the police, the skin and muscle were already coming loose; the medical examiner arrived just before her left arm pulled free from the wall. Four cops had to climb a scaffold and hold her in place so that they could get her down before the rest of her limbs shredded and dropped her amputated corpse to the floor.