The Tetradome Run

by Spencer Baum

Robin used her feet to drag her chair closer to Jenna.

  “You imagine how the future would have been different if you made that one change,” Robin said. “Then you start over, go back farther in your memory, and make a different change.”

  “Seriously, I’ve done some stupid shit in my life, but never, and I mean never fucking ever, would I talk to the cops.”

  “I did twenty-eight months in solitary,” Robin said. “This game kept me alive. And in playing the game, I found the one moment where it all went wrong. I was seven years old. Can you believe that? The choices we make when we’re that little—they can change everything.”

  “There’s no plea bargain when you fess to the cops,” Victoria said. “Bitch might be doing a couple years with a chance for parole, but instead the stupid ass talked to the cops and now she’s running in the Tetradome.”

  “Would you please shut up?” Robin snapped. “I’m trying to talk to my friend.”

  Victoria’s face darkened with anger. The memory of the last click kept her still…but only for a second, then Victoria was up and Robin was up and there were clicks and screaming and bodies writhing in pain on the floor.

  Jenna took the opportunity to leave the room.

  That night, despite her best efforts not to, she ended up playing Robin’s game after her eyes were closed. She searched her memory for the moment, the one moment, when it all went wrong, and imagined what might have been.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Trumpet Player From El Paso Who Was the Love of My Life

  Excerpted from A Victim of Circumstance: The Memoir of Jenna Duvall.

  The stack of pages I’m building in my weekly trips to the prison library is growing slowly. The days left for me are disappearing quickly.

  I don’t have time to say everything I want to say.

  Today, with the crunch of time on my mind, I want to write about someone important who hasn’t gotten his due yet in these pages. My boyfriend. Rudolfo Anthony Salazar.

  I met him in All-City Symphony my senior year of high school. He was a third-generation musician. His dad, his uncles, and his granddad all played mariachi. Rudy started playing semi-professionally when he was little. His father’s band used to bring him along on gigs, dress him up in their mariachi outfits, and let him solo. By the time I met him, he was a polished performer, as in make-a-girl-swoon polished.

  Here’s the thing about my relationship with Rudy. We were in totally different classes in the looks department—Rudy was a ten, I was…well, less than that—but we were still a match. Looks change. They evolve over time. The rigid hierarchies of high school flatten a little bit in college, a little bit more in your twenties, a little bit more in your thirties. I think a lot of girls get this in high school, but only a few boys do. Rudy was one of them. He understood that being attractive was about more than how you looked. He was someone who grew up in a family that valued competence, proficiency, and skill. I liked that he valued those qualities in me. The way he enjoyed listening to me play, the way he looked at me when I played…

  I don’t know if I’ve ever felt as sexy as I did when Rudy watched me play.

  At the end of every summer, All-City Symphony did a three-day rehearsal camp in the Jemez Mountains. As you might imagine, a high school orchestra camp was a raging swarm of hormones (orchestra geek hormones, which I swear are the worst type). There was lots of nighttime sneakery from the boys dorm to the girls dorm. There were secret moonlight excursions in the woods, and nerve-wracking summer-night games of Truth or Dare by the creek.

  Rudy and I didn’t hook up at orchestra camp, at least, not…

  Editor’s note: The remainder of this page was smeared and illegible on the scan of Jenna’s original handwritten document, and the continuity jump in the next legible paragraph suggests at least one handwritten page may be missing. We pick up the next paragraph in the order the pages were found.

  There’s so much to say and so little time to say it! As I write this, my hour in the prison library is almost up, my time on this earth is almost up, my story isn’t even close to finished! Childhood and my parents and my father—I bet I could go on for a hundred pages about my father and the mess he left behind. So many loose ends need to be tied together and I don’t know how to do it and I just NEED MORE TIME!!

  I guess I should skip ahead or something. Jesus…Rudy…why didn’t I write about Rudy first? I think it was easier for me to deal with the fluffy stuff, the stories from my past that aren’t so tinged with sorrow and tragedy, and yes, the story of Rudy and me ends in tragedy. Yes, I’m angry about it and I blame the world and I don’t give a fuck how privileged you think I am—when I think about Rudy, and then think about what happened to me after he was gone—fucking hell. I got a raw deal.

  I’ve had lots of time to think about Rudy, about how it ended, about what I might have done differently on that final night of his life. Three years I’ve had to sit alone in a cell and dwell on my past, to look for meaning, and I’ve come up empty. There’s no meaning to be found.

  Rudy moved back to El Paso after graduation and we broke up, or at least, we told ourselves we did.

  We thought we needed to put our career aspirations first, that we were doing the right thing, that this was just a high school romance. We thought we were being mature by ending it when he moved.

  Our breakup didn’t take. Thank God it didn’t take. Rudy came back between my first and second semesters of college. We started up again right where we left off. By the end of my first year at Hillerman, Rudy and I weren’t talking about marriage yet, but we both knew that’s where we were headed. There was no drama. We never fought. We never ran out of things to talk about. We were smitten.

  I’m still smitten. I plan to stay smitten until I die.

  He was at my house before he died. The gang and I were the last people to ever see him. Rudy, Sunny, Seth, Kyle and me—it was a typical Friday night for us. Gathered at my place with pizza and beer and Xbox. Rudy wasn’t drinking that night. He had a long night of driving planned. He left my house at seven, stone sober, with no beverages in his car except the energy drinks he always took on his nighttime road trips.

  I kissed him goodbye. I told him I loved him and I’d see him soon.

  He was alone in his little Hyundai. He was going south on I-25. He was going to spend the night in Las Cruces with his cousin, then drive to El Paso in the morning for a wedding gig with his dad’s band.

  Police think he fell asleep at the wheel. He crossed the shoulder, drove into a ditch, rolled the car three times, and crashed into a cottonwood tree. He was dead when they found him.

  In a lot of ways, I feel like I’ve been dead ever since.

  CHAPTER 13

  The week before the Semifinal Race, the producers of The Tetradome Run decided to fly Jenna back to Albuquerque to film a segment for the pregame show.

  A director, two producers, three security guards, and a small production crew—thirteen employees in all—accompanied Jenna on the trip.

  The first stop was her old house.

  Kyle had sold the house a year after Jenna’s arrest. He’d used the proceeds to pay her legal bills. The current owners, whoever they were, had taken Devlin’s money in exchange for vacating the premises so Jenna could do an interview with Chad Holiday.

  Chad took Jenna room to room, camera crew in tow, asking her to talk about her memories in each space.

  In the kitchen, Jenna thought about the last fight she had with her dad before he left, but told a story about Grandma teaching her to cook.

  In the bedroom, Jenna thought about her final morning as a free woman, a morning so tainted with ugly memories she didn’t dare speak of it. Instead, she told Chad about sitting on the edge of her bed and practicing her clarinet.

  In the living room, the story that immediately came to Jenna’s mind, the juicy story, was that party from her freshman year of college. The party where Rudy made his return to Jenna’s life after a semester away. The party whe
re Kyle met Sunny for the first time. The party where, apparently, her little brother lost his virginity to her best friend.

  She didn’t tell Chad about the party. Instead, she talked about playing video games with Kyle on Saturday mornings.

  They spent three hours at the house, then they took Jenna to her old high school. Tell us a story about your time here, Chad said.

  She made the mistake of mentioning the Mozart Concerto she played with All-City Symphony her senior year.

  “What a nice memory that must be,” said Chad. “Where did this performance happen?”

  “Popejoy Hall on the UNM campus,” said Jenna.

  They took her there next. They escorted her to the stage, turned on the stage lights, brought in their cameras.

  A production tech brought her a clarinet.

  “We’d like you to play the Mozart for us,” Chad said.

  The clarinet, fully assembled and ready to play, was a Howarth. It felt sturdy and smooth in her hands. She’d never played a Howarth before.

  “I can’t,” she said. “It’s been years. My embouchure’s shot.”

  “Your what?” Chad asked.

  “My embouchure. The muscles you develop when you play a wind instrument.” Jenna pointed at the corners of her mouth. “Playing clarinet well is all about training and strengthening these muscles, and it’s been years since I’ve played a note.”

  “I want you to play for us Jenna,” Bart yelled from the audience.

  He was in the third row, guards and crew seated on either side of him.

  “Really, I can’t, it’s going to sound awful,” she said.

  “Let me be the judge of that,” said Bart

  Jenna glanced back at the camera, thought about how many times she had dreamed of playing for a national audience.

  “Please don’t make me do this,” she said. “I worked so hard to develop this skill and I’ve lost it. If people heard me play now, they wouldn’t understand. They don’t know how quickly you lose it if you don’t practice. They’ll think how I play now is how I used to play, and it isn’t.”

  Bart pulled his clicker from his pocket and held it up for Jenna to see.

  She sighed and closed her eyes, memories of every painful zap she’d received from her spinal implant telling her she had no choice, that she wasn’t just their prisoner; she was their slave.

  “Okay. Just, can I have a few minutes to warm up? Without the cameras on?”

  Bart looked at the cameraman, then whispered something to Jodi. Jodi, in turn, raised her hand and tapped her fingers to her thumb, a motion Jenna had seen her make before. It was a message to the crew that meant ‘take a break.’

  “We’re going to grab some coffee,” Bart said to Jenna. “Be ready to play for us when we get back.”

  Only the prison guards stayed behind, the three of them seated in the third row, staring at their phones, their clickers hanging round their necks.

  Jenna looked out at the empty space behind them. The last time she had been in this hall a thousand people packed into the seats to listen to her play and she nailed it. It was a perfect memory, one she didn’t want to tarnish by playing again.

  A deep breath. She licked her lips, then licked the reed on the clarinet. She laid her fingers on the keys. She inhaled through her nose, smelling the cork grease.

  Her lips pinching down on the mouthpiece, she blew on the reed. A hiss of air, the same sound she made the first time she tried to play in fourth grade. She blew through it, then got to the soft hum of vibrating wood. Weak and airy—it was the sound of an amateur, miles removed from the tone she had worked for years to develop.

  She tried again.

  She got a richer tone, still disappointing but enough to carry her into her warm-up. A chromatic scale, low to high to low again. Then A-major scale, A-minor, B-major, B-minor…the tone was weak but the notes were crisp. Her fingers were still strong. The patterns had never left her mind. For years, sitting alone in a prison cell, her fingers had played these scales in the open air. Absent-mindedly she’d kept the patterns and rhythm alive, and when the crew returned, and the cameras were on, she played the Mozart.

  By her standards, it was a terrible performance, the kind she’d expect after a three-year absence from her instrument. But she got through it. And when she was done, begrudgingly accepting the applause of the people in the hall with her, she thought, not for the first time, of all she had lost. What the world took from her—it was bigger than the years she spent behind bars. Bigger than the years ahead of her that would go black if one of the monsters on the show caught her and killed her.

  When she went to prison, she didn’t just lose the present and the future. She also lost big chunks of the past. Years she spent building a life became worthless when that life was abandoned. Her career, her relationships, her path—these things couldn’t be left unattended. They decayed in her absence.

  The crew still applauding, Jenna bowed her head. Idiot Chad Holiday, misreading everything about the moment, put his arm around her back and said, “That was beautiful, Jenna. Thank you for playing for us.”

  As they walked Jenna out of the performance hall and towards the prisoner van, Bart came up to her and said, “I understand your high school sweetheart died in a car accident.”

  Jenna said nothing.

  “I’ve been told there’s a little roadside memorial on the side of the freeway where it happened,” said Bart.

  She remained quiet.

  “We’re going there next,” said Bart. “Give me something good when we get there, okay? I’m thinking I’d like to see you touch the cross on the side of the road and then burst into tears. Or whatever. You know, just something emotional.”

  Bart had his clicker in his hand.

  “I’m sure you won’t let me down.”

  They went to Rudy’s memorial. She didn’t let him down.

  The next day she learned about her brother’s funeral. Bart surprised her with news of it that morning.

  “We arranged and paid for the funeral ourselves,” Bart said. “Your family...you know, I don’t want to badmouth anyone, Jenna, but there wasn’t much going on for Kyle’s funeral from your family.”

  They were in the hotel Devlin had secured for Jenna, a tenth-story room at the Marriott.

  “I was the only family Kyle had left,” said Jenna.

  “Your aunts, uncles, and cousins we brought into town might disagree,” said Bart.

  “You paid my family to come to my brother’s funeral?”

  “Not all of them,” said Bart. “Many needed no enticements to come show their respects.”

  “You’re doing all this for your pregame show,” said Jenna. “You’ve put together a funeral for my brother so you can turn it into reality TV.”

  “More or less,” said Bart. “We’d like you to give the eulogy.”

  “I don’t want to be a part of this.”

  “Let’s not fight. You know I’m not giving you a choice.”

  Jenna felt a shadow of pain travel down her spine.

  “I want you to do the eulogy, so you will do the eulogy,” said Bart. “The only question is if you write it yourself or you have us write it for you.”

  A minute later, Jenna was alone at the hotel desk, a pen in her hand, a yellow legal pad in front of her.

  She looked at the blank paper, thought about what kind of eulogy she could give for her brother.

  Not an honest one. Not if it was going to be broadcast for the world on the Tetradome pregame.

  She wrote a sentence.

  Kyle Duvall was a kind person with a caring heart.

  She crossed out the sentence and set down the pen. How the hell was she supposed to do this? Her brother’s funeral, the kind he deserved, should be a sacred thing. It should be honest, and quiet, and beautiful, and private. The opposite of a television spectacle.

  She tried again.

  An honest eulogy for you, Kyle, she wrote, would be a private conversation betw
een you and me.

  She looked at her own handwriting on the legal pad. She underlined the words, “a private conversation.”

  She wrote, You and I have been in a private conversation for years.

  And then she tore off the sheet, crumpled it in her hand, and threw it in the trash. She needed to get the idea of speaking truthfully about her brother out of her mind. She needed to write something sterile and short.

  How strange it was to be a prisoner at a desk again, just like her sessions in the prison library when she wrote her memoir.

  How strange it was to be a prisoner at a desk with a blank sheet of paper in front of her and…

  Not a blank sheet. A blank pad.

  About to go to a funeral that was later today.

  A funeral where members of her extended family, estranged as they were, would be.

  She touched the pen to the paper and began to write, but what she wrote wasn’t a sterile made-for-TV eulogy. She’d write that later. First she needed to write something important.

  A letter.

  Before he died, I gave something important to Kyle.

  Who was this letter for? She didn’t know yet. Whoever’s hands she could sneak it into. Whoever could go into Kyle’s apartment and get her memoir.

  It’s a stack of about 150 pages that I wrote in prison. Together, those pages make up an unfinished memoir. I need for you to go into his apartment and get it.

  CHAPTER 14

  The guards escorted Jenna out of the hotel and into a black limo parked at the front door.

  They told her to expect a busy morning.

  Their first stop was the Old Town Clothier on San Felipe Drive, a boutique that opened its doors early for Jenna. The boutique’s owner, a red-haired woman named Edith, had Jenna try on all manner of somber black outfits. Dresses, pantsuits, skirts and jackets—with each outfit change, Jenna was allowed into a private fitting room where she carefully transferred the folded slip of yellow paper she was hiding on her person. In a pants pocket when she tried on the first outfit. In the jacket when she tried on the second.