by Spencer Baum
“I need to keep this quick,” the image of Sunny said. “I wish I didn’t have to do this virtually. I wish I could help you more.”
Jenna stood in front of the Yack Shack desk, looking down at Sunny’s face on the screen.
“I wanted you to be clear of the Tetradome before the Finale,” Sunny said, “but obviously that didn’t work out. So I have a new plan. We’re going to break you out right in the middle of the race.”
Jenna said nothing. Not for the first time in her life, she questioned her own sanity, but ultimately concluded that everything was real, that her senses weren’t deceiving her.
Sunny really was talking to her through the Yack Shack.
“The way this year’s course is laid out, there’s an opportunity for escape in the middle of the forest,” said Sunny. “Jenna, can you come closer so I can see your face? I need to know you’re getting all this.”
Jenna stepped closer to the screen. “I’m getting all this,” she said.
“Good. In order for you to get out, you’ll need to make it to the third section of the course. I wish there was a way for me to help you sooner but there isn’t. Find a way to survive into the third section, then I can spring you loose.”
“Sunny…you’re talking to me on this screen. It’s the middle of the night, I-”
“I know it’s weird. Please just be quiet and listen. There is a forest in the third section of the course. You’ll know it when you see it. When you get there, if there’s anybody behind you, you need to slow down. Halfway through the forest is a marker that helps the producers control the death rate in the Finale. To get you out, I need you to be in last place when you cross that marker.”
“Sunny, I don’t know what you’re talking about. A marker?”
“It’s a flower. A bright yellow orchid. It will be on your left when you pass it. Once the last runner passes that orchid, the forest will burn.”
This has to be a dream, Jenna thought. No matter how real it feels, it has to be a dream.
“The fire is your chance to get out. No one’s going to have any visibility inside the forest for about three seconds when the initial fireball happens. During that time, you need to make it to the service road.”
“The service road?”
“There are secret pathways the crew uses to access the live course. They’re supposed to be hidden from view and inaccessible to contestants, but I’ve made this particular service road accessible to you.”
“What? Sunny, this-”
“Just be quiet and listen! Shift change will end any second now! The service road—you’ll see it come up on your right no more than ten feet ahead of that yellow orchid.”
Jenna squinted at the screen. This was making her head hurt. Whether or not this conversation was real, Jenna had already decided it was too much for sleepy mind to deal with. Yellow orchids and forest fires and hidden service roads…
“Once you’re on the service road you’ll be safe,” said Sunny. “And the fire will buy you some time. I’ve left tools and instructions for you. I promised you I’m getting you out and I will. Everything you need is there for you, Jenna. Have you got this? Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“Sunny, you know how strange this is, right?”
“Repeat back the plan to me,” said Sunny.
“I’m feeling like I shouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“You get past the first two sections, then you enter the forest…”
“How about while you’re here, and we’re talking face to face, we talk a little bit about my brother.”
“You’ve got to be in last place when you’re in the forest. None of this works unless you’re in last place when you pass the yellow orchid.”
“Kyle killed himself, you know. And before he died, he was telling me things about stolen chemicals, and now the news is saying something about a connection between you and Nathan Cavanaugh.”
“Listen to me, Jenna! Pass the orchid, then find the service road. It will be on your right. There’s going to be a huge explosion, but it will happen above your head. It’s a sodium flare built into the treetops of the forest. The dangerous part comes after, when the fireball pushes all the harpies out of the trees.”
“Sunny, did you build the bomb that Nathan Cavanaugh used at the Desert Ridge Hotel?”
“As soon as you see the service road-”
“Sunny!”
On the screen, Sunny bit down on her lip as she took a deep breath. “Yes, Jenna, I built the bomb that Nathan used in Las Vegas, okay? Your brother helped me steal the chemicals. I’ll explain everything when I see you tomorrow. But I have to see you first. You have to do what I’m telling you.”
Jenna stepped back, as if the screen on the Yack Shack had suddenly become dangerous.
“You made the Desert Ridge bomb,” she said.
“Jenna, this story is bigger than you know. Bigger than I can tell you now!”
Jenna was looking at Sunny on the screen, but thinking of Kyle. Thinking of the madness in his eyes the last time she saw him.
“You made him steal the chemicals for you,” she said.
“I know it’s hard, but I need you to quit thinking about all that,” said Sunny. “You’re going to die tomorrow unless you do what I say.”
The helplessness in Kyle’s eyes. The guilt.
“The Desert Ridge bombing,” Jenna said, quietly. “You killed fifty-eight people.”
“What part of you will die don’t you understand, Jenna!”
“He was lost, Sunny. The last time I saw him, Kyle was lost, and then…”
“I’m just going to repeat what you need to do one more time and then it will be up to you. In order for you to escape tomorrow-”
“I tried that already! I tried your escape and it failed. It put me in the hospital ward while everyone else got to train.”
“You don’t need training! You only need to survive the first two sections then I can get you out!”
“I don’t need you to get me out! I don’t need anything from you, you fucking murderer!”
“No, oh no Jenna, this isn’t-”
“You killed him, Sunny! Kyle is dead because of you!”
“You’re going to be dead too.”
“Not if I win.”
“Jenna, you’re not going to win. Nobody’s going to win.”
“Fuck you, Sunny.”
She stepped away from the Yack Shack screen.
“Jenna? Where’d you go? Tell me you understand the plan!”
“I need sleep,” Jenna said. “I’m running in the Tetradome Finale tomorrow, and I’m going to win this thing.”
“No! That’s what I’m telling you! Nobody’s going to-”
With a yank on a cord at the back of the computer, Jenna shut off the Yack Shack, and shut out the girl she’d known as Sunny Paderewski.
No more of Sunny’s convoluted and crazy schemes. No more running in the shadows for the back door.
Tomorrow she’d lace up her shoes, step into the arena, and win The Tetradome Run.
CHAPTER 52
Breaking Up With Sunny
Excerpted from A Victim of Circumstance: The Memoir of Jenna Duvall.
I intended for the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college to be one of intense, deliberate practice. My aspirations heading into that summer were nothing less than six hours of clarinet practice a day. I intended for that summer to be the one when I transformed from really good college woodwind player to world class musician.
Then Rudy died, and everything I thought I knew about my life was up for debate.
I spent most of that summer, the last summer of freedom in my life, in bed. Yes, I regret how that panned out. Yes, I would give anything for a few months of freedom to ride my bike in the morning, practice my clarinet all day, and hang out with my friends at night. Yes, after my boyfriend died, instead of doing those things, I hid under my comforter day and night, coming out only to go to the
bathroom and, sometimes, to eat.
Everything was gray and ugly that summer. Depression, at least, the kind that I had after Rudy died, turns the world around you into a bunch of noise you want to silence. All the things you like when you aren’t depressed turn into ugly clutter when you are. The vibrancy of the world turns into an obnoxious muddle. It gives you a headache, makes you sick to hear it—I would literally get sick when I left my bedroom. So I didn’t. I hid from the world behind a closed door for months.
If you live through something like that, and you’re lucky enough to come out on the other side, like I did, you come out with a unique breed of clarity, one I don’t think you can achieve any other way.
Some people come out of depression and say it was their friends who saved them, or their family, or an exercise program, or drugs, or a change of scenery. For me, it was the clarinet. That funny black tube of wood, that quirky music-maker that, for a host of mostly accidental reasons, had become central to my life, started to guilt me that summer. I would hide in my bed all day, every day, in and out of sleep, I would roll over, I would look at one side of the room, and then the other, I would listen to Mr. Clausen run his lawnmower, I would sit up in bed when my friends wanted to visit, I would humor them, and then, when they left, I would look at that little black case on the floor of my closet. With each day that passed that I didn’t open that case and assemble the clarinet inside, a little seedling of guilt would sprout in my mind. All the time and effort I had put into mastering the art of making sound with that wooden tube, the cumulative nature of the work, the way each day of practice was a step forward from the last, and each day off was a step back—mastering a skill is like adopting a pet. Once you’ve decided to do it, you’ve got to commit, because it’s your responsibility now to keep it alive.
The guilt overpowered my depression one Saturday in August. It was mid-way between afternoon and evening. It was raining outside. No one was in the house but me. I got up, went to my closet, grabbed the clarinet case, and pulled out my instrument for the first time in two months.
The instant I smelled the cork grease I was filled with regret. I was supposed to practice all summer, Rudy would have wanted me to practice all summer, and I didn’t.
That regret is still with me. I can’t believe I squandered the last summer that belonged to me.
I put the reed in my mouth and put the clarinet together. I played two octaves of a C major scale. Then I played the Von Weber Number 1, and even though it was far from my best performance, it was still pretty good.
Clarity. My world had been nothing but noise for months and then, that afternoon, it wasn’t. The simple beauty of a simple melody cut through the noise, and carried me back into the world.
I don’t know if I’ll ever have clarity like that again. The best I can do now is try to remember what it was like. It was an epiphany, a feeling but also a thought. It was bigger than I can convey in simple words—to understand it you have to feel it, and if I think about that melody, and that afternoon, I can still feel it, however faintly, and if I tried to put the feeling into a sentence, it would be this: Beauty is the only thing that matters.
We’re all trying to live the life we think we’re meant to live. We’re all trying to do the right thing. We’re all convinced we are the good guys. We’re all in our tribes. We’re all at war with each other. We’re all looking out for our own. We’re all desperate to believe that we’ve been right all this time and the other guys have been wrong. We argue and we gossip, we eavesdrop and we spy, we condemn, we make fun, we signal our virtue and we point out their vice. We discard old religions, we make new ones, we announce our articles of faith, we create our ceremonies and rituals, we expel our heretics. Civilizations rise and they fall, we are born, we grow old, we die, and if we’re lucky, God help us all to be lucky, we get to experience something beautiful before we’re done, because in the end, beauty is the only thing that matters.
I experienced beauty when I played the Von Weber that afternoon. Once I was inside it, I saw the astonishing depth of the beauty that had been around me all along. The love of my family. The joy of a handwritten letter. The blast of the wind in my face when I rode my bike. The connection I made with Rudy, a connection that was so strong I could feel it reaching out from beyond the grave to find me that afternoon while I played my clarinet.
I played for hours that day, keeping it going well after the sun went down. The next day I woke up early, went to campus, got a practice room, and put in a full day of hard work.
Over the next two weeks, the last two weeks of summer vacation I had left, I practiced for six hours every day. I called my clarinet teacher and told her I was ready to come back. I called the best woodwind players at Hillerman (and the best French Horn player at UNM) and invited them to create a new quintet with me. I called the piano accompanist I worked with on my freshman recital and asked her to start learning the Alwyn Sonata because “we’re going to play it at the fall concert and we’re going to knock everybody’s socks off.” I came back to life with a fury, and to this day, I believe that if I’d been able to keep up the regimen I started in those two weeks, if Sunny and Seth and everything destructive they unleashed hadn’t derailed me, I’d be playing lead clarinet in a world class symphony right now.
And here’s the deal: I knew, even then, that Sunny was a distraction I needed to cut loose. I had clarity in those days, and I can’t tell you exactly when I decided it, or if I even had a moment of conscious decision, but in that 2-week span when I restarted my life, I came to understand that Sunny wasn’t what I needed anymore, and I worked up a determination to get rid of her. Sunny was fire and rage and activism turned violent. The Blue Brigade…you know, since I have you here, reading this, can I just tell you something about the Hillerman chapter of the Blue Brigade? Can I just tell you that most of us in the club started out with good intentions? That we all knew in our hearts that The Tetradome Run was wrong (I still know in my heart that it is), that we were trying to be good people who simply spoke out against it? It’s a funny thing, activism. You can do it out of love or do it out of hate. When you’re out there on the street with a sign in your hand, trying to convince other people to share your view of what’s right and what’s wrong, what motivated you to be there matters a lot. Because if you’re out there not out of a love for justice, but rather, out of hate for your enemy, in no short time you will become the evil you thought you were fighting. Before you know it, the good guys will be the ones protesting you.
After my awakening at the end of the summer, it was clear to me that everything Sunny did was, at root, motivated by hate. And I didn’t need that. What I needed was beauty.
So I quit calling her.
I quit inviting her over.
I only answered her texts sometimes, like when she asked me if everything was okay. I responded that I was fine, which I was.
And then she texted to ask if everything was okay with us. I told her I wasn’t mad at her, but I was still figuring out how to rebuild my life after Rudy, and I wanted some space away from my old friends so I could figure out what I do next, on my own.
She came to my house that night. I answered the door. I pointedly didn’t invite her in. While Sunny stood on my front porch, and I stood in the doorway, I reiterated that I wasn’t mad at her, but I needed space to flourish into the artist I knew I could be and I felt like the two of us needed to spend less time together.
She didn’t like that. Not at all.
“Please, can we just talk about this?” she said.
“We are talking,” I told her. “And I’ve said what I needed to say.”
My words didn’t seem to register with her.
“Please can we just talk?” she repeated. Over and over again that night she repeated those words. Please can we just talk?
It was damp outside. An early evening summer rain, the kind we get a lot of in August, had come and gone, but water was still dripping from the gutters above the porch.
<
br /> “You’ve been there for me so many times before,” Sunny said. “Let me be there for you.”
“I don’t need you to be here for me,” I told her. “What I need is space. Space and time. I want to focus on my clarinet right now, and I want to have space to figure out who I am now that Rudy’s gone.”
Please can we just talk?
An hour of back and forth between Sunny and me ensued that night while I kept her on the porch. It was just…pitiful. Sunny was relentless. But so was I. I told her the truth about what I was feeling. I told her I didn’t want to be in the Blue Brigade, or at least, I didn’t want to be in the angry group it had become. I didn’t want the road trips, the pranks, the parties, or the protests. I told her that I felt like my life took a detour when I met her at freshman orientation, and, interesting as that detour was, I was ready to get back on the main highway. I said, “I want to go back to the life I was living before I met you, when I was a musician first, and everything else second.”
And there was a minute there, I can see it clearly in my mind now, when Sunny was ready to dish out another retort, but then decided she’d had enough.
“Okay,” she said.
And I said, “Okay.”
And she said, “So this is it. This is goodbye.”
And I said, “We’re still friends. We’ll always be friends.”
And she laughed and said, “Yeah.”
Then she turned around and walked away.
CHAPTER 53
Gabe finished his interview with Tammy Flanigan, took a car to his hotel, and went to bed fully expecting to find the world turned upside down when he woke the next morning. Abject panic in the offices of Devlin Enterprises, a media maelstrom surrounding the Finale broadcast, the police and the courts debating if the race should even happen, all because of Gabe’s bombshell piece of investigative journalism…this was the world he hoped to find when he woke up.