She peeked at me with one eye and then started laughing harder. I couldn’t help it—pretty soon I was giggling, too. Before I knew it we were both howling in the front seat of the car in the closed garage.
“What I really said is, ‘blow it out your snotty fat ass, Lorraine.’” We both laughed harder. Between breaths, she said, “And I told her that Howard hit on me at last year’s pool party.”
I gasped. “Get out! Stacey’s dad hit on you? Disgusting! He’s like all hairy and nasty and old.”
She shook her head, barely able to breathe long enough to talk. “I just… made… it up. God, I wish… I could have… been there when… she accused him… of it.”
We sank backward into the seat then and howled for what seemed like forever. I couldn’t remember smiling like that. Laughter felt weird in my mouth. It almost had a taste to it.
“You’re evil,” I said at last, once we started catching our breath again. “I love it, but you’re evil.”
She shook her head again, wiping her eyes with her pinkies. “No. The evil people are the ones who won’t give you another chance.”
I looked down at my backpack and shrugged. “I guess I can’t blame them. I looked guilty. You don’t have to stick up for me, Mom. I’ll be okay.”
Mom was wiping at her eyes with the cuffs of her jacket. “But they need to understand that Nick was the one who did this, honey. He’s the bad one. I’ve been telling you that for years. You’re so pretty—you really belong with a nice boy. Not a boy like Nick. You never belonged with a boy like Nick.”
I rolled my eyes. Oh jeez, here we go again. Mom telling me that Nick was bad for me. Mom telling me that I shouldn’t be hanging around with guys like him. Mom telling me that there was something wrong with Nick—she could see it in his eyes. Mom apparently forgetting that Nick is dead now and that she doesn’t need to lecture me about how bad he was because it doesn’t matter now anyway.
I reached for the door handle. “Not again. Seriously, Mom. He’s dead. Can we move on?” I popped open the door and stepped out, schlepping my backpack behind me. I grimaced when I put weight on my leg.
Mom struggled out of her seat belt and got out of the car on the other side. “I’m not fighting with you, Valerie,” she said. “It’s just that I want to see you happy. You’re never happy. Dr. Hieler suggested…”
My instinct was to glare at her. To tell her what I knew about happiness, which was that you never know when it can change to terror. That it never stays around. That I haven’t known happiness for a long time, before Nick was ever in my life in the first place, that she and Dad ought to know why. That, by the way, she was never happy, either, in case she hadn’t noticed. But seeing her peer at me over the top of the car in her wrinkled suit, tears welling in her eyes, her face still flushed from laughing, saying all of those things would’ve just felt mean. Even if they were true.
“Mom. I’m okay. Really,” I said. “I don’t even think about Nick anymore.” I turned and walked into the house.
Frankie was leaning against the kitchen counter, eating a sandwich. His hair was slightly wilted and his cell phone was in his hand, his thumb working the keypad, texting someone.
“What’s up?” he asked when I came into the room.
“Mom,” I answered. “Don’t ask.”
I opened the refrigerator and pulled out a Coke. I leaned against the counter next to him and opened it. “Why can’t she just get it through her head that Nick’s dead and she can quit bugging me about him now? Why does she have to lecture me all the time?”
Frankie turned in his chair and looked at me, chewing. “She’s probably afraid you’ll turn out like her and be married to someone you can’t stand,” he said.
I started to say something back, but heard the garage door rattle and knew Mom was coming in. I stole upstairs to my bedroom.
Frankie was probably right. Mom and Dad were anything but happy. Before last May they’d been all about getting a divorce, which would have totally been a blessing. Frankie and I were practically giddy at the thought of all the fighting coming to an end.
But the shooting, while it may have torn apart countless families, ironically brought mine back together. They said they were “afraid of fracturing the family further in an extreme time of stress like this,” but I knew the truth.
1) Dad was a pretty successful attorney, and the last thing he needed was a bunch of news coverage insinuating to the world that his marriage problems were at the root of the Garvin High massacre.
2) Mom had a job, but nothing like Dad’s job. Mom made money, but not that much money. And we all knew that some major psychiatric bills were coming down the pike.
Frankie and I were just along for the ride with their relationship, which was usually civil disregard, but sometimes bubbled into hostility that made us both want to toss their things in garbage bags and buy them plane tickets to anywhere else but here.
I walked into my bedroom, which looked a lot mustier and more cluttered than it had when I’d left it this morning. I stopped in the doorway and looked around, sort of surprised that I’d more or less lived in this room since May and had never noticed how disgusting it was. Depressing, really. Not that I was ever big on cleaning my room. But except for the Great Nick Extrication that Mom had done after the shooting, nothing had been picked up or cleaned in months.
I picked up a glass that had been on my nightstand for, like, forever and stacked it on top of a plate. I reached over and scrunched up a paper towel that was discarded nearby and stuffed it into the glass.
I had this fleeting feeling that maybe I should clean it all up. Make a clean start. Do a Great Valerie Extrication of my own. But I scanned the clothes crumpled on the floor, the books tossed to the side of the bed, the TV with its smudged and mucky screen, and I stopped in place. It seemed like way too much work, cleaning up my grief.
I could hear Mom and Frankie talking down in the kitchen. Her voice sounded agitated, sort of like it did when she and Dad were left in the kitchen together for too long. I felt a brief pang of guilt for leaving Frankie down there alone to bear the brunt of her frustrations since I was technically the one who had her frustrated. But Frankie never got it as bad as I did. In fact, ever since the shooting, Frankie really didn’t exist much. No curfew, no chores, no limits. Mom and Dad were always too busy fighting with one another and worrying about me to remember they had another kid to worry about. I didn’t know if I should feel really jealous of Frankie for that, or really sorry for him. Maybe both.
That weary feeling came back and I dropped the glass and plate into my trash can and flopped backward on my bed. I reached into my backpack. I pulled out my notebook and flipped it open. I chewed my lip, staring at the pictures I’d drawn throughout the day.
I rolled over and pushed the button to turn on my stereo and cranked it. Mom would be up in a few minutes hollering at me through the door to turn it down, but she’d already confiscated all my “concerning” music—you know, the music that she and Dad and probably Dr. Hieler and every other old fart in the world thought would incite me to slit my wrists in the bathtub—which still ticked me off since I bought most of that music with my own money. I turned up the volume loud enough that I wouldn’t even hear her. She’d get tired of pounding long before I’d get tired of her pounding. So let her pound.
I reached into my backpack again and pulled out a pencil. I chewed on the eraser for a minute, looking at the picture I’d started of Mrs. Tennille. She looked so sad. Wasn’t it funny that not all that long ago I would’ve said I’d wanted Tennille to feel sad? I’d hated her. But today, seeing how sad she was, I felt horrible. I felt responsible. I wanted her to smile, and I wondered if she smiled when she got home and held her kids or if she just came home and sat back in her recliner with a vodka and drank until she couldn’t hear the gunshots anymore.
I bent my head and started drawing—drawing her doing both at the same time, curling around a little boy like a peanut inside a
shell, her hand curling around a bottle of vodka like the shell clings to the vine.
PART TWO
MAY 2, 2008
6:36 P.M.
“What did you do?”
6
When I opened my eyes again, I was actually surprised to find that I wasn’t still asleep in my own bed, waking to start a new school day. That’s the way it was supposed to work, right? Nick was supposed to call and I was supposed to go on to school, hating every minute of it, worrying that he and Jeremy were at Blue Lake doing God-knows-what and agonizing that Nick was going to break up with me and getting pestered by Christy Bruter on the bus. I was supposed to wake up and the scraps that I could remember about Nick shooting up the Commons were supposed to be a dream, drifting away before I could even drum up the images fully in my awakened mind.
I woke up in the hospital. There were police in my room and the TV was turned on to a crime scene. Their backs were turned to me, their faces tilted up toward the TV screen. I squinted at the TV where images of a parking lot, a brick building, a football field, all vaguely familiar, blipped on and off of the screen. I shut my eyes again. I felt groggy. My eyes were very dry and my leg throbbed, and I started to remember not exactly what happened, but that something really bad had happened.
“She’s waking up,” I heard. I recognized the voice as Frankie’s, but I hadn’t seen him when I’d opened my eyes before and it seemed easier to just imagine him standing next to the bed saying that than to try to see him. So I let myself drift into this imaginary world where Frankie was standing nearby, saying She’s waking up and it was true, but I wasn’t in the hospital and my leg didn’t hurt.
“I’ll go find a nurse,” another voice said. My dad’s. That one was easy. The voice was tense, strained, terse. Just like Dad. He popped into my imaginary scene as well, in the background, floating out of view. He was tapping something into his PDA and he had a cell phone between his ear and his shoulder. He popped out just as quickly and it was just Frankie looking at me again.
“Val,” Frankie said. “Hey, Val. You awake?”
The vision morphed into a morning in my bedroom. Frankie trying to wake me up to do something fun, like in the old days when Mom and Dad got along and we were just two little kids. Find our Easter baskets, maybe, or a Christmas present, or pancakes. I liked this place. I really did. So I have no idea why my eyes fluttered open again. They did it without my consent.
They opened onto Frankie, standing at the end of my bed, by my toes. Only it wasn’t my bed, but a strange one with crisp, scratchy white sheets and a brown blanket that looked like oatmeal. His hair was completely limp and I had a minute of trying to clear my head because I honestly couldn’t remember the last time I saw Frankie with limp hair. I had a hard time matching the fourteen-year-old Frankie face to the eleven-year-old Frankie hair. I had to blink several times before I could make sense of it.
“Frankie,” I said, but before I could say anything else my attention was distracted to a wet sort of sniffling to my right. I turned my head slowly. My mom was there, sitting in a pink upholstered chair. Her legs were crossed at the knees and she had one elbow propped on top of them. In that hand she held a crumpled-up tissue she kept using to dab her nose.
I squinted at her. I somehow wasn’t surprised that she was crying, because I knew that whatever the bad thing was that had happened, I was involved in it—even though I hadn’t yet put together why I was waking up in what was beginning to look like a hospital bed rather than in my own bed waiting for Nick to call.
I reached out and placed my hand on Mom’s wrist (the one holding the snotty tissue). “Mom,” I whispered. My throat hurt. “Mom,” I said again.
But she leaned away from me. Not jerked away—it was way too subtle of a movement to be considered a jerk. But more leaned away, out of my grasp. Leaned away, like she was physically separating herself from me. Leaned away, not like I was to be feared, but like she no longer wanted to be identified with me at all.
“You’re awake,” she said. “How do you feel?”
I looked down at myself and wondered why I wouldn’t feel okay. I checked myself out and everything seemed to be there, including several wires that weren’t normally a part of my body. I still wasn’t sure why I was there, but I knew it had to be something I was going to live through. I’d somehow hurt my leg—that much I could glean from the dull throbbing under the sheet. Yet the leg still seemed to be there, so I knew there wasn’t too much to be worried about.
“Mom,” I said one more time, wishing I could think of something else to say. Something more important. My throat was achy and felt swollen. I tried clearing it, but found it was dry, too, and all I could do was make a squeaky little noise that did nothing to help it. “What happened?”
A nurse in pink scrubs fluttering around behind Mom moved to a little table and picked up a plastic cup with a straw hanging over the side of it. She handed it to Mom. Mom held it, looked at it like she’d never seen such a contraption before, and then looked over her shoulder at one of the police officers, who had turned away from the TV and was staring down at me, his fingers hooked into his belt.
“You were shot,” the officer said plainly from over Mom’s shoulder and I saw Mom kind of wince when he said it, although she was still facing him, not me, and I couldn’t see her face exactly. “Nick Levil shot you.”
I frowned. Nick Levil shot me. “But that’s my boyfriend’s name,” I said. Later I would realize how stupid I sounded, and would even be a little bit embarrassed by it. But at the time it just didn’t make sense, mostly because I hadn’t put it all together yet and because I was just coming out of the anesthesia, and probably even a little bit because my brain didn’t want me to remember everything right away. Once I saw a documentary about different things the brain will do to protect itself. Like when a kid who’s abused ends up with multiple personalities and stuff. I think my brain was doing that to me—protecting me—but it didn’t do it for very long. Not long enough, anyway.
The officer nodded at me, like he already knew this about Nick and I wasn’t giving him any new information, and Mom turned around again and kind of looked down at the sheets. I scanned their faces, all of them—Mom’s, the officer’s, the nurse’s, Frankie’s, even Dad’s (I hadn’t seen him pop back into the room, but there he was, standing by the window, his arms folded across his chest)—but none of them were looking directly at me. Not a good sign.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Frankie?”
Frankie didn’t say anything—just clenched his jaw in his pissed-off pose, and shook his head. His face was getting really red.
“Valerie, do you remember anything about school today?” Mom asked quietly. I won’t say she asked it gently or tenderly or any of that motherly stuff. Because she didn’t. She asked it to the sheets, in a low voice, a flat voice I barely recognized.
“School?”
And then things started flooding in on me. Funny, because when I first started waking up, what happened at school felt like a dream and I thought, surely they aren’t talking about that, because that was just some stupid, horrible dream. But within a few seconds the realization that it wasn’t a dream sunk in on me and I almost felt physically squashed beneath the images.
“Valerie, something terrible happened at school today. Do you remember it?” Mom asked.
I couldn’t answer her. I couldn’t answer anyone. I couldn’t say anything. All I could do was stare at the TV screen, at the aerial view of Garvin High and all the ambulances and cop cars surrounding it. Stare at it until I swear I could see the individual little squares of color on the screen. Mom’s voice was faraway, and I could hear her, but it wasn’t like she was talking to me exactly. Not in my world. Not under this avalanche of horrible. I was alone here.
“Valerie, I’m talking to you. Nurse, is she okay? Valerie? Can you hear me? Jesus, Ted, do something!”
And then my dad’s voice: “What do you want me to do, Jenny? What do I do?”
“More than just stand there! This is your family, Ted, for Christ’s sake, your daughter! Valerie, answer me! Val!”
But I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the TV screen, which I saw and didn’t see at the same time.
Nick. He shot people. He shot Christy Bruter. Mr. Kline. Oh, God, he shot them. He really did it. I saw it and he shot them. He shot…
I reached down and felt the bandages wrapped around my thigh. And then I started to cry. Not loud crying or anything like that, but shoulder-twitching, lip-curling crying—the kind I once heard Oprah call the Ugly Cry.
Mom jumped up from her chair, leaning over me, but she wasn’t talking to me.
“Nurse, I think she’s in pain. I think you need to do something for her pain. Ted, make them do something for her pain.” And I noticed, only barely and through a gauzy sort of wonderment, that she was crying, too. Crying so that her commands took on this frantic sort of gruffness, so that her words were hitched and desperate.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Dad come up behind her and grab her by the shoulders and pull her away from the bed. She went reluctantly, but she did go, and she turned her face into Dad’s chest, and they both walked out of the room. I could hear her harsh barks recede down the hall.
The nurse was pushing buttons on some monitor behind me and the cop had turned and was watching the TV again. Frankie stood staring at my blankets, motionless.
I cried until my stomach hurt and I was pretty sure I was going to throw up. My eyes felt sandy and my nose was completely plugged up. I cried a little bit after that even. I can’t say what was going through my mind with all that crying—only that it was murky and dark and hateful and woeful and miserable all at once. Only that I wanted Nick and I wanted to never see him again. Only that I wanted my mom and that I wanted to never see her again, either. Only that I knew, somewhere back there in the recesses that my brain was keeping safe from itself, that in some way I was responsible for what had happened today, too. That I had a part in it, and that I never meant to. And that I couldn’t say for sure I wouldn’t have been part of it if I had to do it all over again. And I couldn’t say for sure that I would.
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