by Ted Neill
“No.”
“What’s his name?”
“Lewis,” Rupesh said from behind me.
“Lewis, can you hear me?” I looked in his eyes, but they were darting in random directions. He had a plaid shirt on and a white T-shirt underneath, which was—weirdly—still immaculate.
“Hold on, Lewis.” I put his head in my lap. I held his hand with my left hand and checked his pulse with my right. On the other end of the bathroom his feet were squirming like he was trying to take off his shoes. I stared at them longer than I should have. Then they stopped. His hand was still twitching. I squeezed it back, but his pulse was gone.
“Lee, he has no pulse.”
I set his head down and knelt beside him. My jeans soaked up the blood, and I could feel it, warm as bathwater on my skin.
So much for universal precautions.
“Lee, give me that other towel.”
He gave me another towel from the back of the bathroom door. His lips were white and tight against each other, his brow furrowed, but he was still calm as he handed it to me. I was grateful for that. I put the towel under my knees. There were soon two red spots on it where my knees pushed it into the floor, but it was better than before. I told Lee to keep pressure on the head wound while I started compressions on Lewis’s chest. His body shook from the force of my hands, but the rest of him stayed limp. His pulse didn’t come back. The stream of blood from his head had slowed. I heard the ambulance. I kept up artificial respiration until the paramedics pushed their way through the crowd at the door.
Lewis had died in my arms. The police wanted to talk to Lee and me, so we waited in the back of a squad car while they tried to get control of the scene. Lee held onto the revolver until he could turn it over to a cop. It soon looked just like the news: police tape around the courtyard, dozens of emergency vehicles with flashing lights, news vans with their antennas extended up to catch the satellite feed. The coroners brought Lewis out in a black bag on a gurney. I wiped the blood from my hand and held Lee’s. I saw all the blood on me and started to kick the seat.
“I’ve got it all over me.”
We were at the station until four in the morning. We sat at a desk while an officer took statements from us. All the desks around us were empty. The ceiling lights were turned off; the only light in the whole room was from the officer’s desk lamp. The cop drank coffee from a Styrofoam cup. He refilled it three times while he asked us questions.
“Did you know the deceased?”
“Where were you when you first heard the shot?”
“Which direction did the shot seem to come from?”
I wished they would turn on more lights.
Lee dropped me off at six a.m. It was Sunday morning; the horizon was pink. Some of the ROTC students were already outside warming up for PT. My roommate, Trisha, was still asleep when I let myself into our room. From the way her eyes were racing under her lids, I knew she was dreaming. I took my clothes off and threw them in the trash can. My shoes too. I noticed there was pink bubble gum on the top of my shoe. I was wondering how it got there and leaned closer. It wasn’t gum. It was a piece of Lewis’s brain. I felt ready to cry, but I was too tired. I took a long shower, scrubbed my knees and fingernails, then crawled into bed.
Trisha’s clock radio clicked on thirty minutes later. We both lay there listening to the newsman. He said:
“A local university student died last night from a self-inflicted gunshot to the head. Police have ruled it an accidental suicide. No one, aside from the victim, was injured. According to reports, the victim had been playing Russian Roulette with his friend’s revolver after they had been drinking. Services have not been announced yet . . . . The commerce secretary is predicting a robust quarter for local businesses in the coming months . . . .”
“I was there. Lewis died in my arms.”
“What?” Trisha’s voice was thick with sleep. Her hair was still wrapped in a silk scarf.
“The guy who shot himself. His name was Lewis.”
“Melody, are you dreaming?”
“No. I haven’t slept all night. Look at my clothes. They’re in the trash.”
She got out of bed, shuffled across the room, and walked to the trash can.
“Holy shit!” Trisha was Baptist. She never cursed.
“Don’t touch them.”
“Melody, are you all right? What happened?” She was standing next to the bed. Her nightgown was wrinkled, her eyes were big, and her mouth hung open. I could see her retainer wire across her teeth. I told her everything. Neither of us went to church that morning. We talked, but I never called home.
6.
Verities
When I think of my senior year in high school, I think of my court. It had three houses on it. The yellow house on the corner was the Campbell house; Mr. Campbell was a crotchety old man who came out and yelled at us if we made the intolerable transgression of stepping in his yard. He never said hello, or even acknowledged his neighbors’ presence, unless it was to complain about some egregious violation of some minute HOA regulation, such as a non-approved paint color on the trim of a garage or a basketball hoop installed without a permit.
The other house on the court was the O’Reilly family’s. Mr. Campbell I ignored, but the O’Reillys were like family, their house just being an extension of my own—a bright and lively extension as well. The O’Reillys had three children. Bryce O’Reilly was a senior in high school like me, his sister Emily was sixteen, and their little brother Toby was eleven. They had two dogs, a golden retriever and a black lab, as well as a rabbit, two birds, and a gerbil. Mr. O’Reilly was in the army, and we made great use of his retired fatigues and paintball guns. Mrs. O’Reilly taught preschool. In the basement, beside the pool table, her desk was littered with books like Elmo goes to the Store and Everybody Poops.
One Saturday afternoon, Bryce was sitting on the bumper of my car, tapping his feet and running his fingers through his hair. Bryce was always restless. There was a low grumble from the street as a red Camaro decelerated to pull into the court. Vanessa, our mutual friend from school, had come over to study with me for a chemistry test. She was a year behind us but was in advanced classes. Not too shabby. She parked under the plum tree at the edge of my yard. The Camaro had been an indulgence of her father, for himself, before he had settled down and had a family. Now Vanessa had inherited the oversized sports car and complained about how hard it was to park.
Bryce and I would have traded the ten-year-old sedans we were stuck with any time, but once Vanessa stepped out of the car, our minds shifted to things besides cars. She had stepped on some plums and bent forward to pick them out of her sandals. We both probably saw more of her cleavage than she intended. I walked over to help her with her books, trying not to betray the desire I felt.
Bryce knew me well enough to detect my interest in Vanessa, and perhaps her interest in me. That afternoon we had been playing paintball in the woods behind my house. She was early, and I had leaves and brambles in my hair.
“Justin, you’re a mess. Why don’t you take a shower? Vanessa, why don’t you join him, to make sure he gets clean? I don’t want you seen with a filthy guy.”
I was nervous; so was Vanessa. Bryce laughed at both of us.
Bryce and I grew up together. In our younger days, we had tromped through the woods behind my house, jumping over creeks and sliding down muddy embankments. On summer nights, we stretched out in the driveway, throwing balls of aluminum foil in the air so that bats would attack them, mistaking them for insects. We sneaked out at night and peeped into people’s bedrooms from trees, hid from passing car lights in bushes, and considered all of this thrilling. Mr. Campbell wasted many a breath warning us not to go in his yard. During truth or dare games we would run around his house or ring his doorbell, causing him to call the police, or worse, our parents.
In junior high, Bryce and I discovered fire and all its wonderful properties: when coaxed onto a tennis ball with gaso
line, it made a spectacular fireball for a thrilling game of street hockey. Fire could also be used to spell out expletives with flammable rubber cement, which Bryce eagerly demonstrated on Mr. Campbell’s sidewalk.
In high school, we retired from tormenting Mr. Campbell. We let that torch be passed on to Bryce’s brother, Toby, and his friends. Bryce and I would place bets as to how many times Mr. Campbell would come out to yell at children in a single afternoon, keeping track on three-by-five notecards like old folks at a bingo game. It was like a game: there were teams, underdogs, and star players—like Toby’s friend Taylor, who always seemed to kick the soccer ball into Mr. Campbell’s garage. When this happened, Bryce and I would stand on our chairs for a better view of the drama. After screaming at the kids and threatening to call their parents, Mr. Campbell would always look over at us, as if we had instigated the whole thing. We would smile and wave.
He never waved back.
At Halloween our senior year in high school, Bryce and I were too old to trick-or-treat, so we decided to jump out of the bushes and scare kids coming up the court. Kids started coming to our court just to be scared. Later that night, Bryce and I even got our hands on some fake swords and put on a great show where we took turns killing each other—fake blood capsules and all.
One night early in November, before I was dating Vanessa, Karrie Rockford came over. It was a blustery night, and our old couch was sitting in the driveway. The Salvation Army was coming to pick it up in the morning. Karrie grabbed a blanket and we snuggled on the couch, watching the treetops and leaves dance in the wind against a backdrop of stars. The scene was a little surreal, sitting on a living room sofa in a driveway, the wind whipping Karrie’s hair. I remember I liked the idea of having Karrie around, but I didn’t necessarily like her. She was kind of dull. Very attractive, but she only talked about people at school and which football player was dating which cheerleader. I think she may have liked Bryce more than me anyway. That sometimes happened.
Bryce was the ultimate test of my girlfriends. If they liked him, they were acceptable. If they liked him too much, they were rejected. The best example of this system came from my sophomore year. I was getting to know a girl named Samantha. Bryce and I both noticed how she paid him more attention when he was around than she did to me. I wasn’t exactly broken up about it. It was just that Samantha kept telling me that she was really into me.
Then one day she came over, and I wasn’t home. So she just “dropped by” Bryce’s place. One thing led to another, and she asked if she could blow him.
Bryce, who had inherited his father’s brawn as well as his good looks, personally carried Samantha to the front steps, set her down outside, and slammed the door on her. He was very proud of himself that day. He recounted it all to me later, insisting that “no one lies to my best friend to get to me.”
Vanessa and I became a lot closer after our classmate Maria Lofton died. The funeral was mid-December. I remember standing outside in the courtyard of the church. Vanessa was beside me. She was wearing a gray sweater. Mine was navy blue and made my skin itch. I didn’t move to scratch, because that would force Vanessa to remove her hand from the crook of my elbow. She had put it there because she was upset.
The whole senior class was at the church. Vanessa was only a junior, but she was in a few senior courses with Maria and myself. We talked with Mrs. Hardy, my English teacher and a friend of my mother’s. I kept looking down at my feet and the gray flagstones with black moss growing in between them. Maria would have been our valedictorian if she had not died. Junior year, she’d sat in front of me in chemistry class. I would play with her hair, which was so black that it was almost blue. The last time I had seen Maria was after school a few days before she died. I had helped her with her college admissions essay. She was a good writer on her own, but she was also thorough and wanted to get a second opinion on her essay. I remember thinking it was really good, better than all of mine. I kept going over that afternoon, replaying it in my mind for some sign of the depression Maria apparently suffered from. I had been too obtuse to see it. Almost all of us had. We thought she had been perfect. She would have had her pick of colleges.
Instead she killed herself with Prozac and a bottle of champagne. She was wearing her homecoming dress when they found her unresponsive in her bed. Her suicide note had read: Isn’t it obvious.
After the funeral, Vanessa and I went to the International House of Pancakes for lunch. The place was all cheery with Christmas decorations, but we didn’t feel very cheerful. We were in no rush to get back to school, but we were too spent to talk. That was when I realized we were comfortable enough just to sit with each other, not talking, just pouring syrup, eating pancakes, stirring coffee. She always put Sweet’N Low in her coffee, then tucked the wrapper beneath her mug. I could always tell how many cups she had drunk by the number of wrappers that stuck to the bottom of her mug. She always had at least three cups.
In January, I was asked to speak at the National Honor Society induction. Vanessa was being inducted, so her family and I went out to dinner beforehand. I was too nervous to eat much. I had never given a speech to such a large crowd. While waiting backstage beforehand, I ran to the bathroom and vomited. I was sitting on the floor of the stall when I heard someone come inside.
“Justin, my man, where are you?”
“Bryce?”
The door to my stall opened, and Bryce stood looking down on me. Bryce wasn’t in NHS, not by a longshot. His mother was always after him to raise his grades, but he didn’t seem to worry about that too much. He was wearing slacks, a bright white shirt (just from the dry cleaners), and a leather vest. His tie was crooked and clashed with his vest. I felt embarrassed and weak, sitting there on the floor in my oversized suit and my dinner floating in the yellow water beside me. Bryce’s face grimaced when he looked in the toilet.
“I’m a little nervous,” I said.
“You got that right.”
Bryce picked me up by the armpits and told me to stand up straight.
“There’s a thousand people in there, including Vanessa and her family. I want to make a good impression,” I said.
“You know, Samantha is in there too. Maybe I should sit by her.”
I couldn’t help laughing. Bryce moved us to the sink to help me clean up. I could see Bryce’s reflection beside mine in the mirror. His skin, in comparison to mine, was more tanned, his shoulders broader, and his head higher. His face was dark with a manly five o’clock shadow. His lacrosse teammates would have laughed if they’d seen him so dressed up. But he had come to hear me give my speech, and his hands patting me through the shoulder pads of my blazer made me forget that I was nervous. He said he would cheer for me when I got up on stage.
“It’s National Honor Society, dude. There is no cheering.”
“I’ll manage something.”
I went and took my place on stage, dreading whatever Bryce was going to do when I stepped up to the podium. The stage was like limbo. It was completely dark ahead of me and completely dark behind me. The principal finished his introduction, and I got up with my speech in hand. My mouth tasted of bile and breath mints. My hands were shaking. I knew Vanessa was in the audience, although I couldn’t even see the audience. Just as I stepped up behind the microphone, in that terrible moment before I had to utter my first words, I heard a man clearing his throat. Then he coughed and sniffed—finishing it up with a hauking sound, as if he were about to spit. Anyone else would have thought it was an old man, someone’s grandpa with emphysema dragged out of the old folks home to the ceremony. But I knew it was Bryce’s signal; no one else had such a unique sense of discretion. I wondered if he was sitting by Samantha. Then I thought of her offering to suck Bryce off and imagined her expression as he dropped her on her ass out his front door. I almost laughed.
My heart was bursting with for love for him.
Everyone loved my speech. I talked about hard work paying off, the value of scholarship, and its ne
cessity for future success and ultimately changing the world. In retrospect, I realize I was just regurgitating the gospel of upward mobility, which we were being rewarded for having internalized with a little NHS pin that we could wear on our sweater vests and letter jackets, a pin that would remind us that we, indeed, were on the trajectory our upper-middle-class parents and teachers desired for us.
“It was the best one in all the thirty-four years that we’ve had the National Honor Society,” the principal told me. He put his arm around my shoulders and said in a low voice that it was at this point in high school that he and the teachers could see which students were “pulling away from the pack.” He said that I was on the right trajectory and not to veer off, even if I saw others diverging. That was just a fact of life, he said.
I wasn’t sure what exactly he meant. I was glad to get away from him and pose for pictures with Vanessa and Bryce. To me, everything felt so perfect and solidified that night. Our lives just like the lives of those families we saw on TV. This was how the story was supposed to go.
It was February that we knew something was wrong at the O’Reilly house. They always went to upstate New York to visit Mr. O’Reilly’s brother. This time Mr. O’Reilly went alone; his family stayed behind. I went over to inquire. The house smelled of bread baking in the oven and Mrs. O’Reilly’s scented candles, all the scents of a happy home life. Bryce and Toby watched cartoons on TV. At a commercial I asked if there was any reason they had not gone to New York with their father.
“Dad wanted to go alone.” Bryce used the tone of voice that always meant our conversation on the present topic was at an end. I got the rest of the story from my mom. The O’Reillys were having fights. Mr. O’Reilly said he wasn’t in love any more.