“What did he do?” I’m relieved. I’m not the one in trouble. Jude is. They don’t know about the spray paint. “Why are you telling me?”
“Because...because...it’s bad.” Mr. Lawson stops walking. He wipes the sweat from his brow. “He was involved in a shooting.”
A shooting. The words don’t make any sense at first. A shooting?
“Is he okay?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” Mr. Lawson says. “But I think it’s best that you leave school early. Your mother is going to come pick you up.”
“She is?”
“She should be on her way.”
“Was anyone else hurt? Who shot who?” I ask.
“I don’t know many of the details.” He averts his eyes. “It’s my understanding that other students were involved.”
Right as he says that, I see the assistant principal up ahead of us. She has her arm wrapped around a student with long brown hair. Monica Monroe. The girl of my dreams. Her sister dates my brother.
Monica is crying. She doesn’t notice me, but the assistant principal does. She and Mr. Lawson make eye contact, and she carefully turns Monica so they are now walking away from us. She murmurs something to her, but I’m too far away to hear what it is.
And right then, I know.
Jude has done something to Simone.
“Oh god,” I whisper. “Oh no.”
Mr. Lawson pats me on the shoulder, but I pull away from him. It’s hot in the hall. And there is an odd buzzing sound. I’m not sure what it is, but it mixes with the sound of the sirens and hurts my head.
“I have to go,” I say. “Tell my mom.”
Mr. Lawson tries to grab my arm, but I dodge him and run. I push through the front doors of the school and head towards the road. All around the area is chaos. Cars pulling up, brakes screeching, cops directing traffic away from the high school. Shouts and awful wails of anguish.
I hear snippets of conversation from terrified students who are outside.
“He just walked in and aimed the gun,” a girl sobs to a police officer. “He was so calm.”
“They were so young.”
“He didn’t even blink.”
“Simone begged...”
“The librarian managed to tackle him before he could…”
I push past the crowd, hoping no one will know who I am. My thoughts pound in my head to the rhythm of my shoes on the pavement.
Why? Why? Why? Why?
Doesn’t matter right now. He’s lost it.
The notebook. The one he always draws in. The cops will want to see it. I need to make sure they do. Finally, someone will see how twisted Jude is. Or should I say was? Probably shot himself once he took out Simone.
It hits me. Jude is dead. He’s killed himself. My brother is gone. Thank god.
Wait. What kind of person am I? How can I think that? Ashamed, shocked, overwhelmed by so many thoughts and emotions at once, I lower my head and turn to go home before I am recognized. I gotta find Mom.
Someone screams.
I look back, just in time to see my brother walking down the sidewalk, head down, and surrounded by police officers who have him in cuffs. There is a spray of blood on his shirt and in his beard. They shove him towards the car as people shout out things to him.
I expected him to be dead. Isn’t that how all school shootings end? Doesn’t the shooter always kill himself, too?
Right before he gets in the car, he turns and looks at me as if he somehow knew I was there, as if he knew how happy I was at the thought of him dead. He smiles. It chills me.
Why can’t you be dead, Jude? Why can’t you have offed yourself?
I turn and run all the way home.
No one is at our house yet. I unlock the front door and head straight down the hall to Jude’s room. The door is open. Odd. As I study his personal space, taking in the tidy bed, the clean desk, his shoes neatly lined up next to each other on the floor by the closet, and the way he’s organized every book on the shelf alphabetically, I’m struck by how purposeful everything looks. He’s left the computer on, and it’s open to some Word Document. I don’t even bother to look at it. For all I know, it could be his manifesto. Screw that. I want the notebook. The cops will want it, too. It will be enough to keep him behind bars, locked up in some asylum.
As if killing innocent people wouldn’t be enough…
The black notebook rests on the edge of his desk. From where I stand, I can see he’s added so much inside it that it won’t close all the way. It puffs upwards, the edges of his drawings curling slightly as they compete for room.
I walk over and grab it, opening the pages, scanning them, letting the dark drawings and words overwhelm me. There is a picture of a woman lying on top of skulls, her stomach exploded. A baby lays next to her, its mouth open and crying. The woman looks a lot like Mom.
I see an ink drawing of a girl that can only be Simone. There are lots of pictures of her and one in particular catches my eye.
In this one, he has replaced her eyes with butterflies. Their wings stretch across the sockets and her mouth is open slightly. Beneath it in block letters, Jude has written the words: My Butterfly.
I flip through some more of the pages. My brother rants on many of them about how unfair adults are, how unfair the government is, how people conform all the time when what they should do is rebel. He has made a list of the Top Ten Assholes in School. Derek Andrews is number 4 on the list. I wonder if the first three names were people he killed in the cafeteria.
Then I get to the last few pages. More pictures of Simone with butterfly eyes. There is one of her crying. It takes my breath away. The detail. Jude is a master at detail.
How long has he been planning the details to this shooting?
It hits me again what he’s done.
He’s a murderer. A killer. He always wanted to kill me. I know that. But instead of me, he picked Simone. Guilt. Shock. Shame. The emotions roll and roll and roll…
I can’t breathe. I drop the book, its pages fluttering.
Sirens getting close. They will want this book. My thoughts stream faster.
Why wasn’t this with him? Why did he leave it behind? What’s in it? Do we want people to see the insanity? I’m sure Jude wouldn’t care. He loves thinking he’s smarter, superior to everyone else. My brother probably envisioned himself living in infamy, the evil child who Rockingham would never forget. Oh god, the thought of always being remembered must have thrilled him, the thought of people studying his drawings and trying to make sense of his complex mind must have brought him such joy.
I pick the notebook up, stuffing it in the front of my pants, pulling my shirt down over it.
Screw you, Jude.
Better to hold onto this last bit of craziness. No one needs to see it. You have no point to left to be made.
I dart out the back door, hoping I have time before the cops find me.
Mom’s erratic breathing somewhere close to my shoulder brings me back to reality as we look at Jude’s messy room.
“They made a mess of things,” she says. “Jude was always such a clean kid.”
You’ve made me unclean.
Jude yelled that at Mom during the last big argument they’d had. It was about two weeks before the shooting.
“That’s what you were fighting about.” I nod, understanding. “That fight. He was screaming at you about being unclean. Now I know what he meant.”
Mom’s eyes widen with guilt and she moves away, picking up some of the discarded papers on the floor. I sit on the bed, letting that memory come back, too.
“Get away from me,” Jude shouts. “You make me sick.”
I hear him outside my room in the hall. He and Mom have been yelling for at least ten minutes off and on. Their voices boom around the house, coming through the air vents at times, giving me tiny fragmented parts of the conversation. Normally, I tune out when they go at it or I turn up my music and let that
drown them out.
Something feels different about this.
I keep hearing the words clean or unclean being said. Jude must be on another of his compulsive streaks where everything is not as it should be in his eyes. I dread these times. He doesn’t speak, but he gets that weird look in his eyes where he seems to be utterly focused on whatever is going on in his head instead of being in the real world.
“Dammit, Mom! Why did you tell me this?” Jude is in the hallway. He must be close to his own room. “Why do you have to take all the good things away from me? You’re gonna be sorry you did this to me, sorry you were such a bitch.”
“Stop it, Jude,” Mom pleads. “This is for the best.”
“For the best? The best?!” He is practically screaming. “You’ve made me unclean!”
“Jude, lower your voice,” Mom says. “The whole world doesn’t have to come to an end over this.”
“I loved her! You took that away. You’re so selfish!”
“Breaking it off was the best for you both. In time this will get better. It’s only been a few weeks, right?” Mom is trying to be the voice of reason, but it rarely works with Jude. “No one ever has to know.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Jude lowers his voice, slipping into the menacing tone he usually only reserves for me. I’ve never heard him use it with Mom before. He must really be pissed and I can’t help but feel scared for her. I don’t go out into the hall, but I do pick up the cordless phone I’d been talking on in my room earlier, ready to call the cops again if I need to. “You know what, Mom? You’re right. No one ever has to know. I sure hope I can keep the truth to myself.”
He slams the door to his room, the veiled threat hanging in the air.
I replay the argument in my head, hearing it in a new way now, seeing it more clearly. Mom had been trying to keep Jude from telling anyone about the affair and he’d been his usual prickish self, unable to handle the thought of her loving someone other than him.
“Stephen?” Mom says my name softly. “Where is the notebook? I need to see it.”
“Why?”
“I told you. Jude wanted me to look at it. There was something he wanted me to see.”
No. I’m not giving it to her. Not before I’ve a chance to look at it again. If there are more secrets in it, I want to know first. I no longer trust Mom to tell me the truth.
“No,” I say.
She stands there, waiting for an explanation, but I don’t give her one. Instead, I hobble into my own room, locking the door behind me before lying down on the bed. Jude’s words echo in my head, slithering around, waiting to strike.
I am unclean.
I’m going to make you sorry for this.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
MONICA
Daddy is quiet on the way home. His grips the steering wheel of his fancy BMW tightly while he winds his way across town and into our neighborhood. All the shops are closed because of the late hour, making Rockingham seem a ghost town, desolate, and far removed from the rest of the world. The street lamp shines on the sign for the motel and I close my eyes as we pass the place, not wanting to take a chance on seeing Momma there again. When I open them and glance at Daddy, there’s a little tic in his jaw as if the sight of the motel didn’t make him feel good either.
There are so many questions I want to ask. But where to start?
“So you were friends with Stephen’s dad?” I ask.
He hesitates, eyes not leaving the road. “Yes. We were close.”
“Did you date Karen Valley first and then he came along?”
He gets this disturbing faraway look on his face. Daddy shouldn’t be looking like that over anyone but my mother. “Karen was my high school sweetheart. My first love.”
First Love? Wow.
“We dated for two years. Bud Valley was my best friend, but I didn’t know he had feelings for Karen, too. He never told me, never indicated he was interested in her,” Daddy says, like it was all part of some business deal. “Not that I would have given her up.”
Yet he obviously did or I wouldn’t be here. I try to picture the three of them, try to picture this strange love triangle that I never knew existed. But I can’t quite get there. It’s too weird.
“What about Mom?” I ask. “Where does she come in?”
“Stella’s family moved to Rockingham our senior year. She was the prettiest girl in the school. Very worldly. Sophisticated. Everyone was fascinated by this person who had traveled everywhere.” Daddy smiles. “She was tenacious, and when she saw something she wanted, well...there was no stopping her.”
“And did she...did she want you?”
“Something like that.” Daddy glances at me. “And I was attracted to her.”
Attracted to her. No mention of love.
“Uh-oh. Let me guess,” I say. “You broke it off with Mrs. Valley. She found comfort in the arms of your best friend while you fooled around with the new girl in town.”
“Pretty much.” He has the good grace to look embarrassed at being such a dog. “There was some tension for a while, and right after high school, Bud and Karen got married. Your mom and I even went to their wedding.”
“But you still had feelings for her?”
“It was a confusing time. We were so young.” Daddy shrugs. “I went away to college, got engaged to Stella. I didn’t think we’d come back to Rockingham to live, but your grandfather died and I needed to take care of family business. Somehow we ended up just staying here.”
“When did you and...and Karen start seeing each other.” It’s weird to call Mrs. Valley by her first name, but Daddy doesn’t correct me. “Was it long after you moved back into town?”
He doesn’t answer.
Daddy guides the car into the driveway of our house and shuts off the car engine. We both sit and stare at the closed garage door. I don’t know what my father is thinking about, but all that keeps popping into my head is Stephen. And the idea of first love.
Because I love Stephen. I’m not sure when like turned to love, but thinking about him—I can’t imagine giving Stephen up now. So when my father called Karen Valley his first love and said he was attracted to my mom, it confused me. I get the difference between attraction and love, but how could my dad give up something he loved?
I won’t give up Stephen.
I guess, in a way, my dad never gave up Karen Valley.
“Look, Monica, I don’t want you to think I didn’t love your mother. I did. I do.” Daddy runs a hand through his hair, breaking up my thoughts. “And I love you and Simone. I’ve made mistakes. As you get older, you may understand things a little better. I never meant for anyone to get hurt.”
“Jude must have taken the news hard. Stephen makes it sound like his brother was obsessed with having Karen’s attention on him only,” I muse. “But why kill Simone over it? I mean, think about it—“
“I don’t like to think about him at all.” The familiar anger is back in Daddy’s voice. “Jude was deeply disturbed.”
“Did you ever talk to him?” I ask. “I mean, after he found out about the affair, did he ever confront you like Simone did?”
“I don’t want to talk about him anymore,” Daddy snaps. “I made a mistake with the affair. I’ve paid for it with losing my wife and my child. The last thing I want to do is hash over the vicious words of a psychotic kid. Let it go now, Monica.”
Uh-uh. He doesn’t get off that easy.
“No.” I shake my head and he looks at me, surprised by my defiance. “I need to know what happened. What did he say?”
“That I would be sorry.” Daddy eyes are haunted and vacant. “And I am. More than you’ll ever know.”
Without another word, he gets out of the car. I stare at his trudging walk and hunched shoulders and can’t find it in my heart to feel completely sorry for him. Jude may have pulled the trigger, but what happened to Simone is partially Daddy’s fault.
Af
ter a moment, I follow him inside. The house is ominously silent downstairs. Upstairs, I find my father staring into his bedroom, no sign of Mom. Their king-sized bed is made, the heavy blue quilt covering the sheets pulled up tight, untouched. Everything is tidy and straight in the room. The oak end tables and matching chest of drawers are polished and look like something out of a magazine—all part of my mom’s love of everything being exactly in its place. From where I am, I can see the closet door is partially open, but I wonder if her clothes are still inside.
Maybe she left him. Maybe she’s not coming back.
The thought scares me and I choke back a little sob, covering my mouth with my hand. Suddenly, it’s like I’m four years old again. All I want is my mother, her smell, and the touch of her light kiss on my forehead.
“Monica?” Daddy asks, glancing at me. He’s heard my sob and his face contorts into a mix of sympathy and concern. “Maybe you should talk to Dr. Taylor tomorrow. I know…I know you like Stephen, but it’s not…healthy. You’ve been through so much. I don’t want you to get any more involved with him. I think it might be for the best if we just stayed out of their lives.”
My world is falling apart. Absolutely nothing is as it should be. And he wants me to give up the one thing that keeps my sanity from cracking?
“I don’t need to talk to anyone,” I say. “I’m fine.”
Like a zombie, I go into my room. There’s still homework to do, but it’s not going to get done. The thought of going to school tomorrow, facing the world with all this new information, trying to pretend my parents’ lives aren’t falling apart, acting as if everything is okay, dealing with Derek and Caitlin all makes my head hurt.
Fresh, sharp anger burrows into my gut when I think about Derek. Bragging Derek. How can I look at him? Or Caitlin? Will she tell me what he said? I doubt it. Right now I hate them both.
This sucks. School sucks. I don’t want to deal with the stares and whispers anymore or fake a few smiles while I try to act like nothing is wrong.
So I’m not going to.
I’m taking the day off tomorrow, sleeping in. I don’t think either of my parents will notice anyway.
Butterfly Suicide Page 17