The A-Word

by Joy Preble

  Amber studied me briefly, then trained her eyes on Bo’s truck in front of us. “It sucks,” she said. “I know that. He’s nice, right? To you, I mean? That’s important, Jenna. Girls always think they’ll retrain a guy. Make him into something that he’s not. But it never works. Not really. People are what they are. So you have to know up front. Is this the one?”

  “I’m only in ninth grade,” I said.

  I did not say what I was thinking. Which was that I really, really liked Ryan Sloboda in a way I’d never liked a boy before and that I wanted to keep at it and see where it went. That I believed the universe was a douchebag for giving me these FEELINGS for a cute boy with spiky buzzed hair and brown eyes and a tiny dot of a freckle above his mouth and writing talent and single-minded adoration of Tony Stark and a desire to GO PLACES other than here and maybe with me. In spite of everything else that was going on, everything I couldn’t explain, which he’d forgiven.

  Amber’s lips angled into a tight smile, but she didn’t look at me.

  “It’ll work out,” she said.

  She wasn’t as good at lying as she used to be. We both knew how these things went.

  Here is what I noticed as we trooped into Bo’s ridiculously fancy apartment: Two wine glasses on the grey stone kitchen counter, one with pink lipstick. And over in the bedroom area, the bed was all rumpled, the red satin sheets a tangled mess. Eww.

  “Take you from a date?” Amber asked, following my sour gaze.

  “If you want to call it that,” Bo said.

  This was disturbing on many levels. Not the least of which was that he TAUGHT AT MY SCHOOL NOW, although this was no doubt a short-term arrangement. But why would I be surprised? Bo was beyond surprise. It was perfectly in character: cutting school during his first week on the job to do whatever it was he was doing in those red silk sheets with whomever had been drinking with him.

  Someone who favored a not-that-attractive shade of pink lipstick. The heavy kind, not the pretty glosses in my Sephora kit.

  Bo plucked a small remote from his work desk. Pointed toward the fireplace. A screen above it lowered. He clicked again, above him, and a projector turned on. I hadn’t noticed it before, suspended from the ceiling. Another click and something opened on his laptop.

  “You bring us here to watch a movie?” Casey asked. He sounded tired and hoarse. Must have been all that screaming on the field. But then just like that, his voice sprang back to normal. “There’s a new Fast and Furious I haven’t seen.”

  He’d been silent in the elevator ride up, not that any of us had been that chatty. Which was fine. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to hear from him right now, but it didn’t include snot-nosed jokes. Understanding someone’s behavior does not necessarily translate into being less pissed off.

  Bo said, “Sit.” He gestured toward the leather couches.

  I glanced briefly at that wraparound balcony.

  “No worries, Miss Samuels.” Bo’s eyes glittered. “I have no plans to leap.”

  “Shame,” Casey said.

  Amber winced.

  “Listen to me, son,” Bo said, eyes darkening now. “Listen well. I am no martyr and have no need of suffering. They made me what they made me a long, long time ago. I’ve done my time and then some. I’m still doing it. And so will you. I get it, Casey Samuels. I understand. I feel your longings for every damn thing you will never have again. You can screw that little cheerleader—you can make her see God—but you can never love her. You can save your sister here a million times over and it’s not going to change things. They picked you. They brought you back. Just like me. Just like Ms. Velasco. And all the rest of us. And we do what they tell us, by their rules, until they tell us not to. We can try to be shitheads, but we will always fail. Always. If there’s a choice, we’ll pick the right side. Do the right thing.”

  My mouth had dropped open somewhere after the phrase “screw that little cheerleader.” But here is what I realized. Casey and Amber weren’t disagreeing with the last part. The angel part.

  “Casey, you still toke up,” I said. I wasn’t sure why I even brought it up.

  He sighed. “I lost my taste for it, okay?”

  “No, you didn’t.” Even to my ears I was sounding ridiculous. I thought of his room and its new and tidy absence of drug paraphernalia. Well, shit.

  “He’s one of us now, darlin’,” Bo said. “And he’s attempting to do it the hard way.”

  I would have answered, but my brain was whirring in a wheel-of-doom loop. What kind of a person would still pretend to be a weed addict for his little sister? But I already knew the answer. My brother wasn’t a person anymore.

  Bo turned back to Casey. “Amber here hasn’t exactly explained it all to you, has she?”

  Amber’s skin emitted a forbidding golden glow. She was simmering inside. “You said he wasn’t ready.”

  “I’ve said a lot of things. A definite error in judgment.” Bo clicked the remote again. The first slide of a PowerPoint presentation appeared on the screen, one of those lame low-budget ones we have at Spring Creek. There were three words in bold.

  SOMETHING IS COMING

  Of course Professor Bo Shivers would have a PowerPoint.

  He looked from Casey to me and then back at my brother. “You’re a bit slow, son. We’re not saints. Management needs us to be what we are. Bastards. Angry. Willing to throw ourselves to the lions but only so we can rip their hearts out before they can hurt someone else. If we were perfect—some Mother Teresa types, some damn Thomas Aquinas—we’d be no good to them.”

  Casey shook his head, his jaw tight.

  “You’re putting a spin on things, Bo,” Amber snapped, but the glow had faded. “You’re no different than Casey.”

  Bo just smiled. “Amber, this is for Jenna’s sake. And maybe you could stand to learn something, too.” He tilted his head at me, the way he did when I first met him, and his dark eyes bored into mine.

  “Look around you. Your fellow humans—we’re an ugly bunch. Oh we’re noble now and then when it suits us. But when people talk about evil, they need to give it a name, a face, with some demon or devil.” He growled, deep in his throat. “They don’t see it in themselves. It never ends what we do to each other. Massacre after massacre. Men. Women. Children. Crucifixions. The Crusades. Babi Yar. Leningrad. Bergen-Belsen. The Killing Fields. Suicide bombers. Attempted hit-and-runs.” Here he paused. “It never ends. Manny and Renfroe, they’re just the tip of the proverbial iceberg—”

  “Manny and Renfroe?” I gasped. “What do you mean?”

  “Pay attention,” he said, and clicked the remote. Then he put his hand on my shoulder. It still hurts a little to remember, but here’s what happened, in PowerPoint form:

  • The second slide flashed on the screen. FREE WILL PART I.

  • All at once, my body seized. Images rushed through my brain. A half-naked screaming boy, explosions shattering around him. A woman holding a baby, collapsing from a shot to the head. A heap of emaciated corpses. The pictures rolled and rolled, more and more, piling up in my head, each more horrible than the last.

  • The third slide flashed on the screen: FREE WILL PART II.

  • Wild bursts of color and I felt silly and giddy and dizzy. I saw Bo, wearing some colorful hippy-looking shirt and a fringed vest like you see in ’60s movies, and he had a glass of amber liquid in one hand and what looked to be a joint in the other.

  • Somewhere in my frozen state I heard Casey and Amber shout, “Let her go!”

  • There was a FREE WILL PART III with Mother Teresa and some ancient old man and then Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi and a bunch of women I didn’t recognize—and I burst into tears, even though I wasn’t sure why.

  The next few slides were a jumble of economic flow charts and world events and drug cartels and a final thought of, good masquerading as evil but really, what was the difference? But at that point I was too cloudy to absorb it all. When I snapped out of it, the screen was blank
.

  Amber and Casey had pulled Bo away from me. Everyone was breathing heavily. Bo shook my brother and Amber loose. The three angels stared at me, waiting for a question.

  The only one I could manage was, “What the hell did you do in the sixties, Bo?”

  Bo apologized for putting his memories in my cranium. He rambled for a minute or two about some guy named Hunter Thompson, who was something called a “gonzo” journalist, which basically meant he made no judgments even while he put himself in the thick of things he was reporting. This seemed to include a certain amount of “experimentation” (Bo’s word) with drugs like LSD. I supposed that explained how Bo’s memories painted psychedelic circles in my brain.

  After that, Bo explained how everyone had hated President Nixon, but that as I could see, Nixon didn’t have a lock on evil or corruption. Or something like that. I was still sort of giggly from Bo’s flashback. The politics escaped me. In any case, whatever was going on, it was bigger than Dr. Renfroe’s poisoning of my family. And the European conglomerate that ran Oak View was probably part of it. Bo could have said just as much rather than give me a history lesson.

  I was feeling a little winded. But I was ready to make nice and move on.

  Casey was still full-on pissed off and in Bo’s face.

  “You like to hear yourself talk, don’t you?” he hissed. “That’s what this is, right? You talking and name-dropping and expecting us to believe it. Telling us the same old same old about something I’d see in some straight-to-video spy movie—”

  “Casey,” Amber said. She held up a hand. A warning.

  Something dark and frosty crossed my brother’s face. He kept his eyes on Bo. “I’m sorry you had to break up that shit back at school. I did it. I own it. According to you, that makes me more valuable. Well maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t. But my sister needs to leave. She has a function to attend. And as I don’t have my damn car, one of you will need to drive her.”

  I wanted to hug him. I wanted to shout hooray.

  Instead, I found myself asking Bo, “If Manny and Renfroe are the tip of the iceberg, then who are the bad guys? Like, the bad guys we saw in FREE WILL PART I? Our family was ripped apart and Casey’s my guardian now—in every way not just the angel way—but we still don’t know jack, do we? Not anything. Not even how Amber died and I bet that’s important.”

  Bo just smiled. He didn’t turn away.

  “You put all those images in my head, so I know you can do all sorts of things, can’t you? So here’s what I think. I bet you don’t want Amber to know why she died. It makes no damn sense, but I think that’s the truth. I know you saved me, too, but now I’m wondering if you didn’t somehow make our father bump into us in Austin so we’d stop investigating. How do I know you didn’t do that?”

  “What would you like me to say?” Bo asked.

  “I think it makes you feel like the man.” Anger welled up, with images of the horrible things from that first slide. “Holding power over everybody. Over Amber.” I spun to face her. “You need to stand up to him. You need to.”

  But Amber turned away. I felt like once I ran out of steam, we’d be where we always were. In the dark.

  I turned, too, and my gaze settled briefly on one of the paintings. Then another. They were mostly his own, I realized, not just the one in the bedroom of that lady. Deep, beautiful colors. Different scenes, each of them, but in the ones I could see from here, there was always a female figure far in the background, tiny and distant, like she couldn’t be easily reached. If there was time—but there wasn’t—I could ponder this. Wonder about a dead man who would paint that over and over.

  “Casey,” Bo said. His tone was soft.

  I turned, eyes flashing between Bo and my brother.

  “Here’s what she hasn’t told you, son. This is your war. Yours. So stop feeling sorry for yourself and figure out why. You said it yourself. I told you to follow the riches. So why aren’t you doing that? Someone has tried to kill your sister. Twice. Isn’t that telling you something?”

  Casey made a dismissive sound in the back of his throat. “It’s telling me that I need to take her and go. It’s telling me she’s right. You get your jollies off by manipulating us.”

  “Haven’t you listened to a word I’ve said?” Bo’s voice was thunderous. The loft shook. I saw—and heard—a rustling movement under the back of his shirt. Any second now, his wings would unfurl. Something inside me said that if they did, they would fill the room. My stomach knotted into a ball of concrete. “Do you know what free will is?”

  “Forget free will, Bo. Fuck you.” Casey turned to me, holding out a hand. “Come on, Jenna. We’re going.”

  I didn’t want to take his hand. I wanted to stay at Bo’s. But what else was I going to do? Like Bo said, this was Casey’s war.

  Amber caught up with us on the street while we were calling for a taxi. “I’ll drive you,” she said.

  Bo wasn’t with her, but I sensed he wasn’t up there in his little sky palace twiddling his thumbs.

  “Is he telling the truth?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Amber said.

  “He’s been your boss for five damn years. How did he get those wrist scars?”

  “Jenna. I really don’t know.” She sucked in a breath like she was about to say more, only she didn’t. But there was something in her eyes that told me she, too, was lying. Or maybe she wasn’t. Maybe … My head hurt from the overload.

  “Whatever.” My brother was looking up at the sky. “Jenna’s late.”

  “I don’t care,” Amber said. “You think he’s a pissant, anyway.”

  “Yes, you do care. And not about what I think of Jenna’s boyfriend.”

  More frosty glares all around. (But my heart did sing a little at the word “boyfriend.”) And then we did what I had wanted to do when we’d left the practice field. We drove back to school in time for the Bonfire.

  LATER I WOULD believe that I was right, after all: We should have stayed at Bo’s. We should have talked and hollered and cut the truth free like they do diamonds. Hack them loose from their caves and squeeze the pretty out of the ugly coal. But Bo would have probably said that that’s the thing about free will. You don’t always do what you need to.

  I SLIPPED MY phone out to call Maggie and tell her I was already at school. I knew she thought I was with Casey at the DMV taking my permit test.

  “I won’t even text you,” she’d said earlier when I saw her in the hall before Spanish II. “Don’t want you to freak out and fail it or something.”

  That only made me want to talk to her in the worst way. And that feeling grew. Now it was overpowering. I had to come clean. Tell her everything while we ate a gallon of chocolate ice cream and then let her give me one of those henna tattoos on my ankle. Or maybe somewhere more showy than that. If I could tell her, Maggie would have advice. Good advice. Best friend advice. If she believed me.

  Well, that wasn’t going to happen.

  But there was a text from Ryan. Are you okay? Hope you make it for Bonfire. Talk later. ~R.

  There he was again, spelling everything out fully, taking his time about it. I pictured him tapping his thumbs on the screen, making sure the message was just right for me. Was he home, maybe? Getting ready for the Bonfire, Morris nipping at his heels? He had not run screaming (metaphorically speaking) from my brother’s antics on the football field. I memorized every word after reading it four straight times. That way if it got deleted, I’d still be able to see it in my head.

  “You going to stay?” I asked Casey. Amber had driven off, not saying much. What was there to say, really? Like Bo, I suspected she’d be around somewhere. But that was her business. I’d done my best. It wasn’t my fault she didn’t want my help.

  He shrugged. “I’ll be around. You just meet me at the Merc after, okay?”

  We stood there looking at each other.

  Then he took me by surprise and wrapped me in a hug, tight and then tighter. I wrig
gled my arms free and hugged him back, burying my face in his shoulder. I breathed against him, holding on until eventually it felt awkward and we let go.

  “You really gave up weed?”

  Casey laughed, almost a belly laugh but not quite. “Yeah. I really did.” His laugh dried up. “It was easier to let you think I didn’t.”

  I pushed him away, feeling cranky. “You think I’m a little girl still, don’t you?”

  “What I think is that sometimes I want things to just go back the way they were. Way back. Like to when we were little.”

  “So you could pick on me?”

  His lips arched into a grin. “Hell, yes.”

  “Bo was quite the stoner back in the day,” I observed. “Maybe we should introduce him to loser Dave.”

  Casey’s smile flickered. He shrugged. “Don’t think about Bo now, Jenna.”

  We were quiet for a while. “You’ll be fine,” he said. “You let Sloboda come to you, remember? He will.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “He’s right, you know,” Casey said then, looking at his feet then finally lifting his head to look at me.

  “Ryan?”

  Casey shook his head. “No. Bo. I think he’s right, Jenna. I think he’s telling the truth. He just—well, I think that’s how it works. I have to get to it on my own.”

  My heart bumped against my ribs. “Like looking more into what happened to Amber, you mean?”

  He looked up and into my eyes. “It’s bigger, Jenna. That’s what Bo means with his ‘something-is-coming’ crap. It started with Renfroe. With those memory loss drugs he developed. Memory, Jenna. That’s big. That’s what Bo’s been talking about. You know what people could do with drugs like that? You could control a lot if you could control what people remembered, right? That’s everything. That’s what we all have. Memories.”

  My mouth felt dry as a bone. “But you’re not a memory,” I said. “You’re here for me. Even Bo told you that. Because I was poisoned and a car almost ran me down and Dad is gone and Mom is …” I swallowed over the boulder in my throat, doing my best to hold things inside. I was a tough Texan girl, but even I was not beyond crying sometimes. “You know a lot of stuff for a guy who’s retaking Teen Leadership.”