by Amy Bright
But I wasn’t around.
Niall got his ass handed to him. He had been knocked out cold for a solid fifteen minutes. Landed himself an appointment with the school nurse. Someone in the office had convinced him that he wouldn’t be able to go back to class in his messed-up clothes. They were ripped-up and bloody. He couldn’t sit at a neat plastic desk looking like he’d just climbed out of the cage at a UFC match. Someone pulled a pair of jeans and a T-shirt out of the Lost and Found and told him to make the switch. The Lost and Found was made up of clothes that were left in the gym change rooms overnight and collected by the janitors after hours. Most of it got claimed the morning after. Sometimes clothes got left for weeks. But the big rule was: you never took something that wasn’t yours out of that Lost and Found.
Niall came back to class in a Lost and Found outfit.
We knew whose clothes they were. Joseph Clark’s T-shirt, the college that his brother went to stamped on the front. Dark jeans with the patch on the left pocket that Trey Hudson had showed off when he bought them.
Everyone knew. Niall was rich as shit but, for that afternoon, kids teased him for being so messed-up he had to steal clothes from the Lost and Found. Didn’t matter how much money he had, he couldn’t erase how much they hated him that day.
It was Josh who got him sorted out at the end of the day, giving him a spare gym strip from his locker before basketball practice. Josh who made sure those borrowed clothes got back to the Lost and Found where they belonged.
Josh’s spare pill was in my pocket. I checked it out and, when I held it up to the light, I found out it was a Tylenol. Nothing more than a little pain relief. I kicked the metal door hard, feeling vibrations in my heel. The last thing I was going to do was go back to class. So I went out into the empty hallway, but only to get to the front doors of the school.
If Penner was doing a summoning of Josh back into my life, then he had Lee going as a side project. She was sitting out on the lawn when I walked by. A couple of girls were sitting with her, doing this shitty little giggle, high-pitched with knives on. Full of the gifted Tylenol, nothing to even me out, I got out of there fast. Lee and me. Elementary, middle, high school. We went so far back.
Ten minutes later I was home. The driveway was empty. The house key was missing from my jacket pocket and I tipped out the contents of my backpack, searching for it. The doors were locked and there was no way to jack open a way in. I scooped everything back into my pack and left it leaning against the door, a kind of "Hunter Was Here," in case anyone came home at lunch and felt generous enough to leave a door unlocked for me. Being carless in Victoria wasn’t a big deal. The buses went everywhere, and it didn’t get cold enough to make walking impossible. I took the bus downtown and walked down to the wharf from there. Up Dallas Road where the cruise ships came in, big motherfuckers all lit up and on holiday.
There were a couple of places where you could get off the main road and head down the steps to get to the rocky beach. Mom always thought you could tell tourists from the locals based on how much time people spent staring out at the ocean. By her definition, I was a tourist, staring out there for hours. Just passing through.
On my way to school on Friday, I stopped outside of Bridget’s work and knocked on the window. She was helping a customer at the counter, but she still took a second to look for where the knock was coming from. I gave Bridge a small Queen Elizabeth II wave. She hadn’t been around the house as much over the last week. She was sleeping at her apartment again, just dropping by the house for supper a couple of nights a week. There was no pattern to how much she came and went. She just did her own thing.
Friday mornings had turned into a holiday because of my meetings with Penner. I was missing a nice half-hour chunk of Biology once a week.
Someone else had been entered into the Penner rotation. I didn’t know the guy, never even heard his name before, but he was called instead of Hailey Pearlman one morning, another replacement, another problem. I saw him coming out of Penner’s office when I got to the secretary’s desk. He was skinny as hell, his shirt hanging off of his chicken-wing arms, his loose jeans over toothpick legs. I had an urge to high-five him in solidarity.
"Hunter, how’re we doing today?" Penner asked me when we were settled.
"We’re good," I said, apparently answering for both of us.
"Do you have something for me?"
"Yeah, I typed something up," I told him, "but my computer crashed so, poof, I guess I don’t have it today."
His eyebrows knit together. It was the second time I’d used that one.
"Should we switch to handwritten assignments from now on? We can preempt a few of those technological issues that way."
"Nah, my dad’ll have it fixed over the weekend."
Penner spent the next ten minutes in full-on silent treatment. He picked up a pile of papers and flipped through them. He made a couple of check marks and thick X’s on them, turned them over and did the same thing to the other side. He made a phone call to some dude called Craig before he organized one of his desk drawers. I took it all in. I had nowhere else to be.
"Hunter," he said, eventually, "if you don’t make time for me, what’s the point in me making time for you?"
"The computer crashed. That’s seriously it," I told him.
I could see Penner was exasperated. He wanted his hands around my neck so he could go full-on throttle.
"Is there a reason you don’t want to tell me about your friends?"
"Uh, maybe because there isn’t anything to tell you."
Penner raised an eyebrow. King of the expression, that guy was.
"I know Niall’s story."
"Yeah, well, Niall’s not here anymore."
"True, he’s not at school. Have you ever thought of visiting him at the hospital?"
"No."
"This all seems very hard to deal with, Hunter."
"It’s fine. I’m fine. I dealt with it."
Penner shook his head. "Something like this doesn’t just go away on its own. It’s only a few months since it happened. That’s not long."
"Three," I told him, before I remembered that I don’t tell anyone anything.
"If I give you another writing assignment, can you complete it for next Friday?"
"Sure."
The intercom called the next person down—back to Nolan—and Penner pushed a piece of paper across the desk.
"Your assignment," he said.
I didn’t look at it until I was in the hallway. Good thing. I might have thrown it right back across the desk at him, balled up grenade-size.
Write about your last day with Niall.
I knew what Penner meant by the last day. He meant during Christmas holidays when everything changed. No way in hell I was going to write about that.
I could have had a different last day with Niall months before, when I was given my first chance to bail on him. Maybe I could write about that.
We had gone to an end-of-class bash before the summer started. It was out on a stretch of private beach. Some rich bitch from school invited everyone over, BYOB. Me and Niall took the bus out there, and I figured we’d catch a ride back with someone sober enough to drive, or spend the night.
Niall was lit by the time we got there. I don’t know what he took before the party. He didn’t even touch a beer the entire night, so whatever it was kept him going all by itself. I kept an eye on him, only drinking a couple of beers. Lee wasn’t at the party. She’d had a family thing and didn’t feel like making the trip up the coast, just far enough away from her place that it was an inconvenience. I don’t even remember Josh being there, which was uncharacteristic. Him missing a party. So there wasn’t anything occupying my attention. I could keep track of Niall the entire night and not lose him for even a second.
We hung out in that giant house, eventually ending up in this piano room. A back-of-the-house sunroom with a baby grand and stacks of music. It was something my Aunt Lynne would’ve been jealou
s of. She had been a concert pianist.
"Dude, this is great," I told Niall. "Wish we had one of these at home."
Niall, who probably did have one of those at home—somewhere in his giant mansion—didn’t say anything.
"You having a good time?" I asked him. "Feels good to be done school."
Niall shrugged his shoulders. I’d gotten used to the way he would shut right up when he’d taken too much of something. I slouched into a high-backed chair and closed my eyes. I thought I’d give us both a little silence.
So I did take my eyes off of Niall for a second. And that second was all it took for him to lose his fucking mind.
The crash exploded in the little room. I shot up from the chair and surveyed the place. He’d thrown the big piano bench through a window. The glass had broken mostly outward. Not cleanly, but it had made a big enough hole to get out of.
My ears ringing, I grabbed Niall by the arm. Pushing him roughly through the opening, I said, "Get out." I leapt through after him, not looking back. I pushed him down into the bushes and then dragged him toward the front of the house. He wasn’t helping. He was a dead weight. A gash ran along his forearm.
"Dude, you cut your arm." I hated him for getting caught on the glass. The opening was so large, he would’ve had to try hard to catch himself on the shards. His blood was on my hand, warm and sticky.
"You don’t even feel it, do you?" I said. "You’re so fucking numb from whatever you took, you don’t even know you’ve got a fucking open wound. You don’t even know you’re bleeding all over the place."
Niall shrugged.
I turned away from him, my hands balled into fists. My fingernails were digging into my skin. "That is some crazy shit."
"Where are you going?" he asked. No change in his voice. Just flat, easy Niall.
"Home."
I started walking down the long driveway. I figured if I got out onto the main road, I’d be visible enough for a taxi to find me. I was already calling for one.
"Hunter." Niall called out from behind me.
"Leave me alone," I told him. "Find your own way back."
He caught up with me. I’d never seen that expression on his face before, this snarl that made him look inhuman. He shoved me, two hands to the center of my chest.
Niall lost his balance instead of me. Still, he came at me again, this time with his fists instead of his open hands. I felt his knuckles hard on my cheekbone, heard a crack that shuddered through the side of my face.
I turned away from him and I eased into a run. He didn’t come after me. At least, not fast enough to make it to the main road in time for the cab. It was idling by the stop sign. I held the door open, took one more look up the road behind me, and Niall was there, staggering all over the place. He suddenly seemed like more trouble than anyone I’d ever known. I had never cared less about what happened to him. I ducked into the cab.
I guess the guilt didn’t really hit me until I’d been home for an hour or two. Lee hadn’t texted and neither had Josh. I was alone in my bedroom and I couldn’t get a hold of either of my best friends.
So I started texting Niall. Just to check in. Make sure he got home okay. He was suddenly the fallback guy again. The person I called when I had nobody else.
I figured the fight was a one-off. No one’s himself, not completely, taking as many drugs as Niall did. So what if that meant he was hardly ever himself? At least I could count on him being there.
He didn’t text back. I sent about a dozen texts throughout the night, finally passing out and sleeping until noon. There was still nothing from him.
I bussed over to his house. I’d been there a couple of times by that point, more than a couple. Niall opened the door when I rang the doorbell and let me inside. We went straight into the kitchen, where he had left a half-eaten bowl of cereal. While he spooned it into his mouth, I saw that he was wearing a hospital bracelet. His name typed out neatly, the date stamped underneath.
"When did you go to the hospital?" I asked him.
"Last night," he said.
"Why?"
He talked through a mouthful of cereal. "I passed out on someone’s front lawn. They called an ambulance and I woke up at Vic General. Nothing happened. I’m fine."
We never said anything about that June night after that. And I never left him on his own again. I watched out for him like he watched out for me.
But I wasn’t going to write about that in Penner’s assignment, either. I bunched up the assignment and stuffed it into my back pocket. I walked through the school with my head down, trying not to think about anything.
"Hey, hey," Josh said, catching me in the hallway. He dropped his palm, open and heavy, on my back. It took the wind out of me. "How’s the psych ward?"
I pushed past him.
"Dude, tell me you had a headache after that." He grinned, bringing up his pick-and-play Tylenol joke. I walked fast but he was faster.
"There’s a party tomorrow night. Come by, yeah? I’ll hook you up."
"Where?"
He shrugged, like it was no big deal. "Lee’s."
"I’ll think about it."
Nodding at Penner’s office, the door still open, he said, "Watch your brain around that guy." He backed away down the hallway, holding onto his head and pretending he was getting an electric shock, his manufactured buzzing echoing down the hallway.
The night of the party, I took the bus to Lee’s place in Oak Bay. I don’t know how Josh convinced me it was a good idea, but I felt like I was doing the right thing.
It was going to be hard to get home if I stayed until the buses stopped running. I couldn’t bank on getting a ride from anyone, especially not Josh, who would be blackout drunk by the time the party ended. And I couldn’t trust some asshole who wanted to tell me he knew all about what had happened to Niall, when we were out in the middle of nowhere, heading in the wrong direction. Worst-case scenario was making the long trek on foot.
The trees were dark and thick. I tried to make out the house numbers, but they were covered by shadows that stretched long over neatly manicured lawns. A girl maybe my age was sitting ahead of me on the bus. I kept on taking these looks at her, hoping for some coincidental moment of her looking back at me at the same time. But that didn’t happen. It doesn’t happen. You sit on the bus in your own little world when you’re traveling alone.
The bus had that soggy smell of winter turning into spring, when the rain and the fog sink into Victoria in April. Wet boots, wet socks, wet jeans.
I could tell I was in Oak Bay when I saw the first big house with the big yard, and the gate pushing up against the sidewalk. I waited two more blocks before I pushed my hand against the yellow tab by the window, the "Stop Requested" scrolling above the driver’s head. He pulled against the sidewalk and we parted ways.
Lee’s house was my second home before Niall’s was. I had a couple of dinners there a week, some pizzas ordered in from delivery, and Chinese food that arrived in folded boxes and Styrofoam containers. Josh would be there sometimes, but mostly it was just me and Lee. It was a lot to give up, when I chose to be friends with Niall over everyone else.
I walked up the six cement steps to the solid, wood front door. I thought for a second that I should ring the doorbell and give her a heads-up that I was coming, but it was a party and that wasn’t what you were supposed to do. I pressed down on the door handle and pushed my way in.
Lee’s house could fit four of mine inside of it, all wrapped up like a present. A staircase met you at the front door. It led up to the second floor where the bedrooms were, a second living room, the exercise room, and the washrooms. It was the hands-off-don’t-even-think-about-going-up-that-staircase when Lee had parties. I scuffled my shoes on the welcome mat, trying to get off as much of the damp as I could, but I still squeaked on the wooden floors.
Music pumped out of speakers, and all of the people I used to know were looking at me like they were playing "One of these things is not like the oth
er." I made for the kitchen, opened Lee’s fridge, and found a beer.
"Hey man, you made it." Josh slapped me on the back. "Let’s get shit-housed."
Josh grabbed two six-packs from the fridge and set us up in the living room, on a couch backed by the piano and a ten-foot-high window covered by blinds and curtains. Josh got to work, drinking beer and waiting for business.
"What do you think?" he said. "Good to be back in action?"
"It’s good," I said.
"It’s awesome. We all missed you. It’s always, like, where the hell is Hunter? Is he sitting at home, jerking off in his room? Watching re-runs of Friday Night Lights and rubbing one out to Minka Kelly?"
He let out a laugh, a short bark, knowing that people were there to see him and he had the lines to make them hang around, just waiting for him to do something cool.
"If Niall were here, it’d be the whole family," he added.
"You didn’t even want him around," I said.
"Yeah, not when he got fucking crazy. But when he was a little bit of crazy, that was pretty cool. It’s a fine line, man."
I couldn’t remember exactly when Josh stopped wanting to have Niall around. Six months after Niall put that piano bench through the window, I’d invite him over and he’d say, "Is Crazy Niall going to be there?" and I’d have to answer yes. Josh didn’t make up excuses. He didn’t pretend. "Cool. Have fun, man," he’d say and hang up the phone. The same thing happened with Lee, just a couple of months before Josh stopped thinking Niall was worth it.
A couple of guys hung around with us at first, buying a little weed and smoking up with me and Josh on Lee’s couch. It was a weight off my shoulders, a sinking back into the cushions. I was four beers deep, and happy, when people started noticing me there. A couple of them looked at me sideways, peripheral vision sizing me up and figuring out how I’d changed. I wanted to tell them that they couldn’t even know. That they didn’t want to.