“Bear?” said one of his friends, a guy everybody called Hack. I don’t know if that was his first name or last name.
“Smaller,” said North.
“Mountain lion,” suggested somebody else.
Well, you get the idea. They finally got it down to turkeys, which caused general hilarity. I don’t know why, since it was North who suggested we hunt turkeys.
After the jokes died down, Hack said, “Yeah, but you know what else this guy did?”
“What?” asked North, ready for more fun.
“He’s the one that caused them to hire a guard for the cemetery at night.”
General booing and jeers from the table.
North looked at me. I just shrugged. How could I deny it?
“They caught him describing a grave,” Hack said.
North looked puzzled. I think I must have too.
“You mean desecrating, dumbass,” somebody finally said.
“Whatever,” said Hack. “He broke into one of the Crappers’ coffins.”
“No, I didn’t,” I said.
“Well, you did somethin’, I heard,” said Hack. “’Cause Bonnie Flatley says you were in Brennan’s office with a cop, and right after that they hired this guard. And now nobody can go parking there.” He looked around with a grin. “Everybody’s sex life is totally ruined.”
Mine too, I wanted to say. But instead I tried to defend myself. “The guard was there before I did anything,” I said. “That’s why I got caught.”
“You really broke into a coffin?” another guy asked. “Was it like in that movie where the guy has sex with dead bodies?” He looked like he wanted to ask if it felt good.
“All I did was climb on a statue,” I explained. “Somebody else broke into the coffin.”
“Why were you climbin’ on a statue?”
I stopped to think. The truth would sound even worse here than in Ms. Brennan’s office. “I was drunk,” I said.
That was a totally believable answer. They went on ragging me for a while, but I had convinced the group that I was a good ol’ boy, like them.
Except for North. When we were carrying our trays back to the counter, he asked me, “What statue were you climbing on, anyway?”
“The angel,” I said without thinking.
“Caleb used to like that statue,” he said.
I didn’t ask him how he knew.
chapter seventeen
THAT AFTERNOON, I stayed after class to work on the newspaper. My mind wasn’t on the story I was supposed to be writing because I could hardly wait for everybody to clear out of the hallways so I could get to my locker. “Do you want to let Kyle cover the game this Friday night?” Terry asked me. Kyle was a freshman who had filled in for me while I was grounded.
I hadn’t thought about Friday. I had hoped to hook up with Colleen again, but she didn’t respond to my Facebook messages, nor to messages I left on her cell. She never answered when I called. I tried to talk to her at school, but she was always with a bunch of other girls, and I didn’t want to get shot down in public. I’d start to feel like Cale must have.
If North wanted to, he could hook me up with Colleen again, but then there was the problem of where we would go to make out. Since I had ruined everybody’s sex life by making the cemetery off limits.
“Do you know where kids are going to park now?” I asked Terry. I know, what was I thinking? It was just that she was the only other person there.
“What did you say?” Terry asked.
I realized my mistake. “Nothing. Forget it.”
“I’m supposed to tell you where you can drag some cheerleader and screw her tiny brains out?”
Oh. I didn’t know she cared.
I started to say I hadn’t actually reached the screwing part yet, but decided I didn’t want to share that information.
“You know,” Terry said, “she wouldn’t go anywhere with you if it wasn’t for North.”
She. OK, I guess Terry had been paying closer attention to me than I thought. And it didn’t help that what she said was likely true.
“I’m sorry,” I said. Though I didn’t exactly know what I was apologizing for. “Look, Kyle can cover the game. He’s a good writer, and you can edit his story, or I can. I can finish this other article at home, so I’ll see you later.”
Before I left, I took a sheet of plain white paper from the computer printer. I had swiped a wide-pointed pencil and some masking tape from the art room earlier, so I figured I was all set.
The corridor with my locker was completely deserted. No curious freshmen. No tourists who wanted to see the locker.
I opened it up and taped the paper to the underside of the shelf. Nice and flat. I had to bend over and back into the locker to use the pencil, and I couldn’t really see what I was doing. I wished I had a flashlight. Just to make sure, I would have to cover the entire surface. Shouldn’t take long.
“What are you doing?”
I tried to stand up, and bumped my head on the shelf.
Shit. It was Terry.
“Nothing,” I told her.
“Yeah, well you looked like—listen, I just wanted to tell you that I’m sorry,” she said. “I had no right to tell you who you should go out with.”
“O.K., thanks. No harm done,” I said, rubbing my head. Actually, I thought there was going to be a bump, but I wanted her to go away.
“What were you doing?” she asked, stooping over to see what was under the shelf. There was a reason why she was the editor of the newspaper—not just because she was the smartest person in the school, but also the biggest snoop. Not counting Susan.
I pushed the door closed, which was completely the wrong thing to do. Now she knew I was hiding something.
“Did you find something?” she asked. “Does it have anything to do with Cale?”
I was either going to have to come up with a story good enough to fool Terry, or tell her part of the truth and play dumb. The thing is, smart people are always ready to believe anybody else is dumb, so I chose the second option.
“There were some dents in the metal,” I said. “I don’t think they mean anything.”
“Let me see,” she said.
“You can’t really see them,” I said. “You’d need a flashlight.”
She pulled out a set of keys that included, wouldn’t you know, a small penlight. “Open it up,” she said.
There wasn’t much else I could do, unless I was willing to strangle her and hide the body in my locker. I worked the combination and opened the door. She leaned over backwards with the flashlight. Her shirt rode up and I could see her belly button. It was an innie. I considered stroking her softly below the waist to distract her, but knew that would just get me in more trouble.
“So you’re making a rubbing of it,” she said. “Good thinking.” She stuck out her hand. “Let me have the pencil you were using. I’ll finish it.”
A few minutes later, we were looking at the paper. “See, it’s nothing but a bunch of marks,” I said. “Completely meaningless.”
“They’re not random marks,” she said. “They’re in some kind of geometric order.” She turned the paper, looking at it from each of the four sides. “You know what this must be?” she said suddenly. “It’s Braille.”
I tried to discourage her. “I thought Braille had to be raised,” I said, “so a blind person could feel it.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Terry replied. “The arrangement of the dots is what makes it Braille. I’ll bet you knew it all along.”
Well, I could either pretend to be stupid or take credit for being smart. So I didn’t protest when Terry sat down on the floor and looked up the Braille alphabet on her iPhone. She started to write letters above the combinations of dots on the paper. What else could I do but sit down and watch her?
; It didn’t take long for her to decipher the message:
LOOK WHAT SALLY IS READING.
I took a deep breath. It was what I suspected all along, but I didn’t want to share it with Terry. Now she’d find some way to take credit for it.
But she surprised me. “Who’s Sally?” she asked.
I realized that she hadn’t been as obsessed with the cemetery as I had been. Probably she’d never even been there. She didn’t have time to go anywhere and park with some guy. She was busy studying. I had told her about the angel, but not that it was standing over the grave of Sally Dennis.
“I guess some student,” I said.
“I don’t know anybody named Sally in our class,” she said.
“Maybe some other class. Do you know the names of everybody who was going to school here then?”
She thought about it. “I guess not,” she said. “But I can find a list in the registrar’s office.”
“Good. But probably you shouldn’t tell anybody about this message just yet.”
She looked at me suspiciously. “Why not?”
“Well, this doesn’t have to be something that Cale put there. People have had this locker before him.”
“You don’t really think that.”
“Sure I do. How long has the school been here? At least ten years, right?”
“I don’t mean that. You’re still trying to find out what made Cale shoot those people. And this is your clue. Who else would have left it?”
I shrugged. “Did he read any books by someone named Sally?”
“That’s an idea,” she said. “Let’s ask the librarian.”
Shit. Ms. Clement wouldn’t tell me what books Cale was reading, but I’ll bet she’d tell Terry. And I didn’t like to hear Terry say “let’s.” That meant we were now a team, a team on which she would be captain.
“See what you can find out,” I said. “I’m going home.”
“Home? What for?”
“I’m surprised that you ask. We’ve got a paper due in Ms. Hayward’s class tomorrow.”
“Oh, I’ve already finished that. You shouldn’t wait till the last minute.”
I fought back my annoyance. “Well, not all of us are perfect. I’ve got that article to write too, so you see if you can find out who Sally is and send me an email.”
I took my books, shut the locker, and went off. Terry stood watching me. I hoped she wasn’t going to follow.
Good thing she didn’t, because she was a better driver than I was.
I drove straight to the cemetery, wondering what I was going to do. I didn’t think there would be a guard during the day, but if there was, I’d just pretend I was going to visit a grave or drive through without stopping.
When I went through the gates, however, I saw a car I recognized. It was Pastor Flegel’s. After I parked next to it, I got out and looked around. There had been a hard rainstorm the night before and the rest of the leaves from the trees had fallen, along with a lot of branches. Flegel was walking around between the graves with a bag, collecting debris. I went over to talk with him.
“Hello, Paul,” he said. “I thought you had finished your community service.”
“Uh, yeah, actually I did,” I said. “But you know how it is, I sort of got to feeling responsible for the place. And I thought I’d drop by to see if there was any damage from the storm.”
Astonishingly, he believed me. “That’s so nice of you,” he said. “I was thinking the same thing, but you know, I really am responsible for the cemetery, so it’s my job.”
I nodded, trying to take a quick look at the statue.
He found a pair of work gloves for me and I followed him around. We picked up some leaves and put them in a plastic bag, and I carried some of the fallen branches over to the tool shed and put them in a pile. I didn’t know what we were going to do with them, but it made the old man happy.
When we got close to the statue, I almost laughed out loud. A big, really big, branch had fallen and was resting right square on top of the book that the angel held. “Look at that,” I said. “We ought to remove that.”
Pastor Flegel surveyed the situation. “We’d need a long pole or something to get it down,” he said. “There are some rakes in the shed. They might do.”
“It would be better to use a ladder,” I told him. “Otherwise we could damage the statue.”
He agreed to this, and gave me the keys to the shed. Inside was a tall stepladder that was high enough for me to reach the book. I practically ran back with it, but realized that if I seemed too eager, he might get suspicious.
My heart was pounding by the time I got there. It really does at times like that. I set up the ladder. Flegel cautioned me to be careful, and I mounted the steps until finally I was about level with the book.
I reached out, grabbed the branch and tossed it to the ground. Then I looked to see what Sally was reading.
Nothing. The pages were blank, since the sculptor thought nobody was ever going to see them from up here.
At first I was disappointed. But then I saw somebody had chipped away part of one page. A wet leaf had fallen on it and nearly covered the damage. But I brushed it aside and saw that inside the hole was something wrapped in aluminum foil.
I reached over so far that I thought I might fall. Flegel called out to me to be careful, but I managed to pluck the thing from the hole. I knew from the way it felt what must be inside the foil.
A USB drive.
II
Caleb’s Book
Jan 11
This is the book of Caleb. If ennyone reeds it, let them no that in hear, Caleb tryed to make sens of his life. And deth.
The univers is bilions of years old, Mr. Nosker says. He red it in a book, like everything else he nose. Who realy nose? Maybee the book is lyeing. But suppose its true. How many peepol have lived in all that time? Then what does enny one persons life cownt for?
Gram is ded. Gram is ded. Grammmm issss dedddd.
She cownts for me. She was the only won who told me I was enny good.
There was a women in France who lived to be 124 yers old. That’s the longest ennyone has ever lived. They say. Who really nose?
Gram was 84. But her hussband died at 53. My granfather. I never knew him. Gram sed I looked like him. She lived without him for 31 years, but what diference does it make? Now they’re both ded.
Reallisticaly, I might live to be 80 or 90 years if I was lucky. But maybee I won’t be.
Think of all the things that might hapen to me so that I wouldnt even live that long. Get run over by a car. Burnt to death in a fire. Cut myself accidently and bleed to death. A hair dryer falls in the bathtub and illektrokutes me. Get a cramp while swiming and droun. Huricanes. Erthqakes. And thats not counting disseases. I herd about a kid in this town who died of lukeymmia, and he was only elevven. Ennything could kill me. At enny moment.
So the point is…what? I rember now. There are bilions of years before I was alive. Then 70 or 80 or 100 years when I’m alive and then bilions of years—forevver—when I wont xist enny longer. So realy, whats the point? I get a sick feeling that makes me dissy when I think about that.
Gram is ded. What else maters to her? Nothing. Nothing.
I have to stop now.
Jan 14
I started this book becaz I thoht if I culd rite down the rite questions, I would think of the ansers. But maybee I dont want to know the ansers. What good will they do me?
The only thing is, riteing in the book makes me feel that Im in control. Kids are never realy in control of very much in their lifes. Untill your in high scool, your in control of nothing, realy. Your parents are always huvvering over you to make sure you dont do ennything dangerrous. Then you get to move arownd a litle and do things they might think are dangerrous.
Dangerrous meaning ennythi
ng your parents wouldnt like. But you still have to basicaly do what they want. Stay out of truble. Get good grads. Get into colege. Hav lots of frends. Hahaha.
Ill never get into colege. Evrybody nose that. Xcept my parents. Maybee a comunity colege, but who wants to be ther?
The last time, I was riteing about being ded and it made me feel sick. When I thot about it some more, I realized that it wasnt just the idea of being ded. I mean, evrybody is goying to dye, arnt they? And if you dont xcept that as a fact, then you’re just crazy in daniel.
What made me feel sick was noing that I would be ded forevver. For the bilions of years that the univers would go on xisting. For so long that it would be just the same as if I never xisted at all. So it realy doesnt mater if you live 15 years or a hunderd. I could dye today, and it wouldnt make enny diference in the long run.
How bad could deth be? Your alyve, and bang, your ded. Of course, there are a milion disseases that mite make you sufer. Canser. Everybody’s afraid of canser. The way I see it, if you get canser, you should just toss yourself off a brige or find some paneless way to dye. That way, you wont suffer. You just have to xcept it. You have to have the guts.
But what if you went to hell?
Jan 15
Before Gram dyed I asked her if she beleeved in hell. She sed no. Becaz God loved all the creetures He maid. So thair must be heven but not hell. She sed go luk at the angel that is over her mother’s graiv. It says A falen angell may ries agan. That meens that altho the person who lyes here was a siner, she will rise on the last day and go to heven.
Is that going to hapen to everbody, I asked Gram. Even the peepol at scool who maik fun of me? She sayd yes, but they wuld be nycer in heven.
I wunder.
Jan 17
I decyded to try to rite about sumthing else today. Not deth. What’s the oppossite of deth? Life, rite? I mean, if you manaj to do sumthing in your life that makes you feel good, is that enuf?
And even if it is, you stil have the problem of what makes you feel good. My parrents are big on church. Relijon. God. They drag me there every Sunday, made me get baptised, confirmmed, and I didnt have enything to say abowt it. You sit there and lissen to the sermin and wait for God to enter your hart. I’ve been going for all fifteen years Ive been alyv, and I never felt God enter my hart.
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