Lottery

by Beth Goobie

  Somehow, she doubted it.

  Swallowing Javex, she slid the notebook into the back pocket of her jeans.

  The after-school crowd poured jubilantly through the exit, leaping headlong toward the weekend. Pushing her way through the melee, Sal paused inside the doorway, gnawing the raw mush of her lower lip. Private confessions on the phone were one thing, a public encounter in the middle of several hundred potential spies something else entirely. Brydan had had all day to stew in regret. Would he be out there waiting, or would she find herself unlocking her bike and pedaling off into the familiar desolation?

  The bike racks buzzed with the usual banter, students exchanging weekend plans, slipping on knapsacks and cycling off down the sidewalk. Keeping her head down, Sal fumbled with her chain-lock, unlocking and relocking it as the racks gradually emptied. Her heart ticked off seconds like a clock, the voices that surrounded her faded down the street and she stood alone with just two unclaimed bikes. Still Brydan didn’t show. Why would he do this to her, set her up for a day-long torture of expectation, then leave her to dissolve into absolute loneliness?

  “Sal!”

  Glancing up, she saw him cruising toward her, his face flushed but determined. “Sorry I’m late, my math class got held back.”

  The late afternoon sunlight dusted his hair with gold, and she could see every pore in his face. Leaned against the closest bike rack, she tried to disguise a massive adrenalin rush. “How come?”

  “The class next door ended up on the front lawn — someone’s idea of a practical joke when the teacher got called out. A kid coming in late told us about it, so we swarmed the windows to watch.”

  “Could you see anything?” She’d delivered the envelope to Ken Goodwin on Wednesday. Obviously it had taken him some time to work out a game plan.

  “Nah, too many trees in the way. Couldn’t see a thing, but we got held back fifteen minutes for disrupting the class.” He gave her an apologetic smile, his eyes flicking nervously across her face. “Hey, what d’you say we blow this popsicle stand?”

  As they started off down the sidewalk, she ducked her chin against the wind and tried to ignore the startled glances coming their way. Someone across the street gave a wolf howl, and a long low whistle from the school lawn reverberated sickeningly through her gut. Beside her, the quiet slap of Brydan’s gloves on his wheels kept them moving grimly forward.

  “So,” he said finally, as they turned the corner toward Wilson Park. “How was your day?”

  It was, she thought, a heroic, if plastic, effort at conversation. “I’ve been drinking a lot of Javex. You?”

  “ODed on Javex. Then I switched to Drano. I thought about trading in my stomach for a toxic waste container.”

  “God, I feel like such a catastrophe.” The words burst out of her, agonized and astonishing. She tried to choke them off, but they kept coming. “Every time I turn around, I bring more shit into someone’s life.”

  “It’s not you,” Brydan said quickly. “It’s Shadow.”

  “But it’s been like this for years.” How did she explain about her father, her hit-and-miss relationship with her mother, and the fact Dusty couldn’t grow up and get a life because he was stuck worrying about his kid sister’s problems? All her life she’d been a problem to other people — the evidence was stacked sky-high around her.

  Brydan paused at the entrance to Wilson Park. Curving his body around the flick of his lighter, he dragged deeply on a cigarette. “Okay, brace yourself,” he said. “Here it comes, the deep-six meaningful philosophy of my life.” He wheeled across the dry crackle of leaves, following the logarithm of his thoughts. “When I was in the hospital after the accident, I got pretty low. I mean, what a way to come down off acid — stuck in a hospital bed, Christmas lights everywhere, your body sawed off below the knees. I kept staring at those stumps and thinking, This is you, man. From now on, you are nothing more than what you haven’t got. I wouldn’t do rehab or talk to anyone — the doctors, my parents, even my sister Cheryl. Hell, she was the one who was driving — I blamed her for the wreck of my life.

  “Then Christmas Eve, after my family gave up on me and went home, this old lady came and sat down beside my bed. She was a volunteer. You know the type — looks like somebody exploded a pack of rouge in her face. She must’ve been at least eighty, cheerful as a Hallmark card for over eight decades. She was wearing a Santa’s hat and carrying a bag of presents. Oh swell, I thought, the great-great-GREAT-granny from hell.”

  Coasting beside him, Sal dragged her toes through the withered grass. Brydan’s words were comforting, a relaxed thoughtful flow, but they weren’t taking her where she wanted to go, away from the ache inside herself.

  Blowing a wobbly smoke circle, Brydan continued. “‘Isn’t that a nice tattoo you’ve got there, sonny,’ the old lady said to me, and then she started fishing enthusiastically inside her Santa’s bag of presents.”

  “Tattoo?” asked Sal, picking up interest.

  Brydan shot her a sideways grin. “You know hospital pyjamas. I was wearing mine backwards — another way to bitch, I guess. Anyway, I had the string ties across my front and it showed off the dragon I’ve got tattooed on my chest. It’s small, but it’s got a rose in its teeth. I call it Harry Potter. Sometime I’ll show you.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Sal flushed, thinking more about chests than dragons. “Must be a great character reference.”

  “Depends what you’re applying for,” Brydan grinned. “Anyway, this old lady handed me a little wrapped present, all pretty with a big red bow. ‘Merry Christmas, sonny,’ she said, and I was so mad and pissed off, I yelled, ‘Go to hell, you old bag. Can’t you see I just want to die?’“

  “Geez,” Sal muttered, without thinking.

  Brydan nodded. “My first Christmas without feet. Yeah, I was on a downer, but that didn’t throw the old lady one bit. ‘Ah, but you’re not going to die,’ she said with a fiendish grin, leaning into my face. ‘You see how old I am? You’re going to last even longer than me. You’ll be so old, you’ll be defecating dust balls before they finally lay you in the ground. Think about it, kiddo,’ she said, poking my arm with her long skinny claws. Damn near took off the skin, too. ‘You want to be this mean and nasty for an entire century?’“

  Sal giggled uncertainly and Brydan tilted his head back, dragging intently on his cigarette. “Then she came up with something that really blew me away. ‘Remember this, kiddo,’ she said, getting out her claws and poking me again. ‘You’re not a burden, you’re a privilege. There’s some that know this truth about themselves, and the rest ache their whole lives long trying to find it. Now you get working on yourself until you believe what I just told you, and then you go out there and grab everything life has to offer you.’ Then she got up and toddled off to poke and harass everyone else in the ward into crawling back into some self-respect. That was one cool old lady.”

  They’d stopped at a picnic table. Leaning her bike onto its kickstand, Sal sat down and stared across the park. “So you’re telling me I’m a privilege?”

  “I’m telling you that when I started believing I was a privilege, the world threw off the slime it was wrapped in, and nothing was ever the same again.”

  “Yeah, but ...” With you, it’s just your feet — she couldn’t come out and say that to Brydan. How did she know what his feet meant to him? Maybe losing your feet was just as bad as watching the brains of someone you loved blown across the horizon of the rest of your life.

  “But what?” Brydan asked immediately, right on her, and for a moment she considered it — opening to the words that would describe that long ago, helpless shattering. But what would be the point? It couldn’t change what had actually happened, and just thinking about mentioning it was sending her head into dizzy dangerous swerves.

  “I’ve got something to show you,” she said, diving into an abrupt change of subject. Pulling Willis’s notebook from her pocket, she shoved it at him. “It’s full of Shadow’s s
ecret code, the way they talk between themselves.”

  Slowly Brydan perused it, so quiet she could hear the ember flare as he dragged on his cigarette. “I’ve seen them pulling some of this stuff. I never realized — ” He stared off thoughtfully.

  “Realized what?”

  “It was all so meaningless,” he said almost helplessly. “You see them do this code thing, and it makes them seem so — I dunno — so goddam glamorous and important, with their hand signals and meetings and duties. But when you find out what it actually means ... What kind of idiots go through all the effort to make up a secret hand signal for ‘We are gods’? It’s like Saturday morning cartoons. ‘Low-level’? ‘Under-human’! Y’know what this is — just another version of ‘my dick’s bigger than your dick.’ That’s all it is.”

  “I guess that’s the reason for the code — so we won’t figure out they’re no different than the rest of us,” Sal mumbled, trying to ignore the heat that engulfed her. Why couldn’t someone invent a female brain that wasn’t always thinking about sex? But then again, would she want it?

  “Why d’you think we need them?” Brydan asked. “I mean, we must need them for something, or we wouldn’t be paying them any attention, right?”

  Sal leaned into the thought, feeling very intent. “What d’you mean, need them?”

  “I mean, what do they do for us?” asked Brydan. “If they didn’t exist, who would we be without them?”

  And suddenly she knew, the answer coming to her as clearly as if the words had been spoken by Willis Cass himself.

  It was Dusty who opened the door that Sunday afternoon, then stood without speaking in the doorway, ignoring the rain that splattered against his face. Sitting halfway up the staircase to the second floor, Sal had a good view of the encounter taking place in the front hall — her brother’s merciless gargoyle glare and just beyond him, Willis, hunched in his windbreaker, the wind blowing back his hair so that his sideburns could be seen outlined clearly against his face. She’d agreed in advance to let Dusty answer the door — he’d kicked up a mini-uproar that morning when he’d heard Willis was coming over, and she was more than a little curious to see how he’d handle the shadowy president. Now, watching the two silently stare each other down, she found herself more interested in her brother — the cold open anger in his gaze, the fall of long thin hair down his back, his faded AC/DC t-shirt. Everything about him said “low-level” and “under-human” but there he was, his tall skinny body defending the front doorway for her like a bare electric wire.

  “Could I speak to Sal?” Willis asked finally, his voice carefully casual.

  “Maybe,” said Dusty.

  Willis stared back, unblinking. “You looking for an apology for times past?”

  “I’m looking for a guarantee,” said Dusty. “You know what for. Though a guarantee from scum isn’t much of a guarantee, is it?”

  Willis blinked, then nodded. “You’ll have to take my scummy word for what it’s worth, I guess.”

  Dusty spat. “Shadow’s honor?”

  “Shadow’s honor,” said Willis, shifting to avoid catching the goober on his shoe.

  Turning to look over his shoulder, Dusty hollered, “Sal!” and just as they’d agreed, she came thumping down the stairs, pretending to be completely unaware of the encounter that had taken place.

  “Hi.” It was difficult to feel shy after watching that front-door scene. Leading Willis past Dusty’s glower and her mother’s welcoming handshake, she took him downstairs into Retro-Whatever. This scene had also been planned in advance — she’d left the overhead light off for effect, and now watched gleefully as Willis rotated at the center of the room, following the ooze of the lava lamp across the orange shag ceiling, walls and floor.

  “This,” he said slowly, “is a completely alternate reality.”

  “My brother and his friend Lizard did it.”

  “Lizard?” Willis asked faintly. “As in Lewis Jones, former member of the Celts?”

  “Yeah, they’re still best friends,” said Sal. “Lizard practically lives here. We keep him on a leash in the backyard.”

  “Oh good.” Willis avoided her eyes. “I’d like to get out of here in one piece.”

  He’d brought his own music stand and began to set up in front of the two chairs she’d arranged at one end of the room. Flicking on the overhead light, she sat beside him and ran through a few scales. She’d been warming up, on and off, for hours, and after a few squeaks, the reed settled into a comfortable vibration against her lower lip. For the next hour, they ran through “Inside the Question,” trying out all of Willis’s practice patterns — breaking the melodies into riffs, playing it straight through as eighth notes, inverting intervals, attempting it backward.

  “You can’t play it like this,” Sal protested halfway through the last version, dissolving into giggles. “The hawk crashes into the ground, doesn’t it?”

  “Your part doesn’t though.” Willis lowered his trumpet to his knee, oddly quiet.

  “I am the ground,” Sal shot back, sudden bitterness catching her. “I can’t get any lower.”

  “I never thought of your part as the ground,” said Willis. “More like a river, with the hawk’s reflection floating across the surface.”

  “So my part is actually you, upside down?”

  “Maybe.”

  Their eyes met, and she was trapped inside the intensity of his gaze.

  “What would you do, Sally Hanson,” he asked softly, “if you were me? What would you do if you were Shadow president, and the feel of it climbed like snake slime up your throat? If everywhere you went, people either avoided you or sucked up to you because getting on your good side meant keeping off Shadow’s duty list? I look in the mirror and my face gets further and further away, there’s so much shit piled in front of it. I reek, I can’t bear the stench of myself or any of my so-called friends. The only place I can get away from it, the only place I can truly see myself now, is when I look at you.”

  “Me?” croaked Sal.

  “You haunt me like the hawk’s reflection in the river,” Willis said hoarsely. “You’re my shadow, my other option. The choice.”

  “I never chose to become the victim,” she spluttered.

  “No, but I would be,” said Willis. “If I kicked up flack on Shadow or resigned, that’s what they’d do to me — turn me into you. I’d be choosing to become you.”

  Did Willis really see other people as low-flying versions of himself? White-hot phrases exploded in Sal’s head, she felt the rage her brother’s body had radiated at the front door. “You might become the victim, Willis,” she said softly, tasting the pride in her voice, savoring it. “But you’d never become me.”

  He flinched, then took a deep breath. “What d’you say we ask your brother to sit in and listen to us? And your mother? We could use a practice audience.”

  Her mother had gone out, but Dusty tucked himself into the beanbag chair and listened remorselessly, his eyes closed, his body motionless. When they’d run through “Inside the Question” several times, he finally straightened and began pulling on his knuckles, cracking them one by one. Instantly Willis stiffened, as if coming to attention before a superior.

  “Y’know,” said Dusty quietly, studying his hands. “They use all kinds of shit and garbage as compost to help flowers grow. And you’re blooming, Sal, you’re a beautiful yellow rose.”

  Unfolding his long thin body, he silently left the room, and Sal knew this was as close as Willis would ever come to receiving a compliment from her brother.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Monday morning brought another barrage of envelopes, delivered to her locker by Judy Sinclair. “Deliver before 9 AM, no exceptions,” said Judy crisply. Avoiding Sal’s eyes, she handed over the envelopes.

  As if, thought Sal, I’m a machine, or something not quite here. That’s what they’re all pretending — I’m not real, just a symbol. And you can do anything you want to a symbol.

>   Judy’s hand fluttered nervously across her carefully curled hair, then touched the center of her forehead. “And there’s a meeting at noon,” she added tersely. “Don’t be late.”

  Sal recognized the code from reading Willis’s notebook. Shadow Council used a system in which the human face was overlaid with a clock to indicate meeting times — touching the center of the forehead meant twelve o’clock, the chin six o’clock, and so on. But why would Judy use this signal with the victim? The only code Sal supposedly knew was the Sign of the Inside. Did they suspect she’d picked up Willis’s notebook, or were Shadow Council members so caught up in their secret coded world that they sometimes forgot who was “inside” and who was “outside”?

  The name and homeroom of each target had been paper-clipped to the respective envelope. Ditching her curiosity about the contents, Sal concentrated on delivering the envelopes before classes began. Sometimes she knew what kind of misery they contained, sometimes she didn’t — what did it matter? Her job was simply to get them to the targets on time. By now she’d learned to erect an effective barrier against the expressions of startled dislike she received as she handed out duties. This morning’s only twinge of regret came as she delivered the final envelope to Jenny Weaver, last year’s victim, and watched the look of weary resignation cross her face. So it was out of the fire and back into the frying pan with everyone else — surviving a year as victim didn’t guarantee anyone a leap onto Shadow Council’s protected list.

  Twelve o’clock found her at the Celts’ clubroom door, giving the victim’s knock — three short and two long. When she was admitted, she discovered her usual corner stacked with posters for an upcoming garage sale fundraiser that was being held for the drama department. Dragging her footstool to another corner, she watched as each Celt claimed the quota of posters for delivery, then took up a position in the circle formed by the couch and chairs. Immediately the hand signals and foot tapping began, Willis undulating his right hand through the air and everyone following suit.