Tradition

by Brendan Kiely

  “I can ruin you,” he continued. “And everyone you care about. I can sue your ass and sue your family and bankrupt that shitty little hardware store back in Bumfuck Nowhere and ruin you and everyone. I can do that. One call. Remember that, you dumb fuck. That’s what I can do. You can’t do anything. You’re nobody. You’ll always be nobody.”

  I let go and was about to punch him in the face, when I heard my name.

  “Bax! Bax! Stop!” Jules shouted. “Jesus, Bax, don’t do this! This isn’t helping.”

  My fist shook and I wanted to knock him so hard so bad, but I held back. I stepped back. I let go. Hackett pushed me in the chest, but I knocked his hands away and he didn’t try again. He stepped away from the wall.

  “Don’t!” Jules shouted again. She came running up and stood so we could both see her. “He’s not worth it.”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “It might be worth it to make sure he can never smile again.”

  “Don’t,” Jules said. She was terrified and her eyes were wet. “This won’t help. Don’t do this.”

  Neither Hackett nor I knew what to say. We stood there catching our breath as Jules continued. “Just let him go. He’s not worth it,” she said again.

  Hackett stepped away from us, and picked up the guitar, which had fallen to the ground. There were some other people coming out of Mary Lyon now, mostly students, but I wasn’t sure if Mrs. Attison was there too. Everybody else was in the shadow between the porch and where we were. “Well, there you go, Buckeye from Bumfuck Nowhere,” Hackett said. He tried to collect himself as he walked backward, away from us. “And, oh, I’ll remember, all right. I’ll remember.”

  Jules grabbed my wrist and I stayed put. I needed to do something. I needed to break something. I needed to break someone, but in the end, all that breaking only breaks yourself—and I knew it, I just couldn’t stop myself.

  Hackett speed-walked to Tapper, and I turned back to Jules, shaking. I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. My body wasn’t working right.

  She held me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I need you here, Bax,” she said as we hugged. “Please. Please. Please. Don’t do that.”

  “I can’t just let him get away with that. I can’t let him get away with everything,” I said. “I don’t understand. I don’t know how to fix it.”

  “Just keep your shit together and stand by me, please,” she said. “I need friends, Bax. I don’t need friends getting booted from school.”

  “I was coming to look for you,” I said. “That’s exactly what I wanted to say. I wanted you to know I was your friend. That guy . . .” I pointed toward Tapper. “That guy . . .” I fought to find the right words. “I’m sorry. I left you hanging. I left you on your own. I didn’t know.”

  “I have a lot to tell you,” Jules said.

  I hugged her. “I just wanted you to know I was your friend. I wanted you to know I wanted to help.”

  “You want to help, you stick around, Bax. You stick by me, man.”

  “I will,” I said. “I will.”

  “I need to know you’re my friend, not just when I’m around, but when I’m not in the room, you know? I need to know you’re the friend who’s sticking up for me, when I’ll never hear it.”

  “I am. I really am.”

  “And not this way. You don’t have to prove anything this way,” she said.

  I nodded, and we pulled apart. She took my hand. “Besides,” she continued, “I’m working on something. I don’t know what yet. But something. I need you to not get kicked out of school so you can help.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said as we walked into the shadows beyond Mary Lyon, walking away from everyone who was still lingering out front waiting to see if anything else would happen. Nothing did. Jules and I just skipped dinner and I listened to her tell me everything she had to tell until lights-out at eleven o’clock.

  CHAPTER 32

  * * *

  JULES DEVEREUX

  Now that the Winter Ball committee had published the list, it was all anybody spoke about, but when I saw the list, and I saw Lianne’s name next to Ethan’s, all I could think of was how quickly he’d forgotten me. His hands had pushed and kneaded my body as if it was clay, as if there was nothing else inside me, no person, no me at all. If he’d ever seen me, seen the person he once thought of as his girlfriend, how could he have forgotten? Or had he ever really seen me in the first place? What could he do to Lianne?

  I tried to catch her in the hall in Mary Lyon, and then again at lunch, but she avoided me. Finally, I found her between classes at the end of the day. She was walking with two other first-year girls, and they hung back when I said hello. Lianne flashed them a scathing look, so I knew something was up.

  “Hey,” I said to her. “What’s going on? You’re avoiding me.”

  “Nothing’s up, Jules,” she said. She swallowed and continued, staring at the ground and talking to me out of the side of her mouth. “Except you stalking me.”

  I was so stunned I walked beside her silently until I got to the language building, and Lianne kept going and her friends caught up with her and the three of them huddled together as they walked on to the math building, one of them looking back at me over her shoulder.

  The next day, when I was getting a coffee at the student center and I saw her alone at a table with her headphones on, texting with someone, I thought I’d give it one last shot. She was beaming as she thumb-typed away, until she looked up and saw me across the table. Her smile dropped immediately.

  “Wow. Did you just appear out of nowhere?” she asked, taking off her headphones.

  “Sorry,” I said. “You were kind of wrapped up in your own world.”

  “Yeah.” She fidgeted, looking for an escape immediately.

  “Hey, I’m just going to come right out and say it. I know you’ve been talking to Ethan.”

  Her eyes darted around the room.

  “And I am not stalking you. I’m just saying be careful. He’s nice, I know, but he’s also, I don’t know, not nice sometimes.” I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t find the words. Her phone buzzed. “Are you texting with him right now?”

  She sighed. “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not?”

  “You don’t have to, you know.”

  “Why wouldn’t I? It’s fun.”

  “But is he?”

  “Oh my God. He’s just being nice. I know the two of you were scoring last year, but like, I’m sorry. It’s all set up.”

  I tried to stay calm. “If it gets weird at any point, you know you can ask me. I mean, I’ve navigated these guys for the last four years.”

  “Thanks,” she said, although it sure sounded more like Get out of my face.

  “It’s just, they give you all this attention and then they graduate. Older boys, I mean.”

  “I’m really fine,” Lianne said. “In fact, maybe there’s something you should know.” She looked around and then leaned closer to the table. “Some of the senior girls have already talked to most of us in our grade. They’ve been super helpful. They’ve explained why we don’t need to get all paranoid.” She stopped and looked away.

  “Go on.”

  “Like you. They said. Nobody wants to end up crazy like Jules, they said.”

  I tried to hold a straight face, but I was sure I wasn’t doing a good job.

  “I, like, feel bad for you,” Lianne went on. “It’s really mean, I know, but also, truthfully, you look super pissed all the time. I don’t want to be like that.”

  I could picture Gillian giving this lecture. I could see her waving her hand and dismissing me, calling Aileen a slut and me paranoid. “Please,” I said to Lianne, reaching for her. “Don’t think I’m crazy. I’m not.”

  “I don’t,” Lianne said. She yanked her hand free. “I just think you’re super lonely. I’m not going to do that to myself.” She smiled and caught someone coming into the center through th
e doors from the workout rooms. She waved. I could feel the heat of bodies approaching me from behind. “Hey, guys,” she said.

  I didn’t turn around, because I couldn’t be sure my face wouldn’t crumble.

  “What’s up, Lianne.” It was Freddie. “You do something different with your hair? Looks nice.”

  “Thanks!”

  Freddie and two of his hockey buddies hovered beside me. “Jules, man, you are becoming the most unfriendly person at Fullbrook. What happened to the old Fullbrook hello?” He laughed.

  “You’re not a stranger, Freddie. You’re the same jerk I’ve known for three and a half years.”

  “Wow. She’s as cold as ice.” He half sang it, like the song lyric. “Lianne, you have to be careful around this one. She’s toxic.”

  “Actually,” Lianne said, standing and grabbing her phone and headphones, “I was wondering if one of you guys was heading to the dorms. My back is killing me after my workout and I seriously need a hand with my bag. I have like five hours of homework.”

  “Yeah, we’re all heading that way,” Freddie said. He stooped, grabbed her bag, and tossed it to one of his buddies. “Let’s go.”

  She giggled and joined them. They all walked away, and even before they got to the front door, I heard a squeal of joy. Lianne had hopped up onto Freddie’s hips so he could give her a piggyback ride to the dorm. Nobody else in the room batted an eye. If they noticed it, they didn’t care. Everything was normal.

  But normal scared me. Normal was the way Lianne had stared me down with a stiff, frozen distance and the way she melted into a soft S when she said hello to Freddie. Normal was Ethan texting her every day in the lead-up to the Winter Ball. I couldn’t help but think about what else might be normal. Was Ethan slumped over me against the tree normal? Was it normal how easy it was for him to just forget Gillian, or not care about her, as soon as we were alone and pressed together? Was it normal for him to not think or care about what that would mean to her, or to me?

  This wasn’t a new normal. It was all the same old normal that had been here for years—the same old normal, just dressed up in a brand-new jacket and tie.

  When I stepped outside, it was already starting to get dark. Dinner wasn’t for another hour, but I still needed to drop my books and bag back in my room. As I walked down the road toward Old Main, I heard something in the sky, south, by the highway. I looked up and squinted, and saw a black shadow knifing through the dusk light, the blades chopping as it drifted closer, dropping lower and lower as it approached Fullbrook. The helicopter ripped by overhead and the noise it made sucked up all the air around it. Stunned, I watched it hover over the academic quad and slowly sink like a black claw reaching down to the ground from the sky.

  Cray-Cray’s security cart was parked in the footpath on the far side of the quad, and he rushed over to greet the man in a suit climbing out of the helicopter. They got in the cart and Cray-Cray came zooming up the path around the grass toward the admin building. A squat man in a black suit, head hunched forward like an old dog’s, sat in the passenger seat, and even though he was partially obscured by the netting, I could still see who was in the back, his knees hiked up onto the bench because there wasn’t enough legroom.

  I shouldn’t have been so surprised. Ethan’s father had arrived at Fullbrook like this before. I’d been there last year when he came for the ceremony of putting the Hackett family name on a plaque on the new wing of the science building, and I’d seen him arrive for a board meeting the year before that. He never stayed for very long. An hour, tops. The helicopter remained on the quad, waiting for him. It would do so again tonight, and as the helicopter lifted him into the sky, its spotlight would cut across the campus.

  For some reason, the thought of a helicopter’s spotlight slicing through the campus at night spooked me. It was like that feeling you might have walking at night and knowing that someone is watching you but you can’t see anyone there, or worse, like there’s someone or something in your house and there’s nothing you can do about it.

  Cray-Cray’s cart zoomed around the bend in the path, and for an instant, Ethan’s face was lit up by the walkway light overhead. He didn’t look toward me; he probably didn’t even know I was there. He probably didn’t care.

  He didn’t have to. They were going to see Mr. Patterson. It made me sick to think of the three of them sitting in the office together—just as Ms. Taggart and I had. I suddenly hated him. I hated him as much as I hated Ethan, maybe even more. It was one thing to ignore me, to abandon me, to talk about “looking into things.” But it was another to shred my relationship with Ms. Taggart too. To tear her down in front of me and put her in her place. To turn her into a liar, too—we’re going to keep pushing, she’d told me, but we hadn’t. If Ethan had robbed me of my sense of safety, Mr. Patterson had robbed me of my hope. At a place like Fullbrook, a man could do whatever he wanted to me, to anyone, and get away with it. Ethan. Mr. Patterson. It was built to protect them, not me.

  CHAPTER 33

  * * *

  JAMES BAXTER

  They put me on probation.

  “It wasn’t a fight,” I told my parents. It was the same thing I’d told Patterson, but he hadn’t listened, and now I was on the phone with them and they weren’t listening either.

  Dad’s only bit of advice about my going to Fullbrook lurked in the background—he didn’t have to say it, because it was loud enough in my head already. Don’t screw it up. Don’t screw it up. Don’t screw it up. I could see them back home, in the kitchen, the burnt-orange afternoon light melting over the chipped table and the faded brown tiles beneath it. They were saying the same things Mr. Patterson and Coach O had told me. How disappointed they were with me. How irresponsible I was, disrespectful I was—how ungrateful, self-sabotaging, undisciplined, unruly, and lazy.

  “You’re on probation?” They were both on the line, but Dad was always so much louder. “Have you lost your mind?”

  “No. I haven’t. I’m actually doing well.”

  “What is the matter with you, Jamie?” he continued, as if he hadn’t heard me. “You can’t control yourself for half a minute. As soon as it bugs you, you snap. No thinking at all.”

  “Forethought.”

  “What?”

  “The word you’re looking for is ‘forethought.’ I don’t have forethought, you’re saying.”

  “Don’t get smart-mouthed with me. Goddamnit, what is wrong with you, son?”

  I smiled. I was being a jerk—I knew it. But there was something about being called a smart mouth, the fact that I knew enough about a thing to be sarcastic about it, that made me feel good, too. It wasn’t good, but it was honest, and that felt like the world to me.

  I wasn’t sure why I’d said it, and I apologized, but it didn’t matter because he was so angry he yelled more and then told me he was too mad to talk. Apple didn’t fall far from the tree. I heard him hit the table at least twice while we were on the phone. He’d never hit me. Really hit me, I mean. With a closed fist. He was shorter than I was, but I still cowered next to him sometimes. Some guys can do that to you. And whatever he was yelling about on the phone, it drove me crazy, because out on the ice everyone went bonkers when a fight broke out in the middle of a game. The fights are why anybody goes to a hockey game, a clerk at Walmart once told me, straight to my face, when I was buying a new pair of gloves. Control yourself, Dad always said. It was nuts—everybody wanted me to be two different kinds of people all the time.

  When Dad hung up on me, I held the phone so tightly, I thought I might crush it. I wanted to punch a hole in the wall. Instead, I sucked in as much air as I could and breathed it back out. I smiled. “How’s that for control?” I said out loud, with no one there to applaud me.

  CHAPTER 34

  * * *

  JULES DEVEREUX

  It smelled like snow. Only a few scattered clouds crept across the sky, but the air still felt too crisp, almost burned, like all the moisture was gathering int
o something solid, something we could feel.

  Aileen and Javi were slightly ahead of us, up the path, and Bax was telling me about Coach O giving him the cold shoulder at early morning practice. It was Saturday. He was supposed to have late afternoon practice too.

  He walked with his head down, talking to his toes. “A bawling out would have been better,” he said. “It would have been normal. All that silence? Made me crazy.”

  “Meanwhile Ethan’s with the ski team, probably taking selfies at the top of Jiminy Peak,” I said. “Doesn’t seem fair.”

  “It’s not,” Bax said. He paused and looked at me. He put a hand on my shoulder, something he was doing a lot now, looking at me with too much pity. It was annoying.

  “I was talking about how it’s not fair for you,” I said. “Not me.”

  “No. I know,” he said. “It isn’t. But here’s what gets me. So I have most of the team pissed at me right now, like I’m some kind of aberration, like I’ve disturbed their sense of calm.”

  “Yeah,” I said. It hit home. I knew exactly how that felt.

  “But what I’m saying is, no one is giving Hackett a hard time. They’re all giving me a hard time for giving him a hard time. Like everybody would be cool if I just ignored it, kept pushing things along like normal, but because I’m not, because I can’t do that, they all have a serious problem with me.” He hesitated. “Like people all have a serious problem with you. Like if you’d just shut up they’d like you more.”

  We followed Aileen and Javi off the main path and started up the hill toward Horn Rock. That was exactly it, wasn’t it? What are you making such a big deal out of, Jules? It’s not like anything really bad happened. I’d heard that so many times I was starting to think I was crazy, but the thing was, I wasn’t. It was terrifying to think I might be right, and Fullbrook and all the rest of the people there were the crazy ones. Why was it easier for the whole school to let Ethan be Ethan and to tell me to shut up about it, instead?