Whatever, she thought. If Benny just wanted a secretary to help him solve mysteries, she’d be such a good secretary she’d blow his mind. She pulled Trevor’s phone out of her bag. Maybe if she stared long enough at the photo of the golf team dragging the caddie, a clue would magically present itself.
Figure this out, she commanded herself. You don’t need Benny Flax. Benny Flax needs YOU.
The photo didn’t even shock her anymore. It was freaky how quickly her mind had adjusted to the reality of things: that the golfers were violent racist bullies, that Trevor Cheek was an attempted murderer. It wasn’t even that surprising. Trevor had always been a Neanderthal who liked pushing people around. It was only a matter of time before his bullying went too far, and probably only a matter of time before it would happen again. But Benny didn’t seem to think that was their problem. He didn’t believe in interfering, Virginia had long observed. Mystery Club only went in after the blood was already on the ground.
She zoomed the photo on the caddie’s face, a blurry blob of facial features contorted in pain. The weird thing was that the more Virginia looked at it, the more it seemed like he wasn’t actually screaming, he was laughing. Then she’d zoom out, and it would look like a scream again. Then she’d zoom in and feel certain it was a laugh.
Then she noticed something else. A tiny bit of hand that wasn’t the right color, like it had been cut and pasted onto the wrong body.
Oh my god. Oh my god.
Suddenly Virginia knew exactly who the caddie was. She jumped up from the couch and lunged for the phone. She was dialing Benny’s number when she noticed the computer. A new message had appeared in her in-box. She set the phone down and opened it.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: (no subject)
DO NOT RESPOND TO THIS MESSAGE. Account is possibly being monitored
got on my dad’s computer. Voting data for student body prez has been deleted. Data from other elections (prom theme, Homecoming Queen etc.) is still on the cloud, so looks like someone intentionally deleted prez files. Hope that is helpful
so sorry about almost getting us killed. Are u going to the dance? Look at your Rx and if it’s Percocet or anything w “oxy” or “codone” in the name plz bring all of it. Also bring a passport if u have one.
Sry I can’t write more, no time. But to answer your question,
YES
Benny’s house, 6:00 p.m.
The governor was on the news again. He was addressing allegations that his personal conflict with the lobbyist Garland White had resulted in the loss of four thousand jobs for the state. He was “apologizing.” Benny put the sound on mute and studied the governor’s face. He was a robust and red-blooded Southern man. But there was a disturbing lack of depth behind his eyes, as if he were a cardboard cutout who would tip over if faced with an actual thought. They were the eyes of a man who no longer possessed a soul. How did it happen? At what point in a man’s life did he wake up and find himself as hollow as a drum? A beat still pounding in the absence of a heart.
It is my wish that the world should know everlasting peace.
Benny always did his aikido exercises in the living room during the news while his mother made dinner in the kitchen. He felt it was beneficial for his father to observe this ritual in whatever foggy capacity he was able to. The translation of aikido meant “the way of unifying with life energy.” It was a martial art based on purely defensive action. The aikido fighter was trained to evade and redirect attacks in such a way that caused harm to no one, not even the attacker. The idea was that everyone is deserving of empathy and compassion, even those who seek to destroy you. It didn’t require physical strength or brute aggression: only focus and awareness, and the desire to understand your enemy rather than hate them.
It is my wish that the world should know everlasting peace.
He said the mantra again, but the words felt empty. Benny looked at his dad, who was gazing mutely at a spot on the floor. He had the face of a dazed old man. It was hard to remember sometimes that this person was his father and not his grandfather or even great-grandfather—one of those old Holocaust survivors you encountered every once in a while at temple. Usually when Benny looked at his dad—really looked at him—he was filled with a kind of aggravated despair that was hard to describe. But right now he felt nothing, except for a vague alarm at his own numbness. Had it begun for him? The hollowing-out of his soul?
Stop being dramatic, he told himself. He felt as exhausted as a sled dog. He needed to sleep for twenty hours before attempting to unify with life energy. It had been a rough week. Benny had never worked so hard for something in his life. He’d aced three tests and pulled four extra-credit assignments out of thin air. He’d done bonus labs for chemistry, and read the entirety of Moby Dick in three days so he could turn the essay in early. He’d slept a total of eight hours since Monday. He was so tired he barely felt human. But he’d done it. The invitation to the Governor’s Mansion was his. And now he had an entire month to plan what to do with it. Plotting and scheming was not “the way,” Benny knew. But somehow he’d been able to push that out of his mind. He’d pushed a lot of things out of his mind this week.
“I’m going to bed,” he announced to no one.
Rrrrrrring!
It was the phone. His mother picked it up in the kitchen. “Flax residence. . . . One moment, please. Benjamin,” she said, holding out the cordless phone to him. Benny could tell from the tone of her voice that it was Virginia. Benny avoided his mother’s eyes as he took the phone.
“Hello?” he said, going into his room and shutting the door.
“Benny?” The voice wasn’t Virginia’s. It was small and girlish and hesitant.
“Yes?”
“Um, it’s me. Chrissie?”
“Oh. Hi,” Benny said, caught off-guard. He wasn’t great on the phone; he knew that about himself. He’d developed a fairly comfortable rapport with Virginia, but it didn’t really translate to other girls.
“I was just wondering . . .” Chrissie’s voice trailed off, obviously requiring encouragement to go on.
I can’t deal with you right now, he said in his mind, wishing he had the courage to say it out loud. “Yes?”
“Are you going to the dance tomorrow?”
“Yes,” Benny said. “I always attend school events.”
“Because, you know, it’s girls-ask-guys. . . .” There was a long pause. Then Benny realized: She wants to ask me. His stomach twisted with dread.
“Are you going?” he prompted dutifully, wishing he could just hang up the phone. Awkward social pressures were his kryptonite; if he wasn’t careful, he’d end up going to the dance with Chrissie just to be polite and to put this phone conversation out of its misery.
“Um, I’m not sure. . . .”
Oh my god, Benny thought. She was trying to get him to ask her, which not only put him in an impossible position, but defeated the entire purpose of Mrs. Jewel’s women’s empowerment scheme.
“Well, I’ll definitely see you there,” Benny said, trying to sound kind but firm at the same time.
“Do you want to know what color my dress is?” Chrissie asked.
Benny rubbed his temples. Why on earth would he want to know the color of her dress? Was this kindergarten? “Um, sure,” he answered.
“It’s Carolina blue. So . . . a yellow corsage would be really pretty. Maybe a yellow rose?”
A corsage? Benny wished he could die. “Got it. Okay. I have to go. I’ll see you there. Bye.”
He hit the “End” button. Then he buried his face in his pillow, taunted by visions of corsages. Carolina blue? Was that different from regular blue?
Rrrrrrring!
Benny groaned into the pillow. Then he picked up the phone, not wanting his mother to answer it first. “Yes?” he said, knowing how rude he sounded and hating himself for it.
“Guess what?” The voice wasn’t Chrissie’s. It
was Virginia’s. Thank god, Benny thought. The anxious knot in his stomach loosened. He started taking his shoes off and flopped onto his bed.
“What?”
“There is no caddie. The caddie doesn’t exist.”
“Huh?”
“There is no caddie!” she repeated, and then started rambling a hundred miles an hour about a white hand and smudged pants and how the golf team were all psychopaths.
“Virginia, stop. What are you talking about?”
“I know who the caddie is!” she shrieked. Benny held the phone away from his ear.
“Okay, then just tell me,” he said. “Slowly.”
“The caddie . . . is . . .”
“Oh my god, not that slow.”
“It’s Craig. That’s why you can’t see him in any of the pictures. The caddie is Craig!”
Benny sat up, trying to focus on what she was saying. “What do you mean, the caddie is Craig?”
“If you look closely at the photo, you can see that he’s laughing. And his hand is white. Remember the smudges you pointed out on the caddie’s pants? You thought it was blood, but it wasn’t. It was paint. They painted Craig black. Isn’t that, like, horrifying?”
“They painted Craig black,” Benny repeated.
“Yeah. So they could drag him around. Like, as a gross joke.”
“That’s—that’s—” Benny couldn’t think of a decent word. There was no decent word. It was . . . indecent. It was foul.
“Those guys are crazy,” Virginia was saying. “They made Craig their punching bag. And he liked it.”
“Craig likes attention. He doesn’t care how he gets it.”
Benny didn’t know what else to say. He felt stunned. Who were these people? They thought this was funny? He tried to wrap his mind around it. It wasn’t an assault; it was a joke. Somehow the former had been easier to comprehend. These were his classmates. He saw their faces every day. They all lived in the same city as him and had the same teachers. They wore literally the same clothes. But the way their minds worked was utterly baffling, as if they were aliens. Or maybe Benny was the alien.
“It’s, like, pathological,” Virginia was saying. Benny was pretty sure she didn’t understand what that word meant.
“Racism isn’t a pathology,” he corrected her. “It’s a prejudiced point of view. You can’t take a Xanax and stop being racist.”
“Whatever. Those guys are insane.”
“It’s not productive to dismiss people as insane just because they think differently. . . .” Benny trailed off. He felt too tired to have a philosophical debate about a bunch of assholes whose brains would probably explode if they examined themselves for five seconds. You have everything! Benny wanted to scream at them. Why are you so threatened by people scraping to get the tiniest bit for themselves?
“So what do we do?” Virginia asked.
Benny closed his eyes. He unzipped his pants and slid them off, getting under the covers. “What do you mean?” He yawned.
“Craig only got suspended for two weeks. Trevor didn’t get punished at all. It doesn’t seem fair.”
“Punishment isn’t our concern.”
On the other end of the line, Virginia made a frustrated noise. “Well, what’s the point of this, then? What’s the point of Mystery Club if we just let everyone get away with everything?”
“I don’t know,” Benny said lifelessly. They’d had this argument before. Normally he would have launched into a speech about the power of knowledge, and how understanding was the goal, not judgment. How all human beings were flawed. No one could presume to know what was right for anyone else. But Benny didn’t have the energy to stand behind his own credo at the moment.
“I have to go to sleep,” he said. “It’s been a really long week.”
“Yeah, I barely saw you. . . . Did you get your magical four points?”
“I did,” Benny answered. Four points. It was telling that Virginia remembered the exact number. Obviously she expected an explanation for his sudden interest in his grades. But he wasn’t prepared to give her one.
“Is this about that lunch at the Governor’s Mansion?” she asked out of the blue.
Benny’s heart thudded. She’d caught him. She always did. Virginia was better at this stuff than she realized. People’s facades didn’t fool her. He looked at the phone in his hand, considering how to proceed. Then he pressed it back to his ear.
“Can I give you some advice?” he pivoted. “About investigating?”
“Sure.” Virginia sounded annoyed.
“If you have a question like that, never ask over the phone. You need to see someone’s face to know if you’re getting the truth.”
There was a long pause. Then Benny said, “I really need to go to sleep. See you tomorrow at the dance.”
“Should we meet out front and go in together?” Virginia asked. Benny could sense a current of interest beneath the casualness of her voice. She knows Chrissie asked me, he thought. But she doesn’t know if I said yes. He’d been noticing this about Virginia lately: she was learning how to use information. How to dangle it to get what she wanted, rather than using it as a bludgeon. It was a little unsettling, witnessing someone evolve before your eyes.
“Let’s meet inside.”
For a crucial second she didn’t say anything. Then she said, “Okeydoke. Well, bye then.”
“Bye. I lo—” Benny stopped himself. Jesus. That had been way too close. He’d almost just said “I love you” to Virginia Leeds. Surely it wasn’t some big Freudian slip. It was only a habit from always saying it to his mom on the phone.
“Did you just say something?” Virginia asked. “Oh my god, I’m having déjà vu right now. This is so weird. . . .”
Benny turned off the lamp and pulled his comforter up to his chin. “Did you know there are three forms of déjà vu?”
“God, you sound tired. Are you in bed right now?”
“Yep. . . .” It struck Benny how weirdly intimate it was, talking on the phone in bed. It was basically being in bed with someone.
“You’re like a ninety-year-old man, going to bed this early.”
“That’s me.”
“Well, good night, old fogey.”
“Good night. I lo—” Jesus! He almost wanted to laugh, it was so ridiculous.
“What do you keep stuttering?”
“Nothing. Good night.”
“Night.”
There was a pause as each of them waited for the other to hang up. Then Benny heard the dial tone in his ear. He pushed end and dropped the phone onto the floor. He was so excited to go to sleep, it almost made him feel energized again. But he dreaded waking up in the morning. Without exhaustion to numb him, he’d have to feel his feelings. Without studying to distract him, he’d have to think his thoughts. Benny had always been a very mentally organized person. But the last week had been too overwhelming. His school was controlled by racist oligarchs. Virginia continued to get into cars with criminals. Chrissie White had unloaded some very weird information on him, which—if true—basically meant that Benny’s entire life as he knew it was a lie.
Don’t think about it, Benny ordered himself. He knew that if he thought about it, he wouldn’t be able to sleep, and if he couldn’t get some sleep, he was going to fall apart. I’m going to fall apart anyway, he thought miserably. He wasn’t sure if Chrissie even understood the full implications of what she’d told him that night. She seemed incredibly, almost insufferably oblivious. And now Benny would have to buy her a yellow rose—Virginia’s flower—and spend an entire evening with her in her Carolina-colored dress, whatever that entailed.
Dewdrop, let me cleanse in your brief sweet waters . . . These dark hands of life.
He’d forgotten his idea to touch the dew on the grass in the morning. It came rushing back to him now, like a much-needed hug. He could almost feel the cold, beautiful droplets on his fingertips. It was going to be okay. Everything was going to be okay. Benny was asleep before
the good feeling could evaporate. The way dew always did.
Saturday
Calvin’s house, 7:30 p.m.
It was like looking in a mirror—a horrible, cursed mirror that showed the future. Calvin’s face had never felt like his own; he shared all his features with his father. Same dark brow, straight nose, hollow cheeks, green eyes. His father was himself plus thirty years, and looking at him felt like a threat from life: Behold your fate. Calvin stood still, waiting for their miserable father-and-son ritual to be over.
“I’m not high,” he said hoarsely. Mr. Harker was gripping his throat, almost strangling him. He stared into his son’s eyes, looking for signs that he was lying: sclerotic redness, glassiness, puffy lids, unusually dilated pupils. He didn’t believe anything Calvin said anymore.
Calvin took shallow breaths. His dad was cutting off his windpipe. It was purposefully cruel. Mr. Harker had Marfan syndrome too—it was inherited—and he knew his son bruised easily. But Calvin had no choice but to meet his dad’s eyes, which were boring intensely into his own. It was uncomfortably intimate. At this point, the two barely felt like father and son anymore; it was more like jailer and inmate. What had begun as a normal disciplinary skirmish (“Go to your room!” “No!”) had escalated into an all-consuming battle of wills between the two Harkers.
Father: You will submit.
Son: I will escape.
Strange Lies Page 21