by Alex Flinn
“What?”
“Nothing.” I pretended to take a sip from the empty can, then crumpled it.
“So, do you?”
She was so pretty, even in the dark. She held out her hand. I took it, stood. Then, we were across the patio, going down past the laughing group and Caroline. House music faded. Surf music took over. Our feet hit sand, and she removed her sandals, so I took off my own shoes too. I gripped Amanda’s fingers. Was I hurting her? I loosened up. She laughed and pulled me a few steps down the sand.
“Saw you dancing with Caroline Rodgers before.”
“Oh.”
“She’s a bitch.”
“Yeah.” I swung her arm, watching her hand travel up, past my face, then tried to step closer without her noticing. Impossible. “Thought you weren’t talking to me. I mean, you didn’t say hello before.”
She moved closer. Then, closer still, until there was no blackness between us. She reached up, arm circling my shoulders, my neck, her tongue, somehow, part of my head. For an instant, I tried to stay back, not let her feel my hard-on against her. But only for an instant. Then, her mouth pressed in, and I forgot about Caroline and Charlie, Binky, Mom, and everything, everything but Amanda’s mouth, her body on mine.
When we finally separated, she said, “Still worried about whether I said hello?”
I started to say no, but she kissed me again. I crushed in toward her. We sunk down, down into the black sand. My body felt about to explode. Surf pounded my ears, sand like ice against my heat. My hands knew what to do, and I was on her, on her. And there was nothing else.
“Amanda?”
I could have ignored the voice forever, but Amanda stiffened.
“I hate to interrupt.”
Then don’t. I couldn’t stop my hands, fumbling with Amanda’s bathing suit. But Amanda sat up, pushing me up with her. It was Kirby.
She repeated, “I hate to interrupt.” Her voice making it clear she didn’t care. “But it’s past midnight.”
“So?”
“So, you know my parents get home at one.”
“Shit.” Amanda stood, brushing sand from her legs and butt. She turned to me. “Kirby was a ba-a-ad girl. She’s grounded, but we snuck out while her parents were at the club.” She started toward the stairs, Kirby following.
“Wait!” When they turned, I said, “Can I call you?” I couldn’t believe she was leaving.
“I’ll see you in school.” Amanda ran to the stairs and practically jumped over the group sitting there. I watched her. When my eyes reached the top step, they met St. John’s.
Somehow, I knew he’d been watching the whole time. Had the whole thing been to make him jealous?
That night, lying in my sleeping bag in Charlie’s room, I felt Amanda, like she was still beneath me. Charlie’s voice came from the darkness above.
“Have a good time?” I could hear his grin.
“It was okay.”
“Okay? Heard you were rounding third with Colbert on the sand.”
I didn’t correct him. “Don’t know. I think she’s just using me to make St. John jealous.”
“So?” Charlie laughed. “You need to learn, Paul. Life’s on the barter system. We all use one other. It’s just a matter of getting something you want in return.”
“Right,” I said.
Just before I fell asleep, I wondered what Charlie wanted from me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“Hello.”
I hadn’t thought about David much since I’d become friends with Charlie. But the Monday after Pierre’s party, I saw him again.
It was my own fault. I mean, I could have avoided him. He was in his usual spot, near the bell tower where I used to see him with Trouble. Charlie had a tennis match that afternoon, and, stuck waiting for my mother to drive me home, I’d decided to walk around campus. Now, I saw that my old tree stump was occupied. David sat on it, reading a book.
He’d lost weight since I’d last bothered to look at him. And gained acne. His skin was pale, almost translucent, like David was not of this world. Like a messenger from the hereafter.
“What are you staring at?” he said.
“Nothing.” I turned my gaze away. “What are you reading?”
He looked at me a second. Then, instead of handing me the book or just telling me what it was like a normal person, he read:
It was not death, for I stood up
It was not death, for I stood up,
And all the dead lie down.
It was not night, for all the bells
Put out their tongues for noon.
It was not frost, for on my flesh
I felt siroccos crawl,
Nor fire, for my marble feet
Could keep a chancel cool.
And yet it tasted like them all,
The figures I have seen
Set orderly for burial
Reminded me of mine,
As if my life were shaven
And fitted to a frame
And could not breathe without a key,
And ’twas like midnight, some.
When everything that ticked had stopped
And space stares all around,
Or grisly frosts, first autumn morns,
Repeal the beating ground;
But must like chaos, stopless, cool,
Without a chance, or spar,
Or even a report of land
To justify despair.
“Pretty,” I said, when he stopped reading and looked at me like he expected a response.
But as the word left my lips, I knew it was the wrong one. The poem was disturbing.
“You think so?” he said, like he knew I didn’t. “Emily Dickinson. Ever feel that way?”
“No,” I said. But sometimes I did, didn’t I? “Do you?”
“Yeah.” He stared at the poem a long time, like he was reading it again. “We used to live in Georgia, near my mother’s people. It wasn’t perfect. We were always poor. But, at least, there were others there like us. Then, my uncle told my father about a job here in Miami. ‘A prep school,’ he said. ‘Where David would have the finest education—to make something of himself.’ So, we left there and came here.”
“That sucks.” Thinking of all the times we’d been uprooted for Dad’s career.
“Yeah, I’ve tried to talk them into letting me move back, live with my grandparents. But they won’t.”
There was a long silence. I thought of the poem again: to justify despair.
“Why don’t you…?” I stopped, looking for the right word, the right way to put it. “Couldn’t you try to act … normal?”
“You mean act like them?” he said, and behind him, I heard the cheerleaders spelling something. I think it was K - I - L - L!
“Well … yeah.” Except I’d wanted to say it some other way. “I mean, so they’d leave you alone.”
“Nope.” But he looked like he wanted to say something else.
“Why not?”
“I tried that. It didn’t help. The price was too high.”
“But they’ll just keep picking on you.”
“It won’t be much longer,” he said. The cheerleaders had finished their cheer, and I just heard David. “Not much longer.”
And suddenly, I couldn’t handle being around him anymore. Not for a second. I looked at my watch. Four o’clock. “I have to go,” I said. He nodded and went back to his book.
But walking back to find Mom, I kept hearing David’s words in my ears: It won’t be much longer.
Tuesday, it rained all day. Hurricane season was supposed to be over, but this storm was trying to jumpstart it. All gray morning, rain pounded the classroom doors. Old Carlos scrambled around, putting towels under cracks, and someone started a rumor that we’d get to leave early. Someone else picked up on it, and by third period, it was all over school. Between classes, we ran from one room to another because the rain pushed under the breezeway roofs, misting everything in sight.
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br /> Our group was one of the few who left for lunch. “You think we should?” Meat said, staring out at the parking lot deluge. But Charlie said he’d rather get wet than eat cafeteria swill, and of course, I agreed. I always agreed with Charlie.
But on the way back, the rain strengthened. The road was flooded, and our invading tires sent fountains of water back to the clouds. The car ahead was license plate deep.
“We shouldn’t have gone,” Meat moaned. “We’re gonna be late. I’ve got a quiz in Sheridan.”
“You wanted to go too,” Charlie snapped.
“I didn’t.” Meat looked at Charlie, then the rain. “Forget it.”
We plowed through another puddle. A child’s plastic basketball hoop floated by.
“We should stop,” I said suddenly.
“Stop?” Meat stared like I was nuts.
“Yeah. Pull over. We’re already late, already in trouble.” I had a hiccuppy feeling, like when we went out nights. “Just not go back.”
“And do what?” But Charlie stopped the car, turned to me.
“Just not go back. Stay here. Go swimming.” I pulled my polo over my head and kicked off my shoes. Before anyone could speak, I shoved open the door. The water and wind pushed against it, but I slid by.
“Hey!” Meat yelled. “What are you—?” I slammed the door. Charlie pulled over in an arc of puddle water. I lunged through it, a wet wall slamming my hair and face. It felt good. I ran, blinking, to meet them. Charlie put the window halfway down and stared at me.
For a minute, I stood, dripping, caught in passing cars’ headlights, Charlie’s incredulous eyes. What was he thinking? Was I nuts? Too immature? But I crossed my eyes at him, and he grinned.
“Tell them the car stalled out,” I yelled.
In the backseat, Meat was still urging Charlie to go, leave without me. Charlie said, “You’re crazy, Richmond.” And I knew I looked it, water dripping off my hair into my eyes. “And you look like a drowned giraffe.”
But he was laughing, peeling off his shirt. He lit from the car with a whoop, his legs meeting knee-deep water. He grabbed my arm, and we stumbled to the roadside, through the spattering, dancing rain. Meat joined us seconds later. We found high ground and jumped up and down, begging cars to splash us. Most obeyed, sending torrents, monsoons over our heads and down. The water knocked us back, hard. We surged forward again, again, wiping rain from our eyes, spitting liquid from laughing lips. It was a baptism. A new life where I had all the fun, the laughter, all the friends I’d ever wanted.
“What if someone sees us?” Meat yelled after a bus’s wake knocked us to the ground. “Someone from school?”
“Who cares?” Charlie and I shouted in unison. Another wave swamped us. We fought up, laughing. Meat laughed too. It was okay.
We stayed there over an hour, then drove to Meat’s house because he lived closest and his mom was home. We told her the car had stalled, and she served us cocoa and sympathy and provided extra pairs of Meat’s enormous pants for Charlie and me to wear while ours tumbled in the kitchen clothes dryer. I even called Mom to let her know where I was. Near dinnertime, Charlie drove me home.
“Pretty wild today, Einstein,” Charlie said, pulling into a visitor’s spot at our building. I’d long since stopped being ashamed of our apartment. Sure, Charlie had never come upstairs, but it didn’t matter to him that I lived there.
“You may be ready for some serious fun,” he continued.
I didn’t have time to ask what he meant. Mom, who’d probably been watching from upstairs, waded down with her red-and-white striped golf umbrella. “Better go,” Charlie said, laughing. “Wouldn’t want to get wet.”
But the next afternoon, when we were alone in Charlie’s room fooling around on his computer, Charlie turned to me.
“We may need to plant a bomb in Old Lady Zaller’s classroom.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“What?” I stared at Charlie across the monitor. Outside, a Weed Eater buzzed. Charlie smiled, and I laughed. “You really had me going there, man.”
“I’m completely serious.” Still smiling. “We’ve done the research, got the info.” He took a disc from the holder and inserted it into the drive. Pressed a button. The hard drive swallowed it like a snake on a mouse. A few clicks of Charlie’s fingers. The file opened, screaming purple and orange letters.
TEEN ANARCHY!!!
“Charlie…”
But he was scrolling, face still frozen in a half-smile. My eyes shifted back to the screen.
We are teens sick of adults screwing with our world! If we want change, we need to change it even if it means blowing every school away!
Purple skulls and distorted smiley faces framed the text. I knew the page. We’d found it weeks ago, the day Charlie told me about his father. We’d visited it dozens of times, downloading recipes for all sorts of explosives, fantasizing about how it would be to blow the school sky-high. But that was what it was, fantasizing. At least for me. I hadn’t thought Charlie was serious.
Charlie was still scrolling.
Incendiaries. Fun ways to piss people off with fire.
Scrolling…
Needless to say, this information is “for educational purposes only.” But if you want to use it some other way, what can I do? I mean, who am I, your mother?
Underneath, set off by more skulls, were instructions for a bomb. A bomb that went into a school light fixture.
A bomb.
The Weed Eater went dead. The room was silent, except for the hum of the hard drive. And Charlie’s breathing, soft, beside me.
I touched his shoulder. “You crazy, man?” I tried to meet his eyes.
He turned, met mine easily. “Who? Me?” He grinned.
“It’s not funny, Charlie.” I wanted to shake him but, of course, I didn’t. “It’s not funny.”
“Then go home, Paul. Why not go home to Mother?” He turned away.
I stood, walked around to him, needing to explain. “It’s a bomb, a f—” Maybe I should go. “I never thought you were violent.”
“That’s what you’re worried about?” He eased his chair back. I smelled grass through the open window. “You know me all this time, better than anyone, and you think I want to hurt people? Me? I could never hurt anyone. I’m a total pacifist, Paul.”
I looked in his eyes. It seemed impossible. I turned away, shaking my head. “Then why are you saying all this shit?”
“I thought you understood, Paul. Shit. I thought you were my friend, the one person who really knew me.” He stopped.
The Weed Eater resumed. I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to be okay with him, okay like it was before he’d opened his mouth two minutes before. “But a bomb, Charlie…” I could barely say the word. “It’s serious.”
“I know it is.” Charlie’s eyes reproached me. “No one would have to get hurt. There are lots of ways we could do this so no one would have to get hurt.”
“But someone might.”
“No. You’ve seen the website. We can do stuff with fuses, with time-delay so no one is even there when it goes off.” He met my eyes. “Don’t you trust me, Paul?”
“Of course I do,” I said, way too quickly. But I wanted to agree with him. He’d done so much for me. He’d practically saved my life. “I don’t know, Charlie. I mean, it says…” The phrase blowing every school away jumped out at me. This was real. No way could Charlie talk me out of my knowing that.
“We could rig it to go off while everyone is at chapel,” he said. So I knew he’d thought this out. “It’ll start a fire, that’s all. A harmless little fire where everyone will have fun in the sprinklers.” Charlie clicked Exit. “A harmless fire that might, incidentally, destroy poor Mrs. Zaller’s file cabinet.”
Oh, that was it. He was still worried about the D. And his father. He’d mentioned it before, the trouble we’d be in if anyone noticed the grade change. And what would Big Chuck do if he knew about the D? It was too scary to consider. The c
abinet held Zaller’s hard files with all Charlie’s test grades. With that gone, no one would ever find out.
Still, I said, “I don’t know, Charlie. I mean, someone could still get hurt in a fire. It would scare the crap out of them, at least.”
But the thought hit me. So what? So what? They were a bunch of spoiled brats who’d never paid for anything. Maybe they deserved to pay. Or, at least, to get scared shitless. I thought about everything they’d done, everything that had happened to me.
Until Charlie. My loyalty was to Charlie. How could I let him down?
Ask Charlie who killed the dog. Why had his request made me think of the note again?
I put the thought from my mind. It was crazy, thinking like that. “I don’t think so. Maybe we can think of some other way to get rid of the test papers.”
“No problem.” Charlie took the disc from the hard drive, flipping it into his hand. “But think about it. You have time.” He reached for his backpack and buried the disc deep inside. “It would be fun, though, wouldn’t it?”
I nodded, imagining it, imagining all of them, scurrying like ants. It made me smile. “Yeah, it would be.”
That week in chapel, the sermon was “The Terror of Temptations.” I squirmed in my seat and tried not to listen. Why did I even care?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“I want you to stop seeing that boy.”
Mom stood between me and the television. I’d just been flipping through the channels. But now, I bobbed and wove to see it, avoiding Mom’s eyes. I didn’t answer.
I hadn’t gone to Charlie’s after school that day. He had practice. At least, that’s what he’d said, though his practices seldom ran that late. I tried not to consider the other possibility, that he was so angry I’d refused to plant the bomb, that he didn’t want to be friends anymore. He’d said that wasn’t it. “Relax, Einie, I have practice. Duty calls.” And no one picked on me at school, so it was probably true.
Now, Mom snapped off the televison. “Did you hear me?”
“Yes.” Between my teeth.
“Good, then we’re agreed.” She turned the television back on, started to walk away.