by Alan Janney
“I know,” I sighed in resignation. “I am. I’ll look as soon as I hang up.”
“Good idea, handsome.”
“Hey, has Tan…has T contacted you again?”
“Yes,” she admitted. “He’s obsessed with the Outlaw. He and I have something in common, I guess.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know, I just love him. I think he’s beautiful.”
“No,” I groaned. “That’s not what I mean. What do you mean T is obsessed with the Outlaw?”
“His latest text was in all caps, and he demanded I tell him the Outlaw’s real identity. So weird, right? How would I know that?”
Chapter Thirty-One
Tuesday, October 23. 2017
I arrived at school early and taped some tulips to Hannah’s locker. The flowers were from an all-night flower vending machine outside a florist I located using Google. I hoped she liked the color red, because that’s all I could find. I wasn’t sure why I was getting her flowers, considering I didn’t think we’d last much longer. I hurried to math class to study for our quiz. When Lee arrived, I almost fell out of my chair.
“Lee,” I gaped. “What are you wearing?”
“It’s great, right?” he smiled broadly, holding his arms out to display his shirt.
“Where did you get it?”
“At a novelty shop downtown. I couldn’t believe it either, bro! I should have got you one too, huh.”
“Well…” I said. “Can that shirt be legal?”
“What do you mean?” he frowned, looking down at it.
“I don’t know. Copyright stuff?”
“Oh. Copyright infringement? Unauthorized use of a likeness? Something like that, yeah, probably. But who cares! It’s not like he’d ever file a lawsuit.”
Lee’s t-shirt was black and dominated by a face drawn in angry red ink. The face had been dramatized; furious eyes, strong jaw and mouth covered by a skin-tight mask, and a headband holding back locks of hair that still managed to fall over and partially obscure the eyes. It looked a little like Japanimation. Underneath it in jagged script was the word ‘Outlaw.’
“I can’t believe you’re wearing a t-shirt with…the Outlaw’s face on it,” I said. It looked nothing like me.
Others noticed it too. Lee was soon deluged with admiring comments and questions about where it was purchased. Just when my life could grow no more outlandish, Lee shows up with my face printed on his shirt. And I couldn’t even tell him. If Lee ever found out my secret identity, he’d be mortified.
Two hours later, halfway through Spanish class, a note arrived for me. It had been sent by my guidance counselor and requested an immediate meeting. I excused myself from class.
Hannah was waiting for me in the hall. An ambush! I saw no where feasible to hide.
“Hi Hannah,” I said carefully.
“Hi, quarterback,” she smiled. “Going somewhere?”
“To see my guidance counselor.”
“I faked that note. I wrote it,” she said with a wickedly arched eyebrow. “I wanted to see you.”
“Oh,” I said. I’m dead.
“Thank you for the flowers.”
“You’re welcome. I thought-” I started.
“I’m sorry about Friday night. I know I handled it poorly, and that my behavior was extremely inappropriate. I am very grateful you stayed with me, even while I verbally abused you and pushed you away. I want to explain.”
“You don’t need to.”
“My household is the American dream,” she began anyway. “On the surface. But it’s cold and emotionless inside. I have high expectations set for me, but I haven’t been hugged in…I can’t remember the last time my parents hugged me. They are entirely without affection, towards anything. I’ve had to learn how to fake emotions.”
Her eyes were pooled. I felt like I had something stuck in my throat.
She continued, “My parents split up several times when I was younger. They’d be so mad. Dad would get drunk and hit me. He doesn’t anymore. But…whenever he’s unfaithful to my mom it brings back these awful memories, and I…sort of lash out.”
“Oh wow, Hannah. I had no idea. I’m sorry.”
“The bright side of Friday night is that I realized I’m starting to have feelings for you,” she smiled, and she wiped her eyes.
“Oh,” I said. “Good. But. I’m confused.”
“I don’t blame you,” she sighed.
“Why were you dating me then? If you didn’t have feelings for me earlier, I mean.” I asked.
“I’ve always been very attracted to you,” she said. “In fact, I’m not looking at you right now because you look so great in that shirt and I need to concentrate. But the attraction was physical and mental. It was logical. You met all the requirements on the checklist.”
“There’s a checklist?”
“However, after Friday, I started to have feelings. Actual emotions. Really I started having them after your concussion, but I dismissed them as enthusiasm.”
I nodded and said, “I imagine relationships work better when the girlfriend has actual feelings for the boyfriend.”
“Now we’ll be a perfect couple,” she beamed. “I will be a proper girlfriend. Who knows. I might even get jealous and demand you stop hanging out with the beautiful Latina girl, Kate.”
“Katie,” I corrected.
My phone rang at 11:30pm. I looked at the caller ID through exhausted eyes. Katie. Something was wrong. She’s usually been asleep for an hour by eleven, and alarms began to sound in my head before I answered.
“Katie, what’s wrong?” I asked.
“I think he’s here,” she whispered, and I could tell she was crying.
“What?” I asked, sitting straight up in bed.
“T sent me a picture message. Of my apartment building. He found me!”
I leapt out of bed. “Don’t hang up and don’t open your door until you hear my voice,” I ordered and I tore down the stairs and out the front door in a flash. I don’t know which was pounding faster, my heart or my bare feet. I crossed the distance to her apartment building in record time, the neighborhood pine trees flying by unbelievably fast. I was a blur. I arrived at her building and started scanning for suspicious individuals. Somebody was going to die, because I was going to beat them to death. Nothing moved, everything was quiet. I couldn’t even hear dogs barking or car engines. To be safe I circled her building twice, walked up and down the tree line and looked behind every bush. I had planned on twisting Tank’s skull straight off his spine. But after a thorough search I found nothing.
“Still there?” I whispered into the phone.
“Yes. You got here really fast, I heard you.”
“Nobody is out here,” I said. “Can you let me in the back door?”
The lock clicked and the door slid open enough for me to squeeze through before it slammed close again. Immediately Katie came into my arms and buried her face against my shoulder.
“Thank you for coming,” she said, her voice muffled. “It’s better now that you’re here.”
“Can I see the text?” I asked.
“In a minute,” she said, not letting go. We stood there a lot longer than a minute, simply holding and breathing against each other. I stroked her hair and rubbed her back, and I realized she was wearing my jersey. “Have you gotten taller?” she asked. “You can rest your chin on my head. You didn’t used to do that.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Mmmm,” she sighed against me. “Hugging you is my favorite.”
In that moment I might have been the most conflicted kid alive. I really liked Hannah, and looked forward to seeing her, and had grown even closer to her during our hallway therapy session. She met a lot of requirements on my checklist, so to speak, and every guy at our school was jealous of me. But I adored Katie. She wasn’t just a beautiful Latina girl I’d grown up with. She was everything. I wanted her in ways that didn’t exist with Hannah.
“Okay,” she said eventually. “I’ll release you. You can look at the text message.”
The photograph was without question a picture of her apartment building, which meant Tank had been here. I was terrified.
“How’d he find me?” she asked in a tiny voice. I sat down in her desk chair.
“He figured out through clues that you went to Hidden Spring. Then he got his hands on a yearbook and looked at pictures until he saw a girl that he remembered mugging, and then he had your name. He could have followed you home one day after school, or had you followed. Or he simply looked your address up.”
“What does he want?”
“He thinks you’re connected to the Outlaw,” I said. “He wants to find him, and you’re the only way he knows how.”
“Why does he think I’m connected to the Outlaw? Is it because of the video the Outlaw made for me on my phone? How could he know about that?”
“I don’t know, Katie. T must have recorded your phone number, and figured out the Outlaw had given you the phone back.” I wasn’t exactly lying, but I also wasn’t giving her all the details.
“Why do you think T is so obsessed with the Outlaw?” she asked, and she lowered herself beside me.
“That’s a great question,” I said and blew a breath of frustration at her ceiling. “Why is anyone obsessed with the Outlaw? Seriously, it’s so weird. But T is probably mad that the Outlaw took back your phone. And maybe lots of other stuff too, who knows.”
“What am I going to do?”
“Here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to talk to the police again. Show them the video on your phone, and all the text messages. They’ll have to help you. And I’m going to start sleeping in your room.”
“You are?” she gasped. “Fun!”
“And if T shows up here, I’m going to beat him to death.”
Katie engaged herself eagerly in finding me a pillow and blankets, which I laid out directly adjacent to her sliding glass doors. If anyone wanted to get in through this doorway they’d have to literally go over me. I bedded down in the layers of blankets and she crawled onto her mattress.
“Do me a favor and set the alarm on your phone,” I yawned. “For 5:30. That’ll give me enough time to sneak home before Dad wakes up.”
She did and we laid silently for several minutes, listening to the click and hum of her laptop and the drone of the air conditioner. The glass door was cool when I pressed my hand against it.
“Also,” I said. “We can’t tell anyone about this. I don’t want Hannah to get the wrong idea.”
She didn’t respond immediately, but I could tell in the faint light that her eyes were open. Finally she said, “I don’t want Sammy to find out either.”
“I thought he was a doofus.”
“He is,” she agreed. “However, we’re still talking. He’s a doofus, but he’s nice to me.”
We were silent a few minutes.
“He’s jealous of you,” she said.
“Hannah is a little jealous of you too.”
“Hannah Walker is jealous of me?” she laughed. “I don’t believe it.”
On a sudden brazen whim, I sat up and said, “Katie, I can only say this one time. And then we have to pretend I never told you.”
“What?” she said, also sitting up.
“You’re beautiful. Hannah calls you the gorgeous Latina girl, and she’s right. I think you’re so pretty it almost hurts to look at you. And on top of that, you’re the sweetest and smartest person in school. One of the reasons I’m struggling in Spanish is because you fill my entire head. I have a girlfriend so I shouldn’t talk like this, I know. It’s hard enough not to think about you…you know…romantically. But you need to realize how perfect you are. If you don’t want Sammy, every other boy in school would line up to take his place.”
My ears were burning hot with the confession and the candid betrayal of my secrets. Telling her the truth was like an exquisite release of pressure.
“You think about me romantically?” she asked at length.
“I can’t talk about this, Katie. It’s not fair to Hannah. …but of course I do. I can’t help it. I try not to. And if anything ever happens to you I would absolutely lose my mind. I would never get over it, never forgive myself. So I’ll be sleeping here until I can figure out what to do about T.”
“Chase,” she started.
“No. You can’t, Katie. We have to stop talking now. I’m too close to the edge, I’m too close to doing something we’ll both regret in the morning. We can talk about it later but not now. Not while you’re lying in a bed. Not while you’re wearing only my jersey.”
The moment hung in the air and our eyes locked. Twice she started to get out of bed but stopped. I talked myself out of going to her every second. After an eternity, the moment passed. To my extreme relief and disappointment she did as I asked. She didn’t say anything else. She laid back down. So we fell asleep in the small, warm and intimate confines of her bedroom, staring at each other, listening to our heartbeats, dreaming and wondering.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Friday, October 26. 2017
The week passed in a fatigued fog. I woke up on Katie’s floor each morning at 5:30 and jogged home to shower, dress, and eat breakfast. By the time I arrived at Hidden Spring High, I had slapped myself awake enough to half focus in math. Lee, to his credit, fully comprehended the danger Katie could be in and was going out of his way to make sure I missed nothing important Mr. Ford said. My grade in Spanish class kept rising, thanks in part to the tutoring Katie imparted from her bed each night. Hannah and I began eating lunch together most days, and her behavior towards me changed. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but she had grown nervous around me, almost breathlessly happy. She treated me less like a business partner and more like she had a crush on me, which made our English class electric. She even kissed me a few times in the hall, blushing furiously after. I got the feeling part of the affection was an act, but she was only acting because she didn’t know how to show genuine affection naturally.
After school Cory and I trudged to football practice, where I ran and threw until I could barely stand. I took Dad to therapy on Wednesday, and on Thursday I stayed late with Coach Garrett and the offensive coordinator Todd Keith to talk about our game plan on Friday. Coach Keith never mentioned our church conversation, but his encouragement during practices became more specific to me as a person rather than a player. The approaching showdown with Patrick Henry fueled our practices, cranking up the intensity degree by degree until we were ready to explode. Our engines were fully revved, but we still had another opponent to play first and I fully expected to demolish them.
More and more students found Outlaw shirts. Katie had one too, which bizarrely enough made me jealous. Was I jealous of myself? She and I stayed up Tuesday night to watch Natalie North on Conan. Natalie wore a form-fitting black tank top with ‘I Love The Outlaw’ printed across the chest. She charmed the host and the audience, plus me and Katie, who thought Natalie was adorable. After the interview aired, Natalie texted immediately. When Katie wasn’t watching, I replied to Natalie and told her that I’d watched and liked her shirt.
In the evenings, I studied and ate at home. This was an anxious few hours for me, waiting for Dad to fall asleep, because I couldn’t be with Katie. Tank worried me. After seeing further evidence of Katie’s harassment, the police had started sending a cruiser by her apartment once an hour after the sun went down. I have no idea how this helped prevent what seemed to me like an imminent attack. Her mom bought a can of pepper spray. These were all temporary fixes and couldn’t last forever. I grew more tired each day and I couldn’t continue sleeping on her mercilessly hard floor much longer. Tank needed to be dealt with. Soon.
The atmosphere in Katie’s room those nights was ablaze with tension and hints at love and unspoken longings. My desire for her might as well have been a strident blare. The room was enchanted and our growing connectedness kept
the room hot and smoldering, though the thermostat stayed steady just under seventy. Each night I fell asleep on the precipice of my longings.
My stomach had begun to ache regularly, a result of guilt churning my insides into an boiling cauldron. My conflicting emotions were giving me an ulcer. All day I thought of Hannah but my nights were full of Katie. And tucked away in the back of my mind was Natalie North; her adoration, her worship, her acceptance, and our one hot night together. I despised myself, and hated the fact that I couldn’t focus all my attention onto one girl. Was Katie feeling the same strain with Sammy? If something didn’t change soon, the pain would have me retching in the bushes. And I kept having blinding headaches.
Copycat Outlaws were popping up, and two of them had died. I found out about the first two Outlaw deaths as our football team traveled in a convoy to Long Beach to play the Beavers. The first two buses held players, coaches and cheerleaders. The second two buses held band members, instruments, and fans. Hannah and I were using an app on my phone to merge our self-portraits into a new hideous creation when Cory showed me the video.
“What happened?” Hannah asked as we watched.
“Kids making a YouTube video,” Cory grunted.
“Pretending to be the Outlaw?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
The video’s heroes were obviously homemade parodies of the Outlaw. We watched a couple kids wearing masks jump around a rooftop. One boy kept sliding and leaning too close to the edge and, even though we knew he’d be the victim, the fall still took our breath away. The impact was audible even though it happened outside of the camera’s line of sight. Hannah gasped and put her hand over her mouth.
“He died a couple days later in the hospital,” Cory said.
“You said there were two deaths?” I asked, still processing what I’d just seen on his phone.
“Some joker at a city hall protest,” Cory said. “Dressed like the Outlaw and disrupted it. Mexicans beat him to death before they realized he was Mexican too. No video.”
“Yeah, man,” Adam Mendoza said over my shoulder. I didn’t realize he’d been watching. “I heard a couple dudes dressed up downtown and got their ass whipped. Pretended to be the Outlaw, you know? Tried to fight crime or something stupid and ran into the wrong dudes. Got sent to the hospital on a stretcher.”