Spinning Out
Page 1
SPINNING
OUT
DAVID STAHLER JR.
Table of Contents
ACT ONE: EXPOSITION
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
ACT TWO: RISING ACTION
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ACT THREE: CLIMAX
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
ACT FOUR: FALLING ACTION
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTERR TWENTY-FIVE
ACT FIVE: DÉNOUEMENT
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Copyright
For all those who suffer from the wounds that can’t be seen.
CHAPTER ONE
“Come on, pass it over.”
I glanced down at the joint in my hand, watched its thin line of smoke curl up around my wrist, before handing it off to Stewart.
“Sorry.” I felt like telling him that it wasn’t me who always hogged the joint, but I couldn’t muster the energy. I wasn’t especially high—not yet, anyway—but it was Monday morning. And I was replacing one fog with another before heading off to school.
The pit stop. That’s what we called our morning layover. Stewart would pick me up at quarter after seven on his way past my house. We’d drive a half mile down the mountain, then turn off into a field that looked out over the valley where the village lay and park along the tree line. We’d only been back at school for four weeks, but it had become part of the routine. A “tradition,” Stewart called it. To me it was just a habit.
September was almost over, and the colors were bursting from the maples all around us. It was a good year for the leaves—even for northern Vermont—with lots of red, a little gold mixed in, all shimmering in the cold against the early slant of sun. Best of all was the mist that hung below us in the valley—a thick September mist that always slipped in those first cold nights of fall, flooding the hollows by morning, turning the valleys into lakes of white that glowed under the blue sky. It was so goddam beautiful, you almost didn’t need the pot.
I’d tried making the point last week, but Stewart would have none of it.
“It’s not a matter of need, Frenchy,” he’d scolded. “Just a matter of enhancement.” He repeated the line, quietly, more to himself than anyone. I wondered if he was pondering its meaning or storing it for posterity.
I watched him take a drag, his third since squirreling the joint away from me. He had a way of smoking—pulling hard, then opening and closing his mouth four or five times in rapid succession, biting at the air—that I found both cool and revolting at the same time. It was like he was eating the smoke, devouring it.
Seeing me watch him, he offered it back. I shook my head. To be honest, I was getting tired of the whole thing. It would have been fine if we could’ve stayed here in the field, but Stewart wasn’t one for skipping. He was just one for enhancing. Not me. Pot made school longer. And more boring.
“Do those fuckers ever turn?” he asked.
I followed his gaze across the valley to the opposite ridge, where the wind turbines stood, twenty of them all in a row, their blades glinting against the sunrise. At three hundred feet tall, they loomed over everything, a phalanx of metal towers plopped down by a bunch of power company suits from Boston or New York or who-the-hell-knows-where. They’d offered our poor little town a shitload of money to install them, an offer—in spite of serious resistance from quite a few people—the slim majority couldn’t refuse. But it came at a pretty steep price. Two years later, half the town still hated the other half.
It was kind of funny how the battle lines had been drawn. Not the way you might think. Sure, there were the hippie types who loved the wind towers because they were all into clean power and that kind of shit, and there were plenty of locals who were pissed off about a bunch of rich assholes coming in and taking over their ridgetops. But a lot of the natives didn’t mind them. Most people around here don’t have much money, and the idea of saving a few hundred bucks on their taxes made them come around pretty fast. Actually, the people most against the towers were ones like Stewart’s family, who’d moved here from out of state. Flatlanders, we called them. And even though a lot of them were pretty crunchy, a lot of them were pretty rich, too, and they didn’t want their piece of backwoods paradise ruined by a giant row of steely eyesores.
Stewart’s parents had led the charge against the turbines, donating a pile of money to fund lawsuits that ultimately went nowhere. It wasn’t a big deal—the Bolgers had quite a bit of dough—but nobody hated the wind towers more than Stewart and his family.
“I saw them turning the other night. Before the storm,” I offered.
I pretended to hate them too, because of Stewart, but at this point I really had a hard time giving a shit. Sometimes I even thought they looked kind of cool, especially after the morning pit stops.
“Those fuckers need to come down,” he muttered. He said that every day.
“We better get going,” I said.
Stewart looked at his watch and nodded. He took one more drag, then bent down and carefully put out what was left of the joint before placing it in an Altoids tin. Sticking the tin in his pocket, he looked up at me and grinned. I snickered. He was quite a sight, all tall and gangly with his thrift-store hipster garb, long hair, toasty eyes, and cheesed smile. Rising, he started to say something, then jerked his head to the side and whirled around, as if someone had goosed him from behind.
“What?” I said, even though I knew what was coming.
“Did you hear that?” he said. “I heard someone.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ. It’s nobody. We’re all alone. Same as always.”
He nodded, but I could see the echo of fear still on his face. I took one last look down into the valley, then walked past him toward the car.
“Hey, Frenchy!” he called out. “We’re getting low. Better talk to your man.”
I hesitated, then turned around. “Don’t you want to take a break?”
He just frowned.
I knew that look. “All right.”
“Thanks, pal.” His grin returned as he joined me.
“Oh,” he said when we reached the car. “I almost forgot.” He pulled a wadded piece of paper from his pocket and tossed it over the hood at me. While I unrolled it, he ducked into the dinged-up Volvo his parents had given him last summer. Something was up.
I’d noticed the neon green flyers at school—they’d been hanging everywhere since the first day back—but it was funny seeing one of them out here in the field, the paper soft and crinkled, the words a collection of cut-out letters that made it look more like a ransom note than an announcement:
ATTENTION ACTORS Gilliam High School Fall Musical: Man of La Mancha Audition! Audition! Audition! Wednesday, Sept. 30, 3:00 P.M., Auditorium
A breeze rose, fluttering the paper in my hand. I crumpled it back up and got in. Stewart didn’t look at me as he started the engine.
“So what the hell’s this all about?” I flicked the wad into his lap.
He picked up the neon ball and he
ld it out before him, regarding it for a moment as if it were a precious jewel.
“We’re going. You and me.”
I burst out laughing. I didn’t think I had smoked very much, but it was hitting me hard all of a sudden. Through the windshield I noticed the blades on the far towers had started to turn, all twenty turbines spinning in perfect synchronicity.
“You’re joking,” I said, rubbing my eyes.
He glanced over at me with a mischievous grin.
“Frenchy,” he said, “we’re all over this mother.”
This time we both burst out laughing. But behind those half-baked lids, I could see it in his eyes—he wasn’t kidding at all.
CHAPTER TWO
“Frenchy, Frenchy, Frenchy.” Stewart giggled as we drove into Gilliam. The school sat on a hill on the far side of the village.
“Stewey, Stewey, Stew,” I shot back. He hated when I called him Stew.
“What makes you so special, anyway, Gerard Paquette?”
“What do you mean?”
“The nickname, Frenchy. I mean, half the people around here are French.”
“That’s French-Canadian to you, asshole. And stop driving like my goddam grandmother. We’re going to be late for school.”
He waved off the insult. “Just answer the question.”
“Christ, Stewart, look at me.”
With Quebec just to the north of us, there are a lot of locals with French roots, but I really look the part—short and rugged, thick black hair, dark eyes. I started shaving in eighth grade. Now I practically have to hit the razor twice a day to avoid looking homeless. Classic Canuck.
“I don’t know,” I said as we neared the school. “I don’t even remember when people stopped calling me Gerry. Everyone calls me Frenchy. Even my teachers. Even my mom.”
“Wish I had a cool nickname.”
“There’s nothing cool about being Frenchy.”
“It’s the jokes, isn’t it?” Stewart said.
“You mean like how many dumbass Frenchmen does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”
I stuck out my tongue and conjured up the most moronic face I could muster. Stewart burst out laughing.
“You’d think in these enlightened times, people would know better.”
Stewart’s face darkened. “There’s nothing enlightened about these times, Frenchy. Barbarians!” he shouted, gesturing at the town. “Barbarians all around us.”
“Watch where you’re going, for chrissake!” We’d started to drift over the center line. Stewart pulled back into his lane, glancing around to see if anyone had noticed.
“Don’t worry, Frenchy. I know who you really are. Smarter than the lot of them. You should be in the honors courses. I keep telling you.”
“You mean like you?” I said as we pulled into the school lot. “No thanks. I don’t have a quarter the work you have. I just collect my easy As and coast. That’s intelligence, if you ask me.”
“Maybe you’re right,” he said, parking the car.
“Yeah, maybe,” I whispered. I glanced up at the visor mirror. My red eyes squinted back at me.
We popped in a few drops of Visine, got out of the car, and headed across the lot through the bright morning sun.
“Shit, I don’t even care,” I said as we climbed the front steps. “Let people think what they want. They’re going to anyway. Besides, once you get stuck with a nickname, that’s it. You might as well learn to like it. That, or move to Alaska. Try to get rid of it, try to make people stop calling you what they want to call you, and they just end up thinking you’re an asshole.”
He nodded and gave me a sad sort of smile as we paused in the lobby, then parted ways until lunch.
“Off to AP Chem,” he said with a wave, then headed down the hall.
“Try not to blow anything up,” I called after him.
He flashed a peace sign above his head, turned the corner, and disappeared.
“So it’s just a joke, right?” I said.
We were tucked away in our usual spot in the corner of the cafeteria, me and Eddie Edward shoving subsidized Tater Tots down our low-income gullets while Stewart munched on the organic, bullshit hippie fare his mother always packed for him.
“What’s just a joke?”
“This audition business. Another one of your pranks?”
Stewart was known for his pranks. Putting teachers’ cars into neutral and pushing them to the other end of the parking lot after school, slipping Ex-Lax brownies into cafeteria bake sales, squishing a dead mouse between the pages of a book on rodents in the library—stupid shit, I know. But that was the whole point. Stewart fancied himself an anarchist.
“What do you mean, my pranks?” he retorted. “You’re my accomplice. They belong just as much to you. And don’t forget, the cricket job was your idea.”
Last year for Halloween, we went to a pet store over in Burlington and bought two hundred crickets. The guy behind the counter gave us the once-over, but Stewart convinced him they were for his pet snake. A few days later, we smuggled them into school and—as Stewart put it—“liberated” them. Within days they’d spread to every part of the building, their chirping permeating the walls. They were resilient suckers, too. Walking down an empty hall in the middle of May, you could still hear a lonely cricket or two calling from some hiding spot.
I laughed. “That was a good one.”
“The best.”
“So that’s what this play business is all about?”
Stewart flashed a quick smile, then went back to surveying the scene.
“Tina got a boob job this summer,” he said.
“Really?” Eddie Edward said, his eyes widening as we all watched Tina Rutherford walk by with her tray. Eddie Edward was a sweet kid but kind of a dingbat. He would believe just about anything you told him, which was why Stewart let him sit with us at lunch. Everyone called him Eddie Edward. Compared with that nickname, Frenchy didn’t sound so bad.
“Jesus, Eddie, don’t be a moron. Stewart’s talking shit again.”
“Oh,” Eddie Edward said, his face falling.
“No. Consider the matter closely,” Stewart said as Tina headed back to her table in her tight-fitting shirt. “Far more ample than last year.”
I had to admit, they did look bigger. “They probably just grew. Girls don’t get boob jobs. Not around here.”
“One can always dream,” Stewart said.
I told you he was into enhancement.
“Stewart,” I pressed, “the play’s a big deal. It’s not like dumping a bunch of crickets in the library.”
The fall musical was one of the few things our school truly excelled at. Half the county showed up to the performances, packing the auditorium. Hell, I even went once. Okay, twice.
“Besides, I hear those auditions are supercompetitive. I don’t know shit about acting, and I’m pretty sure you don’t either.”
Stewart grabbed my arm. “Look at this place,” he said, turning me toward the crowd. “Everyone in this room, everyone in this goddam school, is acting. Believe it. Besides, like you said, it’s just a prank. Come on, it’s senior year! We’re due.”
“Yeah, well, pranks are one thing,” I said. “Crashing a school function with a spectacular display of public humiliation is something else altogether. Life’s humiliating enough already.”
“Frenchy, my swarthy little friend, the problem with you is that you’re a worrier. You’ve got to stop with the worrying.”
“Frenchy?” Eddie Edward laughed. “He doesn’t worry about shit. That’s why everyone loves him.”
Stewart turned back to me with a grin. “Yes, well, Edward, I guess that goes to show what a good actor Frenchy really is after all.”
I shot him a dark look and went back to my lunch. Fucking Stewart.
“Frenchy,” Stewart said, watching me toss an entire chicken nugget into my mouth, “when are you going to stop eating that crap? It’s no good for you. You’re only seventeen and already halfway
to fat-ass.”
“Bite me,” I said, instinctively reaching down to my stomach. I actually had put on weight lately.
“No, bite this.” He pushed his green-and-beige-colored wrap in my face.
“Get your bean-sprout-veggie-burger-eating ass away from me,” I said, knocking his hand away and trying not to smile.
“Eat it!” He laughed as he jumped up, practically tackling me as he tried shoving his sandwich into my mouth. With my extra heft, I got the better of him, though. Before he knew it, I had him in a headlock.
“Eat this!” I hollered back, squishing a Tater Tot against his sealed lips.
“Frenchy!”
I looked up to see the assistant principal, Mr. Ruggles, glaring at me.
“Knock it off!”
“Sorry, Mr. Ruggles.” I let go of Stewart. I wasn’t too worried. I knew the look was all for show. Ruggles liked me because I never gave him a hard time, even when I got in trouble.
“You too, Bolger,” he added.
Stewart jumped to his feet. “You saw that, didn’t you?” he shouted, trying not to laugh. “You saw him try to taint me with his vile filth! Detention! Detention!”
Mr. Ruggles frowned. He came over, handed me a note, then turned and walked away as the bell rang and everyone scrambled to their feet.
“What’s that?” Stewart asked, glancing over my shoulder.
I opened up the stapled note. “Bryant.” Shit, I’d forgotten.
“Another Gerry session, eh?”
“Yeah.” I kept my head down, my eyes on the note. “I gotta go.”
“I’ll bring your tray up,” he offered, taking it from the table.
“Thanks.” I crumpled up the piece of paper and shoved it in my pocket.
“No problem. Hey, I’ve got a guitar lesson after school,” he said. “Can you get a ride with someone else?”
“Sure. I’ll get home somehow.”
“Cool. Come up to the house after.”
I nodded, then turned and left the cafeteria. As I headed toward Bryant’s office, I could feel my stomach clench as all the Tater Tots and nuggets fused into a toxic ball of sick. I guess Stewart was right about that garbage after all.