by Lis Wiehl
“What in the—! Did you take that photo?” Charlie demanded.
“Yes.” Nate’s face was stony.
“Why on earth did you take it?”
“Why did I take it? Why did I take it?” His words grew more agitated. “Because I wanted them to see what they did to him. They killed a beautiful boy just because he was different. They couldn’t stand that. So they killed him.”
A voice behind Mia made her jump.
“Don’t tell me you are showing those people our son like that. No one should remember him that way.” Laurie Dane was a plump woman with brown hair scraped back into a ponytail. She wore blue scrubs printed with cartoon butterflies.
“They need to see it so they’ll be motivated to take down the bullies that did it to him.”
Laurie didn’t answer, just made a show of waving her hand as if she was trying to rid the room of some of the cigarette smoke. But the air was so saturated it had no place to go. Tonight Mia would hang all her clothes in the garage in hopes of airing them out rather than having to pay for dry cleaning.
“You said Darin was different,” Charlie said. “Was he gay?”
Nate’s hand clenched so hard that it bent his cigarette. “What difference does it make? Are you saying if he was, what they did was okay?”
“No.” Charlie didn’t seem flustered. “I’m saying if he was, there are hate-crime laws that might also apply.”
“Who knows what they are at that age?” Nate said. “If he thought of himself as gay, he didn’t tell us.”
Laurie picked up the cat and then sat down on a brown ottoman. “He’s always been a little different.”
“He’s still our son,” Nate said. “A long time ago I realized I could spend all my time wishing for the son I never had or I could love the son who was standing right in front of me. But those kids—they pushed him and pushed him and pushed him, and finally he fell over.”
“I understand he’s been in counseling since he was twelve,” Mia said softly, trying not to phrase it like an accusation.
“As he got older, the kids got meaner,” Laurie said, stroking the cat so hard that it bent under her touch. “In elementary school, everyone knows everyone. He went to a small school and there were always parents around volunteering or picking up their kids. But things changed in middle school. The kids are on their own more. They have more secrets, and they get sneakier. He seemed depressed, so I took him to a counselor. He put Darin on medication.”
Mia made a note. Some antidepressants had actually been shown to put a small percentage of teens at greater risk for committing suicide. The defense would be sure to bring it up. “Would you give me permission to talk to his therapist?” Patient-client confidentiality would probably preclude a lot of discovery, but Mia still might be able to tease out something if she phrased her questions as hypothetical.
“Of course. It’s Dr. Thorensen,” Nate said. “Harold Thorensen.”
“Do you know if Darin had ever talked about killing himself?” Mia asked gently.
“No,” Laurie said. “At least not to us. He did keep saying he didn’t know how he could do four more years. He wanted us to homeschool him, but how could we do that? I work full-time and Nate never even graduated from high school.” A look passed between husband and wife.
“I know this is painful,” Mia said gently, “but can you go over some of the bullying that went on at school?”
Nate took a deep breath, coughed, and then began. “Last year, when Darin was in eighth grade, things started getting really bad. They pushed notes into his locker. They called him names. They tripped him in the hall. Once I went into his room when he was changing into his pajamas. I saw bruises on his chest. He said he fell. I knew that was a lie.”
Charlie, who normally seemed unflappable, looked ill.
“He used to beg me to call in and say he was sick.” Laurie was petting the cat faster and faster. “He said he could help Nate with the yard work.”
“But it was Facebook that was the last straw.” Nate lit another cigarette. “We thought letting him have a Facebook account would be a good way for him to stay in touch with his cousins or friends who had moved away. He was on it a lot at first, but then he stopped using it as much.”
“The novelty wore off,” Laurie said.
“ ‘The novelty wore off,’ ” Nate parroted. “Get your head out of the sand, Laurie. It wasn’t that Darin got bored. It’s what they started doing to him. He’d put something on his wall, and kids would chime in with sarcastic comments, and then other kids would ‘like’ ”—he made air quotes—“those comments but not his original post.” He took a long drag on his cigarette before continuing. “But the worst is that someone hacked into his account two days before he died.”
“What do you mean?” Charlie leaned forward.
“Someone pretending to be him posted disgusting messages on his wall.” Nate’s lip curled. “They invited kids—boys—from his new school to come over to our house and have sex with him. Only it looked like it was Darin doing it. Kids he didn’t even know. He had been hoping that things would be different because he was in high school.”
Laurie added, “They even put up his address and phone number. We’re just lucky some pedophile didn’t come over here and try to take advantage of him.”
“What do you mean lucky, Laurie?” Nate snapped. “Darin is dead. You can’t get any more unlucky than that.”
Laurie didn’t answer, but she stroked the cat so hard it let out a yowl and shot off her lap.
Mia tried to get them back on track. “And no one told Darin that his Facebook had been hacked?”
“No.” Nate spit out the word. “It took him two days to realize what was going on. Whoever it was, they were smart. They unfriended his real friends, unfriended anyone who was a relative. So no one who might clue him in knew. Meanwhile, it seems like everyone else in school not only knew about it but kept it going. These kids weren’t innocent bystanders. And you can’t tell me that just because they’re in high school they didn’t understand what they were doing. When he finally figured it out, he tried to tell everyone it wasn’t him, but no one believed him. So he came home and killed himself.”
“Was he home alone when it happened?” Mia asked. It felt too cruel to spell out what it was.
Nate flinched as if he had been slapped. “No. I was right here. I was twenty feet away. He came home, yelled hello, and went into his room. I was on the Internet, if you want to know the truth. I was just killing time, looking at stupid stuff, and meanwhile my son’s looping his scarf over the closet rod. It was probably almost an hour before I went in to talk to him and I found him. His skin was already cool to the touch. I can’t help thinking if I had been paying attention . . .” His voice trailed off. “And when I touched his laptop, the screen came to life and I saw his Facebook page. I saw what they had done. I printed it all off in case someone went back and tried to delete things once they heard what happened. Facebook deactivated his account the next day, but not before a few people posted on there saying they were glad he was dead. Glad.”
Nate picked up the stack of papers and started paging through them. “I mean, look at this.” His voice cracked. “ ‘You queer! I’m going to tie you to a pole with a rope, then tie another rope around your stomach and tie the end to my bumper and drive off. I’ll rip you in half.’ ”
What Darin’s father had been describing already met the state’s definition of cyberstalking. But Mia hadn’t seen the death threat before, which took it from a misdemeanor to a Class C felony.
“By making examples of these kids, we can help make it so that it’s no longer acceptable to do what they did,” Mia said.
“Make examples?” Nate echoed sarcastically. “That’s not much punishment, is it? Considering that my son is dead? You sound as wishy-washy as that first woman I talked to.”
Mia froze. “Do you mean Colleen Miller? Colleen is dead. She was murdered in her home on Sunday.”
&n
bsp; Nate had the grace to look away. “I’m—I’m sorry.”
Mia didn’t want to lose her focus, so she turned the conversation back to Darin. “We’re going to do our best to hold these kids accountable. Do you have any idea who they were?”
“Darin would never tell us the names of the kids who picked on him. He said it would just make it worse.”
“Well, can you give us the names of some of his friends so we could ask them?” Charlie asked.
Laurie said, “There’s these two girls, Shiloh and Rainy. They’ve known Darin since grade school.” She turned to Nate. “And maybe they should talk to Jeremy.”
After a moment Nate nodded. “Jeremy and Darin were best friends in grade school. In middle school they started growing apart. Or at least Jeremy started pulling away from Darin. Darin was only over at Jeremy’s house once this summer and that’s it. They used to be really close. But Darin talked to Rainy and Shiloh nearly every day.”
Mia said, “I have a son who’s about the same age. A lot of the time they’ll tell their friends things they might not tell their parents.”
“You have a son.” Nate’s eyes skewered her.
“Yes.” She was suddenly sorry she had mentioned Gabe.
“You still have a son.” He took a long drag on his cigarette. “These punks left me with nothing.”
CHAPTER 20
At the beginning of second period, Gabe broke out his two peanut butter sandwiches. Mrs. Schmalz was cool and let them eat in class. He had made them after his mom left for work, so she wouldn’t ask why he was bringing sandwiches to school but still needed lunch money. She wouldn’t understand.
This morning she had seemed upset about something, yelling at herself for forgetting to buy fresh bread. But Gabe hadn’t seen anything wrong with the bread they already had. And he needed the 680 calories and 18 grams of protein that he could get from two sandwiches.
Today Mrs. Schmalz showed a boring video about geometry while Gabe doggedly chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed. After he finished, it was all he could do not to fall asleep. Even after the lights were turned back on, the talk about postulates and theorems made him prop his head in his hands while trying to keep his eyes open.
In American history they had to pretend they were reporters at a muckraking newspaper and write articles about tenements. In ceramics they made fish out of clay. For lunch Gabe had two vanilla milk shakes and two slices of sausage pizza, for a total of 1550 calories and 42 grams of protein. Then it was on to Spanish I, which was a bunch of verbs he couldn’t remember two minutes after he parroted them back to the teacher.
At least biology was all easy stuff like cell parts, and Tyler was in this class. Tyler wasn’t on the football team—he only cared about basketball—but Gabe and Ty had been tight since elementary school. He had been texting Tyler when his mom made him listen to Colleen’s last minutes. Of course that night, after everything was over and his mom was in bed, he had texted back and forth with Ty, told him what really happened. His mom had said not to tell, but it was too late for that. By then Ty already knew most of it. Gabe had just filled in the blanks.
Before class started, Ty leaned over. “I heard Mr. Washington played basketball at Wake Forest.” His eyes were wide with excitement.
Yeah, but now Mr. Washington was a teacher, not a pro. Maybe that was why he had pinned a quote from Horace Greeley, whoever that was, above his whiteboard: Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident, riches take wings. Only one endures, and that is character.
While that might be true, Gabe thought as he munched on a protein bar on the way to football practice, he wouldn’t mind fame, popularity, or riches. Even if they didn’t last, still, you would have had them for a little while.
Right now he didn’t have any of those things. The high school was four times as big as his old middle school, and he still felt a little lost. But Coach Harper had picked Gabe for the team, so he must have seen something in him. Gabe wished he knew what. It seemed to have disappeared between being picked for the team and actually playing in a game. Once Coach saw how scrawny Gabe was compared to everyone else, he had probably realized his mistake. If he got bigger, maybe Coach would put him in.
Practice started with warm-up drills: lunges, sprinting, jumping jacks. Then Coach had them running up and back around a backstop. As Gabe huffed and sweated, he hoped the running part would be over soon. It was basically cardio, and everyone said cardio burned calories. Next they did monkey rolls and practiced running into dummies. Gabe was feeling pretty good about things—he might be little, but he was fast and limber—but then Coach had them do punts and punt returns. Eldon hit Gabe so hard he ended up on his back with all the air knocked out of him. Then Coach told them to run pass routes, and Rufus just turned around and threw Gabe down like he was nothing. When practice ended, Gabe’s ego was as sore as his body.
After showering, Gabe stepped on the scale. He was pleasantly surprised. He had already gained three pounds! He had set up a diet plan, and it was working. He was on a roll!
A cuff to the shoulder sent him staggering sideways off the platform.
“Hey,” Gabe yelled, fists balling. Then he turned and saw that it was Zach, one of the guys he had hung out with the night before. Zach was a year older, four inches taller, and seventy-five pounds heavier. The cool thing about high school was that you got to hang out with older kids. The classes weren’t filled with babies, little sixth and seventh graders who didn’t even come up to your armpit, the way it had been last year. Some of the guys on the team were the size of adults—and not regular adults either, but football player adults.
“Beefing up?” Zach asked, grinning. “Drinking that protein shake like I told you to?”
Eldon and Rufus were listening as they got dressed. They were both sophomores and friends of Zach’s. Eldon didn’t say much, and his eyes were continually at half-mast, but he was always smiling. Rufus was big, over two hundred pounds, not all of it muscle. But that didn’t matter very much when he had just run into you and he weighed nearly a hundred pounds more than you did.
“I made one of those shakes last night.” It had tasted terrible.
“You should have another one as soon as you can after practice. Try mixing it with grape juice. It’s a fast-absorbing carbohydrate, and that means it’ll replace the glycogen in your muscle cells that you lost when we were pushing you up and down the field today.” Zach probably knew more about biology than Mr. Washington.
“Okay.” Gabe pulled on his boxers and jeans.
“So what are you going to do now?” Zach asked.
Gabe looked around to make sure he was still talking to him. He thought last night had been a fluke, just him happening to be next to Zach and his friends when Grandpa called with the word that he was free.
“Just going home.”
Zach’s eyes flashed over to Eldon and Rufus, then looked back at Gabe. “There anybody at your house?”
“Only my little sister. I have to pick her up from preschool on the way home. My mom doesn’t get home from work until kinda late.” He hoped no one would ask about his dad—or worse yet, knew what had happened and would say they were sorry—but nobody did. “And then I’m going to lift. There’s a whole weight setup in my basement.”
Zach took the bait, as Gabe had hoped he might. “Cool. Maybe we can come hang out at your place?”
“Sure.” He tried to hide his grin. “Like I said, all I need to do is go get my sister.”
“We can pick her up in my car.”
Gabe was still impressed that Zach had a car. They had all gone to the mall together in it the night before. Gabe was studying for his learner’s permit, which he wouldn’t be able to get until he turned fifteen in February. Wasn’t there some kind of Washington law about drivers under eighteen not being able to carry more than three passengers under the age of twenty who weren’t members of their immediate family? Once they added Brooke, it would be four. Plus there wouldn’t be any car seat.
But it was only four blocks, and she would be sitting between him and Eldon and they would be like cushions. And he could throw his arm across her if they had to come to a sudden stop. As they walked out to the parking lot, Gabe gave Zach directions to the preschool.
His new friends stayed in the car while he went inside to get his sister. It was five forty-five, so there were a lot of parents running in and out. He hoped no one noticed that he wasn’t walking her home.
Brooke gave him a big smile with her tiny white teeth. But when they went outside and he opened the passenger door for her, she hung back. Eldon smiled at her encouragingly and patted the empty seat, but Gabe could feel her back stiffen against his knees. “Come on, Brooke, get in,” he said, nudging her. She wouldn’t budge. The only way he got her inside was to have her sit closest to the door while he squished in next to Eldon. Meanwhile Zach drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and sighed.
“Dude, this is nice,” Eldon said appreciatively after Gabe unlocked the front door and they all trooped inside. He looked around, seeing the wood floors and old oak furniture with new eyes. Maybe it was nice. He didn’t know.
“Hey, Brooke, go on and watch TV for a little while, okay?” She went into the family room without protest.
“Time for you to drink that shake,” Zach said. Gabe ended up following him into his own kitchen. While he was making the shake—with milk, since they didn’t have any grape juice—Zach started rooting around in the fridge. “The only way you are going to get big, dude, is to eat lots and lots of protein. Eggs, cheese, milk, peanut butter. And meat. Get your mom to start buying steaks.” He emerged from the refrigerator with an unopened two-pound orange loaf of Tillamook cheddar cheese. “Now that’s what I’m talking about.” He grabbed a knife from the block on the counter and started cutting off hunks and handing them to Eldon and Rufus, in between stuffing bites into his own mouth.