As I sat in that living room listening to my mother and Tristan cry in the kitchen, all I could of think was: What is she going to find to make up for losing a son?
Anyway, after about half an hour, my mom finally left the kitchen, walking right past the couch where I was sitting without noticing me at all.
“I’m home,” I said.
She turned quickly, startled. Her eyes and face were red; her makeup smeared. But the moment she saw me she turned on her brightest, whitest, fakest smile. “Oh, Jonathan. I didn’t hear you come in. How was school? Are you hungry? Would you like me to make you some dinner?”
“Mom,” I said. “You don’t have to be like this. You can—” But she didn’t let me finish.
“I know…I’ll make you beef stroganoff,” she exclaimed, smiling even more brightly than before. “That’s your favorite. Just give me a minute to freshen up.” And with that, she turned on her heels and began to bounce up the steps.
“That’s Ryan’s favorite,” I said quietly.
She stopped abruptly, turning halfway back toward me with a strained look of only half comprehension. “Oh. Was it? Well maybe just meatloaf in that case.” And then she bounced the rest of the way up the steps.
I rose slowly off the couch and approached the kitchen door. Tristan was sitting on a stool at the counter, leaning over her cold cup of tea, wrapping her hands around the mug as if it were still warm. She didn’t notice me there, so I coughed from the doorway. When she looked up, I said, “Hey, Tris.”
“Jonathan,” she said meekly. “Come here.”
I walked over to her, and she stood up to greet me, wrapping me in a big hug and tousling my hair. “How are you doing?” she asked. “You hanging in there?”
For some reason this struck me as a very odd question, though clearly it shouldn’t have. But the thing is, I felt sort of fine, at the moment. I wasn’t depressed, or angry, or anything so severe. I was so consumed with thoughts about how Ryan died and what he believed about God and getting a ride to the party, that I don’t think I could have made myself feel sad even if I wanted to.
I knew, however, that I had to play the part of the grieving brother if I wanted to get that ride, so I gave her my best puppy-dog eyes, looked at the floor, and said, “Not great.”
“I know,” she said. “Me neither.” Then she hugged me again.
After a minute or so, she pulled away. “So I hear you went to school today.”
“Yeah, I did. It was…weird.”
“Well, it’s kind of a weird place.”
I nodded.
Her eyes were sad and swollen. “This is such a terrible way for you to start high school.”
She had no idea. “Yeah well…” I said. “There’s this huge memorial on the front steps. Did you see it?”
“Yeah, I’ve been over there a lot.”
“Did Ryan even know all of those people?”
This made her laugh a bit, but only for a second. “Yeah,” she said. “He was really popular.”
“I never met any of them. The only friends of his I knew were you, the twins, and Jake.”
Tristan sat back on her stool, staring down into her cup. “You know, he didn’t really hang out with Jake or the twins much anymore.”
I thought about it for a second, realizing that, in fact, I hadn’t really seen them for a while. “Why not?”
Her eyes shifted around the room. “I don’t know. They’ve been growing apart for years.”
“Was it because of Alistair and those guys?”
Her eyes darted up at me. “What is that supposed to mean?” she asked, a slight quiver in her voice. She stared at me intently, seeming almost afraid of what my answer might be.
For a moment, I considered telling her everything, the whole story: what happened behind the school, Jesus Jackson, my investigation, Henry, everything.
But I didn’t. I decided to play dumb for the time being. It seemed the safer way to go. “Um, nothing. I just heard him talking about hanging out with those guys. That’s all.”
Tristan still seemed wary. But I made my best attempt at a sadly innocent, slightly confused face, and she softened. She said, “Ryan kind of switched his whole group of friends, and Alistair and company were part of the new one.”
“Oh. I didn’t know.”
“Yeah, well. It happens.”
“What did you think of that? Do you trust those guys?”
“Trust them?”
“I mean, did you like them? Did you like hanging out with them?”
She looked off, over my shoulder. “They’re fine. They were Ryan’s friends, so you know…they became mine.”
“I guess it just never occurred to me that he would have so many friends,” I said, trying desperately to think of a way to broach the subject of the party. Luckily, Tristan did it for me.
“Well he did,” she said, putting her hand on my shoulder. “But I’m sure you’ll get to know them all, sooner or later. At least his real friends.”
“Who are the real ones? Are they the people responsible for this God stuff all over the school?”
She laughed a bit. “Maybe some of them. It is a Catholic school, you know, Jonathan.”
“Sure, but Ryan was no Catholic.”
She looked confused. “What do you mean? What else would he be?”
“Well, he’s…” But I stopped myself. She seemed honestly surprised that I would ever consider Ryan to be anything other than a perfectly normal, good Catholic kid. “Tristan, did you and Ryan ever really talk about, like, God and stuff?”
“No,” she said, with a bit of a laugh, as if talking about God was an even crazier idea than not believing in him. “I mean, we had Theology together in tenth grade, I think. But we never just sat around chatting about Jesus.”
I decided to drop the subject. Clearly, whatever Ryan truly thought about religion since he started at St. Soren’s, he never felt the need to share it with Tristan. So I mumbled something about Ryan being a spiritual guy and then searched my mind for a good way to ask her for a ride to the party.
“About those real friends,” I said. “Actually, I was wondering if you were going to the party Friday night. I mean, I know there’s usually something going on at the radio tower before a big game, and I was figuring that lots of Ryan’s friends would be there, and it might be nice just to be around people.”
“Oh, I don’t know, Jon. I wasn’t really planning…”
I said nothing. I just gave a half-hearted nod and began to shuffle out of the room.
I barely made two feet toward the door. “Okay, okay. We can go up there, for a little bit. It’ll probably be good for me. You know, to get out.”
I turned my head, just slightly, over my shoulder. “Do you think we could bring my friend Henry along? Just, you know, for support?”
“Of course,” she said, though now with a twinge of uneasiness in her voice. “Of course.”
Thirteen
If you had told me three weeks before any of this started that I was going to be the most recognizable kid in the whole freshmen class, or worse, the whole high school, I would have laughed, probably scoffed, and said something like, “Let’s hope not.” But inside (I must admit) I would have probably been excited—or at least hopeful, assuming that such popularity would be due to my heretofore-overlooked wit and sarcastic charm. I think I would have enjoyed the high-fives in the hallways, the inside jokes with every clique in school, the love.
And of course, in a way, I did achieve a good degree of local celebrity, though for the worst of all possible reasons. Everywhere I went—every square foot of every hallway, every classroom, and every seat at every table in the cafeteria—people knew who I was. They knew my name, they knew my face, my life story, and they all just stared at me with the same nauseating look of sympathy and discomfort.
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And really, I don’t think it would have been nearly as bad if it weren’t for all the goddamned God crap that seemed to multiply exponentially by the hour. At least if I were in a public school, the assistant principal wouldn’t be able to add, at the end of every announcement, “And let us not forget to pray for the healing of Ryan Stiles’ family, especially Jonathan Stiles, a new member of the St. Soren’s family, who is particularly in need of our prayers and support.”
It was all I could do to keep myself from running straight out of the school.
Then there was Mr. Finger. Clearly unsatisfied with our first meeting, he sent a pass to my homeroom on Wednesday requesting my presence immediately. I ignored the pass, along with the ones he sent to my third and fifth period classes as well. I made it all the way until Friday, actually, before Ms. LaRochelle finally showed up at Math to escort me there in person. I knew what she wanted the minute she came in the door and began whispering conspiratorially with Mr. McKenzie.
So I relented. I got up from my desk, left the class, and followed her silently through the halls, down the back staircase, and to the end of that awful basement corridor.
Mr. Finger was right where I left him, that blindingly idiotic smile still resting on his stupid face. And just like before, he said, “So, Jonathan. Would you like to start with prayer?”
“No,” I replied. “No, I would not like to start with prayer. At all. Ever.”
“I see. Uh…” He rifled through some papers on his desk. “Not everyone does…um…are you Jewish?”
“Excuse me?”
He stared at some hand-written notes on my file. “Is that why you don’t want to pray? I don’t remember reading that, but…”
“Jewish people pray too. You know that, don’t you?”
“Of course,” he said quickly, now looking seriously concerned, as if I were definitely Jewish and he had deeply offended me. “I didn’t mean to say that you don’t. Jewish prayers are…great! It’s just that some Jewish students don’t like to participate in…”
I sighed. “I’m not Jewish.”
“Oh,” he looked relieved.
“I’m an atheist.”
“Excuse me?”
“An atheist.”
“Oh no.” He leaned back, away from me, curling his lips over his teeth. He looked shocked, uncomfortable, confused. I imagine he’d have had a similar reaction if I told him I was an arsonist, or had AIDS. “But why?”
His shock just annoyed me. Didn’t this guy deal with kids all the time? I couldn’t have been the only atheist in the school, or at least not the only one he’d met. “That’s kind of a big question.”
“Well being an atheist is a big decision.”
“It’s more of a realization than a decision. You just realize there’s no God, and then you’re an atheist.”
He leaned forward in his chair. I noticed a speck of what looked like poppy seed bagel in his silky yellow beard. “You really believe that there is no God?”
I thought about what Jesus Jackson had said: how I didn’t really have enough faith to be an atheist. How, rather than actually believing in nothing, I just didn’t believe in anything. “Sure,” I said. “I really don’t believe in any god.”
“Wow, that must be really hard for you.”
“Not really,” I said, feeling a little like a hypocrite or at least a liar. Because of course it was hard—it was worse than hard; it was impossible. I was paying a goddamned “spiritual contractor” to build me some faith because I could barely keep my shit together without any. And it was all so absurd, when you think about it. I mean, what the hell was I going to do? Just shut my brain off and swallow whatever bullshit Jesus Jackson came up with for me? What if he tried to give me faith in this same old, tired-out Christian God? Or something equally absurd? But then again, wouldn’t anything he gave me faith in be just as ludicrous as Christianity? Did I really think that there was one fairy tale out there that was magically going to ring “truer” than the rest, no matter how obviously false?
These questions kept swirling around in my brain, until I heard Mr. Finger whisper, his voice softening to its most affected, sympathetic-social-worker tone. “I would just think it would be especially difficult, you know, for someone in your position.”
“And what position is that?”
His voice became even more saccharine than before. “Your brother, of course. If you don’t believe in God, then what do you believe happened to him when he—”
I didn’t bother to wait for him to finish the question. I hopped out of my seat, picked up my bag, and spent the rest of the period in the last stall of the first-floor bathroom, cursing Mr. Finger and Alistair and Jesus Jackson and everyone.
By the time I made it home after school I was exhausted—emotionally and physically. Each day that week there had been more religious posters, more sympathetic smiles, more strangers hugging me and crying and regaling me with their vast exaggerations of their deep connections with my brother. Honestly, the last thing in the world I wanted to do was to go to a party with all of those same goddamned people.
But then again, I couldn’t bring myself to call it off. I just kept thinking about Alistair, and his smug face, thinking he’d gotten away with it. Thinking that I’d be too scared, or too stupid, to make him pay for what he did.
***
There was nothing about my house to suggest, even in the slightest of ways, that it was a place of such fresh death, of such ongoing mourning. There were no drawn curtains, no low lights, no lying around of the expected mess or disarray. There was no black. None. Well, except for my room, of course, but that had been black since long before Ryan’s death.
No, my house, as always, had the gloss and sterile perfection of a model home in a real estate ad—everything impossibly aligned and dust-free. Every window thrown open, every light brightly burning, every color combined in a perfect tonal harmony, as if you were wearing some special glasses colored in pleasing blends of beige and powder blue. Not only that, but my mother had barely stopped cooking and cleaning long enough to sleep since Ryan’s death, so everything smelled intensely of Pine-Sol and cookies. Add to this the Christmas music (yes, that’s right: Christmas music…in September) blaring cheerily from the kitchen stereo, and you had a setting that would have seemed eerily festive under any circumstances…much less in the aftermath of a seventeen-year-old’s death.
I think it absolutely floored Henry when he walked through the door.
And as if the house itself wasn’t enough to overwhelm poor Henry, out came my mother, just as he arrived. She was dressed, as she had been all week, in head-to-toe pastel (all designer, all awful) with her up-coiffed brown hair and her flawless face, painfully gritting a too-bright smile. Personally, I thought she looked like a Ralph Lauren mannequin that had taken a bit too much Ritalin. I couldn’t even imagine what Henry must have thought.
“You must be Henry,” she said. “It’s very nice to meet you.”
Henry seemed to be staring at my mom’s high-heeled feet. “Nice to meet you too,” he mumbled.
“I’m just so glad my Jon as made a friend at his new Catholic school. He didn’t make any real friends at his public middle school, which is no surprise, really, because of course his father made him go there.”
She paused for some kind of a response from Henry, but his eyes never left her shoes. This was probably for the best. If he had responded, she just would’ve launched into all of the reasons why, had I gone to the public high school (as I had been begging her to for years) I would certainly wind up a criminal, a drug addict, or worse.
But she didn’t. Instead, she just gave Henry a haughty turn of her disapproving chin and said, “Well, you boys have fun,” and then click-clacked her heels straight back to the kitchen.
“Sorry about that,” I said, as soon as she was out of earshot. “That’s just
kind of how she is.”
Henry shrugged it off. “Mine’s no better.” Then he swung around his gigantic backpack and laid it on the ground. “So I’ve got all of the supplies we need for the night: plastic bags, rubber gloves, two magnifying glasses, headlamps, extra batteries, energy bars—”
I cringed. “Henry,” I said, placing a hand on his shoulder. “We can’t bring all this stuff.”
“Why not?” He looked genuinely confused.
“We’re going to a party. A keg party, in the woods.”
“I know,” he said after a moment. “That’s why I brought bug spray.”
I reached into his backpack and pulled out a handful of plastic bags. “Stuff these into your pocket, they may come in handy. If you bring any of this other stuff, we’re going to look like we’re on our way to a Sherlock Holmes convention.”
“But how are we going to investigate without our magnifying—?”
“Think about this as an undercover job, Henry. Deep cover. You wouldn’t bring a magnifying glass on an undercover job, would you?”
A great wave of realization seemed to wash over my little friend. He slapped his palm to his forehead. “Of course!” he said, breaking into fits of spastic laughter. “What was I thinking? We’re going undercover with the suspects, we have to be incognito, we have to blend in!”
“Exactly.”
Henry skipped over to the floor-to-ceiling mirror right by the entrance to the living room, and began to inspect himself carefully. “Well, my outfit won’t really do at all, then. Will it?”
Now that was funny. He was right, of course—he actually didn’t look that much different than he did in his school uniform. Instead of a navy blue button-down tucked into light khaki pants, he had on a light blue button-down tucked into dark khaki pants. “Well, you’re right about that. Come on, I probably have some old clothes up in my room that will fit you.”
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