All the blood rushed right out of my head; I nearly passed out. How long had it been since I saw Henry? Five minutes? Two minutes? Thirty seconds? Damn this redheaded vixen! She’d messed up my entire sense of time and organization. However long it’d been, I was sure Henry was still in Alistair’s room.
Cassie must have noticed the worried look on my face. She peered out the window and rolled her eyes. “Practice must have been rained out. Don’t sweat it, he won’t bother us…too much.”
“Right, yeah, no problem.” I was just hoping that Henry heard Alistair as clearly as we had. But what if he hadn’t? What if he was behind Alistair’s desk, or in his closet, or under his bed, and couldn’t hear a thing? I had to think of a way to get myself out of Cassie’s room again, if only for a moment.
Before I could think of anything, though, Cassie walked over to me and took both of my hands in hers. She said, “Maybe someday we can do this. Maybe this summer, or next year…once you’ve healed.”
I didn’t know what to say. I had this incredible urge to scream—in protest, in fear—but then all I could focus on was the sound of those footsteps approaching from the other side of the house. So I froze. Half of me was trying desperately to pull away and go running out to save Henry, while the other half wanted nothing more than to stay right where I was and convince Cassie that she was wrong—terribly, terribly wrong.
In the hallway, just outside Cassie’s room, a door slammed. And then Alistair’s voice, loud, yelled: “What the hell is going on here?!”
The bottom dropped out from under me. My knees wobbled and sank. I whispered, “I’m sorry.”
Cassie cocked her head a bit, seeming confused by my barely audible apology. She opened her lips to speak.
BANG BANG BANG. It was Cassie’s door. She let go of my hands, yelled, “What?!”
Alistair threw open the door, yelling, “Why the hell—” but cut himself off when he saw me. His whole demeanor changed, and he looked—I swear—a little scared. “What are you doing here, Stiles?” he asked.
“I’m helping him make up his class work,” Cassie said. “What do you want?”
Alistair’s eyes darted from me to Cassie and back a few times. He said, almost in whine, “Someone left my window open. My carpet is all wet.”
“You probably did it yourself. Now leave us alone, okay?”
Alistair glared at us both, whispered, “Whatever,” and shuffled out of the room.
***
Two minutes later, after having given Cassie some phenomenally lame excuse about forgetting a dentist appointment, or something, I was bursting out of the St. Claire’s front door, running headlong into the pouring rain.
I made it about twenty feet through the front yard when I heard Alistair’s voice calling, “Wait!” from somewhere behind me.
I stopped in a puddle of mud. I could feel the muck seeping in through the mesh in my sneakers. I turned, and there he was: standing on the front stoop, staring me down while the rain drenched his hair and his clothes. “Oh,” I said. “Hey, Alistair.”
He didn’t move; he didn’t even seem to notice the rain. “What’s this all about, Stiles?”
“What do you mean? I’m just—like Cassie said—getting some help with my class work.”
“Since when do you know Cassie?”
“We met at that party. You know, the one you invited us to?”
He wiped some of the water from his eyes. “Yeah?”
“And then she offered to help me out.”
Alistair drew a deep, slow breath. Then another. “So how’d it go then? The class work?”
“Good,” I lied. “We got a lot done.”
“So then you won’t need to come back here?” he said, taking a single step in my direction. “Right?”
I got the hint. “Right.”
Alistair’s shoulders seemed to relax a little. He stood there for another few seconds, then turned without a word, and walked back into the house.
Twenty-one
It took me almost ten minutes of searching behind shrubs and trees and mailboxes and cars, before I finally found Henry. He was all curled up in a little ball, cowering beneath a rose bush in a yard across the street.
“I thought you were a dead man,” I said.
“I almost was,” he replied, shuffling over to me like a little boy who just got his lunch money stolen, his clothes and face covered in grass stains and dirt. “I had to dive out the window at the last minute. I think I sprained my face.”
I laughed. “So how did it go?”
“Bad,” he said, his eyes remaining glued to his feet. “Really bad.”
Shit, I thought. “So you didn’t find anything?”
“Nothing,” he replied. “But that’s not the bad part…”
Now I was confused. “What do you mean? What could be worse than not finding anything?”
Henry looked apologetic, even embarrassed. “I left the hard drive in there.”
“You did what?”
“I was in the middle of copying files when he came back, and I didn’t even think about it. I just jumped out the window…”
“So we’ve probably been figured out already? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“No,” he said. “Probably not. It was an older desktop computer, so I had to plug the hard drive into the back. Unless he happens to look on the floor behind his desk, he’ll never know it’s there.”
“Jesus, Henry,” I said, shaking my head.
“Don’t get mad at me!” he snapped. “What took you so long in there anyway?”
“Well, she kind of…kissed me.”
“She what?!”
“It wasn’t my fault.”
“I was in there risking my life and you were making out?!”
“Well I couldn’t just stop. She would have been suspicious!”
Henry threw his arms up in exasperation. “Right. Of course you couldn’t. I’m in there, on the verge of a brain-damaging beating, all for your brother, and you couldn’t possibly think of a way to NOT be hooking up!”
I stared at my shoes. He was right, of course. I had forgotten all about Henry and my brother and our whole plan while I was in there. “Sorry,” I muttered.
“You know what?” he said. “I’m done. This whole thing is absurd, anyway. You want to play detective, play it by yourself.” And with that, Henry turned and stormed off toward his house.
I didn’t know what the hell to do. Maybe he was right. Maybe this whole thing was stupid. How was a kid like me going to prove anything to anybody? I still had no hard evidence, no real idea what happened to Ryan after I left, and no hope of figuring any of it out at all. As far as I could see, there was pretty much no good reason for me to continue with any of it. I might as well just give up, and get on with my life. What difference would any of it make in the end, anyway?
There was just one thing holding me back: the look on Alistair’s face when he first saw me in Cassie’s room, and then again in the yard. It wasn’t just confused, or concerned, or even worried. There was fear in his face. Real fear. I was sure of it.
No, I decided, I couldn’t just give up. There was no turning back now. No wussing out of anything. Alistair was hiding something, something about Ryan…and if I didn’t figure out what it was, no one ever would. And that just wasn’t acceptable.
So I started off back home, thinking about what my next step should be, when I heard an all too familiar voice calling my name. “Jonathan. Hey, Jonathan. Over here!”
I wheeled around, already knowing exactly who I’d find, in full view of the streetlight, the house, yard—everything. It was Tristan.
I tried to play it cool. “Hey, Tris. What are you doing over here? I was just getting some homework—”
“Get in.”
I swallowed hard, walked over, a
nd climbed into her jeep. My first priority was not to give up anything until I was sure she already knew it. I looked over at the house, and sure enough, both Alistair and Cassie’s windows were visible, though at least partially obscured by some bushes. She very well may not have seen Henry sneaking in. I’d just have to feel it out.
But as soon as I closed the door behind me, Tristan said, “Why are you here? And what the hell did you and your little friend steal from Al’s house?”
“Nothing,” I said. “We didn’t steal anything. And I was just doing some homework with Cassie. Why are you here?”
“I gave Alistair a ride home,” she snapped. “I was just about to leave when I saw some kid jumping out of Al’s window and then you come running like a crazy person out of their front door.”
Okay, so playing this safe was no longer an option. “Look, it’s not what you think.”
“I don’t know what to think. I don’t think anything. I just want to know what the hell you guys are up to.”
“Just…just don’t worry about it, okay?”
“Don’t worry about it?” she said, with kind of a nervous, manic laugh at the edge of her voice. “Are you kidding me?”
“No,” I said. “It’s nothing.”
She put a hand on my shoulder, gently. “Is this about Ryan? Because if this is about Ryan, then…then you have to tell me what’s going on.”
For the first time since I got in the car, I looked Tristan in the eyes. Far from the angry woman I was expecting, what I saw looking back at me was just a broken, shattered little girl, on the edge of falling into tears. It occurred to me that, whatever it was in me that needed to find out about Alistair and Ryan and what happened behind the school, Tristan probably had it too.
I gave in. “So, how well do you know Alistair?”
“What do you mean?” she asked. “I know him fine….”
“Well,” I said, taking a long pause. “I have reason to believe that he may be at least partially responsible for Ryan’s death.”
Out of all of the responses I’d have thought such an accusation would have elicited—surprise, laughter, suspicion, skepticism, concern—the one I got was the last one I ever would have expected.
A halted, choked-back cry of emotion tried to escape from her throat, but she swallowed it back to a barely audible squeak. Her voice shaking, almost on the verge of collapse, she whispered, “I figured that’s why you were over here. So what have you come up with? Anything we can use?”
Instantly, my entire view of Tristan changed. Where I had been thinking of her as an obstacle, here she had revealed herself, with a few short words, to be a possible ally in all of this.
And sure, maybe I should have been a bit more skeptical. Maybe there was something a little too easy about how quickly she revealed her suspicions; something, perhaps, even calculating about the way she inserted herself into the middle of my plan. But what can I say? At the moment, I had nothing—or almost nothing—and my one ally just left me standing in the rain on a street corner.
So, what else could I do? I said, “Are you willing to help?”
“Of course,” she said, wiping a tear from her cheek. “I’ve already started. Look.” And with that she pointed over at the St. Claire house, toward Alistair’s window. Inside, Alistair was rummaging around, appearing as if he lost something rather important. “That’s a little suspicious, don’t you think?”
“It sure is.”
“So what did you find?”
I shrugged. “Unfortunately, not much. Today was a total failure.”
“So you have nothing? No proof, evidence, anything?”
“No,” I said. “I mean, not nothing…” and then I began to tell Tristan the abbreviated version of the story (leaving out, among other things, my make-out session with Cassie), while she drove back to my house. It took the whole ride for me to get through just the shortened version, so we were pulling into the driveway when I finally said, “…and then you came out of nowhere and scared the hell out of me.”
Tristan nodded, deep in thought. “Well, we’re going to have to do better,” she said. “And we’re going to have to get that hard drive back.”
“Yeah, I know.” Honestly, I was hoping for a little more insight from her than that. “Any ideas?”
Tristan stared out at my house, in the direction of my brother’s window. His light was on, which means my mother was in there somewhere, probably dusting, or refolding already clean clothes, or just standing at his closet door, holding onto a sleeve of his favorite jacket. “Why don’t you tell it all to me again?” she said, her voice cracking slightly. “But this time don’t leave out anything. Not a detail.”
And so I proceeded to tell Tristan everything, in the utmost detail…or at least, almost everything. I left out Jesus Jackson, of course, and the fact that I had just kissed Cassie so long and so wonderfully. But everything else, I laid out in its entirety: what happened in the woods, what Henry and I had found, the party, jersey numbers, the footprints, the plan with Cassie—everything. After all of it, though, Tristan didn’t come up with any new ideas. She just listened intently, seeming to lose her concentration every so often, glazing over as she stared up at that window.
After I said good-bye and went inside, I found my mother right where I thought she would be, in Ryan’s room, sitting in the center of the floor. But she didn’t notice me. Her eyes were closed, and she looked as if she’d been crying. I saw that her lips were parted, and barely moving, as if repeating some silent prayer. I hurried past, not wanting to disturb her.
A few minutes later I looked out my window to find Tristan’s car still right where I had left it in the driveway. She, like my mother, was just sitting there: her eyes closed, her cheeks wet, silently speaking words I could never know, or understand.
Twenty-two
My mother was never the type of woman to admit defeat easily. By the spring of 2009, when she finally kicked my father out for good, it was only after chasing off no less than four of his varied and voluptuous mistresses—the last one right across our own front lawn, in front of me and Ryan (we had been told to “wait in the car”), holding a carving knife in one hand and a few inches of the woman’s black hair in the other.
And yet she had no choice but to admit defeat when it came to the salvation of her sons. After all, in the wake of our response to the “burning of the list,” what other choice did she have? Instead of scaring us back toward the path of righteousness, her strategy had just strengthened our resolve to find a path of our own. And by the end of that school year—a year in which she lost not only her sons’ souls, but her marriage and her house as well—she had finally had enough.
You see, the first thing Ryan did after we wrote our new list was to march out into the hall and tape it to his bedroom door. When my mom ripped it down in a fit of rage he just wrote a new one and taped it up the following day…until she ripped that one down, too…and the next, and the next. It wasn’t until that June, when he made a hundred photocopies and pasted them around his room with wallpaper glue, that she finally relented in a storm of tears.
The next day she informed us that Ryan would be starting at St. Soren’s in the fall, and that if I didn’t shape up, I would be joining him there too. Even worse, she told us that we would both be going to a “counseling session” with Father Kevin just as soon as she could schedule one.
The threat of a meeting with Father Kevin made us back off for a little while, and things settled down for the better part of the summer. Then, about a week before Ryan was supposed to start at St. Soren’s, he decided (without consulting me, by the way) to tape another copy of the list to his door.
Within twenty-four hours, our mother had scheduled a meeting with Father Kevin.
At first, I didn’t think too much of it (except for being annoyed about the counseling session), but then I noticed one day that
there was an asterisk next to the first item on the list: the one that listed the reasons why Christianity was false. I looked to bottom of the page and found the following footnote, scribbled in tiny handwriting in the margins of the page:
*Also Mom—no way she’s right about all of this.
A few days later there was another footnote—this one scrawled across three or for Post-it notes under the original.
**More important than any of these reasons, however, is the fact that Christianity is fundamentally immoral. Any god that would create a living being, and then allow that living being to spend eternity in Hell just for not bowing down and worshipping him, is clearly lacking in any sense of morality, and must therefore be considered both evil and corrupt.
Even this, however, didn’t concern me that much (after all, we had discussed ideas like that plenty of times before). And I didn’t really start to question Ryan until the night before our meeting with the priest.
As usual, we were in Ryan’s room, sitting at his desk, with me at the computer and Ryan taking notes. At the moment, I was searching through Wikipedia trying to figure out if any of the more antiquated religions (Manichaeism, Tengriism, Ashurism, etc.) were supported by any kind of actual evidence (spoiler: they weren’t), when I noticed that Ryan was scribbling down notes at feverish pace, despite the fact that I hadn’t given him anything to write about.
“What’s all that?” I asked.
“What’s all what?” he asked, not even looking up from the page.
“That stuff you’re writing.”
“Oh,” he said, looking up. “This…right. Well, I’m working out an argument comparing the basic principles of Catholic Theology to the speeches that Adolf Hitler gave in the years before World War II.”
“But…why? We already have a like million reasons why all denominations of Christianity are fake.”
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