It stopped me so abruptly because that look, the person in that picture and that feeling he was experiencing, seemed so incredibly foreign to me. He seemed like someone I’d never met, who lived in a time, a town, and a country I’d never been to.
Then I flipped the picture over, and found the note that Cassie had left for me. It said, simply:
Jonathan,
I get it. I probably would have left too. Everybody at school has been talking about how cool it was to hang out with you on Friday. I know you’re probably going through a lot right now, but if you need to talk just call me. I miss you.
Love,
Cassie.
PS. Homecoming is this Saturday, and they’re calling it the Ryan Stiles Memorial Homecoming Dance. Anyway, I’m sure you don’t want to go or anything, but I‘ve already told everyone that I won’t say yes to anyone but you.
Of course, the fact that they were holding the dance in Ryan’s honor was a bit nauseating. But it was the last part of the note that really got me—that she wouldn’t say yes to anyone but me. I sank down to the floor, pulling my head into my knees, leaning my head against the cabinets. What am I doing? What’s happening? Ryan is dead and Tristan fucking slapped me and Ryan is dead and my father’s a Buddhist and Ryan is dead and my mom won’t stop smiling and Ryan was probably killed, but I’ll never get to prove it, but that doesn’t even matter because Ryan is still dead and to top of it all off, this sweet, innocent, beautiful girl is clearly in love with me.
Well, there was only one place I could go, only one person I could see. I just hoped I could sneak out onto the football field in the middle of a school day without being noticed.
As it turned out, sneaking up to the football field didn’t prove to be a problem at all. A thick fog had rolled in off the ocean, and visibility around the campus was slim. I just skated right up to the front gate and strolled out onto the fifty-yard line.
But Jesus wasn’t there.
I waited for about twenty minutes, and he still didn’t show. I searched all around the football field for him, and then behind the bleachers, up by the street, in the parking lot. But he was nowhere to be found. A half-hour ticked by, and then another, and another.
My first thought was that he had another run-in with the guys who had beat him up before. Or then again, maybe he just took off and left town—it wouldn’t be that surprising, considering the way that everything else had been going with me lately.
I climbed about halfway up the stands and lay down on one of the benches, hanging my head over the end so that the whole world inverted. With the thickness of the fog, it didn’t even seem to make that much of a difference: the sky was a little darker and the Earth a little lighter, but other than that, it all looked just about the same—hazy and blurred and completely out-of-focus.
After another few minutes, I noticed a glint of white begin to distinguish itself from the pale gray of the fog, coming toward me from the spot in the woods where I last saw Ryan. I held my breath. I squinted as the white glimpse grew more full, until Jesus Jackson himself came walking out of the whiteness, heading straight for me.
When he finally made his way to the bleachers, he took a seat next to me, chuckled, and said, “So is it really that bad?”
“Worse. I thought you took off to Mexico with my twelve dollars.”
This made him laugh even harder. “No,” he said. “Tempting as that may be, I think I’ll stick this job out.”
“I was almost ready to go report you to the police.”
He rolled his eyes. “Police? I think you know how much good that would do.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, pushing myself up to a seated position. “Do you know about…everything?”
He let a mysterious grin creep across his face. “You mean, do I know that you went to the cops, that they didn’t believe you, called your parents…all that stuff?”
“Yeah! How the hell do you know all that? Did you talk to Henry?”
Jesus shook his head. “It was a guess…though, of course, a well-educated one.”
“Oh…well, I wish you could have guessed it before it all happened.”
“I did, remember? You just weren’t listening.”
He was right, of course, and this just made me feel worse. I leaned back against the bleachers, staring up into the gray void of fog. “So what do I do now? The cops won’t listen to me. All of my evidence is gone, or useless, and I don’t even have anyone to help me anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Henry is probably too scared to talk to me after going to the cops, and Tristan left my house in tears last night after she decided to smack me in the face.”
Jesus gave me a sidelong glance, frowning. “Why did she do that?”
“I don’t know. Because she’s fucked up? Because she wants to believe it was all an accident? At any rate, I’m pretty sure she’s done trying to help me.”
“Well,” he said. “You’re right and you’re wrong.”
“How do you figure?”
“You’re right that you’re alone. Even if Henry or Tristan do come back around, this is ultimately your quest—for better or worse—no one can finish it but you.”
“Yeah, whatever. There’s nothing left to finish. It’s over.”
He cocked his head to the side. “Do you really believe that? That it’s over?”
“I don’t believe anything. It’s the truth. It’s reality. I might as well accept it.”
With that, Jesus Jackson hopped to his feet and began to bound up the steps to the top of the stands.
“Where are you going?” I called after him.
“Come with me,” he said, without even turning his head.
“Where? Why?”
“Just shut your mouth and come with me. Now.”
I really didn’t feel like doing anything. In fact, I was starting to wonder why I even bothered getting out of bed. “Do I have to?”
“Yes.”
So I slowly rose to my feet, and followed him up to the top row of the bleachers. “So now what?” I asked.
Jesus climbed up on the railing behind the last row. “Come up here,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
I looked up at him warily. It was a hell of a drop off the back of those bleachers—not enough to kill you, but probably far enough to break an arm, or even a leg—and the railing didn’t look so sturdy. “I don’t think so,” I said.
“Come on,” Jesus prodded, shaking the rail a bit. “It’s perfectly safe.”
“Fine.” Cautiously, I grabbed the top bar of the railing, hoisting my feet onto the lowest bar. “What am I looking for?”
Jesus pointed through the fog toward a far line of trees past the baseball diamonds and soccer fields. “Can you see that?”
“What?” I asked, seeing nothing as I squinted harder, trying to make out what he was pointing at.
“Climb up one more,” he said. “It’s just over that big pine tree.”
Frankly, I couldn’t even make out the pine tree, but I did as I was told, climbing up one more bar, so that my kneecaps were pressed against the very top of the railing. The bar beneath me shook a bit. I tried hard not to look down as I tried to distinguish the shapes through the mist.
“I still don’t see anything,” I complained, and just as the words left my mouth, I felt Jesus’ hand press into my back, and push me hard over the rail.
I screamed, but it was too late. With my knees pressed against the top bar, my whole body just tilted straight as a board over the edge. Almost in slow motion, I watched the world turn upside down again. I felt the blood rushing to my head, and just as my body started to accelerate toward the ground, it all stopped with a great and painful tug—I was suspended, my head still far above the ground. And Jesus was above me, holding my ankles and grinning like an idiot.
&n
bsp; “What the hell are you doing?” I screamed.
“Just relax, would ya?”
“Relax? Are you crazy?”
“Maybe. I’ve certainly been accused of worse, but that’s hardly the point now. You have to relax. We’re going to have a conversation.”
I looked past my feet to the gray sky above. I tried to breath a bit more slowly, to calm myself. “What are we going to talk about?” I asked.
Jesus smiled. “Faith.”
“Oh, Christ,” I said.
“Jackson, actually.”
“Very funny. Can we start talking now, please?”
“Okay. The way I see it, you’re having a crisis of faith.”
“I never had any faith to begin with. Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve told you?”
“I have, and you said that you don’t believe in God, not that you don’t have any faith. There’s a big difference.”
“Fine. Whatever. Just get on with it.”
“Right,” said Jesus. “So, here you are, living your life while you’re having this crisis of faith, which is kind of like flying a plane while having a crisis of fuel—all it really means is that you’re running low…or in your case, nearly empty, you know?”
“Um…sure.”
“Now, tell me: What happens when you run out of fuel in a plane?”
This was getting very annoying. “I don’t know. You crash. Can we move this along a little faster?”
“Exactly,” Jesus replied, clearly unmoved by my plea. “You crash.” And with that, he let go of my ankles.
The ground smacked into me like a brick in the face. I yelped in pain, tasting mud and grass on my tongue and in my teeth. I rolled over, my body aching, and saw the silhouette of Jesus’ head leaning over the railing, a big ridiculous smile on his stupid face. “What the hell did you that for?” I screamed at him.
He chuckled. “To prove a point.”
“What, that you’re an asshole?”
“No,” Jesus said. “That whether you believe in God or Buddha or Krishna or nothing at all, sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith.”
I struggled to my feet. “Are you crazy? You dropped me! What the hell does that prove about faith?”
“Look at you,” he said. “You’re standing, you’re talking, nothing’s broken—you’re fine. We leapt and we landed.”
“Yeah, but what if I wasn’t fine? What if I fell badly and broke my leg, or my freaking neck? That could have just as easily happened.”
“Yes, it could have.”
“So what the hell would you have said if it had?”
“Well,” Jesus said, leaning over the rail, looking me straight in the eyes. “I would have said that it was worth a shot. That taking a leap of faith is always worth a shot. After all, whether you land on your feet or fall on your face, at least you’ll know what’s on the other side. At least you’ll know the truth.”
And just like that, he was gone.
I struggled to my feet and made way back to the bleachers, where I remained for the rest of the day. I sat through the gym classes, and the kids coming out to smoke, and the practices, where Alistair and his boys played scrimmages, and Tristan and her girls practiced their cheers out on the far field over by the woods. A breeze began to blow as the day wore on, clearing out the fog and making the whole world seem so crisp and clear by comparison. No one seemed to notice me, up there in the stands, with my hood pulled down tight around my face…or at least if they did, no one bothered to interrupt my quiet pondering, to disturb my secret planning.
Thirty-five
Now I have to stop here for a second to talk a bit about inspiration. As an atheist, I don’t believe in divine inspiration, exactly….Or at least, I don’t believe that there’s any divine god or mystical whatthefuck out there to do the inspiring. But inspiration itself? That mysterious, unexplainable, baffling burst of insight that somehow manages to tie everything together in a neat little knot? Well, that I believe in. That, I know is true because it’s exactly what happened to me as I was sitting in those stands, watching the football team practice. And the whole rest of this story—its entire sad and unfortunate ending—would have been impossible without it.
So there I was, sitting high up in the bleachers watching the players run back and forth and back and forth, when I caught sight of Alistair, sprinting headlong down the field. He was being chased by a bevy of his teammates, and they were gaining on him fast. He bore down and tried zigzagging to lose them, but it didn’t work, and then finally this monstrous linebacker (he must have weighed 250 pounds, at least) came barreling at him from the side, diving into Alistair’s path and taking him right out at the knees. Alistair instantly was in the air—high in the air—doing a full frontal flip about four feet off the ground, and right then, right in the middle of the tackle, there was this moment—an instant, really, like a frozen tableau in time—where Alistair just seemed to hang there, upside down, dangling, suspended immobile over the ground.
And at that moment, it all just washed right over me: the plan. Seeing Alistair dangling there in the air, I knew exactly what I had to do. What I had to do to him. Sure, it took me a few hours of pacing around behind the bleachers to work out the details, but the plan itself was there; the inspiration, the method, and more importantly, the final result: a public confession at the Ryan Stiles Memorial Homecoming Dance.
After working out some more of the details, I came up with two things that had to get done right away if I was going to have any chance of putting this plan into action: make up with Henry, and start acting like a relatively normal, slightly-sad-but-not-psychotic Dead Kid’s Brother.
I figured that making up with Henry would be as simple as going over to his house and apologizing for being such a lunatic for the past few weeks. Getting him to help me with one last stunt to prove Alistair’s guilt—well, that would probably be impossible. My only hope was to convince him that I didn’t want to do the whole detective thing anymore, and then somehow trick him into playing his part in the plan. I doubted the first part would be hard; the second, though…well, I’d just have to work that one out on the fly.
Wanting to get started as quickly as possible, I skated over to his house, rang the doorbell, and hoped like hell one of his parents didn’t answer.
If there was in fact a god, he clearly wasn’t on my side at this point, because Henry’s mom answered the door, breaking down instantly into a convulsion of whiny-voiced, eyebrow-raised, hand-wringing empathy.
I tried to block it all out, but the parts that got through sounded something like this:
“Oh, Jonathaaaaaaan. How aaaare you? Are you all riiiiiiiiight? Oh my goodness, you poor sooooooul.”
I’d learned by then that the best response to such a display was no response at all. The less you fed into them, the more they just assumed that you’d rather be left alone.
It worked all right with Mrs. Sun. She only kept it up for about two or three minutes before getting the hint. She told me Henry was “in the basement with his computer” in a mildly disapproving manner that seemed as if it would be more appropriate if he were down there with a bag of weed or a stack of dirty magazines.
When I opened the door to the basement, the computer was off, and Henry was staring at the top of the steps, waiting for me.
“I heard my mom,” he mumbled. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I lied. “It doesn’t bother me so much anymore.”
He nodded, and as I walked down the steps and sat on the ratty little couch they kept next to his desk, I noticed that he appeared to be even more uncomfortable than usual. So I just jumped right into my apology, hoping for the best: “Look,” I said. “I’m sorry. Really sorry. About everything—the police station, of course, but everything before that too. This whole ordeal. It’s just…well, it’s just something that I think I had to
do to deal with Ryan’s death. Just some crazy thing. But I’m over it now.”
Henry looked at me like I was speaking another language. “You’re what?”
“I’m over it,” I repeated, trying to sound as convincing as possible. “I don’t think Alistair killed my brother, or anything absurd like that, and I recognize that I only really thought that as a way of coping with my loss.”
“Really?” he said.
“Really.”
“Okay. I mean, if that’s what you really think.”
He seemed far less excited than I imagined he would be. “What’s the matter?” I asked him. “Isn’t that what you think?”
“Actually, no. I don’t think that at all. I’m even more positive than ever that Alistair had something to do with your brother’s death.”
“What?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Are you crazy? Why?”
Henry paused, seeming to appraise my true intentions. Then he said, “Take a seat. I want to show you something.”
I lowered myself into the chair. “What’s this all about?”
Henry opened the top drawer of his desk, pulled out the hard drive I had retrieved for him from Alistair’s house, and plugged it into his laptop.
“Was there actually something on there?” I asked. “Did you find anything?” To be honest, I had all but forgotten about the hard drive once we had Alistair’s phone. It just seemed so much less likely to be useful.
“Here,” said Henry, clicking open a window that seemed, at first glance, to contain nothing but line after line of gibberish and computer code. “I just found it last night.”
I moved my face closer to the screen. “What am I looking for here? This all looks like nonsense.”
“It’s a chat session from sometime less than a week before we copied the files. Most of it is still encoded, but this part is readable.” Henry moved the mouse, and highlighted a few lines right in the middle of all the gibberish.
…789:8;@AHKOU$null‘%angeÄÄÄÄ><>
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