by Blake Nelson
I figured you must be allowed in, since the door was open. I crept forward and looked around. It was completely empty.
I didn’t want to go too far inside. I sat on one of the benches, near the back. They were beautiful polished wood. Everything was super nice. I started to wonder if a priest in a high-class church like this would understand something like what happened to me. Probably stories involving skateboarders and Paranoid Park and people named “Scratch” were not their specialty.
I sat. I stared forward. The quiet and the stillness started to get to me. For some reason I thought of Henry. I pictured him at home, ignored, overlooked, crashed in front of the TV night after night. No Dad. Mom freaking out. His big brother locked in his room with his own terrible secrets. My family: We were disintegrating.
I started to cry. There was already so much pain in the world. And what had I done? I had made it worse. I had made it so much worse.
After I’d cried, though, I felt better. And then I started having strange thoughts. I looked around and wondered why people didn’t steal stuff from churches. There was no one supervising, and there was all this stuff—benches and books, maybe some of the metal stuff was gold. I checked the ceiling for cameras. I was glad I hadn’t said anything out loud. They probably thought I was some kid crying because my dog died. I wish my dog had died. But no, I didn’t wish that.
Then something even more weird happened. When I walked out of the church, I felt awesome. I felt like the biggest shitkicker. I strutted down the street like, Don’t mess with me, muthafucka. I stared at these girls in the park like, You think your boyfriends are tough? You don’t know tough!
But that was so evil and wrong, and just as suddenly, I felt so awful I could barely walk. What was wrong with me? I would have cried more, but I was cried out. I wondered how long it would take for this to wear off. I tried to imagine myself in five years, or ten; would I ever be able to just walk down the street?
And that was the best-case scenario. There was still the possibility of getting caught.
I walked more. I watched the downtown people heading home from work. They wore suits and business clothes and got into nice cars. They probably had stuff in their past-mistakes, bad things they’d done. Everyone must. I thought about soldiers in Iraq, in Vietnam, and every other war. They had to kill people. And they had to live with it. Soldiers through all of history did. And it wasn’t like killing people was some bizarre event that never happened. Someone got killed on TV every two point five minutes. All you did in video games was kill people.
But what were you supposed to do with that weight? Once it was on you? Just be a man? Just suck it up? Maybe you were. Maybe that was the real test. Maybe that’s exactly the thing that made you a man: the ability to function with the worst possible secrets in your brain. Which was why so many grown-up men seemed so ridiculous. They’d never felt that weight. They never felt that responsibility. They were untested, unproven; they were boys in grown-up clothes.
They were like my dad.
There was a big party at Christian Barlow’s on Friday. Jennifer bugged me about it all week.
I went early to hang out with Jared and check out the half-pipe Christian had built in his backyard. I didn’t have a board so I bummed Jared’s, but I totally sucked. I couldn’t do anything. After I fell on my ass a couple times, I gave up and sat in the grass with the non-skaters. That was okay, though; it was a perfect late-September evening-warm, with the smell of leaves in the air. People could tell it was the last of the summer. Everyone was kicking back. I tried my best to enjoy it.
Then Macy McLaughlin showed up. She was with her cool sophomore friends. They stayed in their little pack, not talking to anyone. They were all dressed up, trying to look good for the upperclassmen.
When Macy saw me, she came over. “Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” I said back.
She looked at the half-pipe. “How come you’re not skating?”
“Don’t feel like it.”
Another of her friends walked over. They both stood there. I was lying in the grass, my head on Jared’s board.
“You guys can sit down if you want,” I said.
They didn’t want to. They had to go inside with their friends.
I watched them walk away. It was weird how the younger kids come up. I remembered my first parties, standing around, trying to look cool, trying to act like I knew what I was doing.
Those were the kinds of problems you’re supposed to have when you’re young.
When it got dark, everyone moved inside. It was a good party. People seemed really happy and excited for the new school year. I looked around for Jennifer, but she hadn’t shown up. So I wandered around and played foosball with some guys in the basement.
Jennifer arrived at about ten thirty. She and Petra made a big entrance. They had been at Elizabeth Gould’s having “cocktails,” and now they were drunk and wanted to dance and whoop it up. I avoided them. Instead I sat in the backyard with Jared and some other seniors. That’s where Macy appeared again. She had momentarily lost her friends and came and sat next to me. We didn’t really say anything, and then she saw her friends again and ran off.
When she was gone, Jared asked me who she was, and I said it was Macy McLaughlin, who lived down the street from me.
He said she was cute. The other guys agreed. They were like, Dude where did she come from?
I was like, Calm down, she’s practically my kid sister.
But they didn’t care. They thought she was hot.
Around midnight, Jennifer found me. She grabbed me by the hand and pulled me upstairs. She had apparently staked out a room to make out or whatever. It was someone’s bedroom, a little girl’s.
Jennifer locked the door and put her arms around me and made this big show of being the sexy girl who’d waited all night to get with her guy. She kept making sexy faces, like she was wild with passion.
It all happened pretty fast. We got on the bed and she crawled on top of me. At first, I was into it. She smelled good and it was easy to lose myself in the moment. But then I realized how serious she was. This was it. This was the big moment. She wanted to lose “it” tonight. She’d made up her mind.
I didn’t try to stop her. I should have. The whole situation was so weird anyway. For most of it, I felt like I wasn’t even there, like I was outside my body, floating above the whole thing. At one point I was like, Please, God, just let this be over. I give up. I don’t know how to be human. Everything I do is wrong, and everything else I do just makes it worse.
Afterward, we snuggled, but even that seemed like an act. Everything people did was an act. People did what they thought they were supposed to do. Learn to kiss at fourteen. Learn to drive at fifteen. Learn to have sex at sixteen. Life was easy. Just follow the schedule, don’t make any big mistakes, and everything will be fine.
Jennifer caressed the side of my head. “That was amazing,” she breathed into my ear.
I nodded.
“Do you think we should do it again?” she asked, lifting her head. “Or do you want to wait? Maybe we should wait. We’re going to need more condoms. We should go buy some. They have them at Rite Aid. That’s where Petra and Mike get theirs.”
She lay back down and turned onto her back. “You were so good,” she sighed. “Was I good?”
“Yes,” I answered. We lay like that for another few minutes. Then she got restless. “Oh my God, I have to go to the bathroom,” she said. She went into the little bathroom beside the bed, stopping to dig her cell phone out of her jeans.
I could hear her in the bathroom. She dropped the toilet seat down. I heard her dialing her cell phone. She squealed into it. “Yes! Yes!” she whispered. “We totally did it.... Oh my God, it was fantastic!”
I couldn’t hear what else she said. I got up. I found my boxers and put them on. Jennifer flushed the toilet and came out. She picked up her clothes, too. “Should we go back downstairs?” she asked me.
�
�Sure,” I said.
We went back to the party. As soon as we reached the bottom of the stairs, she ran into the living room to find her friends. I turned the other direction, to the backyard. There were still some people standing around the half-pipe in the dark. A freshman was on it, rolling back and forth, trying not to fall. I watched him. It soothed me somehow. Back and forth. Back and forth. Try not to fall....
That whole weekend turned into an extended party. After Friday night, everyone went home and slept, and then the next day, Christian and Jared and a bunch of us went to Paul Auster’s during the day to watch skate videos and play video games. Then we met Jennifer and Elizabeth and those guys for a matinee movie.
Jennifer was so happy. She was grinning super big, and all her friends stared at me and giggled. Elizabeth even said right in front of everyone, “So I guess you guys sealed the deal.”
That night the whole gang of us drove around downtown. On Broadway there were the usual carloads of high-school kids yelling back and forth. We ran around and switched cars. I got in Elizabeth Gould’s car with Jennifer and everyone teased us and made sex jokes. It was like Jennifer’s official de-virginization party. She was the happiest I had ever seen her.
On Sunday, all the guys went to Skate City. I didn’t want to show up without a board, so I got up early and drove my mom’s car to the mall and got another board. I wanted to get the same deck and see if I could scuff it up or whatever-not that that would fool anyone—just to make it less obvious. But they didn’t have it. I got one that was close and paid with my debit card. I had just enough money for it, thanks to the new allowance my dad gave me out of guilt.
So then I met everyone at Skate City. It was funny—with no girls around, nobody talked about Jennifer and me. Nobody cared. That’s part of the skater thing. It’s a place where you forget all that.
Then on Monday, I went to school and it was all about Jennifer again. She came to my locker and wanted to know if I’d gotten the condoms yet. I hadn’t. Did I want to go get them after school? I wasn’t sure. Maybe.
“What’s the matter?” she said. “Are you mad?”
“No,” I said.
She stared at me. “You sure act weird sometimes. And after what we did. You’d think you’d be a little more happy to see me.”
“Hey, it was your idea,” I said.
“What?” she said. She took a step back. “What does that mean?”
“Nothing.”
“So having sex was my idea?” she whispered, angrily. “You didn’t want to? You just went along?”
“No. No, I’m just saying, you were the one who wanted to get the condoms. So I thought we would get them together.”
Jennifer accepted this. “Oh,” she said. “Okay. I thought you were talking about something else.”
“No, that’s all I meant.”
“Okay,” she said. “Well... we’ll do that.”
“Okay then,” I said.
Jennifer left me alone for the rest of the day. Then, before last period she told me she couldn’t go; she had an appointment at the dermatologist. That was a relief.
With nothing to do, I found Jared and those guys and skated with them on the steps behind the cafeteria. That made me feel better. I felt like I was getting my skate-legs back. I liked my new board. I could do stuff again.
Later, while we sat around drinking Cokes, Jared told more details about his college trip and the weird college girl he hooked up with. He had told this stuff before, but people liked hearing it again. It was quite a story.
As I listened, I wondered if I would ever tell anyone about my night at Paranoid Park. It occurred to me that I never would. That was the only way. It would be in lockdown. Like when a submarine springs a leak and you have to seal off that part. I would lock down that part of my life. I would close it off and seal it. What else could I do? Risk trying to tell someone? Gamble my whole life on if the police and the lawyers and the judges decided a skater has a right to defend himself? I was sorry. I felt bad for the security guard and his family. But there was no fixing it now. It was done and over with. We all had to move on with our lives.
And if it weighed on me, if it meant some sleepless nights, well, that was a sacrifice I would make for the other people involved. For my parents, for my brother, for the people who had taught me and helped me and invested in my future.
For them, I would bear the burden. For them I would be a man.
JANUARY 6
SEASIDE, OREGON
(Morning)
Dear__,
Having some coffee this morning. That’s one thing I’ve learned here at Uncle Tommy’s: how to drink coffee in the morning.
But anyway-that was the situation. The first couple days were pure hell. The next couple totally sucked. Things got a little better after a week. And at ten days, well, the worst of it seemed to be over, the crisis had passed. I might walk around like a haunted zombie for the rest of my life, but at least I would have a life.
Then one night, I came out of the shower and stopped in the TV room to watch the end of Crossing Jordan with my little brother. I was drying my hair with a towel when a newsbreak came on. The newcaster lady said something about a scandal with the new Trail Blazers coach. Then she said, “And police now think that the body of a protection officer found dead at the train yard in southeast Portland last week may have been the victim of murder. Stay tuned for all these stories, sports, and weather at eleven.” While she spoke, a little graphic of train tracks appeared beside her head.
Then there was a commercial for the new Honda Odyssey.
I sat stunned, unmoving. Henry sat on the other end, kicking at the base of the couch.
I tried to breathe. I couldn’t. I tried to lift my arm, to continue to dry my hair, but I couldn’t do that, either. I managed one short, stunted breath. On the TV, the Honda Odyssey had a family in it, a happy family, with a dog and kids watching TV screens in the backseat. My stomach tightened up so much I thought I was going to throw up.
I managed to stand up and walk to my room. I sat on my bed and gradually got my breath back. Then I went to my computer. If it was on TV, it would be online. I clicked on the local TV news Web site. It was the main story on their home page:Train-yard Death Now Possible Homicide Police department officials have reopened the case of Cole R. Stringer, the protection officer who was found dead in southeast Portland on the morning of September 18. Initially, police treated the death as an accident, but autopsy reports have now given the police cause to reexamine the case as a possible homicide.
Cole Stringer, a uniformed officer, was found dead inside the central train yard in the industrial district of southeast Portland. An employee of the Port of Portland, Stringer, 32, patrolled the train yard and its surroundings. Initial reports indicated that Stringer had become entangled in a moving freight train and was accidentally killed.
The Port of Portland is required by law to perform autopsies on deceased employees lost on the job. After evaluating the final report, Portland Police reopened the case.
“There is data in the autopsy that would indicate that there may have been other people involved,” said Clyde Miller, director of communications for the Portland Police.
Anyone with information regarding the incident are instructed to call the Portland Police’s hotline at 555-778-7778.
I read it once. I read it again. Then I clicked on “history” of my Web browser and saw that I had many local news and local crime Web sites up on my computer. I was getting sloppy. I clicked “delete history” and then checked back to make sure everything was gone.
I thought about other things. My dirty shoes and socks, where were they? In the Dumpster, probably safely gone by now. What about my mom’s car? I had cleaned it the other night, scrubbing the seats and the pedals. How about my story? Who knew I went there that night? Jared. What had I told him? I told him I didn’t go to Paranoid Park.
That was my story: I didn’t go to the park. I had to remember that. I
dropped him off, drove around, went back to his house. That was it. I did not go to Paranoid.
But what about my skateboard? Where was my skateboard? Could I say someone stole it? Yes! Someone stole my skateboard and used it in the crime! But no, if the police got that close, if they talked to other people at Paranoid that night, they would know it was me. How about Scratch? Could I blame it on him? He took my skateboard and he hit the guy! No, no, no, I couldn’t blame it on someone else. What was I thinking? That was totally evil.
But maybe I could. Scratch was a street person. They wouldn’t believe him. He wasn’t going to college, he didn’t live in a nice neighborhood, they would ... no, no, no ... It was insanity.... I couldn’t do more bad things. I had to do the right thing. I had to do the right thing, now, before I lost my nerve.
I went to my phone and picked it up. I dialed the police number. 555-788-7778, but that wasn’t the right number. I turned back to my computer, but I had already deleted the site. I tried again. It was ... 555 ... 778-7788? That wasn’t right, either. I tried again. 555- 788-7888, but before it rang I hung up. But that was stupid, what if they had caller ID? What if they called me back?
I flew into a panic. I stood up and began pacing my room. Had I saved anything from that night? No. I still had Jared’s jeans. I had to give those back. What about the people on the bridge? The two women? They hadn’t noticed me. They were busy talking. What about the guy on the bike? He might have. We practically collided. And I was so dirty! How could they not notice me? But being dirty doesn’t mean anything. I could be a mechanic or a guy working construction or something.
I paced. Again, in the midst of the terrible swirl of my brain, the concept came back to me: Do the right thing. I went back to the phone. I picked it up. I stared at the number pad. I’m a kid, I thought. I’m sixteen. Kids screw up. Kids get scared. Nobody’s going to care that I didn’t tell right away. I’ll say I didn’t know what happened. There was a scuffle and then we ran. We didn’t see him get killed. We didn’t even know he got killed.