Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

  That was the description, but nobody ever blamed me for what happened to Jonathan Rice.

  At first, they called it stress blindness, then shock. But Mags and I knew he just got the Fries With That? treatment.

  She called him Fried Rice.

  One day, when Jonathan Rice was in seventh grade, now at a special school for kids, he took a long walk off a short pier.

  I’ve always felt a little guilty about that.

  I asked my mother about it then, and she was cagey, but she finally admitted that my gramma had it.

  So I go to the nursing home where gramma lays sputtering through her nostrils, god love her, and I tell her what mom told me.

  Gramma had these curious eyes back then, pale blue, covered with a translucent milky color. Her skin was as thin as tracing paper, and you could see all these blue veins under the surface. I loved my grandmother, even though she had to wheeze when she breathed. I snuck her cigarettes, too, and played Hearts with her sometimes for hours.

  When I tell her about Jonathan Rice, and then the cat, her eyes fill with tears. Gramma was from Ireland, and she wells up with tears easily, from hearing “I’ll Bring You A Daisy A Day,” to when she thinks of County Clare and all its green pastures and blue skies. Harp ale does it for her, also.

  She reached for my shoulder to steady herself as she rose up on the bed. “You have the evil eye, then,” she said, her voice all soft and wispy like cotton candy. “I knew it would show again.”

  “It’s not my eyes,” I said. “I speak and other stuff happens, too.”

  “It’s through the eyes,” she said. She pointed to the pale blue of her eyes. “Look, you and I have the old blue. Your hair is blond like your daddy’s, but you got the old ways in your spirit. They say we’re descended from fairies, but we are from the original people of the islands. We have the eyes and we have the talent.”

  “But I didn’t mean to hurt Jonathan.” I began crying, still somewhat in my Pretty Little Nothing phase.

  “‘Evil eye’ is what others called it. It’s a vision that takes over. It’s a reshaper of minds, it’s a molder of people’s insides.” Then, Gramma hugged me close. Her breath was terrible, like a cat’s. Her light whiskers scratched my cheek, but her warmth was not to be denied.

  I lay there, letting her hold me, the sticky warmth between us, until it grew dark. Before I left, she asked me to learn to focus.

  “Through craft,” she said. “Talent is nothing but wildness without craft.”

  “Like witchcraft?” I asked.

  “Nothing like that, dearie,” Gramma said, her voice going raspy from the long day of cigarette smoking. “The craft of your art. Your art is there, and now you must make it sing.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “But stay away from the dead,” she whispered. “It’s not meant to be near them.”

  “Why?”

  “Nothing good comes of it when near the dead. Your great-great-grandmother Irene had it, and once, she was at a wake. She thought she heard her dead uncle knocking at his coffin after she’d danced around it a bit.”

  “Cool” I said.

  “Not so cool,” Gramma whispered. “Not so cool at all.”

  She fell asleep soon after, and then a few weeks later, before I could actually ask her how I was to go about perfecting this so-called craft, Gramma died.

  The day she died, it felt like someone kicked me in the gut. Death does that to you.

  I imagine it didn’t feel so wonderful to Gramma, either.

  Because I didn’t like to think of myself as Evil (I was a God-fearing little Jesus freak back then for the most part, although I was moving closer to my ultimate embrace of hormones and sin as time went on), I dropped the whole Evil Eye phrase. I went with Mags’ Fries With That? designation.

  So, when Mags said to Gyro, the afternoon of the Prom, “Don’t worry. We do what we do,” I was a little afraid of the Fries With That? syndrome coming through.

  Mags assured me this was next to impossible. “I mean, it hasn’t happened since you were in fourth grade. For all we know, Jonathan Rice just went brain dead right then because of some interior alarm clock.”

  “Freud said there are no accidents,” Gyro cautioned, although she could not possibly have known about what I accidentally did to Jonathan Rice in fourth grade.

  We repeated a lot of this as we stood over poor Alison Gall, whom we had most heinously trapped at Quent Appenino’s grandfather’s farm out in the middle of Bumfuck.

  Alison wore a cute little yellow pullover that showed her melons to their best advantage and her little tight-ass cheerleader skirt, knee socks, cute little black shoes, and no underwear to speak of.

  Need I mention what a shock she had received when she entered the old barn that had yet another forged love note tacked to its door?

  Three furies standing around in the semi-dark of the barn, with rope, duct tape, and gun.

  Okay, the gun was a last minute thing.

  Gyro’s older brother Lance was a cop wannabe. He was too smart for the local police force, apparently, but still he kept a major stash of Glocks and Smiths & Wessons and big old rifles, none of which Gyro knew much about.

  Mags picked out the Glock 17. “I’ve seen this on TV shows,” she said. “At least, I think I’ve seen this.”

  “I don’t think we need a gun, do we?” I had asked as we stood shivering in Gyro’s brother’s room, knowing the fearful act we were to perform a few hours down the road.

  And then, it was Alison Gall’s turn to shiver, which is what I expected when she saw the gun.

  Instead, she became the bitch of all bitches.

  “What the hell kind of joke is this, you losers?” she asked, and then, looking at the gun, she laughed. “You planning on going to prison for the rest of your lives?”

  Mags laughed. She had that great throaty laugh, the kind of laugh that old movie stars have, or old smokers. “Listen, Alison, we’re minors, get real. Gyro’s dad is a brain surgeon, and Nora’s dad is a tax lawyer. Who do you think’s going to go to prison?”

  “You, trailer trash girl,” Alison huffed.

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “Shut up yourself, geek.”

  “Don’t make me bitch slap you,” Mags said. She meant business, particularly after the trailer trash comment. “My dad may not be some big professional, but he’s been known to spring a few dudes from prison. I doubt reform school is going to take a major army to overcome.”

  Alison quieted down. She glanced at me, then at Gyro. “Is this a lesbian thing or something?”

  I laughed. “You’ll wish when it’s over.”

  “No,” Gyro said. “We just want you out of the way until after Prom.”

  “No way!” Alison shouted, and for a moment I felt sorry for the poor thing.

  Alison Gall lived for major social events. She never missed a football party, or a dance, or a chance to show off her cheering skills. She was a debutante in the big cotillion up in St. Paul. For just a second there, I saw the sad little girl beneath the makeup and the dye job and the “Look How Cute I Am” clothes. She was just like I was years ago. A Pretty Little Nothing. Trying to make do. Trying to please other people. Dealing with a social structure where girls really had to tread water when the boys around her just got stuff for free.

  No wonder she was so nasty to us girls all the time—we were the one group she didn’t have to please.

  I was about to call the gag off, but this was Gyro’s game.

  Gyro stepped forward with the rope. After the initial scuffle, we got Alison’s hands behind her back.

  I only had to hit her once.

  By the time the duct tape went over her mouth, Alison’s eyes were red from tears. Mascara ran down her cheeks.

  “I should shoot you just for being a cheerleader,” Mags said, pointing the gun directly at her forehead.

  Alison didn’t even flinch. I knew why. She was such a Pretty Little Nothing that sh
e thought death was no more terrifying or hurtful than missing the biggest dance of the year. Maybe this was shallow of her, I don’t know. We all want something out of life, don’t we? We all want something, and to someone else, it probably sounds stupid and shallow and empty, but to each of us, it’s the shining moment that we can always have at the center of our lives.

  And Prom was going to be Alison’s shining moment.

  Here she was a senior, probably going to the local college next year, if at all, and her entire future life depended upon looking back on high school as that peak, that golden moment.

  We were taking that away from her.

  Mags must’ve guessed my shift in sympathies. “Don’t forget what she did to Gyro,” she said.

  I shined my flashlight over at Gyro, fury still in her eyes. She carefully wrapped the remainder of her rope around Alison’s ankles.

  I shut my flashlight off.

  I no longer wanted to look at our captive.

  And that’s when Gyro rose up and took the gun from Mags’ hand and aimed it at the side of Alison Gall’s head and shot her at point blank range.

  Sometimes there are things you do in life and you know when you’re doing them that later on you’ll hate yourself, or you’ll want to go back and erase part of the picture of that moment.

  In that millisecond when Gyro fired into Alison’s skull, I tried to, at least in my mind, turn the clock back by a minute so I could grab the gun before Gyro could get it.

  I know neither Mags nor I had intended to use that gun. It was just a scare tactic. But Gyro, I think, probably had planned Alison’s death for at least a week, from at least that moment when she entered the bathroom sobbing, from the moment that we told her that we’d seek a suitable revenge for her humiliation. Gyro, bullied her entire life, her last name turned into an obscene joke, her hair made fun of, her face, her clothes. Girls like Alison had done a lot of it. Maybe even girls like me.

  And she rolled all of that into one moment with a gun in a barn and a cheerleader who had pissed her off.

  The silence afterwards was like a roar of locusts in my head. I thought I heard light bulbs sparking and popping all around us. I thought it was the Fourth of July, from the crashes and booms inside my head.

  Alison lay on her side, half her scalp blown off. Part of her face was on the dirt, as if the bullet had unmasked her.

  Mags was the first to speak. “Oh, Christ, Gyro.”

  “Yeah,” Gyro nodded, tossing the gun down. “I know. I shouldn’t have. But I had to before it went the other way.”

  “Went the other way?” I asked.

  But I knew what she meant.

  If you didn’t put a bullet in the head of the one who tormented you, you put the bullet in your own head.

  It was always either-or when it came to vengeance.

  “All right, now, we’re fucked,” Mags said. “Now we’re really fucked.” She slapped the side of her face. “Christ, my heart is beating like it’s gonna jump out from my chest.”

  “Funny,” Gyro said, almost kindly. “I’ve never felt this calm. You?”

  “I have no idea what I’m feeling,” I said.

  “As long as she doesn’t get the Fries With That? feeling, we’re fine,” Mags managed to joke.

  Long after the Prom was over, we sat in that dark barn with the corpse, passing cigarettes around until our packs were empty.

  “Gyro,” I said, offering her my flask. “You may go to jail for this. Wait, not ‘may’, ‘will’.”

  Mags waved the last of her cigarette, tracing a red line in the air. “We’re accomplices. Or accessories.”

  “Accessories,” Gyro gasped after taking a long swig of my special brew. “But I’m the killer.”

  “You think she was going to change later?” I asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Well, I mean, this wasn’t her prom dress. I wonder what she was going to wear to the dance.”

  Gyro gave me a look like I was crazy.

  I shrugged. “The one thing I can say for Alison is she had some nice dresses.”

  “People loved her,” Mags whispered, reverentially. “I don’t know why, but boys and parents and local business people, and little kids all loved her. Alison Gall, the bitch.” Then she laughed. “I can’t believe we’re sitting here with a cheerleader’s body drinking bad rum and Coke from a cheap flask on Prom Night.”

  “It does lead one to suspect we’re insane,” I said, drunkenly.

  The flask was dry by the next go round.

  “Almost insane. If we were insane, we’d probably play with her or something,” Gyro said.

  “Yuck,” I said.

  “That is disgusting.” Mags shivered. “One thing, though. We need a plan of action now.”

  Instead, we went swimming.

  Out back was that duck pond, empty of ducks at two a.m., and Mags was the first of us to shed her clothes. She grabbed the old rope swing, and swung out over the middle of the pond before dropping.

  The splash was huge. Mags bobbed up laughing. Gyro told me she wasn’t in the mood, but I convinced her we should go in because of how filthy and stinky we’d all gotten since she’d shot Alison Gall in the head.

  Soon, all three of us were in the pond, splashing and laughing and trying to forget the millisecond of bad judgment when we decided to set any of this in motion in the first place.

  In the moonlight, Gyro came up from the water, and both Mags and I gasped.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” Gyro asked.

  I looked at Mags and then glanced back at Gyro. With her frizz brought down by the water, and her glasses off, and naked so we could see her breasts—

  “You are the most beautiful girl in school,” I said.

  “No kidding. Look at you,” Mags asked. “Why hide so much under the frizzy hair and crappy clothes?”

  Gyro covered her breasts with her hands. “You’re making fun of me.”

  “No,” I said. “I swear, Gyro—”

  “Janine,” Mags corrected me. “No girl who looks like this could be Gyroscopa. Jesus, Janine, you look a movie star. And you’ve got those champagne glass breasts.”

  “And not the fluted kind,” I joked.

  “You’re embarrassing me,” Gyro said. “Seriously. Call me Gyro, I don’t like being called Janine.”

  “I can’t anymore,” Mags said. “No way. Christ, Janine. You’re a murderess and a beauty. Surprises galore.”

  “You may prove popular in prison,” I said. It was meant as a joke, but suddenly they both went silent for too many seconds.

  “Please,” Gyro began sobbing. She swam over to the muddy shore.

  There was nothing to do, or at least, we didn’t figure out what the hell we were going to do yet. We sure as shit couldn’t go home.

  We couldn’t just leave Alison’s body there in the barn. We toyed with the idea of pinning the murder on Quent Appenino, because the notes would be in his handwriting.

  And he was stupid.

  But that story would probably have flaws we couldn’t figure out. We thought about saying some strange man did it, but what if some innocent guy matching the description got the chair over this or something?

  We still had shreds and scraps of conscience, after all.

  Then, ‘round about five thirty, just as the first pink rays of June sunlight appeared, Mags slapped me on the shoulder.

  “You!” she cried out.

  “What the—”

  “Fries With That?!” Mags began dancing around in a circle, her blouse still not buttoned up so her breasts kind of swung out like ripe pears about to fall.

  “What’s that mean?” Gyro asked.

  I shrugged.

  Mags clapped her hands together and stood still. “It’s her thing. It’s like an ability. It’s like a magic thingy.”

  “No it isn’t. It’s like the evil eye.”

  “No negative thoughts today,” Mags announced boldly. “Now, Nora, you can fry people’s brai
ns, right?”

  I shrugged again. “Animals, people. Only done it twice that I know of.”

  “What?” Gyro asked, her beauty still apparent in the early light.

  “Okay,” Mags said. She paced in a circle around me like some mad professor. “Okay. So! You know how this ability of yours works?”

  “Nope,” I said. “It’s inherited. It’s like having a bunion as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Wait — you can inherit bunions?” Mags asked.

  “Like a recessive gene,” Gyro volunteered, still with a confused look on her face.

  “Exactly, and it’s there. It’s inside you. It’s sleeping, but,” Mags stopped pacing and stood almost nose-to-nose with me. Her breath was sour.

  Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Ever tried it on a dead girl?”

  Gyro probably whined about not understanding us or something, and Mags probably went on with her ravings, but actually the idea burst within me as Mags said that one sentence.

  Ever tried it on a dead girl?

  Yeah, my gramma’s words came back to me then. “Stay away from the dead.”

  Then I remembered what she’d told me about my great-grandmother. How something had been knocking from inside her uncle’s coffin…

  Birds began singing before the light was fully up that morning. We were worried about when the farm folk would come out to their barn, even though there were no animals to be seen in it, only the basics of farm machinery. So, we took Alison up, using Mags’ sweatshirt to jam her face against her skull. Any little bloody bits, we covered up with straw and dirt. We took her back to her car, and put her in the trunk.