I dust off my bomber jacket and lean back against a tree with my arms folded in an exaggerated sexy model pose. “What?” I give her a chin nod. “S’up?”
This sends her into a whole new bout of laughter.
I push away from the tree and grab her around the waist, planting one more kiss on her lips, but only a quick one this time. I finally tamp down the voice in my head, though it makes one last attempt: Okay, so maybe not naked, but what about pushing her back against the tree? Her body, your body, cement them together, then add friction—I’m biting back a groan, remembering all too well how good she felt just moments ago with those sweet legs wrapped around me. Yeah. Not sure how well I’ll be sleeping tonight.
“Come on, time to get back,” I manage to say, and here’s hoping she doesn’t notice my voice is a little lower than normal. There’s just enough light left and I’ve come here enough times that I know the way back to the bike.
The smile fades from her lips and she hugs me back, hard. “Do we have to?” she asks, her voice getting all croaky and raspy at the end. I wince, all dirty thoughts doused. I’ve kept her out too long.
“Yeah.” The levity is gone from my voice now too. “But I’m with you now. You’re not alone anymore.”
She nods into my chest and doesn’t say anything. I hug her tighter in a way I hope she’ll take as reassurance. But it’s for me too. She’s in my arms. This really happened. We didn’t say the words, but I think after tonight, she’s mine now. Lauren DeSanto is finally mine. Everything I ever wanted, even when I thought I hated her, is finally here within my grasp.
Now if only I can get away with never mentioning the one thing that could fuck all this up: the truth.
The ride back to Lauren’s house passes too quickly. Now that it’s dark, it’s cold as a witch’s teat out here, probably in the upper forties. The wind cuts through my coat and jacket even though I keep my speed relatively low. I can feel Lauren shivering behind me even with her heavy down coat on. I barely notice the chill. I’m still flying high with the pressure of her arms around me and the memory of her lips on mine. I’m so caught up in her and paying attention to the road that I don’t notice the two cop cars parked outside her house until the bike rolls to a stop at the curb.
Lauren immediately jumps off and yanks the helmet from her head, shoving it against my chest. At first I don’t understand why she’s moving so fast, but then I see her mom running down the front walk. She sweeps Lauren into her arms with an “Oh, thank God!” She squeezes Lauren hard, then glares over her shoulder at me with a look of fear. “You stay away from my daughter!”
“Nathan Jude Williams, down on the ground, hands over your head.”
“What the hell?” It’s one of those sensory overload moments. I’m being shouted at from all sides. When I look around, I see I’m flanked by four cops with their guns trained on me. Guns? I feel like I’ve stepped into some crazy twilight zone version of my life.
“Down on the ground, hands over your head!” One of the cops is shouting at me louder now. These guys are serious. This is no joke.
So I do what they say. I drop to my knees, then lie down on the lawn and put my hands behind my head. The next second someone seizes my wrists. I feel the cold bite of metal handcuffs cutting into my skin. Then I’m wrenched to my feet and a too-bright light is flashed in my eyes.
“You are under arrest for the abduction of Kadence Mulligan. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you…”
The officer goes on with the familiar script, the same one you always hear on TV. I look over my shoulder as they drag me toward one of the squad cars. Lauren. Where’s Lauren? I can’t see her. Is she watching this? What is she thinking? Oh, Christ, no. Not now, after our perfect night together. A deputy shoves me by the shoulders down into the backseat, and before I can think of a single thing to shout out to Lauren, the door to the cop car is slammed shut.
Twenty
Lauren
DeSanto Residence
Thursday, April 5
11:52 p.m.
I am a fool. And apparently that’s never going to change. I wrap my pillow around my head and squeeze my eyes tight. Then tighter. When will you ever learn, Lauren? When will you ever learn?
I’ve always said yes to everyone, to everything. Always so willing. It’s made such a mess of everything, and now I’m going to make that same mistake with love? A sob rips up from my throat, and I smother it against the mattress.
Forget it. No more. I am a rock. I am an island. And Paul Simon’s perfect lyrics hold me—most assuredly—as I cry myself to sleep.
Twenty-One
Jude
Sheriff’s Office
Friday, April 6
1:00 a.m.
I turned eighteen a month ago. Usually that’s a great thing, what everyone’s looking forward to. Being an adult, getting the hell out of high school. Buying smokes without any hassle. Yeah. Except for the part where the first time I ever get in trouble with the law, I end up in the county jail on a Thursday night.
I’m dragged in, stripped, searched—and when I say searched, I mean searched, which is just as unpleasant as it sounds. They give me new clothes—an undershirt and these sky-blue hospital-like scrubs to wear. Then there’s the fingerprinting and mug shot. The entire time I’m thinking, This is not happening to me. This is someone else’s life, or I’ve watched too many COPS episodes in a row before falling asleep and this is just a seriously vivid dream.
No such luck. I am booked. Officially booked. Fingerprints permanently on file, forever. Then they ask me weird questions, like for a handwriting sample, and if I have a job, along with the basics of where I live and who I live with. But they don’t ask a single thing about Kadence.
They say that these are all normal booking procedural questions. I mention a lawyer and they say yes I can have a public defender, that I will be appointed one tomorrow if I want. I ask for my phone call, but when I call my home phone, Dad never picks up. Shocker. We don’t even have an answering machine.
I wonder if he’ll come by tomorrow when news gets around at the garage that I’ve been arrested. I wonder if the disappointment will hit me fresh when he doesn’t. But maybe Rocky will come by. Christ, that’s fucking pathetic, hoping someone else’s dad will come when you’re dumped in jail.
By the time I’m processed, it’s one in the morning and they’re leading me to a holding cell. Which is when I see I won’t be alone for the night. Well, I’ll be alone in my cell, but I’m led by five other barred rooms, and it’s classy in here, lemme tell you. Some dirty bastards probably picked up for being drunk and disorderly and one guy who’s strung out on something because he’s muttering crazy crap to himself in the corner. Most of them are quiet, but a couple call out to me as I pass. Things about how I’ve had sex with my own mother. How they want to have sex with my mother. How my mother must have had sex with a dog and that’s how I was born. Why are mothers always dragged into this?
“I know why you’re here,” says the loudest one as the guard leads me past, “and they all know it too.” He tilts his head toward the other winners in the cells around us.
And suddenly my mask fails me, all this BS calm I’ve worked so hard for. The new man I’m trying to become. As if I could actually change who I am. Jude the cool, the collected, full of hatred but outwardly impervious. It’s fucking shattering.
Because people are staring at me again. I’m Nathan the stalker, Nathan the monster freak. And I’m flung back to the day it all happened. Fall of eighth grade. I’d been so stupid. All the previous year and that summer, I’d thought, I’d hoped, if I could only get through to Lauren, if I could make her see that we could still be friends, then everything would be okay again.
Sure w
e’d never go back to being as close as we’d once been. No more afternoons of peanut butter and honey sandwiches. I got that. But it would have been nice if she would acknowledge me in the hallway or maybe talk to me sometimes. I was so lonely. I didn’t have any other friends. At all. It was social suicide to be friends with the guy with the exploding face, and I wasn’t exactly putting myself out there after Lauren ditched me. I wasn’t especially good at school, so not even the nerds wanted to be around me. Self-preservation mechanisms kicked in, and isolating myself was doing the trick. Except for the super-lonely part.
But I missed Ren so bad. I would have taken any scraps she’d thrown my way. She was the one person I believed could still look past my face and see me, just like she always had. So I was going to make a grand gesture, like in the movies. It was going to be so sweet and so thoughtful that there would be no way for her to keep ignoring me.
If I could write her a letter explaining everything perfectly, the way I never could in real life, then she’d see. And I’d make her something too, something beautiful and meaningful. She always kept these small keepsakes on top of her dresser. Snow globes and miniature porcelain swans and other knickknacks, but always classy things. Not junk. If I wanted to make something she’d remember me by, it had to be of the same caliber.
So I had this great idea. Origami. But not some crap little crumpled-paper kindergarten project. No, it would have to be intricate and delicate and personal. That would prove to her everything she meant to me and, along with the letter, would make her realize that we were the kind of friends who could never lose each other.
I got a bunch of books from the library and mowed lawns to save up money to buy the fancy origami paper from the craft shop. Then I practiced and practiced and practiced. I decided to make a design from the advanced origami book, this supercool firebird phoenix. Lots of colors, hundreds of intricate folds to imitate the feathers. It would symbolize our friendship: rising from the ashes. Just by looking at it, Ren would have to see how many hours I’d put into it. And therefore how much she meant to me.
The thing took me three weeks to complete. I’d finished half of it before realizing I’d done a bunch of the folds the wrong direction and the wings wouldn’t fit on the right way. I had to scrap everything I had. But I didn’t get mad or start cussing or anything. I just brushed what I’d done into the trash and started over.
There’s this whole philosophy behind origami. Like Zen and crap. After all the hours of folding those tiny pieces of paper, trying to make them all uniform with my big, clumsy teenage guy hands, I realized pretty fast that I could either get so frustrated there’d be no way for me to continue, or I could get super chill about it all. Because of my end goal, getting Ren back as my friend, I was able to go the chill route.
I could put up with paper cuts and hours of messing up and working with a magnifying glass trying to fit the tiniest pieces of paper together until my eyes were so strained I could barely see straight. I didn’t mind. The suffering made it better even. It proved my devotion. She would feel it all, just by looking at my finished creation.
Finally, twenty-two days after I’d started the phoenix, two and a half months after I’d started learning origami, I was ready. The phoenix was perfect. It looked as good as the one in the book. I grinned down at it, then grabbed a spiral notebook from my bag. I wrote my note.
Ren, I made this for you. I want us to be friends again. I know you have other friends now. That’s cool. But maybe we can talk sometimes. I miss hanging out with you.
I frowned down at the note, chewing on the end of the pen. I felt like I should try to say more, but I didn’t know what. Lauren was always so much better with words than I was. Like, sometimes I could put thoughts down in my notebooks, but this was different. This was to her. But I was confident the phoenix would say everything I couldn’t. I signed the note and tore out the page. Then I folded it twice and slid it into my pocket.
I put the phoenix in an old Pop-Tarts box so it wouldn’t get crushed on the way to school, then went to her locker. I knew Ren had history first period and didn’t go by her locker because it was on the other side of campus. The halls were busy so no one noticed me sidle up to her locker.
I quickly rolled the tumbler to her combination and opened the locker. I was an office aide and had looked up Lauren’s combo when the secretary wasn’t looking. At the time, I didn’t think of it as being creepy. I was still thinking in terms of grand gesture.
When I had Lauren’s locker open, I pulled the note from my pocket, smoothed it out, and then grabbed the phoenix from the Pop-Tarts box. I set it all up on the tower of books in her locker where she couldn’t miss it. Then I clicked the locker closed with a wide grin on my face. Grand gesture accomplished. Now it was time to wait for Lauren to come to me, amazed and overcome at my super thoughtful gift, and we could go back to the way things were.
So I waited.
And I waited.
And waited.
A week later I heard Lauren’s voice saying my name. But she wasn’t coming up behind me, putting a hand on my arm, and gushing over the phoenix.
No, it was her voice saying my name over the loudspeaker…to the whole damn school.
“Man, Nathan is such a stalker freak. You should have seen that nasty note he put in my locker last week. How did he even know my combination? It was soooooo creepy.”
Her friend Kadence’s voice came on next: “I can’t believe you were ever friends with that monster. I mean, his face is so gross. He’s a total Frankenstein, no, make that Zitzenstein.” Then her voiced dropped to a dramatic Slavic accent, “I am Franken von Zitzenstein. I break into girls’ lockers and leave creepy notes, and I vant to eat your brainz!”
And then Lauren laughed like it was the funniest thing.
The secretary came on then, telling the girls that one of them had accidentally set her bag on the button for the PA speaker. They apologized and went on to announce something about a talent show the school was putting on that night. I barely heard the snickers of those sitting around me in class. All that really registered was the sound of Lauren’s laughter as my heart shattered into a hundred thousand pieces.
Life got bad after that. I’d only been invisible before. But after Kadence coined the nickname Zitzenstein, I found it in permanent marker on my locker. Jocks would ram my shoulder in the hallway and say it under their breath to me, either that or “stalker.” I was beaten up a few times. The more popular Kadence and Lauren became, the worse the bullying got. But none of it hurt as much as Lauren laughing so hard the first time Kadence called me the name.
I’ve played through these memories so many times that I fast-forward through them in seconds as I glare at the men behind bars. But I see something different on their faces than on the old bullies’ faces in high school. They aren’t just disgusted and amused at their own power to pick on someone weaker than themselves. They’re afraid. Oh, they’re taunting me. They think I’m a sick freak who likes to hurt girls for kicks. But there’s fear underneath it too. Because I’m an unknown. What did I do to her? Nobody knows. People are always afraid of what they don’t know. And part of me is glad for their fear. Because at least fear is better than disgust, isn’t it? Fear at least has a degree of power to it. Disgust means you are the victim. Fear means you are their master.
If nothing else, I think, at least there’s that. At least there is that. So I smile at them. I grin an evil fucking grin and make eye contact with each one that I can see from my vantage point. I hope it’s a face that will haunt their dreams. I hope they think they’re looking into the face of the devil himself.
There was never any real hope of rebirth for me. I get it now. I was always gonna be a monster one way or another. A phoenix is a bird that burns up and then is reborn again from the ashes, but I’m like one that stayed ash and never became a bird again. Then I smirk darkly. More like the origami one I made
that was crumpled and tossed away with the half-empty neon-green slushies and candy wrappers in the dark trash can where I’m sure Lauren threw it.
I keep the grin plastered on my face the whole way to my cell. Until the barred door clanks shut behind me and the noise echoes off the gray-painted cement walls. The other inmates are silent now.
I sit down on the cot attached to the wall and fist the worn, dark-gray blanket in my hand. The same stupid hand that only hours ago was caressing Lauren’s cheek. Because along with the rest of the accusing eyes of the world, Lauren now thinks the worst of me. And is she entirely wrong?
No. No, she’s not. Christ. I thud the back of my head into the wall. You can’t hurt people and then pretend it never happened. Consequences were always gonna catch up with me in one form or another. My eyes start stinging. I slam my palms against them. For real? I’m gonna start crying? Now? After all these years? I haven’t cried since I got home from school that day she laughed over that goddamned loudspeaker.
I drop and yank the scratchy sheet and blanket over my body. Squeezing my eyes shut hard, I pretend I can go back to a time before monsters, before prison bars. Before the name Kadence Mulligan was even a whisper on the wind. Back to just a boy and a girl laughing and running through the woods, the taste of peanut butter on their tongues.
Twenty-Two
Kadence
Found Video Footage
Kadence Mulligan’s Laptop
Date Unknown
Image opens.
Kadence sits on a stool on what appears to be a stage set of some kind. A heavy, red velvet curtain hangs behind her. There is a red oriental rug on the floor. Her hair is piled on her head in curls, with a Rosie-the-Riveter bandana tied around it to keep it in place. She has on heavy cat-eye makeup, red lipstick, and a tidy, narrow-fitted button shirt tucked into a vintage, gray pencil skirt. She appears agitated as she taps her foot.
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