“That’s what he told me. I didn’t believe him. Maybe I didn’t want to believe him.”
What did he mean by that?
“When Staci dumped me, it wasn’t even for someone else,” he said. “You know what that feels like? You’re crazy about this girl. You’ve been crazy about her forever. And one day, you don’t even see it coming, she tells you that’s it. She doesn’t want to see you anymore.”
Why was he telling me this?
“I asked her, did you meet someone else? But no. That wasn’t it. She just didn’t want to be with me anymore. Like she was tired of me or something. Then I see her with him, talking and laughing.”
As if that were some kind of excuse.
“Look, I had nothing against him, okay? Well, except that Staci seemed to like him better than she liked me. A lot better. But I’m not a killer. I’m not. And I sure didn’t want him to die.”
I just stared at him.
“I have a big mouth, I admit it. Like at the funeral, with your pal Taglia. I’m sorry about that. We have a little history, him and me.” Vin had mentioned that. Teddy looked at me. “The cops really came on strong,” he said. “I was scared there for a while. But they believe me. You can ask them. You can get Riel to ask them.”
Right, like the cops never got it wrong.
“He was an okay guy,” Teddy said. “He was in my history class. He put his hand up a lot. He seemed to get a kick out of getting the right answer. But other than that, he seemed okay. We didn’t have any special beef or anything—other than Staci liked to be around him and she didn’t like to be around me anymore.”
He jabbed the ground with his stick.
“I went into that alley,” he said, not looking at me now. “A bunch of us did after that woman came screaming out of there.”
That cold feeling came over me again.
“I saw him. I guess that’s why I went to the funeral.” He looked up at me for a moment. Then he jabbed at the ground again. He kept jabbing.
I watched him, and then I joined in. I had never talked much to Teddy—never wasted my time. Never saw any reason to. But looking at him and listening to him just now … I wanted to hate him. I wanted to believe it was all his fault. But now I wasn’t so sure. Was he telling me the truth, or was he snowing me the way he had maybe snowed the cops?
We finished cleaning up all the mess under the bleachers. Mr. Wong came over to inspect our work. He said we’d been thorough and that we could go.
We went back inside to drop off our coveralls and work gloves. We were going up the stairs when Teddy said, “Hey, do you …”
He broke off and shook his head.
Whatever.
He stopped on the step above me. “You want to come to a party tomorrow night?” he said.
I stared at him.
“You’re inviting me to a party?”
“Well, yeah.”
“What kind of party? You mean at that construction site?”
“No,” Teddy said, surprised. Maybe he didn’t know that I’d heard about him and his friends hanging around in those half-built houses. “I mean at the bluffs.”
“The bluffs?” What was he talking about?
“Matt’s dad lives up there. The guy is loaded. You should see the place. You should see the property. It’s huge, and it goes right out to the bluffs. Matt’s dad lets him have bonfires out there. The guy ditched Matt’s mom for someone half her age, and ever since he pretty much lets Matt do whatever he wants when it’s Matt’s weekend to stay there. It’s great. You want to come?”
“I don’t even know Matt,” I said.
“So what? The party is for me. It’s my birthday. Actually, it was my birthday last week. We were going to have the party last weekend, but it was right after Sal was killed and some of the people I invited knew him. Miranda … you know Miranda?” I nodded. “She said it wouldn’t be right if kids from school were at a party the day after Sal died.”
So that’s why Miranda had been talking to Teddy.
“She said I should postpone it. So I did. We’re having it tomorrow night instead.”
He was really confusing me. He sounded like he meant what he was saying. Or maybe he was a gold-medal liar.
“You want to come? You don’t have to buy me a present.” He flashed me a smile. I stared at him. “I’m trying to show you I have no hard feelings, McGill,” he said.
So he was inviting me to his birthday party? What made him think I would accept the invitation? Why on earth would I want to go to a party for Teddy Carlin?
CHAPTER TWELVE
I had to work that night. When I got to the store, I saw Alex and Bailey at the far end of the parking lot. Bailey was saying something to Alex. When Alex started to walk away, Bailey grabbed his arm and jerked him to a standstill. He looked really angry. I didn’t care if they were cousins. I started toward them.
Bailey saw me first. He dropped his hand and muttered something to Alex that I couldn’t hear. I ignored him and said to Alex, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Alex said. He glanced at Bailey, but he didn’t seem mad at him the way he had been in the cafeteria. Instead, he seemed kind of sad.
“Remember what I said, Alex,” Bailey called after him as Alex and I walked back to the store together.
I waited until we were almost at the employee entrance. I wasn’t sure if I should say anything, but I felt bad about what had happened.
“I didn’t know Bailey was your cousin,” I said. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have said what I did yesterday.” At least, I didn’t think I would have said it. “I’m sorry if I caused trouble between you two.”
“Staci says that she doesn’t think Bailey said anything mean,” he said. “But he didn’t tell them to stop making fun of people. That’s wrong. It’s wrong.” He shook his head.
Yesterday he had been angry with Bailey. Now he seemed disappointed. I guess I would have felt the same way if I’d found out that someone I cared about had let people say all kinds of ignorant, stupid things about me and hadn’t told them to just shut up.
“My mom died in the summer,” he said. I sure knew what that felt like. “So I had to move in with Bailey and his mom. I know his mom doesn’t want me there, but Bailey told her I have no place else to go right now. He helps me with stuff at home, but he says that at school he has his own friends and I should have my own friends.”
Oh. So that’s what was going on between them. I wondered if Bailey was embarrassed by his cousin. Maybe he thought people would make fun of him if they knew he had a cousin in special ed. I wondered how Alex felt about that.
“Bailey is right,” Alex said, as if he knew what I was thinking. “We used to go to the same school in Regina.”
“Regina? That’s where you’re from?”
“Bailey, too. Until his mom and dad got divorced. Then he moved back here with his mom. Kids used to tease me sometimes at our old school. Bailey made them stop.”
I guess that changed when Bailey started hanging out with Teddy and his cool friends.
“He used to make me stop, too,” Alex said.
“Stop what?”
“Stop getting into trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Sometimes I lose my temper,” he said. “Then I get into trouble.”
I wondered what kind of trouble.
Work was pretty normal that night—I spent my shift stacking stuff on the shelves. Every now and then I had to run back to the storeroom to tell Mr. Geordi that there was a customer asking if we were all sold out of whatever special was on this week but that wasn’t going to be on special come tomorrow morning. If it turned out we weren’t sold out, I’d bring the customer whatever it was they were looking for. If we were sold out, I’d have to go back and tell them, “Sorry.”
It was maybe five minutes before the end of my shift when I turned around and saw Rebecca standing behind me with a great big smile on her face.
“I thought we were g
oing to meet at your place,” I said.
“I finished packing, so I thought I’d come and get you,” she said. “We can stop by the video store on the way home and get some movies. My parents are out tonight, Mike. We have the whole place to ourselves.”
I like it when Rebecca’s parents go out. In fact, some of my best times with Rebecca have been when we rented some movies and it was just the two of us in the house.
“I gotta go sign out,” I told her. “I’ll be right back.”
My Friday night curfew is usually eleven o’clock. Sometimes—rarely—Riel will extend it to midnight, if I ask. I called him around ten to ask. I was thinking he’d say no, on account of what happened at the funeral. But he surprised me. He said, “Twelve thirty at the latest, okay, Mike?” I didn’t ask why he was giving me so much time without an argument. I just said, “Okay.”
I had a great time with Rebecca that night. Her parents still weren’t home by the time I had to go. She walked me to the door.
“I’m going to miss you, Mike,” she said just before she kissed me.
“I’m going to miss you, too,” I said, when she finally stopped kissing me.
I thought about her all the way home.
After work on Saturday, I walked over to the Blockbuster on Danforth to return the movies that Rebecca and I had watched the night before. Teddy and Sara D. and some of the others were standing outside the dollar store next door when I came out. Teddy saw me and nodded at me. Matt saw him do it. He looked confused. Then Sara D. said, “Look who’s coming.”
It was Staci. She was walking down the sidewalk with a Shoppers Drug Mart bag in one hand. She hesitated when she saw Teddy. I remembered what she had told me about the day Sal had died. I wondered if she was doing the same thing now, if she was trying to decide if she should cross the street to avoid Teddy or if she should stand up for herself. Finally she pulled herself up even straighter and held her head high, like a little bird puffing up its feathers so that it would look bigger than it really was. She began to walk past them.
“Hey, Staci, where—” Sara D. started to say. The snotty look on her face matched the snotty tone in her voice.
Teddy cut her off. He said, “Leave her alone.” Sara D. stared at him. She shut right up. Teddy watched Staci as she made her way past him. For once, he didn’t say a word. None of them did, although it looked like Sara D. really wanted to. I could see that Staci was relieved. She also seemed a little stunned, like she couldn’t figure out what had just happened.
I thought about that all the way home from the video store. I was still thinking about it when I was nuking leftovers for my supper. Susan was working. She said that Saturday nights were the worst nights in the emergency room, especially after ten o’clock. Sometimes she didn’t get home until late Sunday morning. Riel was out, too. I sat in front of the TV, eating my supper and thinking about Teddy’s party. I thought about what I had seen outside Blockbuster and what Teddy had said he’d seen in that alley. I also thought about what he had seen me do at school the morning Sal died. Then I thought about who would be at Teddy’s party—all those kids who had been out there on the sidewalk that day. Maybe one of them had seen something or heard something or knew something. If they had, they sure wouldn’t come up to me at school and tell me. I wasn’t friends with most of the people Teddy knew. But if I was at the party, and if everyone knew that Teddy had invited me to come …
I thought and I thought.
Finally, I got up, left a note for Riel—Gone to see a movie—grabbed a jacket and headed for the bluffs.
It was dark by the time I got there. I had to take the subway, then a bus, then I had to walk for fifteen minutes along a winding road where the houses were set way back. Finally I found the address I was looking for. The street number was on a stone column to one side of the driveway. There was a big stone fence along the whole front of the property, and the driveway went back a long way until it finally reached a four-car garage. To one side of the garage was a huge house, bigger even than some of the houses in the neighborhood around the private school where Rebecca’s mother teaches. Jeez, I never thought that anyone who went to my school would have parents who were so loaded. Well, one parent. Teddy had said that the house belonged to Matt’s dad and that Matt’s parents were divorced.
I walked slowly up the driveway. Before I left home, I’d thought this was a good idea. But now that I was here, I wasn’t so sure. What if Teddy had been playing me? What if everything he’d said out in the schoolyard had been an act? What if he’d invited me so that he could play a trick on me or make fun of me or humiliate me the way he did Staci? What if he wanted to get back at me for hitting him or because I was friends with Sal? I almost turned around and went back down the driveway. But all of a sudden a voice to my right said, “Hey, you came.”
Teddy.
He had just come out a door at the side of the house—a big sliding glass door in a whole wall of glass—and was carrying a big Styrofoam cooler. He grinned at me like he was glad to see me.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you where the action is.”
I hesitated. But, what the hell, I was here, wasn’t I? I fell into step beside him. We crossed a patio next to a swimming pool and a hot tub—“Cool, huh?” Teddy said—and then walked uphill until, all of a sudden, I saw fire. We were at the top of a rise in the property. The house was behind us. Up ahead was a huge lawn bordered by trees and bushes. Near the back of the property, which ended at the bluffs, was a huge fire pit with a fire in it and kids sitting all around, laughing and talking and listening to music and drinking and eating. Beyond that was nothing but sky and, way down below, water. I knew there was a marina down there somewhere, but I couldn’t see it from where I was standing.
“Come on,” Teddy said.
I followed him to the fire. As soon as he set down the cooler, kids started to get up and come over and grab a cold drink. Teddy made sure everyone knew I was there. A few kids nodded at me. Some of them said hi. A lot of them ignored me. Matt was one of those people, which made me feel awkward because it was his house.
“Here,” Teddy said. He handed me a can of pop. “Come and sit down.” He led me over to the fire and dropped down on the ground next to Sara D. He put his arm around her, which surprised me because I thought he was still interested in Staci, even though she had dumped him, and because he had stopped Sara D. from giving Staci a hard time today. “Say hi to Mike,” he told her. She looked sullenly at me and mumbled a greeting. If you ask me, she was thinking about what had happened at the funeral.
Teddy started talking, telling me about the great parties they had up here when Matt was staying with his dad, and how cool Matt’s dad was—he let them do whatever they wanted because, “Get this, Mike, he thinks we’re going to do stuff anyway and that it’s better if we do it where we can’t get into an accident or get busted or anything. The guy is unbelievable. You have to meet him.”
While I listened, I looked around. I recognized almost everyone who was there. They almost all went to my school, and they almost always hung out with Teddy. Then I spotted two people sitting far away from the fire. I had to focus hard before I finally made out who they were—Bailey and Annie. They were talking, and Annie was shaking her head, like she was telling Bailey no, no, no.
Teddy kept offering me things to drink and eat, and the music was pretty good, although I couldn’t figure out how they could play it that loud without any of the neighbors complaining. Then Teddy looked around and nodded at a girl who was sitting on the other side of the fire. The girl got up, circled around to where I was, and sat down beside me. I recognized her, too. Her name was Meghan. She smiled at me and said she was sorry about what had happened to my friend, which is exactly how she put it—not Sal but my friend.
Before I could say anything—and I had no idea what to say—I heard an angry noise. I turned toward it. Everyone did. Bailey was standing now, his arms up in the air. He was shaking his head and saying to A
nnie, “You said you did. You said so.” At first Annie was sitting down, but she jumped to her feet and ran away from him.
“Uh-oh,” Meghan said. She got up and went after Annie.
Bailey watched her. He seemed to hesitate, like he was trying to decide whether he should chase after them. Finally he turned and walked toward the fire. That’s when he saw me and, let me tell you, that stopped him in his tracks. He looked at me. Then he searched out Teddy and gave him a look that said, What the hell?
A few minutes later I saw Meghan walking back to the fire alone.
Bailey intercepted her. “Where is she?” he said.
“She went inside.”
Bailey started toward the house, but Meghan caught him by the arm.
“She doesn’t want to talk to you right now, Bailey. She just wants to chill, okay? She said she’ll come back out again in a little while. Okay?”
Bailey stared up the slope. Only the top floor and the roof of the house were visible from where we were. Finally he turned and walked away from the fire to the edge of the bluffs. Meghan dropped down beside me again.
“Poor Annie,” she said. “She just hasn’t got over it yet. She told me she’s been having nightmares about it.”
“About what?” I said.
“About what happened.” She looked at me as if of course I should know. But I didn’t. “After that woman came screaming out of the alley, Annie was the first one to go and see what was going on. She was the first one to see your friend. She said his eyes were still open. She said she thought for a couple of seconds that he was alive.”
I felt sick as I pictured it.
I sat there beside Meghan for a long time, listening to her talk about what had happened, which is the way she always said it, not the kid who got killed or your friend that got killed, but what had happened and how awful it was and how she never knew anyone her own age who had died.
I did. I knew Robbie Ducharme.
After she talked about that for a while, she started asking me about school and which options I was taking and what I thought I was going to do after high school. She said she wanted to be a marine biologist; she said biology was her all-time favorite subject, which surprised me. I’d never figured on any of Teddy’s friends doing anything serious, for sure not marine biology. The whole time she was talking, I kept looking up at the house and wondering about Annie and what she had seen. I wondered if the cops had talked to her and, if they had, what she had told them. After a while, a couple of girls got up and started dancing. Then more girls got up and danced. Some of them dragged boys to their feet. The boys mostly just shuffled around, although there was this one guy—he was really into it and, boy, could he move. Soon almost everyone was on their feet.
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