Put Me Back Together

by Lola Rooney

  I saw the look of horror on the old woman’s face as she took in the sight of me.

  I saw the paramedic vomiting behind a tree.

  I saw the caved in place where Tommy’s face should have been, the bloody hole that had once been his smile.

  I saw blood, I saw blood, I saw blood, I saw blood, I saw blood…

  Fingers gripped my own and somebody was speaking to me tensely, but I couldn’t understand the words. My hands hurt for a moment and then they were empty. But I still had my bat. I needed my bat so I could face Brandon. Because he was coming for me. He was coming anytime now.

  A glass was pushed against my lips but I shoved it away. The person kept blocking the door and I didn’t like it. I needed to keep my eye on the door and the window and the other window. I needed to stay vigilant. I think I opened my mouth and said things, screamed things, but I wasn’t sure what the words were. Whatever they were, they had the desired effect. The person cleared out and I was alone again. It was better that way, anyway. Brandon wouldn’t come unless I was alone. And he was coming, I was sure of it. I’d told him to come. He would come. Any minute now.

  A while later—I had no idea how long—I found myself staring down at my throbbing hands. They were red, raw, and shaking. They wouldn’t stop shaking. Someone had put a blanket over my shoulders, but I shook it off. I’d lost track of my bat but it didn’t matter. If I got the knife out of his hand I could get him before he got Tommy. I could stop him. He wasn’t that much bigger than me. It was just a knife. I could do it. I could save him.

  I heard a voice that sounded like my own, crying. Was I crying? I touched my cheeks but they were dry. My tongue was dry. I wanted so much to lie down, but I knew I couldn’t. I had to save Tommy. People moved around me. Someone held my hand. I asked for my bat. I asked for my knives. I had to stay awake.

  I saw Tommy running.

  I saw the train tracks coming up to meet me.

  I saw the knife in Brandon’s hand.

  “Girl, you’re bleeding! What happened to you? What happened?”

  “Race you to the train tracks, Katie!”

  “Oh my God, call the police!”

  “You heard him, Katie Kat. You’d better hurry now. If I get there first, who knows what might happen.”

  “Did you see what happened? Did you see who it was?”

  “Today’s the day we take care of business.”

  “Get her cleaned up. They found something. They found a body.”

  “Just like you said.”

  “Oh dear God. Oh holy Jesus.”

  “Just like you asked.”

  “Who was it? Who did this?”

  Tell me this isn’t happening.

  “She’s in shock.”

  Tell me it isn’t my fault.

  “She knows something. Let her speak.”

  It wasn’t me.

  “What did she say? Did she say a name?”

  It wasn’t me.

  “Stupid bitch.”

  It wasn’t me.

  It wasn’t me.

  It wasn’t me.

  When he came into the room at last I had nothing left. The others scattered as he approached the couch and I started to whimper. He picked me up and carried me into the bedroom. I guessed that was where he wanted to do it. Right on the pillow he’d pierced with his knife. He always did like to cut the same place twice.

  He was whispering to me, but it was as though my ears were filled with cotton.

  “I always knew you’d come for me,” I said as he laid me on the bed.

  There was some discussion in the other room, maybe an argument. I hoped he wasn’t killing them. They didn’t seem so bad. I hoped I hadn’t brought this on them, too.

  Then he was back, looming over me, touching my face. I swatted his hand away. “Are you going to kill me now?” I demanded. All this waiting around was beginning to seem awfully unfair. If he was going to do it, I wanted him to do it. Get it over with. Unless he was waiting for something. Like my permission.

  “It’s okay,” I mumbled. My mouth sort of felt like it was full of cotton now, too. My eyes felt so heavy. “I know I deserve it.”

  I heard a clicking sound and saw a dim light beside my head. Then he said two words, which I heard loud and clear: “Goddammit, Katie.”

  And then there was nothing.

  19

  I woke up in Brandon’s grip. He was everywhere, his voice in my ears, his spiteful face reflected on the insides of my closed eyelids, his deeds running through my mind on a never-ending loop. He’d been my companion throughout my fitful sleep and for the tiniest moment when I opened my eyes at last I thought I was waking up in my hospital bed six years ago. It was as though Tommy had just died yesterday.

  The pain that hit me in that moment nearly tore me apart.

  My eyes focused on Emily lying in the bed beside me. One of her hands was wrapped tightly around my wrist. I knew precisely why: I’d tried to hit her in my sleep.

  As I very carefully extricated my arm from her grip, a few stray memories of the night before floated through my mind. I tried to piece together what had actually happened, but it wasn’t easy. Nothing made sense. I’d let the memories in. I’d let the fear in and it had overcome me. How many hours had I spent sitting there, obsessing over Brandon, waiting for him? I must have gone a little mad.

  One thing was obvious: Brandon had not come, though my brain told me without a doubt that he had. I flexed my aching fingers and felt my heart begin to race as I realized how much I’d given away. Emily definitely knew something was wrong now. I remembered screaming at someone. But maybe what I’d said had been unintelligible. Maybe I was still safe in my bubble of lies. Except…

  Someone I’d thought to be Brandon had carried me to my bed. And I’d asked him if he was going to kill me. And I’d told him I deserved it. But if that hadn’t been Brandon, then it could only be one person.

  I started gagging and scrambled out of bed just in time. The popcorn from last night came up the second I gripped the toilet bowl. And then the burger I’d had for dinner with Lucas. And the yesterday’s lunch and breakfast and on and on until there was nothing left, but still I kept on gagging. Eventually I slumped against the bathtub, pressing my cheek into the cold porcelain. I was back to feeling old feelings again, the paranoia of walking high school hallways and feeling their eyes on me, of being so sure they could see through me, that they’d found me out.

  He knows.

  Sipping from a cup that normally held my toothbrush, I tried to look at the situation with a clear head.

  Yes, Lucas knew something, but he didn’t know everything. And if Brandon had actually come to find me, wouldn’t Lucas have found out everything anyway? Just because Brandon hadn’t come last night didn’t mean he wasn’t still coming. My time was running out. My time to tell Lucas everything, in my way, on my terms.

  As I pulled on some clothes I found in the bathroom hamper, I realized I wanted to tell Lucas the truth, even if it meant I would lose him. As he’d said, I wanted to get it out of me. But more than that, I wanted him to know me, all of me, the real me. It had been so long since anybody had. Even if I only got to hold him for a moment as myself, that was what I wanted.

  I wanted to set Katie Archer free.

  Much as it pained me to leave Emily without a word, knowing how worried she must have been about me all night, I knew waking her up would mean long hours of explaining everything. I had to talk to Lucas first. So I left a note for her on my pillow that I hoped said enough but not too much and tiptoed out of my bedroom. By the clock on the microwave I saw that it was already four o’clock in the afternoon. Already most of a day gone, with Brandon circling and Lucas thinking God knows what about me. I felt my feet itching to go and find him, but made myself choke down some dry toast first. Then I flipped through the school directory until I found what I was looking for and I left.

  I walked the whole way there. I really should have taken a bus—it was drizzli
ng, and wasn’t there a murderer on my tail?—but it didn’t occur to me. I just bowed my head and walked, one foot in front of the other, all the way through campus. I was hoping the words would come to me, that by the time I found my way there I would know exactly how to say what I’d never been able to say. But as I stood staring at the doors of Victoria Hall, I realized I’d spent the entire walk picturing the look I would see on Lucas’s face when I began to speak.

  Great. It looked like I’d be winging it.

  By some miracle I managed to follow a lone student into the building and get directions from him to Lucas’s room, which seemed odd for a moment, until I remembered he was Lucas Matthews. Of course everyone knew where his room was. The halls echoed with silence. Term was ending. It felt like everything was ending. It seemed fitting; the end of school, the end of Lucas and me, the end of my charade…the end of me?

  The door to his room was partly open and I didn’t let myself stop and think. If I gave this any thought at all I’d been running for it in seconds. I pushed it the rest of the way open and let it hit the wall with a thump. The room wasn’t tiny, but it was overcrowded considering there were three beds and desks and wardrobes squished into the space. One mattress was bare and another was covered in half-packed bags and piles of books and hockey equipment. On the third bed, which faced the window, sat Lucas.

  He turned to look at me and our eyes locked. His faced seemed lifeless. It was almost as though he didn’t recognize me. That expression almost had me making a break for it, but I braced my legs instead, staying put. He walked over to me, his shoulders slumped. With one hand he cupped my cheek, barely touching my skin, and I looked up into his eyes searching for a sign, some indication that he still cared, that I wasn’t about to bare my soul for nothing. His eyes were still the colour of liquid gold and they burned straight into my heart, but in their depths I could only see one thing: sadness. After a moment he dropped his hand and turned away.

  He didn’t want to have anything to do with me.

  “Can I have my phone back?” I said, my voice harder than I’d meant it to be. But what did it matter anyway? If he was done with me, there was nothing to ruin. It was already ruined. I’d ruined it.

  Lucas hesitated a moment before reaching into the pocket of his jeans and pulling the phone out. He placed it on the bare mattress without looking at me. When I turned it on, it opened to the texts I’d received from Brandon.

  “How many did you read?” I asked.

  “We were panicked,” he said. “You were practically catatonic. You’d mentioned Brandon had been texting you. I thought maybe if I could see what he’d said to upset you so much…”

  I scanned through the texts, page after page. I hadn’t realized how many there had actually been. I’d just started ignoring them after a while.

  “How many?” I asked again.

  “All of them,” Lucas said, his voice rough, as though he’d spent the night yelling.

  My heart sank into my shoes. All of them. Every disgusting name and degrading threat, every shaming, hateful, spiteful one of them. It wasn’t the fact that Lucas knew that someone else thought these things of me that made me want to curl up and die. It was the fact that I thought them, too, and maybe now so did he.

  “Well, I guess now you know—” I began.

  “That you lied to me?” Lucas said loudly, spinning around. His eyes weren’t liquid gold now. They were on fire.

  “You think I should have shown these to you?” I said shakily, holding up my phone. “You would have called the cops in a second.”

  “Oh yeah, wouldn’t want to get your boyfriend into trouble,” Lucas said bitterly.

  As I tried to figure out what the hell that meant, Lucas cast around the room, looking for something. Then he picked a basketball up off the floor. I thought he might throw it at me, but instead he pressed it between his hands, as though he planned to pop it like a balloon.

  “You’re still in love with him,” Lucas said. “That’s obvious.”

  I let out a short, loud laugh and his eyes snapped to my face, incredulous. “You think I’m in love with Brandon?” I said, unable to stop myself from grinning. It was just so ridiculous. “I haven’t seen him in five years!”

  Lucas stared at me, breathing hard, then began to pace in front of his bed, still gripping the ball. “You don’t protect someone from the cops unless you love them,” he said. “You don’t let them say things like that to you and then say it’s no big deal. He threatened to kill you, Katie! Not just once but again and again.”

  He was furious now, though I couldn’t really tell with whom. Brandon? Me? Himself? He threw the ball hard against the brick wall and then caught it as it flew back. He did this several times more, knocking things off his desk, and hitting a clock that fell of the wall and broke. Then he started yelling.

  “You’ve been having some kind of twisted love affair with him this whole time and making me…and telling me…!” He didn’t finish, just continued slamming the ball around the room.

  I stood frozen in place, paralyzed with fear of this anger that poured out of him as he kept throwing, the ball bouncing precariously close to the window. Then, as he reached back to fling it one last time, aiming for the glass, my hands flew forward and grabbed the ball out of his grip.

  The fight went out of him right away. Without his ball, he just looked like a lost boy who’d run out of things to break, his arms hanging heavily at his sides. His feverish eyes found my face and searched it, full of questions. I knew I owed it to him to answer them.

  I rolled the ball under one of the beds and then folded my hands. “I am not in love with Brandon Tomko,” I said firmly. “I’m in love with you.”

  It was the first time I’d said the words out loud. Something flickered behind Lucas’s eyes, but otherwise he didn’t react. I could understand that. He thought I was a liar. I was a liar.

  “And because I love you, I’m going to tell you the whole story,” I said, my voice cracking on the last words. “I’m going to tell you the truth.”

  I moved to his bed and sat down on the worn flannel cover, pulling my legs up underneath me. Lucas stood staring at me for a moment before following suit. He sat down gingerly, almost warily. In that moment, watching him, I really felt as though I’d already lost him completely. I wasn’t sure if it would make it easier or harder for me to tell him everything, but I knew it didn’t really matter. There was no going back now.

  I cleared my throat and waited until he was really looking at me to begin. This was the kind of conversation that needed everyone’s full attention.

  “Have you ever heard of the Kindergarten Killer?” I asked.

  Lucas frowned slightly. “Sure, everyone has,” he said. “The kid who murdered Tommy Wesley. The most horrific homicide in recent history, if you believe the papers. It’s been all over the news, because he just got out. Why are you—” I held up my hand to stop the question I knew he would ask. We’d never get anywhere if we did it this way. I just had to tell the story and let him hear it.

  “I was thirteen when that happened,” I said. “He lived in my neighbourhood. The media frenzy was unbelievable. Even when they don’t publish your name they find you anyway—nobody ever mentions that. His parents barricaded themselves inside their house. The parents of the dead boy, the Wesleys, were crying in the papers, on the news, on their lawn. They lived on my street.

  “Emily didn’t understand why I reacted the way I did. Why I changed into this sullen, silent creature that roamed the house at night because I couldn’t sleep and stopped caring about anything, stopped living. I couldn’t face the Wesleys, even though they wanted to see me, to comfort me. They thought I was on their side, but I knew better. I knew more about Tommy Wesley’s death than anyone.”

  “What do you mean?” Lucas said, his face clouded with confusion now instead of anger. “How could you know more than them about their own son’s death?”

  I raised my chin. “Because it wa
s my idea,” I said.

  20

  “I met Brandon at the park,” I went on, looking out the window now. I couldn’t look at Lucas anymore. “That’s important. We didn’t go to the same school. The park near my house was this huge, wild tangle of nature, with a forest and hiking trails. I used to go into the woods to sketch on these huge boulders. That’s where I met him. He liked to smoke there and I thought he was cool because he smoked for real. You know, not like a kid pretending to smoke. He smoked like he knew what he was doing, like a grown up. Remembering it now it seems absurd, but I was so impressed with him at first, even though he was a year younger than me. He never said much, which was so different from all the boys at my school. He had these intense dark eyes. And he was cute. He called me Katie Kat. We met up every day for a week and a half and I called him my boyfriend, in my head anyway. A week and a half. That’s all it took.

  “I didn’t tell Emily about him, which I was really glad about later. It was the first thing I’d ever kept from her.” My mind reeled as I said this, because I’d lied to her so constantly every day since. “I didn’t know it until…after, but Brandon never told anyone, either. If what happened next hadn’t happened, Brandon Tomko would probably be erased from my memory by now. There wasn’t much to our relationship, really. We never even kissed. But what happened did happen, so Brandon and those days we spent together in the woods are now and forever a major event in my life that I can’t ever escape.”

  My voice quavered and I felt Lucas’s hand cover mine. His thumb smoothed the skin on the back of my hand and I knew that I’d been wrong. Whatever might happen in the next little while, I hadn’t lost him yet. He was still here with me. It gave me the strength to go on.

  “Tommy Wesley was five and Ricky Wesley was nine. I was their babysitter. It was my first babysitting job. I’d watch them two or three times a week after school while their mother was taking a class. Copywriting, I think. I wasn’t a very good babysitter. Mostly I’d just let them watch TV for three hours straight, which was completely against the rules. Tommy would sometimes talk me into playing trains with him. He adored trains. If he hooked up all the toy trains he had—which he did once—it made one gigantic train that stretched all the way from the kitchen to his bedroom door. He was a cute kid, very cuddly. He still had that baby sweetness. It was Ricky that was the problem.”