Make Something Up

by Chuck Palahniuk

  Troublemaker got up from the floor and made a big show of slapping the dust from her pajamas. She went to the door. “I’ll be back in less than an hour.” She punched four numbers into the keypad. Four notes sounded, and the door unlocked. “The code was written on her gallbladder.”

  Kevin realized that all the codes for all the doors were recorded inside Suede’s guts. Her insides served as the collective memory of every boy who’d passed through her. Kevin warned Troublemaker, “You’ll never make it out that way. You’ll never make it past the front doors.” But Troublemaker was gone.

  —

  Troublemaker wasn’t back in an hour. Two hours passed. It was almost sunrise.

  Whale Jr. grumbled, “We should untie the rope. You guys are going to wreck my parade.”

  None of them had so much as gotten out their belts. For a while the Rock Hudsons had signaled from the dark, but even those flashes had tapered off. The sun would be up in half an hour. Brainerd voted that they untie the rope and toss it out. It was Kevin and Tomas in favor of keeping the lifeline. Everyone else, against. They heard a noise in the stairwell.

  In another moment four musical notes sounded from the keypad in the hallway. The door creaked open, and there stood Troublemaker. She stooped, something flung over her shoulder. Panting with the effort, she walked into the room. Her burden was wrapped in a dingy plastic sheet. Nobody asked what it was. They could tell from the smell.

  Something slipped out of the sheet and flopped onto the floor. It sparkled in the dim light. Everyone studiously ignored it until Troublemaker thrust her chin toward it. “Would one of you pervs pick that up?”

  Kevin pulled the sleeve of his pajamas down so that it covered his hand like a mitt. He reached to get whatever had fallen. It was the charm bracelet. His pajamas didn’t have any pockets so he knelt and fastened the chain around Troublemaker’s ankle.

  —

  It wasn’t lost on Kevin that something was happening, an event that he’d never need to exaggerate. He’d only have to tell the story and people would be impressed. He only needed to not die and he’d have a life worth more than $20,000.

  Troublemaker decided to go last. Since she’d carry Suede she’d weigh double. Nobody wanted to go first so Kevin volunteered. He’d take the laser pointer and flash a code if he arrived safe and the coast was clear. He climbed the beds and chair and looped a belt around the rope. The window being open so long, the room was unbelievably cold, but his pajamas were soaked with nervous sweat. He looped his head and shoulders through, but couldn’t bear to step off. He kept half remembering some book where kids thought happy junk and flew out a bedroom window. Some fairy-tale bullshit. In London.

  At times like this Kevin felt as if he’d lived only through books or television. His best memories were a mash-up of different stories and movies. He was sixteen years old, and he’d wasted his entire life.

  At the rate of one thousand dollars a week, every minute counted.

  In the next moment the room was blazing with lights, and the building was shrieking with bells. Whale Jr. was standing next to the fire alarm. His hand wrapped around the handle, he was shouting against the bells, “I warned you guys!”

  —

  Kevin must’ve flinched. The chair under his feet shifted and toppled over. Before Kevin could untangle himself from his belt he was already sliding toward the window. Before he was free, he was outside, dangling in the dark, like live bait over invisible attack dogs. The alarm had woken them, and Kevin could hear their barking, their teeth snapping below him. Mindful of the electric fence, he lifted his feet and pulled his knees to his chest. He was sliding through darkness, soaking wet, suspended halfway between where he wanted to escape and a new future he couldn’t begin to imagine. Behind him were the bright lights and the blaring noise, before him were the faceless shapes of silent people waiting to arrest his fall. A long howl escaped his lips, and the Stalag 13 dogs howled along with him.

  Of course they got caught. Only Suede escaped, and that was only because Kevin, Tomas, and Jasper had carried her away. Pig the Pirate and Brainerd dug the hole, and they’d all buried her. So far none of them had confessed the exact location. The Commander had brought in search dogs, but they’d only wandered around tracking circles in the snow. Kevin and his fellow pervs had lugged the body in confusion, crashing through acres of cornfields, crossing and backtracking their own footprints for miles in panic. Wherever Suede’s grave was, no one would ever find it.

  Troublemaker was another story.

  She’d come out the window, last, leaving behind only Whale Jr. Just as they suspected, her weight had made the line sag dangerously. She had hardly cleared the dogs. She could’ve dropped Suede to save herself, but she didn’t.

  They were all waiting to catch her. Nobody could see anything until a bright flash lit up the night. A supernova of blue sparks like a giant bug zapper. Troublemaker had almost cleared the electric fence. The blast of fireworks exploded as the charm bracelet around her ankle brushed the top wire. Kevin smelled smoke, and when they caught Troublemaker her fingers wouldn’t let loose of the looped belt. Her pajamas were smoking, her pajamas and her hair, and they had to beat out the little flames with their bare hands. Kevin could see uniformed figures running around behind the windows of the sixth floor.

  Suede’s wig was scorched from the electric shock. Between her frizzed hair and her stitches she looked like the bride of some mad scientist’s homemade monster. Troublemaker wasn’t dead, but she wasn’t waking up, either. Her eyes were half closed, the pupils weren’t the same size. She looked like the monster.

  The Rock Hudsons promised to keep the gates blockaded. For the first time they would keep people inside rather than out. This would give the boys a head start. Kevin grabbed Suede around the waist. They all grabbed her. They were freezing cold, but now her skin was warm, warmer than alive. It felt good to hold her. And they took off running barefoot through the rows and rows of dead cornstalks.

  —

  Troublemaker never uttered another word. Days, they propped her among themselves. In the television lounge or the cafeteria, she was always the center of their group. And they told the story about how she’d memorized the security codes written on a dead girl’s organs. They regaled each other with accounts of how Troublemaker leaned out above six stories of certain death and caught the yellow balloon. Pig the Pirate recounted how Troublemaker had looked, leaping from that window with a damsel flung over her shoulder. In that way, they spoke her into a legend. They took her out to sit on the basketball court, sunny days. They included her in everything.

  They didn’t include Whale Jr. Nobody spoke another word to Whale Jr. One day after basketball they came back to the sixth floor to find that he’d piled two beds together and balanced a chair atop them. He’d looped a belt around the pipe where Troublemaker had tied the rope. Whale Jr. had put his neck through the belt and stepped off the chair. He hadn’t gone anywhere. Leastwise his body hadn’t. His body got the homecoming parade he’d always craved, a long, slow, stately drive down Main Street, but nobody cheered and he wasn’t riding in a convertible.

  Troublemaker was still with them, but she was no longer Troublemaker. She stared into space, trembling, like she’d sat in an electric chair that had only executed her courage. To preserve her secret, Kevin had to take her to the bathroom. Kevin had to feed her. If the staff of the Fag Farm had discovered her secret identity, they didn’t let on. Maybe someone was still paying the bills for her. Maybe they were afraid of an investigation.

  The sixth-floor inmates made halfhearted plans for another breakout. Jasper carved a bar of soap into a pistol and painted it black with shoe polish. Kidney Bean sat by the window at night, on the lookout for another balloon. In truth, none of them longed to reenter the outside world.

  Kevin didn’t see the point, not anymore. Who wanted to return to a world that was so corrupt? Who wanted to be celebrated by such despicable people? He might go back as a hero, but
who wanted to be king in a world of assholes? None of the boys wanted to serve as living proof that this bogus system worked. If they went back, now, their natural desire for girls would vindicate people they’d grown to despise. The Commander would be a hero. Confined here, they had the comfort of knowing they’d be a drain. Their families and their communities would be crippled by the cost of warehousing them. Theirs would be a generation on strike.

  Kevin sensed that, for the rest of his life, he would be rushing and striving. For now he could relax. It was okay to be trapped here. He didn’t need to be in a Porsche driving two hundred miles an hour. It felt great just to sit still. These days Troublemaker didn’t seem any more alive than Suede had been, and Kevin resolved to protect her.

  He dressed Troublemaker and walked her to the classrooms. In trying to teach Troublemaker physics, Kevin learned it himself. Seldom did Kevin look at the calendar, he was so content. He didn’t wish time away, nor did he long to be someplace else. His life was no longer a race into the future.

  Something told Kevin that this was good practice. This was how it would feel to be a dad. Thus his idea of happily-ever-after evolved, slowly. For the time being, the irony wasn’t lost on him. His parents had sent him here to save his soul. As a prisoner he’d found it. His life, such as it was, was good enough. He didn’t need to distort himself into a cartoon freak.

  Hovering here above the endless cornfields, this prison had come to feel like a cloister. Heavenly, almost.

  —

  The same as most afternoons, Kevin sat Troublemaker on the toilet and waited. It was better to be on the safe side after a big lunch. The lavatory was so quiet he could hear the drumming of the basketball on the concrete, outside. Awkward, he stood to one side of the cramped stall, crowded by Troublemaker’s hairy knees. Perverse as it sounded the smell of piss had come to fill Kevin’s heart with joy. It would mean Troublemaker was doing her business, and the two of them could go.

  No one was in earshot as Kevin Clayton made his confession in one-sided dialogues. “The only answer I know is running away.” He patted Troublemaker’s hair flat where the high voltage had turned it spiky. A black fly landed on his friend’s cheek, and Kevin waved it away. “I escaped from my family,” he continued. “I could’ve escaped this place and kept going.” He listened for the sound of Troublemaker making water. “Time will rescue us.” Troublemaker farted. That was a promising sign. “Time rescues everybody.”

  Absently, Kevin inspected a snag on the front of the black T-shirt. He poked a finger through to measure the size of the hole. “We’ll have to get this mended.”

  Seated on the toilet, Troublemaker’s shoulders were still heaped with muscle, her anatomy piling up around her thick neck. The “Suede” tattoo. Her arms still strained the sleeves of her black T-shirt, but Kevin babied her. “No offense,” Kevin offered, “but the problem with homosexuals is they never grow up.” In Kevin’s opinion, homos never earned the dignity that ultimately won people’s respect. Fags never brought the cattle rustlers to justice or slew the dragon with a gleaming sword.

  He sighed. He tore off a few squares of toilet paper. Kevin pressed one hand on the back of Troublemaker’s bulky shoulder and leaned her forward. Using the paper, Kevin reached down in back of her. When he checked the paper it was spotted with yellow. He dropped the first handful and tore off another wad of paper. This time when he wiped there was piss but something more. The paper gleamed, not white, but iridescent. Kevin knew Vaseline when he saw it. And there was more. Kevin wiped again and the paper collected a cloudy gunk. It was the same murky, viscous spunk they’d found inside Suede.

  Whether it was the Commander’s work or it came from the floor guard, someone else had discovered that Troublemaker wasn’t a boy.

  —

  That spring, in her latest letter his mom complained that her garden was being destroyed. She was haunted by the ghosts of gerbils she knew Kevin had murdered. Kevin had brought this curse down upon their house. Ghost gerbils appeared at night, she claimed, and ate the strawberries. They decimated the early lettuce. It was a plague of vengeful gerbil spirits that had returned to starve them. The words she wrote, they trembled on the cusp of a truth she could never accept. She clung to the reality she knew: The gerbils were dead, her son was a pervert, the Commander would fix everything.

  Rumors filtered from the floor guards that an investigation was pending. A possible lawsuit was in the works. Still, nothing actually got rolling.

  Kevin pictured his mom weeping over her swollen, bloody feet. Despite the gossip about investigations, Kevin didn’t expect one. Everybody was too invested in this awful system.

  Before anything could happen the Commander announced that they would recommence their studies. Betsey was gone. He wasn’t happy about that. But the bereft parents of a new girl had donated her physical vessel. She’d been killed in a car accident.

  —

  It took some time, but every detail would eventually come out in court—their predawn zip down a tightrope in the pitch dark, the way snow had started to fall as they dug Suede’s grave with their bare hands. Much later, when the TV cameras would ask him about what happened, Kevin would say that those few weeks had been the happiest of his life. With one hand on the Bible, Kevin would say the impossible. To a judge and jury, he’d say that the nature of happiness is that we only recognize it after the fact. No one would believe him.

  Seated beside him would be Troublemaker. Her hair grown out to girl hair. Her eyes vacant. Her belly two trimesters big.

  The defense attorney would ask if Kevin had been afraid for his own safety. To that Kevin would answer, No. His worst fear was that true love only existed in retrospect.

  In the future, when the prosecuting attorney asked who’d killed the Commander, Kevin would swear under oath, “I did.”

  When the defense attorney would call Kidney Bean to the witness stand and ask who’d murdered the Commander, Kidney Bean wouldn’t hesitate. He’d say, “I did.”

  The medical examiner would testify that the Commander died from a single deep stab wound to the throat. It was impossible to determine who had administered it. When the guard had arrived at the Therapy Room to collect the boys, he’d found them all splashed with the victim’s blood. Dead on the concrete floor was Mr. Peanut in a puddle of gore.

  What none of them would say is what drove them. In a world where Troublemaker was hated, Kevin wanted to be hated, too. If the world despised Troublemaker, Kidney Bean only wanted to be despicable. Until the world welcomed Troublemaker, none of them—not Tomas or Jasper, Pig the Pirate or Brainerd—wanted to be accepted. Under oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, one by one, each would say that he’d killed the Commander. As juveniles they’d still go to jail, everyone except for Troublemaker.

  —

  What none of them said is what really happened. Pig the Pirate would always say that he had the knife. Brainerd would insist that he, himself, had it. And so on, dot-dotting-dash-dippity-spot-spot. One Porsche. Two Porsches. And so forth.

  On their last day at the Healing Center an ambulance had arrived at the gates but without any flashing lights or siren. Seeing it, the protesters had stepped aside. The babies the Rock Hudsons cradled, like magic even they’d fallen silent. The new girl was here.

  That afternoon, the Commander sent a guard to escort the boys downstairs. Kevin walked alongside Troublemaker, holding her hand to lead her in the right direction. The charm bracelet still rattled around her ankle. The high voltage had fused the clasp. In the concrete hallways, the bracelet sounded terrible. The chain and the little medals clanked like leg irons in a prison movie. Troublemaker was a living, breathing legend, but that’s all she was doing.

  When they got to the Therapy Room and Kevin saw the shape shrouded by the grimy plastic sheet, his heart filled with dread. It had huge tits. Bigger than any high schooler he’d ever seen except for one. The new girl’s belly was a mountain swelling up underneath
the sheet. In St. Cloud, Kevin pictured two orphaned Porsches, fresh off the assembly line with no one to take them home. As before, he felt ghosts pulling his hair. He dropped Troublemaker’s hand and crossed his fingers.

  The Commander held a scalpel. “Our new girl was a reckless driver. She was promiscuous and sunk her beloved family deeply into debt…”

  Before the Commander lifted the plastic sheet, Kevin knew this story would have no happy ending. The dead thing stretched across the table would have skin coarse and yellowed like the calluses on his palms. There would be no more babies with skin the same flawless pink as the skin under his fingernails. No one was pining for him to come home. It took no real effort to accept this traffic accident. It seemed so horrible but so perfect, and there was a perfect shape to fate. It was as inevitable as the shape of an egg. He couldn’t deny it or argue it away. It had the perfection of truth.

  “Gentlemen,” announced the Commander. “Today will be your final exam.”

  The Commander cast aside the plastic sheet, and there was Mindy Evelyn Taylor-Jackson. Unlike Suede, she was unmarked. No one had explored her with knives.

  She wore a regular, plaid dress Kevin remembered. She’d worn it on their third date, but it hadn’t fit this tight. That night Kevin had lost his cherry. Now the Commander called him by name and bid him step forward and undo the buttons, and by reflex he did. They felt the same as the buttons he’d opened the time before. Mindy lay still, holding her breath. They’d both been too afraid to breathe.

  The Commander offered him the scalpel and said, “Would you expose the inferior hypogastric plexus.”

  Kevin shook his head. He wouldn’t accept the knife.

  The Commander pressed the scalpel on the other boys, but no one would take it. Tomas, Pig the Pirate, Brainerd, and Jasper, they only needed to see Kevin’s face to know something was wrong. They held back, wallflowers. A reluctant stag line.