Random

by Tom Leveen

  And for some crazy-ass reason, I say, “So did I save your life or not?”

  Andy finally turns his head to look at me. When he does, there’s no study in it, no analysis. He looks at me like he’s known me for years and isn’t surprised by how I look, what I’m wearing . . . anything.

  “Well,” he says, “that’s the big question, isn’t it?”

  Licking my lips, I point to the hood. “Can I join you?”

  “I’d be offended if you didn’t. I mean, after all we’ve been through together.” He pats the hood.

  I climb on. I sit with my knees up, like his, and wrap my arms around them, connecting them by grabbing my right wrist with my left hand.

  “I thought you’d have long black hair,” I say after a moment.

  “Do I disappoint?”

  “No,” I say. “Not at all. What color are your eyes?”

  He turns to me, raising what looks to me like a flirtatious eyebrow. “What do you think?”

  “Blue,” I say. Except they’re not just blue; they’re practically white. Like a husky’s.

  “Close enough,” Andy says. “You handled the cop pretty well back there, by the way.”

  “Me?” I say, and almost manage to laugh. “You were freaking brilliant.”

  “Really.”

  I squint one eye at him. “Can I tell you something you may not know about yourself? You have a habit of phrasing things as statements that most people would phrase as questions.”

  “Do I.”

  This time I laugh. And Andy smiles.

  “So. Victoria,” Andy says. “Let’s talk, shall we?”

  My stomach grumbles. I ask him, “I don’t suppose you have anything to eat by chance?”

  “Backseat,” he says. “Ice chest. Have at it.”

  “Thanks.”

  I slide off the hood and go to the rear passenger door, which is unlocked. Inside is a basic blue ice chest. I notice a laptop resting on the passenger seat too, and wonder if he composed a suicide note on it. The thought chills me, and I focus on the ice chest. I open it up and find an assortment of food and drinks inside. Cokes, water bottles, apples, crackers, cookies in Ziploc plastic bags, all nestled between packages of that blue ice stuff.

  It’s a lot of food for someone not planning on being around much longer, but then again, I’d want to go out on a full stomach too. These are probably some of his favorites.

  I grab a bag of oatmeal cookies and a bottle of water, and rejoin Andy on the hood. The cookies and water are unbelievably awesome. I’d been keeping on my softball diet, lots of protein and fruits, but what the hell. I didn’t know hunger could make things taste so good. I haven’t eaten since lunch yesterday.

  “Okay,” I say, after downing my first cookie practically whole. “Talk about what?”

  “How about the trial?”

  The cookie gets sticky in my throat. I have to wash it down with half a bottle of water.

  “Um . . . it’s just—”

  “Oh, what, you’re not supposed to talk about it?” Andy asks. “Please. You crossed that bridge quite a bit ago.”

  Good point.

  “All right,” I say. “What do you want to know?”

  “What’s the worst-case scenario? What could they do to you?”

  “Well, the absolute worst possible thing is that they’ll find me—us—no, wait, screw it, me. They’ll find me guilty of all the charges.”

  Andy raises that eyebrow again. “Ah, suddenly your compatriots aren’t quite as important.”

  I shrug. He might be right. Maybe I don’t care so much about them anymore after all. Even Lucas. Broad shoulders and a good-looking face aren’t much of a consolation if things go badly.

  Andy says, “And if you’re found guilty?”

  “Then it would go to sentencing, and that could be up to ten years.”

  I wait for the inevitable drop in my stomach as I say the words, but it doesn’t come. Maybe I’m getting used to the idea. Maybe I’m just too tired to care right now. I suddenly wonder if Noah has gone to sleep or not. Is he waiting up for me? Did he go home or wait at the house? Maybe he was able to find a car and he’ll come cruising past like he said. That would be great.

  “Ten years,” Andy says, and shakes his head. “That’s a long time.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what’s the best-case scenario, then?”

  “Well, in a perfect world, I wouldn’t be in this stupid mess in the first place. But since it’s too late for that, I guess the best case is to be found not guilty on all charges. Or the case gets tossed out by the judge before the jury even gets to deliberate. God, I really sound like I’m on Law & Order here.”

  “That’s okay,” Andy says. “I like Law & Order.” He puts his chin on his arms and stares out over the valley. “That’s a lot to have on your mind, huh?”

  “I guess.”

  I shove another cookie into my mouth and chew it carefully. I’m not sure how much more I want to tell Andy about this. Mostly because it makes me feel a little sick. It makes me sick the way Jack—until tonight, anyway—wouldn’t talk to me, or even look at me. How Mom isn’t quite as affectionate as she usually is. How Dad hasn’t smiled since he got the call from the school that day last month that the police had just picked me up.

  Suddenly furious again, I spit out, “I didn’t even talk to him. To Kevin. I mean, in person. At school. I barely even noticed if he posted something or not.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” Andy says, “but you barely noticed him.”

  For a second I feel betrayed, punched in the gut. That makes me mad.

  “Hang on,” I say. “That’s a bunch of crap.”

  “What, am I wrong?”

  “It’s not—yes! No. Look, lots of people feel ignored, okay? I have. You have. It’s not something unique, it’s not something Kevin Cooper got to call all his own, all right? Lots of people feel alone and don’t jump off a balcony with a scarf around their neck.”

  Andy says, “How many want to, I wonder?”

  I ignore him and keep going with my point. “I’m just saying that it’s high school, all right? Everyone gets depressed, everyone feels alone, this is not a new phenomenon. Maybe I felt that way too, until I met some new people.”

  “True, it’s not a new phenomenon, but it’s not usually fatal.”

  “Oh, Jesus . . . !”

  “What about him?”

  I shake my head. Come to think of it, what am I still doing here? Andy’s out of his car; he’s clearly not emotional. Isn’t it safe to say this is one guy who won’t be throwing himself off a cliff anytime soon?

  “If there’s some kind of karma or whatever, for whatever it is people think I did, I’m getting it, okay?” I say. “You want to talk about being alone? Swing by my house the past month, or the foreseeable future as far as I can tell. I’ll show you what alone looks like.”

  “I never said he was alone,” Andy says. “I said you didn’t notice him. Not unless you were laughing at him, anyway.”

  “I teased him sometimes,” I say. “As a friend. I’m not a bully.”

  “Well, what do you mean, whatever people think you did? Is what you did different from what the prosecutors are charging you with?”

  “I didn’t do anything! Haven’t I been over this? I made a joke on a website—”

  “More than one joke, wasn’t it?”

  “—two or three jokes on a social networking website and a guy killed himself. And that is sad. And that is tragic. And I wish it hadn’t happened. But I didn’t kill him.”

  Andy shrugs.

  “I wrote a letter,” I say, and even I can hear the whine in my voice. Why do I feel like I’m losing some kind of battle here?

  “A letter,” Andy says.

  “To his mom? You know. Apologizing? ”

  I see Andy’s jaw clenching and unclenching behind closed lips. “Well,” he says, “that was . . . nice of you. What did it say?”

 
“I dunno,” I say, and Andy snorts. “I mean, I said I was sorry, and it wasn’t . . . I don’t know, just that I was sorry.”

  “But she took you to court anyway.”

  I rub my eyes. “No. That had nothing to do with Mrs. Cooper. It had to do with this bitch Allison Summers, who’s a reporter and got a bug up her ass. Wants to make a big media case, sell more papers, win a Pulitzer or something. . . . I dunno. Mr. Halpern tried to explain it, but I kind of glazed over.”

  “Who’s Mr. Halpern?”

  “My lawyer.”

  “He any good?”

  “I guess we’ll see. He’d better be, ’cause I’m not going to U of A anymore for it.”

  “But, strictly speaking, unless they find you guilty and put you away till you’re twenty-six, you do get to go to college if you want,” Andy says.

  Twenty-six.

  Twenty. Six.

  That’s a long time away. Twenty-six.

  “And if they did put you in prison, even after you got out,” Andy goes on, “or, if I’m not mistaken, probably even while you were in there, you could still finish school. That’s something, right? That’s more than . . . some people got right now. Maybe you should be more grateful.”

  I glance over at him again. Andy’s face seems more relaxed than it did a minute ago. It’s hard to keep up with this guy.

  “So how are you?” I say pointedly, beyond ready to move on to a new topic.

  “How am I, what?”

  “How are you feeling? Are you still thinking about driving down this hill and over the edge, or what?”

  Andy rears back a little, like he’d forgotten why he was parked at the top of a hill in the first place.

  “Not really,” he says, and unless I’m mistaken, he’s actually smirking when he says it.

  “So you’re safe? I can get my brother’s car back before he wakes up? I can finally get some sleep?”

  The smirk falls off Andy’s face, and I wonder if I’ve just completely blown it.

  “Tori,” he says, “you didn’t have to come up here.”

  “No, Andy, I kind of did.”

  Andy slides off the hood and stands, putting his hands on the hood and leaning forward toward me.

  “No, Victoria, you kind of didn’t,” he says. “Nobody forced you to come up here. I’m glad you did, I really am. But a lot of people wouldn’t have. Especially not on the eve of, shall we say, so momentous a day as you’re facing. Do you get that?”

  Maybe I get it, but maybe also my eyes are so tired and dried out I feel like scratching them with my fingernails. And the oblique reference to my plea today sends tremors up my legs and down my arms.

  “Well, anyway,” Andy says. “Regardless, it was cool of you to come up here. But I understand needing to get home. It has been a long night.”

  “We should do it again sometime,” I say, joking mostly out of exhaustion, and then it snaps into my brain how many different ways that sentence could be heard. One way is, Hey, let’s me and you get together sometime.

  Andy doesn’t move. Only watches me.

  “It’s just that except for Noah, no one else is really talking to me,” I say, for clarification. Andy is definitely not my type. “Not even the people I thought were my friends.”

  “Your co-conspirators?” Andy asks, but not in a mean way.

  “No, the team. My girls. I thought we . . . I mean, that I could count on them, and . . . it would just be nice to be able to talk to someone or see someone who doesn’t hate my guts.”

  I think I see something shift in Andy’s eyes, but it’s hard to tell with the rising sun lighting right into my face.

  “Tell you what,” he says. “Call me sometime. You’ll get your answer.”

  Cryptic, but who cares. It’s something.

  “Thanks,” I say, not even sure anymore if I mean it.

  “Don’t thank me yet.”

  Clearly enjoying that little send-off, Andy moves to the door, so I slide off the hood and walk around to that side as well, toward my car. Sorry, Jack’s car.

  “Are you going to be okay?” I say.

  Andy turns back to face me. “Actually, yes,” he says. “Thank you for asking. Seriously.”

  “No problem.”

  “No problem,” Andy mutters back, so quiet I can barely hear him. Not sure why he’s repeating it. He starts to duck into the car, but I stop him again because there’s just one tiny detail I need to know before heading home and putting this whole weird-ass night behind me.

  “Andy.”

  “Hmm?”

  “When you first called me tonight. Who were you trying to call?”

  “I told you. It was random.”

  “You just punched in seven numbers and hoped someone would answer?”

  “Sure.”

  “No offense . . . but that’s bullshit.”

  Andy grins.

  “Okay, maybe not random, exactly,” he says. “More of a misdial.”

  “So who were you trying to call?”

  Andy’s grin blossoms into a smile. He opens the driver’s door, gets in, shuts the door behind him. Starts the engine. Rolls down the window.

  “Suicide hotline,” he says. “I must’ve hit eight instead of nine at the end.”

  “You mean my number, my cell phone, is one digit away from a suicide hotline number?”

  “I know,” Andy says. “Crazy, isn’t it?”

  He guns the motor.

  “Take it easy, Vic,” he says, and, after checking for traffic, pulls onto the 57 and drives on down the hill.

  Ugh. Vic. Even under these bizarre circumstances, I hate being called Vic. Must be why Jack does it so much.

  There isn’t any traffic yet at this time of day, and I watch the little white car until it hits the first switchback. Waiting, I guess, to make sure he’s really going to stay on the road and not, you know, drive off it.

  I get into the car and start it up. Then, again maybe just because I’m that wiped out, I decide to call Andy back. Right now. Now that he’s on the road, and safe, I’m going to call and tell him he can squarely go screw himself for dragging me through all this tonight.

  I dial Andy’s number with the last gasps of battery life on my phone. He doesn’t answer, though. It’s way too easy to imagine him checking the screen, seeing it’s me, and laughing, tossing the phone onto the seat beside him.

  I’m about to hang up when the voice mail kicks in.

  And when it does, my stomach lurches sideways, wrapping around my spine in something like terror. Like an icy hand gripped my intestines and spun them on a merry-go-round.

  I listen to the entire outgoing voice mail message, which must last only five seconds at most, but which in my body feels like decades. I am old by the time it ends with a beep, older than a high school kid, older than my dad, older than sin.

  I do not leave a message. I barely have the strength to tap the end-call button.

  Andy lied.

  About how much, I don’t know. Maybe all of it, maybe some of it, but he lied. And did an exquisite job of it. Maybe Andy’s not even his name.

  I throw my phone into the seat beside me, and tear off down the highway as fast as I dare, trying to catch up with the fleeing Sentra. Andy can’t be too far ahead of me; I could possibly catch up with him before he ever reaches an intersection to town.

  I play no music, speak no words aloud or in my head. Just hear the voice mail message skipping over and over from beyond death.

  It’s not an accident, not a mistake, and not a misunderstanding. It’s him.

  “Hey, this is Kevin, leave me a message. Later!”

  THE ARIZONA NEW TIMES

  Horses vs. Humans

  (continued from first op-ed page)

  “Kevin wasn’t very athletic,” his mother, Cindy Cooper, reports, struggling to keep her tears in check. “Even back when I was in school, that was always important. The popular people were good at sports, and I wasn’t. So I got teased. Everyone gets te
ased. I don’t argue that. But to launch a campaign of relentless attacks on my son because he couldn’t, what? Catch a ball? That’s absurd and, I’m sorry, sinful.”

  A relentless campaign, she said. There’s that word again.

  The genius responsible for the “faggit” comment was not alone. Other commenters left similar remarks regarding Kevin’s sexuality. The irony, if one dare call it that, is that there’s no proof Kevin was, in fact, gay.

  The question is: Does that matter? Should it? For certainly the people behind the comments—not identified here because of their ages—seemed to think he was homosexual and thus worthy of aggravated ridicule and demonization.

  “This online bullying thing, it’s out of control,” Cooper says. “The things these kids say to each other, even things adults say. It’s awful, awful stuff. Things you’d never say face-to-face. These kids who tormented Kevin, they’re cowards. They’re monsters hiding behind Wi-Fi, as if there aren’t real people on the other end of the screen. Well, there are. Maybe if they’d thought of that, Kevin would be alive today.”

  What will Kevin Cooper’s legacy be? That’s in the hands of the courts now. But rest assured, we’ll be watching.

  So will every Kevin Cooper in the state.

  ~A. S.~

  SEVENTEEN

  Of course, of course, of course . . .

  I will say this, think this, chant this until the world stops turning, if that’s what it takes to make me fully accept the enormity of my stupidity.

  So clear now. Not that it makes sense, because it doesn’t, it makes no sense whatsoever, but of course there was something not right about this whole thing, this entire scenario, from Andy’s phone call at midnight up till now.

  And I bought it. Bought the entire story.

  No, wait. I did not! Okay, there were a couple times during the conversation that I worried, that I wondered if he was really in danger. But from the very beginning, didn’t I think it was a prank?

  How much of Andy’s story is true? How much of it could possibly be true?

  And, most important . . . who the hell is he, and how’d he get Kevin’s phone?

  For one instant I wonder if I’m in some weird horror story, and that Andy is really Kevin, back from the dead, back to haunt me, back to take me to my own grave.