Shooter

by Caroline Pignat

  HOGAN

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  All kinds of people said that. The cops. Coach. The team. But it wasn’t true. Because the people that mattered most—they didn’t believe it. Not my mom. Not my dad. Not Randy. Not me.

  Mom tried to comfort me. But how could she? How could she be kind to the kid who caused her so much pain? I heard her crying. Missing him. How could I let her hug me and pretend like things were okay? Like she didn’t wish it was Randy in her arms—and not me.

  Dad worked more at the office. Avoided his grief, and the cause of it, altogether.

  And I…well, I don’t know what I did really. These past thirty-one months, the 939 days since my brother died, they’re all just one long blur.

  I quit the team. Quit talking to Izzy. And, after a while, she quit calling. It was better that way. People were so uncomfortable around me. I felt their stares, heard them whisper as I walked past. I was famous now, finally famous. But for all the wrong reasons. Even the teachers seemed to tense just a little when I happened to come to class.

  Why bother?

  “It is what it is,” Coach said one time when we straddled our bikes at the top of the Gatineau Hills, waiting for the rest of the class to catch up. “It’s a damned tragedy. But punishing yourself for the rest of your life, well, Hogan,” he looked off into the sky, “that’d be a tragedy too.”

  He never said anything more after that. Which was just as well. That one sentence gave me a lot to think about as I rode back home.

  “When it came to his big little brother, Hulk Hogan—Randy loved to brag,” Izzy says, trying so hard to convince me of something that isn’t true. More than anything, I wish it were. But how could he be proud of the brother that put him in his grave?

  I clench my jaw.

  “Oh!” Xander says, like he’s just put two and two together. “Hulk Hogan, the wrestler. I get it. Your name is Hogan. Yes, that makes sense now. All this time, I thought you were named after the Incredible Hulk.”

  We look at him.

  “You know, Dr. Banner and the gamma rays?” Xander says, like we all speak geek. “It’s a Marvel—”

  “I know who he is,” I snap.

  “Of course you do. He’s famous now.” Xander rummages in his bag and pulls out the Marvel Encyclopedia. Flips to Incredible Hulk’s page, even though I bet he’s got the whole thing memorized. “He appeared in 1962, but for the first five issues the Incredible Hulk was not an immediate success. Probably because he is not typical hero material.” He looks at me. “You know, you might be more like him than you think.”

  “Great,” I say. “Thanks.”

  Xander continues, like anyone cares. “And—”

  “This isn’t the time for trivia,” Alice interrupts. This from the queen of fun facts.

  “But don’t you get it?” he continues.

  “What?” I ask, sure I’ll be sorry I did.

  “For years, he was just the sidekick in a bunch of other heroes’ stories.” Xander flips the page and holds up a two-page spread of the Hulk: torn purple shorts, bulging green arms, boulder-sized fists clenched overhead. A typical teeth-gnashing pose. “And…” Xander continues excitedly, like he’s saving the best for last, “he’s the symbol of subconscious rage.”

  Everyone looks at me like I’m going to explode.

  I stare back. What’s their problem? Why are they looking at me like that?

  “What?” I say, defensively.

  No one speaks.

  Finally, Alice clears her throat. “Um…you do give off a bit of a…hostile vibe.”

  “Hostile vibe?” Izzy snorts. “That’s one way to put it. Seriously? You’ve been an angry ass since Randy died.” She pauses. “No offense.”

  That I can agree with. That I know to be true. I have felt nothing but anger or numbness since Randy died. Anger at him for pushing me. Anger at myself for taking the bait. Anger at my parents for loving him more. At him, for always being better. And especially, anger that he wasn’t better that day in the change room, in our last match. Even when I win, with Randy, I always lose.

  Oh yeah, Hulkster! When you gonna learn? You can never win against me.

  “You’re right—” The words snag in my throat and I say it louder. “You’re all right. Even Xander…I’ve always felt like I played second best to my brother. Even after he died.” I pause. “Probably more now.”

  No one says anything. In the corner, Noah hums.

  Xander closes his book and puts it back in his bag. He seems proud of himself for sharing—even though he seems to have no idea what just happened here.

  “But the Hulk did eventually get his own successful strip in 1968,” he says, and smiles that weird smile. “And today, he’s one of Marvel’s key characters.”

  “Which goes to prove,” Alice adds, directing her statement to Izzy, “that even a hero can play the role of supporting cast.”

  “Or,” Izzy points out, pulling out her phone as it buzzes, “even a supporting character can become a hero herself.”

  Funny how people can see the exact same thing in so many different ways.

  ISABELLE

  BRI: I know you’re not talking to me.

  IZZY: I’m not.

  BRI: I just thought you’d want to know they’ve identified the shooter.

  IZZY: Fine. Just tell me.

  BRI: Maxwell Steinberg.

  IZZY: Who?

  BRI: Exactly. I’ve never heard of the guy. But he goes to St. F.X.

  IZZY: What grade?

  BRI: Dunno. But they say he’s the one who shot out the atrium displays and set off explosives in the stairwells.

  IZZY: Where is he now. What’s his plan?

  BRI: That’s the big question, isn’t it?

  IZZY: No, Bri.

  I have MUCH bigger questions than that.

  ALICE

  “Maxwell Steinberg.” Isabelle looks up from her phone. “Anybody know him?”

  Hogan and I shake our heads.

  She glances at Xander’s backpack by his leg. “Got a yearbook in there?”

  He hesitates for a second, like he doesn’t want her to see it, then he reaches in his bag and hands the book to her. It’s navy, with the school’s logo embossed in green on its cover, just like every other yearbook. Only on this one, the big X has been colored red and a red circle drawn around it.

  Isabelle looks at it in disgust, clearly annoyed that someone had defaced her cover design. “Well, that’s original.” She flips open the cover revealing a blank page—just like mine. I guess he hasn’t asked for signatures either. Because who’s going to sign it? And what would they write, anyway?

  Have a good summer, whatsyourname. It was nice NOT knowing you.

  She skips over the grade 12 pages. “He’s not grade 12, I know that. I had to edit all the grad write-ups.” She glares at Xander, like it’s his fault. “I know his name’s not there.”

  “Not all grade 12s got grad pictures or did write-ups,” Hogan says, defensively.

  “Well, duh. But there’s only five leftovers.” Isabelle keeps flipping, oblivious to the way her casual dismissal of Hogan makes him grit his teeth. “Doddson, French, Garamond, you, and Styles. Steinberg’s not a grade 12.”

  She stops at the grade 11 portrait pages and runs her finger down the Ss. “Stanley…Steele…Steepleson…Steinberg. Here. That’s him.”

  We lean in over the page and examine the two-by-three black-and-white of some random kid. He’s wearing a superhero T-shirt. Short brown hair. A few pimples. An awkward smile.

  “Recognize him?” she asks.

  I shake my head. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him before. He’s familiar in his averageness. He could be anybody—he looks like everybody. Which, ironically, makes him a nobody.

  “If he was on a team or a club or anything noteworthy in the yearbook, I’d probably know about him,” Isabelle says.

  “Noteworthy or not,” I add, “if this guy goes to our school and is
under the radar, only someone really watching would notice him.”

  Xander isn’t looking at the picture. But if anyone saw this guy, it would be him.

  “Xander,” I ask, “have you ever taken photographs of this guy?”

  Isabelle turns the page towards him. He looks at it, blinks a few times, and then pulls a Nike shoebox from his backpack. The cardboard is worn and frayed at the edges. The end label reads: “Cross-Trainers: Size 5 Boys.” He sets it on his lap and lifts the orange lid. Inside are photos—hundreds of four-by-six black-and-whites. He dumps the box on the tile floor and spreads them around, searching through their glossy rectangles for the one he has in mind.

  I pick up a picture.

  In it, a teacher, back to us, looms over a student sitting at a desk. The kid, facing the camera, is cringing, clearly on the hook for something.

  Xander glances at it as he rummages. “Shame—that’s shame. It’s kind of like guilt.” He picks up another and hands it to me.

  In the second shot, taken through the back door windows, a wide-eyed kid stands, mouth agape. You don’t have to see the smashed glass or the slingshot in his hand to know what he’s done.

  “Sometimes they’re hard to tell apart,” he says. “Like…uh…this one.” He hands me another.

  This one shows the chairs outside the VP’s closed door where two kids sit, their clothes ripped, lips bloodied. One holds a baggie of ice to his forehead.

  “This face is shame—sad, sorry, regretful,” Xander says, pointing to the guy with the ice. “He obviously did something, probably started the fight. And he’s been given his punishment. But this guy.” He points at the other one, staring at the door. “See the way he’s worried? But still angry, like, how his chin juts out? That’s guilt. He knows what he did was wrong, but he doesn’t know what is going to happen yet. I bet there’s a third guy in there ratting him out.”

  The puddle of pictures spreads as he rummages. Each one a crucial moment captured—a whole story, really, contained in four by six inches.

  A close up of Mr. Jinder picking his nose as he marks assignments at his desk.

  Some girl cheating off her neighbor’s test.

  Some freckle-faced guy jeering and pointing.

  Mrs. Tripp lighting up a cigarette in her car.

  A scrawny basketball player slumped alone on the bench, chin in hands, elbows on knees, his teammates a blur of legs running by on the court in front of him.

  Mrs. Tucker, the librarian, yelling at kids in front of her “Quiet Please” sign.

  They are not flattering—but they are real. Almost beautiful in a strange way. Like some modern-day Norman Rockwell painting of dirty-kneed rule-breakers. Meaningful, candid moments of real life. Every image affects me in some way. Stirs me. Each one…emotionally charged. That’s it. Ms. Carter always encourages us to write in an “emotionally charged” way, to capture a moment of something really good or really bad, but full of raw feeling. Isabelle’s yearbook has pictures of those typical high school highs, but Xander and his camera—he has somehow captured the lows.

  “Did you…” I pick up a stack and shuffle through them, “did you take all of these?”

  A hairline X appears in the bottom right corner of every one. A criss-cross crack. His signature, or a broken lens, perhaps.

  “Most are for my Yearbook assignment.” He glances at Isabelle. “I thought if I took a lot, I’d have a better chance of getting what she wanted.”

  Isabelle holds up a photo of a grade 7 vomiting all over his lunchbox as the kids around him recoil at the splatter. “Seriously. Like, who wants to keep that memory?” Disgusted, she tosses it back in the pile. “Don’t you get it? No one wants to see this—much less remember it.”

  “But it happened,” he argues. “It’s true.”

  She sighs. “Why can’t you do more pictures like this one?” She holds up a shot of a girl sitting alone on a swing. She looks sad, to be honest, but it might pass for daydreaming. “Or the good stuff?”

  “Why do people only want to remember the good things?” he asks. “That’s only half the story. And Mrs. O’Neill said telling half a story is like lying. You need to tell the whole truth.”

  Xander picks up another photo and considers it. “Why don’t people want to see pain or sadness? It’s real.” He flips the photo around to show us Hogan, sullen and smoking on the school steps. “Right, Hogan?”

  HOGAN

  It’s me, all right. Smoking on the school steps, alone in a blur of kids coming and going. I’m the only thing in focus. Which is kinda cool. Cigarette in hand, smoke seeping through my lips, clouding my face—but you can still tell it’s me. I look pretty badass.

  Xander looks at it. “My grandfather told me, ‘This guy is a rebel. He’s pushing people away, but what he really wants is for someone to care.’ ”

  I snatch it from Xander’s hand to rip it up. But something catches my eye and I bring it closer for a better look.

  The jean jacket.

  “If you really wanted to be alone,” Xander goes, “why are you sitting on the steps?”

  “Yeah,” Izzy adds. “Why’d you even come? It wasn’t for school.”

  I remember now—the day I wore his jacket. October 16.

  I clench my jaw. Take a deep breath. “It was Randy’s anniversary.”

  No one says anything.

  “My parents went to the cemetery…” I swallow, “but I couldn’t.”

  I still haven’t. Haven’t even cried. Not once. What kind of stone-cold bastard doesn’t cry over his own brother?

  I keep my eyes on the picture. “So, I came to school. I sat on the steps all morning. Never went to a class. Never even spoke to anyone. But I had nowhere else to go.”

  I feel him then, Randy, the weight of him on my chest, his hands locked around my throat like when we were kids.

  Give up, Hulkster? You can’t win.

  It happens whenever I think of him. I stop, take a couple more breaths, and it goes away. But he’ll be back. He always is.

  “I wore his jean jacket. I’d lost mine and it was cold that day.” I remember taking it from the closet, the smell of him still on it. The ghost of him in it. Mom had finally given away all his stuff, but she’d forgotten about his jacket. And when I slipped it on, it was like he was there behind me, arms around me just ready to tackle me to the ground.

  “What are you looking at in the photo?” Alice asks, leaning in. “What’s in your hand?”

  It’s a small square between my fingers, but I know exactly what it is. “My football card. I was looking for my smokes and I found it in his pocket.” I shake my head and toss the picture back on the pile. “Yeah—like he was pointing the finger from the grave.”

  “Or maybe,” Alice says, so quiet I can barely hear her, “like Isabelle said, maybe he was just a proud brother.”

  “Is that…?” Izzy snatches a picture from the pile on the floor and glares at Xander. “You said you destroyed that picture.”

  “I did,” Xander goes. “This one is a different shot.”

  “Wilson meant all of them.” She frowns as she looks at it. “You should’ve destroyed them all.”

  “But he specifically said: ‘Destroy this picture and its negative.’ ” Xander seems confused. “That is not that picture.”

  I sneak a look at the photo in her hand: a close-up of a girl sitting at a table, face hidden behind the curtain of hair, X-acto knife in her fingers. Sunlight catches on the tiny triangle blade waiting over her smooth inner arm.

  It’s beautiful. And terrible. All at the same time. Dramatic. Just like Izzy.

  “We can’t see your face,” I say, trying to help. “It could be anyone.”

  She rips it in tiny pieces and throws them in the trash. “Yeah. But it IS me.”

  “It’s you, then,” Alice goes. “It’s just one moment.”

  “Yes. YES!” Xander looks at her. His eyes light up. “One moment. You see that, you get it, right, Alice?”
>
  Alice blushes.

  “Easy for you to say, Alice,” Izzy says. “It’s not your moment that’s exposed. It’s like…I’m naked.”

  Normally, I would have made some smartass comment about seeing her naked, but not now. I know what she means. I felt like that when everyone was staring at my picture. Like they were seeing that hidden part that no one should. A part of me that even I had never seen before.

  I look at the photos sprawled all over the floor. The hundreds of naked moments Xander saw but everyone else missed. He’s weird, but somehow he seems different to me. Like, I’m seeing him more clearly, too.

  “How do you do that?” I ask. “Time it just right, I mean, to catch that moment.”

  He looks at me like I’ve said something ridiculous. “I dunno.”

  “Is it something you learned in Photography class?” Alice asks.

  Xander shrugs. “I just watch.” He picks up his camera and looks through it. Lowers it and adjusts the lens. “They happen all the time. Most people are so caught up in their moment they don’t see all the ones happening around them, I guess.”

  It makes sense. I’ve been so busy with my Randy stuff, I had no idea Izzy was so stressed, that she was cutting. Hell, I didn’t even know she’s adopted.

  “You’re creeping them.” Izzy waves her hand at the pile of pictures. “Invading privacy.”

  Xander shakes his head. “I only see what’s there for everyone to see. The Yearbook classroom door was open. Hogan was sitting on the school steps.” Xander lists the facts like it’s so obvious to him. “If you do something out in the open, why are you upset when people see it? Like Facebook. Or Instagram. You put up pictures of yourself on vacation in your red-and-white-striped bikini. So, why am I a creep for looking at them?”

  Izzy crosses her arms over her chest. Rolls her eyes. Her typical answer when she hasn’t got one.

  He has a point, though. She always puts up selfies. Pictures of her pouting and posing in different outfits, or lying on her bed, or trying new hairstyles or makeup. As though her hotness depends on getting enough likes.