Confessing was, at first, like losing all the marrow from his bones. It was excruciating, but he felt suddenly weightless. Able to soar above it all. Now his heart is kicking against his ribs, and he thinks about how some birds die scared, their hearts bursting in their tufted chests even as they’re flying.
He doesn’t want to be a killer.
He doesn’t want Pinon dead.
But there’s no way to change who he is and what he’s done.
He hears his mother’s feet in the gravel driveway and then she’s in the yard, carrying the brown bag and a shovel. She walks through the grass then slips between the trees and into the woods.
TUESDAY
7:50PM
They’re finishing dinner when two police cruisers pull into the driveway. His mom gets up from the table and walks to the window.
“Randy is here,” she says. “And those two cops.” She turns and looks at Cameron. “Jeffries is going to meet us at the police station. Remember not to say anything.”
Cameron nods.
“The therapist, from Philadelphia, he’ll drive out the day after tomorrow.”
His mom believes that what happened in the boys’ locker room is the culmination of a year’s abuse. It makes sense to Cameron. His freshman year of high school made him a soldier.
“I’ll talk to him,” Cameron promises.
Robbie stands up, bounces on his feet, pushes his hands into his pockets then pulls them out again. His mom walks to him, places her hand on his arm and says, “Remember, we’re thinking positive.”
Cameron looks at his brother’s face, the fear in it making Cameron’s stomach lurch. He remembers how he wanted Robbie to be afraid of him, just a little. Now it feels as wrong as everything else. Anyway, Robbie is afraid for him, not of him, and that’s even worse.
“You worry too much,” Cameron tells Robbie.
“That’s the way I am,” he says.
“I know.”
Randy knocks on the door. Everything by the book. Cameron’s mom has to open the door, give her permission for them to ask Cameron questions. She lets them in but tells them, just as Jeffries instructed, that Cameron isn’t speaking about the crime with which he is charged.
“That’s murder,” Bad Cop says. “Just so you know, the arrest warrant says ‘for the murder of one Charles Pinon, a minor.’ ”
“That’s your opinion,” Cameron’s mom says.
Good Cop puts the handcuffs on Cameron. The metal is cold and tight. Then he turns Cameron around and Bad Cop reads him his rights, stopping after each one to ask if Cameron understands it.
Randy says, “Don’t talk, Cameron.”
“I know.”
“Not in the cruiser. Not in processing. Not at any time your lawyer isn’t with you.”
Cameron nods.
Good Cop goes through Cameron’s pockets, runs his hands under Cameron’s armpits, between his legs and all the way down to his feet, his long fingers squirming into the tops of Cameron’s sneakers.
“We have a room waiting for you at the Ritz,” Good Cop says.
“It’s going to feel like the Ritz after they move you to adult court.”
“If they do,” Randy says.
“Give it up,” Bad Cop says. “You know which way the wind is blowing on this.”
“Mr. Jeffries will see you tonight,” Randy says, putting a hand on Cameron’s shoulder. “He’s going to make sure they’re treating you right.”
“With gloves on,” Bad Cop says.
Cameron’s mom slips her arms through his. She pulls him into her embrace, sniffling through her tears, and says, “I’ll be there to see you as soon as they let me. Maybe tomorrow.”
“Okay.” Cameron hears his voice break but remembers that killing Pinon was the only action he could take. The only one available to him. “I’ll see you.”
He looks at Robbie. “You going to come visit me?”
“No kids allowed in the jail,” Good Cop says.
EPILOGUE
SENTENCING
“No one really knew my son,” Mrs. Pinon says. “Not at that school. No one gave Charlie a chance.”
She stands with her husband at a podium in the middle of the courtroom. They don’t look at Cameron. They don’t take their eyes off the judge who sits with his hands folded, his maroon tie looking like a drop of blood above a black so dark it has to be death.
“He was a great kid. I want you to know that. I want them to know that. All the kids at Madison High who decided because he didn’t look like them, didn’t play football, didn’t belong to a team, he wasn’t of value. He was smart and funny. For my birthday he made me a swan. An origami swan.” Her voice gets thick and wet and she stops and clears her throat. “He was scared to go to school. No child should ever be scared to go to school.”
Beside him, Mrs. Roth, Jeffries’s legal assistant, rubs Cameron’s arm. She did that a lot during the trial, whenever anyone on the stand had something bad to say about him. When his father was up there, talking about how hard he tried to make sure he raised sons who would be real men, she put her arm around his shoulders and whispered to him, “That’s as close as he’s going to get to you.”
She understands what it was like for him growing up with his father. Cameron doesn’t know how. Mrs. Roth is at least as old as his grandmother.
Cameron knows he’s going to stay in jail. He’s already put in eight months and six days, waiting for his trial, waiting for his trial to end. But it won’t be for murder. The psychologist his mom hired to evaluate him, Mr. Lau, diagnosed him with a stress disorder. He told the court he believed, one hundred percent, that Cameron killed because he felt he didn’t have any other choice. Lau said, being back at the scene of his assault, Cameron’s reality blurred.
So he hasn’t been tried for murder. He won’t spend twenty-five years in a tiny room with a tin can toilet.
Cameron knows that memory and reality blurred that day in the locker room. But only for a moment. Cameron believed his life was in danger; with Pinon alive to talk about what really happened in the locker room, the stuff the pictures didn’t show, Cameron would have had no life. But that’s not self-defense, is it?
Lau told the court that Cameron didn’t even know it was Pinon he was harming. Not at first. He resorted to the survival instincts of a soldier in combat.
A medical doctor, a specialist on how the brain works, told the court that Cameron’s brain was not fully formed. He showed MRIs of three brains: Cameron’s, another kid Cameron’s age who never committed a violent crime, and the brain of a twenty-four-year-old man.
“The region where we decide between right and wrong, the human threshold of morality,” the doctor said, “is not fully formed until we’re in our mid-twenties.”
“Who can argue with science?” Jeffries asked the court.
In the moment, Cameron didn’t think about death and how it was forever, but he had thought about it before, and after, and forever was what he wanted.
Jeffries appealed to the jury, “Cameron’s brain is no different than any other kid’s his age. It is humanly impossible, at the age of fourteen, to know the complete ramifications of an act that was spontaneous and defensive in nature.”
“We didn’t want this tried in adult court.” Mr. Pinon is talking now. He’s a small man in a dark suit. He pushes his hands into his front pockets and digs up the coins he finds there. “We don’t want to see another child’s life ruined.”
Jeffries scribbles something on his yellow legal pad and Cameron waits for him to stop writing so he can read it: LET MR. PINON’S COMPASSION LEAD YOU AS YOU SET MY CLIENT’S PUNISHMENT.
Jeffries will get his turn to talk after Cameron’s mother.
He has organized a list of all the things the judge knows about Cameron:
–BOY SCOUT
–STRAIGHT-A STUDENT BEFORE HE ENTERED HIGH SCHOOL
–ABUSIVE FATHER
–BULLIED/RICH PATTERSON GUILTY OF ASSAULT
&n
bsp; Under the heading TESTIMONIES, Jeffries wrote:
–HART: CAMERON DOESN’T CARE ABOUT MUCH OF ANYTHING
–SPANISH TEACHER: WORRIED ABOUT SPIRALING GRADE
–PE COACH: DESCRIBED A LOCKER ROOM OF LITTLE/NO SUPERVISION
–FATHER: ADMITTED TO PHYSICAL AND VERBAL ABUSE
–SGT. LUCAS: DETAILS OF PINON’S “UNPLANNED” KILLING
–PSYCH: “A STRESS DISORDER WHERE THE VICTIM ACTIVELY DISENGAGES FROM REALITY”
–ELWOOD: COUNSELED REGARDING ATTACK/OCTOBER
Under this, Jeffries has written: NO ADULT INTERVENTION
“Charlie talked about Cameron,” Mr. Pinon says. “He said the kids who picked on him picked on Cameron, too. I remember that.” He rolls onto the balls of his feet and bounces nervously. “The truth is, I should have done more to help my son. I keep thinking, why are we in adult court when no adult ever stood up and did anything to help these boys?”
“Cameron Grady killed my son,” Mrs. Pinon says. “I want you to remember that. But he didn’t do it alone.”
Cameron’s mom speaks next. She’s light on her feet and holds onto the edges of the podium. She apologizes for not being a better mom. She thought her son was having a difficult time adjusting to high school; she didn’t know every day was a living hell for him. She didn’t know he would kill an innocent boy. She apologizes for that twice. She turns and looks right at Pinon’s mom and dad and says, “I’m sorry.” Then her face breaks up into the mismatched pieces of a puzzle and she pushes her next words though tears, “Sorry just isn’t enough.”
She turns back to the judge and says, “But he’s still a boy. He’s my boy. And there’s so much about him you don’t know.” And she tells him about all the hours Cameron put into the community, as a Boy Scout, more volunteer hours than he needed.
Cameron listens to her voice warble. Her hands lift off the podium and flutter in front of her throat. When she runs out of good things to say about him, she stands gasping for breath. The judge tells her to sit down.
Cameron watches her move through the gate, into the gallery. Randy is sitting toward the back. He takes her hand and whispers something to her. Words that give her a lift. She dries her eyes with a tissue and then looks at the judge.
Jeffries stands and pleads for a soft sentence. The judge listens, taps a pencil against a pile of papers, then tells Jeffries to sit.
“Will the convicted please rise.”
Cameron’s legs won’t cooperate and Jeffries pulls him up and keeps a hand on his elbow until he’s steady.
“Cameron Grady, a jury sat in this courtroom and listened to testimony about the death of a young boy whose only offense was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They heard about your troubles. They were given expert testimony on the biology of a brain that is moved to kill and testimony that described a trend in America that scares us all. And they found you guilty. It is my job now to decide the legal consequences of the crime for which you are convicted: manslaughter.”
Beside him, Jeffries and Roth stand close enough that he can feel their body heat, but he can’t feel the floor beneath his feet. He knows now what triggers his ability to move in and out of his body: mental and emotional stressors. He loses feeling in his hands and feet and then he’s like a kite, banking in the wind, looking down on himself and feeling that whatever is happening, it can’t be too bad.
“Four years in the New Castle Youth Development Center in Pittsburgh,” the judge says. “This is a maximum security detention facility for juvenile offenders. It’s a rigorous program, and rehabilitation will be your first responsibility. You’ll use the four years to reflect on your actions. To find a way of living peacefully with what you’ve done and form a plan for how you’ll make the best of this second chance you’ve been given.”
A second chance. That’s what he wanted, from the beginning. But he knows there’s no way to really start over new. Tomorrow, he’ll wake up and still be Cameron Grady, killer. And Pinon won’t wake up at all.
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