What We Kill

by Howard Odentz

  It’s truly awful.

  “Today’s Saturday,” Marcy says, still staring forward, her hands now in her lap and folded together. “He might have gone to the playing fields.”

  I nod my head and steer my truck to the right, go down two blocks, and turn left by the Meadowfield town tennis courts. There are white-clad people there, with whiter-than-white sneakers volleying balls back and forth. Nobody our age is on the courts right now. Probably anyone we know is part of an ever-growing crowd of spectators and forensics hobbyists, down Merriweather and around the other side of the dingle where something far more interesting than tennis is playing out on Covington Circle.

  I force the awful thoughts out of my head, quickly drive past the tennis courts, and turn left again. There are several playing fields all along our right hand side, next to Jolly O’s Coffee Clutch. The Clutch is Meadowfield’s version of Starbucks, but all our own. Our town is too uppity to allow franchise stores to sprout out of the ground here. We’re all about unique boutiques where everything costs twice what it should but people are willing to pay anyway.

  At The Clutch, perpetually single or divorced grown-ups hang out in a spectacular live version of online dating. We go there sometimes and watch the desperately lonely leave in twos and sometimes threes, and hope to God we never end up like them when we’re adults.

  Anders’ mother goes to The Clutch a lot. She brings her laptop and sits there, pretending that she’s writing the great American novel, but in truth, she’s hoping to get hit on by someone with an oversized checking account.

  Anders hates going to The Clutch. Everything about it reminds him of his situation, and no amount of café lattes can douse that fire.

  “I don’t see your car,” I murmur to Marcy as I scan the parking lot for what Anders took without asking. Marcy looks, too, but in the backseat Myers is slouched down with his eyes closed. He’s breathing deeply. I think he’s asleep, which sort of figures. Frankly, a sleeping Myers is good right now, because his special brand of annoyance is becoming increasingly hard to handle.

  “Where else?” Marcy asks as she peers across the fields, hoping that we’re wrong and Anders is there after all, but I don’t think we’re going to find him. It looks like soccer is finished for the day, and field hockey and lacrosse have taken over.

  I don’t play sports. I never did. By the time I was in middle school my legs were rubbing together so fiercely I could scarcely walk let alone run. Besides, I don’t think it would have been in Beryl’s wheelhouse to actually sign me up for a sport. She ascribes to the notion that little Jewish kids don’t play sports, which is totally untrue. There are plenty of Jewish kids on the school teams. Still, I wasn’t part of the ‘kids-with-parents-who-care’ club, so I was hiding in my bedroom eating Twinkies every day after school, while most normal kids were practicing something or other.

  Even Myers had scouting.

  “Over there,” says Marcy and tilts her chin to the edge of the fence where the parking lot for The Clutch slides up against the grass. Grafton Applewhite is sitting on his bike talking to Joe Richman. Joe’s not a bad guy. He’s in some of my classes. I’d like to say he’s stooping a level by hanging out with Grafton, but I think they both probably assume Anders is stooping even further to be hanging around with us.

  I slow my truck down and do a three-point-turn in the middle of the street, then head back to the parking lot, Grafton, and Joe.

  When I pull up, they both look at the truck and not at me. Everyone in town judges others by what they drive. A year ago, I bet more than a few people would have thought I drive a truck instead of a car because nothing else could carry me around. Now, they probably think I’m rebelling about something.

  “Yo,” Grafton says when he sees it’s me. Joe just nods his head. “You still look like crap. Praying to the porcelain God yet?”

  What a prick. I think I’ll always hate Grafton Applewhite with his pretentious New England moniker and his bullying past. “Listen, have you seen Anders?”

  Joe sort of smirks and shakes his head, then turns and stares hard at Grafton.

  “The dude’s messed up or something,” Grafton says. “The coach yelled at him for blowing off the game and then Anders hauled off and punched out Barry Kupperman.”

  I close my eyes and pray that I heard something completely different come out of Grafton’s mouth, but I know I didn’t.

  “And?” I say, sounding a little too pushy, a little too popular.

  “What’s your deal?” says Grafton, like he suddenly realizes that I don’t have Anders around to protect me and I’m long overdue for a beat down.

  Marcy slides across the seat, practically crawling on top of me. Grafton and Joe sort of flinch when they see her, as though their faces might melt if they stare at her long enough. Marcy seems to sometimes have that kind of power.

  “Do you know where Anders is now?” she asks. Then she punctuates her question with, “It’s important. Seriously.”

  Grafton shrugs and turns away. Joe looks at Marcy and something in his eyes kindle. I don’t know what that something is, and maybe I never will. It could be love. It could be hate. It could be a thousand different things all wrapped up into one. “Try The Stumps,” Joe says. “I don’t think Anders and Barry are done beating the crap out of each other.”

  Marcy crawls off of me and repositions herself in the passenger’s seat. She automatically sticks her fingers in her mouth but doesn’t chew. She wouldn’t dare. Finally, she turns to me and says, “You told me Grafton saw us at The Stumps last night.”

  “That can’t be true.”

  “And a murder house across the street from Sandra Berman’s house on Covington Circle can’t be true either,” she says. “But it is.”

  I sigh and chew at the inside of my cheek. The thought of driving over to The Stumps is so odd and out of character for us. I used to be afraid of the kids there, who hang out behind the brambles, smoking weed or whatever. They’re the same kids who hang out in the courtyard at school, dealing in attention deficit disorder pills or their parents’ Percocet, under the incredibly unwatchful eyes of the school administration.

  I’m not afraid of them anymore. My fear of them melted away with my fat. Now, I just feel sorry for them. They’re the ones who don’t know that they’ve peaked in high school. Their popularity is going to shortly turn horizontal, until they realize too late that their parents’ basements aren’t life-long residences. When they finally wake up, the bitter truth that they can’t even afford an apartment in East Meadowfield or Springfield will slowly creep in and force them to start counting the long, lonely days until their parents kick and they inherit a little bit of cash.

  Sometimes bitter, vengeful thoughts like that fuel me. I know it’s wrong, but after a lifetime of being on the bottom rung, it’s comforting to know that I have nowhere else to go but up.

  “Fine,” I say. “Let’s go to The Stumps.”

  Marcy nods her head then turns and stares at Myers sleeping in the back seat. “I wish I could sleep through all of this,” she whispers.

  “Me, too,” I say. “Sometimes being asleep is way easier.”

  31

  BACK IN 2011 THERE was an October snow storm. Usually the hill towns and the Berkshires get some snow in early November before the skiing season starts, but having snow down in the Connecticut Valley is rare in the fall.

  When it happened, it wasn’t only our area that was hit by what everyone referred to as ‘Snowmageddon.’ The entire east coast was totally blanketed with almost a foot of snow. I remember Scott Dwyer, the weather guy on Channel 22, saying the snow was Santa’s way of letting on that he had an overabundance of naughty names on his list that year. He said it was up to all of us kids to make things right or we were going to end up with coal in our stockings come the holidays.

  The whole Santa refer
ence was lost on me and Myers. We didn’t have Santa for Hanukah, but some of the dim kids—not Anders or Marcy, but some of the really stupid kids—started being nicer because they didn’t want their Christmases to be ruined. Unfortunately, being nice can only last so long.

  Anyway, that October we lost power for almost a week. We also lost tons of trees. The leaves hadn’t fallen away yet and the added weight of the snow on top of leaves cracked branches in two.

  In Meadowfield, all the cleaned up foliage from Snowmageddon was dumped at the dead end of Miller Road, creating the whole area known as ‘The Stumps.’

  Miller Road is down Meadowfield Street on the river side of the road. I drive that way, past the high school, through one of only two sets of lights in town, by the First Church Cemetery with the huge crypt in the center that used to give me nightmares when I was little, and then hang a left at the town green.

  Fucking Anders. Why did he have to take Marcy’s car and leave us? Where does he think he’s going? He’s been so off today, so wrong, like a complete stranger has taken over his body, that I don’t know quite what he’s capable of doing.

  He pushed Marcy. He made her bleed. That in itself is so topsy-turvy that I have a hard time wrapping my head around it.

  My silent thoughts are broken apart by Marcy. She turns to me and says, “Damn Tate.”

  What a perfect way to take my mind off of Anders. The subject of Tate Cole is definitely worse. Damn Tate is right.

  “When was the last time you saw him?” I ask her. I haven’t seen Tate Cole for so long that I’m not sure I would recognize him even if I did. He’s a bad dream from a life lived a long time ago. I’m sure that someday his ugly specter may rear its ugly head again. I only hope it’s not soon.

  Decades from now would be good.

  “We see him a couple of times a year,” Marcy says. “Our birthday, and . . . family days.”

  “Is he still mental?”

  “He hates me. That’s for sure.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say to her. “What’s to hate?”

  She stares at her hands, folded in her lap again, and snorts in that little way that girls sometimes do. “West, why are you so good?”

  I don’t miss a beat. “Because everyone else around us sucks,” I tell her. It’s the truth. If anyone ever told the embryo version of me that life outside of the womb was no bed of roses, I might have clung to Beryl’s placenta more fiercely. “Your brother can go fuck himself. You’re amazing. Don’t ever think you’re not.”

  Marcy reaches up and swipes at her face. I don’t even have to look to know that she’s dabbing at a tear. Marcy has always been a little emotional like that. “What am I going to do without you guys next year?” she asks. “You’re moving as far away from your mother as you can. Myers is probably going to end up at some techy place where he can play with computers all day long, and Anders is going to Norway. What about me?”

  “What about you?” I ask. “You’re going out into the world, too, and showing everyone exactly who Marcy Cole is. You’re going be amazing. You’ll probably become rich and famous and forget all about us.”

  “No, I won’t.” she says. “I’ll never forget.”

  She may say that now, but even I know that childhood ends. We all grow up, spend years in therapy dealing with how messed up our parents made us, then make little versions of ourselves to try and heal the wounds inflicted on us as children.

  As for me, I’ll never have kids. I don’t think anyone needs my genes, or Beryl’s. The Kahn name can disappear quietly into the night for all I care. Besides, if obesity can be inherited, I’m sure that indifference can, too.

  My future kids don’t deserve either.

  “Okay,” I say. “Let’s make a pact to rock our fifth year reunion and show all these stuck-up assholes exactly how awesome we are.” I’m not sure I believe we’ll ever keep a pact. Who knows what’s going to happen to all of us once we leave Meadowfield?

  Who knows what’s going to happen to all of us today or tomorrow?

  I’m sure every one of those bodies being pulled out of Dr. Viktor Pavlovich’s house was someone who had dreams. If Sandy Berman is one of the dead, I’m sure she had dreams, too. Even the crazy, dotted survivor girl, who screamed when she saw us, has dreams. They might be more like nightmares than dreams but they belong to her.

  Maybe our dreams will somehow involve staying in touch. Maybe they won’t. Even Beryl Kahn can’t predict the future, although she thinks she can.

  Meadowfield Street dips up ahead, right where the big yellow Drake Mansion sits on the left hand side of the road like a relic from some bygone era. The Drakes made all their money on ice cream back in the Stone Age, then funneled it into The Drake Academy up in Greenfield Center. Lots of kids from Meadowfield end up there. The Academy is elite, so it’s an acceptable place for parents to dump their kids if they’re going through a divorce or just plain tired of parenting. Beryl almost sent me there in ninth grade. I didn’t want to leave my friends.

  Case closed.

  At the bottom of the dip on Meadowfield Street is a sign that says ‘Miller Road,’ and another one below it with an arrow pointing right that reads ‘Meadowfield Transfer Station.’

  Part of me hopes that when I turn on to Miller Road, drive past the dirt cut-off to the dump, and make my way to the dead end, Marcy’s car won’t be there. I don’t want to deal with Anders right now.

  I don’t know who he is today.

  I don’t think he knows, either.

  32

  I HEAR A CHANT floating on the wind as I get out of my truck next to Marcy’s car. I run my hand along her hood. The engine is still warm.

  I can’t quite make out the words at first, then when I do, I get this really sick feeling in my stomach that’s part fear and part knowing.

  Anders.

  He’s doing something bad.

  “Fight. Fight. Fight,” I hear people crying beyond the broken brambles and branches that make up the entrance to The Stumps. “Fight. Fight. Fight.”

  Marcy gets out of the car with me. I turn to wake up Myers, but he looks flat out with his mouth open and a dribble of drool seeping out of one corner. I decide to leave him there. Besides, he’s a major distraction. Just looking at him, with his corn niblet teeth and his eyepatch, is enough to get any number of douchebags all revved up to throw a punch.

  None of us need that right now. All we need is Anders.

  “Fight. Fight. Fight.” I hear again. “Fight. Fight. Fight.”

  “Come on,” I tell Marcy and wince as my triangle starts aching again. The pain is just another thing I push aside in a long list of worries. I’ll deal with them all when I have a chance to breathe. Right now, I have to save Anders from what I already know he’s doing, and I don’t know what saving him looks like.

  I’m never the one to save the day.

  He is.

  Marcy follows me as I carefully step on rigid branches, climbing over the pile of debris blocking the woods beyond. She stumbles as she follows me. I reach out and grab her elbow to steady her. She stares at me like she doesn’t want to be doing what we’re doing because she knows what we’re going to find in the woods.

  “Why is he being such a fucking idiot,” she says. Marcy doesn’t often swear. I feel like I’ve been momentarily sucker punched by an invisible fist.

  “I don’t know,” I tell her. “At the very least we can try and stop him from being a dead fucking idiot.”

  Her eyes turn sad.

  God. Things are so different. In one day, how can things change so much?

  I hear yelling as soon as my feet hit solid ground. There are people off in the distance, standing in the trees.

  A couple of girls are walking toward us, passing a joint between them and shaking their heads. They probably don
’t want to watch anymore. One of the girls looks up, stares right through Marcy to me, and says, “Stupid assholes.” Her name is Penny Fisk. Penny is a cheerleader on the Meadowfield cheerleading squad. The other girl is Lindsay DeCandria. All I know about Lindsay is that her daddy is really rich and pays for her to have a horse stabled over in Tobacco Alley because farm animals aren’t allowed in town.

  “Who’s fighting?” asks Marcy, but they literally ignore her.

  “Who?” I ask them.

  Lindsay DeCandria, with the joint still in her hand and the sweet smell of weed tickling the end of my nose, rolls her eyes and says, “Didn’t you use to be really fat?” Then she gives me a once over, her eyes mentally removing every stitch of clothing on me like she’s a human x-ray machine. “Do you have AIDS or something?” She glances sideways at Marcy as the tiniest hint of a smile cracks at the edge of her mouth.

  “Fuck you.” Marcy swears again. The words come out of her mouth forged in something dark and sharp.

  Penny Fisk pulls the joint from Lindsay’s hand and says, “Anders Stephenson is going all cray-cray. Someone needs to put him down.”

  Marcy and I share a knowing glance and I say, “Maybe.” Then we leave Penny and Lindsay behind.

  We jog through the woods to where everyone is standing in a circle, chanting. “Fight. Fight. Fight,” surrounding two guys who are obviously bent on killing each other.

  As Marcy and I break through the circle, acutely aware that we don’t belong at The Stumps in the first place, I hear Anders growl, “I’ll kill you. I’ll fucking kill you.”

  That’s too many ‘fucks’ for one day. I feel as though we’re all channeling Myers’ mother.

  Anders is looming over Barry Kupperman, who has a huge nose and an even huger mouth. Barry has been itching for a chance to fight Anders since way back in tenth grade. This girl, Angie Bellamy, hit on Anders while she was still dating Barry. Anders took the bait because that’s what Anders is like, nibbled on it for a weekend, then jumped off the hook.