Oh God. Calista Diamond wasn’t just a resident of Bellingham. She was a student at The Bellingham School.
“She looks all messed up,” says Myers again. He’s right. People who look like her don’t live in Meadowfield. No matter how pretty she is, she’s pretty in a way that defies our town. No one would ever say that Calista Diamond is wholesome-looking. Girls in Meadowfield don’t dye their hair wonky colors while they are trying to get into Ivy League schools. Girls in Meadowfield don’t have long thin braids that look like they were purchased out of one of those trashy, trendy stores up at the Ingleside Mall in Holyoke, where they sell glass pipes and blacklight tee-shirts. “Who is she?” he asks.
“Calista Diamond,” I tell him. Myers has no reason to remember her, other than as a desperate, creepy reminder that a mass murderer and his house of horrors was found down on Covington Circle, and a girl survived.
“Who’s Calista Diamond?”
I gulp. “Think shaved head and dotted lines.”
Marcy still can’t talk. She has one hand in her mouth, almost forgetting that she doesn’t bite her nails anymore. The other is on her hip.
“What?” Myers says and clutches at his stomach.
“Don’t puke again,” snaps Anders. His eyes are now open. His words sound like an order and Myers doesn’t do anything but meekly nod his head up and down.
Then he gets it.
He really gets it.
“You mean that’s the girl from Running Man’s house?” Myers blurts out. “What happened to her hair?”
“Shaved,” I said.
“Why?”
I don’t want to say the words. I want to close my eyes and pretend he’s never asked the question.
“That’s what a plastic surgeon does before he performs surgery,” says Anders. “It’s so he can see the cut lines.” His words are sharp and brutal, like the sharp edge of whatever tool Dr. Viktor Pavlovich used on his victims.
Myers’ lips tremble. “That’s messed up. You’re kidding, right?” He looks imploringly from me to Marcy then back to me. He doesn’t want to look at Anders. “He’s kidding, right? Please tell me he’s kidding.”
I wish I could, but I don’t want to lie anymore. I look down and desperately search for that spot between my feet that’s such a perfect place to hide.
Finally, Marcy pulls her hand from her mouth, takes the quarterly from me, and slowly starts thumbing through the pages again. Her eyes scan the photographs, stopping for a moment to look at Tate, who is featured more than a few times.
There he is ‘killing it’ at ping pong.
There he is lounging on a beanbag chair, reading a book.
Three more pages, and she stops. Her mouth turns into a tiny, horizontal line, and her nostrils flair. She looks up at Anders, not at me. “This is him, isn’t it?”
Anders takes a deep breath, takes a few steps, reaches out, and pulls the quarterly out of her hands.
“Him, who?” pleads Myers. “Someone talk to me.”
I stand there, shoulder to shoulder with Anders as we look down at the glossy pages at a picture of a kid with a hatchet for a face and greasy, stringy hair. He looks strung out on something, even though I know he can’t be. I’m sure one of the edicts of The Bellingham School is that he can’t be ‘strung out’ on anything.
“Shit,” I whisper under my breath.
“It is, isn’t it?” Marcy says with bile in her voice. “Anders?”
And just like that, we are reliving the events on Val Buenavista’s video all over again. The greasy guy is pawing Marcy six ways from Sunday and touching her in all sorts of places that she doesn’t want to be touched. He’s telling her to be nice like being nice is some sort of sick offering she has to give to him so he’ll be nice back.
I can see it all playing out in my mind, but this time, I’m not seeing it sideways, shot from a weird angle on Val’s phone. I’m seeing it through the trees. A memory is forming inside my head and that memory is of me at The Stumps, holding something cold which I know has to be a bottle of beer.
Another round of throbbing pain spirals out of the little triangle on my arm, and I simply will it to go away. I’m not ready to think about my triangle yet. I’m not ready to connect the lines. Instead, I take the quarterly from Anders, flip back to the front, and start turning the pages like Marcy.
I know exactly what I’m looking for, and I know I’m going to find it.
Twelve pages in and there it is, in a photograph of a group of students from The Bellingham School on an outing.
Calista Diamond and another girl are sitting on a huge horse with one of those weirdly cropped tails that looks like it belongs on a rabbit. Tate’s not in the picture, but the greasy-haired kid is there. He’s wearing sunglasses and pointing at the horse’s ass, laughing, and so is another kid with big frizzy hair.
My mouth grows small.
The kid with the frizzy hair is definitely not from Meadowfield.
Kids in Meadowfield don’t have afros.
51
THEY KNOW EACH OTHER.
They know each other.
Tate Cole, Calista Diamond, the guy with the greasy hair, and the other one with the afro who threatened Val Buenavista when he found out she was videoing them, all know each other.
The four of them live at The Bellingham School. They’re not normal. They’re addicted or insane. They threaten family members with knives or repeatedly flip the bird at teachers. They pop medications like penny candy and are connected to people who can hook them up with drugs like Flunitrazepam. Kids who live at The Bellingham School know people like that.
What’s more, Tate is still in Bellingham, probably because he’s only seventeen-and-a-half like Marcy and can’t leave, but Calista Diamond? She’s eighteen. They said so on television. Her friends are probably eighteen, too. Schools like Bellingham aren’t jails. Once you become of age, you can probably sign yourself out or something.
That’s what happened yesterday.
She signed out . . . or something . . . and in between leaving Bellingham and now, Calista almost ended up dead at the hands of Running Man.
Shit.
A vivid memory snakes out of a dark corner of my mind and sheds its drug-induced amnesia. It’s not even a memory really. It’s a truth, equal parts naked and unashamed.
I remember her. I remember Calista. In my memory she still has hair. In my memory she still has thin braids.
She got right in my face in Marcy’s kitchen, so close that she was a blur, and she poked me with her glittered nails and said, ‘Hello? Anybody home?’
No. I wasn’t home. I was drugged. Still, part of me was there, and that part of me remembers someone else laughing and a deep voice saying ‘Cool.’
Another sickening truth dances across my face, so vicious and real that I don’t even have to question it. Calista Diamond, the greasy guy, and the guy with the afro were all here last night. In this house. In this kitchen.
They were all right here, an hour away from Bellingham, with a drugged pizza courtesy of Tate Cole.
What was it that he said to Marcy? ‘. . . my bank account and the knees on my jeans both took a beating this past year. The least you could do is stop breathing.’
Oh no.
My head jerks like I’m a robot who just got a brain upgrade.
Everything that’s happened to us since last night has been about Tate and his hatred of his family—simply everything. The four of us eating drugged pizza and being dragged to The Stumps and somehow ending up at Prince Richard’s Maze—all of it—is because Tate wanted to get at his parents . . . at his sister. He wanted to get at them so badly he persuaded three of his friends to do it for him.
I feel sick to my stomach, not for the lingering drugs or the truths that are slapping me
in the face over and over again. I feel sick because I can taste Tate’s palpable disdain for his family like spoiled food in my mouth.
On some level, if I project myself so far out of my body that I’ll have a hard time finding my way back, I can even understand it. On another level I can’t.
I won’t.
I close my eyes and imagine Marcy’s psychotic, scheming brother shelling out his allowance and performing favors in the dark corners of The Bellingham School, all to persuade a bunch of degenerates to break out, or sign out, or whatever people like them have to do to leave the woefully inadequate vigilance of Eddie Bick, and come for his family.
How much did it cost him? How many pairs of jeans did Tate wear out at the knees?
I start shaking my head, my nostrils flaring with the disgusting smell of a plan gone woefully wrong. Tate didn’t know that Marcy’s parents were going down to the Indian Casino last night. He planned for his friends to show up, drug them all, and . . . and. . . .
She had no pants.
This morning when we woke up, Marcy had no pants. Myers was missing his eye. I had a triangle burned into my arm, and Anders—Anders was covered in blood.
It’s all because Marcy wasn’t with her family last night when some strangers delivered a pizza and said something like, ‘courtesy of Pizza Depot, coming soon to Meadowfield,’ or another lie equally as lame.
She was with us.
We all probably toasted our good fortune for getting a free meal, although I can’t imagine how I ever let pizza pass my lips. I’m Mr. Extra Meatball. Regardless, the four of us ate from a poisoned apple and passed out while Calista and her friends let themselves in through the door in the back of the garage that’s never locked and hit the lottery, not once but four times over.
“Fuck me,” I say out loud. I think we all are harboring the same sentiment.
Marcy slumps to the floor and puts her head in her hands.
My colorful choice of words just about sums it all up.
52
MYERS IS STILL wearing his Master Baiter tee-shirt from yesterday, but it’s starting to smell ripe. The rest of us have had the luxury of a second set of clothes, but all Myers has done is cover his eye hole with a pirate patch.
Marcy gives him one of her dad’s shirts. He is swimming in it, and the whole effect makes him look a little homeless.
Anders is brooding again. He could be brooding about blood, or bloody Barry Kupperman, or even the fact the Marcy told him that she loved him and he doesn’t know how to cope. It could even be about three juvenile offenders who took a joy ride from Bellingham last night, maybe even in a stolen car, stopped for pizza and Flunitrazepam, then came hunting for Marcy and her family.
Frankly, I could keep listing the things that Anders could be brooding about for the rest of the night and be right on all accounts.
We have such a capacity to hold chaos in our heads. We cradle it there, cupped in our gray matter, while it swirls around like a tornado, breaking things at every turn.
One thing’s for certain. Amidst all the chaos, none of us know what to say to each other. There are too many mental balls juggling in our hands and none of them make sense.
Myers is still groggy and drugged and completely confused.
Marcy is rapidly falling apart with the realization that everything that has happened to us since last night has something to do with her family and three residents of The Bellingham School.
As for me, I keep going back to a fourth resident—Tate Cole.
None of us ever really talk about him, or his anger, or that awful day so many years ago when he cornered Marcy in the bathroom with a knife and Anders had to intervene. What kind of kid—what kind of person—does something like that to his twin? I can’t speak from experience. I’m an only child. So is Anders. So is Myers. I think our parents realized that one and done was a good policy, especially after they figured out that kids are nothing more than sucker fish attached to their sides, syphoning off whatever we can get.
What’s more, once we greedily drink our fill, we turn our backs on our creators, vowing to move as far away as we can from the things that made us.
I guess that’s the circle of life. At least we don’t resort to matriphagy. The only reason I know all about matriphagy is because of a paper I wrote in Advanced Biology for Mr. Kirkpatrick. Matriphagy is when the offspring of a species eat their mothers. I got an A for the paper. Kirkpatrick likes me, but he did jot down a note in the margin on the last page asking if I was saving up for psychotherapy.
I know he was only being funny, but it made me wonder if he had ever met Beryl. If he had, I don’t think he would have written that note in the first place. Words can hit too close to home sometimes, even when they are never meant to cause damage at all.
Just like Marcy’s words. I can’t even imagine the bomb that she detonated when she said what she said to Anders. ‘I love you.’ That’s what she said, and he’s probably now caught in an emotional typhoon. Honestly, I don’t have to imagine it at all. I’m watching it unfold right in front of me. If I had to guess, I would say that Anders is brooding because of what she said more than anything else. He’s not thinking about Prince Richard’s Maze or waking up without a memory, or even being covered in blood. He’s not thinking about Running Man or Calista Diamond or beating the crap out of Barry Kupperman down at The Stumps.
He’s thinking about Marcy, and it’s eating him alive from the inside out, like when a mother crab spider’s baby spiderlings devour her until she falls over, immobile, and they consume her entirely.
I get it, but at the same time, there’s a hint of jealousy there that I can’t ignore. Fat kids don’t have people who fall in love with them. Fat kids hide in their bedroom and shore up mental walls so they don’t have to talk to their mothers. Fat kids stare at the space between their feet and find solace in the fact that the bigger they get, the more invisible they become.
Fat kids . . . and I stop myself. I’m not fat anymore.
I’m not fat.
I’m not fat.
I’m not.
I close my eyes.
Am I?
Marcy slowly stands, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, and glides into the kitchen like a ghost.
“I’m hungry,” she says.
None of us reply but she’s not waiting for a reply. She’s sucking everything up inside herself, shoving it into a little mental box and locking it tight. That’s how Marcy rolls. That’s how she has managed to stay relatively sane here in Meadowfield when none of us have sane lives.
Our town, our world, might look really pretty on television, but the truth of it is, our lives are hard. Just like hiking the Grand Canyon looks like an amazing time when you’re watching other people do it from the safety of your own home, but doing it for real? It’s hard. It’s dirty. It’s like living in Meadowfield where everything looks beautiful on the outside.
Even our serial murderers are beautiful. Perfect, prancing Viktor Pavlovich with the fancy sports car and the string of beauty wannabees who eagerly got in his passenger seat because he was hot.
Calista Diamond should know all about that. She almost got close enough to him to get burned.
For real.
53
I SIT AT THE KITCHEN counter staring at the to-do list that I wrote. The next thing on the list is something I don’t want to do, but I don’t think we have a choice.
Way across town in the fading light, the sun is setting on Prince Richard’s Maze and on an old, rotted-out stump that everyone calls The Grandfather Tree. Wrapped into a ball inside that tree’s guts is a wad of clothing covered in blood.
It’s not my blood. The blood doesn’t belong to Marcy or Myers. The syrupy red paint doesn’t even belong to Anders, but it’s still blood.
That ball of cloth
ing can’t be there. That ball of clothing can’t be anywhere where people can find it. Not now. Not ever.
“We have to get rid of Anders’ clothes,” I say.
“Why?” asks Myers.
“Because we don’t have a good answer for why they’re covered in blood,” I tell him without looking at Anders.
Marcy has pulled some boxes of cereal out of one of the cabinets in the kitchen, plopped a gallon of milk on the counter, and littered the granite island with bowls and spoons.
I don’t eat cereal anymore. Cereal is part of an ever-increasing number of evils that I’ve decided will never again enter my body.
Cereal is a carbohydrate.
Carbohydrates turn into sugar.
Sugar turns into fat.
Fat can never happen again.
Anders slumps over a bowl that’s bigger than the rest of ours. It’s more for mixing food than eating food. He has one arm curled around it while he’s shoveling corn flakes into his mouth with the other. I don’t even think he’s chewing. A steady stream of milk is dripping down his chin and falling back into the bowl, only for him to scoop it up again.
We all watch him for the better part of a minute, until he takes the remains of the bowl, soggy broken flakes and all, tilts his head back, and drinks the rest of it as though he’s totally alone in the world, wearing nothing but dirty underwear and anticipating that he’s going to be able to let out a long, low belch in private.
The thing is, Anders isn’t that gross. He’s nothing like how he is acting today. He’s never seemed so lost in all the years that I have known him.
He drops the bowl back onto the counter, wipes his mouth with the heel of his hand, and thankfully doesn’t belch.
“I’ll do it,” he says. “I’ll get rid of them.”
What We Kill Page 18