A moment later I open the driver’s side door and let myself out, too. Anders is ten feet away from the truck, hunkered down in a crouch, staring at the black pavement like the sun is shining, and he’s watching carpenter ants burn or sink into tiny puddles of asphalt.
“You leaving again?” I ask him. He doesn’t say anything. “You can’t. There’s no place for you to go. There’s no place for any of us to go. We have to get rid of your clothes.”
I walk up to his hunched form, trying to quell the idea of kicking him hard because if anyone needs a good ass kicking today, it’s him.
Only then do I realize that he’s crying, too.
“I can’t . . .” he begins. “West . . . how . . . I can’t. I just can’t.”
I take a deep breath. I know what he’s talking about. I think I’ve always known. For the first time today—probably the first time forever, I decide I need to say something about the unspoken thing that we never discuss. Anders Stephenson is my best friend. He’s one of my very best friends in the whole world. He’s always been there for me. Now, I have to be there for him.
I lower myself down so I’m also resting on my haunches in the middle of the empty parking lot. A year ago I would never have been able to be comfortable like this. I would have toppled over into a heaping pile of lard.
“Hey,” I say to him as gently and as honestly as I can. “She really is beautiful, you know.”
Anders turns his face away. He doesn’t want me to see him like this. He doesn’t want anyone to see him like this.
Finally, he takes in a ragged breath and pushes it out into the night. Anders lifts his head and stares off at the flagpole, flapping gently in the evening breeze.
“That’s just it,” he says, quietly acknowledging what we’ve always known about Marcy, ever since third grade when her parents, our parents, our teachers, and everyone explained to us as best they could that Mark Cole didn’t exist anymore. Anders wipes away his tears and chuckles in a way that would be endearing if it wasn’t so sad. “He is beautiful, isn’t he?”
59
MARK COLE DISAPPEARED when we were in third grade. His disappearance coincided with his twin brother, Tate, crossing over into Crazy Land, but Mark Cole’s disappearance had nothing to do with Tate being mental.
Tate was always destined to end up a bad seed.
The introduction of Marcy was the most natural thing in the world. Marcy was always there anyway. We all knew it. It’s just that her outsides finally started to mirror her insides. She began wearing dresses and letting her curls grow out. Her parents even allowed her to get her ears pierced—only one on each side.
After all, this is Meadowfield.
Mark became a distant memory so quickly it’s like we all forgot that he ever existed. Marcy was just Marcy. Sweet, beautiful Marcy.
Anders was always protective of her, like he was over all of us. Maybe other groups of kids who grew up on the same street might have drifted apart with the wealth of crap we all had to deal with, but our circumstances only made the four of us stronger. Of course our bond didn’t stop me from eating thousands of calories a day to drown out the fact that I had a distant, uninvolved mother, or Myers and Marcy from getting picked on at school, but through it all, we had each other.
That’s all that really mattered.
When we were in middle school, Marcy started taking some sort of medication for kids committed to fully transitioning, so that her body would slow the onset of puberty. The rest of us grew peach fuzz, then real stubble. Anders shot up like a weed and cemented his reputation as a jock. Marcy remained Marcy, without any tell-tale signs that she wasn’t genetically born that way.
Then, a year and a half ago, right on her sixteenth birthday, Marcy started hormone therapy with her parents’ blessing. That’s when everything really changed. I mean, she was always pretty, but Marcy didn’t only blossom into the girl that we all knew she was.
She turned into the definition of a high school boy’s wet dream.
I knew she was beautiful. We all knew she was beautiful, but knowing and admitting are two different things. Besides, I’ve always realized that what’s on the inside is more important than what’s on the outside.
Being fat will teach you that pretty damn fast.
It wasn’t until the end of junior year, after we all took our initial college exams and began talking about what comes next, that our lives began to change. Anders started testing the waters with little comments here and there about how he had loads of family over in Norway. He began dropping hints about maybe taking a year off before going away to school, but I didn’t really think anything of it.
Honestly, I thought he was full of crap.
Marcy never said a word about Anders going to Norway, but we all knew she wasn’t happy. Well, Myers and I knew. Anders seemed to be clueless. He’s such a guy. He’s always had that jock thing going that Myers and I will never understand, and he’s always had girls, too—lots of girls that he goes through like I used to go through bags of potato chips.
This past summer was normal enough. Except for some completely unnoticed tension between Anders and Marcy, which I can now go back to and fill in the blanks, we were all fine.
We were fine until last night when a bunch of lunatics drugged us, dragged us around town, and somehow landed us in Prince Richard’s Maze.
‘Baaaaa.’
‘Baaaa. Baaaa. Baaaa.’
My mouth grows small as the sheep quickly skip through my head, in one ear and out the other. I slowly stand in the parking lot of Meadowfield High School and hold my hand out for Anders.
“Dude, you’ll figure things out.” I say. “To be honest, I’m kind of jealous.”
Anders shakes his head and takes my hand. As he gets to his feet, he says “I’m not talking about this, okay?” He doesn’t say it in a mean way or a way that makes me think that the subject is off the table. He’s just putting the conversation on pause because we have other things to worry about.
I think that’s fair. Besides, I don’t think I’m the one he has to talk to. The person he needs to have a serious one-on-one with is himself. He has to finally sort out his feelings and come to the conclusion that what people think, doesn’t matter. Only what he thinks matters. When he’s done with that conversation, he has to have another one with Marcy. I don’t know how that one will end up. It’s really not my business.
Right now, my business is the four of us and putting together the rest of the pieces of what happened last night. I’m starting to get the idea that I’m not going to like what I find, but I have to look.
We all have to look.
One thing’s for sure. Calista Diamond is dead. She would have been dead whether she blew her brains out with a rookie cop’s gun up at Wang Memorial Hospital or if Running Man sliced her into thin strips like sushi. Somehow we’re part of what happened to her.
Now we have to figure out why.
60
MARCY AND MYERS are quiet.
Myers has unloaded his addled brain as much as he can. He sits in the front seat, slouched, with his head almost touching his chest. I don’t think he’s sleeping. I think he’s hiding by folding in on himself instead of seeking out the safe place between his feet.
To each his own.
As I slowly drive my truck through the side streets of Meadowfield, I quickly glance in the rearview mirror at Anders. He’s barely visible, but I can still feel him, all messed up and confused. There must be a storm inside his head right now, and he doesn’t know when it’s going to end. I don’t know how a guy like Anders is going to come to terms with the fact that he’s into a girl like Marcy. Who can blame him?
It’s all confusing until you stop thinking and start living.
Marcy isn’t talking at all. She’s staring out the window as we drive through th
e tree-lined streets of the older part of town. Huge brick colonials, some with pillars in front, are the norm here. This is where old money Meadowfield lives. Don’t get me wrong—Primrose Lane is beautiful, but none of us who live there can say our families came over on the Mayflower. None of us can cite great, great, a dozen times great grandmothers who voyaged to the new world centuries ago. People on my side of town are only two or three generations-worth of wealthy. People in old Meadowfield have family crests hanging in their living rooms and own centuries-old moss-covered crypts in the huge cemetery behind the stark white church in the center of town.
As I slowly drive my truck, passing by majestic homes with their lights on, I can imagine that inside the beautiful facades, frightened families are huddled around their big-screen TVs, drinking martinis, totally engrossed in the saga of Viktor Pavlovich.
Meadowfield doesn’t know how to deal with such things. We’re mostly populated by people who are ill equipped to handle the messier truths of life. The four of us, in one way or another, have been dealing with those messier truths for so long that I think we’ve developed an extra layer of skin to make us a little bit tougher.
Maybe everyone in town has the same extra layer as we do, but is so adept at lying, they hide their misery just like us. Sometimes it’s hard to know how other people might feel. Maybe Val Buenavista is such a bitch because she’s trapped inside the body of a linebacker. Maybe Grafton Applewhite gets beaten with a soup ladle by his mother or has spent years trying to live up to his father’s unreasonable expectations of what a man should be.
You never know what other people go through. Contrary to what they say, we can’t walk in other peoples’ shoes. We don’t have that kind of power.
Five minutes later, I pull my truck down Golden Street alongside Prince Richard’s Maze. The four of us haven’t said a word since Anders and I got back in the car. Like before, I don’t think we’d know what to say even if we wanted to talk. Instead, we’ve nested into our collective silence like it’s a fluffy pillow that promises the best night’s sleep ever. Who wants to mess with something like that?
After I park my truck up against the woods and quiet the engine, we still sit there in silence. I stare through the black trees into an abyss. I’m not afraid of going into the woods at night. That brand of visceral fear has all but drained away from me, and probably from my friends, too.
We’ve already had enough scares to last a lifetime. I think something really frightening would have to happen in order for us to register any kind of emotion. As for me, I feel dead inside about what we have to do next.
I’m just following a to-do list, and this is the next thing to be done after deleting Val Buenavista’s video and finding out about Flunitrazepam. I go over the steps in my mind.
Drive to town but take side streets so no one will see you.
Park your truck in the shadows of the trees next to Prince Richard’s Maze.
Open the door.
Get out.
Close the door quietly so none of the houses across the street will notice the truck in the dark.
Carry a bottle of lighter fluid and a lighter into the woods.
Follow Little Loop until it passes the cut-off to Big Loop.
Veer off into the woods at the same place you’ve veered off a thousand times before.
Don’t let your sneakers crunch the leaves too much in case there are others in The Maze doing God knows what.
Find The Grandfather Tree.
Reach inside and pull out Anders’ bloody wad of clothing.
Take it out.
Burn it.
It isn’t lost on me that we are potentially destroying something that shouldn’t be destroyed. I feel like the four of us are systematically covering someone else’s tracks, but those tracks seem connected to our own feet. It’s as though we are intentionally eliminating evidence, but evidence of what? After all, none of us know why Anders woke up this morning covered in blood. None of us know why it was only on him and not on the rest of us, and we certainly don’t have a clue where it came from.
Still, it feels as though his blood-stained clothing can’t be found. I don’t know why, but what we are about to do seems right.
As a matter of fact, it seems vitally important.
“So?” I say, with my hand on the driver’s side handle. “Are we going to do this?”
“I’m afraid,” Myers sniffs.
“We don’t have any room to be afraid,” I say. I’m not mean when I tell him that. I’m speaking the truth.
“Let’s get this over with,” Anders says and opens the door.
As the light flicks on, I see Marcy’s face. She should look as though she’s ready to bolt down the street any second, running as fast as she can away from us, Prince Richard’s Maze, and everything, but she doesn’t. She scoots across the leather, going out the same door that Anders opened because it opens to the street. The other side is a matted tangle of brush and dead October leaves. She probably wouldn’t be able to get out that way, anyway.
Her face is hard and determined and maybe even a little scary.
For a second, a vision of Tate flashes before my eyes.
Tate had a twin. His name was Mark. Mark’s gone. Now there’s only Marcy, and no thanks to Tate, Marcy is very much alive.
61
HOW DO YOU ignore your own brain turning on you? How do you make the jabbering stop? As soon as we step over the chain that blocks cars from entering The Maze, I feel like the woods are alive with voices.
It’s the same soundtrack that I’ve been hearing all day long. There’s laughter and sheep crying. There’s screaming and more. All the little snippets of memory that are floating around in my skull are trying to come together into a coherent tune, but instead of coming together, they keep smashing against one another like in one of those old Asteroids games where giant rocks float around a black screen until they collide and break apart into smaller rocks.
I feel like I’m living in that game right now. I’m floating in a great black expanse of nothingness, and every thought that I have keeps sliding up against the next one and then splintering into twos and threes.
Marcy and Anders are walking ahead of me and Myers. Marcy is actually first. If we had our cell phones we could flick on a flashlight app, but we don’t. All we have is the moonlight peeking through the trees and our own memories of these woods to guide us.
That’s all we really need. If we were blind and the trees only had braille bark, we would still be able to find The Grandfather Tree easily enough. This is Prince Richard’s Maze. Every kid in town knows the trails here. We all know the offshoots and the shortcuts. The Maze’s geography is secret knowledge to those in Meadowfield of a certain age. Of course, we’ll grow up and forget. Too many other things will take over our lives when we’re out of this town, and the lingering memory of the patch of woods between Meadowfield and Springfield, looming over the highway and the Connecticut River beyond, will disappear forever.
For me, I’m not so sure about that forever part. I have a feeling I’m never going to forget Prince Richard’s Maze. Even if I do, as soon as I look down at my left arm and the little triangular reminder of what happened here during October of my senior year in high school, the memories will come shooting back.
This place will forever secure its gnarled roots deep inside of me. Every time I think about it, all I’ll want to do is suck my thumb until the memory goes away.
“Ow,” snaps Myers. “Watch it.” I’ve inadvertently let a taut branch whip back into his face.
“Did you lose another eye?” I say. I’m not trying to be funny. I don’t even know why I said it.
“Maybe,” he sniffs. “Do I get a cool dog with a harness if I do?”
“Your mother would probably freak.”
“About me losing an
other eye?”
“No,” I tell him. “About having a dog in the house. Maybe it will want to eat her cookies or something.”
“Maybe it will give her something else to scream at besides me.”
I don’t answer Myers. He picked open his own scab and is waiting for me to pour verbal vinegar on it so his pain will be that much more intense. I don’t want to be the person to cause him any more pain. I don’t want any of us to be in pain.
“She’s a bitch,” I say as we make our way through the woods. “Graduate and leave. Don’t even send her a mother’s day card or acknowledge her birthday.”
Myers snorts. “That’s kind of harsh,” he says.
“I’m feeling harsh.”
“If you say so,” Myers says right as Anders turns and tells us both to be quiet.
Meanwhile, Marcy is traversing The Maze with single-minded purpose. Step after step she goes deeper into the woods, the only sound being the soft crunching of dead leaves under our sneakers and the slosh of lighter fluid in the plastic bottle that she’s holding.
How much of the liquid will it take?
How much of the fluid in that little bottle will we have to splash on Anders’ bloodied clothing and light with a match before we can obliterate the memory of his soiled pants and shirt forever? My guess is that Marcy’s dad’s lighter fluid could come out of an endless stream in the side of a rocky hill, gushing free for hours and hours, days and days, and it still wouldn’t be enough.
I don’t know if it will ever be enough, but we still have to try.
We have to try no matter what.
Five minutes later we’re in front of The Grandfather Tree. Underneath the moon the rotted bark hangs on its sides like wrinkled skin. The jagged openings in the huge stump look like eyes, a nose, and a mouth, and the broken branches sticking out of its sides are arms.
I stop for a moment, a wave of fear bubbling up inside of me. Anders left his bloodied clothes insides its guts and now the Grandfather Tree has tasted blood. This is the part of the movie where the unreal becomes real and the huge stump comes alive. It will take Marcy first, because she’s the closest. As it stuffs her inside its gaping maw, Anders will grab onto her feet to try to pull her back, but he won’t be able to, and he’ll get eaten alive along with her.
What We Kill Page 21