White Rabbit Society Part One

by Brendan Detzner

  KILL SOMEBODY

  YDOBSMOSLLIK

  K SOMEBODY

  KS

  DO IT

  He almost laughed at the last one. It was probably all he needed to remember. He filled in the blank space and threw away the practice sheet.

  He looked back at the notebook and numbered the steps, just so that there wouldn’t be any confusion.

  “If you can’t come up with at least one person…”

  Josh wondered if that was true, if there really were people you could use like that, who were just filling up space. It was the exact opposite of what they said at church, but that didn’t mean anything. His dad talked about it all the time, somebody wasn’t doing their job, somebody was getting in his way or wasn’t good for anything.

  He felt bad just thinking about it; it was a strange thing, bigger than he was. He knew for sure that if Andrew was here it wouldn’t even be an issue, that they’d probably be arguing over whether to throw the books in the furnace. He decided to leave it alone for now. He was still so young, it was not like living forever was a pressing issue for him anyway.

  The next day, Andrew still wasn’t at school. It was time to worry— not time to freak out, it had still only been a couple of days, but it was time to start thinking. Josh skipped Health class and went to the attic. He took his stuff out and tried to figure out if there was anything he could do other than wait. There was something in one of the books he had only glanced at before, near the diagram where he’d spilled both their blood. It hadn’t interested him then, but it did now.

  He spent the rest of the lunch period decoding. When he went home he didn’t bother with his homework, he just kept working. At around five, his mom knocked on his door and poked her head into the room.

  “Your father’s going to be coming home for dinner tonight. Six o’clock.”

  His sisters were already there when he arrived at the table. A minute later his father stomped his feet on the welcome mat by the front door and stepped into the living room. He hung his coat on the back of his chair and sat down.

  He took a deep breath.

  “Well. Everybody’s here. Let’s get going.”

  They said grace and started passing food around. Josh took two rolls and a giant pile of green beans; he didn’t take a burrito until his mother told him he had to. As soon as he was done, his mom got up and came back holding a tub of ice cream and some glasses.

  Josh finished his desert and looked around the table. His sisters and his mom were talking, but his dad wasn’t. The top button of his shirt was undone and his tie was pulled loose; he looked very tired. More tired than usual.

  He asked to be excused. His mother didn’t want him to go yet, but his father waved his hand.

  “It’s all right, let him go. Not a big deal.”

  Josh pushed his ice cream bowl to the center of the table and went back to his room.

  Around eleven o’clock, after everybody else was in bed, Josh took a black pen from his desk and went to the front door. The family’s shoes were all piled together next to the welcome mat; Josh found his father’s right shoe, pressed the tip of the pen against the side of the sole, and drew a tiny equilateral triangle. He put the shoe back and returned to his room.

  He worked late into the night, and slept without dreaming.

  #

  The next day, Andrew was still missing. Josh skipped Health class again, sat down in the middle of the attic, opened one of the books, and started writing. Not thinking, only getting it done.

  Ten minutes later he was in the middle of a line when he stopped. He stared at the page, put his pen down, flipped back and forth frantically through his notes. He’d made a mistake. The last two pages were all wrong and he didn’t know how to fix them.

  He stood up with his fists clenched at his sides, hit the wall and leaned back against it.

  “Fuck.”

  For all he knew, Andrew was dead by now.

  Josh realized that he was starving. He checked his watch. He still had time to eat something before the end of the period. He went downstairs. The noise in the cafeteria was deafening, he hadn’t eaten here in so long he’d forgotten what it was like.

  The day ended and he walked back home. He heard somebody playing basketball in the front drive as he approached his house. He got closer and saw his father passing the ball to one of the guys who worked for him. They were both wearing suits.

  They stopped playing for a moment as Josh approached. Josh’s father waved hello.

  “How’s it going, Josh?”

  The question burned. Josh shrugged and disappeared into the house, trying not to let it show. He thought about it for a minute when he got back to his room— only for a minute, he couldn’t afford any more than that. If he slipped he would slide, if he tripped he would fall, he would keep falling.

  What hurt was that he really wanted to answer the question. He wanted to talk to somebody. Without Andrew, that was it, there wasn’t anybody else. Two days and already it was starting to drive him crazy. It made him feel weak.

  He worked for an hour, got thirsty, and went to the kitchen to get a glass of orange juice. He had to go through the living room to get there. One of his sisters was laying on the couch, staring up at the ceiling with her hands behind her head.

  “They’re still playing,” she said. “They’ve been playing all afternoon.”

  He didn’t know if it was Grace or Sandy, wasn’t sure if it mattered. He finished his juice, put the glass in the sink, and went back to his room.

  He sat down at his desk and heard his door open. He turned around.

  “They’re probably talking about you.”

  She left before he could say anything and closed the door behind her.

  Josh looked down at his books and tried to remember what he’d been doing, but he couldn’t concentrate. He finally pushed the books to the side, drew the pattern on a spare piece of paper and slapped his hand down on top of it.

  The sole of his father’s shoe bent as he lifted his heel and disappeared from view as he darted around to the side. Josh pulled back; his dad twisted forward, stopped, smacked his left foot down and grabbed the ball with both hands.

  He pivoted on his opposite foot and made his shot. The ball hit the backboard and slipped silently through the net.

  “Shit.”

  His opponent was a vaguely familiar face, a business partner or senior employee, Josh couldn’t remember which. He leaned over, red-faced and sweaty; he loosened his tie and put his hands on his knees.

  “Nice one,” he said. “Shit, we look like two old men.”

  Josh’s father shrugged.

  “Your ball.”

  His opponent nodded and walked back up to the foot of the driveway. He checked and turned his body to the side, faked to the left and ducked right. He made his lay-up before Josh’s father knew what had happened.

  Josh’s father shook his head. “Goddamn it.” He was still gasping for breath. “Let’s take a break, all right?”

  He sat down with his back against the house and rested his hand on top of the ball, let it tilt back and forth. The other man sat down a few feet away.

  “You know what really gets me about all of this?”

  He took his hand off the basketball. It rolled past him, coming gently to rest against the inside of his foot.

  “I love my kids. I love my girls and I love Josh, and I know he’s going to be fine once we get through this rough patch. It’s just that… I’ve done a lot of shit in my life. I’ve gotten a lot of things done, and I’ve got a lot to keep track of…”

  “We’re going to find out what happened to Tom. Nobody’s giving up.”

  “No, that’s it. I am giving up. It doesn’t matter what happened. None of this weird garbage that’s been going on makes any difference. I haven’t been paying enough attention to my family and that has to stop.”

  He pushed the ball back towards him with his foo
t, picked it up, and threw it to the ground, spinning it so that it rolled back to him after it hit the ground.

  “You want to hear the really nasty part, though?”

  He wiped his face with the sleeve of his T-shirt.

  “It feels like I don’t have a son anymore. Josh is my kid but Tom was my son. Cut and dried, that’s what it feels like.”

  He threw the ball again and it came back to him.

  “Christ, I sound like an asshole.”

  #

  When Josh woke up there was a wet spot on his pillow where he’d been crying. He turned it upside down, threw the covers off his body and got up. There was a mirror in a frame on top of the dresser. He saw his face as he leaned over and he was angry again. It was like he hadn’t slept at all.

  He had raisin bran for breakfast. His mom said goodbye as he stepped out the door. He went to school, he put his coat in his locker and went to class.

  By the time lunch came he was starting to calm down again. He bought a sandwich in the cafeteria and snuck it up to the attic. He didn’t get any work done, he just ate.

  The bell rang, the day ended. He didn’t know where the time had gone. He felt empty, a white screen with nothing on it. He felt perfectly still, even as he walked down the hall towards the front doors of the school. Jeremy and his friends were standing in a circle in the limbo between the bank of doors that led outside and the gym.

  Josh walked up to them. He decided he was going to fuck with Jeremy. Not a lot, just a little. Like eating a small piece of chocolate to wipe the taste of something from your mouth. He got close enough to make eye contact, settled in place, and stared, smiling. He waited there for a reaction.

  Jeremy saw him. He reacted, but even before he reacted, Josh felt something rising in his stomach. This was wrong.

  Jeremy smiled back at Josh. His friends turned and looked and moved, expanding their circle so that Josh was now in the center of it.

  “Where’s your spooky fucking boyfriend, Josh?”

  Looking back even a short time later, Josh would be surprised by what had happened. He hadn’t thought that people really saw red, he’d thought that was just an expression.

  Jeremy pushed Josh’s shoulder. His friends all laughed.

  The blindness spell was one of the simpler ones. All you had to do was visualize a particular pattern, a circle embedded in a square embedded in a circle, rotating counter-clockwise.

  Josh exhaled and opened his eyes, and took a step back. Jeremy took a step back and spun around, waving his arms in front of him.

  “I can’t... I can’t fucking see…”

  Josh had never hit anybody before, but his brother had shown him how to do it. Keep your wrist straight, wrap your thumb under your fingers, squeeze tight. His fist struck Jeremy in the temple; his knees buckled and he fell to the ground. He kicked him in the stomach. He only meant to do it once, but he couldn’t stop. He kicked him over and over again, and when his leg got tired he kneeled down and started hitting him in the face.

  None of Jeremy’s friends did anything to help. They just watched.

  #

  A gym teacher broke it up a few minutes later. Josh was brought to the counselor’s office; he refused to talk to anyone. They called his mother to take him home. She yelled at him in the car and yelled at him once they got home, but he didn’t have anything to say.

  That evening, Josh sat on his bed with his back against the wall. He drew the pattern and closed his eyes, and saw his father’s shoe against school carpeting.

  “If it were anybody else’s kid, Bob, we’d already be talking about expulsion.”

  “This is ridiculous. Josh was defending himself.”

  “By the time he was done defending himself the other boy had to go to the hospital.”

  “So maybe now he won’t have to do it again. Look, it’s not as though Josh has a history…”

  “The kid’s blind.”

  Josh waited for his father to answer, but the room was quiet. When the counselor spoke again, his voice was softer than it had been.

  “The doctors don’t know what’s wrong, but they say if it was just psychological it would have gone away by now. What happens next will depend on whether his parents decide to press charges.”

  Josh lifted his hand up and he was back in his room.

  He’d practiced the blindness spell with Andrew dozens of times. It never lasted for more than a few minutes.

  Maybe he’d done something different this time without realizing. It didn’t matter now anyway. He had other things to worry about. All his stuff was in his backpack. He took out what he needed and got to work.

  He opened the book to the diagram and pressed his fingertips down onto the page so that they circled the place where he’d spilled his blood. He whistled a short tune, reached into his pocket, took out his last pill, and swallowed it. He reached for the light switch. The room went dark just in time for him to see a pair of blue spheres float through his window to the sidewalk.

  He grabbed his backpack, crept quietly through the living room, and started running the moment he left the house.

  #

  Andrew, Paul, and Anna sat at the foot of the bed. In front of them was a coffee table supporting a six pack of generic cola and two pizzas, a large one with pepperoni and a small one covered with pineapple.

  Someone knocked at the door. There were three locks, the one on the doorknob, a dead bolt, and a chain.

  “Anna,” Paul whispered. Anna got up; she touched Andrew’s shoulder, took him into the bathroom, and closed the door.

  Paul reached under the mattress and pulled out a gun. He sat back down and covered the hand holding it with a blanket.

  “Come on in.”

  CHAPTER 18

  #

  Paul tried to talk to Andrew in the car, but all he could do was stare out the back window at the fire trucks. He pawed limply at the door handle, but the child lock was on and it wouldn’t open.

  Paul kept talking until Anna interrupted him.

  “Now’s not the time.”

  She said it quietly. She was staring at the road in front of her and had both hands on the steering wheel.

  “I rented a room a couple days ago. I’m pretty sure nobody saw me and I haven’t spent the night there yet. We’ll go there.”

  She stopped for a moment at a red light and made a left as it turned green. Paul closed his eyes. He imagined that his head was filled with thick sludge, that he was squeezing it through his ears and his nose and his mouth, trying to get it all clear.

  A few minutes later, he heard the car chewing through gravel and sat back up. Andrew had his hands folded in his lap and was slowly rubbing them together. Anna killed the engine. She looked at Andrew in the rear view mirror, then at Paul.

  Paul took a deep breath.

  “All right, I got it. Just give me the key and a minute alone with him.”

  She looked into his eyes, just to make sure that he was all there. She reached into her pocket for the key, gently handed it to him, and got out of the car.

  Paul turned around and threw the key into Andrew’s lap.

  “We’re going to be staying here a little bit. I need you to hang out in the room for a little while so that...” He thought about it. “So that me and your aunt Anna can talk. I know you have some good reasons not to like me all that much, but after what happened to your grandmother…”

  He paused again. He couldn’t cry, he felt like an idiot for having to tell himself that.

  “Anyway, there’s a lot of really bad people out there who might be looking for you. So if you want to make a break for it then that’s your decision, but I think you’ll be better off here right now whether you like us or not.”

  He decided that he was finished and finally took another look to see what was going to happen. Andrew was holding the key. He rolled down the window, reached through it, and opened the door from the outside. He got out of the
car and disappeared behind the motel room door.

  Paul got out and sat down on the hood of the car. He took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. He saw Anna walking back to the car. By the time she reached him, his eyes were starting to water.

  “God…” he said once she was close enough to hear him. “My mom’s dead.”

  She put her hand on his arm, and at first he didn’t even notice. He felt like he was floating in space, a million miles from anywhere. Then suddenly he could feel the tips of her fingers against his skin, hot and cold at the same time, and he reached out for her shoulders and pulled her up against him. She wrapped her hands around his waist.

  “I missed you a lot,” she said.

  Paul leaned back against the car and kissed her gently on the lips, and for a minute they held each other. When he stood back up and opened his eyes, he saw somebody staring at them from the other end of the parking lot, an old man wearing overalls and a baseball cap. Paul glared at him; he looked away immediately and retreated around a corner.

  Even after he was gone, Paul just stared at the place where the man had been standing. Anna glanced over her shoulder.

  “We better get to the room,” Paul said.

  #

  They each took a different corner of the bed and sat down. Neither of them said anything; for a moment Andrew wondered if they expected him to talk, then he realized they were each waiting for the other.

  “Can I take a shower?” Andrew finally said.

  Paul almost jumped back in his seat.

  “Of course, sure.”

  Andrew got up, went into the bathroom, locked the door, and took his clothes off. He could hear them whispering. He turned the water on, got in the shower, leaned over again and twisted the knob until the sound of the water hitting his back was loud enough to drown out the sound of their voices.

  He was about to get dressed when he suddenly remembered his mother yelling at him for doing the same thing back home. The whole point of taking a shower was to get all the dirt off you. Putting back on the same dirty clothes you were just wearing defeated the purpose.