We found out later that the jogger died. I hadn’t been surprised in the least; no human head could turn that way, unless they were part owl. His name was Joe Johnson, a generic name for a generic thirty-five-year-old insurance salesman, doting husband, loving father to two young boys and a Labrador retriever generically named Fido.
His death hadn’t been what stopped me from driving, though.
No. It was the thrill that pumped through my veins as I watched his lifeless body tumble off the road. It was so easy, and the payoff so great. I couldn’t be tempted, because someone could catch me, and then I’d go to prison. That was what convinced me I could never drive again. The thrill was what convinced me I was beyond fixing, that my brother or I or anyone else could never make that part of me normal, whole, the way he’d suctioned out that dent.
Joe Johnson was the first. That is not a lie.
I’m stalling. To get straight to the point, I am a liar. A good one, yes, but a liar nonetheless. And no matter how good a liar you are, the fact of the matter is, the truth will always come back to haunt you. And no matter what happens in this room, whether I have five minutes left to live or five hundred years, I know it has come back to haunt me now.
—
My brother and I were born hand in hand. We grew up leaning on each other, sometimes Ryan holding me up, sometimes me him. On chilly camping trips, we’d huddle together in our tent for warmth. We’d watch movies together on the couch, and I’d fall asleep on his shoulder, feeling safe and warm no matter how bony that shoulder was, with his arm tucked behind my back.
It was only natural our relationship would develop. We were everything to each other emotionally, mentally, spiritually. It was only natural we would become everything to each other physically as well. It was only natural. It was only natural. It was only natural.
He kissed me for the first time when we were fourteen. Sure, we’d kissed each other plenty of times before that: when we were little kids playing at being a married couple, on the cheek like dutiful siblings, tentative good-night pecks in front of our parents. But this kiss? This kiss was the real thing.
I’d spent all day at band practice, learning the wonders of the clarinet and the horrors of a splintered reed. That was back when Ryan was in band, too; he’d taken up the trumpet, though, and as brass and woodwinds practiced separately, I didn’t see him until we met up for the walk home. We strode along the side of the road together in a comfortable silence, my clarinet case tucked against my chest, his trumpet case swinging by his side. Light from the setting sun filtered red and orange through the autumn leaves rustling overhead. “So how was practice, Dizzy?” I asked.
“What?” His eyebrows, thick and heavy as caterpillars, bunched together quizzically.
I sighed. “Dizzy? You know, Dizzy…” I couldn’t think of his last name. “Dizzy something. The famous trumpet player.” It came to me. “Gillespie! Dizzy Gillespie.” I sighed again. “Never mind. The moment is gone.”
“You killed it,” Ryan agreed. “I would counter with a famous clarinet player, but I don’t think there are any.”
“Of course there are!” I went to name one, but my mind was blank. “There are lots. I just can’t think of any.”
Ryan smirked. “Yeah, okay.”
“I would hit you, but I wouldn’t want to hurt my baby.” I clutched my clarinet case harder against my chest for emphasis. “Anything exciting happen at practice?”
Our feet crunched over dead leaves. A chilly wind whisked by, and I shivered, goose bumps popping up on my arms. “Kind of,” he said finally. “Esther asked me out.”
“Esther?” My mind went blank again, and then I remembered: Esther, a tall girl with arms too long for her body, who liked to braid her hair into intricate styles all over her head, who had pale blue eyes that sparkled in the shine off her mellophone. Nobody liked the mellophones. They were always off beat. Only failed trumpets switched to the mellophone. “What did you say to her?”
He shrugged. I watched his shoulders slope up, then down, so easily, as if he wasn’t tipping the earth off its axis. As if he wasn’t changing the way things had always been. “I said maybe. It felt weird.”
My breath came in shallow gasps. “It is weird. Neither of us has ever gone out with anyone before.”
There went his shoulders again, up and down. “Maybe we should,” he said. “We’re going to have to do it someday. Marriage, kids, the rest.”
I darted a glance at him. He was staring off ahead, squinting as if into the sun, though it was actually setting behind us.
“Why?” I dared to ask, then held my breath.
He turned to look at me, still squinting. “What?”
“Why do we have to go out with other people?” I said. My heart pounded through my entire body. “Aren’t we enough for each other?”
The crunching slowed, stopped. “Are you saying…”
“You are everything to me.” The words burst from my chest. “I don’t need anyone else.”
“But…” He studied me as if through new eyes. I looked right back at him. It was physically painful; every nerve in my body screamed for me to look away, but I held fast. “Are you saying…”
“Kiss me.”
A heart-stopping yearlong moment passed, one where everything might have stopped and fallen dead around me, but then he leaned over, let his trumpet case fall, and pressed his lips against mine. I drank him in for a few seconds before he pulled away. He looked stunned. “Was that okay?” he said.
I responded by pulling him back down to me, my hands traveling over the sculpted muscles of his back.
His trumpet was never the same. I went back to the side of the road the next afternoon to see what I could salvage and found it dented, dinged, tarnished, as if it had aged a hundred years in a day.
We moved slowly. It was necessary, of course, to keep it hidden from our family and friends and society as a whole; as much as I wanted to kiss him in public, to press up against him in the food court or against my locker at school like the other kids, I knew nobody would accept it. I didn’t understand why it wasn’t okay. We were two people who cared about each other. Why should anyone concern themselves over the blood in our veins? It wasn’t like we were making them take part. This was America. Land of the free.
By the next school year, though, people were growing suspicious. Liv included. She’d broken up with her boyfriend. On the prowl for a new one, she’d set her sights on Ryan and, by extension, on me. “You’ve never had a boyfriend, have you, Julia?” she asked, her eyes narrowing into slits. “But you’re so pretty. Are you a lesbian or something? Because if you are, that’s totally cool, you know. Even if you have seen me in the changing rooms at Forever 21. Just tell me.”
So I sent Ryan on that disastrous date, and I let Liv fix me up with Aiden. I remember the first time Aiden and I kissed; we were in his car, me tucked against the passenger-side door, Aiden practically straddling the gearshift. “How was that?” he’d asked huskily, his hamburger breath gusting against my face.
It was all wrong. His teeth had knocked against mine. His nose had stuck me in the cheek. His lips were chapped and dry. “Great,” I said, my stomach roiling.
I met Ryan at the front door. “I can’t do it,” I said. “I can’t fake it. I can’t be with someone who isn’t you.”
“I can fix that,” he said.
Aiden and I went out a few more times. I cheered him on at soccer games, let him parade me around on his arm, endured his kisses, which always mysteriously tasted like various sorts of meat, even when the only thing I’d seen him eat all day was salad. But one day, as Aiden was driving me home from school, the brakes snapped. We crashed.
I sat in the passenger seat, bruised and reeling, my wrist screaming in pain, as Aiden bled to death two feet away. My ears rang so loudly I didn’t hear my brother wrenching open my door before he pulled me out. I sagged onto the ground. Shock waves rippled through me like I was the epicenter of an earthquak
e. “Did you do that?” I asked, dazed, steadily refusing to look over at Aiden.
“You weren’t supposed to be in the car,” Ryan said miserably. “Liv was supposed to drive you home today.”
I could hardly hear him over all the bells clanging in my head. “Liv was sick,” I said. “You almost killed me.”
I sank into his chest. He rested his chin on the crown of my head, staring over me into the car behind. “But I didn’t,” he said. “And now you’re all mine. For good.”
The rippling waves of shock turned into rippling waves of anger, fiery and hot in the pit of my stomach. I shoved him with my good arm; taken by surprise, he stumbled three steps back before catching himself. “You almost killed me,” I said. “I almost died. I don’t think you get that.”
He blinked. “Of course I get that,” he said. “But you didn’t die. You’re still here.”
I whirled around. “But I almost died,” I said. “And now I’m angry.” Neither Ryan nor I spared much thought for the boy actually dying in the car behind us. Neither of us was particularly concerned.
In revenge, I started dating Evan Wilde a few months after Aiden died. My big, dumb football player, the first to die in the band room.
The band room.
Now, that’s a subject I don’t want to go near.
But I promised Ryan I’d tell the whole truth, and so I will tell the whole truth. I owe him that, at least.
Evan and I dated for about four months. I let him slobber all over my chin in front of my brother, and in exchange, he boosted my image. Liv was beyond excited to go to all the football parties and hang out with the popular kids. We hadn’t ever been unpopular, as in nobody had ever actively made fun of us or ignored us, but we’d been off to the side. Invisible. But with Evan by my side, I walked under a perpetual spotlight. Some of the little band freshmen, flutes and clarinets, mostly, took to following me around, basking in my newfound glow, a rarity in band kids. I knew them in passing—thought two of their names were maybe Penelope and Sophie—but otherwise didn’t pay much attention. Most of my attention was dedicated to counting the times the muscle in my brother’s jaw throbbed or judging the shade of red to which his face deepened every time he saw me and Evan together.
We lived in the same house, sure, but I did all I could to avoid Ryan during the day: I’d come home and shut myself in my room, only emerging when my parents were around. He’d knock on my door, stick notes through the crack, but I wouldn’t budge. He’d almost killed me. He’d almost killed me. I wasn’t talking to him until he realized how big a deal that was and begged for my forgiveness.
So it wasn’t a shock when he cornered me at school that fateful afternoon, just as I was coming out of the band room, in the hallway behind the room lined with all the instrument closets. “Julia. We need to talk.”
He backed me against the wall next to the clarinet closet, pinning me in with his arms. I squirmed, trying to break free, but he pressed the length of his body against me. “Let me go.”
“No.” He searched me with his eyes, and when he spoke, his voice crackled with intensity. “What the hell are you doing with Evan Wilde?”
“He’s my boyfriend.” I wanted to cross my arms for emphasis, but there wasn’t enough space. “Now let me go.”
“No.” He leaned down and kissed me. I resisted, keeping my lips stubbornly still, but that only lasted until my insides erupted into flame. I threw my arms around him and drew him closer, closer, closer, until even the air molecules between us were squeezed out.
“The instrument closet,” I panted, and cracked the door behind me. We stumbled through.
We were so busy we didn’t even hear the footsteps outside. I drew back to take a breath and looked over his shoulder to see two pairs of eyes and two mouths, all round as Cheerios, staring through the small window in the door. Those two annoying freshmen, I realized—Penelope something, Sophie something.
By the time I’d composed myself and made it out the door, Penelope and Sophie were already running down the hall. “Wait!” I shouted after them. “Stop! Tell anyone and I’ll kill you both!”
But it was too late. They were deep in whispers with Elisabeth Wood, who would rush to tell Irene Papadakis and Nina Smith, who would eventually tell her boyfriend, Danny Steinberg, who would nudge his best friend, Erick Thorson, and snicker about it. About us.
Erick Thorson was on the football team with Eddie Meyer, who was starting quarterback beside Evan’s running back. Evan would rush to Liv’s ear, asking her if what he’d heard could possibly be true. All this would take place in approximately an hour.
Mr. Walrus was a mistake. Mr. Walrus shouldn’t have been there.
I turned to my brother. “I know how you can get me to forgive you for almost killing me in Aiden’s car,” I said, my voice deadly calm. “Run home and find my old backpack. The pink-and-purple one. Get Dad’s gun and put it inside. Run home, and bring it back to me.”
He nodded, already backing away. I know his mind was racing as frantically as mine, but he trusted me. He’d do anything I told him to.
“I’ll be in the band room,” I said. “Waiting.”
—
You have to understand—I didn’t want to kill anybody. Well, that’s not entirely true. I would think back to Joe Johnson, and smashing into him with my car, and the thrill that coursed through my veins. I wanted to kill people; I liked how it felt, but I knew enough to know it was wrong. That doing it again could get me locked away forever. I only did what I did to protect myself. I didn’t have any other options.
Most of it did depend on luck, of course. It was only a matter of luck that Penelope and Sophie and the others all had gym class last period, and their phones were tucked away in their gym lockers with their real clothes. If they hadn’t all been in the same gym period, and if Penelope and Sophie hadn’t been running late, without even time to stop and send a frantic mass text, it never would have been contained.
Luck. Good luck for me. Bad luck for them. It’s all a matter of perspective.
But it was preparation, too, of course. I forged assorted notes (which, when found later, were blamed on Ryan) and stuck them to their gym lockers—emergency notes from club advisors: Don’t change into your school clothes, just go directly to the band room. You’ll have plenty of time to change and gather your stuff later. This is an emergency. The roof of the instrument closet fell in, or there was a fire in the locker room out at the football field. Crises that had to be dealt with right away. And I glued the alternate exits shut before anyone showed up. Superglue did the trick just fine.
And then I made my dramatic entrance from the instrument closet and stood in front of the room, an empty music stand before me, surveying all the people on the risers. Everybody had their own distinct shade of horror on their face.
“You’re here because you heard a terrible rumor about me,” I said. It should have taken Ryan about fifteen minutes to get home, maybe ten to find my backpack and get the gun, then fifteen to get back. It had taken about that long, maybe even longer, to figure out the chain of gossip and gather everybody together. I was just glad they’d all come. “And I wanted to talk to you about it.”
“This isn’t French club,” Nina Smith said, still confused.
Evan’s face was glowing and red, a planet all its own, or a dying star. “Can we talk in private?”
“We don’t need to talk in private,” I said. Now that Ryan and I had been together again, I couldn’t face the thought of Evan’s hot-dog breath or clumsy fingers on me. I’d already given his varsity jacket back, stuffed it symbolically into his locker while he was in gym. “Not when—”
And that was when Ryan burst through the door. He already had the gun in his hand.
You know what happened from here. I carved my name into the music stand as it all went down, knowing this was the end of life as I knew it.
First went Evan. Then Liv. Then Eddie. Then Elisabeth Wood, Irene Papadakis, Nina Smith, Danny S
teinberg, and Erick Thorson piled into stacks like firewood by the superglued doors. Then Mr. Walrus, then the trembling Sophie Grant and Penelope Wong, trapped under our teacher’s sweaty bulk.
When it was over, in our twelve minutes alone, Ryan dropped the gun to his side. The barrel released an acrid scent into the air. Somebody, Evan, maybe, or Eddie, had left pink spatters of brain on the blackboard. Distantly, somewhere outside, we heard shouting. People had clearly heard the shots and screams. It would only be a matter of time before the police showed up.
I think he knew then what I was going to ask him to do. I could see it in the way he searched my face. Like he knew he was never going to see it again. I was looking at him the same way, my eyes roving over the scar on his forehead from when I’d thrown that glass at him when he dared to have a crush on someone else, memorizing the slope of his nose, the golden shimmer of his hazel eyes. He was the only one. There would never be another. There could never be another. We were suitable only for each other. We were both born defective, lacking the same empathetic center in our brains. Or perhaps we were both born stronger. Maybe we’d gotten a glimpse in the womb of all we would need to do over the course of our lives, and had steeled ourselves, ripping those parts of our brains out right then.
“One last time,” he said. He didn’t have to specify. I rushed to him and we tangled together, desperately, as the blood of our classmates soaked into the carpet. His lips tasted like blood, though it might have been my imagination.
Time flew by. We pulled apart, panting, after eleven minutes that felt like eleven seconds. “Are you sure you can do it?” I asked.
You can tell me I’m a sociopath. You can tell me I feel nothing. But I promised my brother I’d tell the truth, and I’m telling the truth now when I say that I felt something then. Grief was tearing through me, a rip through the very core of my being. But he had to do it. There was no way for both of us to walk out of there, and I couldn’t bear to see him in jail. Better a sweet memory than that.
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