“Gee, thanks.” Steven turned his head around and looked at Connor. “Are you high or something?”
“Of course not.”
“Drunk?”
“Well, maybe a little this afternoon but that’s worn off now.”
“Nauseating. That’s what you are.”
“You’re drowning me with negative energy.”
“You’re killing my doombuzz.”
“Doombuzz?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s no such thing.”
“Yes there is . . . And you’re killing it.”
“So, are you going to your graduation?”
“No. Definitely not.”
“Why not?”
“Why bother? It’s just a stupid ceremony. I get to wear a cheap rented gown and walk down an aisle and stand there while lots of boring things happen. Oh, and if I’m lucky, I’ll get to go out into the parking lot and throw my hat up in the air. Mmmm, now that’s what I call excitement.”
“I don’t suppose you would go just for me, would you? Chances are, you’re going to be the only child I get to see at graduation.”
“As much as I would like to do it for you, I just don’t think I can. You don’t really care anyway, do you?”
“Maybe I’m getting sentimental in my old age.”
“Or senile.”
“It’s a proud moment. It’s an accomplishment.”
“Yes, indeed. Graduating from a public school with average grades so I can take my diploma and get into a community college if I want to.”
“Why do you make everything sound so negative?”
“The doombuzz, man.” Connor wasn’t sure, but he thought he could see Steven smirking on the couch. That was probably as close as he would get to a laugh.
“Just try not to be so sad, okay?”
“No. What are you reading? I bet it has trolls in it.”
“And a wizard.”
“Of course. Always the wizard. Why do you read that garbage?”
“It makes me happy.”
“Again with that word.”
“Jeez, you’re bringin me down.”
“Straight to hell, old man.”
“I’m done with you.” Connor picked up his book.
Only, he wasn’t really done with him. They stayed in the living room together for the next few hours, Steven channel surfing while Connor read his book. Even though they didn’t really talk, he liked the time. It was a different kind of closeness and he was just happy he could be there for Steven to talk to if he wanted.
The days leading up to graduation were similar to that one. Connor and Steven staying close together, both of them relishing the closeness but not really saying anything about it. In a way, he was disappointed that Steven had apparently broken up with the girl but, in another way, it felt like he had one of his friends back. He hadn’t realized how used to Steven being in the house he had grown. Even if he was in his room listening to music, it was comforting to know he was there.
Occasionally, he would ask Steven about graduation. Steven accused him of “wheedling” and essentially brushed off his comments and suggestions. Connor proposed they do something else for graduation like go to a movie or something. Steven told him he would rather stay in his room and brood. Connor informed him, even though he was nearly graduated, he was not yet eighteen and told him he could legally make him do just about anything he wanted. So Steven agreed to go to dinner and a movie with his dad in lieu of the graduation ceremony. He asked him if he would wear the robe when he went out and Steven said only if he didn’t have to wear anything under it.
On the morning of the graduation, Connor woke up and went to work. It was a sunny, crisp, beautiful morning. He would come home from work early and take Steven out.
Sixteen
Graduation Night Part One
Connor drove Steven to a restaurant in Alton. There they ate an abundance of Italian food and drank a bottle of wine. No one bothered asking for Steven’s ID, a precursor to this glorious realm of adulthood he was about to enter. Well, he thought, if all else fails, at least I can become an alcoholic. After dinner, they went to see a movie at the only thing resembling an art theater Alton had. It was a small, two-screen theater called the Abode. On one screen, they played all the big Hollywood movies most people paid to see. On the other screen, they ran smaller movies: foreign films, old horror movies, cult classics, low budget independent things. They watched a fairly unremarkable film with what Steven thought was at least a humorous premise: a priest and a pedophile hijack a van and take a cross-country trek to Disneyland. There were a few entertaining scenes but it came off more as a bad John Waters attempt than anything incredibly original. They were two of only five people in the theater.
After the movie, on their way to the parking garage, Connor playfully punched Steven on the arm and said, “I’ve had a pretty good time.”
“Yeah, me too,” Steven said, more to placate his dad than anything. Truthfully, he had not enjoyed a single moment since Elise had dumped him. At least, he was pretty sure that was what she did. He didn’t really know. He hadn’t gone to school since that night and he wasn’t really sure she even had his phone number but he figured she knew where he lived and if she really wanted to see him then she could stop by his house. The whole situation made him feel strange. He was the older one in the relationship but didn’t think that entitled him to immediately know more about relationships. That was the first thing he had even remotely resembling a relationship. Elise had at least admitted to having boyfriends before.
If all else failed, he thought he could maybe go back to stalking her. But he knew he wouldn’t do that. Maybe it wasn’t even truly over. Maybe they just needed some time apart. Maybe Elise had pushed him away so his throbbing libido would have some time to cool. If so, that probably wasn’t a bad idea.
Steven and Connor got into his dad’s rickety car and began the drive home.
“We should make this a weekly kind of thing or something,” Connor said.
“Yeah, sure, that’d be good.”
The rest of the drive was very similar to this, Connor trying to start some thread of conversation and Steven dampening it with short, soulless answers. It was a dark, clear night. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Not a Deathbreaker up there. A waning moon hung overhead. The stars seemed vengeful. He guessed graduation was over by now.
“So are you still glad you didn’t go to graduation?” Connor asked, as though reading his mind.
“Yeah, I never even really thought about it.”
“I think this was a good alternative. Probably more fun for me too. If I recall, graduations are not usually that entertaining.”
“See, I knew you didn’t really want to go.”
“Oh, but I did want to go. You have to promise me you’ll go to your college graduation. That is something I have never had the pleasure of attending.”
“Why didn’t you ever go to college?”
“I went, once or twice. I just couldn’t get into it. Married too young and then we had you and then it was more important to work and make money. Besides, I’ve always thought working in a bookstore probably gave me a better literature education than any university. You get to read a lot . . . plus, you get to see what people are actually buying. Trust me, after working in a bookstore, you stop thinking James Joyce is the all-important writer.”
“I guess you think Stephen King is more important, huh?”
“No, not more important. You just have to wonder how much of an impact a writer can have if no one reads him.”
“That’s true. I always knew you were a populist at heart.”
“Give the people what they want.”
Steven chuckled, thinking his father was probably telling him the exact opposite of what he actually felt. About halfway home, Connor stopped at a red light and the car shimmied violently.
“When are you going to give this thing up and buy a real car?”
“You m
ean a new car?”
“No, just something that runs. If this car were a horse it would have been shot a long time ago.”
“No, it’s Old Reliable.”
“What, you can rely on it to break down every month?”
“At least it’s expected. I hate to be taken unawares.”
“It scares me just to ride in it.”
“Try driving it sometime.”
They cruised along the state route, ready to make a right hand turn onto Gethsemane Pike. Connor took the turn and sped the car up to well over sixty. Once off the state route, the roads were relatively unpopulated and unpoliced. The car shook brutally around sixty but smoothed out after Connor added a few more miles per hour. As they entered the outskirts of Gethsemane, he had to nearly slam on his brakes. There was a wall of fog beginning right before they reached Green Heights. Out in the fields.
“Shit,” Connor muttered.
“Foggy,” Steven said, thinking about that night at the water tower.
“To say the least. It’s like driving through a fucking cloud.”
Connor grew a bit more comfortable with the fog and put on a little more gas. Then the car hit something and he slammed on the brakes.
Steven’s heart leapt up into the back of his throat.
“Are you okay?” Connor asked.
“Yeah. I’m fine. What the hell was that?”
“Probably just a deer.”
Connor pulled the car over onto the side of the road and they got out. He looked the car over while Steven wandered back to see if he could find out what it was they had hit. The fog was so thick he could only see a few feet in front of him.
“Any damage?” he called to Connor.
“I don’t see any.”
“I was kind of being sarcastic.”
“Oh.”
“Oh God,” Steven muttered as he saw what they had hit.
A large deer lay on the side of the road. It was on its right side, its head thrown back. A large hunk of hide was torn from its left side, exposing its guts. Its legs were drawn up toward the body. It was large and Steven was kind of surprised it hadn’t done more damage to the car. He figured they were probably pretty lucky. They could have been seriously injured if that thing had come through the windshield.
“What is it?” Connor asked.
“A huge deer.”
“Awww. You mean I hit Bambi?”
“You trounced him.” Or her, he thought. He really didn’t remember if Bambi was a boy or a girl and was about ready to ask his dad when the deer began twitching. “Jesus, I think it’s still alive.”
Connor started toward him. “I should probably call the police or something when we get home so they can come out and put it out of its misery.”
Steven felt sorry for the deer. He knew there wasn’t anything he could do to make it better but it felt wrong to leave it lying there. He thought he should tell it he was sorry or something, even though he knew it wouldn’t do any good. Taking a few steps toward the twitching deer, he jumped back when it stood up. And it didn’t just stand up on its four legs. It stood up on its two hind legs, reminding Steven of a bear, ready to attack. The deer walked over to him, swatting its hooved forelegs in the air, coming at Steven.
And it was hissing.
Or seemed like it was. It was an absurd vision, this deer coming toward him on its hind legs, its guts tumbling from its torn side, and hissing all the while. It was this absurdity that kept him frozen there, not quite sure of what he was seeing. But there was something horrific about it also. The fact that this deer could probably do serious damage to him if it actually caught him with its malevolent hooves.
“Steven, get in the car.” Connor grabbed him by the arm and led him quickly back to the car.
They jogged the short distance, getting into the car and shutting the doors behind them. Steven felt silly, running from a deer. Once the doors were shut, Connor took the car out of park and they felt the deer ram the back of the car. Connor didn’t want to back up over it but he didn’t want to end up in the ditch either. Steven stayed turned around in his seat, staring out the back window at the deer. It launched itself up onto the trunk and began beating its hooves against the rear windshield, trying to break out the glass.
“Get out of here, Dad!” Steven said, now terrified of the deer. This was the closest thing he had had to a physical confrontation since Georgie Bender on the playground in fourth grade.
“Well, I don’t want to hit it,” Connor said. The car was at an odd angle. He couldn’t just gun it forward.
“Who the fuck cares!”
Connor threw the car in reverse, pitching the deer forward. Steven saw its head smack against the rear window and got a very clear view of one eye, wide-open and crazed. Saliva was slimed all over the glass. Then Connor gunned the car forward and the deer slid off.
“Jesus, what the hell was that?” Steven asked.
“That was Bambi gone wrong,” Connor said, clearly not as shaken by this as Connor was.
“That was zombie Bambi.”
Steven wanted the ride to end there. Part of him said that was enough adventure for the night and it had to end there. But that part was wrong. The deer was really just the beginning.
Going farther into Gethsemane was going farther into the fog. Steven hadn’t thought it could get any thicker but, driving through the quiet streets of their suburb, he found he was wrong. It became a thick white blanket and Connor mentioned something about how it would probably be safer to get out of the car and walk. The entire time, Steven kept imagining all that fog to be swirling around the water tower or moving toward the water tower. And maybe he was hallucinating all of it but he thought he saw odd, almost human shapes in the fog. Ghosts? His already spooked mind was probably just playing tricks on him. He wondered if his dad saw them too but didn’t want to bring it up. There was something about the subject of ghosts and deaths Steven just knew would take him back to the conversation and then he would have to start thinking about his own mortality again and he didn’t want to do that. Not on this night. This night that had been so pleasant otherwise.
Besides, maybe his mind wasn’t just playing tricks on him. Maybe he was the only one who could see the shapes. Maybe they were there only for him. He was the one who had written the names in the notebook. The destroyed? He was the one who had written about the water tower and something called Obscura. He was the one who had written the story. And maybe he was the one who was coming undone.
Although that was another reason to mention it to his dad, he still couldn’t bring himself to do it. It would either serve to verify his sanity or his insanity, all depending on what his father saw. But he felt almost certain his dad would have said something if he saw anything unusual.
Connor didn’t say anything until they pulled up into the driveway and got out of the car.
“That is some creepy fog,” he said.
“You saw them too?”
“Like weird human things?”
“Yeah.”
“I just thought I was imagining them.”
“Me too.”
“But I wasn’t.”
“Me either.”
“What do you think that means?”
Steven shrugged his shoulders, coming up behind his father as they walked up the path leading to the front door. “I guess it doesn’t really have to mean anything.”
Connor unlocked the door and they went into the living room.
“Do you ever get the feeling things just aren’t right around here anymore?” Connor asked.
There he goes again, Steven thought. Trying to lead him into another serious conversation.
“Right now, the only feeling I have is that I have to pee very badly.” And, with that, he walked to the bathroom.
When he came back out a few minutes later, his father was in front of the flickering TV. He knew something was wrong by the way his father just stood there in front of it with the remote control kind of dangling in
his hand, like he had been so shocked by what he saw that he was frozen, unable to sit down. Steven turned his attention to the TV.
Something else had gone wrong in Gethsemane.
Seventeen
Graduation Night Part Two
Elise sat in the back of the auditorium with her friend, Carrie Bendrix, and her family. Carrie’s older brother was graduating and she had invited Elise to come along. Elise thought it might be a good idea. Ever since leaving Steven, she had trouble thinking about anything else.
How could she have told Steven she had left him out of self-preservation, because she had to, more than out of any problem she might have had with him? She knew he probably wouldn’t have understood that. But she had her secrets. So many secrets. And she didn’t think she would be able to stay with anyone with all those secrets in her head. She was afraid if she shared those secrets, then he wouldn’t want anything to do with her.
Thus far, the graduation had been pretty boring. She had never been so thankful Gethsemane was such a small town. The graduating class was just under a hundred and it was still painful to hear the principal read off all of their names as they walked up the aisles. Several times she found herself wanting to go to sleep. She was already thinking of excuses she could use to get out of going to any graduation parties with Carrie. She didn’t think she wanted to spend the night watching Carrie get trashed before going off with some boy, leaving her to fend off some other boy and his bad jokes or personality he had stolen from the television. It was thoughts like those that made her want to run to Steven’s house. Run there and tell him she was sorry and she wanted to be with him but there were just a few things she needed to tell him first.
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