But all Bryce wanted to talk about was how clever he was and how much money he was going to make. “This will be a big first step for you, Jackson, but it’s just the beginning.”
And that’s when Abby walked into Bonner’s. She saw me first. Bryce had his back to her. She was angry. Her eyes were burning right into me. The other drinkers in the bar had noticed her too. The room went quiet except for the sound of a rap song playing on the sound system.
Abby walked straight up to me and slapped me across the face. I hadn’t been slapped by a girl since I was in seventh grade. “You liar,” she said.
It had never occurred to me that she would follow me. But here she was. My face was stinging as Bryce said, “What the hell?”
Abby turned toward him, confused. Bryce looked more than a little stunned too.
I had to try to pull this one out of the fire. “I found him. Abby,” I said quickly. “I found him, just like I said I would.”
Bryce looked at me as if I had just smacked him in the face. “What the fuck are you talking about, Jackson?”
“Bryce…” Abby said and then stopped. She seemed to be at a loss for words. The same could be said of Bryce. He recovered quickly.
“Abby, baby, it’s been such a long time. I’ve missed you.”
Abby threw herself at him, and Bryce held her tight and then kissed her on the neck. “I’ve missed you so much,” he said again.
The rap song ended, and now the bar was silent. People stared. I felt a cold chill of panic running down my spine. I had brought them back together. Abby had followed me here only to discover her long-lost boyfriend. I knew in my gut that anything bad I said now about Bryce would only work against me.
I wanted to tell her what a real creep Bryce was, how he didn’t give a shit about her or any of the people, including kids, he wanted to buy his precious kryptonite. I knew Bryce didn’t have any real feelings for Abby. I didn’t think he had any real feelings for anyone but himself.
But as Abby pulled back from Bryce, I watched her face as she looked at him. The girl was still in love with the guy responsible for sending her to Westlake.
I could take a hint.
Bryce was starting to wonder about this connection between Abby and me—I could see it in his eyes. He was starting to wonder what I was up to. What kind of game was I playing?
Abby saw the look too. “Jackson helped me find you, and now I have you back.”
I got up to leave. “Well, I think I’ll hit the road. Good to see you two back together.” I said it like I meant it, but I felt my world crashing down around me.
“Wait,” Abby said, standing up and blocking my path. She threw her arms around me and gave me the biggest hug. “Thank you,” she whispered in my ear. “Thank you so much.”
I savored the moment for what it was worth, pretending Abby was hugging me like it was me she cared for. But now that Bryce was back, everything would be different. As she pulled away, I realized that I had really, really mucked things up. How could I have been so stupid?
I walked slowly toward the door as the bartender eyed me. “You going to pay for your drink before you go?” he said.
I wanted to say, No! Screw you, asshole. I needed someone to be angry at. I couldn’t unload on Bryce or Abby. But I held my tongue and slapped a ten-dollar bill down on the bar. I realized I’d probably never set foot in there again and that the fantasy life with Abby I had conjured was never going to happen.
Chapter Nineteen
So when you are sixteen and your life falls apart, what do you do? In my case, I went home, slept, got up the next morning and went to school. Lucky me.
I thought about ways I could try to get Abby back. Things I could do or say to her. After school I went to Striker’s Sports. I looked around, but she wasn’t there, even though I knew she had a shift that day. Mr. Striker was at the cash register and looked my way. “Abby quit this morning,” he said before I asked.
Damn. I phoned her and left a message. “Why did you quit? Where are you? I need to see you.” She never returned my call. I left several text messages but got nothing back.
I asked myself a million questions. What did Bryce think I’d been up to? Could he figure out I was only pretending to sell his drugs? Did he think I was really trying to get him and Abby back together? Maybe Bryce thought I had some kind of complex con game going. I decided to take a chance and send him a text.
Bryce, still hoping to cash in. Where can I meet you?
It didn’t take long for him to respond.
Fuck off, jerk. Eat shit and die.
The message was clear enough. Bryce didn’t trust me anymore or want me to be part of his operation.
I worried about what was going to happen to Abby. She was going to have access to all that kryptonite. She liked it. She liked to get high. And Bryce would undoubtedly enlist her to sell the stuff. To high-school kids, probably, since I was no longer in on the sordid action. I refused to let myself think about what else Bryce would ask her to do. She’d do whatever he asked.
I was to blame for them getting back together. I kept pushing my brain to come up with some way to show Bryce’s true colors and get Abby back. But I had nothing. And I do mean nothing. The more I thought about losing Abby, the deeper it hurt. But none of this thinking did me any good.
And then a really weird thing happened.
Mr. Carmichael came into my homeroom at school and asked me to follow him to an empty classroom. The guy seemed all steamed up about something. He sat me down by a bank of computers. On the first one right in front of me was my essay. “Now move over, screen by screen, and look at the pieces I have highlighted,” he said.
I did, and I saw every bit of work I had cribbed from other sites. He had somehow found them all. Mr. Carmichael sat down at the last computer. “Now watch this,” he said. He cut and pasted each of the highlighted areas from the various websites into one document. Then he pasted it into a window on the Google translation site. “This was the part that took me a while to figure out,” he said. He hit a few keys, and the site translated it all into French. “Voilà,” he said.
I pretended I had no idea what he was doing.
“And then we translate it back into English.” He punched a couple more keys.
But I knew exactly where he was going.
“All you had to do was tidy it up a bit after that. Because of the double translation, the words and syntax are just different enough from the original to escape detection.” He almost looked impressed. Then he turned to me. “But it’s still plagiarism, Jackson. It’s still cheating.”
He’d nailed me again. Given what I’d been through lately, I shouldn’t have given a shit. But it suddenly occurred to me that this stodgy high-school teacher was one of the few real people in my life.
“It wasn’t French,” I said. “It was Italian.”
I thought he was going to smile. But he didn’t.
“So you get another F.”
I shrugged. I didn’t care about the grade. I didn’t care anything about school or any of the people in it. Maybe Carmichael would have me kicked out. Maybe that was my ticket out of here.
“Can I go now?” I asked. I started to stand up, but he put his hand on my shoulder. Firmly.
“No. Follow me.”
We headed down the hall to another classroom, which was being renovated. It was empty. No desks, no computers. The walls were partly painted. In the middle of the room, on the floor, was a pen and an exam booklet.
“Give me your cell phone,” Mr. Carmichael said. I handed it to him. “Any other electronic devices?”
“No. You want to search me?”
“I do not. Sit. Write. One hour.”
“What do I write about?”
“I teach a philosophy class, and you are in it. I have tried to teach my students about many important things that happen in our lives and how to cop
e with them. I want you to write about a problem, what we philosophy teachers call an ethical dilemma. I want you to write about your ethical dilemma, a problem you’ve encountered, something personal, something real. Explain the nature of the problem and the possible solutions. Just tell the story. Show me where reason fits into it but also emotion. Understood?”
It all sounded like bullshit, but I just wanted Carmichael out of my face and out of the room. “Understood,” I said.
“Good. One hour. Now sit.”
Chapter Twenty
As I sat on the floor, I realized all I had to do was walk out of that room and out of the school and never come back. I almost did just that. But I didn’t. I started to write.
I wrote about the stolen shoes and about meeting Abby. I wrote about my time with her and her background. About meeting Bryce, the kryptonite and how things all went south. I’m not sure I covered the reason part like Carmichael wanted, but I wrote about my feelings—attraction, falling in love, then losing everything. I certainly didn’t have any solutions.
The hour went by quickly. Suddenly Carmichael was back in the room. “Can I go now?” I asked.
“No. Stay put.”
Carmichael snatched up my exam booklet and walked to the window. He stood there, reading what I had written. When he finished, he ran a hand through his thinning hair.
“Holy shit,” he said out loud, surprising me. “This is all true?”
I nodded.
“That’s one hell of an ethical dilemma. This all happened just recently?”
“Yep.”
“What are you going to do about it? The drugs, the girl?”
I threw my hands in the air. “Bryce has written me off, and Abby won’t speak to me. I guess I just let it go and get on with my life somehow.”
“And take no responsibility?” he asked, now sounding like my father. “He’s selling this stuff to kids!”
“What would you do?”
“I know what I would do, but it’s rather unlikely I would have found myself in such a situation to begin with. My life is rather routine and sometimes tedious. I tend to avoid drugs and trouble, and I happen to be fond of telling the truth.”
“So what do you propose I do?”
“Two choices. You either act or you do nothing.”
“I choose doing nothing. Now can I go?”
“No. You cannot. Doing nothing is sometimes a valid ethical decision but not often.”
“Well, I can’t call the police and have Bryce arrested. The stuff isn’t illegal.”
Now Carmichael was looking me in the eye. “Doesn’t matter. I have a list on my desk of new drugs floating around, how bad they can be and what to look for in my students. This one is bad. It will be illegal soon enough. Just takes time.”
He handed me my cell phone and a card from his wallet. “Call this number. It’s an anonymous tip line. You don’t have to leave your name.”
“But they can’t bust him, not if kryptonite is still legal.”
“Doesn’t matter. They’ll look into it. And this Bryce guy. Sounds like they should be able to bust him for something.”
“Let me think about it,” I said.
“Thank you. You may go. And hang on to this,” he said, handing me back my essay. “It deserves an A. And I say that wipes out the other Fs. Have a good day.”
I didn’t bother going to any more classes that day. I walked straight out the main doors and down the street. I had to think. Writing about my situation hadn’t exactly solved anything. But somehow I felt different now. Much as I hated the idea of taking advice from any adult, I knew Carmichael was right. It all came down to either doing something or doing nothing. I looked at my cell phone. No way. It wouldn’t be anonymous. My call could be traced. I kept walking.
But I kept thinking about Abby. She was not going to come out of this well. The drugs, the selling game, the whole Bryce thing. Fuck it.
I looked up. I was standing right in front of a pay phone.
Chapter Twenty-One
A pay phone? I didn’t even know there were any of those left. I lifted the receiver and heard a dial tone. It actually worked. I dropped in coins and made the call. I got a machine. I didn’t say a word about Abby, but I told them everything I knew about Bryce, about kryptonite and Bonner’s and the plan to sell this “legal” drug.
And then I got on with my life. I didn’t go looking for Bryce, but I kept hoping I might run into Abby. I asked after her again at Striker’s, and I went over to Carsonville now and then and just walked, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. I tried texting and phoning but soon got a “this number is no longer in service” message. I guess you could say Abby was my kryptonite.
I didn’t feel great about turning Bryce in. In many ways, it didn’t feel right. I hated being a snitch. I’d had kids snitch on me more than once.
I started reading some stuff on the Internet about kryptonite and a few other recent drugs, and all the harm they were causing among unsuspecting users. You’d think that would have made me feel good about trying to stop Bryce. But it didn’t. There was so much of that shit out there, Bryce was just a drop in the bucket. If he was no longer on the scene, someone else would take his place.
I plodded through the rest of the school year. Carmichael never asked me if I had made the call. But he treated me differently. He’d call on me in class and ask for my opinion on some point of philosophy. And I had answers. I soon realized that I actually liked his class and the challenges it presented.
I dreamed about Abby from time to time. I used that facial-recognition program on a dozen search engines, expecting to get a ping for Abby or Bryce. Nothing.
And then, three weeks after I’d written that story and made that phone call, I got a letter. An actual letter in the mail. It was from Abby.
Dear Jackson,
Well, I’m back in Westlake. I hate it here.
I think I made a lot of big mistakes.
I wanted to stay in touch with you, but Bryce wouldn’t let me. He said you were a liar and a manipulator, that I should never trust you again.
And maybe I shouldn’t.
I just wish you had never led me back to Bryce. I should have realized how good you were to me.
I guess you can figure out that I got caught at something. I was pretty stupid really. I did whatever Bryce told me to do. He had that kryptonite stuff, but there were other things too. I liked the idea of the danger and the money, of course. When I got busted, Bryce never came for me. I never heard from him.
He just disappeared. Again.
So now I’m back here.
I’m writing to you, Jackson, because I want you to know that I really have feelings for you. And I know you cared for me. And I screwed that up really badly.
I’d like you to write back to me. Send it by mail. They’ll let me have mail and maybe, maybe, I can call you. Can we do that?
Can we pick up where we left off?
Love,
Abby
The letter totally caught me off guard. I wanted to write back immediately, but something stopped me. I guess you could say I was having another ethical dilemma.
I felt bad that Abby was back in Westlake, and I knew there was a good chance that my phone call was directly responsible for it. I was the snitch. Maybe I had been brainwashed by Carmichael and his philosophy bullshit.
I held her letter in my hands for a really long time. I studied the elegant feminine handwriting, and I held it to my face. I could smell Abby. I still thought about that girl a lot.
But doors were opening in my mind. That’s what it felt like. Doors opening. Sunlight. Sky. I needed to get out of the house and go for a really long walk. Out through some real doors and out into the world. I put on my old running shoes and a hoodie. On my way out, I dropped that letter in the trash.
Lesley Choyce, who has been teaching English and creative writi
ng for over thirty years, is the author of dozens of books, including Identify and Scam in the Orca Soundings series. He has won the Dartmouth Book Award, the Atlantic Poetry Prize and the Ann Connor Brimer Award. He has also been shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Medal, the White Pine Award, the Hackmatack Award, the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Award and, most recently, the Governor General’s Literary Award. For more information, visit www.lesleychoyce.com.
Titles in the Series
Another Miserable Love Song
Brooke Carter
B Negative
Vicki Grant
Back
Norah McClintock
Bang
Norah McClintock
Battle of the Bands
K.L. Denman
Big Guy
Robin Stevenson
Bike Thief
Rita Feutl
Blue Moon
Marilyn Halvorson
Breaking Point
Lesley Choyce
Breathing Fire
Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang
Breathless
Pam Withers
Bull Rider
Marilyn Halvorson
Bull’s Eye
Sarah N. Harvey
Caged
Norah McClintock
Cellular
Ellen Schwartz
Charmed
Carrie Mac
Chill
Colin Frizzell
Comeback
Vicki Grant
Coming Clean
Jeff Ross
Crash
Lesley Choyce
Crush
Carrie Mac
Cuts Like a Knife
Darlene Ryan
Damage
Robin Stevenson
A Dark Truth
Jeff Ross
The Darwin Expedition
Diane Tullson
Dead-End Job
Vicki Grant
Deadly
Sarah N. Harvey
Dead Run
Sean Rodman
Kryptonite Page 5