“He deserves it,” I say.
And then it’s my bloody body on that table. Lindsey’s. Taylor’s. Blair Mattern’s. If he could have, Kyle would have killed any of us. Maybe all of us.
“He definitely deserves it.” I know I am right. And that rightness thrums in my chest like a pulse.
There is no punishment Kyle Paxson doesn’t deserve.
How to Fight Dirty
Lindsey and I hide in my room most of the morning, listening to music, complaining about the paper we have to write for Mr. Harrel’s government class (the same class—though I have it third period and Lindsey has it seventh), and analyzing each other’s dreams.
I dreamed of swimming across a lake, which Lindsey says represents emotional questioning, while the marching band played fight songs on the opposite bank, which she says represents my need to overcome. She doesn’t specify what I need to overcome, and I don’t ask.
Her dreams are not so easy: Her mother, her sister, and Robert drift away in a hot-air balloon, while she’s stuck in the city below where there’s some sort of epidemic that makes people lose their skin.
“Um,” I say, “maybe you’re afraid of something?”
“Like what?”
“You know, like losing your skin?”
“Well, that’s literal.” She gives me a look. “You’re really not good at this, are you?”
I shake my head and suggest we go find breakfast.
My mother is at the kitchen table with the crossword puzzle and a cup of coffee. “The prodigal girls return,” she says.
She is always saying things that don’t make sense. I’ve learned to ignore it.
“Hungry,” I say.
“There are muffins.” She states the obvious, gesturing toward a platter on the counter. “Or you could fix yourself a bowl of cereal. There’s yogurt, oatmeal—”
“This is good,” I interrupt, aware my mother will go on listing everything edible in a ten-mile radius of the kitchen if I let her. I take two muffins and pass one to Lindsey.
“Thanks!” I call over my shoulder as we skirt out of the kitchen to the den.
There, Lindsey turns on the TV and clicks through the channels until she lands on some celebrity gossip show. My phone chimes in the pocket of my sweats. It’s from Charlie. I’d added his number last night and then texted him so he’d have mine. As I open the message, my insides go rigid, like they’re on heightened alert.
Thinking of you, beautiful. Time for a run today?
I grin and pass the phone to Lindsey, who gets an evil smirk on her face and starts typing.
“What are you doing?” I yell. “Stop it!” I try to grab the phone, but Lindsey swoops aside, still typing.
“Don’t!”
She stands up on the couch and, holding the phone above her head, snaps a photo of me as I try to wrestle the phone from her hands, then gives me a devilish look and clicks what I can only guess is send.
“What, do you want this?” she asks, the picture of innocence, and holds out the phone to me.
“You suck,” I say, taking the phone from her outstretched hand.
“That’s what you get for not having sisters,” she says. “If you had a sister, you’d know how to fight dirty.”
When I check it, there’s a message to Lindsey. Not Charlie. And an unflattering picture of me—well, mostly my hand—grabbing for the phone.
I’m messing with your head. This is what it looks like. Love you! Ha!
“Oh, you double suck!” I laugh, relieved.
“You know I’d never do that,” she says. “You just looked so pleased with yourself.” She plops down on the sofa and takes a sip of her coffee. “So, are you going?”
“Going where?”
“Running. With Charlie?”
I like the sound of that. Running with Charlie.
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, I think I am.”
Running
The path by the river is smattered with leaves. I try to keep my mind on the darkness of them as we pass. The wetness of them. The way they glob up in the gutter between the greenway and the road.
I am thinking of leaves because I don’t want to think.
The smack of our soles against the pavement makes a comfortable rhythm.
Leaves are safe. Leaves, leaves, leaves.
The way I feel for Charlie isn’t safe.
I love how fast he is, how he smiles when I come up beside him. Even the casual smile of one runner to another feels… glowy. Like there should be angels singing choir-like in the trees.
We don’t talk. I guess he doesn’t feel the need. I’d probably babble out of nerves alone, but I don’t want to embarrass myself by panting in this cold air.
When we reach the end of this stretch of the greenway, he’s hardly winded as he asks, “You want to hike up the hill?”
I nod and we slow to a walk. The path ends in a big circle near a parking lot. As we head across the lot, he matches his pace to mine, walking beside me, and I wonder if we should be holding hands. He doesn’t take my hand, though, and I don’t take his.
Together, we make our way through the woods, up and up. There’s still green in the underbrush, some ivy-ish and ferny-looking stuff, but mostly just brown earth and yellowed, fallen leaves.
The path ends, opening to a vast, grassy meadow, which goes on for almost a mile before it lowers to the road. Beyond, another mountain rises, immense and speckled with the orange of October.
On the hill where we’ve arrived, there are maybe a dozen big wooden jumps where people train their horses. Some look like stairsteps, others like little houses for gnomes.
I’ve been here before, but I’d forgotten the view. After the long climb through the trees, it’s almost too open, too gorgeous.
I love being here with Charlie—the world in front of us.
Two years ago, I might have said forever was in front of us. But I know there’s no such thing. Because of Jamie. Because of Kyle.
It’s like that country song “Live Like You Were Dying.”
And mostly, I do.
Or maybe I just live like some random boy might at any moment slaughter me.
It’s not the way they describe it in the song.
“What would you do,” I ask Charlie, “if you knew you were going to die tomorrow?”
“Hmmm.” He looks up at the sky, down at the grass. “Where did that question come from?”
“Country music.” I laugh because the truth sounds so ridiculous. He doesn’t answer at first, so I climb onto the end of a nearby horse jump and walk along its ridge, holding my arms out on either side for balance. When I get to the other side, I squat and angle my legs around so I’m sitting. “So…? What would you do?”
“I’m not sure.” Charlie comes over to lean against the jump, right next to me. “Maybe I’d spend the day with my family, just hanging out. Maybe I’d try to write something, you know, to leave behind. Some sad little yawp to prove Charlie Hunt was here.” He pushes off the log and looks out at the view. His back is to me when he says, “Maybe I’d go see Kyle. Maybe I’d… I’d…” He turns toward me, shrugs.
“You’d spend your last day with Kyle?”
“I mean, it’d be the end anyway, right? And it’d feel pretty good to beat the crap out of him.”
“Oh,” I say. I hadn’t thought of that. The bruises on Charlie’s face are faded yellow and brown in the afternoon light, like the leaves.
“I don’t know, really,” he says. “Most likely, I’d be right here, doing just what I’m doing. Here, with you.” Taking my hand, he pulls me from the log. He steps closer so the length of our bodies touch, like we’re slow dancing without the music. “This isn’t such a bad last day,” he says. Then Charlie is kissing me, and I’m kissing him back.
It’s a good kiss. More deliberate than in the bar parking lot. Not so full of questions. And for a minute, I give myself over to the softness of his lips, his earthy boy smell. I’m in a beautiful void, and I ne
ver want to leave.
Then he pushes my hair back from my cheek, tucks it behind my ear. “What about you?” he says. “How would you spend your last day on earth?”
“Who knows,” I say, “maybe this is my last day.” It’s the truth, too, but I don’t laugh at it.
“You shouldn’t say that,” he says, and when he looks into my eyes, I’m not sure it’s me he sees.
“I don’t know. No one does.… Jamie didn’t know.”
“Just stop.” He steps away, and the warm space where his body had been shielding mine goes cold. “You can’t live like that.”
“But I do,” I say. “Most the time, it’s like I’m… like I’m not living at all. I’m just some girl who, for whatever reason, isn’t dead yet. A girl he didn’t kill.”
“I hate him. God, I hate him.”
I know that hate. I feel it. But seeing it on Charlie’s face—his beautiful features twisted and hollow—makes me sad more than anything else.
I touch Charlie’s cheek. “You sure you don’t hate me, too…?” This time I don’t say her name, but there can only be one way to fill in that blank. For living when Jamie died?
“Why would you even ask that?”
He pulls me close, so there’s no need for me to answer, only feel the comfort of his arms around me, trembling the smallest bit from all he’s holding in. I press my ear against his chest, listening for his heartbeat. When I find it—quick and strong—I smile at the wonder of it, its steady persistence. Tha-thum, tha-thum, tha-thum. The best sound I’ve ever heard.
Strange Blooms
Monday morning, I’m walking to my car when I see in my periphery a blur of colors beside our front door.
Flowers—a willowy bouquet of yellows, purples, and whites in an openmouthed glass jar. I walk closer. They look to be mostly wild flowers, the kind you find at the neglected edges of things, around the train tracks or behind the convenience store. Airy and open and gorgeous, except for a single clump of blooms that doesn’t seem to belong: five tight-fisted carnations colored a pale blue. Artificial-looking, like they’ve been dyed.
In the jar, there’s a clear plastic trident-thing sticking up, and tucked in its prongs, a small tan envelope.
I snatch the envelope up and do a tiny happy dance, singing under my breath, Charlie sent me flowers, Charlie sent me flowers!
I fumble open the envelope and slip out the note.
There, in tight cursive letters:
It’s not your fault
Four words.
No charming cliché. No overblown emotion. No signature even.
I’m not sure what I was expecting, but not this.
It’s not your fault? I feel like a popped balloon. What isn’t my fault? What does that even mean?
I think back to yesterday, on that hilltop. How we were talking about Jamie.
I guess it could make sense in that context.
It could actually be kind of sweet, right?
I mean, the flowers are pretty, and he took the time to get up early and pick them or buy them at Kroger’s or wherever.
Because here’s the thing. I have only received flowers one other time in my entire life, and that was when my dad took me to the father-daughter dance for my Brownies troop, so I’m not about to let this—my first time ever to get flowers from a boy, not to mention a boy I really really like—be ruined by a somewhat cryptic, vaguely creepy note. I mean, he probably wasn’t even awake when he wrote it. Or maybe he was quoting a song lyric or something and I just don’t get it?
I quick Google “it’s not your fault,” but all I get is a million hits for Good Will Hunting.
I stuff the note in my jacket pocket and pick up the flowers, holding them at arm’s length, admiring their color against the blue-frosting sky.
They truly are beautiful. Bright and shimmery.
I don’t have time to take them inside, so I set them in the shade beside a shrub where they won’t get too much afternoon sun.
Happy—and determined to be happy—I jog to my car.
Alas, Poor Yorick
When I get to English class, I can’t keep my eyes off Charlie. Mr. Campbell has made us move our desks into a sort of crooked horseshoe. “It’s a circle of trust,” he says. “I want you to see each other when you share your free-writes.” I try to keep my face forward, but my eyes keep veering to my left, where Charlie is sitting.
It’s not just that he’s good-looking, though he is good-looking. It’s that he’s… Charlie Hunt. Which to me is synonymous with some sort of cosmic magnet that I’ve been trying to avoid for the last half of my life. But now, I guess I get to look at him all I want.
And not only look, but I can—well, for one, I can now admit (if only to myself) that even when I was at my craziest over Sander, I would have dropped him like a hot brick if Charlie had shown the least interest in me.
But Charlie was always with Jamie. And now he’s, well, not with me, exactly. But sort of. I mean, he got me flowers.
And she’s…
It’s messed up. A sprinkle of guilt baked into every delicious bite!
Mr. Campbell booms, “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio!” We’re at that place in Hamlet where the prince finds the skull of his buddy Yorick, the court jester, and starts spewing crazy-talk to him.
“You know the Long Theater Building on Main Street? Where the social service offices are?” Mr. Campbell asks. “Well, a long time ago, it was used for plays. The guy it’s named after, Jedidiah Long, left that building to the town in his will. He also left money to organize an acting troupe for the theater. But”—Mr. Campbell raises his arm and wags his finger dramatically—“Mr. Long had one stipulation. After his death, he wanted his skull to be taken from his corpse and used as the skull of Yorick in a production of Hamlet.”
“Ewwww,” says Paige Sanchez. “So, was it? I mean, did they actually do that?”
Mr. Campbell sighs with satisfaction, giving Paige the that’s just the question I wanted to hear look. “I have no idea, and no real way of finding out,” he says. “There’s no written record, and anyone who might have once known is long dead. Which leads us to one of the main themes of Hamlet: the uncertainty of life, and the mystery of death. We can never know… well, pretty much anything, can we? Can we know by looking at someone the state of their soul? Can we guess what consequences our actions will have? The entire play is about our inability to really know what the heck is going on.”
Mr. Campbell plucks a large, skull-shaped candle off his desk.
“And then we come to Yorick.” He gives the skull-candle a lazy toss. “‘Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs?’ Hamlet is essentially asking Yorick, the court jester from his youth, where his life has gone. ‘Here hung those lips that I have kissed.…’ So where Yorick’s lips were is now just skull. It’s like Hamlet’s trying to figure out exactly where that line is between being alive and playful and fun, and being dead, rotted down to the bone, in a worm-eaten grave.”
I can feel the tension spike through Charlie’s body from two feet away.
Geez, I think toward Mr. Campbell, do we really have to do this?
Because if skulls and graves make me think of Jamie, what must Charlie be thinking?
Inside I scream, HOW CAN YOU BE SO OBLIVIOUS?!
I don’t care that I’m not being fair. I get that it’s Hamlet, which is pretty much a big parade of death. I get that the only outward indication of Charlie’s agitated state is the index finger of his right hand tapping the edge of his desk, lightly, but at a sugar-high pace. Even so.
“So for your free-write, I want you to meditate on death. What can we know about it? What does it mean? Get out a clean sheet of paper. I want you to write for five minutes. Don’t worry about grammar. Just keep your pencils moving. Start…” Mr. Campbell checks the wall clock, and then, when he realizes it reads 10:11, where it’s been stuck all year, pulls out his cell phone and sets the timer. “Now!”
I feel like
I’m going to be sick.
How can I possibly write about death?
Instead, I stare at the floor, focused only on the curved line of feet across from me. It’s like one of those words that can be read backward or forward, only made out of shoes; from left to right: boots, flip-flops, tennis shoes, heels, tennis shoes, flip-flops, boots.
Next to me, Charlie is bent over his desk, writing furiously, like there’s not enough paper in the world and he has to use it all.
I pick up my pen, doodle something to avoid making actual words. Write whatever you’re thinking, Mr. Campbell said, but the words I’m thinking are best not committed to paper.
Fartwad. Asshat. Prick.
I scribble a few random words, put my pen to my lip like I’m in the “thinking” pose, and stare some more at other people’s feet.
Finally, the five minutes are up, and Mr. Campbell makes us go around and “share” our free-writes. And share we do.
Someone has a dead grandmother, dead fish, dead cat. One boy whose name I don’t know feels way too guilty about accidentally stepping on a stinkbug. Clarissa Coleson reads a pro-vegan poem that rhymes “Barack Obama” with “sock-sore llama,” and Nick Richert’s paragraph is nothing but a list of questions that only a zombie could answer.
When Mr. Campbell gets to me, I rub my eye with my knuckle, fold over my paper of scribbles, and tell him it’s kind of personal. “Could you maybe skip me this time?” I ask in my most pitiful voice. I’m not much of an actress, but Mr. Campbell’s not much of a judge of character either.
He nods. “Just this once.”
Finally, it’s Charlie’s turn. This is what he reads:
You asked us to write about death. I want to write about love.
They’re not the same, but they link us together in the same way. Death and love. They both wrap us up in their cords, and they don’t let go.
And when they mix—when death takes the one you love so far away you can never touch her again, you can never hear her voice, you never see her smile—when death leaves you alone in a room with a wooden box, and inside that wooden box is another box, and inside that box is another, and it just keeps going on and on until you finally get to the smallest box, and that box you can never open—that doesn’t mean the love is dead, too.
How She Died, How I Lived Page 11