by Tim Floreen
Callie stopped pacing and stared straight at me through her window. “Are you fucking kidding me? So you saw him? You talked to him?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And your mom asked you to do it? Isn’t that a little fucked up?”
“This project’s important to her. You know how she is about her work.”
“But she didn’t even stop to think it might retraumatize you to see him?”
“It didn’t, Callie,” I snapped. “I was in there for five minutes. Less.”
Across the street she shook her head and went back to pacing. “So what the hell was he like?”
“He was a monster, Callie. He said stuff about my brother. That maybe he wouldn’t have died if he’d played Son of War. And other stuff too.”
“That’s fucking sick.”
I stared at the smears of color on my desk, trying to make a picture emerge from the random markings. “Here’s what I can’t stop thinking: even if Mom’s procedure succeeds, even if Franklin suddenly starts acting completely different, Pete’s killer will still be in there, won’t he? Like Tor said at lunch today, Franklin’s always going to be the guy who shot Pete. I mean, I’m no brain scientist, I’m not even good at science—”
“I can confirm that.”
“But something inside me says whatever made Franklin Kettle the way he is, capable of doing the things he’s done, you can’t just fix it with a little cerebral rewiring.”
“What do you mean? You think there’s something wrong with his soul?”
On the shelf above my desk, on the top of my stack of gothic horror novels, lay my copy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Like the other old paperbacks on that shelf, this one had a lurid cover from the sixties or something. Half the reason I’d bought the books in the first place was for their covers. Painted with crude strokes in garish colors, they had a weirdness that had inspired some of the images in my Tattoo Atlas. The Jekyll and Hyde cover depicted a man’s face split in two, one half handsome and respectable-looking and brightly lit, the other twisted and menacing and shrouded in shadow. On that side a bunch of demons—the original inspirations for my imps—hovered around him.
“Maybe,” I said. “I just don’t think I believe evil is some disease you can treat, like malaria.”
When I glanced across Boreal Street, Callie had stopped pacing again. She leaned her shoulder against the window frame and peered across at me. “I understand how you feel, Rem. I do. I’ve told you about my mom, right?”
“A little.” I knew Callie’s mother suffered from clinical depression, and I knew that had made life tough for Callie sometimes, although to me Mrs. Minwalla had always been this friendly neighborhood mom who invited us all over every year on Callie’s birthday for a huge Indian feast she cooked herself.
“For a long time,” Callie said, “when my mom would have one of her sad spells and start crying constantly, I’d get so fucking furious at her. I’d take it personally, almost. I’d want to shake her and say, ‘We have a good life, there’s nothing to be sad about, so why can’t you just be fucking happy?’ It took me a long time to understand she had an illness. She wasn’t sad because we had a bad life, she was sad because there was something wrong with her brain. Maybe evil’s the same way. Maybe evil is a disease.”
I set my copy of Jekyll and Hyde back on the shelf. “But if we start thinking of evil like that, then what happens to the whole idea of personal responsibility? Just because my mom tweaked Franklin’s brain a little, does that suddenly mean we don’t hold him accountable for the horrible thing he did? Does that make him innocent somehow?”
“I don’t know,” Callie said. “Believe me, I get what you’re saying. I’m pretty sure I hate Franklin just as much as you do. How could we not? But do you think—and I’m just playing devil’s advocate here—do you think that has more to do with us than with Franklin? Like to us he’ll always be Pete’s killer?”
I didn’t answer.
Callie went quiet too. She turned away from the window, so I couldn’t see her face anymore. “Hey, Rem,” she said in a lower voice, “you want to know a secret? Like, a really twisted one?”
“Sure.”
“Before the Big Bang, I thought there was something sort of hot about him.”
“Franklin Kettle? Really?”
“In a weird, weird way. I mean, weird can be hot, can’t it? The way he walked around school all quiet and moody in that black hair and black denim jacket of his . . . you have to admit, it was kind of sexy. Plus, have you ever really looked at his face under all that hair and those glasses?”
“I’m not sure.” I hoped my voice hadn’t gone funny, or if it had, that she didn’t notice. “But Callie—”
She groaned. “I know. Thinking about it now, it makes me fucking nauseous knowing my brain even went there. But back then he wasn’t a killer. Just the odd kid who lived at the end of our block.” Across the street she turned around to peek at me. “It’s late. I should go.”
“Hey, before you do.” I stood and touched my fingers to the cold glass of my window. “I meant what I said earlier. Your speech today totally got me, just like you told me it would. Everything else about that stupid assembly was a joke, but what you said was the real thing. You did Pete proud, Callie.”
She put her fingers against her window too. “Thanks. Sleep well, Rem. No nightmares, okay?”
“Fingers crossed.”
She reached for the string on her blinds and disappeared.
It was almost eleven. I still didn’t feel tired, so I pulled my Tattoo Atlas from its hiding place. I already knew what I wanted to draw. Another story Callie had told about Pete in her speech had given me the idea. Each morning when he rode to school in the way back of the Saab, with his gigantic bulk draped across the bench seat, he’d almost always fall back to sleep for a while. Once we forgot all about him and left him there, and he slept clear through the first two periods. After that he’d always say to us as he climbed in through the rear door, “Now, don’t forget I’m back here, okay?”
I grabbed a pencil and turned to a blank page in the sketchbook. From memory I drew my Saab as seen from the back. Pete sat in his regular spot on the rear-facing bench seat, his knees and round face visible through the window, a small bloody bullet hole in the center of his forehead. I sketched the neck and shoulders and upper back of a person sprouting from the bottom of the car, like the Saab was actually someone’s head. Over the top of the drawing, following the line of the car’s roof, I wrote in cursive, Now, don’t forget I’m back here, okay? Then I drew a little banner below, held up by two imps, that read PETE.
I’d just started to reach for my watercolors when my phone buzzed with a text from Lydia.
Can you come outside? I’m on your back porch. I need to talk.
I squeezed my bottom lip between my forefinger and thumb while I stared at the screen. It was cold outside. If she needed to talk, why didn’t she ask if she could come in, or invite me over to her place? And what did she need to talk to me about? Of all the other members of the Boreal Five, I’d always felt least close to her. Her goodness sometimes got on my nerves. Ironic, maybe, considering everybody knew me as Mr. Nice Guy. These days, for obvious reasons, I felt like talking to her even less.
Be there in a sec, I texted back.
Mom was still up when I left my room, still sitting at the kitchen table with her back very straight, still cradling the same glass of wine. Or maybe she’d broken her rule tonight and poured herself another. “Shouldn’t you get some sleep?” I asked.
“Can’t. Brain’s too busy.” She wiggled her fingers next to her head. “Neurons firing all over the place.” Pushing back her gray hair with its thick lock of white, she peered at me. “You’re sure you’re okay with talking to Franklin again tomorrow? Because you know you can change your mind. I don’t want you to feel pressured.”
“It’s not a problem, Mom.”
There, you see? I told Callie in my head. My mom does worry ab
out how seeing Franklin will affect me.
Grabbing my coat, I said, “I’m just going over to Lydia’s for a bit. I’ll be back soon.”
I went out through the front door, but then I circled around the house and found Lydia sitting on a bench on the back porch.
“What’s up, Lydia? Why did you want to talk out here? It’s freezing.”
She shrugged. Her eyes flicked toward Tor’s house. His bedroom window was visible from here, and light still glowed from it.
“Why don’t you come inside?”
She shook her head. Even in the darkness I could make out tear marks on her freckly cheeks.
I cleared more snow off the bench and sat next to her. “Tell me.”
“I didn’t know who else to talk to,” she said in a choked voice.
“What about?”
She bit her lip and gave her head another shake, like she couldn’t decide how to begin. “Rem, do you have a cigarette?”
“You mean, like, to smoke?”
She pulled off her gloves, rifled around in her purse, and pulled out a pack. “Never mind. I have one.”
I gaped at her. “Okay, I feel like I’ve just jumped into an alternate reality.”
She had a lighter, too. The flame sprang up, the light flashing in her wet eyes. The cigarette crackled as it caught. She exhaled.
“Seriously, Lydia, you’re freaking me out. You hate smoking. It goes against everything you stand for.”
“Which is why I don’t tell anyone I do it, and I hope you won’t either. This doesn’t happen very often. Only when I’m feeling reeeally pooey.”
She smoked, but she still couldn’t bring herself to say the word “shitty.” That, at least, I found reassuring.
“How long have you been smoking? Since . . . ?”
“The Big Bang. Yeah. A few weeks after it happened, I had this weird urge to do something really bad, so I stole three cigarettes from the pack Tor keeps in his coat and smoked them when I got home. That was it. I was hooked.”
I smirked at her. “Yeah, that’s really bad.”
She held the cigarette out to me.
Uh-oh, I thought. I’d only ever taken about one and a half puffs, and lots of coughing and retching had ensued. How was I going to fake this?
“Oops,” she said. “You quit. Sorry, I forgot.”
“Right.”
She took another drag and stared at the gazebo. The sight of her smoking was still blowing my mind. Like Callie, I’d always sort of assumed Lydia was the most psychologically healthy person on earth. But I supposed it stood to reason that Pete’s death had left its mark on her, too.
“Would you answer a question for me, Rem?” she finally said. “And be honest. Do you know of any reason why Tor might be faking his feelings for me?”
My cheeks turned hot in spite of the cold. “Not that I can think of. Why?”
“Is there something wrong with me? You can tell me. I can take it.”
“Of course not. What’s going on, Lydia?”
She studied the red glowing tip of her cigarette. “I told you how the two of us got together, right?”
“You were lab partners, you’d been working together in the bio lab after school, the sight of cat intestines and the smell of formaldehyde got you in the mood. It makes perfect—”
“He had a panic attack.”
I looked at her. “Tor?”
“At least I think that’s what it was. We were working on the cat, and all of a sudden he stumbled back from the table and sat down on the floor like he was dizzy. His face was all pale and sweaty. I ran over and put my arm around him and asked him if he was thinking about Pete. He nodded yes. It made sense to me, with that dead cat laid out in front of us and the posters with Pete’s picture all over the lab walls. They’d only gone up that morning. So I just sat there and held him.
“After a while, he seemed to feel better. Then he grinned and said, ‘So this is what it takes to get you to put your hands on me.’ The next thing I knew, we were kissing. Even at the time, I almost wondered if he was just trying to cover up for his freak-out. And ever since then, he’s been . . . odd. He acts all affectionate in public, but when we’re alone, there’s suddenly a game on TV he has to watch, or he decides he needs to do a million push-ups right then. We’ve been going out for three weeks, and already it’s like we’re an old married couple. That’s weird, right?”
I nodded. It was weird. I’d never heard any rumors about Tor having trouble getting physical with other girls he’d dated. Then again, I hadn’t been close to any of his previous girlfriends. There had been a lot of them, but none had lasted very long. Had he been like that with them too, or was Lydia the exception?
Not that I was complaining either way. I couldn’t help it: a warm flush of pleasure spread through me as I imagined the two of them sitting awkwardly side by side, not touching, while in his mind he was creeping back down to the steam tunnels with me.
I wondered if that made me an asshole, but then I reminded myself of what I’d told Callie: I’d been with Tor first. Lydia was the interloper here, even if she didn’t know it.
She sniffled, scrunching her freckle-covered nose. “I was always worried I’d be too much of a prude for Tor, but evidently that’s not an issue.” With a glance at me, she added, “I thought maybe you’d have some idea what’s going on. You know him as well as anyone.”
“Nobody really knows Tor,” I said. “The guy’s a mystery.”
“Do you think he might just be going out with me to please his parents?”
Tor’s parents did love Lydia. Why wouldn’t they? She was kind, smart, pretty, polite—the perfect girl next door, who actually did happen to live next door. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
She flicked her cigarette, and a smattering of dark ash dusted the white snow at her feet. “I’ve had a crush on Tor since I was seven. It never even mattered that he could be a jerk sometimes. I swear, he’s my kryptonite.”
Mine too, I could’ve said.
She took another drag and flashed her eyes in my direction. “Any more news about Franklin?”
“Not really.”
“So they still don’t know if the procedure was a success?”
“Uh-uh. They have to do lots of tests.”
“I have to admit, sometimes I wonder how it would even be possible to fix someone like him.” She shook her head. “I guess that’s not very nice of me to say.”
“Don’t worry, I feel the exact same way. I was just trying to explain it to Callie. Like, you know that game he’s obsessed with, Son of War? My mom downloaded it for her research, and earlier today I got curious and tried playing it. I felt so gross afterward I felt like I should take a shower. I’m pretty sure anyone who likes playing that game must be completely sick. I guess that says a lot about the general population of our country.”
Lydia got quiet. She pulled her auburn ponytail over her shoulder and played with it, her face caught in a wince. “Rem? I think I need to make another confession.”
“You don’t.”
She buried her face in her hand. “I do. I downloaded Son of War the same day I smoked my first cigarette, and now I love playing that awful game. Blowing those bad guys’ guts out just feels so good. It takes my mind off things when I’m having a bad day.” She brushed her ponytail back over her shoulder. “Which probably explains why I’ve been playing it so much lately.”
“I guess I can understand that. To be totally honest, part of me liked playing it too. But it really doesn’t bother you, all the violence? Even after the Big Bang and everything?”
“Not really. Maybe there’s something wrong with my brain.” She dunked the tip of her cigarette in some snow banked on the side of the bench. “I should go.”
I gave her coat sleeve a tug. “Will you be okay? I wish I could’ve helped more.”
“Just give me an hour in my room with Son of War and I’ll be good as new.” She stood. “You won’t repeat what I to
ld you about me and Tor, will you?”
“Of course not.”
Lydia glanced again at the gazebo. A sad smile crossed her face, and I knew she was thinking of the five of us hanging out in the ice palace. From there her eyes went one more time to Tor’s window. Then she turned away, still carrying the cigarette so she could dispose of it responsibly in a trash can.
I waited to hear the distant clunk of Lydia’s front door closing before cutting across my backyard and through the trees that separated the Agnarsons’ property from ours. On the way I texted Tor. Coming to your kitchen door. Need to talk.
Tor opened the door and waved me in. His parents had gone to Europe for their twentieth anniversary, and he didn’t have any siblings, so I’d figured I’d find him there alone. I followed him down the hall and up the stairs. Tor’s mom kept the place immaculate, with bouquets of fresh flowers and tasteful arrangements of objets everywhere you looked.
“What’s up?” Tor said, pushing his bedroom door shut behind him. His room was neat too, but instead of flowers and objets, military-straight rows of swimming trophies covered every available surface.
I leaned back against his desk, folded my arms across my chest, and tried to figure out what I wanted to say. It felt strange being alone with him in his room. I hardly ever found myself in Tor’s house without Lydia and Callie here too, and we’d certainly never messed around here before. Another of Tor’s unspoken rules, besides the no-kissing thing, was that his house and mine were off-limits.
“I was just talking to Lydia.”
“Really?” For no apparent reason, he peeled off his T-shirt and tossed it in a corner. I was used to that—he did it in front of Callie and Lydia too—but it still got harder to form coherent sentences with all those muscles bulging and rippling in my field of vision.
“She was upset, Tor.”
“What about?”
“You. She said you’re all over her in public, but you ignore her whenever you two are alone.” I arched my eyebrow. “What’s wrong? Don’t you like her bends and curves anymore?”