Tattoo Atlas

by Tim Floreen

  Then I spotted them through the crowd of bodies: two pale legs stretched out on the lowest steps in just the same way Callie’s had been when I’d seen her dead on the cafeteria floor.

  “Rem?” Mrs. Hicks had noticed me.

  “Lydia.” The word sounded more like a gasp. I barely had enough breath to speak. “What happened? Is she—”

  The crowd parted. Lydia appeared, sitting at the bottom of the staircase.

  Alive.

  I almost passed out right there on the doorstep. “I heard you scream,” I panted. “Are you okay?”

  She covered her face with her hands. “I’m so embarrassed.” Peeking through her fingers, she said, “I’m sorry I scared you, Rem. I thought I heard something outside my window. It was probably just a nightmare.”

  “No nightmare would make you scream like that.” Her dad crossed his arms and cast a grim glance up the stairs. “I heard it too. There was someone outside.”

  “But whoever it was didn’t get in?” I said.

  She fidgeted with the hem of her pajama shorts and shook her head.

  I gripped the frame of the Hickses’ front door. My heart had slowed a little. At least I knew Franklin had been in my room, attached to my mouth, when all this had happened. Already my mind had started working. Could this be the proof I’d hoped to find that Franklin hadn’t killed Callie? If so, could it prove his innocence in other people’s eyes too?

  The police officer’s walkie-talkie blared static. A voice said, “We’re almost there. Over.”

  “That’s my backup,” the cop said. “We’ll have to check the house just in case.” He turned to me. “Son, I appreciate your concern, but I need you to go back home.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Talk to you later, Lydia?”

  She gave a weary nod. I closed the front door and raced across the street, my body still buzzing. Now all I could think about was telling Franklin what I’d learned: that I might have what we needed to clear his name once and for all. Mom stood in the doorway waiting for me, her winter coat over her shoulders, her hair in disarray. “What happened?”

  “Lydia heard something outside her window,” I said, hurrying past her into the house. “She thinks it was probably nothing. Look, I should get some sleep.” I rushed to my room, hoping she wouldn’t find my brisk behavior strange. The second I’d pressed my door shut, I whispered, “Franklin? I have some news. Good, I think.” I dropped to my knees to look under the bed.

  Of course. Gone again.

  But he’d left behind the screwdriver he’d used to pry open my window. It lay balanced on the angled surface of my paint-smeared desk, next to my old copy of Jekyll and Hyde.

  When Lydia called about an hour later, I saw her name on my phone’s screen and answered halfway through the first ring.

  “What’s going on?” I said. “How come the cops are still there? Did they find something?”

  I’d been watching her house through the window. Less than a minute after I’d left, two more police cruisers had joined the one already parked at the end of the block. They hadn’t gone yet.

  “Oh, Rem,” she whispered. “I think I really messed up.”

  A little over an hour ago, Lydia had been awoken by noises right outside her window, just like I had earlier that night. She’d sat up screaming, but instead of finding a Son of War mask staring in at her, she’d glimpsed a face she knew: Tor’s. He’d come to surprise her, the same way he had a few nights ago.

  The next instant, he’d disappeared. Her scream had startled him, making him lose his balance and fall. That had prompted Lydia’s second scream.

  “Is he okay?” I asked.

  “He’s fine. I talked to him on the phone a few minutes ago. But when the police searched the house, they found his footprints in the yard and signs he’d climbed up the trellis.”

  “Did they track him all the way back to his place?”

  “No. They don’t know it was him. If my dad had any idea Tor was trying to get into my room, he’d never let me set eyes on him again. But now everybody thinks it was the killer who was trying to get into the house. My dad’s flipping out. Rem, he’s sending me away with my mom to stay with my grandma in Saint Peter.”

  “When?”

  “First thing tomorrow morning. My mom’s already packing.”

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t even know. Until all this blows over, I guess.”

  I got up from my bed and went to the window again. All the lights in the Hickses’ house had stayed on. The three police cruisers still stood in a line along the far side of the street. I’d already noticed Franklin had managed to smooth out the snow outside my window, apparently without anyone spotting him. Our front yard looked as pristine as a blank canvas. That reassured me at least. If the cops searched the rest of the block for signs of a skulking murderer, I didn’t think they’d find any here. But now that I knew Lydia’s prowler wasn’t the killer after all, that also meant I no longer had an alibi for Franklin.

  “Don’t you think maybe you should tell the police the truth, Lydia?” I asked. “It might throw off their investigation if they go on thinking it was the murderer who tried to break in tonight. And then maybe your dad wouldn’t make you leave town.”

  She heaved a breath. “I hate lying, but I just can’t do that to Tor. Plus my dad terrifies me, too. He’d probably send me to my grandma’s anyway, just to teach me a lesson.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. I knew all about keeping secrets I probably shouldn’t.

  The next morning, at the same time we all usually met up to drive to school together, Lydia ran across Boreal Street to hug me and Tor good-bye. Her mom already had their car running; her dad watched us with his arms crossed and a frown on his face. She held Tor a long time, her cheek crushed against his thin long-sleeve T-shirt, but she couldn’t kiss him with her dad there.

  Her eyes glistening, she straightened his earmuffs and ran back across the street to her parents. A minute later Tor and I were rumbling to school in the Saab.

  “And then there were two,” he said.

  I didn’t reply.

  “Are you still mad at me?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” I snapped. “By the way, I’m only giving you a ride today because I didn’t want Lydia to suspect there was something weird going on between us. After school you’re on your own.”

  “I still don’t see what you’re so worked up about.”

  “You treat me like shit, Tor. It’s like you don’t care about other people at all. I swear, sometimes I wish my mom could put a fucking capsule in your head too.”

  He threw up his hands. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You rub your relationship with Lydia in my face. You act like what we do together’s dirty and disgusting. Aren’t those the exact words you used in the cafeteria the other day?”

  “What a load of bullshit. I already explained how it is with me. I never lied to you about that. If you’ll recall, I even tried to end our thing last week because I was worried about how it was affecting you.”

  “Then two days later you were hitting on me again.”

  He shook his head, disgusted. “For Christ’s sake, grow up. Take some responsibility. I never forced you to do a single fucking thing. Come on, Nice Guy. I’m still waiting for you to tell me what I’ve done that’s so goddamn horrendous.”

  “You—”

  I stopped myself. You might’ve gotten my brother killed, I’d almost said. Jesus, where had that come from? I bit my lip and stared at the road.

  Tor shifted in his seat to look at me. He had a Band-Aid on his forehead where he’d bumped himself falling off the trellis. In a gentler voice—the voice that up until a few days ago had never failed to puree my insides—he said, “Look, I know Lydia told you what really happened last night. When I climbed up to her window—”

  “Can you just not talk for a while? I’m really not interested.”

  He pressed his lips together, fa
ced forward, and slammed his fist against the Saab’s hard dash. But he stopped talking. I’d never bossed Tor around like that before, and I had to admit it felt good. Sitting next to him now, I didn’t even feel an urge to bury my face in his neck and breathe in his chlorine scent.

  As we coasted through the snowy streets, my thoughts drifted to Franklin. Was he the reason Tor didn’t have the same hold on me he’d once had? That second kiss we’d shared last night, what the hell did it mean? Had I really gone from having feelings for a mere asshole to having feelings for a sociopathic killer?

  But Franklin wasn’t a sociopath. The capsule had changed him. Over the last few days he’d done more to show how much he cared about me than Tor ever had. He’d spent probably hours drawing detailed portraits of my face. He’d escaped from custody multiple times just so he could spend time with me.

  He’d actually wanted to kiss me on the mouth.

  What did it mean that he’d changed, though? If the gadget in his head had made Franklin the person he was now, was I having feelings for a real person at all? Just thinking about it was enough to scramble my brain. I supposed it was like we’d been saying last night: people changed all the time, for all sorts of reasons. But if people changed all the time, what was it we fell in love with when we fell in love with someone? An idea? An illusion? There had to be something there that didn’t change, right?

  Not that I was falling in love with Franklin.

  We turned a corner, and Lake Superior came into view. The dark sky hung low above it. The weather app on my phone had warned of a blizzard hitting later today, and I could already feel it building. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the Hickses’ Lexus had fallen in behind me, with Lydia’s mom in the driver’s seat and Lydia slumping unhappily next to her. Even if her dad did have a scary overprotective streak, I knew he’d done the right thing sending her away.

  Which made me wonder if I should think about leaving town too. My name was next on the list.

  A sub was standing in for Ms. Utter again today. He’d just called class to order when the door opened and Abigail Lansing slipped in.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” she said to him, the earnest furrow already in place on her forehead. “I have an announcement about the assembly tomorrow.”

  He shrugged and waved her to the front of the room.

  “I wanted to tell you all myself,” Abigail began, “because I know many of you in here were close to Callie Minwalla.” She gave me and Tor a significant nod each. Summoning a teary gleam to her eyes, she said, “Callie was deeply involved in putting together the memorial for Pete Lund that was scheduled for tomorrow. During that time, the two of us became very close, which has made her loss especially hard for me personally.” She bit her lip as if to hold back a sob. “Principal Chen and I have decided to move ahead with the assembly as scheduled, but now we’ll use the time to honor both Pete and Callie. Because she would’ve wanted it that way.”

  Bullshit, I wanted to yell. Callie had always hated assemblies like that. “That’s Principal Chen’s solution to every problem,” Callie had quipped after she first heard about the Big Bang memorial. “Throw a fucking assembly at it.” What would she have said if she’d known she’d be the subject of two assemblies in one week? I wasn’t sure, but it would’ve involved a lot of swearwords.

  I kept my mouth shut, though. Abigail wiped the dramatic track marks from her cheeks and left. After that, the sub spent most of the hour reading out of the history textbook in a dry-mouthed monotone. I didn’t mind. I stacked some books on my desk, laid my cheek on top, and stared out the window at the snow, which had just started to fall.

  And I worked on my plan.

  Mom had said she’d have to work late that evening, and maybe even stay at the lab overnight depending on how bad the snowstorm got, which would make executing my plan easier. At around seven I drove to Nil Bergstrom’s house, just a few blocks over from Boreal Street. I’d been there once before, when we’d been paired together for a science project freshman year—an excruciatingly uncomfortable experience.

  I parked halfway down the block. My vintage Saab didn’t exactly blend in, so I didn’t want to bring it too close. At least the snow had picked up enough that a white blanket was already forming over the bright yellow hood and roof. I got out and crept closer.

  By the light radiating from the little house’s windows, I could see the snow had smoothed out the rutted front lawn, stacked itself on top of the low chain-link fence enclosing the yard, dusted itself across the gray aluminum siding. Nil’s bedroom occupied a detached garage covered in the same gray siding and standing off to one side. I peered at the garage’s small windows, straining to see if she was inside, but I could only make out an inconclusive low blue glow.

  Stepping over the chain-link fence, I slipped under the shelter of some trees that separated the Bergstroms’ yard from their neighbors’. The snow made a soft, dry crackling sound as it landed in the tangle of branches above me. I had to wade through deep drifts even here, but at least the trees would help keep me hidden. I made my way to the garage and crept along the wall farthest from the house until I reached a window. That bluish light continued to filter through the glass. Crouching low, I peered over the sill.

  The room didn’t look all that different from how I remembered it. A large folding table stood against one wall, with three monitors on top—the source of the blue glow. A couple keyboards and lots of papers, soda cans, candy bar wrappers, and other trash covered the rest of the table’s surface. Two PC towers were tucked underneath. Across from the table stood a bed, unmade, with black sheets sagging onto the floor. Nil had painted the walls black too. Son of War posters hung here and there, the mask with its trapezoidal goggles staring out from multiple directions, and there were also a few for old bands like Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails.

  Then my eyes caught on something new: an arrangement of hunting knives decorating one wall, their shiny blades standing out against the matte black paint. Even from where I stood, even in the low light, I could tell how sharp the blades were. Or maybe I just imagined I could.

  But at least I couldn’t see anyone inside. The room appeared still, the bed empty, the computers dormant, their screens all on screen savers displaying contorting blue geometric shapes. I brought my face all the way up to the cold glass and scrutinized the interior. Just below one of the monitors, bathed in its bluish light, a book lay on the table, partially covered by a crumpled potato chip bag. I could still see its black cover, though, and the letters written along the side that spelled FRANKLIN KETTLE.

  I pulled out the screwdriver Franklin had left in my room last night and studied the window. Nil had locked it. I could tell right away. But hadn’t Franklin told me every house had at least one unlocked window? I just had to hope that rule counted for detached garages too. I edged along the wall to the next window, located above Nil’s bed. I cupped my hands around my eyes and put my face to the glass, my heart banging.

  This one she’d left unlocked.

  And if she’d been careless enough to do that, maybe that also meant she hadn’t tricked out her room with security cameras—something I wouldn’t have put past someone as tech-savvy as her. But then again, I reminded myself, so what if she had? If she found out I’d broken into her room, what could she do? Report me for stealing the notebook she’d been concealing for the past year? I could always tell the police the truth, or part of it anyway: that I’d seen her carrying the journal around and wanted to find out if it was the one that had belonged to Franklin. Perhaps using poor judgment, I’d decided to investigate myself. Nil had a lot more to lose than I did.

  I wedged the screwdriver between the window and the frame and wiggled it up and down. It took me a while, but I finally managed to force a gap just big enough for my gloved fingers. The window squeaked and groaned and finally flew upward. I stood there panting and sweating, not even believing what I’d just managed to do.

  Headlights flashed across
the outside of the garage. I dropped to a crouch and spun around, my heart going triple-time now. A car had pulled into the driveway next door, but the trees between the Bergstroms’ property and the neighbors’ screened it from view. The car’s doors opened and closed. The neighbors murmured to each other as they hurried inside. I didn’t think they’d seen me.

  After taking another few seconds to let my heart calm down, I knocked my boots against the wall to get off as much snow as I could and swung my legs over the sill one by one. Scraps of snow still landed on the black sheets, but that couldn’t be helped. I’d reposition the messy bedclothes to cover the water marks before I left and hope for the best.

  I stepped from the bed onto the floor—old shag carpeting, the same shade of green as Nil’s hair, mostly covered with dirty clothes and towels—and pulled the window down to keep out the snow. As I turned around, I noticed the hunting knives again, and my heart hiccupped. I squeezed my eyes shut, shook my head, and forced myself to focus. Whatever I’d gotten myself into, it was too late for second thoughts now. I waded through the mess, past Nil’s giant backpack lying in the center of the floor, to her cobbled-together computer setup on the far side of the room.

  Before I even got to Franklin’s notebook, I noticed something else underneath the trash on the folding table: a blueprint of Duluth Central High School. Had she used it to create the floor plan for the school in Son of War High? Why else would she have something like that lying around?

  I pulled the journal out from under the potato chip bag and ran my finger over the worn sticker on the cover and the red capital letters running down the edges of the pages. The answers might all lie in here. I started to shove the book into my coat pocket, knowing I should leave fast, but then I stopped, stared at it another second, and opened to the first page.