by Barry Lyga
They didn’t even wait for the answer—her look of honest bafflement told the tale.
“You said you were a jock,” Marcie went on. “Did you know the Laird twins at all?”
A fond smile creased her face at the mention of the twins. “Black Lightning. Pride of the school. Fastest four legs in the county. But I played basketball, not track and field. I think one of the twins was in my… chemistry class?” Squinting into the past, she sought confirmation. Couldn’t find it. “I’m not sure.”
“So you didn’t know any of them?” Jorja jumped in before Marcie could follow up. She sounded antsy. Impatient. Elayah willed her to chill out.
“I knew of them, of course. Especially after…” Rourke paused, as though wondering if she should proceed, and then continued, her voice gathering steam with a damn the torpedoes timbre. “After what they did. You do know about what your parents did, right? How they broke into the school?”
“Wait, they did what?” Elayah sat bolt upright.
Rourke nodded. “It was a whole mess. They only really caught one of them, but things leak out.… It was sort of an open secret that they were all involved. They had to be; your folks were all thick as thieves back then.” She paused, lost for a moment in her own skin. “They still close?”
The four friends exchanged looks between them. Liam shrugged.
“Not like in high school,” Jorja offered.
Kathleen sighed heavily and seemed so much older, as though the hope of their parents remaining “thick as thieves” had been one of the primary sparks animating her. “Too bad. They always tell us that high school will be the best four years of your life. But they don’t bother to tell us that you shed it, like—”
“The school,” Marcie prodded. “They broke in?”
“Oh, right. It was homecoming, I guess. I was at the dance. And then suddenly there’s police cars in the parking lot, lights spinning. By Monday, word had spread that there’d been a break-in. And then… I was in… math? Calculus, I guess. With your dad.” She pointed to Liam. “He got called to Admin in the middle of class. We all knew what it was about.”
Liam’s expression said it all: He couldn’t imagine his father—his cop father—breaking and entering.
“What happened then?”
Rourke squinted again, this time tilting her head to the ceiling. “It became a sort of a joke. ‘Keygate.’ Someone was expelled.… I’m sorry, I don’t remember much more. It was a long time ago.”
“Did anyone call you Katie back then?” Marcie asked.
“No. I was always Kathy or Kath. Why?”
Marcie shook her head and did her best to plaster a pleasant smile on her face. Her best wasn’t all that great.
“No reason. Did you know anyone named Katie?”
Rourke favored them with a befuddled look, the same way Elayah’s grandmother looked when her phone asked for her password.
“Thanks for your time,” Elayah said hurriedly, for Jorja was already on her feet and headed to the door.
1986: DEAN
Rules.
Rules made things simpler, Dean had deduced at a young age. When you followed the rules, even if you did the wrong thing, you could still at least proclaim, I followed the rules. And people generally had sympathy for you in that case.
One reason he liked being with Jay, he knew, was that Jay broke the rules. Being in Jay’s presence gave Dean the vicarious thrill of breaking rules, but with the sense that someone else had done it first or worst. It was like when his father sped on the highway—Dean’s dad always made sure someone else was going even faster. If the cops are going to get someone, it’ll be the guy going faster than me, his dad’s theory went.
Dean’s relationship with Jay was similar. Jay broke the rules first and fastest; Dean could watch and assess the danger, then follow if it seemed safe or bail if it didn’t.
But there were times—like now—when he couldn’t let someone run ahead of him and test the waters. Now, in this moment as in so many others recently, he had to break the rules all on his own.
The only advantage to insomnia that he’d identified was this: He possessed an expertise of the nocturnal rhythms of his house. Jenny crashed early, exhausted from college and her job at the record store, falling asleep at an enviable ten o’clock almost every night. Nothing could wake her.
Mom and Dad sometimes stayed up late to watch Johnny Carson’s monologue; Dean could hear Ed McMahon’s baritone guffaws through their door down the hall if he opened his own bedroom door. Dad’s snores provided a handy method of determining when they were asleep. Once Dad was out, Mom never stirred, either.
On this night, Mom and Dad had closed their bedroom door at eleven; ten minutes later, the familiar, broken snorts of Dad’s sleep breathing echoed down the hall.
Dean waited another half hour, just to be safe. Then he crept out of his bedroom, down the hall. Past his parents’ room. The night was cool, but he wore shorts, a T-shirt, and a light blue windbreaker. His hair, washed, was lank and brown, spilling over his head like unkempt blankets on a bed. It was strange to go out without his hair slicked back, without the hard armor of Dep shellacking it to his skull.
He snatched up his shoes and padded outside onto the front porch. A single yellow bulb illuminated the front of the house, and for a horrible moment, he was and felt utterly exposed. Trees on either side of the property line blocked him from sight in those directions, but directly across the street, the Seavers had a light on in one of the upstairs windows. They had a new baby; they never slept.
Slipping on his shoes, Dean double-knotted them, then bounced up and down on his toes for a moment. Insomnia didn’t mean not tired. It just meant can’t sleep. He should have been exhausted, tossing and turning in late-night frustration.
Instead, a high electrical current whistled in his nerves, sparking at the tips of his fingers. He was Lightning Lad and Thor combined; he could light up a city if you plugged him in.
He inhaled, then exhaled, then started running.
The school was, technically, within walking distance of Dean’s house; it’s just that the walk—roughly twenty minutes—was considered too long by whatever metrics and analysis the county board of education used to determine such things. As a result, Dean took the bus to school on days when he couldn’t hitch a ride with Jay or borrow Mom’s car.
He jogged along Founders Street, turning left onto the access road that wound its way through an empty field, coming up on the science-wing side of the school, opposite the main entrance. As he closed in, the school came into greater focus, and he spied a figure loitering by one of the side doors, a slim black figure against the red brick.
People liked to make jokes about Antoine and Marcus being difficult to tell apart. Which was ridiculous because for one thing, they wore their hair very differently—Marcus’s was what he called relaxed, glistening with something like Dean’s own signature gel. And Antoine’s was cut into a high-top fade. You’d have to be blind not to know who was who.
Even without the haircuts, though, he couldn’t imagine how someone could mistake them for each other. Their identical faces betrayed emotions, thoughts, notions, realizations with utterly distinct miens; Marcus’s eyes widening in surprise, while Antoine’s remained the same, tilting his head instead. Each had a signature poise; the way they held their limbs was so manifest and particular to each twin. And their voices, the rhythms of their speech… nothing alike at all.
What’d I tell you? Dean remembered his dad saying one time, nudging Mom with an elbow. They all do look alike! Oh, come on, honey—it’s just a joke!
Dean gritted his teeth and cast the memory from his mind as he got closer to the school. His breath was coming hard and hot now, his lungs burning. How did the twins do this for fun?
“How do you guys do this for fun?” he asked as he slowed to a halt by the school. Panting.
“All depends on what you’re running from,” said Antoine.
“Or to?” Dean asked.
“Have you been here long?” he asked Antoine.
Antoine shook his head.
They unlocked the door and went inside. Together, they navigated the halls and the stairs. Dean led the way. On the second floor, they located the appropriate alcove, and Dean unlocked another door, then trotted up the revealed stairs. Soon, they were outside on the rooftop.
“Here it is,” Dean said, gesturing to the encircling night with a hand sweep.
Antoine planted his fists on his hips and gazed around. There was a mild haze in the air, a smoggy, translucent, almost invisible gray that clung to the night; it lent the stars and the moon fuzzy halos.
Dean held his breath. When he’d first come up here with Jay, he’d been nearly poleaxed by the sight, by the spread and sprawl of the trees and fields, the dim ribbon of factory smoke rising in a wavering column in the distance. No specific or unique element stood out; it was merely a matter of new perspective. And perhaps of the proscription of the discovery, of finding the stairs, of standing where students certainly were never intended to stand.
At the end of the day, though (for it was literally the end of the day, midnight nigh), it was just a rooftop. It was just the same view as from the second-floor chemistry lab, only raised by a few feet.
“It’s beautiful,” Antoine said into Dean’s self-doubt. And he turned and flashed a grin, wide and toothy and explicit. “It’s really beautiful, man. Up here, it just all seems different, you know? Like it’s part of a different world.”
Dean had felt exactly the same. He hadn’t realized it until Antoine gave it voice.
He came over to Antoine’s side; their shoulders brushed against each other. He took Antoine’s hand in his own and they stared out at the moon together. It was waxing gibbous, almost three-quarters full, a pregnant, gleaming bulge.
After a moment, they kissed. It was light and there was no desperation or need, just quiet want and a longing that had lingered but was, for now, fulfilled.
THE PRESENT: LIAM
Settle down, Jorja Jean.” Liam deliberately dropped in her middle name. They’d called her Jorja Jean until somewhere in sixth grade, usually in a singsong voice. He thought it might take her back, calm her down.
It didn’t. The whole way back to El’s house in the car, Jorja fumed about what a waste of time the visit had been.
“It’s not a waste,” Marcie told her. Liam stole a glance in the rearview. Marcie patted Jorja’s hand, and she didn’t pull it away. “We learned our parents broke into the school at homecoming.”
“No, we learned that she remembers it being our parents,” Jorja said with petulant ire. “She could be wrong. Or it could have involved one of our parents.”
“We’ll find out,” Marcie said.
“Why does it matter? They broke into school. If it was a really big deal, don’t you think we would have known about it already?”
“Maybe something happened when they did,” El said from the passenger seat next to Liam. She was gazing moodily out the window as the nighttime blurred by. “Maybe something worth killing for. They buried the thing a week later.”
And, she didn’t add, her uncle ran off to Mexico at the same time. Or was murdered. One or the other. Too many coincidences to be just coincidences.
“It’s pretty weak sauce, if you ask me,” Jorja said.
El huffed out a piqued breath. No one spoke.
“I’m sorry,” Jorja said after a moment.
No one said anything.
“I’m a little…” She fumbled in her pocket for something. A square of paper. She unfolded it into what looked like a letter and handed it over to Marcie, her expression miserable.
“I found it when I was looking for Dad’s yearbook. In the little storage space under the basement stairs, in a box of old high school and college junk. No yearbook, but…” She gestured to the paper.
“Holy crap,” Marcie said, and handed it up to El, who scanned it quickly.
She whistled low and long. “These are committal papers, Jorja.”
“I know.”
Committal…?
Oh. Oh man.
Liam pulled over to the side of the road. This required his full attention.
Jorja’s dad did time in a mental hospital.
With the revelation, Jorja sort of broke down. Marcie tried to comfort Jorja in the back seat, with El turned around so that she could offer sympathy.
Never before had Jorja seemed so vulnerable and so overcome.
“It was my dad, wasn’t it?” Jorja said.
Liam skimmed the paperwork, figuring it would be too highbrow for him, but it was actually cut-and-dried. Jorja’s dad had been admitted to Sheppard Pratt down in Baltimore in January of 1987, less than three months after the time capsule had been buried, along with its secrets and mysteries. He’d been released that summer, in July.
Other than a statement that both the committal and release had been at the behest of his father, Jorja’s grandfather, there was nothing else to go on.
“My dad did it,” Jorja said, and hitched in a breath. Liam thought for a moment that she might start sobbing. “Whatever it was.”
“We don’t know that,” Marcie told her, clutching her hand.
Liam thought of his own dad’s admonition about “crazy people.” He held the letter loosely and stared ahead down the road. In the distance, the factory—always the damn factory—loomed.
It couldn’t be his own dad. Liam knew that for a fact. And he desperately didn’t want it to be El’s dad—he liked Mr. Laird, for one thing. And he more than liked El.
Marcie’s dad was sort of a dick, but he was never around, so it didn’t matter one way or the other. Given a choice between ruining Marcie’s dad’s life and ruining Jorja’s, well… it wasn’t a hard choice.
But then again, it wasn’t his choice to make.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” Jorja whispered.
Liam did a double take as Marcie took Jorja’s face in her hands and kissed her passionately on the lips. He exchanged a glance with El. A glance was all it took for him to know that she’d already known about Marse and Jorja.
Of course. Odd man out again. Emphasis on man.
“I guess that’s one way to shut her up,” he cracked.
El and Marcie stared daggers at him, but Jorja blubbered laughter, howling until tears streamed down her face. Her mirth broke the others’ sternness, and Marcie and Elayah both chuckled.
Most people with mental health issues are victims, not perpetrators. That was what Dad had said. It popped into Liam’s mind as though it had just been spoken.
“Maybe your dad didn’t do it,” Liam said. “Maybe it was done to him.”
No one spoke. He couldn’t blame them—no one was used to Liam saying anything remotely profound. Or even interesting.
He twisted around in his seat. Jorja gazed at him with hope in her eyes.
Liam was unaccustomed to being taken so seriously. A thousand jokes popped into his head, each one calculated to burst the bubble of solemnity in the car. But it wasn’t time for that.
“We’re still blind here, guys,” he said. And the truth of it pressed down on him. The helplessness weighed a ton. “We don’t know what happened. We know that someone connected to Lisa is trying to find out. Maybe Lisa herself. And we know our parents were involved. But we’ve been thinking they did something wrong. What if they were the victims? What if something horrible happened to your dad, Jorja? Something so awful that he spent the last half of his senior year in a mental hospital? And our parents knew what it was, but it was so bad or so tragic that they did what we did the other night: They swore never to tell.”
“And they literally buried it,” El whispered.
“Right.”
“We have to go to him, don’t we?” Jorja asked after a moment.
; Marcie put her arms around her and kissed her temple. “We’ll all go with you.”
“Absolutely,” said El, reaching into the back seat to put her hand on Jorja’s.
He nodded and stretched his own hand back there. “Yeah,” Liam said. “Sure.”
1986: DEAN
Their first kiss had been stolen, passionate, electric, stumbled upon at Jay’s eighteenth birthday party two weeks after the end of junior year. Jay’s parents had supplied a cooler of beers, with an admonition that everyone was limited to one apiece. Dean, having had one already, decided that it would be a minor infraction to slip out into the garage and have a second. Jay’s parents, after all, were already breaking a rule. So it was okay for him to break one. Or so the logic went.
Antoine had beaten him to the cooler and stood there, a beer in one hand, his other tucked behind his back.
“This is the last one,” he said with a shrug of apology.
Then, as though to compensate Dean for the stricken look on his face, he showed his hidden hand.
“Look what I found.” Antoine’s grin was wide. Too wide. It stretched the corners of his mouth in a way that appeared painful. It didn’t touch his eyes.
What he’d found was a copy of Playboy, which he held open to the centerfold. Miss May 1982 gazed out at them with blue eyes, reclining on a bar counter, a glass of wine in one hand.
Dean licked his lips and paged slowly through the magazine with Antoine. They settled onto the cooler, using it as a seat. It pressed them close together, and he was aware of the familiar—from Kim—sensation of another body’s heat. Unfamiliar, though, was the hard, unyielding press of Antoine’s shoulder and arm, the lean muscle. The strength and the power.
Too, there was the scent of Antoine’s sweat. The garage was un-air-conditioned, verging on sweltering in the June heat. Yet still they sat, so calmly, paging through the magazine, pursuing the obligatory ritual of absorbing each naked form as the curl of slick paper revealed it. Golden-toned leg after golden-toned leg, pink-tipped breast after pink-tipped breast.