“MOSES!” MICHAEL SAID, calling from behind me while jogging. He caught up and smiled one of those sad funeral-smiles. One of those everything-is-fucked kind of smiles. “Where’re you going?”
“Barn.”
“Oh,” he said. He was keeping up with me even though I hadn’t invited him to come along. But I was hoping he would. I was banking on it.
“You all right?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“You’re lying.”
“Yep.”
We were quiet for a stretch. The moon was bright enough that we could see how the trees around us were covered in names carved into their wood. The names were from always: ones that, according to their dates, were only carved a few months ago, right next to the ones that had long since turned into the trees’ scar tissues. There were enough names carved into enough trees that, statistically, many of them were long since dead.
I didn’t say anything because I was looking at the trees that were living testaments to the dead and that got so dense and complete that, as far as I could tell, they had to go on forever. And because I knew that the more I didn’t say, the harder he’d insist on trying to help.
I told myself to think of Charlie. Even if I hated him sometimes, he wasn’t always wrong. I could grieve for Lump’s pain like a real, live person, but I could be like Charlie when I needed to be.
I just had to hold it together for a few minutes longer.
“That’s okay. Not being all right,” Michael said. He was keeping pace even though I was walking fast and with my hands shoved in my pockets and answering with single-syllable words. “So hey, Moses…” he said.
He stopped and expected me to stop too.
We were deep enough in the woods that nobody could hear us, but not so deep that we were lost. We were somewhere between the children and the adults and the winding gravel was dusted with snow.
Some of the names carved into the trees were higher up than others. They were high enough that when the trees were in full color or filled with green leaves or red buds they’d be invisible. It was only when the trees died for the season—when the leaves all fell away and the wood went gray and all the color dissipated—that the birds packing the branches and the nests tucked safely away in the highest parts of the ancient trees became visible. I stopped and turned toward him.
“How’re you and Matty doing?”
“We broke up,” he said, the way you’d expect someone to report on the weather. Like he was a machine. They were finally dealing with their apocalypse. “She’s on the fence about it, but we broke up.” He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his coat pocket and shook one out.
“You smoke?” I said.
“I’m mourning my relationship,” Michael said over his cigarette and behind his cupped hand. He took a long pull, burning a quarter of the goddamn thing down in one go. He held the cloud in behind puffed cheeks for a few seconds, nodding. And then bent at the knees and coughed until he almost threw up.
“When did you have time to buy cigarettes to start this new habit?” I felt like Test. I felt like a parent. I felt like Charlie.
“I bought them off a kid.” He sounded like he expected me to laugh or give him a high five.
“One of the Buddies sold you a pack of Pall Malls?”
“No. One of Bryce’s shit-ass little friends.”
“What are you doing?” I asked him. Except I knew. I was all too familiar with playing the asshole. More than that, I was familiar with other people doing it too.
“Jesus, this is awful.” He spit a thick wad of phlegm into the gravel.
“What are you doing?” I asked again.
“Fucking up. I should have bought menthols,” he said, coughing.
“Menthols aren’t the reason you’re fucking up.”
He brought the cigarette to his lips again. “I know.” And he said it like me. Like someone who thought the best course of action was to give the hungry crowd exactly what they wanted. He’d be the asshole he assumed Matty thought he was. The worst parts of Moses Hill and Charlie Baltimore mixed together.
What I didn’t say:
“Remember I told you about the guy that shot Charlie? Powell? And how wrecked he was by what happened? During his deposition he told everyone how he put his gun to his head every night since the night we’d burned the bowling alley and all the gods down. He’d press the gun into his forehead, right above his eyebrow—which he thought was metaphorically resonant because it’s where he shot my cousin, who was also supposedly my other half. He said he tried to pull the trigger for three months and that he wanted the same dice roll he gave Charlie: coma, brain death, or miracle. He turned in his resignation papers after he pulled the trigger and found that the safety was on even though he swears he turned it off. My point is, the life he’d had before was gone and, in its place, he found something new. But that something new had a price tag.”
What I did say:
“You take another drag of that and I’m going to kick your ass.” He smiled at me but I kept staring at him; he cupped one hand and tried to start a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. “I’m not kidding. There’s no bluff clause or joke here; if you put that fucking thing in your mouth I’m punching your goddamn teeth out of your head.”
The smile faded and his face changed. Sometimes people burn bridges because, after all, at least a burning bridge makes light for everyone else.
“It isn’t up to you,” he said, snatching the Pall Mall out of his mouth and pointing at me with the two fingers holding the cigarette.
“This is though.”
“What I do isn’t up to you. That choice isn’t yours,” he said, and placed the cigarette back between his lips.
My nerves still echoed with Evulsion. Powell had paid the price for his something-new, and so had I. Sometimes the world needs to be given something to come back from. Give them a fight they can win and they’ll be warriors. Give them the end of the world and they’ll make love. Give them the brink and they’ll fight it.
I head-butted him through the cigarette.
No one in the history of head butts expects the head butt.
He reeled back and grabbed the side of his face like someone had just extinguished a lit cigarette with a flying head butt to his face. I launched myself forward again, going for the tackle.
In my head, Charlie was telling me to make sure Michael’s trajectory was headed in the right direction. To keep him from paying the price for his new, battered life.
I’m not sure what happened next because I was staring up at the sky, the wind knocked clean out of me.
“The fuck is wrong with you?” he asked me. He had me straddled with my arms held down with his knees. Even after everything, part of me expected his hands to go to my throat; to match his handprints to where Charlie’s brother had almost crushed my windpipe. He swiped an arm across his face and left a smeared line of blood up his sleeve. His eyes were wide; his eyes were open.
My head was swimming, but I started laughing because I hadn’t expected him to be that fast and because he still hadn’t done anything other than defend himself. I could taste the blood on my teeth. My breath kept hitching and I choked on the air but that made me laugh harder.
I was Moses. I was Charlie. I was both halves evolved into someone new. The best parts of Moses Hill and Charlie Baltimore mixed together.
Hopefully.
“You’re crazy. You’re actually crazy,” he said, pulling his hands back.
Get them mad and they’ll realize how much they care. Give them something they can triumph over. Give them a transformation they don’t even realize is happening.
“Hey,” I said, cutting the laughter off. “She can do better than you. You don’t deserve her.” I smiled. I relaxed. I didn’t struggle.
Give them a choice where the only possible outcome is a life made better: go left, become the beautiful, human animal; go right, be the gleaming hero. Rig the game. Stack the deck. Make them pay attention.
He leaned into my face and didn’t say anything for a moment. He pulled me closer by my jacket. He would hit me and Matty would leave him behind because she’d see Dalton in him; neither one of them would know he was baited into it and she’d leave and his heart would break but someday, a lifetime from now, I knew he’d find a version of himself built from the flaming wreck.
Or he’d unclench his fists. He’d let the blood drip from his face and fall wherever it was going to fall and let me be the villain. He’d walk away, not weak for bleeding but stronger because of it. Every drop of unavenged blood would bring him closer to the person he thought he should be.
He didn’t growl anything or threaten me. There were no warnings. He just looked at me with his sad, hurt eyes before clearing his throat and spitting a wad of red out away from us. He pushed me back down, using the momentum to stand up.
As he walked away, I said, “Good choice,” under my breath. The entire pack of Pall Malls was spread out on the path. Inside, just down the walkway and past the big doors and down the hall, the campers were hearing about Lump.
I sat up on my elbows and let my head clear. When the world slowed down, I reached over and picked one of the loose Pall Malls off the ground and stuck it in between my lips, staring down its barrel. I lay back.
Right as I plucked the cigarette out of my mouth and flicked it, unlit, into the woods Michael crashed out of the door and back down the path. I could hear him storming up to me for fifty yards before he said, “What the fuck is wrong with you?” He kicked a tidal wave of gravel at me. “It’s not about you, asshole. We’re your friends.”
I wanted to tell him that that’s exactly why it was about me because forgiving others is a skill, but forgiving yourself is an art. Especially when no one knows you need forgiving.
“Mike: that kid got fucked up because of me, okay? She was my responsibility.” I said it as plainly as I could because I still felt like it was true.
“Get over yourself,” he said. “Bad things happen, you fucking douchebag. That’s it. You’re not the only one bad things happen to, or is Lump not enough goddamn proof of that?”
I dug a piece of gravel out of the back of my head. I lay back and closed my eyes, picturing him going back to his friends covered in blood. Going back to Matty with a blood-spattered face. When I opened my eyes he was gone. I didn’t know how much time I had before my phone buzzed in my pocket with a call from the taxi company, but it wouldn’t be long. I also didn’t know how much time I had before her parents arrived.
* * *
Harriet Tubman was asleep in the warm barn. She was cuddled up on top of the other deer and she had a series of bright green Band-Aids holding a thick swath of bandage to her leg. She was alive. She was safe. Her world was, at least for the immediate time being, apocalypse-proof.
* * *
I was sitting on the steps in front of the rec center waiting with my bags and thinking about what Test had said. About how her parents had already been through enough and how they didn’t need me stepping in front of their unfolding disaster.
The ceramic Buddy was covered in water-logged, melting snow that covered his sign to the point where it was unreadable.
If I’d still been hallucinating, I would have seen Charlie on one side of me and Lump on the other. I was between living ghosts.
I imagined them fighting over me and I could almost hear them but I was too awake or too tired to make out what they were saying. So I imagined it: I imagined Charlie telling her that she was being a child on account of her being a child and Lump telling him that she was eight and three quarters and that the way to save the world isn’t to make it hurt more, plus he wasn’t even a real ghost because he was still technically alive. To which Charlie obviously rolled his eyes and muttered about her being a fucking hypocrite.
If I laughed at Imaginary Lump and Imaginary Charlie calling each other fake ghosts, I knew I’d break apart, so instead I just smile-frowned and let my eyes get hot and wet.
I imagined Charlie leaning over and saying something about how this kid could fuck right off, since what did she know? I wanted to look over at Lump and see what she thought but I couldn’t because she wasn’t there because she was wrecked in an ambulance, about to start her new and different life. Instead, I kept my head rested on my arms and imagined her not saying much of anything to Charlie which was somehow even worse than hearing her side of the imaginary argument.
It was like she was getting further and further away. Like the imaginary Lump wanted to yell something at me but couldn’t. Like she wanted to tell me to just get in the taxi and leave.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said.
I looked to my left to see if Charlie was there but he wasn’t either because he was in a hospital bed a million miles away with tubes running out of his all-but-dead body.
I kept my eyes on the tree line because there were no ghosts and no judges and no Test to tell me what to do. All I had to do was deal with whatever car came first: if the taxi came, get in, drive away, let them suffer in peace because maybe it wasn’t all my fault and we’re all entitled to grieve and hurt how we each need to; if her parents showed up first, open my arms, look them in the eye, and say I did it—that it was my fault and I was their daughter’s friend, and let them focus all of their pain into one perfect, defined focal point. While they were searching for some kind of meaning in all the broken pieces, I’d tell them to get a blood sample from me because I’d been drinking—that, even if it didn’t show up, there were plenty of witnesses who could attest to the fact that I had been drunk off my ass. To look at my texts that I’d missed. To look at my criminal record. And they’d listen to it all.
I just had to listen to Charlie one last time. Be selfish, one last time, and make up for how wrong things went at the bowling alley.
It was just a matter of waiting because the ghosts were gone. It was just me and my luggage.
I pulled my phone out and brought up my contacts.
I cleared my throat.
And I hit Call.
Three rings later, my mother said, “Hey, Super Boy!” and I felt my face and nose tingling and my throat catching and the hot pressure in my chest and when I didn’t say anything back fast enough she said, “Moses? Are you okay, what’s going on?”
“Mom?” I didn’t try to keep my voice even.
“Yeah, sweetie, I’m here.”
“Mom, I’m really not okay right now and I just need to talk to you and Dad.”
* * *
Ten minutes later, the door behind me opened. I didn’t look back to see who it was but as soon as I saw the bare knees sit next to me, I knew. Test sat down. I knew he’d be gone soon so I told my parents I’d call them back when I knew we could talk for as long as we needed to.
“Taxi called. They’re pulling around the bend now. You ready?”
“Don’t really have a choice.”
“Sure you do. Just have to make it and live with it.”
“Where are her parents?”
“Close.”
I heard it before I saw it. Whichever car it was, it was louder than the late night Midwest wilderness. Test didn’t know which one it was either, because he looked like he was figuring out whether or not I needed to be restrained.
The lamplight glinted off the cab’s windshield. Nathan the groundskeeper was keeping his schedule because the dirty little streetlights around the camp’s driveways were already on and humming. Test stood up and brushed his hands off on his shorts.
He waved to the big, clunky cab and walked over to it as it pulled up. He spoke to the driver for a second while I got my bags together.
Before I piled in, Test nodded at me—not like a dealmaker but like someone who, for some reason, had decided to give a shit about me. I set my duffel bag on the seat next to me. The cab was a minivan with a King’s Ride decal on the side and the driver was a forty-something woman drinking a Big Gulp that smelled like Mountain Dew. She was poking around on the GPS, getting it back to the home screen. She leaned over and breathed deep through her nose.
“You smell like a campfire; I love that smell.” The smell was in my jacket and in my hair. It was woven through every inch of me. When I die, I will smell like campfires and northern pines and winter come early. “Got any requests, hon?”35
“Requests?” I asked.
She held the old-school iPod up. “Makes the ride better for everyone, I think,” she said, and winked at me. “So?”
I thought about it for a second, looked at her, and said, “How much classic rock do you have on there?”
Her face lit up and she moved her shoulders back and forth, mom-dancing in the driver’s seat. “Honey, I’ve got it all. Creedence to Zeppelin, the Stones to Motown.”
I started to imagine asking Charlie which song we should listen to, but it was Lump I saw sitting next to me. Lump, who was proud of me for getting into the cab instead of talking to her parents. Even if she hated me. Even if she never wanted to see me again.
“Skynyrd?”
“Got Skynyrd.”
“‘Tuesday’s Gone.’”
And Lump smiled.
“You got it.” As she shuffled through the iPod, she asked, “So what’s the plan?”36
I gave her the police station’s address and she hit play on her iPod.
We started moving, crunching over the snow and the rocks, warm in the music, and as we made our way up the drive I saw them.
The dinged-up 2007 Honda Odyssey puttering down the driveway was the most terrifying thing I’d have ever hoped to see. It was the fire crawling toward the prison-cell powder keg. It was the sixth desperate pull of the trigger. The eyes under the bed that remind you that there are monsters worth fighting.
Along the driveway, Charlie stood looking at me; he was thin, and he was wearing his hospital gown, and one of his eyes was cold and dead, and he pointed at them.
We pulled to the side of the narrow driveway to let them pass. When they parked, I saw the stickers on the back windshield: a father stick figure holding a briefcase, a mother stick figure in a dress, and, next to the dog sticker, a little girl sticker.
The man who climbed from the driver’s seat, at over six feet, couldn’t have weighed more than one hundred and thirty pounds. Her father’s hair was so thin that the light cut clean through it and gave him ghost hair, just like she’d said. He moved like there was cancer in his bones despite it being in his organs and his eyes were swollen, but he stood with cartoonishly good posture.
Every move Lump’s mom made was brisk and urgent—every adjustment to her hair and shirt, every shuffling of her purse—like every second she was jolting awake and finding herself staring over the edge of her own endless abyss.
We started moving again.
Everything started moving again.
“Goodbye, Charlie,” I said, under my breath.
She put the van in gear as we pulled up to the stop sign at the front of the drive. The CB radio fixed to her dashboard beeped, loud, but she didn’t seem to hear it because she was looking back at me.
I watched Lump’s parents disappear safely into the building. They’d have somewhere to put their hate, and if that somewhere was me, that would be okay. They could hate me because Lump was alive, and her name was Allison, and the world would come to know it. I could live with that.
Under the camp’s welcome sign, just outside of the van, the muddy, graffiti-covered light above the camp’s entrance flickered out.