52

MYERS IS STILL wearing his Master Baiter tee-shirt from yesterday, but it’s starting to smell ripe. The rest of us have had the luxury of a second set of clothes, but all Myers has done is cover his eye hole with a pirate patch.

Marcy gives him one of her dad’s shirts. He is swimming in it, and the whole effect makes him look a little homeless.

Anders is brooding again. He could be brooding about blood, or bloody Barry Kupperman, or even the fact the Marcy told him that she loved him and he doesn’t know how to cope. It could even be about three juvenile offenders who took a joy ride from Bellingham last night, maybe even in a stolen car, stopped for pizza and Flunitrazepam, then came hunting for Marcy and her family.

Frankly, I could keep listing the things that Anders could be brooding about for the rest of the night and be right on all accounts.

We have such a capacity to hold chaos in our heads. We cradle it there, cupped in our gray matter, while it swirls around like a tornado, breaking things at every turn.

One thing’s for certain. Amidst all the chaos, none of us know what to say to each other. There are too many mental balls juggling in our hands and none of them make sense.

Myers is still groggy and drugged and completely confused.

Marcy is rapidly falling apart with the realization that everything that has happened to us since last night has something to do with her family and three residents of The Bellingham School.

As for me, I keep going back to a fourth resident—Tate Cole.

None of us ever really talk about him, or his anger, or that awful day so many years ago when he cornered Marcy in the bathroom with a knife and Anders had to intervene. What kind of kid—what kind of person—does something like that to his twin? I can’t speak from experience. I’m an only child. So is Anders. So is Myers. I think our parents realized that one and done was a good policy, especially after they figured out that kids are nothing more than sucker fish attached to their sides, syphoning off whatever we can get.

What’s more, once we greedily drink our fill, we turn our backs on our creators, vowing to move as far away as we can from the things that made us.

I guess that’s the circle of life. At least we don’t resort to matriphagy. The only reason I know all about matriphagy is because of a paper I wrote in Advanced Biology for Mr. Kirkpatrick. Matriphagy is when the offspring of a species eat their mothers. I got an A for the paper. Kirkpatrick likes me, but he did jot down a note in the margin on the last page asking if I was saving up for psychotherapy.

I know he was only being funny, but it made me wonder if he had ever met Beryl. If he had, I don’t think he would have written that note in the first place. Words can hit too close to home sometimes, even when they are never meant to cause damage at all.

Just like Marcy’s words. I can’t even imagine the bomb that she detonated when she said what she said to Anders. ‘I love you.’ That’s what she said, and he’s probably now caught in an emotional typhoon. Honestly, I don’t have to imagine it at all. I’m watching it unfold right in front of me. If I had to guess, I would say that Anders is brooding because of what she said more than anything else. He’s not thinking about Prince Richard’s Maze or waking up without a memory, or even being covered in blood. He’s not thinking about Running Man or Calista Diamond or beating the crap out of Barry Kupperman down at The Stumps.

He’s thinking about Marcy, and it’s eating him alive from the inside out, like when a mother crab spider’s baby spiderlings devour her until she falls over, immobile, and they consume her entirely.

I get it, but at the same time, there’s a hint of jealousy there that I can’t ignore. Fat kids don’t have people who fall in love with them. Fat kids hide in their bedroom and shore up mental walls so they don’t have to talk to their mothers. Fat kids stare at the space between their feet and find solace in the fact that the bigger they get, the more invisible they become.

Fat kids . . . and I stop myself. I’m not fat anymore.

I’m not fat.

I’m not fat.

I’m not.

I close my eyes.

Am I?

Marcy slowly stands, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, and glides into the kitchen like a ghost.

“I’m hungry,” she says.

None of us reply but she’s not waiting for a reply. She’s sucking everything up inside herself, shoving it into a little mental box and locking it tight. That’s how Marcy rolls. That’s how she has managed to stay relatively sane here in Meadowfield when none of us have sane lives.

Our town, our world, might look really pretty on television, but the truth of it is, our lives are hard. Just like hiking the Grand Canyon looks like an amazing time when you’re watching other people do it from the safety of your own home, but doing it for real? It’s hard. It’s dirty. It’s like living in Meadowfield where everything looks beautiful on the outside.

Even our serial murderers are beautiful. Perfect, prancing Viktor Pavlovich with the fancy sports car and the string of beauty wannabees who eagerly got in his passenger seat because he was hot.

Calista Diamond should know all about that. She almost got close enough to him to get burned.

For real.