WHEN I GET HOME, DAD’S drunk in the backyard chasing Horace with a lasso made from an electrical cord. Stonewall wobbles on his back in a patch of fading sun, his chin and nose crusted in a red mask. The seizure’s long since passed. I kiss his forehead and carry him to his crib.
Inside, Mom watches House Hunters in the dark. Her dress is smeared in blood. Her jagged mouth could swallow the world. On the television are Florida waterfront properties with community pools, sunny and bright verandas, slender women in bikinis sleeking past sculpted, oiled studs. Young white couples without children. Middle-aged white couples without children. Lots of dogs though, dogs they call their babies. It’s enough to keep life fulfilling, all the nightclubs, waterfront amenities, gyms, and walking paths without children.
“Doctor called with the test results,” she says to me. “It’s a genetic disease. He has a deformity in his brain. It’s a chromosomal thing inherited from one of us. Nothing can cure it.”
It takes me a long time to sit next to her, but I do.
“They could be lying,” I say. “They don’t know everything.”
“This time I think they do, honey.”
I wrap my arm around her and squeeze her close. We cry together. It lasts, and then it passes, and then it’s gone.
The television keeps going, and so we watch that.
A young blond couple walks on the beach hand in hand with only a golden retriever leading them. Meanwhile, an attractive black couple is smiling. They just got married and are buying their first home, a modest house to raise a family, a happy, sunny place far from the tide.
“You mail the application, honey?”
“Yes.”
“Good. That’s good.”
I could be a veterinarian. I could go to jail. I could change my name and move to another place and start another life. It doesn’t matter. There’s no light waiting for me somewhere. The dark doesn’t follow me. It is me.
She squeezes my hand. “The kindest thing would be to have never been born at all.”
In school they touch me, hug me, know I’m hurting because they are, too, the loss of a friend with an entire life before him. They pat my back. This is how people comfort and grieve.
There are a few skeptics. Like if they glare at me long enough, I’ll sprout horns and breathe fire; this fat girl will transform into the monster they fear me to be. When I step toward them, they step back. People like Durum never keep their mouths shut. But none of them will ever know, not really, not for sure. I fight their suspicions by simply being human, giving thanks, bowing my head and accepting the sadness around me. And I do feel it. I cry with them. And for a few startling moments, I forget I killed him.
Others hate him, this killer, this murderer. Nobody builds a memorial shrine.
In civics, Mr. Packard says a few words about loss and remembrance, the lasting impression a man leaves behind in the souls of his friends, but I don’t listen. I focus on Paul’s empty desk. Marybeth dabs her eyes. He always stared at her chest. I think of how she’d look if those breasts were eaten with cancer and cut off. She’d still be beautiful, not me.
“Life challenges us. It can sometimes seem horrible. But it’s love…” Packard holds up a single, knowing finger. “It’s love that gets us through, guys. We must carry him in our hearts.”
In all these ways, Paul becomes the villain and hero and victim of a story that was never his.
I imagine him still here, handsome and sweet, as if he never came on my porch that night. What would he say? Who would we be? And if he had come to me and, instead of asking for my help, asking me to destroy something, what if he had asked me to leave? A full tank in his truck, the bed loaded with a cooler, blankets and sleeping bags, a few books he’d read to me. What if he’d asked me to pack a suitcase and grab my favorite dress, listen only to my heart? We’d escape this town together on cool night roads, and the faraway dawn would warm us free. I’d stretch across that big front seat and hang my feet in the wind, rest my head on his lap and gaze up at him with nothing but love. He’d smile and kiss me and make me laugh, put my mind at ease, silence the dark and take us home, wherever that could have been.
Sadie waits for me at the end of the hall, guides me to the stairwell with irises gone to frost. I follow after her black dress. She passes an empty classroom and walks outside. We move close to the wall beneath shut windows.
When she turns to face me, we’re alone and almost to the trees.
“Can’t remember the last time I’ve seen you in black,” I say. “Your way of telling all the boys you’re in mourning?”
She inspects my face. Her chest rises in slow, deliberate breaths.
“I needed to talk to you days ago.”
“I tried,” I say. “Your mom—”
“I know you killed Steven Forsythe. Paul told me.”
And there it is, said so clear that it hits me like a bullet to the brain. But I don’t even flinch. No more surprises. No more doubt. I did the right thing, the smart thing.
“He didn’t know if it was an accident or not.” She hesitates. “He said he couldn’t be sure.”
“It doesn’t matter what he said,” I say. “He was desperate, in a bad place.”
“I helped you. I protected you. I haven’t told them what he told me. Not yet.”
Bugs crawl beneath my skin, gnaw at the nerves.
“Everyone’s talking about you,” she says. “Afraid of you.”
“I don’t care what people think.”
“You should. You need to care how people see you.”
“Like you? You know what they call you?”
“You’d never let him go alone. You’ve loved him your entire life.”
“You believe what you want.”
She tucks her hair behind her ear, a childhood gesture that keeps the world at bay. “I’m trying really hard not to blame myself for all this. He wasn’t thinking. I tried. But he wouldn’t listen. He went to you. He went to you, and he shouldn’t have.”
I want to reach for her, fall into her and cry. Explain. Explain I’m still me.
“What really happened to Paul? I need you to tell me,” she says.
“He died.”
“You’re my friend. Why won’t you tell me the truth? Were you there? When he fell?”
Her words aren’t like her, a quick, mechanical syntax. I reconsider her dress, a baggy dress, sloppy, her mom would say. All her bony angles hidden. Possibilities occur. What could be under there, who she’s already let in, listening. I adjust, speak as if it’s not just the two of us.
“No. No, Sadie. I wasn’t there.”
“For the last week, I’ve wondered how well I actually know you.” Her face trembles. “Did you?”
“Did I what?”
“You didn’t. You couldn’t.”
“What do you think?”
“Amy. I don’t know.”
“That’s right. You don’t.”
“I know what happened that night. You shot him. I know that much is true.”
“No. You only know what Paul told you. You weren’t there, Sadie. By your choice. So, you actually don’t know shit.”
“What will you tell me?”
“That it’d be best if you just forgot about this.”
“I can’t do that. I’ll never forget any of it.”
I look to the chain-link fence surrounding the lot. “Where you going to college?”
“What?”
“College. Where you going?”
“I’m not going. Not yet, anyway. Waiting a year, maybe. I don’t know what I’d go for. So I’m not going.”
I didn’t even think this was a possibility for her. I had taken it as a given. That she would be strutting across some campus, an alluring damsel boys followed after like famished dogs. She’d sit in lecture halls, raptly engaged, and answer every question with firm boldness. She could do anything or be anything she wanted.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I say.
“Wasting her money. She’s leased hundreds of acres to Demont. Money, security, means everything to her.”
“Those things are important. You wouldn’t know because you’ve never been without.”
“I don’t want anything to do with money,” she says. “Not like that. It’s going to kill us all in the end.” Her voice is a raspy scream. “You see that, don’t you?”
“Sure.”
“You have no idea what it’s like,” she says. “Living in that house.”
“It’s a beautiful house.”
“I want a family, a real family, kids, a good man who loves me. What she’s built… it’s nothing. It didn’t give her the happiness she expected, and so she feels cheated, took it out on all of us. Now, it’s just me, me and her.”
This is how we used to talk, open, honest. I haven’t missed it. “You used to actually care about your future. It just saddens me.”
She laughs without smiling. “Saddens you?”
“You have all these advantages I don’t. Always have. And you don’t give a shit.”
“Well, it’s not my damn job to make you happy.” She glances over her shoulder, her hair a sunny tangle. “If I’d gotten to you sooner, would it have changed anything?”
“Probably not,” I say. “Don’t lose sleep.”
“I could go to the police. I could tell them everything.”
I walk away, light and unburdened. Let her. She probably already has. I’ve analyzed it every way, walked through that labyrinth and inspected every door. They have nothing. The only way they’ll know is if I open my mouth.
She calls out, “He was gay, you know.”
That stops me. “Fuck you, Sadie.”
“It’s true.”
“Since when?”
“Since forever, hon. He was too afraid to tell you.”
She isn’t lying. She’s too confident. Several loose pegs click into place. But I still say, “Bullshit. He would’ve told me.”
“He didn’t know how.”
My voice cracks. “Why?”
“He knew how you felt about him. He wasn’t stupid.”
“So he told you instead?”
“Yeah. He said you’d always try to kiss him and he just went along with it because he didn’t want to hurt your feelings. We talked all the time. He never judged me. I was his friend.”
“So was I.…”
“You changed on us. I’m not sure when or how it happened. But it did. We were your friends. You only had two good friends.”
I can’t look at her.
“There was a time when I really loved you,” she says. “But underneath it all, you just hate everyone and everything. You’re poison.”
She was never there. She doesn’t know. A door had been opened that could not be shut.
“You’re just a silly little whore, Sadie,” I say. “A cum dumpster who’ll end up in a trailer with some retarded redneck you’ll pretend loves you. You’ll throw away your future because you resent your mother’s strength. And then, maybe then, you’ll know what it is to hate. But it won’t be me. You won’t be able to blame it all on me.”
That hurts her. She glares at me with heavy, awful eyes. Her bottom lip spotted with leaking pustules she tried to conceal with thick makeup, caked and clumpy like scar tissue.
“Even as kids, you and Paul were the same. Want to know what your problem is?”
“My problem?” she says.
“Yes. Yours. His.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Believing for even one second that this world gives a shit about any of us.”
That pretty face turns cruel, defiant. “I’m going to make my life good, without people like you. There was always something wrong with you. Off. Like a rotten smell. And I didn’t see it. Paul always tried to tell me, but I didn’t believe him. I should have.”
I can’t stop them. A couple, only a couple, spill over and smear my fat cheeks.
“I’m sorry that’s how you see me. Because I come from the same place as you.”
“No,” she says. “You don’t.”