54. Crazy Ideas

I watch her coming up the steps to the school, and I make sure she sees me. Jocelyn doesn’t walk the other way. She approaches me, and soon I understand.

“What happened?”

One long, sleek hand brushes over her eye, covering the bruise. Then she moves it and lets me see. There’s a purple half-moon underneath the eye and rising up to her temple. It looks a few days old, with that slightly yellowish and faded look.

“Let’s keep walking,” she says.

We head down the hallway toward the lockers.

“Jocelyn—”

“Look, you can’t email me. You can’t do anything unless I okay it, you got that?”

“Who did that to you?”

“The guy you met that first weekend in town.” She says this looking ahead, acting as if she’s talking about the weather or the movie she saw this weekend.

“Your step-uncle.”

“Yeah.”

“Was that why you were out on Friday?”

She nods. “Looked a lot worse then.”

“But what about—where’s your aunt?”

“She’s out of town. Nice little business trip.”

“So then, how—what happened?”

She reaches her locker and opens it. I see a page from a magazine hanging up on the inside of the locker door showing a road heading into the woods. There’s writing underneath that I can’t make out.

“This isn’t the first time, Chris.”

“Yeah, well, maybe it needs to be the last.”

“Listen, we can talk later—after school, okay? Not when others are around. Not with Poe and Rachel.”

“Do they know?”

“Of course,” Jocelyn says. “They’re not idiots.”

“Why would he do this?”

She laughs. “People do a lot of strange things when they’re out-of-their-mind drunk.”

“Listen, if you want—”

“I want you to just calm down for the moment. You can’t do anything here and now, okay? Wade would kill you. He’s stupid and crazy.”

“But you have to let someone—”

“No. We’ll talk after school. He’s gone tonight.”

“When does your aunt come back home?”

“Wednesday. The day before Thanksgiving.”

I’ve forgotten that Thanksgiving is this week.

Guess I haven’t been thinking of many things to give thanks for.

Seeing the discoloration on her sweet, beautiful face, I don’t feel like starting now.

“Don’t,” Jocelyn says.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t get any crazy ideas. I can see it on your face. You’re an open book, you know that?”

“You sure aren’t.”

“No, I’m like that book you’re looking for in the library but that’s always gone.”

“That’s always checked out?”

Jocelyn shakes her head. “No. More like stolen. See you in English.”

Even though I hear her words, I can’t help them coming.

Those “crazy ideas.”

I wade around in them, plunging deep and feeling the darkness.

I’ve seen and heard about things like this, sure, but never firsthand.

There were kids who had issues and problems at my last school, but when it wasn’t in your face it was easy to forget about it.

The suicide attempt by the freshman.

I didn’t know him.

The kid called out of class because something happened with his parents. Something like his mother shooting his father.

The kid was a bit crazy, so it all made sense.

I think of the lyric from the song I’ve gotten used to hearing by The Smiths. I’ve seen this happen in other people’s lives, and now it’s happening in mine.

This sweet, dark angel with her secrets and her scars.

I want to wipe them away.

I feel like I need to talk to somebody, but there’s only two people I think of telling.

My mother. And, strangely enough, Newt.

But I can’t. I don’t think either will be able to do anything.

If Rachel and Poe have any concerns about Jocelyn, they sure don’t show it. I have to listen to Poe bemoan her upcoming trip to New York to visit her relatives. Rachel complains about having to stick around here and endure a Thanksgiving with a houseful of crazy people. Jocelyn doesn’t say what she will be doing.

“How about you?” Poe asks me.

Then suddenly something comes out of my mouth that I don’t expect.

As if someone else is talking.

“I have a date.”

“A what?”

“A date. Jocelyn didn’t tell you? We’re hanging out together.”

Rachel and Poe look at Jocelyn. Jocelyn smiles, then nods and confirms.