It’s 5 a.m., and finally the boys are sleeping. Bodies can only take so much. Witness Tommy Underwood, only hours ago when it happened, his muscles froze when he was running with the others to get me. His flight mechanism overwhelmed by adrenalin, by shock. Every muscle in his body flooded, and his body went rigid. He slammed against the wall. Temporarily paralyzed. Too much moving through vessels too open.
There are two boys asleep on my pull-out couch, and other Second Formers are sleeping in older boys’ rooms. They can’t go back to their cubbies, not yet. The boys in my apartment don’t even move when the phone rings.
“Song, this is Alex.” He doesn’t wait for me to respond. “Kyle’s dead. DOA. So much for CPR. I mean, I took the class two weekends ago. The doc said there was nothing I could’ve done. But we tried, didn’t we, Song?” He is talking fast. Big man talking like a boy, a boy whose job was to ride with a dead student in the ambulance to the ER in Wilmington.
What am I supposed to say? Kyle was blue, and there was Alex putting his enormous mouth over little-boy lips, folding enormous hands and pumping boy lungs. The color of Kyle, his bloodshot eyes, I knew there was nothing we could do, but Alex acted. He tried, and what might have seemed foolish then proved the measure of him, a man with honor.
“His parents are here. Mom and Dad. It’s like they’ve checked out, zombied, nobody’s home.” Alex’s words trip on themselves. He starts to giggle. “They’re gonzo, gorked,” and his laughing has high notes, close to crying. A paper bag should go over his mouth to save the man from passing out. Every good man gets overwhelmed.
“What was the cause? Did the doctor say?”
“Cerebral hypoxia, strangulation.” He sounds like a report. Gone is Kyle, the boy wonder, the weird genius who made animal noises. Now he is a report.
“Suicide?”
“Looks like.”
“So, they’re not going to investigate?”
“No, Kyle did it. You know how he was, Song. Somebody found a note. It was in his pocket, his mother’s name on it, even a stamp.”
“A note?” Mr. Happy-to-Be-in-Study-Hall?
“His mom had it in her hand when I saw her. An envelope.”
My head feels heavy, so heavy I need my other hand to hold it up, my elbow on my desk.
Kyle wrote his mother, all smiles, not caring when Donny and his minions surrounded him, when the boys pushed him. The decision was made by then, and he was happy.
“Song, you still there?” I forget Alex is on the line.
“Still here,” I say, but I’m really back in study hall, back with a boy writing his mother. Kyle in his blazer, tie tied right. Kyle with his hair combed. The times he burst out laughing, the other boys ignoring him. The way he kept me waiting to fold the note just right.
“We did what we could, right?” Alex’s voice, so high, brings me back to my apartment, my desk, the maroon ink blotter. The phone is hard in my hand. His voice is so much smaller than he is.
“We did all we could, Alex,” I say, and I don’t say we could’ve done more.
Alex says he’ll be back for breakfast at school, he’ll teach today, hold practice. Mr. Tough Guy, macho jock who tried to breathe into a little boy.
He’ll fold.
There’s nothing left to do but fold.