FOUR YEARS AGO, IN JULY: HANNAH DIED
Because Grace, who was my girlfriend back when I was an eighth-grade criminal, works for Grandma Gin at Dairy Queen, Mom wouldn’t let me work there anymore. To make money, I clean gutters and paint houses with Joey Derossi, a twenty-year-old dude who was my sister Hannah’s weirdest friend.
He is a wild card but isn’t wild. He’s just weird and I like him more than just about anybody, not only because he reminds me of how funny Hannah was.
In my second life, we drove around in his old GMC pickup truck. He played whatever music he’d gotten into (usually from the 1960s or ’70s, but sometimes new stuff—as long as he could get it on CD or cassette—Joey lives as analogue as possible, no smartphone, electronic notebook, laptop, internet). He talked about whatever strange idea he’d been reading about at the library. Last summer, he began asking me to write stuff and read it to him. He wanted to examine my deep perceptions. Doing that writing—and I wrote all the time—felt good, but also shook me up. Yes, I like Joey Derossi more than anyone my age, except for maybe Grace.
This is how the weird writing thing started.
Last summer, after I began having a recurring Hannah dream, Joey gave me one of those green-and-white composition notebooks you can get at Walmart for a dollar. He said, “Grab a pen. Write that shit out. Write about your feelings, bro. This is the greatest gift the great eyeball in the sky gave to all us humanoid primates down here. The ability to reflect and write out all our big-brained-ape shit.”
“Seriously?” I said. “I don’t really want to.”
“I’m your pal, man. Listen to your pal,” he said.
“No thanks,” I said, handing the green notebook back to him.
“Bullshit. Riggles and Twine don’t care if you’re struggling. But your real pal, aka me, wants you to be as mentally healthy as you are physically magnificent.”
Joey Derossi. A freak of nature. I did think it was funny he called my best friends over at school, Riley and Twiggs, “Riggles and Twine.” I also thought maybe he was right about this gift from the “great eyeball in the sky” (this is what he called his version of God). When my first life broke completely, back when I was fourteen, the social worker at the group home I was sent to asked me to write stuff, too.
Anyway, this is the first thing I wrote for Joey Derossi. I started writing it in first person, because why wouldn’t I write about myself in first person? But Joey—who is probably a genius—made me go back and write it in third person.
“That way you get out of your own path. You gotta get out of your damn head!”
Okay . . .
Four years ago in July, Hannah Died
The phone rang just after 10 p.m. Isaiah’s mom and dad were in the living room watching a Kevin Costner movie on Netflix. Something about baseball, which thirteen-year-old Isaiah thought was stupid. This was during the summer between seventh and eighth grade, when Isaiah was small and dirty and liked to eat peanut butter right out of the jar (sometimes with his finger).
Instead of watching the stupid movie with his boring parents, he played Temple Run II on his phone. Although he was physically attracted to Scarlett Fox—the character with whom he played the game—he kind of hated Temple Run II. It took too long to die once you got good and when you did die you had to start over from the beginning, so it took a long time to learn how to deal with the challenge that killed you. It gave him a big headache. Sadly, Temple Run II was one of the few games that still worked on his piece-of-shit Galaxy, and he needed to be doing something with his damn brain.
There was tension in the air. His sister, Hannah, who had always been the good kid in the family, had skipped her shift at Dairy Queen to go to Blackhawk Lake with her new boyfriend, Ray Gatos. The dude seemed so nerdy to Isaiah. But apparently Ray had some criminal intentions? Or a criminal mind? That’s what Isaiah’s parents said anyway.
“That kid is a bad influence,” Mom whispered before the movie started. “We better keep our eye on him.”
It really didn’t seem possible to his parents that Hannah would have chosen criminal behavior, missing her DQ shift, on her own. Grandma Gin owned Dairy Queen. Hannah hadn’t just skipped out on a fast-food job; she’d put her own grandma into a crap spot on a busy summer night (Isaiah had been forced to work for two hours, which made him mad, except the new girl, Grace, was at Dairy Queen, and he liked her weird sense of humor and also, if forced to admit it, how she smelled when she was sweaty), and Grandma Gin was not one to forgive and forget, so Hannah would be in trouble for a long time. . . .
Hannah wouldn’t invite the wrath of Grandma Gin into her life, would she?
Scarlett Fox, who looked a little like the new girl, Grace—kind of pouty and pointy—burst through the temple ruins, jumping over massive holes, sliding under fallen trees and bursts of fire, picking up all the tiles, and avoiding the giant creature that chased her and wanted to tear her to pieces.
The landline rang in the kitchen. Isaiah figured it was Hannah, finally. He didn’t even look up from his phone. He didn’t want to hear Mom’s screaming. But Isaiah did look up when Mom failed to scream. At first, Mom said yes, yes, yes? Then she gasped. Then she began to cry oh no, oh no, oh no, again and again.
“What?” Isaiah asked. “What?” he shouted from his bedroom.
“You know there’s no way Ray Gatos forced Hannah to go, right?” Joey said to me after I read it aloud to him. “No way he was the one pushing her. It was other way around with those guys. Ray Gatos was like a cute little teddy bear Hannah carried around with her. Bro, she owned Ray Gatos.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yeah, man. Yeah. All you people think Hannah was some angel, but she wasn’t, okay? Don’t get me wrong, she was about as nice as a human being could be. She was sweet to a weird-ass high schooler like I was, right? But come on. She was fun. Hannah was, like, ‘Hannah the Adventurer.’ She was a little bit half-cocked and good to go, you know what I’m saying?”
“No.”
“She loved to live her life. That’s all. Nothing evil. She was just out there doing stuff.”
“That’s a new perspective,” I said.
“Always good to see things from different angles, bro. How about you imagine her at the end, in that car, loving life, not worried about breaking those rules too much?”
So I did. One Saturday afternoon two weeks before football started, while we were out in Hazel Green working for an old lady Joey had known since he was a kid, Joey cleaned gutters on a ladder above. I sat on the old lady’s lawn with my green notebook and wrote this . . .
Ray Gatos drives his Toyota Corolla on the rolling county road. “I can’t believe your grandma let you off work tonight,” he says.
“Yeah. Ha ha. Seriously,” Hannah, who sits next to him, replies. She blushes. She is not a great liar. She doesn’t want Ray to worry she might get in trouble. To take her mind off things, she sticks her hand out the window and lets it ride the hot air currents of a falling summer night. Whatever trouble she’ll be in, the day was worth it. The whole day had been amazing. Grandma couldn’t hate her forever, right?
At that same moment, Steven Hartley (33), leaves the Boulder Junction Tap and stumbles to his new Ford F-150. The man is broken, drunk, loaded to the hilt. He climbs in, turns the ignition, and puts his head down on the steering wheel. “I can’t do it,” he sobs. Then he takes a big breath, lifts his big head, whispers, “Screw this.” He flips the truck into drive.
Meanwhile, the sun sets red over the Driftless Area, that weird, rolling landscape in southwest Wisconsin that the earth-grading glaciers somehow missed. Everything runs red to orange and green in the fields and a perfect light shivers along the road.
Ray and Hannah have not been drinking, like some of their friends were out by the lake. They’re not about that. They are quiet, and totally in love. They swam together in the lake. They hiked down into a valley and up across a high ridge that gave them a view of the entire park. They kissed up there for the first time.
And now, in the car, they listen to Sufjan Stevens, the Michigan album, because it’s Hannah’s favorite, because the sweet, rolling songs remind Hannah of home, of rolling Wisconsin country. The open windows let hot farm air pour in, wet earth, growing corn. It is perfect. Her hand rides the currents.
Ray’s Corolla crests a hill near Rewey, about fifteen miles northeast of Bluffton. The song “Alanson, Crooked River” comes on. It’s not even a real song, just a dozen tiny bells ringing together, like the sound fairies would make playing in the tall grasses along the road. “I love this,” Hannah says.
They cross into an intersection. The pickup truck driven by Steven Hartley comes from the right, runs a stop sign. Hannah doesn’t even have time to scream. In a flash of steel and light, Steven Hartley’s truck blows the Corolla to hell.
Steven Hartley of Arthur, Wisconsin, dies in a blink. He’s so confused as the Ford’s engine cuts through him.
He has a blood alcohol level of .19, which is more than twice the legal limit. He is in the middle of a divorce. He has a two-year-old daughter named Melanie. Everyone is confused. The dude never drank. Never.
Until he went to Boulder Junction Tap. Then he did drink.
He kills Hannah while fairy bells play.
I read my thing to Joey while he drove us home from Hazel Green.
He had to pull over.
He stared out the window for five minutes without saying a word.
Finally, he looked at me, and said, “Yeah, bro. I bet that’s exactly how it happened. You nailed it. The goddamn fairy bells, right?”