It took me forever to get to sleep that night. That’s not all that unusual for me, but that night, in particular, it was like, Why bother? It really seemed like they could come for me anytime, banging on the door in the middle of the night, just like in the movies. I just stayed there under the covers, overheated and stewing in my own juices, turning it over in my head a thousand times.
Here’s the thing, straight up: I’d done nothing. Nothing useful, anyway. That was good and that was bad. I mean, if someone was going to call me on it, I’d say, “What? I didn’t do anything!” And if someone was going to accuse me, they’d be like, “He didn’t do anything.”
And both sides would be right. I hadn’t so much as touched Haberman. Well, I had, but that was just to check his pulse. Also, and I think you could argue this part forever, but I’m pretty sure I stopped Bones from going back in for round two.
On the other hand, I hadn’t done anything to stop him during round one. I mean, not jumping in on a beating you could sort of see. A guy could get hurt that way. I’d yelled out, but I’d yelled the wrong thing. I should’ve yelled “Stop,” to get myself on the record as being against what was happening, instead of “Bones,” which only got me on the record as knowing his frickin’ nickname. I mean, at least I could’ve said something useful like “not on the head,” but I didn’t even do that.
Mixer didn’t do anything, either. I’m not pointing fingers, but for a second I thought maybe I could claim peer pressure’s what turned me into such a lump. At the school, they were always talking about “the adverse effects of peer pressure” and stuff like that. But I realized pretty quick that peer pressure is not a topic you ought to be raising when it was your idea to go there in the first place. I mean, what was I supposed to say, “But, Your Honor, it was just supposed to be a shakedown.”
It’s like, damned if you do, damned if you don’t. The fact remained that I’d done nothing, and it all sort of branched out from there. I thought of him lying there on the floor, his cheek streaked with nose blood and me working hard to find a pulse. What if he died?
If he bought it after I stood around watching, I’d be charged with that, with letting it happen. I thought about it, and the mistakes we made hit me one at a time. It was like a line of people waiting their turn to hit me in the gut with a baseball bat. There’d be tire tracks in the yard from where Bones’d pulled off to the side so the truck would be tougher to spot. Tracks from tires so old the police’d know they came from a truck that didn’t see much road. That’d mean a truck kept in a garage or a barn.
And my frickin’ fishing gear was in that truck, those night crawlers dying in there slow.
And there’d be footprints. There’d be two pairs of tracks from where Mixer and Bones waited in the soft dirt along the house. And inside, I’d wiped down everything we touched—at least I think I did—but it’s not like I wiped my feet on that stupid mat before I went in. And I’d touched him, checked for a pulse. I didn’t think they could get prints off a man’s neck, but I didn’t know for sure.
And all this applied if he lived and had the memory of what happened knocked out of his head. All of it except maybe the fingerprints-on-the-neck thing. But that was stupid anyway: Amnesia was for the movies. Relying on it in real life was like relying on magic elves or something.
But if he didn’t die, and he didn’t forget, well, then what was taking him so long? I looked over at my alarm clock. He’d be at the hospital by now, all cleaned up and asleep in his little white bed. He would’ve already told them everything he knew: the who, what, why, and they’d already know the where. He probably would’ve said what’d happened to him when he called for the ambulance. Dialing 911 was really one-stop shopping when it came to stuff like that.
Back at the house we’d thought maybe he wouldn’t tell because he’d be afraid of us, but really, fear was a better reason to tell the cops than not to. And so it was back to waiting for that knock on the door, wondering if I’d even have time to get dressed before they hauled me off. Wondering what my mom would think, would she even be surprised?
I must’ve dozed off for a bit, because I woke up with a start at around four. There was a thought in my head, and it was so clear and up-front that it was like the thought is what woke me up, like it just wouldn’t let me ignore it anymore. I guess it was two thoughts really, but they were all tangled together. One: I should call the cops, just tell them what happened, how I hadn’t meant it, how it was all Bones. Because, two: Friendships end. It happens every day.
It seemed so obvious, but I knew better. I’d had all kinds of crazy thoughts in the middle of the night, lying there bleary-eyed and fuzzy-minded. I once had myself half convinced that I could move the alarm clock with my mind. So I tried to calm down and untangle it all, just to see if it really made sense. After a few minutes, I knew that it might’ve, but that it definitely wasn’t as clear-cut as it’d seemed when I woke up.
Yeah, friendships ended, but there was a fine line between moving on and cutting out when things got tough. Ditching a friend…it just sounded bad. It seemed like the guy walking away was always the dick. And even a dick with a good excuse is still a dick. I’d always thought I could trust Bones before, and now I wasn’t sure. But I was the one thinking about turning him in, so really, who couldn’t trust who?
The sleep was coming back and it was hard to focus my thoughts. I tried again. It’s like they say, your girlfriend cheats on you with your best friend, dump the girl. Of course, that’s a pretty easy thing to say when you don’t have a girlfriend. And Bones wasn’t my best friend, either. But the general idea still seemed to apply: You can let a lot go, if a guy’s your friend. It’s supposed to mean something.
Bones hadn’t stuck to the plan and he’d screwed us over, but it wasn’t all that different from the stuff he’d been pulling for years. Yeah, it was more serious, and it was a teacher this time. But I hadn’t walked away before, and it’s not like I hadn’t had plenty of warning.
As for calling the cops, well, it seemed like I’d missed that boat. It wasn’t so much that I should do it now as that I should’ve done it then. If I’d done it right away, if I’d snuck upstairs to Haberman’s room and hit 911, for the cops and the ambulance, too, then maybe we could’ve sold Bones up the river, made it a solo trip for him. But then I was right back to the thing about sticking by your friends, and that branched off into the friendships end thing. I remembered Throckmorton sitting across from me, his face impossible to read. I just didn’t know, and it didn’t matter anyway, because what did I do instead of dialing 911? I wiped our prints off the furniture and stood there watching the guy bleed.
But maybe it wasn’t too late. I tried to pull it all apart and piece it back together, but I was so tired. Words floated into my head, just pieces of a sentence: “with painful concentration he looked around…the floor…everywhere…trying to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything…” At first I couldn’t remember where I’d heard it, but then I remembered. I hadn’t heard those words at all. I’d read them.
The night was quiet outside, just the spring sounds of insects and wind. I looked over at my alarm clock, and I knew the light would be creeping into the room soon, and not long after that, I’d have to get up and go to school. I couldn’t afford not to go, just in case. It’d be Monday morning, and we’d have Yanoff for English. That’s how it would all start. The alarm clock would have to tell me when. I fell back asleep.