Kristen is gone, like she evaporated, which is what I was wishing I could do when I was walking in the dark toward town from the highway, sticking out my thumb whenever a car passed because it’s a hell of a long walk, even for me who walks everywhere. Natalie was probably the last person to see her, but they think it was me, and I guess if I was them, I would at least wonder too.
The movie I saw that night was about this kid who was having a tough time because he was depressed and his parents had him seeing a shrink and taking all these drugs. He kept seeing this weird guy with a rabbit-head mask that made him do secret things, and an airplane engine fell on his house, making a direct hit on his bedroom, and it would have killed him but he was sleeping on the golf course because of the rabbit guy and he keeps doing what the rabbit guy says, and there’s a girl and love and it gets complicated and tragic and ends up being about time travel, or if one certain thing happened different, the whole chain of events afterward would be different. At least that’s what I got from it, and right now I’m trying to figure out which thing I could have changed on Friday so that Kristen would be home and alive and I wouldn’t be here.
There was this cool song in the movie, at the end. It’s really beautiful, about how the world is a sad, mad place which I think is true, and how the best dreams are about dying, and I couldn’t get it out of my head as I walked toward town from the highway near the gas station where Kristen was last seen. I was bracing myself to face Harold and my mom when I got back to the house, and I decided not to go there. I’ve been doing it for a while, not going home. It’s worth it if the weather is nice, and Friday was warm and the sky was clear and the Big Dipper was behind me as I walked along the pavement safe from traffic on the extra-wide lane marked for bikes.
There’s this place out on the north fork of the river. I first found out about it when I was nine or ten and went fishing for humpies with a kid from school and his dad and uncle. They said it belonged to a farmer, but since it was on the river side of the dike a long way from the farmhouse, and it got flooded sometimes, no one paid much attention to it. Fishermen used it as a place to stop to build a fire and warm up. I kept some camping gear stashed there, and when I couldn’t handle being anywhere else, it was my hideout.
If she’s really gone like they say, and someone did hurt her the way they think I did, I know I could kill that person. I wouldn’t hesitate, though killing him is probably too kind for someone like that because he must already be so miserable that living is probably its own punishment. At least that’s the way it feels to me. Most of the time life sucks.
Okay. I admit I have thoughts about weird stuff. And sometimes when I’m really pissed, I imagine having the balls to do something extreme, maybe strap a bomb to myself like someone in Iraq or Afghanistan. But they’re not kidding. They—the cops I mean—think I hurt her or worse, even though they don’t know what happened, or even if anything happened. They actually think I could have... As if I’d do something like that to her.
I watch the news. Sometimes I even read newspapers. It’s not like I thought it up myself. You can’t turn on the TV without those guys blaring at you about how a bunch of people got blown up by some fanatic trying to help Allah get even with infidels. What I think it’s really about is just being so totally pissed off that life gets blurry for you and you can’t sit still and take it anymore, so you pop.
My life is blurry a lot and I get really pissed off at unfairness and the stupidity of some people, like my asshole stepdad. Talk about someone who. . . It would do him good to know fear. And the principal too. They’re both full of bull. You’ll notice I didn’t use the word “shit” here. I would have—I use profanity a lot—but I don’t want to put you off, and that word bothers some people. Plus, it doesn’t really make my story more accurate, and accuracy is important to me, like when I called my stepdad an asshole. I know that word bothers people too, but it’s accurate. He really is one.
Anyway, when they are yelling at me, most of the time I probably deserve it, but it makes my head spin. I get this clutchy, tight feeling around my heart and just want to fade out, become invisible, disappear, but I can’t and I have to stand or sit there pretending to listen, so I imagine things, like what if I had a bomb strapped under my clothes like those Arab guys who probably feel the same way. What if I could yell back, or better yet, just open my coat or shirt and watch his (my stepdad’s) eyes take it in, and his mouth stop.
I always end it there because if you play it out, it’s not so good. I’m not an idiot. I know that bombs kill innocent people, kids like my little half-sister, Tristan. It’s on the news every day. I couldn’t really do it. I don’t believe in an afterlife like the Muslims or Christians. I don’t believe in anything, so the only reward would be the immediate result which would include my being vaporized too, and I’m not sure that that’s a reward, even though I spend a lot of time wishing I could disappear.
But I could never hurt her. She wasn’t having much fun either. It’s true—she wasn’t, even though she never let on to anyone. On the surface, she seemed to have it all together, perfect grades and everything. The teachers all loved her, but I could sense something about her, like she was scared to let go and breathe. I wish I could talk to her now, but I’m stuck in here and she’s gone. They think she’s dead and when I let that thought in, let it touch me, certain moments come into my head, and reliving them seems more real than sitting here in this dump. Moments with her, just talking or not talking, maybe just sitting by the river watching stuff float by in the current, or sitting up on Sugarloaf, the Olympic Mountains in the background, with the turkey buzzards from the San Juans soaring above that little lake. I’m discovering, now that I’m locked in this room with nothing to do but think about how she might actually be dead, that it was in those moments that the tight feeling that’s always around my heart would relax a little, and I could forget for a second or two that life is a mean joke.