A Twist of Hate (14 page)

              “White supremacist stuff,” Camden said.

              “Michael’s grandfather showed us a recording of a Hispanic man being whipped in an alley somewhere,” Brian said. “He showed us a magazine with photos of a group of men wearing SS uniforms raping a woman wearing a big fake nose and a tiny forked tail. A number had been stenciled on her forearm, and she was naked except for an exaggerated yellow Star of David, like the ones you see in archive photos of Jewish people during the Holocaust.  It was supposed to look old, like from World War II, but you could see a cordless phone in the background of one of the photos, and one of the men was wearing a digital watch.”

              “The tape looked real but the magazine was fake, like it was meant to be a joke. A really sick joke,” Camden said. “Michael’s grandfather had a black-and-white photo framed and mounted right next to the dart board.”

              “To this day, that photo makes me sick,” Brian remarked.

              “What was the photo?” Courtney swallowed hard. “I know it was something awful, wasn’t it…”             

              “Two black men were hanging from a tree with dozens of white people, even children, standing around watching. Michael’s grandfather pointed to one of the boys in the photo and said it was him. He said it was his first lynching.

              “Brian and I got the hell outta there.” Camden shook his head as if he could dissipate images he would never unsee. “We went to a service station and told the attendant that Virrell Littlefield was going to murder us and sink our bodies in the lake, or something like that. We were totally in a blind panic. The guy just laughed at us, and said, ‘Virrell Littlefield is a good ‘ol boy.’”

              “I called my dad and he picked us up,” Brian said. “We waited outside that filling station for three hours. We were so scared, we stayed in my dad’s car with the doors locked when he went into the lake house to get our backpacks and sleeping bags. Michael stayed. He was so pissed at us for leaving, he threw rocks at my dad’s car as we drove off. He spent every weekend and a few summers at his grandfather’s place after that, but I think he stopped going down there once he got his driver’s license.”

              “No wonder he was a felony waiting to happen,” Mr. Cleese said on a sharp sigh.

              “I told my folks what we saw down there,” Brian said. “They called the police. Nothing ever happened to Michael’s grandfather because I couldn’t prove that anything he had was illegal. That’s another reason Michael and I don’t get along. He knows I’m the one who ‘snitched’ on his dear old persecuted grandpop. He called me a race traitor when I started dating Courtney because she’s Jewish. He said he was only joking, but how can you believe someone who thinks it’s okay to make jokes like that?”

              “I should have listened to Siobhan,” Camden said. “If I’d just agreed to let her cast David in the play from the beginning, all of this could have been avoided. Siobhan wouldn’t have been hurt. Michael would be graduating.”

              “You’re not his keeper,” Brian said testily. “Why do you always jump to his defense? He attacked your girlfriend and you’re worried about him graduating?”

              “We have history, all of us, like it or not,” Camden argued. “Maybe if we had treated him differently, or tried to understand him—”

              Brian abruptly stood and said, “Are you saying this is
our
fault, for not having a racist’s intervention for him in fourth grade?”

              “Why are you so mad at me, Brian?” Camden shot back.

              “Stop it, both of you,” ordered Mr. Cleese. “No one could have predicted Mr. Littlefield would go mental. Every bit of blame for his fate lies solely with him and no one else.”

              Before Camden or Brian could respond, Siobhan entered the office. The cuffs of her white Issey Miyake blouse overlapped her wrists, hiding her bruises. She had styled her hair to hide the abrasion near her temple. She looked none the worse for her experience. Her smile grew more radiant when she saw Camden.

              “Good morning, again.” She quietly greeted Camden, joining him on the sofa.

              He smiled, and a blush raged from his collar to his hairline. Mr. Cleese raised his eyebrows. Courtney tapped Brian with her toe. Brian intently searched for signs of unease or tension between Camden and Siobhan. He saw none. Last night had only cemented their bond.

              “There’s something going on there that I should know about,” Courtney murmured.

              “It’s none of our business,” Brian grumbled.

              The bell rang for their last class, saving Brian from more questions. Courtney had a free period while Siobhan, Camden, and Brian had French.

              “Camden’s having a few people over for dinner before the play,” Siobhan announced pleasantly as the foursome left the drama teacher’s office.

              “I am?” Camden replied.

              “You are?” said Courtney.

              “Why my house?” Camden asked.

              “You live closer to school than I do,” Siobhan explained.

              “You know I can’t cook,” Camden whispered. “I don’t even know what a lemon looks like.”

              “That’s okay.” Siobhan smiled. “Lemons aren’t on the menu.”

***

              “Where were you this morning?” Camden asked as Siobhan piled brown bags brimming with groceries into his arms.

              “I had to go downtown.” She closed the trunk of her Honda, slung both their heavy backpacks over her shoulder, and started for the stone path leading to the front door of his house.

              “Okay.” He fell into step behind her. She could her keep her secret. For now. “Have you talked to your dad about his meeting with Mr. Edwards?”

              “I’ll talk to him later. He’ll be here for dinner.” She fished in the pockets of his jeans for his house keys, found them, and opened the front door.

              Camden rushed into the kitchen and set the bags on the breakfast bar before they toppled from his arms. “Exactly who are we entertaining this evening?”

              “Courtney, Brian, my dad, Mr. Cleese, Dr. and Dr. Livingston, and a guy you don’t know.”

             
A guy I don’t know?
An alarm went off in Camden’s chest.

              “Settle, big fella.” Siobhan patted his shoulder. “He’s a real geezer. He’s old enough to be your father.”

              She took her backpack up to a guest room and changed into jeans and a loose lightweight knit top. After pinning her hair up in a sloppy bun, she returned to the kitchen and asked Camden for an apron. That was all the help she asked of him. She peeled, chopped, and sautéed with skill and efficiency that Camden could only sit back and admire.

              “My parents and I used to make Chinese food at least once a week when we were in London.” Siobhan added a tangle of soaked bean threads to a large mixing bowl full of julienned rotisserie chicken breast, fresh bean sprouts, black bean paste, straw mushrooms, chopped bok choy, grated carrots, and a heavy sprinkling of spices. “The dishes I’ve planned are very quick and easy.”

              “They don’t look easy.” Camden plucked a still sizzling crab rangoon from the batch she had just finished stuffing, folding, and frying in peanut oil. “When did you have time to plan this?”

              “I didn’t sleep very well last night.” She wiped her hands on a clean cotton towel before plunging them into the mixture in the bowl. “When we were actually sleeping, I mean.” Her brow knitted slightly, but the expression of worry passed too quickly for Camden to comment on it. “I woke up with the whole dinner in my head. It’s just our friends coming over, so it doesn’t have to be perfect. And Chinese food really is a lot easier than it looks. It took fifteen minutes to do that entire batch of rangoon and in another twenty minutes, I’ll have the egg rolls finished. It doesn’t get much easier than this.”

              She mixed the ingredients for the egg rolls with her hands, then lined a generous dollop of the mixture diagonally across a pre-packaged egg roll wrapper. In three deft motions she rolled it, sealed it with water, and placed it on a cutting board to await the wok.

              Camden stole it and ate it in two bites. “This is really good.”

              “They’re even better cooked.” She swatted at his greedy hand before he could rob her of the second one.

              “Give me something to do to help,” he said as the doorbell rang.

              “Let the flower guy in, please.” She stirred a bubbling pot of plum sauce.

              Camden answered the door to find three deliverymen from Karenosaurus Rex Florists. They brought in lush arrangements of tiger lilies, chrysanthemums, gardenias, lotus blossoms, and birds of paradise. They had instructions to arrange the flowers in the pool house. All Camden had to do was show them where to go.

              “Are there any other deliveries I should be aware of?” Camden asked Siobhan. “Will the zoo drop by with a pair of giant pandas? When you decide on a theme you go all out, don’t you?”

              She answered with a mysterious, luminous smile that lured him to her. He pulled her away from her steaming pots and spattering pans to kiss her.

              “It’s about time you got around to that,” she said. Her hands were sticky with the aromatic marinade she’d made for the shrimp, so she made a point to not touch him.

              He nodded toward the islands of food in various stages of completion on the stove and the prep table. “How much longer do you think it’ll take to finish this?”

              “If you push together the tables in the pool house and set them with the stuff in the box in the backseat of my car, we’d probably have time to jump in the pool before everyone arrives.”

              “You brought a bathing suit?”

              Blessing him with another intoxicating smile, she said, “I brought a towel.”

***

              Michael examined the bullet holes in Camden’s treehouse. In one section of the curved wall, slender beams of light entered through three tiny, clean holes. The tip of his index finger nicely plugged each of them. The corresponding holes in the opposite section of wall were quite different. He had put his fist through those holes, without touching the jagged, splintered edges of the polarized glass. The bullets politely entered the treehouse yet wreaked havoc on their exit. Michael wished he had brought the gun to school with him for his big meeting. He could have made a mural of Mr. Edwards, Mr. Cleese, Damon Curran and Elvira on the headmaster’s silk wallpaper.

              He took a swig from the bottle of whiskey he’d taken right from under his mother’s nose. If she noticed it sticking from the opening of his backpack on his way out, she’d had the good sense not to say anything about it. He thanked God that all he’d inherited from his mother was thick, carroty red-orange hair and blue eyes as pale as shallow, still water.

              Whatever brains he had, he’d gotten through—not from—his father. If his parents had possessed half his Grandpa Virrell’s cunning, the meeting with Cyril Edwards would have gone quite differently. Grandpa Virrell would have had the headmaster peeing his pants. As for Damon Curran, well…Grandpa Virrell knew how to deal with his kind.

              Michael angrily scrubbed his palm over his head, which no longer sported thick, carroty red-orange hair.

              He and his mother got home from Prescott and he’d locked himself in his room to escape Elvira’s wailing and bitching. In a frenzy of rage, he’d trashed his room—hurled a Little League trophy through the screen of his flat-screen television, flung his laptop through the window and shattered the glass pane—he’d upended his desk, strewing its contents everywhere. The tantrum ended once he realized he’d thrown his gaming console out the window and into his mother’s bullfrog-shaped birdbath.

              Elvira had been in the hallway the whole time, banging on his door, begging him to let her in, begging him not to harm himself.

              That’s when he decided to shave his head.

              He’d gone into his bathroom and used clippers to cut his hair, leaving it all over the white porcelain basin and floor tiles. He removed the stubble with the straight razor Grandpa Virrell had given him for Christmas. Unfamiliar with such a sharp blade, he nicked himself eight times. He looked like a victim in a slasher flick by the time he finished shaving his face—eyebrows included.

              He took his time dressing in the fashionable black on black suit he’d planned to wear for graduation. With his steel-toed combat boots on, he deemed his attire perfect for a night at the theater.

              When he left his room, Elvira’s deep set eyes sunk farther into her skull at the sight of him. She quavered and slid to the floor, a reaction that pleased him. She had found her voice again and tried to stop him from leaving the house, going so far as to call his father. Michael tore the cordless phone from her hand and shattered it against the nearest wall. He left his mother cowering in fear beside the refrigerator.