Absolute Brightness (26 page)

After some careful clicking, Travis got his cursor to find its way into an electronic game the likes of which the Super Mario Brothers could never have imagined.

“This game was made by the army to train troops. You buy it in stores and it's way more violent. There're more fractal explosions, shit like that. You run out of ammunition, you can just get more illegally from the back of an ambulance or whatever, which you definitely can't do in real war. So it's not like actual life. And the people who die are … well, it says right here.”

Travis leaned over the computer, his face glowing as he squinted into the light. He read the type written on the left-hand side of the Full Spectrum Warrior home page.

The object of war is not to die for

your country, but to make the

other bastard die for his.

“Cool, huh? Watch.”

Even from the bed I could see the tiny figures of American soldiers on the screen; they were wearing desert fatigues and hiding their faces behind guns aimed at an imaginary enemy. None of them were moving, not yet; but any minute they would come to life and perhaps die if Travis didn't click his thumb on the mouse fast enough.

The game began, and instantly his attention was sucked into the screen. Muted sounds of explosions, gunfire, and general mayhem filled the room. It was impossible to believe that this was the same boy who, only moments ago, was tenderly slipping his arm under my neck, feeling for my breast, and whispering “'S all right” into my ear. His face had now taken on the ghostly pallor of the dead. His jaw was clenched, his mouth was pursed, and his eyes had gone glassy. Only the twitch of his fingers as he manipulated the mouse, and the occasional wince or involuntary groan when he lost an American soldier, reminded me he was human. A tank blew up and he seemed to take the hit physically; he jumped away from the screen for a moment, got his footing and his nerve, and then returned, ready for more.

But out of the corner of his eye he caught me staring at him, and perhaps because he was being watched, he felt the pang of losing more strongly. In any case, he let the game go and quickly moved back to the window ledge.

“I'm really good at this,” he told me. “I'm not going to get killed, if that's what you're worried about. I know what I'm doing.”

Just then I remembered Leonard telling me the same thing.

“Look, Pheebs,” Leonard had said to me once upon a time while sitting on a garbage can and dangling his legs, “I know what I'm doing.” And if anyone was proof that he didn't know jack about what he was doing despite the fact that he said he did, it was Leonard. Look where he ended up.

But do any of us know what we're doing? I mean, really? Isn't this rightness, this I-know-what-I'm-doing attitude in each one of us, isn't it just something figured into our DNA so that we won't always be looking over our shoulders, second-guessing, and generally freaking ourselves out, because we don't know
anything
? Could it be that survival, on some level, depends on the belief that we
think
we know what we're doing? And whether some unseen, all-knowing, and omnipresent God has installed this trait into our hard drive or it's the result of a long and drawn-out process of Darwinian natural selection, well, it hardly matters. Chances are that anyone will tell you that they know exactly what they're up to. But do they? Do they
ever
?

I could feel myself on the verge of crying. There was a load of tears gathering in my head and they were about to fall—big, fat, weepy girl tears, like the ones that had spotted the front stoop while Travis touched the nape of my neck. I couldn't do this. Not again. Not in front of Travis. Crying once was understandable; but crying twice made me a head case. I had to get out of there before it was too late. I began groping around the floor at the foot of the mattress for my flip-flops.

“Wha's matter?” Travis asked.

“Nothin',” I said as I stood up. “I'm tired. I should go home.”

My eyes had fully adjusted to the darkness, and I could see that the place was a major mess of discarded clothes, soda cans, crumpled-up papers, candy wrappers, old sneakers. It was a room that hadn't heard many bedtime stories, seen many playdates, or enjoyed even the occasional sleepover. It certainly wasn't the kind of room a girl would want to remember years later when she recalled the night she lost her virginity.

But the décor was not the reason I wanted to run. And really, it wasn't the threat of tears either. The reason I had to get away was the same reason I was about to cry. I had suddenly realized that I didn't have the slightest idea who Travis was. For the past month, I'd been making up a picture of Travis in my head, and in the process I had refused any information about him that came to me from the real world. If it didn't fit with the picture of Travis that I already had in mind, I had no use for it. Travis Lembeck was my creation, my Frankenstein's monster. Even the very real business of kissing him, smelling him, being pressed up against him in the dark couldn't disturb my fine-tuned, half-baked fantasy. Now with the revelation that he was going to join the service, that he blew up cyberpeople and destroyed cybervillages just for fun, the Travis I'd been cherishing in my heart suddenly seemed trumped-up. Like those life-size, cardboard cutouts of presidents and movie stars that you can stand beside and have your picture taken with so you can give everyone the impression that you hobnobbed with the genuine article. I was sure that if I stayed there in his room another minute, the real Travis would reveal himself to me, and I wasn't sure I could handle that.

“I have to go,” I repeated, like a robot programmed for flight. My left flip-flop wasn't really on my foot, so I grabbed hold of a wooden dresser just to the left of the door to steady myself. And as I was scootching the flip-flop onto my foot, I saw it. It was peeking out from under a pile of random junk, just sitting there in plain sight on top of the dresser like anybody's business—Leonard's money clip.

Travis was standing behind me saying something about how I couldn't just leave, and what was going on with me? But I couldn't really hear the exact words, because I was focused on that glint of fake gold.

“Where'd you get this?” I said after I had swung around to face him. I was holding the clip between my fingers, holding it out for him to see.

“What?”

“Where'd you get
this
?”

“He gave it to me,” Travis said, without skipping a beat. His expression was difficult to read, because the light from the computer was directly behind him, his face in full shadow. But judging from his voice, he hadn't flinched and there was hardly a breath between my question and his answer. He took a small step toward me, which caused me to clutch the clip and press it against my tank top.

“Who?” I asked. “Who gave it to you?”

“You know. Your cousin.”

“This is crazy. Why would he give it to you?”

“I don't want to talk about it. Could we maybe just change the subject?”

“
No!
His mother gave this to him,” I said, my voice shaking. “This was all he had left of her and—”

“I told you,” Travis said, cutting me off. He sounded bored, as though the whole subject had been discussed and the case was closed. “He
gave
it to me.”

He popped the top of a Mountain Dew. After slurping the fizz that rose up over the lip of the can, he parked himself on the window ledge and casually offered me a sip. I gave my head a little shake. I had no intention of putting my lips to anything that had touched his. He just shrugged, downed another slurp, and then turned away from me like he couldn't care less. Something moved through me, a chill, something that was the exact opposite of the rippling and flapping and overlapping of soft flames that I had been in the thrall of a short time ago. Somewhere deep down inside me, the Travis I'd constructed took its last gasp and died. I was standing in the upstairs bedroom of an empty house with a total stranger, and I was suddenly afraid.

“He told me you were a good friend to him,” Travis said, with such calm in his voice that it sent a shiver down my spine. He wasn't looking at me. “He told me you were lucky for him.”

There was that old story again. Me and Leonard, buddies for life. Total fiction. Why was everyone so intent on this idea of me being best friends with Leonard?

“I wasn't so great.”

“I saw you two together once. Remember? At the mall? You stood up for him.”

“Whatever.”

“No. Not whatever. You did.”

“When did he give it to you?” I asked. “When?”

I was almost pleading with him now. I needed him to tell me, because the seams of my known world were ripping, and the universe was pulling apart and splitting into a million particles. If Leonard and Travis had had the kind of relationship that included gifts, heart-to-hearts, or even a single casual conversation in which I was the subject, then everything needed to be refigured. For example, why hadn't Leonard, a person who really never understood the value of keeping anything to himself, ever told me about his friendship with Travis?

“He gave it to me a while back.” And then he added, “I'm not gay, if that's what you're thinking.”

Maybe it was the unexpectedness of this declaration, but I just laughed out loud.

“What's funny?” he wanted to know. “You think it's funny?”

Travis placed the soda can on the window ledge and he leaned in to me, dead serious. Was he threatening me? Was he about to hit me? The darkness seemed to veil his face, obscuring his intentions. But his voice was sharp and menacing.

“You're not going,” he said, and before I could disagree, he had gotten hold of my upper arms and was pulling me toward him. He tried to kiss me, but I kept pulling away, inching my face out of his range. He shook me with a sudden violence, as if he were trying to force loose change out of me. He stopped and then he did it again. I relaxed into it. There was no use fighting him; he was definitely stronger than me. He forced himself on me, pressed against me like he was trying to prove something. I loosened my arm from his grip, and with one swift jab I elbowed him hard in the gut. He sprang back like a wild animal.

He switched on a tiny lamp next to his computer. A light intensely bright and white filled the room, and my eyes smarted. I was forced to turn away, but as I inched my head back in his direction, my eyes blinking to accommodate the unexpected brightness, I caught sight of something leaning up against the wall. It was a sleek and modern fishing rod with a fancy, complicated reel of taut nylon that seemed to glisten, like a single strand of a spider's web wound up tight.

“I really have to go.” I turned and bolted.

“You'd have to be a darn good fisherman to do a knot like this in the dark.”

Peggy Brinkerhoff's words were booming in my head like in cheesy movies when the heroine suddenly remembers the essential clue with the killer standing behind her, literally breathing down her neck. How could I have been so stupid? How could I have let him touch me?

I took the stairs two at a time until I was down and out the door. The sky was brightening at the edges, and the birds were twittering in the treetops. I wanted to scream, but I couldn't afford to waste my breath. All I knew was that I had to get away. A block later I was sweating bullets, my lungs were strained to the point of popping, and I had developed a sharp pain in my side. As I crossed over the Parkway, my heart was working hard.
Don't think, don't think
, I told myself.
Don't stop. Just run. And keep running. Run, and whatever you do, don't stop to look over your shoulder
.

 

eighteen

SEVEN MONTHS LATER
I was sitting in my first real-life courtroom. It was the first day of Travis's trial for the first-degree murder of Leonard Pelkey, and all I could think about was how an actual courtroom looks nothing like the ones I've seen depicted on TV. And why was that? After twenty minutes or so, I had the answer: It's the lighting. On TV, people get sworn in, tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, lie, argue a case, present evidence, and give closing remarks while standing beneath fixtures designed to make them look like movie stars. What you get when the cameras aren't rolling in a place like, say, Trenton, New Jersey, is lighting more cost-effective than flattering. The face of an accuser looks just as desperate as that of the accused; the color of even the brightest correctional jumpsuit seems to have been dulled down so as not to distract from the proceedings at hand; and the highlights in everyone's hair (even those that have been chemically enhanced) lose their brilliance under the fluorescents; in short, the lighting is far from TV quality.

This may have been my first trial, but I quickly learned that the key players in these not-made-for-TV courtroom dramas are also not quite up to snuff. Actual lawyers, judges, members of the jury, and assorted bystanders don't get selected because of their sharp profiles, shapely figures, or outstanding ability to cry on cue. And it's not just that they are less attractive than the actors who appear nightly on any of the three hundred or so episodes of
Law & Order;
it's also a matter of costuming. In real life, people tend to wear a lot of bargain-basement outfits, clothes that are not so well fitted to their various body types, ensembles that are knockoff and off-the-rack. I sat there in that courtroom day after day flooded with emotion, but what kept coming up for me again and again was the wish that people would make more of an effort with their appearance. Maybe this was Leonard's legacy to me—maybe he would always be sitting beside me shaking his head in disbelief, discouraged by the bad outfits and unfortunate hairdos, determined to give everyone a brand-new look.