Come Sit By Me (3 page)

BEFORE I
COULD
interview anybody else, a woman in a maroon pantsuit who looked like she expected to be obeyed appeared on the stage and announced, “The memorial service is about to begin. Everyone take their seats.”

We didn't have assigned seats, so I just grabbed one in the row behind the teachers. Nobody else was eager to sit there, but eventually Terry sat down next to me. “Find out anything?” she asked.

I started to reply, but a tall man stepped up to the microphone on stage. He tapped it to see if it was working and then cleared his throat. Lots of people behind us in the hall were talking, but they didn't shut up until the woman who looked like she expected to be obeyed came to the edge of the stage and glared at everyone. “That's Ms. Brennan, the assistant principal,” Terry whispered.

Silence spread through the room as if Ms. Brennan had a giant vacuum cleaner that sucked up all sound. “This is our new principal, Dr. Haynes,” she said. Somehow she managed to glare into the eyes of every person in the auditorium at once. Or maybe she was just glaring at me. That was the way it felt. “I want you all to give him your undivided attention.”

Dr. Haynes wore a dark suit with a light blue shirt and a bow tie. He looked to be about 45. Probably this was the best job he'd ever had, because who but a loser would want to be principal of a school where there had been a massacre? He smiled, the kind of professional smile that looked as if he had practiced it in front of a mirror. “I want to welcome you all back to Hamilton High School,” he said. “Even though we are here to commemorate a sad occasion. Let us never forget the friends and teachers that we have lost…” He paused here and indicated we should look at the pictures of the seven people who had died. He lowered his head, but after a moment, raised it again, with a hint of the smile. It was clear that was going to be enough brooding about the past.

“We must look to the future,” he said. Yep. “A new year brings new opportunities and new challenges. Here at Hamilton High, I know we have a tradition of responding to challenges, no matter how difficult they may seem.”

I hoped we wouldn't have to respond to another challenge like the last one.

Gradually, I tuned him out and began to think about my assignment. I figured I could wing it on the basis of what I had. The thing that I found myself wondering about the most was Cale. The eighth person who had died. The one whose picture wasn't there. The one Dr. Hayes wasn't going to talk about.

The one whose locker I had.

What did I know most about him? Besides the fact that he was a wacko killer.

That he liked to write a lot. That was something we had in common, anyway. Although I didn't keep an online diary or put notes on a USB drive.

I started to get edgy. Dr. Haynes was still going on about the challenges that lay ahead of us.

For Cale, maybe the problem was sex. Of course, he wasn't the only kid in the high school who was horny. But the direct approach seemed like a very odd way to find a girlfriend. I mean, looking at it realistically, no girl would ever respond with a yes. At least, no girl I'd ever met. Of course, I never had sex, either. At least not all the way. There were a couple of girls in my old school who I'd played around with, so I wasn't a total cherry.

Terry stood up, startling me. I was glad she couldn't read my thoughts.

I noticed that Dr. Haynes had stopped, which was the signal for the rest of us to leave. Teachers were standing and motioning for the students to file out through the rear doors, row by row, but Terry didn't wait. She headed toward a side door, so I followed, figuring that she knew what she was doing.

Nobody stopped us, not even Ms. Brennan. When we stepped out into an empty corridor, Terry asked me, “Did you find out enough?”

“Enough to write a story,” I said. “But really, not much.”

“What else do you need to know?” she asked.

“Something more about Gwen Maguire and Sharon Craft. Other than the fact that they were nice. And whether the two boys were anything besides athletes.”

“Gwen and Sharon
were
nice,” Terry told me. “Sharon intended to go to college. Her family was pretty well off, and she wanted to be a veterinarian. She liked animals, had three dogs. You want their names?”

“Um, no. So what about Gwen?”

“Her only realistic life plan would have been to try to find some guy who was smart enough to get a job but dumb enough to get her pregnant.”

“Any candidates for that?” I asked.

“Several, actually.”

“But she wasn't pregnant.”

“No, you're supposed to do that second semester of senior year. She was just a sophomore.”

I kind of laughed. “Does everybody around here do this kind of planning?”

“Sure,” she said. “Where'd you say you came from? New York? The city? I bet people you were in school with were all planning what colleges they could get into. Maybe starting to take the PSATs for practice, joining extracurriculars so it looks good on their applications?”

I raised my hands. “That's all true.”

“Kids around here aren't much different, except that most can't afford a private college, or even a state college, and so they look at other choices.”

“How about you?” I asked.

“I'm not going to be in your article,” she said. “And I can get into a major college, but I'll need financial aid. Which I can get. Now as for the two boys, Marcus and Ronnie. They were athletes, and devoted their time toward practicing and increasing their skills. All they had to do was pass their courses here—not hard to do—and they would get scholarships to some kind of college. Preferably one in a warm climate. You've heard about them. If you're a good athlete, particularly football or basketball, you hardly have to go to class. That's not what you're there for.”

“How good were they?”

“You would have had to ask Coach Hardin.”

An idea popped into my head. I don't know why. My dad says sometimes he thinks of his best questions in the middle of interviews. “Why would Cale have shot
him
?”

“Supposedly the coach heard the shots and came to help.”

“That's what Junior told me. But how would anybody know?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, nobody survived, did they?”

She gave me a look again. I wondered if she was having second thoughts about making me managing editor. “You think the story they printed in the newspapers wasn't true?”

“I'm just saying.” I didn't want to tell her that my dad says only about half of what you read in the newspapers is really the true story. “Do
you
believe it?” I asked her.

“Why would I not?”

“Because there were no witnesses.”

“I wouldn't look into it too hard if I were you,” she said. “People would rather forget about it.”

I didn't think that was much of an attitude for a journalist. “Are
you
going to forget about it?”

“I'm going on with my life, just the way everybody else is. Next year I'll be in college. I won't tell anybody where I went to high school. Because then all they'll associate me with is…” She waved her hands. I knew: a school shooting.

I couldn't let it go. “What about the librarian? Cale have anything to do with her?”

“Everybody has been in the library at one time or another,” she said.

“Did anybody know what kinds of books Cale checked out?”

“Nothing on bombs or guns, I'm sure. The library wouldn't have them.”

I wrote myself a reminder in my notebook to check with the new librarian.

“So all I need to know about Marcus and Ronnie is that they were good athletes?” I asked.

“Sure. Around here that's enough to make you popular. And it's not like it wasn't true. Just write an article where you say good things about the people who died.”

“Except for Cale.”

“I would leave him out of it, if I were you.”

I shrugged. “When do you need this article?”

“Tomorrow. We're trying to bring out the memorial issue next Monday, when classes start.”

“That's a pretty short deadline.”

“You don't have any homework. What else have you got to do?”

I stopped myself from saying,
Other things besides working for you
. Instead I just nodded.

“Need a ride home?” she asked.

I did, actually, but there were a couple of things I wanted to do first, so I told her I'd hang around school for a while. She shrugged and went off. I went in the other direction, toward my locker.

Yeah, all right, it had been searched, emptied, and scrubbed, but still…I kept hoping that somebody had missed something.

As I twirled the dial on the built-in combination lock, I felt my fingers tingle. Couldn't help it, now that I knew who had opened that locker before me.

OK, so there were my books, just as I placed them earlier. I took them out and set them on the floor, along with some blank notebooks I had bought.

Empty locker. A shelf that had a metal lip. I felt underneath it. Clever, right?

Found nothing. Except some rough spots that felt like somebody had pounded a nail into the metal. Or a knife.

But no USB drive.

“You know who had that locker before you?”

The voice made me jump. I turned around and saw a short, wiry kid with bad teeth and dirty brown hair. He was grinning, because he knew he'd startled me. “They took all the ammunition,” he said. “If that's what you're hoping to find.”

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Seese,” he replied.

“Seese?”

“Short for Cecil. Cecil Joseph. Really dumb name. Thank my parents for that. They think giving me a fancy name makes up for the fact we live in a trailer park.”

“Did you know Cale?”

“Enough to know that he liked to be called Caleb. My locker is right over there.”

I made a note. Caleb. “So were you friends?”

“Didn't you read the newspapers? Caleb was a loner. He had no friends.”

I recognized sarcasm when I heard it. “Except you?”

Seese shook his head. “Nope. Not me. That's what I told the cops. Everybody said the same thing. Caleb? Nah, never heard of him.”

“I'm not a cop. I'd just like to know more about him.”

“Why?”

I didn't know the answer myself. “I'm supposed to be writing an article for the school paper.”

“Bullshit,” he said. “They won't print anything about Caleb.”

I didn't make any response to that, since it was the truth.

“You know Caleb liked to write?” he asked.

“So I'm told. On his laptop, right? Do you know what he was writing?”

“I asked him that once,” Seese said. “He told me there was only one thing worth writing about, and that was yourself.”

“Did you ever see what he wrote?”

“Nah. He was obsessed about hiding it. Maybe he was embarrassed. He'd slap the lid on his laptop down if he thought you were looking at it. And he saved everything on a USB drive, so he could carry it in his pocket.”

“You think he made a list of people he wanted to get revenge on?”

Seese licked his lips and looked away. “You know, I couldn't believe it when they told me it was Caleb who did the shooting. All I remember is that the word came over the P.A. that we were supposed to go outside. Then the fire alarm went off. I guess somebody pulled it. By the time my class went outside, there were already a couple of police cars in the parking lot. Cops yelling at us. Put our hands on our heads, they were saying. The cops looked more afraid than the rest of us were. Almost all the kids thought it was just a fire drill. But the cops knew it wasn't.”

“But you didn't think it was Caleb shooting up the place?”

“No way. There were lots of rumors spread around that day, and after. I think there were some things about it that didn't add up. But when we were standing around outside, all of a sudden people started saying, ‘It's Cale. Cale shot somebody.' Right away I thought bullshit, Caleb wouldn't do that.”

“What do you think now?”

He was getting agitated, and I reminded myself that I didn't know if this guy was crazy or not. And we were alone in the corridor. “All right,” he said. “It looks like he shot those kids. I admit that. But he didn't do it by himself. Somebody put him up to it.”

“Why?”

“Because…I don't know. Because he wasn't capable of it. That took planning. He wasn't a planner. He didn't even have a gun at home, like a lot of people around here do.”

“So where did he get the gun?”

“There were two guns, according to the police. They couldn't trace them. The serial numbers were filed off. Which proves again it wasn't just Caleb. He wouldn't have known how to do something like that. And anyway…why would he care?”

I thought about this. “You mean since he intended to kill himself anyway.”

“Right. Why bother to hide where you got the guns?”

“Unless he got them from a friend.” I suggested.

“Not a friend. Somebody who put him up to this,” Seese said.

“Well, who did he hang out with?”

That was a question Seese didn't seem to want to answer. Probably because the answer was: Seese. After shrugging his shoulders and looking around, he said in a low voice: “I'll bet it's on that USB drive. But it's not in his locker, is it?”

I shook my head.

“The cops probably found it,” he said.

“If they did, how come nobody else was ever accused of helping Cale?” I asked.

He had no answer for that.

I DECLINED
SEESE'S
offer of a ride—seemed like everybody had a car but me—and he went off.

I had one other thing I wanted to do. I found my way to the school library, where I hoped to find out what kinds of books Cale had checked out.

I expected the new librarian to look like the old one, Ms. Robbins, who'd been one of Cale's victims. Instead, I found a babe-a-licious cutie hanging up posters urging people to read. It crossed my mind that the library was going to be a more popular place this year.

Blonde, wearing jeans and a white cotton pullover that stuck out in the right places, she gave me a huge smile. Bump. I introduced myself, and she said, “I'm Ms. Clement.” She shook my hand. Her skin was unbelievably soft, and I almost didn't let go. “You're my first customer,” she said. “Even before school starts. You must be a wonderful reader.”

“Uh, yeah, I like books,” I said, without adding that it would be difficult for any male student to think about books when she was around.

“Who are you favorite authors?” she asked.

And of course my mind went blank. I had a smile on my face that froze, along with everything else above the neck. Author, author…

“Dr. Seuss.” It just popped out before I could stop it.

She nodded—sympathetically, I thought, because what else would you feel for a high-school senior who liked to read Dr. Seuss books?

“He's not the only one,” I said desperately.

“I don't know if we have any of his books,” she said, looking vaguely at the shelves. “Maybe you'd like something more…” She didn't know how to say “something with more words” without offending me.

“That's O.K.,” I said. “I really came here because I'm writing an article for the school newspaper.”

“You are?” She couldn't hide her surprise. I mean, how could you write articles with only a fifty-word vocabulary?

“Yes. It's a memorial to those who were…” I didn't want to say “killed” or “shot,” particularly here in the library. But she got the idea.

“That's very sweet,” she said. Obviously she thought I was doing this on my own and nobody would ever print what I wrote.

“And I needed to know what kinds of books they read.” I really wanted to know what Cale had read, but including everyone else made it more of an innocent request.

She frowned. It was such a cute frown that I almost patted her arm. “I don't know if I can release that information,” she said.

“You can't? Why not? I mean….” I avoided saying the obvious: They're dead. Who cares?

“It's a privacy issue,” she told me. “We should respect their privacy.”

I was desperate. “How about just Cale Peters? Could you tell me what books he took out?”

She shook her head, frowning more seriously now. I could tell I wasn't going to win this argument. “In his case,” she said, “there's another issue besides privacy.”

“What's that?”

“I don't know if I should tell you.”

This sounded interesting. “I can keep a secret.”

“It's not a secret. It's just a little complicated.”

And of course I'm a simp who reads Dr. Seuss books. “I'd still like to know. So I can tell my editor why I couldn't get the information.”

“Well, you see, given what he did, people look for reasons.”

I nodded. “Why he did it.”

“Yes. And if he happened to be reading some book, people could assume that he was influenced negatively by it.”

“Maybe he was,” I suggested.

This time I got a disapproving look. I felt ashamed. “Books don't make people do bad things,” she told me. “But people like to blame them when bad things happen. If they knew what books Cale was reading, that kind of person would want me to remove them from the library.”

“You wouldn't do that,” I said, trying to reassure her I was on her side.

“It's not just up to me,” she said. “I have to answer to the principal and the school board.”

I mulled this over. “What if
they
asked you what books Cale was reading?”

“So far,” she said, “they haven't. And if you don't mind, I would appreciate it if you didn't bring up the subject in your article.”

I shook hands with her again, to show she could trust me. And also because I enjoyed shaking hands with her. Then I thought of something else. “Was there a yearbook that had Cale's picture?”

She brightened up. She hadn't thought of that. “Well, let's see, shall we?” She went to a shelf that held a bunch of old yearbooks, and took down the latest one. “So he was a junoir,” she said, flipping the pages. “Here's the class picture, and the names. He should be second one in the third row…oh.”

I peered over her shoulder. The class had sat on some bleachers in the gym. I saw what had surprised her. Somebody had taken a black magic marker and blotted out the face of the second person in the third row.

She let me take the book from her, because after all there was no privacy issue with that. I stared at the blacked-out face. In death, Cale had become…nobody.

I gave the yearbook back to her. I tried to decide if it was worthwhile to call my dad and ask him to pick me up, or if I should just walk home. I went outside to see what the weather was like, and found North Hawkins sitting there in a pickup truck. It was black but shiny, and big. He sat way up off the ground, and glanced over as I approached.

“Hey,” he said when he saw me.

“Hey,” I replied.

“You got any wheels?” he asked.

I had a feeling he knew I didn't. “No.”

“You want a lift?”

“Sure.” I went around to the other side of the truck and felt like it ought to have a ladder to make it easier to get inside. But I made it. He started the truck and drove off. I wasn't paying attention because I had my eyes on the rifle mounted over the windshield. I guess he noticed my surprise, because he said with a grin, “Don't have them where you come from?”

“We carry handguns instead,” I said, trying to be a tough guy.

He gave a laugh as if he knew I was kidding. “I bet you never fired a rifle,” he said.

“You're right,” I admitted.

“Really? I was just putting you on. You honestly never fired a rifle?”

“Or anything else.” He might as well know the awful truth.

He shook his head. “Well, we can fix that up right quick.” He pulled off to the side of the road.

“Why are we stopping?” I asked, though I had a pretty good idea.

He took the rifle off its rack and got out. The next thing I knew, he opened the door on my side. “Come on,” he said, practically pulling me out. There was nothing but woods on either side of the road here, but I protested anyway.

“You can't just fire guns off anywhere,” I said.

“This isn't a ‘gun,'” he said. “It's a rifle. Guns are artillery.”

“Well, whatever it is. You could hit somebody.”

“Naw. This ain't the city. These here woods goes back for a mile or more before you find anybody living in them. Come on, you don't want to be like Cale, do you?”

“Cale? He didn't have any trouble firing a gun, er, a rifle.”

“Trouble was, he was just a pussy who was never raised with weapons, so he went crazy once he started.”

We had started walking into the woods. I was interested, to tell the truth. “How did he get started?” I asked.

North gave me a look. “Nobody knows,” he said. “You trying to find out?”

“Just curious,” I said.

“You remember what curiosity did to the cat,” he told me.

He was holding the gun, so I didn't argue.

We stopped. He pointed toward something. “See that tree?” he said.

“I see lots of trees.”

”The birch, with the white bark.”

“OK, I see it.”

He handed me the rifle. I held it awkwardly, and he showed me the right way. “This thing's the trigger,” he said with a grin.

“I figured that much,” I said.

“Now raise it to your eye, align the sights and aim it at the birch.”

I did. It was harder to pull the trigger than I thought.

“Just squeeze until it fires,” he advised me.

I did and when the gun went off, it was loud. Louder than I expected. Not like TV cop show loud.

“Now you're a man,” North said. “Except you missed the tree.” He laughed.

“How can you tell?” I asked.

He just shook his head. “Give it another try,” he said.

I raised the gun again and tried to aim more carefully. I realized that I wasn't holding the barrel steady. North saw it too. He reached over and moved my hand farther down the barrel. That solved the problem. I fired again. Still loud.

He nodded. “Got it that time,” he said. Even though I hadn't seen either time whether I had hit the tree or not, I felt a sense of pride, and was angry at myself for it.

“I'll take you hunting sometime after the leaves fall,” he said. I liked hearing that too, even though I promised myself I wouldn't go.