The Danger of Being Me (14 page)

Helen blinked.  "I could have lived a full life without ever learning that particularly piece of information," she said sweetly.  I grinned at that.  I couldn't help myself.

"There's a cardiothoracic surgeon over at Prophecy General," Ben said.  His usual sarcasm was absent.  "She did my grandmother's triple-bypass a few years ago."

"That's her mom," Gale confirmed.

Ethan looked to Ben.  "You never put that together?"

"Never had a reason to," Ben admitted, shrugging.

"Yeah," Gale said, "they live up there in Brookshire, near the golf course where Tiger Woods plays."  Then she turned to look me in the eyes, and I saw her dangerous hazel eyes flash maliciously as she asked casually, "What part of Prophecy Creek do you live in, Michael?"

From the sudden look of disgust on Helen's face, she was the first to put it together.  Then all at once, all of the tumblers clicked into place in my own mind.  I pulled in a hard breath, held it for a moment, tried to bite back my response, and failed spectacularly.  "Fuck you, Gale."

Winnie gasped.  Ben looked up, and Ethan spun in his seat.  Helen was the only one who didn't react.  She was still glaring at Gale, who stood and leaned forward with her palms on the tabletop.  "What'd you say to me?"

The room went silent like someone had hit the mute button.  That scarlet flush crept out of my collar, but I stared her down from across the room.  "Did I stutter?"

"I'm the editor of this newspaper," she said.  I couldn't decide if the fury in her voice outweighed the satisfaction.  She had gotten what she wanted out of me.  She folded her arms across her chest.  "You don't talk to me like that."

"Take it up with Mrs. Kraven," I recommended, mostly because Mrs. Kraven was not in the room.  Not yet.  "Until then, I don't talk to you at all."  I grabbed my notebook in one curt snap, and as I flipped it closed and crammed it back into my bookbag, I saw Ethan watching me.

I looked back into his face for a long moment.  Then I demanded, "What?"

He didn't even flinch.  "You need some air?"

I did.  I nodded roughly, and he pushed out of his seat.

"We're not done here," Gale huffed indignantly.

I turned to respond, and felt that sweltering scarlet veil swirling up around me.  But before I could even open my mouth, Ethan had a hand on my shoulder.  I looked down at it, then up to him, then across to Gale where I found Helen standing between her and Ethan.  Hellfire flared in her eyes as she stared down the editor.  "You're done."

Gale glared at me.  She didn't speak; she didn't move.  Ethan started me toward the door, and I emptied out of the crowded, overheated newsroom into the hallway.

8.

Immediately around the corner, I spun on my heel and drove my knuckles into the narrow door of a locker hard enough to put a tiny dint into the metal.

A brassy note clanged out, and a dozen kids turned to look.  I ignored them, hissing as a bolt of fire exploded inside my fist and surged up my arm to my shoulder.  I stopped next to the locker, shaking out my hand, flexing my fingers.  My knuckles felt full of hot sand.

Ethan shook his head with a lopsided grin.  "You're really gonna let her get to you, huh?"

"I get that I'm a piss-poor nobody from the ghetto of Prophecy Creek."  I winced at the shattered glass grinding in my hand.  "Does she think I don't know that?"

I looked up at Ethan.  His grin widened.  A freshman girl excused herself from beside me and gestured toward the locker I'd just dented.  I apologized and followed Ethan through the knot of teenagers.  He said, "So you think you two have got a
Lady and the Tramp
thing going on."

I considered the analogy as we turned down another aisle.  Halfway down the row, Ethan stopped at a locker and started spinning the dial.  It was the locker he'd used before he joined the newspaper staff.  "Gale obviously thinks I'm some mutt sniffing up Amber's ass."

Ethan finished his combination and snapped the door open.  "She clearly does," he said, glancing to me before reaching to the upper shelf.  "To which I say: BFD."

I watched him dig through the assorted clutter on the shelf until he found what looked like a green cigarette box.  He stuffed the box into his pocket, closed the locker, and started around me.  He said, "Do you really think that anyone gives a ripe toss what Gale Knox thinks?"

I smiled despite myself.  I followed Ethan out of the aisle, falling in beside him.  "She's the main character in her own story, but she's just an ancillary player in yours."

We crossed the bay of lockers and headed down the hall toward the main lobby.  "She's also an ancillary player in Amber's story," I said.  "That makes me nervous."

Ethan actually laughed.  He realized that it wasn't the prudent thing to do, and tried to stop, and that just made him laugh harder.  "Does this Amber have a brain?"

We passed the auditorium and reached the lobby, and I turned to him. He waited for an answer as we angled short of the entrance doors.  "She seems to," I admitted.

"Then don't fucking worry about what Gale says," he told me with a laugh just as Mrs. Kraven passed us.  She cleared her throat, and looked at Ethan, and he had the courtesy to apologize.  Then she was gone, and he grinned as we headed into the main stairwell.  "What Gale fails to realize," he said as we started the ascent, "is that nobody cares about her opinion nearly so much as she does."

I had to laugh at that.  I clapped him on the shoulder with a grin of my own.  "Thanks for that, man."

"It's what I'm here for," he said, and he laughed.

We reached the third floor landing, and Ethan pushed through the door.

I followed him down the hallway behind the balconies.  Before we made it to the set of four steps at the far end of the hall, the door to the roof swung open.  Dr. Lombardi stepped inside as we reached the stairs, holding the door open as Ethan climbed the steps.  He glanced to him, and they regarded one another, each of them nodding almost undetectably.  Some understanding passed between them.  Dr. Lombardi nodded to me as well, and I saw a flicker of surprise when he looked at me.  I followed Ethan through the door, and Dr. Lombardi let it close behind us.

We spilled out into the grey afternoon, and that sheet-metal sky pressed down on us.  We crossed the roof to the rampart above the courtyard, and Ethan looked out over the industrial landscape as he told me, "Whenever I have a problem I can't solve, I come up here to think it out."

I looked across the courtyard and the student parking lot beyond it, and the sprawl of Prophecy Creek beyond that.  Even during the day, the view was extraordinary.  Ethan said, "The answer usually comes to me."

I laughed.  "I don't believe for a second that there's ever been a problem you couldn't solve."

Ethan glanced over his shoulder at me, flashed an impossibly knowing smile, shrugged.  I took a step toward the rampart, watching half-a-dozen teenagers deftly trade a hacky-sack around their circle while a pair of kids tried to skateboard around the weedy brick island at the center of the concrete concourse between the stone staircases.

I sighed.  "Amber is destined for greatness."

"No one's destined for anything," Ethan said shortly.  He turned to look at me for a moment, then cracked a tiny smirk.  "If she has the talent and the ambition, she will be great.  But not because she's destined for it."

"She's certainly got the talent," I told him.  "And she's got the ambition."

Ethan dragged off his cigarette.  "She has a purpose."

"She knows what she wants," I said.  "What can I offer a girl like that?"

Ethan laughed.  "Shut up, you ridiculous prat."  He shook his head, stepped back from the wall, dug the green box out of his pocket.  I saw the word Herbala printed across the front.  He flipped the box open, pulled out what looked like an ordinary cigarette, and removed a pack of matches.  He set the cigarette between his lips, struck the match, touched the flame to the end of the cigarette.  The tip flared, and he shook out the match.

He turned, sat on the parapet with his back to the air.  "You don't think she gets anything out of spending time with you because you don't know what you want?"

I sighed.  There was more to it than that.  There always is. It was all in my head, and at least part of me understood that, but it was the same part that sometimes wondered if I wasn't just a butterfly dreaming it was a man.

Ethan brushed his fingers through the greasy curls of his hair and smiled at me.  "It may shock you to learn that some of the men and women who teach in this school still haven't decided what they want to do with their lives."

I laughed, and watched one of the skateboarders execute a successful kickflip over the lower staircase.  The kids in the hacky-sack circle applauded him, and I said, "I want to peer into the dark corners where others refuse to look.  I want to find the truth inside the lies."

Then I glanced to Ethan, and grinned.  "But that doesn't exactly pay the rent or keep the lights on, does it?"

"It is an uncommon person with the audacity to chase his own improbable ambitions."  He looked at me, flashed a crooked smirk.  The world isn't built for people like that.  The machinery of the world operates on uniformity."

I watched him.  "You talk like you know some shit."

"All I know is that I know nothing," he told me.  Then he laughed.  "Though my dad always says that a man who knows himself knows the only truth that matters."

The phrase burned brightly in my mind for a moment.  A bitter breeze sliced across the open grounds, and I looked down into the courtyard again, at that brick island at the center of the concrete concourse between the stone staircases.  Nothing but weeds would ever grow there.

Ethan dragged of the cigarette again, and breathed out the smoke as he said, "But the world also needs that unruly minority fearless enough to turn their backs on conformity and live in pursuit of their own given purposes."

"No one is given a purpose," I said, shaking my head.  "That's just a fantastic lie that we tell ourselves."

Ethan considered.  "If you think purpose is a lie," he said, "Then why do you look so hard for it?"

I opened my mouth, but found nothing to say.

He looked at me.  "It's why you came to the newspaper.  Why you ran for editor.  Why you decided to write, shoot and edit a film for a high school midterm project."

"A short film," I corrected him.

"It's why you've been writing anonymous love poems to girls you don't even know."

I felt my breath go out on that.  Ethan saw it, but he didn't react.  I stepped to the wall and sat down a few feet to his right.  He turned to look at me through the smoke drifting off his cigarette.  "You don't believe in purpose, but that hasn't stopped you from searching for it."

I nodded reflexively, and Ethan nodded back.  "I think that you're halfway there."  I looked at him as he watched the smoke curl into the afternoon air.  He answered my look anyway.  "Purpose isn't something that someone else can give you.  You're right about that much."

He dragged, leaving the cigarette between his lips, then turned to me and grinned.  "But halfway there is twice as far as the rest of these uncultured bloody miscreants."

I grinned back.  "What's the other half?"

This time he shook his head, the cigarette waving back and forth but never coming loose.  "Can't tell you.  That would defeat the purpose."

I laughed out loud, and gestured to the cigarette.  "You know those things'll kill you."

Ethan plucked the cigarette, looked at it.  "Yeah?"

"From what I hear," I said.

"Good."  He nodded, laughed, dragged deeply.  "A man shouldn't live too long."  Then he glanced out toward the front of the building.  "Especially not someone like me."

He shook his head, laughed at himself.  "These are just herbal cigarettes."  He smiled faintly at an inner memory, and said to no one, "these aren't going to kill me."

The way he said it gave me pause, but then turned back to me, and the look of secret knowledge in his mahogany eyes made me shiver.  "I guess I'm just destined," he told me, grinning, "to be someone else's tragedy."

CHAPTER THREE

1.

On Thursday night, I twisted the steering wheel to the left.

The Jeep Wagoneer rolled across two opposing lanes and over the lip of the driveway.  I pulled into an open space between a silver 1980 Porsche 930 and a hunter-green 1997 Subaru Outback, shut down the engine, and climbed out of the SUV.   I crossed the asphalt to a short concrete staircase that ended at a pair of glass doors entirely blocked out with fliers.

I yanked on the right hand door– it stuck, fought, then gave – and slipped into the repurposed warehouse. A haze of secondhand smoke hung low over two dozen billiard tables, each occupied by groups or couples.  Michael Aday and Ellen Foley reminisced about a deep dark night when they were barely seventeen and barely dressed.

I found no one I knew.  I peered through the smoke before turning to find the night manager behind the counter.  He was losing his hair, but what he had left he had pulled back into a grey ponytail.  He watched me for a few seconds, then asked, "Something I can do for you?"

"Yeah," I said, stepping toward the counter. "I'm – "

"Michael."

I turned to find Amber angling toward me, her caramel eyes sparkling through the haze.  She wore a form-fitting t-shirt bearing the phrase
FREE THE WEST MEMPHIS 3
in white block letters, a pair of faded American Eagle jeans, and a pair of three-inch daniblack Platinum Glitter heels. A sheer scarf held her gentle russet curls back in an unkempt ponytail that looked freshly washed and hastily bundled.

Amber reached the counter, and I turned back to the night manager with a grin.  "I'm looking for her."

"Table 19," she told him. "In the Blacklight Room."

The night manager nodded, turned to the ancient computer next to the register.  Amber returned his nod, then started back across the room. I followed, keeping pace as her heels snapped against the worn carpet.