The Danger of Being Me (23 page)

I don't know how long I stood in that arctic March air next to a massive stone bench with the words PROPHECY CREEK carved into the back.  The bench was just a few months old, a replacement for one that had occupied the spot for six years before Ethan had noticed that the school's name had been misspelled PROPHCY CREEK.

I stared at the flag like a patient etherized upon a table.  Then I heard a sharp breath at my right and turned to find a short redheaded girl.  I knew her.  Of course I knew her.  I couldn't even guess how long she'd been standing there.  She stared up at the flag with me, the collar of her jacket flipped upon against the cold, her trembling breath streaming in a steady mist from her flushed nose.

Winnie Donne didn't look at me. "This fuckin sucks."
I almost laughed, but settled for a quiet, "Yeah."
Then she turned to me, and I felt myself tumbling into the fragile eternity of her mesmerizing emerald eyes.  A cold teartrack glistening on her face, a kamikaze streak down her cheek.  I doubt she ever knew she'd shed it.

I reached to her, took her hand in mine, interlaced my fingers with hers.  I don't know if I was seeking comfort or offering it.  But I smiled, and said, "the text is in italics."
She looked down at our hands, then up to my face, and blinked at me.  Then she smiled, and it was sadness all the way to the bottom.  "I don't know what that means."

I looked back to the flag snapping curtly at half-mast.  I laughed, but it came out sounding like a thick sob.  "I don't think it means anything," I told her, shaking my head.
She said nothing. Her fingers tightened on mine.

I don't know if she was offering comfort or seeking it.

4.

Phil drove his rickety Chrysler Newport in silence.  Regina and I said nothing, because there were no words.

Phil twisted the steering wheel to the left.  The sedan rolled across the two opposing lanes of Worthing Street, coasted down the gravel driveway to the Transcendence Unitarian Universalist Church on Worthing Lane.

Ethan's mother had thought enough of her son's friends to hold a wake Stateside before returning to Scotland to bury him and his father on a yellowed hill in Meadowbank with nine centuries of Clan Gibson. I had borrowed a suit from my grandfather, and Phil picked me and my sister up in his an hour before the viewing.

Now I stared out the passenger's side window as we passed by more cars than I possibly could have imagined. They filled the parking lot, huddled along the shoulder of the driveway, spilled over onto the grassy field behind the building. Phil parked near the treeline at the far end of the field, and we hiked back to the church.

We found Winnie outside the doors, looking lost amid a cluster of teenagers, wearing an amethyst scarf and a lilac sundress. Her eyes burned a furious crimson that matched her hair. She wore no makeup. She saw us approaching and blew out a thin and trembling breath. She nodded to us, and we nodded back. There were no words.

The four of us slipped into the modest nave crowded with more than a hundred teenagers. Many sat in pews, while others lined the left side of the dais, along the aisle running the length of the building. I scanned the room, and felt icy nausea churn inside my stomach as teenagers mingled like patrons at a macabre cocktail party.

I spotted all-state quarterback Dean Holliday and class president Zarina Stevens waiting along the left wall. I saw Roy McCleary, flanked by his eight bandmates in a cluster near the far doors. I saw the state-championship chorale positioned on high bleachers to the right of the dais.

Most of these people hadn't known Ethan in life.  Now they had turned his death into a grotesque social event. I blew out a hot breath and glanced to Phil. I saw him look across the crowd, and when he turned back to me, I found the same silent disgust in his eyes that I felt in my gut.

Winnie scratched her name into the registry. Regina followed her, and then Phil signed his name. I took the pen from him, steadied my hand, and scribbled my name in a tilted handwriting that I didn't quite recognize.

The four of us passed through the open double doors, and walked by the window that looked into a soundproof room designed for parents with noisy children.  The room was dark, but I spotted a figure on the far side of the glass, sitting in the far corner, little more than a shadow against the darkness.  Ben sat alone, unmoving, just staring out of into the crowd filling the church.  I shuddered.

The four of us settled into the queue along the left side of the building. We waited, and said nothing. I watched Winnie's shoulders under her sundress and the amethyst scarf draped around her neck, ignoring the conversation and occasional laughter that rippled around me.

The procession advanced, and I suddenly I stood before Ethan's bereft mother. Her eyes burned a furious crimson. She nodded to me, and I nodded back. Because there were no words. This woman had woken up one morning with a family and gone to bed the same night with nothing. There were no words for that. None.

She watched my face, and nodded to me again, and seemed to understand all of the things that could not be said. She leaned to me, and wrapped me up in a hug. I hugged her back, and she squeezed my shoulder before standing away again. "Thank you," she tried to say, but no sound came out. Because there really were no words.

"In the meadow by the river, my love and I did stand." I heard the chorale now, singing softly from their high bleachers, and I looked at them. The girls all wore white dresses with black sashes at their waists; the boys wore white shirts and white pants and black neck ties. I spotted Amber to the left in the second row, her eyes burning a furious crimson as she looked at me. I saw Gale beside her, and Dawn behind them, and Rose and Bellona.

"And on my leaning shoulder, she laid her snow-white hand," they told me, and I looked down at the body.

This wasn't Ethan. The mannequin in the box bore a passing resemblance to the kid I knew, but its features were too gaunt and waxy and pale. Someone had cut his hair, and I had to close my eyes. They had cut his hair.

The body in the suit in the box was not Ethan, but it was all that was left of him now that the most important piece had been taken away. "She bid me take love easy, as the grass grows on the weirs," Dawn sang to me.

I shook my head. Winnie stood beside me as I looked at the body, at all that was left, and I knew. There was nothing else. Nothing further. There was nothing more.

"There has to be more," I hissed, because I needed there to be more, and I knew that there wasn't. All roads lead here. To the deep and terrible End of the All. Winnie drew a trembling breath beside me, and Amber's voice reached out across the church to me like the sighing of an angel. "But I was young and foolish," she told me softly, and I heard her crying. "And now am full of tears."

I closed my eyes, sucked in a dry breath, and stalked out of the building like a specter.

5.

On Tuesday night, I sat in one of the hard plastic chairs in the A/V suite off the library's microfilm reading room.

A deep ache had settled into the muscles of my back from the hours I had spent hunched up at the terminal. I wanted to go home and hide away in my bedroom and read my borrowed Chuck Palahniuk from cover to cover. But the project was so close to being finished that I didn't want to put it off any longer. I wanted it to be done.

The final seven minutes of the film had proven trickier than I'd anticipated. I'd spent twelve hours on the last scene, because the ending alluded to my own metamodern twist on the story: that Cyrano and Cristian were, in fact, two aspects of the same person. A bifurcated man, Charlie had called him, and that sounded right. But I left it to the viewer to decide which character was actually real.

And then, at ten minutes past eight on a stale Tuesday evening, I dragged the 28-second closing credits clip to the bottom of the screen and dropped it into the video bar. I scrolled to the beginning of the file and watched the film in its entirety, uninterrupted, for the first time. Twenty-three minutes later, I sat forward, smiled, unfolded my arms.

Cyrano
was finished. It really was.

I dug a blank video-CD out of my bookbag, slid it into the computer, and saved the file to the disc. Then I made a second copy of the project before saving a third copy just to be safe. I slid each disc into a protective sleeve and tucked them into the front pocket of my bookbag.

I collected my script notes and my storyboards and the pages of my screenplay and stuffed them all back into the main compartment of my bookbag.  I pushed myself out of the hard plastic chair, slinging my bag over my shoulder as I crossed the room and stepped out into the library.

I glanced toward the half-circle bay window looking out over the courtyard, spotted the crown of the Scots Pine against the slate-black sky beyond the student parking lot.  Phil had planted the tree on the last Saturday in March.

He had gotten permission on the day we learned that Ethan was gone, and put the twelve-foot-tall evergreen in the brick island at the center of the concourse between the staircases. The newspaper staff had split up the cost.  Ben had a chunk of soapstone engraved with Ethan's name and dates, and set it in the mulch at the base of the conifer.

Now I watched the crown of that Scots Pine.  The slate-black sky behind it threatened to rupture again and empty another foot of snow across the world.

Graphite whispered dryly on looseleaf, and I passed a lanky sophomore girl with acne.  She glanced up at me with clear coffee eyes, and I was certain that she would be a striking beauty in ten years.  Then she looked back down to her notebook and resumed her writing, and I headed across the room.  I spotted Rob McCall alone at another table beside the bay window, hunched over a massive book with a slimmer volume open above the first.

I angled toward the doors, and saw the librarian read a well-worn copy of
Mrs. Dalloway
behind the circulation desk.  I glanced back to McCall one last time for no real reason at all, and that's when the exterior floodlights snapped on, bathing the courtyard in a harsh white halo.

I watched out the window, saw a streak of white arc upward. The stripe snagged the uppermost branches of the Scots Pine before tumbling down out of view, leaving a pallid fluttering streamer over the crown of the tree.

I paused at the center of the library, waited a couple of seconds, and then crossed the carpet to the wide transom. A floor below, a lurking figure scurried across the concrete around the tree, and I memorized the ribbed slate-black turtleneck he wore. He would have been nearly invisible in the darkness before the spotlights had snapped on.

In another second, the figure reached a splotch of white on the ground at the end of that white line arching over the Scots Pine. He stooped quickly, picked up the tousled roll of toilet paper. His right arm reared back again for another pitch as he decided where to place his next brushstroke.

Hot fury erupted out of the back of throat, tasting like brimstone and cordite.  "
HEY!!!
" I bellowed, pounding a fist once against the glass.  The figure stood, spun, found me.  I stabbed a finger against the window, mashing my fingerprint into the pane: "
yeah, YOU!!!
"

The figure stared up at me for one long moment.  I felt my heartbeat quicken in my throat as my breath splashed across the window.  I glared at the kid, saw his hair stand at jagged spikes and angles, and realized that there was nothing I could do.  The kid knew it as well.  The white gleam of his malicious grin flashed in the spotlight as he jabbed his middle-finger skyward.  Then he spun and hurried up the stone steps toward the parking lot.

I broke from the window, sprinting across the room as the librarian protested.  I darted through the security sensors, pushed out the wooden door, barreled into the second-floor stairwell.  Even as I pounded down those ceaseless stairs, I knew that the kid would be gone before I ever reached the courtyard.  I'd never catch him.

But I pushed faster, taking the steps at a clip that threatened to snap my ankle.  I poured out into the main lobby, rushed down the length of the cafeteria, slammed open the doors that emptied into the floodlit courtyard.  Four paces out onto the concrete, I stumbled to a stop.  The sweltering scarlet veil of my own rage churned around me, the stitch in my side screaming.  I doubled forward, hands on my knees, my breath spilling into the night air.

I stood alone on the cement, that vandalistic bastard long gone.  Monolithic fury beat its pulse inside my skull, and I wheeled, kicking a trashcan.  It did two cartwheels and a backflip before coming to rest on the stone steps.

I twisted, ready to kick something else. I found nothing nearby, and I felt that sweltering veil burst into scarlet dust around me as I stood in the artificial light of a March night without my jacket.  I gasped in sharp, jagged breaths, and wished that I could go on hating for the rest of my life.

I caught my breath, and crossed the concrete.  The Scots Pine stood with quiet dignity despite the ribbons clinging to it.  A bitter breeze sliced across the open grounds.  I climbed onto a picnic table and snatched the nearest streak of paper.  For twenty minutes, I stripped away every shred of damage with unwavering relentlessness.

Ethan had been gone for nine days.

6.

Phil drove his rickety Chrysler Newport in silence.  Ben and I said nothing, because there were no words.

It was April first, the Day of Fools.  We were running late, because Ben had waited until we arrived at his house at six-thirty to insist that he needed to take a shower.  He had spent the next twenty minutes in his bathroom.  Phil and I had sat in the kitchen while Ben's father had watched
Heartbreak Ridge
and nursed a Yards Brawler in the living room.  We considered leaving Ben to find his own ride at one point, but talked ourselves out of the idea.

Now at quarter-after-seven, I sat in the passenger's seat of Phil's rickety Chrysler Newport, listening to Joe Perry's lonely guitar chords underscore Steven Tyler's coarse vocals.  I stared out the window as the storefronts of downtown Prophecy Creek, such as it were, slid by through the darkness beyond the glass.  Tyler spoke of mirrors and the lines in his face, and as we rolled past the Serenity Tavern, he declared that the past was gone.