True Letters from a Fictional Life (5 page)

When I emptied my pockets
after school that afternoon, the coffee can I chuck my change into was three-quarters full. One of the things that ended up in the change can was Aaron's alligator PEZ dispenser. My keys live in that can, too, so I figured I'd see the gator when I grabbed my keys on the way out the door on Monday morning. I'd stuff him back in my pocket to trade with Aaron. I hate PEZ, and I love that sweater.

Kevin O'Dea used to go to our school, but this year he transferred to a rich private school in New Hampshire. We don't see much of him anymore, except when he throws parties.
His parents had gone out of town again, so he invited half the kids in the Upper Valley to his place. That half invited the other half.

Derek and I discovered an old telescope in the garage and, to take a break from the crowd, we retreated to the tree house in an old hemlock. The moon was bright that night. I had just managed to bring the mountains around the Sea of Serenity into focus when we heard shouting coming from the other side of the house.

“Someone's probably having trouble getting his car past all the other ones and wants, like, thirty people to back out,” Derek guessed. We had parked on a back road over the hill from Kevin's place, knowing we'd be stuck if we parked on the long, narrow driveway.

“Whoever's yelling is pissed.”

“That's Mark,” Derek replied.

And then the real screaming began between four or five boys. A bottle broke. Derek and I both stood up and let go of the telescope. It tipped out of the tree house, spun twice in the air, and clattered onto the ground. Through the kitchen window, we could see a crowd rushing into the living room, where windows looked out onto the driveway. A girl shouted “Stop! Just stop it!” and another yelled “Oh my God!” over and over and over again. The music fell silent.

“What just happened?” Derek asked flatly.

But he didn't move and neither did I. We could hear a kid yelling, “He didn't mean it! He didn't mean it!” Another kid
shouted, “Shut up! Shut up and get the cars out of the road so an ambulance can get through!”

It's tough to say how much time passed before we started down the ladder. Inside the house, we could see girls in tears being comforted by stiff-shouldered boys. Kevin O'Dea was running around with a black garbage bag, and another boy was chucking beer bottles in it. He used his whole arm to sweep a dozen cans off the kitchen counter.

As Derek and I rounded the house, engines started up along the length of the driveway. Descending cars sent light beams careening across the treetops. We saw Mark sitting in his car, cradling his hand, flexing his fingers. Hawken stood by the door, whispering to him. He held a handful of snow to his own jaw and as we approached, he waved us away.

Boys from Kevin's school stood on the edge of the light, about ten yards away from where a boy in a green sweater lay in the snow. A kid wearing a volunteer fire department jacket knelt next to him, holding a fleece to the back of the boy's head and talking into his phone. I squinted at the kid lying on the ground.

“That's . . . that's Aaron Foster,” I whispered. Aaron looked like he was gazing up at the moon and stars. His eyes were half open.

“I don't know his name,” the boy said. “But he might've cracked his skull.”

I pointed to Mark in the car. “Did that kid punch him?”

“Yeah, but he's so hammered he doesn't even know where
he is, never mind who he hit.”

“I got hit, too,” a second boy said. “My lip's bleeding. Look.”

“I got elbowed in the jaw wicked hard,” said another. “By you, I think.”

“Did Mark punch Hawken?” I asked. “The kid holding snow to his jaw?”

“I only saw Hawken tackling Mark in the snow,” said the kid tending to Aaron.

“As if he would've been able to steer down the driveway even if all the cars
had
moved. He's so wasted he threw a whiskey bottle against the side of the house.”

They all started talking over one another.

“Where'd all the blood come from?”

“Didn't you hear Aaron's head hit the ground? He cracked the ice.”

“Is Aaron breathing?”

“He's dead.”

“Is he dead? He's not dead!”

“Hey,” the kid holding the fleece to Aaron's head interrupted, looking up. “Would you all shut up? This is really, really bad.” His yellow winter gloves dripped blood in the snow.

Everyone went quiet.

Theresa found Derek and me shivering in the dark among drunk kids we hardly knew. She leaned against me. “He was asking Hawken and Mark where you were,” she whispered,
nodding at Aaron. “He'd been here only, like, five minutes.” She squeezed my hand.

Sirens yelped at the bottom of the driveway. The ambulance had to wait for the last of the cars to clear out.

“We can't help. We should split,” Theresa whispered to Derek and me as the sirens grew louder on their way up the hill. The three of us slipped behind the house and climbed over the ridge back to the car. I felt bad leaving Aaron there, but it wouldn't help anyone if we got busted.

We jumped into the bushes along the road when a couple of cop cars flew past. Theresa, who is usually our self-appointed designated driver, took us home. We learned later that the police weren't letting cars leave even after they turned off Kevin's driveway onto the main road. They blocked the street. Two kids got DUIs that night. Ten got charged with underage drinking.

My parents were reading when I arrived home. They sat with me in the kitchen until one, talking through everything.

Conflicting stories would emerge from that night, but the story I knew then was that Mark had been yelling for kids to move their cars so he could back out. No one cooperated. Drunk out of his mind, he pushed the kids nearest him, and when one of them pushed back, he went nuts. He hit Hawken. He shattered a whiskey bottle against the house. He clocked Aaron in the jaw, and Aaron's skull cracked the ice.

My parents looked more worried than I had expected
them to be when I told them about Aaron. “Was he breathing?” my dad asked. “Was he conscious? Did he respond to what was said to him?”

I shrugged halfheartedly. I wanted to reassure them, but I couldn't.

“He cracked his head on an icy driveway and was unconscious, James. People die from hitting their heads like that. A hockey player died a couple of years ago after hitting his head on the ice during a fight.” My dad didn't seem to notice that I had put my head in my hands. He just kept talking. “Swelling beneath the skull puts so much pressure on the brain that sometimes doctors have to drill a hole—”

“What if Aaron's dead?” I interrupted.

My parents didn't respond.

“What if he's dead, and Mark gets charged with murder?” I hadn't cried in front of my parents in years, but my voice was tight. I got up for some water.

“Mark's not going to get charged with murder,” my mom said softly. She's a lawyer. “But he might spend a lot of time in court. He might get sentenced to a few months in corrections. How did he get that drunk anyway? How is he getting his hands on bottles of whiskey?”

“I have no idea. Probably through someone at work.” Like everyone else I know, Mark has connections. My brother Luke's pal buys beer for us sometimes and charges us only a cheap six-pack. “I didn't have anything to drink, anyway,” I lied. “Neither did Derek or Hawken. And I'm sure Aaron
didn't either. He'd been at the party for, like, five minutes.”

“Aaron's the boy you all think is gay, isn't he?” my mom asked carefully.

I nodded.

“Do you think Mark punched him on purpose? Do you think he hit him because Aaron is—”

“No,” I interrupted again. I told them that Mark's a good guy, that Hawken's good friends with him, that he's really funny, that he dressed up as a skunk for Halloween one year. During a field trip to the science museum in fourth grade, Mark and I spent the entire time together, watching the leaf-cutter ant colony.

They didn't say anything.

Derek came to my place Saturday afternoon. His parents said that Aaron was still in the hospital under observation. They work in a different department there, so that's all they knew about him.

Mark, we heard from Hawken, had been arrested and then released into his father's custody. Hawken had only had one beer that night and was chewing gum when the cops arrived. No underage drinking ticket for him.

Derek and I tried doing research for our history papers, but I'd get to the bottom of a page and realize I hadn't taken in any of the words at all. My mind was full of ambulances and beeping hospital machines. I caught Derek staring at the ceiling.

We ended up sitting at the kitchen table talking with my
mom for a while. It made me a little nervous to hang out with her and my friends. She can say embarrassingly insensitive things. Most famously, at my sixth-grade birthday party, she commented to Derek's mom in front of the other boys: “Well, I'm just glad James is good with his feet because he certainly can't catch or throw.” I'd heard that one repeated a lot over the years.

“Aaron's not going to die,” Derek said.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“It just doesn't seem like that's meant to happen.”

“What? What is that supposed to mean?”

My mom looked tense, but she was staying out of it.

“I just don't think he's going to die,” Derek said.

I let it go and just stared out the kitchen window into the woods. I thought for a second that moose was back again—I stood up, peering into the fading light.

“What?” said Derek, following my gaze.

Just a tree. “Nothing,” I said, sitting back down. “I wonder what Mark's doing.” We'd heard he'd gotten a two-day in-school suspension.

“Mark?” Derek said. “He's probably watching ESPN right now, cursing at competitive poker.”

“At least he didn't try to get away last night,” I offered. It's what Hawken would have said if he had been there.

“Mark couldn't reverse down the driveway because of all the other cars. That's why he was throwing punches in the first place.”

“But he didn't run off into the woods. Hawken kept him calm until the cops arrived.”

“Right. Hawken, who he had just decked, had to calm him down,” Derek said. “Mark's like a bad pit bull. A bad
drunk
pit bull. There's always the chance he could suddenly go berserk.”

“He's had a rough time.” I don't know if I was defending Mark or defending Hawken for being good friends with him. “Mark's dad kicks him out all the time. He showed up barefoot at Hawken's door at two in the morning last November.”

“Was he like, ‘Hey, Hawken, how much can you bench-press?'”

“No, he was like, ‘Dude, I want your mom.'”

My own mother lost her patience and slapped my arm. “I don't know how you two can be laughing,” she interrupted. “Have either of you tried calling Aaron?”

“He's in the hospital. He can't answer his phone.”

“Well, his mother?”

“What are we supposed to say?” I asked.

“I'm sure she'd like to know that his friends are concerned about him.”

“Mom, we're not really his friends.” I pictured him wearing my sweater as I said it, but I went on. “We've never hung out with him. Not once. I don't even know his number.”

“He only hangs out with girls. Maybe because he acts like one,” Derek explained.

My mom shook her head. “It must be really hard for his parents.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, him being gay.” She sighed. “And now this.”

That was her attitude. That's why she never talked about gay people—they have a sad affliction.

“I'm just grateful you boys are all normal,” she went on. “I don't know how I would deal with that sort of . . .”—she searched for the right word—“complication.”

I started breathing again when Derek spoke.

“Aaron doesn't like boys,” he said. “But he really,
really
likes boys.” And then he started laughing, and I pretended to laugh, too.

My mom didn't. “You two are terrible.”

“What do you want us to do?” I asked. “Sob into each other's arms?”

“You should call his mother.” It wasn't a suggestion.

“Do you think they'll let Mark keep his job?” I asked.

When Mark first announced that he had landed a job at a restaurant, we all assumed it was a fast food joint over in West Lebanon, but it turned out to be a really nice place up in an old mill town on the Connecticut River. The town used to be one of those places with a supermarket that smells like cigarettes and sells produce wrapped in cellophane, even in the summer. Just off Main Street, right next to what must be the last video rental store in the state, there's a methadone clinic. But a couple of years ago, the town underwent a sort
of revival. Sumac, the little restaurant where Mark works, opened up. One of the local bars started brewing its own beer and bringing in live music. Someone renovated the old theater. A decent pizza place appeared. The
Boston Globe
mentioned Sumac in an article about the best farm-to-table restaurants in New England, and Mark carried the piece folded up in his pocket for a few days to show anyone he could trap.

Hawken, as always, came to his defense. “Let him be happy about it. He's proud of something other than baseball for once, and he's not getting any support from his dad.” Evidently, his father was happy that Mark was earning money, but he had nothing nice to say about the restaurant. Once he told Mark not to bring any arugula-eating boyfriends home from work. “I was impressed that he knew what arugula was,” Mark said with a shrug.

“That job's the one good thing he has going at the moment,” Derek said. “I hope they don't fire him. Otherwise, he'll be out getting laminated all the time and throwing punches at anyone within swinging distance.”