Bang (4 page)

Rowan melts into the sea of students and

Sawyer is pulling me to the side of the school building.

“When,” he says.

“What?”
“When can I see you? I need to see you. After school?

Say yes. Say yes. Say yes.”
“I—” I begin, and the rest of the automatic sentence,
have to work
, drops away. His cheeks are flushed with the
cold. “Okay,” I say.
“Okay?” He sounds shocked.
“Yes,” I say, grabbing some of Rowan’s boldness before
it dissipates. “I—I’ll join a group. Volunteer.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Alibi. Just thinking out loud. Don’t you
have to work?”
“I switched with Kate.”
Kate. The cousin in college. Kate with the funky
blond hair whose life I saved. “Right. Excellent. Rowan
will cover for me. Okay.” I take a breath and decide
specifically not to think about what my father will do to
me when I don’t come home. Trey will help. As we walk
into school together I start reading posted signs on the
walls for the first time in my high school career. “Pep
Club? No, no way. Too much Roxie and BFF Sarah.
Psych Club . . . a-ha-ha-ha, no comment.” I keep looking. And then I turn to see Sawyer watching me, that
little smile on his lips. “Do you play chess?” I ask.

“Um, why? Is this a trick question to determine if I’m
too awesome for you?”
“No no no, I’m just looking for a club to join so I have
an excuse to see you. I could tell my parents I’m in a chess
club, but then I might have to, you know, eventually, um,
prove that I know how to play.”
He’s still smiling at me. My brain turns to fuzz.

“Yes,” he says. “I play chess.” We stop at my locker and
he says, “In fact, I was thinking about starting an exclusive
chess club for offspring of pizza proprietors.”
I grin. “Oh my dogs, I believe I qualify.”
“We’ll have a lot of meetings,” he warns.
“I’ll be there—as often as I can.” I ignore the nervous
quake in my gut that taunts,
Your parents will find out.
His face is close to mine. “Tonight’s launch meeting is
from three to five thirty. I’ll have you back at the restaurant by then. Will that work okay?”
I nod. Whisper, “We’ll get this vision thing figured
out, Sawyer. I promise.”
The bell rings. Sawyer’s smile turns reluctant and he
caresses my neck, one slick motion that makes my hip
sockets burst into flames.

Trey promises to tell Mom that I joined a chess club (dotcom, he says wickedly, so I have to kick him), and that I’ll be home by five thirty. And that I would have called

her myself but I still don’t have a cell phone. Not one she

knows of, anyway.

I load up my backpack more slowly than usual, letting the halls clear around me. Sawyer saunters up to me and we walk down the hallway together. Ever so

casually he takes my hand, entwining his fingers with

mine. And then my eyes get all misty. Stupid, I know,

but you know what? I remember thinking there would

never be a time when I’d hold a boy’s hand in the hallway at school, much less the love of my life’s. It was all a little emotional there for a second, because here I am,

and it feels even better than it looks. I squeeze his hand

and he squeezes back and looks sidelong at me, and I

am so in love.

He opens the car door for me, which feels so incredibly awkward that I hurriedly ask him not to do that again, unless I’m, like, carrying a six-foot sheet cake or something. And then we set out for somewhere, I’m not sure where. He takes my hand again and puts it on the stick

shift with his. When he pushes in the clutch I change gears

for him, and we’re flying out of town, away from Melrose

Park, away from people who frown at us for stupid reasons. After a few minutes Sawyer pulls into a community college parking lot and parks by the gymnasium. Without

a word we get out and he pulls me through the snow to

the side of the building. There are a few cubbyholes in the

walls and I can hear fans running. I catch a whiff of chlorine and feel a blast of humid air on my cheeks.

Sawyer and I duck inside one of the indents and suddenly it’s warm. “Pool fan,” he says, facing me. “My brothers told me about this trick.”

I stare at him. We are alone.
At last, at last.
I lunge for his coat, unbuttoning it, and I slide my

hands to his neck, pull his head toward mine, trying not to

scrape him with my clunky cast. His hands suspend in the

air for a second, and then he buries them in my hair and

we’re kissing and panting and touching each other, starving and lusty and steamy hot, and soon he’s wrenching my coat off and pulling off his own, and he presses against

me, his chest against my chest, our feet finding spaces

every other, and his thighs squeezing mine. And suddenly

I realize that what’s pressing against me is not all thigh,

and I am secretly amazed and a little shocked by it being

there, doing that. He moans and drags his lips to my neck,

and my hands flounder at his hips and slide over them

into his back pockets, like my fingers are someone else’s

expert sexy fingers and I’m the lucky one who gets to feel

through them, because dog knows I don’t know what I’m

doing, I’m just going with it, intoxicated by his fervor and

the overwhelming electric, psychedelic aching in my loins.

“Oh my God,” he whispers after a few minutes,

breathing hard, and he lifts heavy hands one by one and

slaps them against the wall behind me, pushing away, forcing space between us. He leans forward, arching his back, and rests his forehead on my shoulder, panting. “Shit. You

are dangerous.”

I pet the back of his head, my lips tingling. “Are you

okay?”
He lifts his head and looks at me, and it’s a look I don’t

recognize. Desire and heat and I don’t know what else.

“My God,” he says again, shaking his head a little. “What

the heck was I thinking all those years.” He mops his face

with a hand and looks at the coats on the cement pad at

our feet. “I mean, it’s—” He looks around, distracted, like

he forgot where we were. “It’s not just the
this
stuff, but

the
this
is . . . probably . . .” He nods to himself. “Yeah. It’s

going to kill me. For sure.”
I am intrigued by his random candidness, and I think

how funny it is that I can make ball jokes until I’m blue

in the face (dot-com) but I’m sooo inexperienced in the

actual
this
of things, that I’m not quite sure what should or

should not be happening on what I’m starting to think of

as our first date. Which is also
my
first date ever. I’m pretty

sure coats on the ground is far enough, though.
I reach up and kiss him again, lightly this time, and

then turn my head and rest it on his shoulder, holding

him. But those last words from him ring in my ears.

Yeah. It’s going to kill me. For sure.
And that reminds me of

something else entirely unsexy, which makes my stomach

clutch. I glance at my phone to check the time, and my

brain totally changes gears. “Sit with me,” I say. I slide

down the wall and sit, enveloped in the warmth from the

swimming pool circulation fan. He hesitates and eases

down to sit, too. And then, together, we sigh. The fun is

over, and we turn our attention to the urgent matter of the

vision that is taking over Sawyer’s life.

He pulls out a folded wad of paper from his

pants pocket and opens it. The late-afternoon sun glows

orange through nearby branches as he looks at his notes.

“First of all, this sucks,” he says. “Making out was way

more fun.”
“Making out is my favorite,” I say glumly.
“Right?” He folds the papers with one hand and puts

his other to his forehead, rubbing his temples. “Okay, so

here’s how it goes.”
I link my arm in his and scoot my butt closer.
“We’re in a classroom. You asked me how I knew

before, and I couldn’t tell you back then, but now I know.

In a couple of the frames, as my view—or whatever—pans

the room, there’s a whiteboard on the wall and a few tables

and overturned chairs.”
“I always thought of my view as the camera angle,” I

say. “You see what the camera sees, right? And the angle

changes a few times? Mine did, anyway.”
He nods. “Yeah, it does. That’s totally how it looks.”

He rests his hand on mine, absently traces my fingers. “So

the first scene, I guess, is from a back corner of the classroom. The camera does a fast pan of the room and lands on a person—the gunman. He’s wearing dark-wash jeans

and a black fleece jacket, and he’s got a floppy knit cap on

his head.” He turns toward me a fraction. “Any questions

so far?”
“Yeah,” I say. “About a hundred. Was there a clock or

calendar anywhere?”
“Not that I saw.”
“Any writing on the whiteboard?”
“Yes, but I couldn’t read it.”
“A lot?”
“A few lines.”
“Like math equations or like sentences?”
“Sentences. Outline form. Ish.”
I rummage around in my coat pockets for a pen. I

always used to keep a few handy for when I was doing

deliveries. I find one in an interior pocket and pull it out.

Sawyer hands me the notes, and I start jotting down things

on the back of one page. “Okay, so probably not a math

class, right?”
“Hunh. I guess that’s a reasonable assumption.”
“Did the guy have any snow on his shoulders or hat?”
“Um, I didn’t notice. I don’t think so.”
I start a second list on a different sheet of paper—

things for Sawyer to look for next time.
“Did you get any view of the windows?”
He squeezes his eyes shut, thinking. “You know, I

think maybe I did, but I don’t remember anything about

them. The windows felt . . . dark. I’ll look again.”
I write that down and ask, “How tall was the guy?”
“Kind of short.”
“How could you tell?”
He pauses. “In relationship to the tables, he seemed

short. Thin build.”
I nod. “Boots or shoes?”
His mouth parts and then closes again, and I write that

one down for him to check on.
“It was dark, you said the other day. Darkish, anyway,

because you could see the muzzle whatever fire thingy.”
“Yeah. Not totally dark. More like . . . dimly lit.”
“So it could just be from the shades being drawn? Like

they were doing something with a projector? Or maybe it

was stormy outside?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.” He sets his jaw. “I don’t know.”

“I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s okay. You’re asking great questions. It’s

just . . . hard.”
I nod. After a minute I ask, “What about the next scene?”
He looks at his notes. “Okay, so the angle changes. The

camera, I mean. I think it’s at the front of the room, because

the wall I can see in this next scene doesn’t have a whiteboard and the tables are on the left instead of the right. I—”
“Wait. Is anybody sitting at the tables or are the chairs

empty?”
“Empty. Disorderly. Some of the chairs are tipped

over.”
“There are no people? Just the shooter?” I watch his

face. He stares straight ahead.
“There . . . are people.” His eyes glaze.
A shiver rolls down my back. Finally I whisper,

“Where are the people, Sawyer?”
“They’re . . . in the back corner.”
“They’re standing in the back corner of the room?”
“Not standing.” His voice is wispy under the grumble

of the fan. His eyelids droop shut and his face grows

pained. “They’re . . . they’re on the floor. And there’s . . .

stuff . . . everywhere.”
My stomach turns, and I don’t want to ask. “Stuff?”
He nods. “I don’t want to tell you.”
I can barely breathe. “You mean blood.”
“Yes. Blood.”
“More than blood?”
He takes in a sudden breath and blows it out

through his mouth. “Yeah. Guts and brains, I guess.

And . . . that’s all.”
I pull my hand out from under his and rub my forehead, almost feeling sick. I know how real the vision must look to him. And I know he’s looking at me to say something that can give him some hope. But it’s a long reach.

“The thing is,” I say in a quiet voice, “is that if we get this

right, and we find this classroom, and we stop this gunman, that scene will go away. It won’t happen. They won’t get shot, and they won’t die. Right?”
He’s frozen.
“Right,” I answer for him. “So we focus on finding the

date, time, and place. And we don’t focus on the bodies

and the blood and the . . . the stuff.”
This time he nods, and after a minute he looks at me.

“The only time I think there’s any chance at all to save

them is when you’re with me.”
I give him a grim smile. “Oh, there’s definitely a

chance.” I think about it for a minute—the vision police,

or the president of scenes, whoever or whatever controls

this beastly mind game—and I say, “I don’t think we’d get

this chance to save people if it was hopeless.”
As I say it, I try to convince myself that I believe it.

Five things that you can never truly understand

unless you live through them:
1. Hoarding
2. Visions of dead people
3. Driving a giant meatball truck to school
4. Depression
5. Love
6. Sexy time

Okay, so that was six, but I could probably come up with

even more. Shall I elaborate on said list? I say no on numbers one through four.

Number five—I just really had no idea how painful

love is. I mean, my love is different for Sawyer than for

anybody else I love. If Trey was the one going through this

vision thing, I think I could handle it better. Oh, it aches,

the love. Gah. I hate my pathetic overdramatic self.

Number six. Sexy time—I guess I’m trying to process

this one. Let’s just say that weird things happen when you

get all sexy with somebody. I seriously didn’t understand

this even from reading some of the skanky books my dad

brings home from yard sales that mom forbids us to read.

Like, during sexy time, stuff happens physically and mentally and emotionally
all at the same time
, and you kind of lose your mind a little bit. Let’s dissect.

First, you’re just minding your own business one day

when something inside you randomly decides that you

are attracted to a certain person, and you really have no

control over it. Like, one day he’s just some guy in your

math class, or some boy you played plastic cheetahs and

bears with in first grade. And then before you know it,

he’s like a freaking sex magnet and you can’t stop thinking

about him. What the heck? He says something or does

something that changes absolutely everything. You used to

think he had a big nose, but now it’s perfect or whatever.

Or you thought you’d never like a person with zits, but

then you totally change your mind and decide zits aren’t so

bad after all. And if you kind of look at them in a different,

intense way—and I seriously did not factor in the power

of all the possible ways to look at someone—it makes your

body get all electric and wilty inside, and so you decide,

hey, I wanna suck face with that person. What?

Seriously? I mean, I care about germs. I do. I work

in a restaurant, and we have rules upon rules, and I am a

stoic follower of germ rules. But if Sawyer Angotti wants

to put his germy tongue (GERMY TONGUE NOT

RELATED TO HAIRY TONGUE) in my mouth, I will

welcome it. What has happened here?

Yeah, I took health class–slash–sex ed, and I learned all

that textbook stuff, like that the first sign of pregnancy is

missing your period and that whole “point of no return”

and shit like that. But they do not, I repeat, they do not

teach you about that delicious, delirious, buttery, melty

feeling between your legs.

I’m not trying to be gross or weird here. I’m just saying there is no teaching or describing this in any possibly accurate way. Parents do not tell their children about this,

even the hippie parents who are all like “sex is beautiful”

and stuff. There is only discovering it when you are going

through that whole rationalization scene—how you used

to think other people’s tongues were disgusting, and then

suddenly in
one instant
they’re like the best thing ever and

you want it in your mouth like
now
.

And let’s talk about the boys. And how things like

penises are so weird and awkward and probably superugly,

and then they, like,
react
to things like they are alive and

living their own little life in your pants—I don’t know.

Like a freaking barnacle or something. And as a girl, I’m

sorry, but I have never really thought about this penis

factor as it pertains to me. And boys? I have to say that I

am very sympathetic. Because what if, like, my boobs or

my elbow or something totally wigged out into the shape

of the Eiffel Tower whenever I started kissing someone

I liked? I mean, seriously. How embarrassing. But guess

what? Because of number six, suddenly it’s not embarrassing, because we’re in some sort of bizarre temporary world where such things are acceptable.

And I’m not talking about

actual
sex, okay. I mean,

I just had my first kiss, so it’s not like I’m experienced

enough to address that. I’m talking about the attraction

thing and the mushy gut stuff that goes with that.

And it’s those feelings that I am most shocked by.

Indescribable. Which means, of course, I want like hell to

describe it.

I think I might even write my next psych paper about it.

Poor Mr. Polselli.
But the last thing I need to say about this is that I

should not, not, not be thinking about sexy time when

Sawyer is having a vision portraying a freaking homicidal

maniac who blows people’s brains out. I mean, how awful

am I that my mind and my dreams return to sexy time

again and again? Pretty freaking awful.

But here’s the thing that’s even worse. What if Sawyer

can’t save those people, and he dies trying? Seriously, what

if he dies? I don’t know if I can handle it. After all I did

to save him with my vision, I have to go through this all

over again, only somehow, now that we are together, it’s

a hundred times worse. Because I’m the one with a crazy,

endlessly depressed father and these crazy psycho genes,

and I infected Sawyer with this vision that he has no

choice but to obey.