Blank Confession (6 page)

“Oops,” he said.

Shayne, looking down at his fallen bike, shook his head slowly.

“Your bike fell down,” said Trey. Jon and Kyle laughed. Marie took a few steps back, watching with that pseudo-bored look girls get when boys are about to do something incredibly stupid but potentially exciting.

Shayne raised his eyes to look first at Jon, then at Trey. I searched the parking lot for some sort of adult intervention, but there were no teachers in sight.

Shayne said, “You don't have to do this.”

Trey grinned and shrugged his colossal shoulders. Shayne bent over and grabbed the handlebars of his bike and lifted it back onto its stand. The bike must have outweighed him by a couple hundred pounds; Shayne made it look easy. The rearview mirror hung, shattered and twisted, from the fall.

“Your mirror's broke,” Trey said. They were standing on opposite sides of the bike.

Shayne looked over at Jon and said, “I'll send
you
a bill.”

Jon laughed and looked at Trey. Trey raised his foot and tried to topple the bike again. Shayne's hand shot out, cupped the back of his ankle, and heaved. Trey, off balance, hopped back on one leg, then fell.

Jon, laughing, said, “Whoa! Dude!”

Trey jumped to his feet and went after Shayne. That was the part where any normal person would have taken off running, but Shayne just backed away a few steps and stood with his arms loose at his sides, hands open, feet spread.

“Don't,” he said.

Trey wasn't listening. He aimed a skull-crushing blow at Shayne's head.

Impossibly, he missed. Shayne drew his head back at the exact right instant, almost casually, as if he knew what was going to happen a tenth of a second before it did. Trey's fist missed him by inches.

“Don't,” Shayne said again.

Trey swung again. Shayne ducked under the punch and thrust his elbow up to strike Trey in the triceps. Trey let out a grunt of pain and backed off, grabbing the back of his arm.

“Stop,” Shayne said.

Trey, cursing and scowling at Shayne, shook out his arm and flexed it a few times, waiting for the feeling to return.

“It'll be fine,” said Shayne.

Trey threw himself at Shayne, this time with both arms
outstretched. Instead of moving back, Shayne stepped into the embrace. There was this frozen moment when I imagined they were about to hug each other, but Shayne went in low—Trey's arms grabbed nothing, his feet came off the ground, and he was in the air, head pointed straight down, four feet above the asphalt parking lot, as his feet pedaled sky. Time slowed, then sped up. Trey's legs went up and over and he landed flat on his back. I could feel the earth shake when he hit.

Even before Trey hit the ground, Shayne had stepped away and turned so that he was facing an astonished-looking Jon and Kyle. Trey, flat on his back, stared pop-eyed at the sky, making
heek-heek
sounds, followed by a shuddering, wheezy gasp.

Shayne's attention was fixed on Jon and Kyle. Kyle's thumb worked the slide on his utility knife, the razor-sharp blade snicking in and out like a cat's claw.

Trey coughed and climbed to his hands and knees. He gave Shayne a look that contained equal measures of anger, bewilderment, and respect.

Shayne offered him a hand up. Trey slapped it away and lurched to his feet.

Shayne stepped back, once again assuming that loose, ready stance. Trey clenched and unclenched his fists.

Jon forced out a laugh. “Better chill, Trey. Five-O.”

I looked over to see Mr. Benno jogging toward us from the school entrance. Kyle retracted the blade of his knife, slipped it into his pocket, and straddled his motorcycle. Jon started his bike and slapped his thigh, as if calling a dog.

“Let's go, shorty,” he said to Marie.

Marie gave Shayne a weak smile, then climbed onto the back of Jon's bike. Jon pointed his finger at me and said, “Wednesday, Mikey.” They took off, followed by Kyle.

Trey stayed where he was, glaring at Shayne as if he was disappointed at not getting another shot at him, but it seemed to me that the main thing he was feeling was relief.

Seconds later, Mr. Benno arrived, all out of breath and trying not to show it. “Is there a problem here?” he asked.

“No problem,” Shayne said. “Trey here accidentally knocked my bike over. No harm done.”

Mr. Benno looked at the broken mirror. He seemed about to argue, then gave his head a little shake, deciding it would be a lot easier to let it go.

“Perhaps you should apologize,” he said to Trey.

Trey scowled, but apparently Mr. Benno, his former coach, still had some influence over him. “Sorry,” he muttered.

“All right, then!” said Mr. Benno, clapping both Trey and Shayne on their backs as if he'd just brokered peace in the Middle East. “Let's not have any more nonsense.” He walked off.

Shayne said to Trey, “So are we cool?”

Trey turned his back and walked over to his bike.
So much for peace in the Middle East,
I thought. Trey started to get on his bike, then hesitated and said something I couldn't hear.

Shayne said, “What?”

Trey said, “How did you know to do that?” He moved
his hand in a circle, which I understood to represent his 280-pound body flying through the air. “That thing you did.”

I'd been wondering the same thing.

Shayne said, “My dad showed me.”

Trey shook his head. “That was wild,” he said, then got on his bike and rode off.

Later, as Shayne was giving me a lift home, I said, “Trey used to be a nice guy.”

“I never said he wasn't a nice guy,” said Shayne.

“He just tried to beat you up.”

“That wasn't Trey. It was Jon.”

He was right, of course. But how many guys would see it that way?

George Rawls liked to think that he understood teenagers. After all, he had once been one. And before he'd become a cop he had spent a year, part of a year, teaching high school. And he had two teenage nephews—his sister's kids. They weren't all that complicated. One part genius, one part idiot, and three parts peer pressure. Throw in a handful of rampant sexual energy and a dash of geeky awkwardness and you had it: Teen Boy.

This kid, though …this kid he didn't get at all.

For one thing, there was a
calmness
there, even though the kid was clearly in pain—whatever he had done, he was hurting from it. But when he spoke it was in this matter-of-fact voice, as if he was reading from a script only he could see. And he was taking his time.

Rawls said, “So you had a fight with this kid Trey. But he was okay?”

“He was fine. It was just a scuffle, really.”

Rawls sat back and scratched his head. He tried not to do that because someone had once told him that scratching your head would cause baldness. More hair loss he did not need. But it helped him think. Maybe it increased blood flow to the brain. He scratched some more, then
said, “Listen, kid, I know you got this big long story for me, and not that I don't appreciate it, but I don't see how this incident with Trey is important.”

“It's important because of what happened later.”

Rawls sighed and made a reeling motion with his hand: on with the show. The kid took another sip of soda, then continued.

“I knew Jon wasn't going to let it go, so after the thing with Trey I thought I'd go see Jon's dad. It turned out to be sort of a bad idea.”

“How so?” Rawls asked.

“Well, for one thing, his dad was kind of a jerk.”

Rawls waited.

“I went over to his house that same afternoon. I figured Jon wouldn't be home. I rang the doorbell. Finally, a guy answered who looked like Jon only way older and fifty pounds heavier. He was wearing boxers and a T-shirt. I think I woke him up from a nap.

“He said, ‘Who the hell are you?'

“I told him my name and asked him if he was Jon's dad. He wanted to know why I cared, so I told him.”

“Told him what?”

“That Jon was threatening other students.”

“Did you tell him Jon was selling drugs?”

“I might have mentioned it.”

“What did he say?”

“He just stared at me for a while—you know that look a guy gets when he's trying to decide whether to hit you? Then he said if I ever came around there again he'd kick my ass. Then he slammed the door.

“So I figured that explained a lot about Jon. You know, how he got to be the way he was. Anyway, I was just leaving when Jon pulled into the driveway on his bike. He just sat there and stared at me.”

“What did you do?”

“I got on my bike and rode off.”

“That's it?”

“I wouldn't say that. Something happened after I left. But I didn't find out about it until the next day.”

Money. I do have an income, sort of. Mrs. Garcia, three doors down, who refuses to leave her house due to her pathological fear of squirrels, pays me to run errands for her. Like picking up things from the grocery or her prescriptions from Banner Drug. She's good for twenty or thirty dollars a week, depending on how many errands I run. Sometimes she forgets to pay me, but she always tells me how nice I look. She is one of the few people who truly appreciates the care I take with my appearance. In fact, that's where most of my money goes. Clothes. Not that I pay full retail. I buy my clothes at thrift stores. There's a good one over near the synagogue where there are always new suits in my size coming in—all those thirteen-year-old Jewish kids wear them once for their bar mitzvah then grow out of them. Most of the suits are pretty dark-colored and boring—I think a bar mitzvah must be something like a happy funeral—but they fit me fine because of my diminutive stature. But they are not free, and dry cleaning costs money too. And even if I quit buying new clothes and gave every dime I earned to Jon Brande, it would take me months to come up with five hundred dollars.

Mrs. Garcia's Saturday morning grocery order was usually too heavy to carry, so I borrowed Mom's three-wheel gardening cart and walked it over to Jerry's Shop-n-Save. I rolled the cart right into the store. They let me do that because I am a regular.

There were about twenty items on the list, including English muffins, baking potatoes, liverwurst, graham crackers, ginger snaps, and a case of chocolate Ensure. You know what Ensure is? I drank one once. It's like a thick, slimy version of chocolate milk. Old people chug them like Red Bulls.

I noticed that almost everything on her list was brown, so I added a bunch of bright yellow bananas, a head of lettuce, and two red apples to the cart. Mrs. Garcia likes me to be creative. I threw in a can of root beer and a Slim Jim for myself. Have you ever read the ingredients list on a Slim Jim? Love those “mechanically separated chicken parts.”

Mrs. Garcia must have just got her Social Security check; she paid me with a crisp twenty dollar bill. That increased my total cash supply to $27.92. No way would I come up with $100.00 by Wednesday. I was thinking about that as I rolled the cart back into the garage, and I was still thinking about it when I went into the house, but then I stopped thinking when I saw Shayne sitting at the kitchen counter with Marie.

Marie saw me come in and made a face.

I made a face back at her. Shayne looked at the two of us in that way he had: measuring, evaluating, computing.

“What's up?” I said.

“Shayne was telling me about when he grew up,” Marie said.

“You grew up?” I said. Maybe I was being a little bit sarcastic, but I really meant it, in a way. I guess I had this feeling about Shayne even then, that he hadn't ever been a little kid, that he had always been exactly the same.

Also—this is embarrassing—I think I was a little bit jealous. Like Marie was trying to steal him from me.

“You didn't tell me he was originally from Australia,” Marie said.

Australia?
I looked at Shayne and thought I detected a faintly self-conscious smile on his lips. “Let me guess. You were raised by kangaroos in the outback?”

“Aborigines,” Shayne said with a straight face.

“Of course.”

Marie wasn't getting that it was a joke. She was all in lust. Seeing Shayne toss Trey Worthington over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes must have given her a hormonal overdose. Even if she wasn't my sister, I think I'd have found it somewhat repellent.

“I thought you grew up in Arkansas,” I said. “Or Idaho.”

“There too,” he said without hesitating.

“And are your parents doctors, or spies, or aboriginies?”

“All three.”

Marie said to him, “You're funny.” It came out like,
You're hot.

“I am a maze of contradictions,” Shayne said, still with that hint of a smile.

“Me too,” Marie said. “I contradict myself amazingly often.”

“I think you're both insane,” I said.

“You shouldn't say that,” Shayne said, suddenly serious. “Insanity is no joke.”

“What should I say then? You're in la-la land? You're nut jobs? Crunk monkeys?”

Shane gave me about two seconds of nothing, then asked, “What's a crunk monkey?”

“I have no crunking idea.”

Shayne's mouth softened, then formed a smile, and then he was laughing. Marie started laughing too. I, who was no crunk monkey, turned my back and went to my room.

Shayne had dinner with the four of us again that night. Marie was being talkative for a change, and at one point she mentioned a book she had read.

“Since when do you read books?” I said. I hadn't seen her read a book since the seventh grade.

“Now Michael …” Mom started her usual dinner table intervention, but Marie was on a roll.

“Since forever,” she said. “What do you think I do in my room all the time? Work on my hair?”