Fearless (8 page)

SAM WASN’T WALKING THROUGH THE park because he wanted to see that girl. He didn’t want to see that girl. She was trouble.

And he had a girlfriend That was the more important point. He had a girlfriend, and he was late to meet her, and even though it was almost dark and he knew he shouldn’t be cutting through the park with all of the crap that was going on, he was doing it anyway.

But not because he wanted to see that girl.

Although he was running late, he could count on the fact that Heather would be at least twenty minutes later and that she would show up with a noisy entourage. She would be all out of breath and apologize fervently for being late, as though her lateness depended on such a rare and extenuating matrix of once-in-a-lifetime circumstances that it could never possibly happen again. And the next time she would be just as late.

He should just tell her it bugged him. He was basically a punctual person, and he didn’t appreciate all the dramatic entrances. He didn’t love the entourage, either.

But if he did tell her, she would probably listen and stop, at least for a while. And then where would he be? What could he complain about? What reason would he have for breaking up with her?

Ooh. That last bit just slipped out. He hadn’t totally meant to have that thought.

Heather was gorgeous. Heather was smart. Heather was confident and funny. Heather, though only a senior in high school, was the envy of all his college friends. Heather was even capable, when she let go of her own mythology for a few minutes, of being a decent person.

But these were not good reasons for going out with a person, and he knew that in his heart. So why did he stay with her?

That was complicated. It hinged on a lot of stuff about his old life and his old self, and he didn’t feel like thinking about it just now.

His thoughts wandered back to the girl.
The girl
. He’d certainly never thought so much about a person whose name he didn’t know. His mind slipped back to her every time he gave it a moment’s freedom. He kept picturing her eyes, infinite as the sky. His mind used to be so obedient, so precise. For the last

twenty-four hours it had behaved more like a badly trained dog on a too long leash.

Did she live in the neighborhood? Where did she go to school? Would she come back to the chess tables in the park? If she did, would he try to talk to her? Would he ask her to play again?

His heart rate was rising at the very thought.

Okay, enough.

He was so distracted, he veered off the path and nearly crashed into a sign. He looked up at it.

Curb Your Dog, it said.

IF SHE SAW HIM, SHE WOULD just change course. Gaia’s eyesight was good. She would spot him before he spotted her, before any interaction needed to take place.

Strictly speaking, walking through the park wasn’t the smartest way to avoid him. But it was the fastest way to get home after she dropped Ed off at his house. And now that it was dark, it was by far her best chance for getting jumped or slashed by one of those neo-Nazi bastards.

She wasn’t going to go out of her way for this guy.

Usually the park was still busy at this hour when the weather was good, but tonight it was nearly deserted. People were spooked by the reports of slashing. Lots of kids had been talking about it in school that day.

Gaia paused to take off her jacket and tie it around her waist. Slashing was such a random, mean-spirited brand of violence and the whole Nazi mythology so profoundly hateful, she was particularly eager to draw it out. She liked to think of herself as a trap. A walking trap.

As she dawdled in the wooded area near the dog run, she heard whispers. Oh, man. Could it be this easy? She strained her ears to hear and ambled a tiny bit closer. She couldn’t really make out the conversation, but she did see the flash of a knife. Not a blade this time, a real knife. Four guys were huddled together, probably plotting their next attack.

Me! Me! Choose me! she thought Jeez, what a wacko she’d become. She made as much noise as possible while still appearing naive and oblivious. She really hoped none of them would recognize her from a previous run-in.

She walked as slowly as she could without actually stopping and yet within moments found herself on the open, brightly lit sidewalk of Washington Square West untouched. So it wasn’t her lucky night. Maybe tomorrow.

She felt sulky and suddenly quite alone. It was weird, this business of having a friend, she decided, thinking of her long, aimless walk with Ed. It made being alone less fun.

Gaia looked up and saw a figure crossing the street toward her. It was a girl, and she appeared to be heading straight into the park. Gaia’s mind flashed to the knife she’d just seen, and she bent her steps toward the girl. She didn’t realize until she was a few feet away exactly which girl it was.

“Is that Gaia?” a not-friendly voice demanded.

It was Heather. This really wasn’t Gaia’s lucky night. Gaia was immediately struck by the fact that Heather was alone. Where was the famed boyfriend? Where were the adoring, fashionably dressed friends?

“Listen, Heather,” she began matter-of-factly, “you probably shouldn’t—”

Heather bristled and walked on. “Leave me alone, bitch.”

Gaia wasn’t sure what to do. Follow her? “Heather, I really don’t think—”

“Get away from me,” Heather snapped. “I don’t care what you think.”

Gaia had intended to be helpful, but now she was angry. Let the stupid girl get slashed. It wasn’t Gaia’s responsibility. If anybody deserved it, Heather did.

Gaia’s temper smoldered as she continued across the

street. She was just about to turn onto Waverly when she spotted more familiar faces. They were all three Heather acolytes. One was named Tina, she believed. The other was a girl whose name she didn’t know, and the third was the good-looking guy from the cafe.

This time she was just going to keep walking, but one of them stopped her.

“You’re Gaia, right?” the non-Tina girl asked.

“Yeah.”

“Have you seen Heather, by any chance”

Gaia looked from one to the next. This didn’t seem like a trick or anything. “Yeah, I just saw her about a minute ago. She was cutting through the park.” Gaia gestured in the general direction.

“Thanks,” they all said. They weren’t oozing warmth, but they seemed perfectly friendly.

“Hey, uh … Tina,” Gaia called over her shoulder.

They all stopped and turned.

“You really shouldn’t go through the park. There’s a bunch of whacked-out guys in there, and at least one of them has a knife.”

Tina and her friends looked surprised and alarmed in varying degrees “Shit. Okay. Right.”

“Thanks,” the guy said again.

Gaia watched with satisfaction as they skirted the park, staying on the lighted sidewalk.

See? She’d done her good deed. She wasn’t a bad person. She could go home in peace.

Sometimes
I dream I’m skating. Not a ramp or half pipe like one of those Mountain Dew commercials. My feet are planted on a board, and I’m steaming along straight and steady. First it’s maybe a sidewalk and then a street and then it becomes a highway of at least four lanes. Then the board transforms into an airplane, and I’m in the cockpit. It’s a passenger plane, I guess, but I ‘ m not aware of having responsibility for any passengers. I have this sense of excitement and anticipation as I accelerate, gaining intense, powerful speed. Fast, fast, faster. I feel sure I ‘ v e passed that speed you need to leave the ground. But I ‘ m still on the highway. I ‘ m still zooming past houses and fields and forests.

The highway bends slowly into a curve. It curves again. I become conscious of road signs-Deer Crossing, Boulders Falling, you know those. And I begin to pay attention to them. I realize I’ve adjusted my speed from about a million miles an hour to just a few above the speed limit. I peer into the side mirror of my airplane to check for cops.

After a while it’s a forgone conclusion that I won’t be taking off. Just a plain fact, like any of the others we learn to live with. I ‘ l l be following signs on the highway in my jumbo jet, built to fly thirty-five-thousand feet above our blue Earth.

And she followed them through the exit, distinctly aware of the huge cloud of hate behind her.

BEFORE HE PASSED THROUGH THE school entrance the next morning, Ed knew there was something wrong. The halls were extra crowded, but not loud enough. Kids were gathered in little clots held together by hushed voices. A lot of eyes were darting around. The air had that heightened energy, that guilty pleasure of tragedy.

“What’s going on?” he asked the first person he came to, a vaguely familiar girl with a magenta crew cut.

“God, it’s so scary,” she said. He could tell she was trying to rein herself in to project the right amount of sobriety. “Heather Gannis got shot in Washington Square last night. She’s in the ICU at St. Vincent’s.”

“Jesus,” Ed muttered. That sick zingy feeling, as if his blood were suddenly carbonated, started under his stomach and spread through his limbs. “Do they know who did it?”

The girl was already gone, so he wheeled up to the nearest group. “What happened? Who did it? Is she going to be okay?” he burst in loudly. He didn’t feel like being measured and coy.

The five faces above him were practically caricatures of gravity. “The police claim they have suspects, but there hasn’t been an arrest,” a black-haired girl

answered. “Nobody knows exactly what happened. They think it was some kind of gang activity—this white supremacist group—connected to the slashings.”

“But it was a shooting,” he argued.

“No, it wasn’t. It was a stabbing,” a guy said.

“A stabbing?” Ed asked.

At least two of them nodded.

“She’s in ICU?” Ed continued, feeling impatient. He needed this information to slow his speeding heart. He actually cared about the facts and their implications, unlike most of the rumormongers.

“In a coma,” another girl added.

He sighed in frustration. “We’re talking about Heather?”

Black-Haired Girl’s face closed in annoyance. “Obviously,” she snapped.

Ed wheeled away, shaking his head. He had a feeling that if he talked to every one of the groups in the hallway, he would get a slightly different story from each.

This was surreal and terrifying. Heather wasn’t the kind of girl who got shot or stabbed or stepped into a hospital for any reason but to visit her grandmother after elective surgery. He couldn’t help but think of Heather’s parents and sisters.

His experience on Mercer Street with Gaia came

back to him in full detail—the knife, the fear, the chaos. How had the world become so malignant? New York City was transforming from the eccentric but comfortable place where he’d grown up into the dangerous, angry place he’d always heard about.

“Attention, students.” Principal Hickey’s voice came blasting through the loudspeaker. “There will be an all-school assembly this morning directly after homeroom. Attendance is mandatory.” Even the principal’s solemnity sounded phony and exaggerated.

Ed wheeled slowly to homeroom, his mind ricocheting from big, appropriate thoughts about crime and death and police investigations to weird little inappropriate thoughts like whether Heather was wearing one of those hospital gowns that tied in the back, and, if so, who had undressed her. Then he felt guilty about having that second category of thoughts and tried not to have them, which took up a certain amount of mental energy in itself.

He was sitting in homeroom, trying not to have any thoughts at all, when he overheard Gaia’s name mentioned. He didn’t turn because he didn’t want to disrupt the conversation.

“Gaia Moore saw what?” asked Becca Miller, a girl with long, supercurly hair who always sat behind him.

“She saw the guy with the knife in the park,” responded Samantha something, a friend of Becca’s, in a

voice hushed but intoxicated with the thrill of conveying important information.

“What are you talking about?” Becca asked.

“Gaia was in the park just a few minutes before Heather got slashed, and she saw the guys who did it.”

“Tell me you’re kidding. How do you know this?” Becca demanded.

“Tina Lynch told Carrie she was with Brian and Melanie last night and they saw Gaia, right outside the park. Gaia told Tina she’d just seen Heather going into the park. But Gaia warned Tina and those other guys not to go into the park—that she’d just seen a guy with a knife.”

Ed’s mind was spinning with the number of names and personal pronouns, but also with the ramifications of what he was hearing. Gaia was involved. Of course she was. If trouble was magnetic north, then Gaia’s head was a huge chunk of iron. In the short time Ed had know n her, he’d almost gotten killed, watched three thugs get demolished, witnessed two catfights, seen one slashing victim’s family crying on the news, and now learned his ex-girlfriend was in a coma.

Of course Gaia was there. How could it be otherwise?

But what had she done, exactly?

He couldn’t trust these girls or really anybody but Gaia to tell him what had happened. And Gaia would

give him the unvarnished truth. He and Gaia were alike in that way. They both took special satisfaction in telling you the one true thing you really, really didn’t want to hear.

GAIA HADN’T PAID MUCH ATTENTION to all the whispering at first. She had learned to be good at ignoring it. In her experience whispering either:

1. Didn’t include her

or

2. Was about her

And in neither case could she take part.

So it wasn’t until the assembly that she heard the news.

“As many of you know, a tragedy befell our school community last night,” Principal Hickey intoned to the enormous, totally silent all-school assembly. Gaia should have known right then that something was seriously wrong by the simple fact that people were actually listening to the guy. “Heather Gannis was slashed in Washington Square Park last night. She lost

a great deal of blood before she was discovered by friends and fellow students. She is in critical condition at St. Vincent’s Hospital. I know you all join me in sending Heather and her family our …”

He kept talking, of course, but Gaia didn’t hear. An ugly, evil creature with smelly fur and sharp fangs was gnawing on her intestines, and that was hard to ignore.

Her thoughts from the previous night returned to her word for word.

Let the stupid girl get slashed. If anybody deserved it, Heather did.

But I didn’t mean that, a small, panicky voice inside Gaia claimed pitifully. I meant to warn her. I was going to, but—

Shut up!
Gaia screamed at her own mind. If she’d had a tire iron, she would have clubbed herself with it. She’d heard too many excuses in her life. She couldn’t stomach them, especially not from herself.

The principal was droning on about safety precautions now, and the attention he’d commanded was lost. Kids were talking, whispering.

Gaia realized when she looked up that hundreds of eyes were bouncing around and landing on her again and again. What could she expect? She had known exactly what Heather was walking into, and at least three other people in this very auditorium knew that she

knew. She could have saved Heather, and she didn’t. She let a petty, stupid conflict, probably based more on her own jealousy than anything else, destroy another person’s life.

The fanged creature devoured several more feet of intestine and moved on to the lining of her stomach.

Everybody was standing up and milling around. Gaia guessed that the assembly was over. Numbly she got to her feet and let herself be moved along by the crowd. Just beyond the doors, in the lobby of the auditorium, the puffy, tear-stained face of Tina Whats-her-name bobbed into view.

Gaia stopped.

If only shame were part of fear. If only self-loathing were part of fear.

If Gaia were a better person, she would have offered some comforting words. She didn’t. She remained the person she was.

“What
happened
last night?” Tina asked her in a voice tinged with hysteria. “What was Heather
thinking
going in there alone? Did you talk to her? Did you tell her what you’d seen in the park?”

Gaia realized Tina wasn’t judging her. Not yet. She was inviting Gaia to commiserate, to take part in the why-oh-why-oh-why that churned her restless mind. She wanted to think the best of Gaia.

Other people had gathered. Some were comforting,

others being comforted. Several friends clutched Tina supportively.

“I—I didn’t,” Gaia said stiffly. “I didn’t warn her.”

Tina’s face took a few moments to register this. “What do you mean?”

Gaia had to remind herself to breathe. “I mean I didn’t tell Heather about the guy with the knife.”

“Why not? Why didn’t you?” Tina’s shiny doe eyes turned into slitted bat eyes.

The crowd of people readied their looks of horror but held off, waiting for an explanation.

A part of Gaia wanted to describe to all these eager sets of ears how Heather told her off, called her names, but she knew it would sound just like the lame excuse it was. She deserved the blame for this. She would take it without flinching. “I just didn’t.”

Tina was crying now. “God, what’s the matter with you? You warned us but not her? Do you hate Heather so much that you wanted her to get killed?”

Amid the loathing, judging faces, Gaia suddenly spied blue. Dark blue uniforms, dark blue hats. The fragments resolved into two policemen.

Could you actually get arrested for failing to warn someone? Gaia wondered irrationally. The faces parted to let the police come through. The hum of voices in the lobby grew to a roar.

“Are you Gaia Moore?” one of them, a tall black man, asked.

“Yes,” she answered. Were they going to handcuff her right here, in front of the entire student body?

“Would you please come with us to the precinct? We have some questions to ask you.”

The man asked it like a real question, not a rhetorical one. He waited for her answer; he didn’t slap on any handcuffs.

“Yes,” she said. “Of course.” And she followed them through the exit, distinctly aware of the huge cloud of hate behind her.

That was one plus about profound self-loathing. Nobody could hate you worse than you hated yourself.