Following Christopher Creed (32 page)

"In other towns, the kids might have driven across the parking lot. Maybe even around the block," he finally said. "Everyone else in the car would have been saying, 'No, no! Let me out!' Some girl would have been crying—"

"You don't know what went on in that car!" the kid said loudly. "You don't know that some girl wasn't crying. You weren't there."

Yeah, but if something like that had happened, he would have told us.

Torey tired of our half-serious game. He got a little snappish. "Were you looking for us for some reason, or just stopping to shoot the breeze?"

"No, I was looking," Steve said, jerking his head at me. "Justin sent me to look for you. He says he needs to talk to you about something. I don't know, man ... He's acting strange."

"Where is he?" I asked with a sigh.

"At the Lightning Field."

I turned until I found Torey's eyes again. I raised my shades so he could see how I rolled my eyes, not amused. I dropped my glasses onto the bridge of my nose in disgust and muttered under my breath that he'd been a no-show today and I'd walked to town.

"Let me guess," I went on, my gut instincts firing off like crazy. "Is he talking at a hundred miles an hour?"

"Yeah"

"He mention his mom?"

"Yeah. But I couldn't make sense of it."

"What did he say?"

"She ... took drugs off him or something? Says he doesn't need them?"

"Hmm."
She took his prescription and won't give it to him. He's manic, been through a stress, lost at least two doses, and...

"He do any
other
drugs?" I asked.

"Just one line of coke."

Just.
"Gee, that'll help slow him down," I said sarcastically.

I glanced at Torey's left hand, thumb stuck in his pocket, million-dollar guitar fingers dangling loosely...

"You don't want to go back there with me," I said. "It could be dangerous. You got a career to think of."

I couldn't see the look in his eyes because of his shades. I just know they didn't move off me.

"I'm not leaving you," he said swiftly.

I wondered if
rock star
would be good enough terminology for him. I wondered if he wanted to be nominated for sainthood. I just hoped this wouldn't turn out badly. I put Lanz in the back of Torey's mom's car and dropped into the passenger seat beside him.

W
HAT DO YOU SAY TO A KID
whose eyeballs can look in nine directions faster than most eyes can look in two? I did not know what to make of Justin, since my drug-taking history is only one episode deep. (I smoked pot with Stedman one night last year when the rest of the school was watching the Randolph baseball playoffs. We don't watch baseball on principle.) I can usually tell if someone has done a line or two of coke by the way their eyeballs dance, but this was like watching a fast-forwarded version of a high-speed chase.

Justin was circling a lightning tree, muttering some
thing to it, or muttering to Mary Ellen, who was seated inside the hollowed-out stump, hugging her legs to her chest and glaring at us over the top of her knees. I couldn't see anyone else in the field. Lanz stepped forward and in front of me, sort of putting himself between me and Justin.

Adams was silent behind me, taking it all in, I supposed. He was like a calm non-presence. Justin was too wild and distracted to realize who this was, and Mary Ellen didn't seem to know. Adams's charismatic posters didn't reveal the normal-guy element well.

"I hate when he gets like this," she said into her legs. "He got like this a lot just before rehab."

He looked in five directions in two seconds.

"Can you
feel
anything?" He looked directly at me, but I supposed he was asking Mary Ellen.

"No! I honestly can't! I mean, I can feel that you're scaring me half to death," she snapped. She rolled her eyes toward me. "Back when I was trying to tell him he was bipolar, he wouldn't listen to me. Now he's telling us he's bipolar. My cousin Dwayne is bipolar and gets all twitchy like this. He tells me people talk to him through the walls when his parents are out—"

"Nobody is talking to me through the walls!" Justin insisted. "This is not the same as that! This is quantum thought. How dare you confuse me with a psychosis."

Um, it looked the same.

"Everyone who doesn't want to believe in supernormal powers says the people who experience them are psycho. What the hell kind of a world is this if all magic moments are psychotic? You think
I'm
crazy? What about the people who believe that?"

He caught sight of me again and proceeded before I could think of what to say.

"Magic grounded in science ... Do you believe in quantum thought, Mike? Do you believe people's thoughts become things?"

I decided to take the high road. It might neutralize him somewhat. "I believe Edison really wanted to create a light bulb."

"And hence, he did." Justin stuck his fingers to the tree, looked at them curiously, and shook them out.

"But we went over this yesterday, buddy," I reminded him. "We decided people ought to think of the other guy. Especially the Creeds—"

"Why is it"—he stuck two fingers up to the crystallized trunk again—"that I can feel a charge coming from this tree? But nobody else can? I can
feel
it! I am not lying!"

Mary Ellen shook her head, watching me helplessly. "My mom says not to argue with Dwayne. She says he sees what he wants to see, feels what he wants to."

It seemed to me I'd heard something similar from Torey Adams's mom about anyone who hung around out here, and I didn't suppose these woods were helping. Nothing was helping—not his missing doses, not his drug consumption, not his stress levels.

"I am not 'crazy,' thinking my energy can reach my brother. What do you want me to do now that all those lights have been seen? Stand here and shout at him?"

The lights were not helping either.

His words had come out in quick, jerking sentences. He turned around and faced the north woods. "
Christopher Michael Creed! Come out here, fuckface! I need to see you, man!
"

"Maybe you're feeling an energy charge because you did two lines of coke in one hour," Mary Ellen suggested, and she sprang out of the tree trunk finally.

So now we were up to two hits of coke on an overcharged head.

I scratched mine, sensing the time wasn't quite right to make references to trapped lightning. He might stuff me into the lightning tree headfirst.

"If he's out there, he'll come when he's ready," Mary Ellen said, but I sensed her deep turmoil thrown into the stew. As Kobe Lydee's sidekick, she probably was very confused about whether she would see a spook come out of these woods, a live guy, or nothing.

"He has to come out of there before that funeral and I go back to rehab! He's playing with me! And I need him!
I need him!
" Justin insisted.

Steve came into view from the side. I hadn't noticed him here before. He was out of breath and must have ridden down here at ninety miles an hour. He looked back and forth from Justin to Torey and, I supposed, decided it was better not to distract Justin from what he was doing to say "Open your eyes" or some such thing. Maybe he'd tell Justin later, all, "Guess who was standing right beside you this afternoon?"

Torey stayed silent and still. Steve put three fingers up to the tree, then put his hand in his pocket without saying anything. I took that as a neg from him, too. I didn't bother.

I turned to Mary Ellen, who looked torn between watching Justin and watching me. Her eyes turned to mine, and she said, "Mike. I just want you to know that last night, I tried to get out of the car. I was screaming to get out. But they wouldn't let me."

I wondered aloud this time, "Are the words 'I'm sorry' too much for
anyone
in this town?"

Adams put his hand on my shoulder and said with dramatic seriousness, "I am sorry, Mike."

We might have laughed if Justin weren't sobbing suddenly and babbling incoherently. The only words I understood were "not fair, he can't just..."

And this Steve guy was all, "
This
is not Justin. He was a great time until just recently. You important people should know that."

My class notes came jolting to the front of my brain—probably because I needed them. I knew bipolar disorder is often triggered in adolescence.
It can be triggered by a traumatic event. What had happened the last time Justin was with Danny Burden?
I looked at the menacing clouds rolling in overhead and went with my gut.

"Torey, can you get rid of these people? I need to talk to Justin in private."

He stared at Justin for a moment, then looked questioningly at me. He brought his car keys out like a good assistant, but turned to Mary Ellen. "Come on. Quit crying. Lemme take you home, okay?"

"Aw, me, too?" Steve begged. "It's going to rain on my head, man. I'll leave my bike in the bush."

I figured he just wanted to be in a car with Mr. Fame, and Torey was doing his best to set boundaries as they started off. "...guys
doing
back here?
We
never partied back here ... clean up your act ... stop crying, okay?...and stop touching me!" I got a blast of him pulling his shoulder away from Steve's paw. I wondered if, somehow, he didn't have a worse deal than I did.

Having gotten to town by myself with a completed story for Claudia, I was in a mindset of thinking ahead like I'd never been before. While waiting for Justin to calm down 382 a little, I called Yellow Cab just in case. I didn't want to be stuck out here in a blinding rain storm where lightning liked to strike. They said they could be here in fifteen minutes when I gave them the road and the landmarks. If we didn't need them, they'd have a hard time finding me to give me hell.

Justin had slithered down and was sitting on the ground in front of the lightning tree. I lowered my aching legs beside him, but the trunk was not very fat. So, we were facing off in sort of different directions. I watched Torey lead Steve and Mary Ellen off, looking back at me every ten seconds with concern.

"Sorry I didn't come back last night," Justin started, refusing to look at me. At first. Finally he turned, sitting Indian-style and facing me. His eyes passed over me six times while he said, "Whatever, I'm not myself right now and all I can say is I'm acting like a scumbag loser."

I didn't deny it. "What happened?"

"Last night somebody gave me a vial of coke and some Seconal, which I didn't want, but I didn't give back, either. I just couldn't let go of them. I was manic those times I thought I'd reached my brother, the time I saw him at that cemetery, in that barracks-looking place. I can see that now. Manic has great energy, man! I suppose you think that sounds crazy, but it's true! I was adding coke to the thing. It was just in case I wanted to be even more manic, but after I took my mom's car back, I did a couple lines, and then I couldn't sleep, so I went over to Mary Ellen's and crashed out under her bed, and here I am. I have some coke left. Take it from me. Here. Hurry up before I change my mind."

I found the vial he was holding out, his hand trembling slightly. I flipped the black cap off and turned it over on the ground, but when I found his face again, capsules were going into his mouth.

"Jeezus, Justin. You're gonna ... stop your heart," I said, with no actual clue what I was talking about, but it sounded right.

"No, now I won't. I'll be good in about fifteen minutes. Slow train coming..."

I handed him my water bottle out of my backpack for lack of something better to do and fingered my cell phone, knowing I could punch 9-1-1 without even looking.

"Just ... give me a few minutes. Slow, slow train. Then I got something I need to tell you."

I reached out and put a hand in his hair, going, "Take it easy. Whoa ... whoa..."

I had touched so few people over the past few years, outside of RayAnn. Affection in my life had been something one-sided, from one person only. It had been selfish and indulgent on my mother's part, and it brought me a dim view of touching for comfort.

The idea rode me that I could let RayAnn walk away from me, but I could make room in my heart for someone with a drug problem. A couple times she had been really blunt with me:
I can understand about your mom, but don't you miss Charlie and Merilee?
I'd never answered her. I had made my choices, and there was nothing I could do about it. Now, suddenly, there was.

I rubbed Justin's hair and his back, which brought his head down into my lap, and he was crying at the ground. The clouds hid the sun almost entirely by the time he found his voice, but somehow the world felt dry as a bone. Dry and silent.

"Remember the night I hit my mom?" he asked.

I nodded. "You said you were trying to go out and she didn't want you to."

"I used to sneak out my bedroom window a lot. She'd catch me the next day, ground me for life and whatnot. But I never actually tried to push her aside so I could walk out the front door before. She's just so ... unseeing. Any normal mom would have seen I was unglued about something and would have let me go, and maybe I could have explained later."

I started to put it together that he hadn't been lining up a drug deal that night. I guessed as much aloud.

"Hell, no!" He raised his head finally. "At that point in my life I had smoked one joint. It was the night Danny Burden called me. The night Darla died."

I wondered if he should wait until he was calmer to talk about this. But I kept a hand on his shoulder, which seemed to be calming him more quickly than the drugs.

"He said Darla had shot herself in this outbuilding on the back of his property and he didn't know what to do. He could hardly talk. Nothing was coming out except these ... terrible wails most of the time."

"So, you hit your mom to get to him."

"I totally nailed her. When she was too bloody to hold me down anymore, I took off on my bike. The only thing I had said to Danny—the only thing that made sense—was 'Don't touch anything. Nothing. Don't go back in that building until I get there and we can figure something out.'"