North Fork (24 page)

I skipped school for two months. They could have a court hearing on that if the school makes an issue of it, but they won't because I'm a good student and they have bigger problems to spend their time on. Now that Corey seems okay, school may be my biggest real problem. I'm short of credits for graduation. I missed half a semester, which means I don't have passing grades
in any of my classes. If the teachers would let me, I could make it up, but I doubt that all of them will. This isn't like having cancer, or being injured in a car wreck, or even having mono, though they let a girl who had been drinking and got hurt when she ran her car off the road make up her work. As Sterling likes to remind mom, it was my fault, and there has to be consequences, so we shouldn't expect any help from him to pay for my college, if I can even get in now.

It's been a week since the fireworks. Bonnie let me have the Taurus for a night out. I think she knows I'll see Corey tonight and probably accepts it. He's definitely not her idea of good boyfriend material, but she knows I have a connection to him. I'm finding out that Mom's pretty human when you find your way to her. So I park the Taurus in front of Corey's dad's house in Burlington. The neighborhood has a similar feel to the one where Natalie lives—kind of decayed, but in a different way—and the house is grimy inside, like Ian's uncle's house in Victoria when I moved in.

Corey shows me his room, which is a guy room and kind of messy. Then he says, “This place is depressing. I don't want to hang around here unless you do. We could go for a walk, only the neighborhood is depressing too. I haven't been out to the campsite since the night they took me to Juvie. We could go out there and build a fire.”

So we went. It was early and would stay light for hours. We stopped at the market and got some hot dogs and buns and chips. He had a pack all ready, with everything else we needed in it, which didn't surprise me. There's a road over the dike and a place to park on the river side, out of view from the road, but we didn't care who saw us. Our story had been in the papers and even made the Seattle TV news. I was kind of the villain now and he was the victim, but we didn't think anyone would bother us.

As we walked in, I remembered what it felt like to walk that
trail in the dark that other night, and how alone I felt then, and how I trusted Corey because I thought he knew more about aloneness than I did, and that he respected me. I still think that. So I took his hand, just like I did that night, and we carried our picnic stuff to the river. The rock-circle fire pit was still there and, at first, the place had a weird feel to it. There were bits of colored plastic, numbered in black marker, tied to branches, and a stillness, an emptiness, like no one had used it since my tragic death. We built a fire.

He told me what it was like that last night, and about the fight with Harold that made him decide to sleep there and about hoping I would drive by and pick him up when he was walking. He wouldn't talk about Juvie, so I told him about leaving the car and about Natalie's neighbor giving me a ride and me hoping that he didn't recognize me, and about all the strange moments that could easily have gone differently and made me turn back, but didn't, like passing through Customs and finding a place to stay and a job. Then I told him again how really sorry I was.

And he kissed me.

And I kissed him back.

I had it all planned. I didn't know if she would go, but she went out there with me to the river. It was strange, driving up, parking the car, walking down the trail, holding her hand. But it felt good too. The cops hadn't cleaned up after themselves. I pulled down as many of their little plastic flags as I could. Once we got the fire going, I cut some sticks for the hot dogs and loosened up a little.

The river felt alive, the current rippling, the surface moving and changing in the reflected sunlight. There was a kingfisher working an eddy on the other side, hovering above it in that distinct, fluttery way, then dropping hard with a splash and coming up again and flying to a limb to rest and eat. There's a myth about kingfishers. They mate for life, and when this ancient Greek lady's husband got killed in a shipwreck, the gods turned her into a kingfisher and brought him back to life as one too, in honor of their deep love for each other. I asked Kristen if she remembered the story and she didn't, but she wasn't in that class with me. Maybe the reason I remembered it was because of the husband's name. It was Ceyx, and we made jokes in class by pronouncing it “sex.”

Then she told me how sorry she was about them blaming me for killing her and I kissed her.

Maybe I would have blamed her if things had turned out differently. If I had just seen her there with her mom when I was looking for Harold, I don't know what I would have done. I was pretty much over the edge, and the surprise might have had a
different effect. But she came to me, touched me and apologized. Her need for my forgiveness was part of the package, part of what I had to take in with the fact of her presence, the end of her absence.

There was nothing fake about it. She wouldn't let go of my hands, like she really wanted to understand the place I was in and be connected to it, even if it was dangerous, which it was. She was willing to come out to the edge with me. And I remembered the trust I felt in her hands, walking out here that other night. And she had pulled off the vanishing act, like my uncle, only smarter and better, which made me an accomplice, a partner in something I thought you could only dream about. So instead of being tragic, something I could feel sorry for myself about, them blaming me became funny and absurd because the whole thing is funny and absurd. And tragic. But in the end more funny and absurd than tragic.

And she kissed me back.

She trusted me. What happened that night, or didn't, would become part of my baggage, one of the things I carry with me, like Smith offering me his boat money, believing in me when no one else did. It has become part of my truth now, something I have to live up to. Now someone else I care about, trust and respect, believes that I'm worthy of her trust and respect, so I have to live up to it too. It's pretty heavy stuff.

So if we did it, had sex, it means I took on the responsibility for being enough of a man to be worthy of her, and if I can't do that, if I'm not ready to do that, I'm a loser. If we didn't do it, maybe I passed up my big chance. Or, maybe I saved myself from becoming a loser. I will say this. She makes me want to be worthy of her friendship. That connection, the one that involves trust and honesty, is what's most important. It's new to me and I don't want to lose it.

What happened is private.

The strangest thing about the last six months is how it seems to have just faded away. The trauma and intensity just flattened out like it would after a near-miss car crash, except that it got stretched out over a longer period of time. Of course it's left its marks on all of us. A lot of important things are different from what they would have been if Kristen had just obeyed her curfew that night and stayed home and done whatever Sterling and Bonnie wanted her to do, pretending to be happy, going to school and doing her homework, living in that room full of stuffed animals. They're gone now, the stuffed animals. We took them to the Salvation Army store instead of the dump, so maybe some kid will give them a chance at another life.

Christmas has come and gone. Brad and I are a real couple now. I did some family stuff with him at Christmas. His mom is still pretty icy, but as far as I know she hasn't disowned him yet. I got accepted at Wazoo—you know, Washington State University in Pullman—which is where Brad is going. I would rather have gone to the University of Washington in Seattle, but Brad's family has a Cougar tradition, and for him, Seattle is too close to home anyway. Wazoo is a party school. It's so far out in the sticks, there's nothing else to do, but just going to a real university instead of a community college is a huge step for me, so I'm not too particular which one. I got a good financial aid package, but the main thing is that Brad will be there.

When school started this fall, I didn't know what to expect.
I assumed there would be a lot of drama about Kristen running away, that some people would be really mad at her. Some of the teachers are chilly toward her. Some people are big on accountability and punishment, and seem to think they have to create consequences above and beyond the natural ones. Like the reward they get for being good isn't worth much unless bad people suffer. As if life doesn't create its own version of hell. I think being good brings its own rewards; they're just not always immediate. I think if she tried hard enough, Kristen could have gotten the school to force those teachers to let her make up the work. They do it all the time, but she decided she wants to do Running Start.

She takes classes at Skagit Valley Community College, and the high school has to pay the tuition. The high school is pretty anal about graduation requirements. They think they're pretty special. They have the highest credit requirement in the valley and won't accept substitutions for certain classes like English and history, even if you took those classes at the college. Kristen has plenty of credits to get her diploma through the college, and the only drawback is she wouldn't get to suit up and walk with her class at graduation. Her grade point average is good and she got accepted at some good colleges.

But she might not be able to go because of money, which is really tragic. Because she ran away, Sterling won't pay for her college. But because he makes as much money as he does, she doesn't qualify for financial aid. She says she's moving to Seattle after graduation, no matter what, even if it means she can only go to school part time. Their house is pretty crazy now. Sometimes it's like a war zone and sometimes Sterling is all nice. Bonnie quit working in Sterling's office and now works at a bank. She doesn't make as much, but for now it doesn't matter because Sterling has plenty. But Kristen says she and Bonnie might move out, which would solve her school problems. Since Sterling didn't adopt her,
they would be poor enough for financial aid. It's a weird world.

So she's taking classes both at the high school and at the community college. She got to play soccer with us, and she's at school enough that I see her nearly every day. We're even better friends than before she went to Victoria. Only now we're not like opposites. Sometimes I miss being the strong one, but we have a lot more in common. We even look alike. People joke about it.

To some, she's kind of a hero now. I mean, what kid hasn't thought about running away, but she pulled it off, like Huck Finn. She didn't come back all beat either, or full of rebellion and bravado. She's playing it straight. When kids ask her, she just says parts of it were fun and parts of it were hard. No bullshit from her. She's worked hard in her classes, and though she's nice about it, she gets really impatient when immature kids waste class time.

In spite of what people think about kids and of the way we act sometimes, we really do know we have to grow up. A lot of kids just haven't been jolted much by reality. Adults protect them, and so much of what we get from adults is laced with bullshit. It makes it easy to pretend the important stuff doesn't apply to us. What's true is that most adults haven't figured out good answers to the important stuff either.

But they pretend they know, pretend there are simple answers, like if you obey your parents, get good grades, and go to college, you'll have a happy, successful life. What they really mean is that if you listen to them, you might improve your odds a little, and then their lives will be easier. We're not idiots; we listen to and watch them, and we try to manipulate them the same way they try to manipulate their circumstances. The world is a messy place. Life is risky, full of uncertainties, disappointments, disasters, and just plain noise.

The best we can do is weed out the bull and try not to add any. My parents are losers, but I have something a lot of kids don't
have. Trish plays it straight with me, and she loves me. That's huge. Brad and I are still playing it straight. I don't know about that kind of love yet. What we have might last and it might not, but for now I'm going with it in spite of his mother. Brad may eventually have to choose, or his mother may have to soften. Or we might just drift apart.

Oh, I almost forgot to tell you about Kristen and Corey. I have to admit I still have a hard time with Corey, but I don't hate him anymore. It's hard to forgive. Even though she hasn't said it, I know that's what Kristen wants me to do. Corey seems to have forgiven her, which I don't completely understand. If it wasn't for already having a date with Brad, I would have helped egg Corey's house. I probably would have helped lynch him if the circumstances had been right. I know he was screwed because of what she did, really screwed, but within a week or two after she got back, they were like good friends. It made me jealous. They're not a couple exactly, but they have some understanding, almost like they're co-conspirators. It's an odd relationship. I haven't tried to get her to explain it to me, but eventually I will.

He wrote me this letter. It was a card actually, and pretty short. He brought it to my house with a flower, a white rose. He just handed it to me and left. He apologized for the camera thing. He said he was a dumb kid, but it was still an asshole thing to do, and he wishes he could take it back, but he can't, so he's sorry. I'm sure Kristen put him up to it, and at first I was mad. But after I thought about it, I decided that maybe it's okay. She's my friend and they're good friends. It's not like I can just forgive and forget all at once, but my attitude is changing.

He's going to this alternative school in Mount Vernon and will graduate at the same time we do. He came to some of Kristen's and my soccer games, and some football and basketball games too. People seem to accept him now. He and Kristen talk on the phone a lot. Even I can tell he's changed. He has a job now,
washing dishes at a restaurant near his dad's house, so he doesn't have much free time. She says he's saving money so he can get out of the Valley.