Skippy Dies (66 page)

Lori wants to shout That isn’t true! again but she can’t because she is wondering if it is true and for a second the guilt-wave
knocks her backwards. But then another wave rises up in her to meet it – a wave of anger, anger at Daniel for doing this to
her, for making her feel this way, for weighing her down with death and making her carry it around with her for ever when
she barely knew him! She barely knew him! And now jumping up she shouts back at the fat boy who has come into her house to
do this to her, Daniel didn’t even know me! I saw him three times in my entire life! I didn’t ask him to write my name on
the floor! I didn’t ask him to do any of that! Sparks are shooting from her, she is so sick of boys and all the things they
want from her, endlessly endlessly wanting and pulling and draining her away – he didn’t know me, I didn’t know him. I didn’t
know about his life, I didn’t know his mom was sick –

The toad’s little squinty eyes open in surprise. His mom? he says.

You didn’t know that? Lori’s dad had told her, he’d heard it from his friend the Seabrook Principal. But it looks like it’s
news to toad boy. She’s dying, she says, how can you not know that? Weren’t you supposed to be his friend?

The toad boy looks at a loss.

How about the swimming team, did he tell you about that?

The swimming team?

How he wanted to quit but he couldn’t?

The toad boy frowns. Lori laughs, this is just too funny. Wow, some friend, she says. Do you actually know anything about
him at all?

The toad doesn’t reply, he is totally confused because he’s come to punish her and take revenge on her and put the blame on
her for what’s happened but now he’s finding out it might not be so simple as the video, it might be that some other things
were bothering Daniel too that someone else might have been able to help him with, e.g. him fatso his so-called friend. You
can see it sinking in, he falls back into the armchair with a look of
shock crossing his face, but instead of wanting to make him feel better and say, Hey it’s OK, we’re in this together, and
share the pain they’re both feeling between them instead she finds now the tables have turned she wants to finish him, she
wants to pay him back for what he’s done, for making her feel evil and loveless, for making her feel rotten and black inside,
when if he knew the first thing about her he’d know that she’s a lovely sweet person that everyone likes, and that Love is
all she cares about and all she thinks about all day long, FYI Mr fat slob, Mr disgusting monster, Mr giant repulsive toad
who nobody will ever want to kiss even if they’re blind, she wishes he was dead cold in a grave somewhere too, she would love
to put him there, she would love to really hurt him, she would love to go over to him and scratch his face, scratch and scratch
and dig and dig until there’s nothing left no face just red like a plate of spaghetti Bolognese after you’ve eaten all the
spaghetti off it and she even gets up and takes a step towards him and emerging out of his reverie she sees his eyes widen
in terror –

Everything OK in here? Mom’s face in the door.

Yes, thank you, Mom. The face that Lori presents back to her is sweet and composed.

Would your friend like some OJ? Or some Pepsi? Mom wonders.

No thank you, Mrs Wakeham, toad-thing says.

Actually he was just about to leave, Lori adds.

On cue, the fat boy rises from his chair. Mom nods and closes the door again. Lori and the fat boy stare at each other. He
is trembling, in his eyes there is despair and not-understanding as far back as she can see. Goodbye, she says. He goes to
the door and down the stairs. She hears him open the front door and shut it. Crossing over the landing she pushes back the
curtain so she can see him in the driveway. He is standing there in the light of the security lamp, clutching his head as
if he’s experiencing a tremendous pain. Maybe it’s the same pain that’s in her stomach. He stays there so long without moving
that the security lamp switches
off. She pulls the curtain closed in one quick motion and sinks onto the bed and cries until the duvet is soaked.

I did love him, she croaks through snot and tears to Lala the teddy bear, and as she says it she knows it’s true, and she
knows that Carl knew it too even before she did and that’s why he did what he did. And she realizes that love doesn’t go in
straight lines, it doesn’t care about right or wrong or about being a good person or even about making you happy; and she
sees, like in a vision, that life and the future are going to be way more complicated than she ever expected, impossibly,
unbearably complicated and difficult. In that same moment she feels herself grow older, like she’s finished a level in a video
game and moved on invisibly to the next stage; it’s a tiredness that takes over her body, a tiredness like nothing before,
like she’s swallowed a ton weight…

And so she’s glad when her phone buzzes with a new message and she can stop thinking about it. When she checks, she finds
that in fact she’s got messages from lots of people in the last hour – from Janine, from Denise, from KellyAnn, Shannan, Richard
Dunstable (Seabrook), Graham Canning (St Mary’s) and Leo Coates (Gonzaga); she reads them one by one, replies, replies to
the replies, time slipping by, phone buzzing, messages wrapping around her like a cocoon, protecting her from the thought
of the toad-boy, of what is in her stomach, of everything else.

Obviously the text from Shannan she deletes without even reading. Lori and Janine have been ignoring Shannan ever since Lori
found out Shannan told Kimberley Cross that Janine hates Lloyd Dalton even though she knows Kimberley’s boyfriend and Lloyd
Dalton are best friends. It’s as she’s sending the message to the trash that she gets her idea. When something annoying or
stupid or evil or all three like Shannan is in your life, the best thing to do is treat it like it doesn’t exist. So, that’s
what she should do with the invaders in her stomach too! While they are living inside it, she will cut her stomach out of
her life, just like she and Janine and Denise have cut out Shannan. She will act like it’s not there until she’s sure the
problem has been solved.

She knows her body will not like this. Her body wants to eat food, it wants to grow and make itself stronger. Even now her
stomach is mewling with hunger, not knowing that it’s in control of the enemy. But she has the answer to this too, in fact
the answer has been here all along – tucked away inside her favourite bear, a baggie of at least one hundred pills, enough
to last her for a couple of weeks at least. She reaches for Lala, finds the secret tear underneath his left arm. She’ll start
now with one pill or maybe two. Soon she’ll have everything back under control.

Something is following Carl.

In the beginning he just feels it, in the classroom, in Texaco, outside Lori’s house. It’s watching him but it doesn’t let
him see it, he turns round and it’s gone. He asks Barry if he’s noticed anything.

‘Like what?’ Barry says.

‘Just like someone following us around.’

‘Shit, you mean like the pigs?’

But Carl doesn’t mean the pigs. He doesn’t know what he means. But just because he doesn’t know what it is doesn’t stop it
from watching him, even in places where it’s impossible to watch him, in Deano’s flat or in his own room, or in his dreams
where he starts to feel it too, the same pair of eyes that track him invisibly when he’s awake, there silently in the dream-space.
For a long time though he doesn’t see it, it’s just a feeling, so he smokes more and more of the superskunk and tries to bury
it under the feeling of nothing.

And then one night he is with Janine. They are in the greenhouse talking about what to do about the Plan, which is over because
Carl ruined it. He doesn’t remember why he did it. It was a very good plan, the way that Janine explained it. We trick Lori’s
mom and dad so they think she is going out with Skippy, but really she is going to meet you. They won’t know about you. Skippy
won’t know about you. The only people that know about you will be the three of us. Lori will have to be with Skippy a little
bit sometimes for the Plan to work. But it won’t mean anything. And the two of you can be together, Janine said, my love,
and she ran her tongue over Carl’s neck. And Carl understood. Lori would be with Skippy sometimes, but it wouldn’t mean anything,
the same way it didn’t mean anything when he was with Janine. It was just a trick to
fool her parents, so she could say, I’m going to meet Skippy, and then she would go to meet Carl. He understood, he could
see it was an excellent plan. But then at the last minute, when it was actually happening, he realized he didn’t understand.
Most of him did but he couldn’t explain it to the part that didn’t. And he worried about whether the boy Skippy understood.
That’s why he sent the film from the roof of Ed’s, so that everyone would know what was going on, everyone would know that
Lori was his. But you see that was not part of the Plan. So what happened then was, instead of bringing him and Lori together,
he has actually split them apart, and now he is in Janine’s granny’s greenhouse and everything is different. She is telling
him Lori will not see him, will not talk to him. She is crying. He is breaking her granny’s flowerpots. She is begging him
to stop. She is telling him that it will blow over, that Lori will come around, that she will talk to her. She is saying you
can’t blame yourself for this, Carl! She keeps scrambling up his leg to try and kiss him, and he keeps pushing her back but
then she gets close enough that he sees something. I love you, she says, but he doesn’t hear her, he is staring deep into
her eyes.

The dead boy is staring back out at him.

Carl always thought it was him. Now he knows for certain.

After that Dead Boy becomes braver, he will appear not just in eyes and dreams but like a hologram beside Carl, or behind
him, or in front of him, there and gone, a split-second at a time. No one else can see him, only Carl. ‘See what?’ they say.
‘A person.’ ‘Yeah right, haven’t you ever heard the saying, don’t get high on your own supply?’ and then they laugh. And right
in the middle of them Dead Boy will be standing, staring at Carl with his big empty eyes.

Carl tries to get used to him and ignore him. Then he tries to fight him, to hit him kick him stab him, one day in school
when he sees him standing in the window he throws a chair at him he screams at him in his bedroom, Stay away from me, but
nothing works, just Mom appears at the door with messy hair asking if he wants a sleeping pill.

It gets hard to concentrate on things. Mark gives him jobs to
do and he can’t find the money afterwards. Did he forget to take it? Did he leave it somewhere? You better get it from somewhere,
dude, Barry says, otherwise he’s going to freak. So Carl ends up replacing it himself. After a while he starts running out
of replacement money. But Mom’s written her ATM pin at the back of her address book.

Get it together, Barry says. You snooze you lose in this game, bro.

Barry is jealous because Carl has been suspended for a week because of throwing the chair. But being suspended is not that
great. Most of the time he just goes to Deano’s gaff. Deano lives in the flats behind the shopping mall with his mom, only
he calls her Ma, she looks like his granny and most of the time she stays in the kitchen drinking cups of tea and pretending
not to know what they’re doing. Outside, everything smells like piss. The blokes are all scobes in tracksuits and the birds
are mingers with ponytails and earrings as big as their heads, they laugh at Carl and call him a Seabrook bum boy and a poshie.
But no one ever tries to mess with him because they know Deano has a sawn-off in a sports bag under his bed. He sits there
with the others watching
Ren and Stimpy
and smoking and Dead Boy flicks in and out and Carl’s heart screams Lori Lori Lori Lori until the grass blots it out.

So where does all this shit come from? Barry says one night.

What? Mark says.

All this stuff we smoke and we sell, where does it come from?

A stork brings it, Deano says.

We buy it off the fuckin Mafia, Ste says.

Really? Barry goes.

No, you thick cunt, Ste says. Barry goes red.

What do you fuckin care where it comes from, Knoxer says. Are you on fuckin work experience or something?

Work experience! Deano says, laughing so hard snot comes out of his nose.

Knoxer is a cunt with greasy hair. Gee, Ren, says Stimpy, he is holding out a plate of sick.

It comes from different places, Mark says. They make the pills mostly in Holland. Coke, that’s all from South America. And
heroin, that comes from poppies that these ragheads grow in Afghanistan.

From poppies? Like – poppies?

Yeah, then it comes up here from Spain, through Africa.

This is like fuckin Geography class, Knoxer says. I’m goin for a shite.

The &(*DEAD BOY→% revolves around the @@):/ DEAD BOY *¥
.

But where do
you
get it? Barry says. Deano looks at Mark. Mark shrugs.