The Boys Are Back in Town (6 page)

Grimly, Will kept his hands tight on the wheel and forced himself to stop thinking about it, intent on reaching his apartment and finding the proof that he knew lay waiting. Proof that would put the lie to Danny Plumer's ire and disappointment and Martina Dienst's sad recollections.

I still have nightmares about his funeral.

Danny's voice kept playing in his head, but Will wasn't listening.

W
HEN AT LAST HE REACHED
his apartment, he ran up the stairs. The back of his skull ached dully, but he was not tired anymore. If anything he felt more awake, electrified with determination, or perhaps it was merely desperation. Will unlocked his door and flung it open, then left it that way, the keys jangling in the lock behind him as he hurried down the corridor. Emotions warred within him. Brows knitted grimly, he went into the second bedroom.

His address book sat beside the computer screen.

Will had no idea where Mike would be staying if he had indeed come back to Massachusetts for the reunion. The first guess would logically be at his parents' home, but Will hadn't the first clue as to whether the Lebos still lived in the area, or where.

It didn't matter. Mike had responsibilities back in Arizona—a job, a fiancée, friends. He would be checking his messages from time to time. All Will had to do was call and leave him a message, and then this bullshit would be resolved. And if it was a gag—
it has to be
—and Mike was in on it, well then Will would have a few choice words for him.

As he picked up his address book, Will shivered unconsciously. A chill went up the back of his neck and the book felt strangely heavy. He stared at its turquoise cover and was filled with the impulse not to open it, to simply slide it back onto the desk.

Images he did not want to see flashed in his mind and he squeezed his eyes shut a moment, massaging the bridge of his nose, trying to force them away. The chill was gone. His entire body felt as though it were alive with prickly heat.

Then he scowled, shaking his head, and he flipped through the book to the
L
section. Mike Lebo's was the second name he had put into that section of the book, the second address listing under
L
.

Only it wasn't.

“No,” Will whispered, shaking his head. His face began to feel oddly numb and his eyes began to fill up as though he might weep.

The second listing under
L
was for Angie Lester, a woman who worked in sales for the
Trib
with whom he had gone on a total of three dates several years ago. He glared at the page as though he might be capable of intimidating it into resolving the confusion in his mind, but the conflicting thoughts and memories were still there.

Will flipped to the next page. And the one after. Then there were no more entries for the letter
L,
and he had not found a listing for Mike Lebo.

“Bullshit,” he muttered to himself. “Bullshit.”

He picked up the phone and dialed directory assistance. When the cold digital voice asked him for the listing and city, he spoke them aloud. “Michael Lebo. Phoenix, Arizona.” But he had to bite down hard to keep from shouting into the phone, from screaming that he had just traded e-mails with the guy, that he had talked to Mike on the phone right around the Fourth of July.

But as he waited for the response he bit his lower lip and closed his eyes and a knot of ice formed in his chest, because he knew what the answer was going to be.

There was no listing for a Michael Lebo in Phoenix, Arizona.

His mind began to grasp for understanding. The previous week, he and Mike had made plans to get together on Sunday because Will was reluctant to attend the reunion. He had not imagined it. A nervous laugh escaped his lips and Will slapped the heel of his hand against his forehead. “Idiot,” he said, clicking on the computer. He had deleted the e-mail but all that did was move it from the in-box folder to the one for Deleted Items. Some computer systems dumped that folder at regular intervals, but he purposely let his accumulate, having elminated messages he needed one too many times. He nodded his head in rhythm, silently urging the computer to boot up faster, then logged on to the Net to get to his e-mail. As the new messages began to download he clicked over to Deleted Items and scanned down, trying to remember Mike's e-mail address. He checked his e-mail address book, but as he scanned through it he realized he did not expect to find the information he sought.

He sat back in the chair and stared at the screen. His head still hurt but now the ache seemed to spread throughout his body, a dull pain that went deep as the marrow of his bones.

There was a soft ding that let him know his new e-mail had finished downloading. Conditioned by routine, he clicked to open the in-box. There were over a dozen new messages but his eyesight blurred as he glanced at the names, knowing by now that none of them would be from Mike.

How could they be?

Girls in black dresses, a line of people across the ragged lawn at Pine Hill Cemetery, the collar of his new white shirt is too tight and he feels as though he is being strangled, as though he will pass out before the priest falls silent and dismisses them. . . .

Two words leaped out at him from the screen, the return address of one of the new e-mails in his in-box.
Message Undeliverable.

Shuddering, he bent over the desk, fingers twined in his hair, palms against his forehead. The headache had taken on a new ferocity, the dull throbbing replaced by slivers of ice that shot through his skull, spiking him with pain. Will felt suddenly as though his head could not contain the conflicting images, the contrary memories that were clashing in his mind. There just wasn't room.

“Jesus,” he whispered, and though he often spoke that name as a curse, for once it was a prayer.

Will shoved back his chair and stood up so quickly that he nearly toppled it. One entire wall of the room was covered with bookshelves, and as he walked stiffly toward them he felt as though he were wandering. It was only as he dropped to his knees and began pulling at the oversized books on the bottom shelf—the atlases and coffee-table books—that an understanding of his own intentions began to filter into his conscious thoughts.

He clawed at the books and they toppled out, slapping one upon the other and spilling across the floor. Weakly he sifted through them until he found the smooth, thin, blue volume he had been searching for—the one with
Eastborough High School
in gold leaf on the cover.

Holding his breath Will paged through the yearbook. In his mind he could still see Mike's handwriting, and the message that he had written that night at Ashleigh's graduation party. But the image in his mind was blurry now, out of focus, and he could not quite recall the precise phrasing of the words Mike had scrawled above his picture.

Vanessa Lalley, Mark Leung.

There was no picture of Mike Lebo. No message.

As if moving of their own volition his fingers began to turn pages. A prisoner of his morbid curiosity and impaled upon a blade of dread that twisted in his gut, Will flipped to the back of the yearbook. Some part of him—some newly minted portion of his mind—knew what he would find there, just a few pages before the end.

A picture. Not the one that had been in the yearbook but another, more candid shot that had been donated by his parents.

In Memoriam. Michael Paul Lebo. We will never forget you.

“Holy shit.” Will let the yearbook slip from his fingers. His right hand shook as he raised it up to cover his mouth. “Holy shit,” he said again, repeating it several times like a mantra. His eyes burned and it was only when he tasted the salt upon his lips that he realized he was crying.

Weeping over the loss of someone dear to him.

Grieving for a friend who had died more than a decade before and who would never become a man. Never move to Phoenix. Never have a fiancée.

“What the hell's the matter with me?” he rasped, speaking the question to the shadows in his darkened office, half believing that they would respond, that some voice from the ether would whisper an answer.

Minutes passed before he realized that he was rocking gently back and forth, staring at the books he had spread across the floor. There was the biography on Houdini, whose image adorned the wall here in his home office just as it did at work. And amongst the other research volumes strewn about, there was
A History of Magic,
something he'd picked up for research years before.

Will stopped rocking. He scowled as he lifted the Houdini bio and dropped it on top of the other book. The suggestion of something had flitted across his mind like a flare fired into the night sky only to drop into the ocean and be snuffed. Houdini had debunked all of that crap. How convenient it would have been to be able to blame this on magic. How much easier. He would have happily embraced any other explanation for this than the one that seemed so patently obvious to him.

I'm slipping. My mind is slipping.

The terror that gripped him at this dawning realization was unlike anything he had ever felt before. He shivered as he rose from the floor and then staggered to the bathroom to piss, after which he stepped out of his jeans and somehow managed to navigate his way into the bedroom.

For hours he simply lay there in the dark, staring at the ceiling. Much as he wanted sleep to claim him, to carry him away from the confused jumble of his thoughts and memories, it would not. The ache in his head became a kind of haze that seemed to disorient him.

A night out playing pool during Christmas break, sophomore year of college. Mike was never any good at pool but he has been practicing and he beats Will easily, swigging from the bottle of Rumple Minze Peppermint Schnapps they've been drinking and wiping the back of his hand across his mouth.

As his eyes closed and he at last began to drift off, Will's mind was assaulted by a series of Zoetrope-flashing images.
Mike hands him a tourism flyer about Arizona, telling him to come visit. The two of them on Cape Cod for a weekend the summer after freshman year in college. Singing along at a matchbox twenty concert at the Fleet Center in Boston.

But those images had already begun to fade, the edges charring and crumbling like burning photographs in his mind. They were simply wrong. Impossible. They could not have happened.

Not when he could remember now, so very clearly, the morning Principal Chadbourne had announced the hit-and-run that had killed Mike Lebo. Not when every moment of anguish in the days that followed was engraved upon his memory. The oh-so-silent wake, where no one had recovered from the shock of it enough to speak about it. The funeral, with the sobbing girls and the fallen roses, and the white collar that was so tight around his neck.

Mike Lebo was dead.

And all these years later, Will's grief was still an open wound.

Aluminum. Rust.

There's a metallic taste in his mouth as though he's been chewing on aluminum foil. Ashleigh is crying, stricken and pale, sliding down the locker to sit hard on her ass. His gaze sweeps the hall. It's between classes and the throng is in motion, or should be. Instead, they're frozen, these kids, just standing there staring up at the ceiling, eyes searching for the speakers from which the hard-edged words have just issued.

In a moment the whispers will begin. Hearts will start to beat again. The kids who didn't know Mike Lebo, or who knew him only from passing him in the hallways, they'll be a little creeped out, freaked at the idea that a kid their age—any kid their age—could die. This isn't the evening news and it isn't some story spun by Students Against Drunk Driving. This is a kid they had passed in the hall at school, who maybe had ridden the bus with them.

That shit just doesn't happen. Not here. Not to someone they know.

He can see it all in their eyes, can read their thoughts in that frozen moment, in that collective intake of breath. There will be counselors at school and cautionary speeches from teachers and administrators and a flag flown at half-mast.

The metallic taste in his mouth is strong enough to make him wince and run his tongue over his teeth in an attempt to erase it. It remains. His skin tingles and he feels oddly thirsty. Ashleigh's crying is stifled as she puts a hand up to cover her mouth, but it is there to hide her horror, not because she is ashamed of her weeping. Her chestnut hair falls across her face. Caitlyn whispers to the son of God over and over, shielding her eyes as though the sun is too bright, though they are in the shadowed corridors of Eastborough High.

His cheeks are numb. His feet are dead flesh, too heavy to lift. His tongue is swollen and tangy with the flavor of aluminum. The fillings in his teeth hurt. At the far end of the corridor, at the foot of the stairs, Brian Schnell has his eyes closed, his lips pursed as though for a kiss. He sways as though at any moment he might fall.

Will watches Brian's eyes open.

People begin to move again, yet now there is a funereal pace to their travels and a whispering shroud has fallen over their voices. Danny crouches to help Ashleigh up, whispering softly to her. Caitlyn is watching him, corpse pale and yet still startlingly beautiful. Her eyes roll back and she stares at the ceiling.

“I can't believe they . . . can't believe they did that. Just . . . just announced it like that, like it's nothing. Like he's fucking student of the month or something. Jesus, like they're announcing a rally for a football game.”

Aluminum. His mouth . . .

“Jesus,”Caitlyn says again, but now it's a whisper. She stares at him. “Will, you're bleeding. Your mouth is bleeding.”

His fingers flutter toward his mouth, wildly, as though they may not find anchor there. When at last they alight upon his chin he feels wetness, sticky and strangely cold. He touches his lower lip and it stings. His tongue runs out over his mouth and the metallic taste is stronger than before.

He gazes down at his fingers, slick with his own blood.

In that moment when the words were announced over the loudspeaker system, he had bitten through his lip. As he traces his mouth now, his finger finds the wound, plays at the edges of it, and idly he wonders if he tried to force it, would his finger push all the way through until his nail tapped the enamel of his bloodstained teeth?

He feels his face collapse, the muscles turning in upon themselves, and the tears come. “Why him?”he rasps. “Why did it have to be him?”

The throng has begun to churn again, to stream and flow toward classrooms and lockers. His friends are all looking at him now and he feels their eyes but cannot meet them. Ashleigh and Danny and Caitlyn—his Caitlyn—he leaves them behind as he forces his feet to move, stumbling along the corridor and around the corner to the men's room.

The door slams open, clacking against the tiles, perhaps cracking the tiles, and it hisses softly closed behind him. He does not enter the first stall but the third, the one he always chooses. Inside that intimate cube he slides the lock across. There is a coat hook on the back of the door—miraculously unbroken—and now he grasps it, nearly hanging on it, holding himself up as his forehead presses against the cold metal of the bathroom stall door.

Aluminum. In his mouth, that metallic tang is joined by the taste of salt. Blood and tears.

His mind flashes back to his bedroom at home, where there are multicolored candles and bits of reptile skin, whittled yew and ash branches, red ribbons, herbs, and dried apples. There are books there as well, two of them stolen from the special collection at the library, shoved down his pants while Brian created a distraction. These things are in a box in his closet, a box he has not opened since the previous year. He has not opened the box because all it contains is bullshit.

It's all bullshit, and yet he thinks of it now and wishes he had not.

Blood and tears.

A spark, a floating orange, a glass of blood, a memory trick, a cut healed as though it never was. Nothing. Games. Foolishness. Certainly not magic.

Bullshit.

There's no such thing as magic.

Only blood and tears.

. . . and then he wakes.

W
ILL
'
S EYES SNAPPED OPEN
and he inhaled sharply, greedily, convinced in that moment that he had stopped breathing while he was asleep.
Apnea,
he thought, apropos of nothing having to do with his dream or the day ahead. The word popped into his mind and just then seemed far more important than anything else.
Sleep apnea. Stop breathing while you're asleep, never wake up.

The thought filled him with cold dread, an enemy he could not fight. He took several more breaths and then shook his head to clear it. Maybe he had stopped breathing a moment, but he had woken up instantly. It was ridiculous to be afraid of such a thing.

Will laughed softly, but there was an edge to it that he did not fail to notice. Idly, almost as though his subconscious mind did not want him to realize he was doing it, he licked his lips as if his tongue thought it might find something there. A milk mustache. A ring of chocolate, the way he had so often had around his lips as a small child, thanks to indulgent parents.

“Jesus,” he whispered, and then he shivered, the curse/prayer an echo of his dream, though he could no longer remember precisely why. He grasped at the remnants of the dream and it fled him, so that he could now remember only small snatches of it.

The day they had learned Mike Lebo had died. Will sat up in bed now and sighed. He had been a hell of a guy—self-effacing, his presence always calming—and the loss had shaken all of them. In some ways, though, it had also brought them closer together.

Most of them.

A flash of the previous night's events came back to him now, the weird moment of disorientation that had come over him when he and Danny had talked about Mike. Will slipped out of bed and padded to the bathroom, his bladder heavy.

What was that about?
he thought.
What's wrong with your head?
How could he have forgotten, even for a moment, that horrible day in the early autumn of their senior year, the scene in the corridor, Ashleigh's sobbing, and the taste of blood in his own mouth? Though he tried to push it away, Will was worried about such a lapse in his own memory. What did it say about his mental state that he could construct in his imagination a fanciful alternative, where Mike had never died?

“What the fuck is wrong with me?” he muttered to himself as he pushed open the bathroom door and flicked on the light.

The fan whirred overhead.

In the mirror his face was pale and there were dark circles under his eyes.
Not enough sleep,
he thought.
Or just troubled sleep
. He knew that after this weekend was over he was going to have to make some calls, try to find someone to talk to. The idea that he had been so haunted by Mike's death that the imminent arrival of the reunion had caused him to go into some bizarre denial was upsetting, but not nearly so upsetting as the alternative, which was some kind of mental deterioration.

Too young for that shit, by far
, he thought as he pissed into the toilet, the hissing sound of it hitting the water disturbingly loud in the silence of the apartment.

Will flushed, then shook his head again. He ran water from the faucet and splashed some on his face. This weekend was his chance to reconnect with old friends, some he was intimate with, and some he had lost in the fog of passing time. He had begun that with Stacy Shipman last night, and then he'd had to bail.

Enjoy the weekend,
he thought.
There'll be enough time on Monday to find out if you're cracking up.

Staring into the mirror, he studied the small scar just under his lower lip, that thin white reminder of Mike Lebo's death that had been with him for eleven years, ever since he had bitten into his lip that day and tasted his own blood.

Will ran his fingers over that scar, so familiar and yet somehow also alien to him, as though he had always had it but never managed to really see it before now.

He stared at it, troubled.

T
HE CLASSIC ROCK STATION
Will often listened to was playing the Goo Goo Dolls as he turned off of Union Avenue and into the rear entrance to Cougar Stadium. Ten and a half years ago, when his high school graduation had been held here, there had been only a gravel road and yellowed grass out behind the stadium. Sometime since, the de facto parking lot had been paved over to confirm its use for that purpose. Cougar Stadium was not nearly grand enough to have earned the appellation, but its bleacher seats were modern and numerous enough that
field
had apparently been rejected as too limiting a description.

The paving over of what had once provided parking only to those savvy enough to sneak in the back way did not really alarm him. It was progress, of course, and he could not begrudge anyone that. On the other hand, the idea that the classic rock station was playing the Goo Goo Dolls—a band that had had its greatest success in 1998—got under his skin. Not that there was anything wrong with the band, but the whole classic rock format implied certain things, among them the suggestion that if you'd grown up contemporary with the music, you weren't precisely young anymore.

Will glanced at his watch and saw that it was a quarter after one. He went through the rear gate of the chain-link fence that surrounded Cougar Stadium, but instead of going up into the stands he went around the rear wall toward the front. It was the coldest day of autumn thus far, and he wore a heavy black leather jacket over his favorite Red Sox jersey and a clean pair of blue jeans. Will sipped from the hot chocolate he had picked up at Dunkin' Donuts on his way.

There were groups of parents with giant coffee thermoses threading along the yellow grass toward one entrance or another, and students in small gatherings—boys laughing, girls leaning up against the wall, smoking and eyeing the boys suggestively. In one arched entryway the cheerleaders for Natick High—the opposing team in today's game—were in a huddle, waiting for the festivities to begin.

Around the front of the stadium the cars were parked at every angle, tucked into spots that had clearly never been intended to hold them. Though inside there were concession stands that sold hot dogs and pizza, fried dough and pretzels, there were people barbecuing in the main lot, tailgating, drinking beer. In that way, things had not changed at all since he had been a student here. The lot looked like a miniature version of the tailgating bash that always took place down in Foxboro before a Patriots game.

Will sipped at his hot chocolate, warming his hands on the cup, and steam came from his breath and from the small tear in the lid. He looked at the main gate and saw the people lined up at the entrance and out on the sidewalks. A motorcycle cop pulled up in front of the entrance to Cougar Stadium and dismounted, blue light spinning on his bike.

The parade had arrived.

A broad grin spread across Will's features and he picked up his pace, hurrying along through parked cars until he merged with the mass of people who flanked the entrance to the stadium. He glanced around in search of familiar faces, hoping to run into some of his classmates, but at first he saw only students. The current batch of kids at Eastborough High seemed horrifyingly young. It had only been ten years, but as he studied the faces of the jostling boys and posing girls, he could not remember ever being that age.

That's what we looked like, too,
he thought.
Kids. But we never felt that young.
He knew it was true, remembered all too well how world-weary and wise they had all believed themselves to be. Not children anymore, but
teenagers,
with all the presumptuousness that implied. Now he looked at the latest generation and marveled at their youth and naïveté.