The Danger of Being Me (7 page)

"We better get out of here," Phil said at last.

Ben stood from the chair at the foot of my bed, dropped the magazine into the seat.  He stretched, yawned, glanced to the television as Victor Estes gestured mutely about the deals on new and used vehicles at Victory Chevrolet.

Phil stood from away the windowsill and stepped into the bathroom.  Estes gave way to a trailer for the
Spawn
film, and Ben took three steps up the side of my bed.  The toilet flushed in the bathroom, and the faucet ran.

"Get better, man," Ben said, clapping me on the arm.

Five days after that, Regina and my mother helped me out to the Jeep Wagoneer for the first time in a week.  I blinked against the brilliance of the midmorning sky.  The sun was too bright, and the heatwave hadn't broken.

9.

Now, standing on a rooftop at eight-thirty at night, March darkness tumbled overhead like so many of my own half-wrought thoughts.  I never thought to ask for the name of the seraph in my operating room.  I regretted that.

Glacial night air swept through my lungs.  I felt a faint itching under my right armpit, and in two pinpricks on the starboard side of my back.  A car door slammed across the blacktop.  I shook my head.  The Dodge Neon squealed across the parking lot and emptied onto Creek Drive.

Another moment later, a dark BMW rolled up the access road from behind the football field at the far side of the asphalt.  Its headlights were out.  It drew no attention to itself, and that caught my interest.  The car pulled into the main parking lot and started a slow circuit around the periphery.  It passed the courtyard, as close as it would get to me.  I couldn't see a driver, but the BMW paused briefly as it passed the dozen cars clustered near the gym.  Then it rolled by and made another lap around the lot.

The car passed the courtyard a second time, then sped up, slipping into an empty spot between a Chevy Tahoe and a Volkswagen Corrado.  I leaned against the rampart, squinting through the darkness, and managed to make out the vanity plate on the back of the BMW.  DUKE419.

The driver sat in the car for another thirty seconds, and when he got out, he left the engine running.  He moved with confidence, not rushing.  He rounded the front of the BMW toward the passenger's side, crossed to the driver's side door of the Porsche 930 parked nose-to-nose with the Beamer.  He threw one quick glance back toward the gym exits and the courtyard, then ducked to one knee at the driver's side door to the Porsche and out of my sight.

I turned to cross the roof again, reached the door and pulled the handle, letting myself back into the warm air inside the school.  I found the phone tacked to the wall at my left, grabbed the receiver off the hook, punched 9 to get an outside line, and dialed up information.  I gave the automated voice my city and state, and when asked for a listing, said, "Prophecy Creek Police Department."

The automated voice found the number and offered to connect me.  I punched 1 and waited.  The line rang twice before Officer Benjamin Schechter answered, identified himself, and asked me how he could direct my call.

"I'm at the high school," I told him.  "There's somebody out in the parking lot messing with people's cars."

"Prophecy Creek High School?" Schechter answered.

I blinked.  "Is that the only one in Prophecy Creek?"

"Yes," he confirmed.

I paused.  Then I said, "He rolled up in a dark Beamer.  It has a vanity plate.  Dee-You-Kay-Ee-four-one-nine."

"Duke-419?" Schechter asked, and I heard typing.

"Yeah," I confirmed.  "Like the Nigerian scam."

"Okay," he said.  "And what is your name, sir?"

I didn't even hesitate.  "Jack Hart."

He repeated the name back to himself as he typed it.

"Those are some expensive cars out there," I told him.

"There's a patrol car in the area," Schechter assured me.  I hung up the phone, stared at it for a second, then lifted the receiver and wiped the plastic with my sleeve.  I hung it back on the hook, looked at it again, and wondered why I had bothered to do that.  I shook my head at myself.

I took the steps two at a time back to the first floor.  As I crossed the lobby outside the theater, I heard someone say, "A hickey from Kenickie is like a Hallmark card!"

I angled toward the auditorium and leaned against the door to watch the rehearsal.  Stage hands crossed through the action as Donovan Blake got the most out of another verse of Kenickie's dialogue.  Charlie Carmichael, Dawn Hillard, and Amber Chandler stood nearby.  I had seen Amber on stage twice before, both times by accident.

Dawn had emerged as the celebrity of our class.  She had starred in the last two school productions, playing Lola last December, and Maria back in May.  Winning the role of Sandy in
Grease
would make the trifecta.  But right alongside her, carrying her own share of the story, was Amber.  As Meg Boyd; as Anybodys; now as Betty Rizzo.  Doing all of the work for less than half of the credit.

I was still thinking about her by the time I pushed through the heavy door into the newsroom.

But I finally had an idea how to fix my story.

CHAPTER TWO

1.

The next morning, I pushed through the heavy door into the newsroom as Mrs. Kraven packed the last of the March layout sheets into a broad portfolio.  I fumbled to the center table and signed in, then wove a path to my locker, heaving my bookbag back inside and stowing the brown bag that contained my lunch on the upper shelf.

"—all the way back from Schenectady."  I glanced to my left.  Gale and two other girls stood near the advisor's desk in the corner, engaged in animated discussion.

Gale's brunette friend started to respond, but a crash drown out whatever she meant to say.  To my right, Ethan flung open his locker door, flashing an absurd grin as he tried to stay the surge of papers spilling from inside.

"—until after midnight," Gale told her friends.  "With all the paperwork, he sat in that cell for five hours."

"It's an atrocity," the brunette announced.  I laughed, and Ethan grinned to himself as he shoved pages back into his locker.  Gale glared at me from between her friends.

I nodded, told them, "Nelson Mandela disagrees."

The brunette looked thoroughly confused, but the shorter blonde had caught a full dose of Gale's outrage.  "They're just targeting Roy because his dad criticizes the Police Chief."  She glanced quickly to Gale, who nodded her encouragement.  The blonde added: "it's politics."

"I don't want to close the polls early," I said, "but that may be the dumbest fucking thing I hear today."

"What do you call it," Gale demanded, "when a kid's just waiting in a school parking lot to pick up a couple of friends, and a police car just happens to show up, and he just happens to get dragged in on a trumped-up vandalism charge that is completely—"

"This all happened last night?" I interrupted.

"Yes," Gale said, exasperated.  I laughed.

"That was Roy McCleary doing laps in a Beamer?"

The brunette looked confused again. The blonde looked to Gale, who watched me suspiciously.  She looked like she might be trying to put something together in her head.

I grinned, turned back to my locker.  "I called that in."

"You did what?" Gale demanded loudly, her hazel eyes flashing dangerously.

I turned back to her, my grin widening.  "Called.  It.  In," I repeated, this time accompanying each word with the appropriate sign language gesture.  "And if he got busted, then he's a shittier car thief than I would have guessed."

Gale bristled, and I had the decency not to laugh.  I closed my locker, catching a glimpse of the flyer taped to the inside.  The school was hosting its first annual Poet Laureate competition, and students were allowed three poems.  Entries had been due yesterday afternoon.

I dug through the small shelf at the top of the locker, found a translucent plastic case.  I crossed to the computer, snapped the case open, slid the disk into the slot, brought up Word, printed a file labeled "bardpoems."

I grabbed the three pages off the printer and checked that my information was printed on each, then slipped the pages into my World Lit folder.  A moment later, a sharp triple-chime signaled the end of homeroom, and I stuffed the folder into my bag, slipping out of the newsroom.

I headed up the hall toward my first class, and spotted Amber Chandler on her way from her own homeroom.  We shared World Lit, and I caught up with her, adjusting the strap on my bag.  "So did you finish reading the play?"

She cast me a sidelong glance.  "
You strip from me the laurel and the rose
?" she recited.  "Oh yeah, I got this."

"I'm not particular to French theatre," I admitted.  "But I've read worse.  To be fair, I'm more of a sci-fi kinda guy.  Put Cyrano and Cristian in charge of a ragtag fugitive fleet searching the universe for the long-lost thirteenth tribe of humanity, and you'll have me from the word go."

"Only if Maren Jensen plays Roxane," Amber said.

We turned a corner.  Locker doors clanked around us like the bowels of some vast industrial machine.  "Any idea what you might do for the midterm project?" I asked.

Amber shook her head.  "No fucking clue."

I cocked an eyebrow.  "No worries," I said, smirking.  "You've still got, what: three whole weeks, right?"

We reached our class and slipped in through the door at the back of the room.  Amber dumped her bag into her seat, and corrected me, "Three-and-a-half, actually."

I grinned.  "Plenty of time."

"An eternity," she agreed.  "What about you?"

I suppressed the smile this time.  "I think I'm going to adapt a scene from
Cyrano
, but with a sort of postmodern, existentialist flavor.  Probably a huge departure from the original narrative.  I just don't have a hook yet."

"A hook?" Amber asked as she dug through her bag.

I opened my own bag and slipped my World Lit folder out.  "I've got a concept.  A postmodern reimagination of Rostand.  But it's just an idea at the moment.  And an idea does me no good until I have something to hang it on."

Amber nodded.  "A hook."

"Ideas are easy," I said.  "But a good hook is like a ghost orchid.  It blooms when it damn well feels like it."

Amber cocked an eyebrow at me, and the corner of her mouth twitched.  I felt a scarlet flush creeping out of my collar, and I tapped my World Lit folder against my palm.  I told her, "I have to run these up to the Doc."

She watched me as I turned and wove a path through the clutter of disorganized students toward Dr. Lombardi's desk at the head of the room.  I pulled up short a few paces from his desk as he scribbled energetically across the front page of a thick stack of stapled pages.  Even upside-down, I made out the title: "The Search for the 7th Character."

"Something I can do for you, Michael?" he said without looking up.  He scratched another line onto the cover, and I waited for him to finish before saying, "hopefully."

Doc finished his missive, emphasizing his point with a violent period at the end of his final sentence.  He tossed his pen down on top of the essay and sat back, sighing and running his hands through his greying blonde hair as he muttered, "
jebany
plagiarists."  Then he blinked, shook his head, and looked at me.  "How can I help you?"

I opened my World Lit folder and slid the three printed pages out.  "I know the deadline was yesterday afternoon, but I was really hoping that you'd still consider letting me enter a couple of poems for the Laureate competition."

Doc leaned forward in his seat.  "Rules are rules," he said, gesturing for me to hand the pages to him.  "Without them, we're nothing but dressed-up barbarians."

"Rules are made for breaking," I said as I passed my entries to him.  He smirked at that without looking at me, flipping through the sheets, examining the formatting.

The sharp triple-chime signaled the beginning of first period a few seconds later.  I glanced to the door while I waited for Dr. Lombardi's verdict, and spotted Phil in the hallway amid the bustle of tardy students rushing to their classes.  He stood with Charlie Carmichael, the two of them huddled close to one another against the far wall, conversing quietly as teenagers hurried past them.

"I feel like you might be trying to take advantage of my charitable personality," Dr. Lombardi said.  I turned back to him and saw the tiny grin at the corner of his mouth.

"Just appealing to the better angels of your nature."

He laughed at that.  I glanced back toward the door.  A moment before Charlie headed away down the hall and Phil crossed the corridor to the classroom, I saw Charlie's fingers lingering on Phil's hand.  Then Charlie was gone and Phil was heading for his own desk at the back of the room in front of Amber.  He nodded to me as he passed.  I nodded back.  Then I turned back to Doc and waited.

He stalled me for a couple more seconds, then sighed.  "It's a good thing I found these in my desk before I turned in my stack of entries this afternoon," he said, shooting me a pointed look, "or they'd have missed the deadline."

I smiled, laughed.  "That's a very good thing.  Thank you so much," I said, then added, "for checking one last time before you turned in your stack of entries."

Dr. Lombardi smirked and waved me away.  "Go get your book.  You're on in five, and you better impress."

I just nodded and headed back to my desk.  Phil turned in his seat as I passed, and said, "I assume that went well?"

"You know what happens when you assume," I said.

"You didn't quote Thomas Paine, did you?" he asked.

I rifled through my bookbag, finding a thin hardbound volume with a dark pen-wrought gash across the cover.  I opened the book to the marked page near the middle and glanced up to Phil.  "Abraham Lincoln," I admitted.

"Hack," Phil said with a laugh.  "Shameless hack."

Amber laughed at that as Doc stood up at the head of the class.  "Now that everyone is quite settled," he said in the commanding voice that he had developed as an Army Ranger.  The room went silent like someone had hit the mute button, and Doc flashed a warm smile.