The Kindness of Strangers (11 page)

“Tony, I told you—”

“Don’t skip again,” Mackenzie said.

“I’m not—”

“Oh, I get it. She’s got you pussy-whipped.”

Mackenzie squinted at Tony, pinching up her face with an I-smell-garbage expression.

Tony grinned. “I mean, he said you gave great head, but I never dreamed—”

The buzz caught and ignited, like an engine starting. Nate grabbed the front of Tony’s shirt, yanked him inches from his face, and yelled, “What the fuck is your problem?” He shoved Tony hard, knocking him into another girl at her locker. Both Tony and the girl tumbled to the floor, paper and books flying everywhere. Before Nate could move, a hand gripped his shoulder. Hard. It hurt.

“Nate Laden! You need to come with me.”

Nate turned. Mr. Rubio. Oh, man. He was screwed. To his left, Tony brushed himself off and skittered away. To his right, Mackenzie looked at him with huge, wounded eyes.

“Mackenzie, I never said—”

She shook her head, then turned and walked away.

“Mackenzie! He’s lying. He’s an asshole.”

“Excuse me?” Mr. Rubio asked. “Nate, I think you better quit while you’re ahead. You don’t need to dig yourself in any deeper.” Mackenzie disappeared around the corner of the hallway. “Are you all right?” Rubio asked the girl who’d fallen. The girl stood up and clutched a hand to her bloody nose. Red drops sprinkled down the front of her previously white sweater.

“Oh, no, I’m sorry,” Nate said. “I didn’t mean to—”

The girl glared at him, then examined the blood on her fingers.

“Nate, I’m taking this young lady to the nurse. You need to have a seat outside my office. Do some thinking while you wait for me.”

“I’m really sorry,” Nate repeated to the girl as Rubio guided her away.

Shit. The hallway traffic already thinned. He slammed his locker, then kicked it. The tardy bell rang. A hush descended, except for the sound of one lone pair of running feet fading down the hallway. Nate didn’t run. He walked down the stairs to the office, where a girl already sat waiting outside Rubio’s door.

The secretary sighed and peered at him over her bifocals. “Nathaniel Laden. You just can’t seem to stay out of trouble, can you?”

No, he couldn’t. He sat on the bench, leaned his head back against the wall, and looked at the clock: 10:45, and his day was already screwed. He considered banging his head into the wall but didn’t figure that would do him any good. Better to bash Tony’s head for insulting Mackenzie. Shit. Mackenzie walking away like that. Why the hell would she believe Tony?

Nate looked at the girl waiting. She was chubby, her face soft-doughy pale. She looked harmless and sad, the kind who always sat alone at lunch, and Nate wondered what the hell she’d done to get in trouble. She stared back at him. Nate leaned over, elbows on his knees, and rubbed his temples with his hands. The pulsing buzz in his ears hadn’t stopped.

What would happen to him? Was this because he’d shoved Tony? Not likely, if Rubio hadn’t hauled Tony down here, too. Because he said “fuck” in the hallway? Man. He was gonna get expelled because he’d said “fuck” to Tony Harrigan.

And that girl. He hadn’t meant to hurt anyone. He’d offer to pay for her sweater. Face wounds always bled so much—he knew that from hockey—that it was hard to tell how serious it was.

Fifteen minutes passed, and Rubio didn’t return. The chubby girl cracked her gum. The secretary tapped away at her computer. Nate’s blood buzzed under his skin. He couldn’t sit still. He wanted to scream and kick in lockers.

After twenty minutes Nate stood up and walked out the front door. Just up and walked out, even though the secretary called his name and told him he’d better get his butt back. He had to move. Couldn’t just sit there. He started walking home.

How did this happen? How could he get in trouble trying to stay
out
of trouble? His mom would kill him. He wished he could keep walking forever and never have to face her. He wished, for the five-hundredth time that day alone, that his dad were alive; if he were, Nate would call him at the hospital. Dad would figure out what to do, how they would tell Mom together. Nate never used to get in trouble when Dad was alive. What the hell was wrong with him? The worst thing that ever happened when Dad was alive was that some of Nate’s middle-school teachers said he was “too social” and needed to “channel his energy properly.” Nate remembered Dad telling him he’d better straighten up, or he and Mom would volunteer to chaperone the dance and purposely act like dorks to embarrass him.

Nate snorted. They did actually chaperone the eighth-grade dance, but they left Nate alone. He’d been worried that his parents would try to talk to him or hang out with him, but they were cool. They kind of avoided Nate—or let Nate avoid them, he guessed. Mom and Dad danced on a couple of slow dances. Nate’s friends thought that was cool—that they looked all in love. Nate really thought they were. And that’s what sucked so bad. Bad things happened to the people who didn’t deserve it. Not that anyone deserved it, but why couldn’t someone die who hated his wife? Or who was mean and beat his kids or something? Why did it have to be
his
dad?

And before Nate knew it, he was crying. Walking down the damn street crying. Jesus, he was such a baby.

He was relieved that the van was gone when he got to the house. He unlocked the door and slumped onto a stool at one of the kitchen islands. Where was Mom? With Mrs. Kendrick? Hell, maybe she’d realize that Nate’s problems were nothing compared to heroin addiction. Maybe this Jordan situation could help him.

Not likely. He was in big trouble now. Nate leaned across the kitchen island and rested his cheek on the marble, wondering what he could do to stop the dentist-drill sound in his head. He was just kind of staring, and he realized he was looking at a green backpack he didn’t recognize by the kitchen door. He stared at it until the initials penned into the beige hem of the outer pocket troubled him. J.K.

J.K.? He rolled himself off the island and picked up the bag. He undid the drawstring and reached inside. The first thing his hand touched was a thin paperback workbook for school. He recognized Danny’s vocabulary book. No, it wasn’t Danny’s—this workbook was full of red-penciled “100%”s and gold stars. In the back was a pretty detailed doodle of a cat. Nate looked inside the front cover. There, in neat block letters, as small and uniform as typing, was the name Jordan Kendrick.

Whoa. Why did his mom have Jordan’s backpack? This whole thing was getting so weird. Were there drugs inside? He reached in again, to the bottom, under the books. His hand touched something soft. He pulled out a Maxi pad. What the hell?

Nate squeezed along the pad’s length, wondering if Jordan hid his drugs in them. He sniffed it—not that he’d recognize the odor of heroin—and a bedsheet-right-out-of-the-dryer scent met his nose. He set the pad on the kitchen island.

He picked up the backpack and heard the unmistakable rattle of pills. Sure enough, his fingers wrapped around a bottle, but it just said “Tylenol Extra Strength.” Nate opened it and was disappointed to see that that’s really all it was. Only seven pills rolled in the bottle.

There were three pencils and a calculator. There was a black notebook with nothing but the kid’s name written in it. Hardly seemed like the stash of a hard-core heroin junkie.

All that remained was a five-by-seven unmarked manila envelope. Not fat enough to contain drugs. He pulled it out anyway and felt something shift in the envelope. He undid the metal clasp, and a pile of CDs clattered onto the counter.

Four of them. Labeled with marker—“Feb. 22,” “March 13,” “March 28,” and “April 4.” What was on the disks? Music? Photos? Homework? April 4 was only two days ago.

Nate carried the disks into the living room and inserted the one marked “April 4” into their computer. He didn’t know what he expected, but he didn’t figure it would hurt anything to check it out.

“April 4” opened into a long list of icons—JPEGs for forty photos. He selected the first picture and clicked on it.

The computer whirred and hummed, and then a clear color photo popped onto the screen. Nate blinked. Naked people. Having sex. Whoa. A man and a woman . . . and shit. Nate blinked again and stared, his mind beginning to grasp the image before him. The buzzing behind his ears returned with force.

There was a kid in this picture. The face was obscured by the man’s legs, but Nate could tell it was a kid. A kid way too young to be doing this. Some poor boy and two sick, twisted adults.

Nate swallowed, choking on the sour taste rising in his throat. He closed the photo.

He looked at the list. There were forty of these? He clicked on the next photo. The kid’s face hidden again. He closed it almost as soon as the photo materialized. Why the hell would Jordan have these?

Nate thought about that.

His stomach turned over, and a sinking sensation spread through his limbs.

He clicked on the third picture. He could see the boy’s head and face this time. A boy with curly red hair. He looked angry. The corner of his mouth was bleeding.

Nate clicked through a fourth picture, a fifth, a sixth . . . not really looking, but searching for what he knew he was going to find. On the tenth he found a girl. Her blond hair in two ponytails. She looked scared. Her eyes were pink, and she was crying.

Nate clicked on and on until he found him. At first there was still no face, but Nate looked at a boy’s thin body and tried to remember the soccer games and the determined sweeper defending the goal. He tried to remember that fierce player’s height, the length of his arms and legs, but he couldn’t even make the two images mesh; his brain wouldn’t do it.

Nate closed it and clicked on the next picture. This time he could see the face.

The kid was Jordan Kendrick.

The pounding hammered behind Nate’s eyes. His hands shook. Shit. That face.

Jordan looked not at the camera, but past it, not really focused. His eyes were seeing something far away from that room, making his face register something similar to boredom.

The man behind Jordan was Mr. Kendrick. Jesus. His own father. Nate had talked to that guy. He’d seen that guy ruffle Jordan’s hair. He’d seen that guy stand with his hand on Jordan’s shoulder, like any dad, like
Nate’s
dad used to do.

Nate thought he might puke.

Even though he hadn’t seen her in any of the pictures, Nate remembered Mrs. Kendrick kissing him, touching him, the way she looked at him. He couldn’t breathe right; his breaths dropped shallow and quick. He clenched his fists to stop his hands from shaking.

He heard a noise on the front porch and braced himself to tell Mom. But when she came through the front door, she was followed by a troop of guys in suits.

Who were these guys? Why were they here?

His mom stared at him. “This . . . these are the . . . police,” she said.

Holy shit. Had the school secretary called the police?

“What are you doing home in . . .” Her voice trailed off as she looked past him at the computer, and he watched her face cloud, her eyes widen.

“No, Mom,” Nate said, realizing what she must think. He picked up the disks. “These were in Jordan’s bag. It’s Jordan, Mom. Look what they did to him.”

A police officer took the disks from Nate’s hand and sat at the computer.

“Where’s the bag, son?” this really tall, black-haired man asked him.

Nate led him to the kitchen island and pointed.

“Did you touch anything?”

Nate nodded. “All of it.”

“We’ll need to get prints off him.” A woman officer went out the front door. Nate looked at his hands as if they were already tainted.

And they were. He knew they were. So much so that when Mom’s hands closed on his and she looked up at him, he had to pull free and walk away from her. He wanted to crawl into her lap and press his face against her neck, but instead he went into his room and shut the door.

Chapter Six
Sarah

W
hen the police and Lila Ripley left Sarah’s home that day, Sarah closed the door, then slumped against it. She ached all over as if she’d been beaten. And, truly, she would have been less shocked if Courtney had attacked her with a baseball bat than by . . .
this
. She still couldn’t grasp it, this awful discovery. Her brain kept rejecting it.

Lila had scurried over after Sarah had come home, curious about Nate’s arrival in the middle of the day and the group of people with Sarah. Sarah believed that Lila’s nosiness might have finally gotten her more than she bargained for. The photo, still visible on the computer, had given the old woman quite a shock. Sarah had never seen Lila speechless since she’d known her. Lila bounced back, as she always did, and brought tea and cookies over to the officers.

Sarah adored Lila, but when the police were leaving, she had gently asked her to go home. Sarah wanted to talk to Nate and knew he wouldn’t talk to her for real as long as Lila was here. Sarah had followed him immediately to his room, of course. She hadn’t given a damn how long she kept Kramble or the others waiting. She knew she needed to follow her son. Even though Nate said he didn’t want to talk, he’d seemed grateful that she’d tried.