The Sorrow King (4 page)

Ms. Hennessy’s entire body was now visibly shaking. Her face was an unnatural shade of red.

Dave, who Steven knew didn’t like Ms. Hennessy because, unlike a lot of the other teachers who cared more about seeing the football team win, she made him work and earn his grades, saw how he was getting her worked up.

“
And,” he continued, “I feel sorry for teachers who are gonna waste their class time trying to tell us how it’s all our fault or society’s fault . . .”

But Ms. Hennessy cut him off. She closed the few feet between herself and Dave and smacked him in the face. She was bawling now, tears pouring out of her eyes as she smacked him again and again. He lifted his arms to shield the blows.

“
People like you are just as sick as people like him,” she spat, continuing to smack about his head. He reached out a huge hand, grabbing the front of her sweater and pulling her into him before shoving her away. The desk bashed her in the hip, her slight frame barely causing it to move. She steadied herself on the desk and looked back, only once, at the class. Steven thought he saw shame written across her face. She smoothed her sweater and his heart hammered as he thought she made eye contact with him. Then she walked out of the classroom.

The students would never see her in the school again.

Dave sat in his chair, looking over at Aaron and saying, “That bitch is fucking in
sane
.”

The rest of the class didn’t know what to say. Even though their adrenaline was pumping, they sat silently in the classroom, left to stew in some kind of electricity. Alison was now crying also. She stood up and said to no one in particular, “I have to go home,” before leaving the classroom. A few minutes passed before McFee came in to question the class about what they had just seen.

Steven said nothing.

The morning passed, a slow haze.

Steven had no friends. This was only his second year at Gethsemane and his friend of last year, Jeff Campbell, moved to Connecticut when his father had to relocate. Therefore, his lunch breaks were spent alone. He had discovered it was too humiliating and depressing to sit in the cafeteria all by himself, or to uncomfortably pretend he was sitting with some other losers at a table, so he went through the line, got a chocolate milkshake, two chocolate chip cookies, and found somewhere around the school to hide and eat. Today, he figured he would be able to go out to his battered black truck in the parking lot. He didn’t think anyone would notice or care, what with everything else going on. Outside, he might even be able to enjoy a smoke after eating and get back in time for Calculus, that mindboggling rape of a class.

Walking out of the cafeteria, preparing to take the most deserted hallway that would lead outside, he spotted the girl he had seen on his previous night’s wandering. He stopped where he was and stared, unaware of how this would appear to anyone who might be looking at him.

It was
her
.

She sat at a table with some giggling freshman girls. Only she wasn’t giggling along with them. She was reading a book and he tried briefly and unsuccessfully to make out what it was. Sitting there, the meager sunlight floating in from a window, he thought she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. Not beautiful in the same way as the make-up and clothes junkies sitting next to her. Beautiful as in perfectly natural and probably unaware of this natural perfection. Straight orange hair hung to her shoulders. Her skin was very pale, contrasting against the gray of her sweater. He filled in the green eyes and sparse freckles he knew would be there if he were closer.

A large boy with a tray full of food nearly ran into him and Steven’s stupor was broken.

Right. He was on his way outside. And while something inside of him told him this would be a perfect time to go over to her table and maybe mention something about seeing her last night, some other thing, some other
feeling
kept him from doing that. All those giggling girls were probably just waiting to laugh at him if he did anything like that. That was the voice he followed. That was the voice that had probably kept him completely friendless so far this year. It was the voice of reason and the voice of fear.

He shrugged off the thought, shrugged off the voice, and continued outside.

Once out there, he looked up at the sky. Low gray clouds hung overhead, meager beams of sunlight radiating downward, and he briefly imagined some intricate pattern, a code, scrawled on the bottoms of the clouds where they were just a shade darker.

Stratus
, he thought, continuing to his truck parked on the far side of the lot. He parked far away just in case of a chance opportunity such as this one.

The only decent thing about his truck was that it was equipped with a CD player and good speakers. He put the key in the ignition, turning it back toward him so the stereo came on. A CD was in the player. It was a sad, moody CD. The singer sounded tortured, accompanied by a single sparse guitar. It was a CD he listened to when he was sort of depressed and he had been sort of depressed for a couple of years now.

He finished his milkshake and cookies and contemplated going back into the school before thinking about how much he would rather go home and take a nap instead. Turning the key the other way, the truck started up, shaky and sputtering at first. But, he discovered, if he turned the stereo up loud enough it almost blocked out every indication the truck was dying. Feeling slightly guilty about taking advantage of the sad chaos of the day, he pulled out of the parking lot. When he got home, he would call his dad at work and give him the heads up, just in case the school decided to call there.

Steven didn’t want to worry the man.

Chapter Four

The Park at Night

Steven lay in his bed with the cordless phone against his ear, listening to it ring on the other end.

After about six rings, a voice said, “Bookhaven.”

“
You really should change the name of your store,” Steven said. “‘Bookhaven’ sounds religious. Are you a religious bookstore?”

“
Hello, Steven.” It was his dad, Connor. “To what do I owe this call?”

“
Just calling to let you know that I left school. They’ll probably call you at work, wondering where I am. Tell them their lunch left me with crippling diarrhea.”

“
Are you feeling okay?”

“
Physically, I guess.” It was always Steven’s goal to make his dad think he was far more depressed than he ever actually was. The more he could convince him he was a teen-on-edge, the more the man caved to his wants and desires. Although, managing a used bookstore in Alton, Steven understood his dad did not always have the means to meet every want and desire so he tried to keep them to a minimum.

“
No crippling diarrhea, then?”

“
No.”

“
I guess you’ve heard about the . . . uh . . .”

“
Suicide? Yeah, it really brightened my morning.”

“
Did you know him?”

“
No, he was a middle schooler.”

“
Christ . . . Just a kid.”

“
Yeah, well, so I took off. I didn’t figure they would really notice if I was gone.”

“
You didn’t take off to kill yourself, did you?”

“
Wow, that was in poor taste. I guess you’ll just have to find out when you come home.”

“
I’ll probably find you unconscious but I’m pretty sure you’ll still be breathing.”

“
You know we’re both going to hell.”

“
That’s where all the interesting people are.”

“
Yeah yeah. Says the manager of a religious bookstore.”

“
So, well, get some rest or whatever it is you need. Try not to leave the house. It’s always incriminating when you call in sick and people see you traipsing about town. It makes me look like a neglectful parent.”

“
Oh, you are.”

“
Thanks. That makes me feel a lot better. So, since you have all of this time on your hands, what’s for dinner?”

“
Well, your Visa’s in the cabinet so I was thinking pizza’s looking pretty good.”

“
Ah, the quintessential chef. Give him a phone and plastic and he will create miracles.”

“
The cutting edge of cuisine. What time you gonna be home, old man?”

“
Oh, you know, whenever the psychic vampires will let me leave. Probably around seven or so.”

“
All right. I’ll leave you some pizza.”

“
Thanks.”

“
Just for you. Don’t you have work to do?”

“
Always brisk. I probably should be pandering some smut to a morbidly obese housewife out on leave. Talk to you later.”

“
Bye.”

“
Bye.”

His dad hung up the phone. Steven flipped the OFF button on the cordless and tossed it onto the beige carpeted floor, lying back in his bed and looking up at the olive drab parachute draped over his ceiling, losing himself in the folds and the slightly musty smell.

Lying there, he found himself more concerned with this Jeremy kid’s suicide than the others and he couldn’t really figure out why. He thought it had to be because he had written his name down on a piece of paper probably about the time the suicide was happening. Maybe he had some kind of telekinesis he didn’t know about. Maybe the next time he wrote down a name in his notebook he should find out where that person lived and rush to his house, trying to talk him out of it like there was some kind of hostage crisis.

Steven couldn’t see himself doing that. He lay there in the silent room and slowly drifted off to sleep.

Connor Wrigley pulled his loudly whirring Honda up in front of his small house, the car dying before he could even put it into park.
Well
, he thought,
that makes things easier.
He put it into park and took the key out of the ignition, hoping the car would start in the morning. It was already growing dark and chillier outside. Connor looked forward to daylight savings, that mysterious time of year when whoever controlled time just decided to skip an hour so it would be daylight longer.

He walked into the house, knowing if Steven was home it would be unlocked. It was. He walked in, hungry, hoping to find pizza waiting for him in the kitchen. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t. Steven probably hadn’t gotten around to ordering it. In fact, he assumed the boy was probably still asleep in his room.

Connor didn’t think he could blame him. Steven had been through a lot over the past couple of years. First, losing his mother to a nasty and rapid moving colon cancer and then moving to Gethsemane to live full-time with him. Connor liked having him here. He wished the circumstances could have been different but he considered himself lucky to have Steven all the time and he considered himself lucky Steven was who he was. He figured there were a lot of teenagers who would have taken their frustrations out in a lot of other ways besides sleeping.

Still, there was something about Steven that unnerved him. There was something about him being here that made Connor slightly anxious. Connor knew where the unease stemmed from. It was from a single incident at Alison’s funeral and he had been meaning to ask the boy about it but they hadn’t really had any “big conversations” since he had moved in. Maybe, since Connor had had him just about every weekend since he was four, it just wasn’t that much of a transition. Or maybe they were both just a little bit afraid of what might come out of the conversation. Like opening Pandora’s box.

Connor put the two books he had brought home from the store on the teeming bookcase next to the archway that led to the kitchen and thought about waking Steven up. Reaching his door, he decided against it. Connor held sleep with a kind of holy reverence. Let Steven get his sleep out while he could. Once he reached the adult world, he would be lucky to get eight hours a night. And if he ever got some form of management job, he would be lucky to get any, especially if he inherited the anxiety gene that clung to Connor’s nerves night and day.

He pulled off his corduroy blazer and flung it over the back of a chair. He went to the cordless charger in the kitchen and, seeing that the phone was not on it, figured it must be in Steven’s room. So he went into his own tiny bedroom, picked up the ancient rotary phone and dialed the number to the pizza place he had, sadly, memorized. He ordered a large sausage pizza and a two liter of Coke and felt relieved that food was on its way.

To an outsider, his evenings could probably be viewed as a kind of subtle travesty. They were all pretty much the same. He turned on the classical music station that came in from Cincinnati, pulled a book off the shelf, took a Rolling Rock from the refrigerator and began his night of reading. This usually continued until about midnight when he carried his book into his bedroom and read until he fell asleep. Some evenings, Steven would wander out and turn on the television. Sometimes, the boy would pull a book off the shelf and read it with the same voracity his father had probably read the same book some fifteen years ago.

Steven’s reading followed a similar pattern also. He had started with Stephen King, Clive Barker and Anne Rice, with some Peter Straub or Dean Koontz thrown in for good measure. Basically it was blood, blood, and more blood though. Now he was moving onto the Beats—Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs. This meant Connor would probably have to keep a close eye on him to make sure he didn’t begin a life of rampant drug use. He knew the boy had a good enough head on his shoulders not to try any of that shit, though. Well, Connor would be a hypocrite if he came down on him too hard for
trying
it. Just so long as he didn’t get carried away.