Authors: Peter Lerangis
The Yearbook
Peter Lerangis
For Tina, at long last
Prologue
M
Y NAME IS
D
AVID
K
ALLAS
.
I am in trouble.
I do not know how long I will live.
My only possessions are the clothes I’m wearing and my backpack, which contains this pen and pad.
I do not know if my mother and my house still exist.
What’s more, I have a splitting headache.
But let’s look on the bright side.
I am alone with Ariana Maas. I am too embarrassed to say
exactly
how that makes me feel. She is smart and gorgeous and kind and thoughtful, and she has a body to
die
for — which I am reminded of only because our clothes happen to be tattered in some convenient places. We are alone on top of a hill outside Wetherby, Massachusetts, without anyone around for miles. Unfortunately, Ariana is fast asleep. She’s also sucking her thumb and muttering. This is not normal for her (I don’t think), but under the circumstances, I can’t blame her.
Which brings me to the minus side: I believe I have destroyed my entire hometown. This, of course, weighs heavily on my mind. It’s a big thing for a seventeen-year-old to do, possibly a first. I think, however, it’s too late to put it on my college applications.
The smoke is still billowing below us. It looks as if we’ll be up here a long time. I feel numb and nauseous.
I need to piece it all together. To start from the beginning. At the very least, the writing will keep me sane.
More importantly, there will be a record. Someone will know what happened here.
And someone
will
need to know. Because it all may happen again.
And when it does, there may not be anyone left.
David
Chapter 1
I
WILL BEGIN WITH
what I saw on the night of April 15. But, first, a word from your narrator.
I, David Kallas, am a Genius.
This is not a boast. I don’t look or talk anything like a Genius. My grades are pretty mediocre, and I have a lazy streak from here to Montana.
But my test scores confirm it:
IQ Level
—
Genius.
Right up there with
Hair and Eyes
—
Brown
and
Height — 5’11’’
So I don’t fight it.
What does it mean to be a Genius? It means teachers always look at you perplexed and disappointed. It means every adult you’re in contact with thinks he or she must be doing something wrong. It means
you
must be doing something wrong, because you’re exactly like everybody else.
For a Genius, I did an extremely stupid thing on April 15. Now, I could have detected warning signs, as early as February, but I’ll go into that later. Anyway, on that night, I took a walk in the Ramble.
The Ramble is a small forest at the edge of town, sloping downward into a wimpy river called the Wampanoag. A few well-worn footpaths wind through the trees, and one path of tire tracks leads to a secluded clearing. To many people in my drab hometown of Wetherby, Massachusetts, the Ramble is
Nature.
To others, especially those who know the clearing well, the Ramble is
Sex.
I’ll put it more delicately. As a teenager in Wetherby, book-learning goes on in school. Learning about everything else happens in the Ramble.
Parents warn their kids never to go there after dark. The older the kid, the more frequent the warnings. Once puberty hits, it becomes the world’s most dangerous place. Oddly enough, no one can actually recall a crime there in years. You are more likely to come upon a parked car with steamed-up windows than a mugger.
Well, I did come upon one of those cars that fateful night. And Ariana Maas was in it. With someone who was not me.
I admit, I asked for it. I kind of thought she’d be there. I was on a very indirect route to the print shop to proofread our high school yearbook, the Wetherby
Voyager.
I guess my curiosity had gotten the worst of me.
Her thick red hair was unmistakable, even mashed against the mousy brown hair of her boyfriend, Smut. (Yes, Smut. The initials stand for
S
tephen
M
atthew
U
nderwood-
T
aylor.) I had an urge to pull open the car door and yank the guy out. But I didn’t.
I may be a Genius, but I’m not a Hero.
I slunk away before they could see me. If I had had a tail, it would have been between my legs. Ariana was discovering heaven in a Chevy, while I was off to check for apostrophes. What a life.
The weather had been horrendous for months, so the river was pretty swollen. It wasn’t the measly sewage-choked trickle we’d all come to know and love. I decided to follow it to the other side of the Ramble. That would put me on the road to Someday My Prints Will Come, which I think is the dumbest name for a print shop ever invented.
That was when I saw the brownish lump of fur. It was floating on the water, mostly hidden by a boulder.
At first I thought it was a badger, or a river rat. I was still angry and frustrated and hurt, thinking about Ariana, and that is the only explanation I can give for what I did next.
I picked up a rock and tiptoed closer. Being quiet was easy. After all the recent storms, the fallen branches were soggy, and the ground soft.
Slowly I made my way around the boulder. The critter was still, sleeping maybe. Easy target.
I cocked my arm, took aim, and threw.
Thud.
Dead on. Right in the critter’s side.
I braced for a yelp or a scream. If the thing came after me, I would need to book.
But the rock bounced silently away. It left a small indentation in the flesh. I slumped and sighed. Hooray for me. I’d hit a dead rat.
I stepped out from behind the boulder, feeling extremely stupid. Now I got a closer look at the fur.
It wasn’t fur.
Fur was not that long. Not on any animal you’d find in the Ramble.
But it couldn’t be what I thought it was. The body — the
object
— covered with this hairy substance, was almost flat. As if it had been stepped on. As if it were a thick, wet mask, not a living thing.
I noticed the smell then. Not an ugly smell, but sort of chalky and slightly sweet, like dried milk.
Leave.
Leave now.
My brain echoed with that warning. Did I listen?
Noooo.
I kept walking around the boulder. I reached down and pulled the brown hair ball toward me. Why? I’m still asking myself.
I should have taken a look at the whole thing before I touched it, but I didn’t. Only when I had a fistful of hair was I angled close enough to see the whole body. Only then did I realize it was human.
My hand froze. I felt something shoot through me, like an electric jolt. The smell was overpowering now.
When I yanked my hand away, the face lolled around. It was a young face, familiar somehow. But there was no way on earth I could tell who it was. Its eyes were missing, its mouth two sunken flaps of skin. Flesh hung from its face and arms in thick, shriveled chunks.
A scream caught in my throat. I wanted to run, but I couldn’t move. My eyes were locked on the corpse.
Under an outfit of black pants and a shirt, it was grotesque, distorted. It bent to the right and left, not at the joints, but everywhere. Its calves curved into the opening of a drainage pipe, bending forward in a smooth and perfect C shape, opposite to the way the knees were supposed to bend. Like a Gumby.
A Gumby?
A vicious laugh welled up inside me. But I didn’t open my mouth for fear that all my sanity would go rushing out. I just kept staring.
And I realized I was looking at a person who had had his insides removed.
Then, for the first time in my life, I fainted.
O
UT OF THE DARKNESS
comes a dream.
In my dream I’m a man and I’m fishing in the river and I catch a whopping bluefish. I reel it in, and it’s flipping, flopping, desperate to get back into the water. But my hook is clean through its mouth, and blood sprays all over the place with each flip.
I want to throw it back, but a little boy comes up to me, screaming happily. He wants to take it home, which means I have to clean it.
I drop the fishing rod, grab the fish’s tail with one hand, and take out a gutting knife with the other. All I need to do is slit open the belly, pull out the guts, and throw the fish in my pail.
I’ve done this a million times, but this time I start to feel sick. The fish is enormous, and as I cut it open, thick warm blood spurts into my face. I grit my teeth and grab its insides. They are throbbing. I pull, and pull, and pull, and pull. The entrails seem endless, but they’re attached to the bones, so I keep pulling. The skeleton is now coming out and I’m thinking: great, instant fillet. The little boy is staring, horrified.
That is when I realize the fish is not a fish. It’s a classmate of mine, and he’s screaming for me to stop.
I
DID NOT REACH
the printer that night. That much I remember.
My nightmare jarred me awake into a pitch-black night.
The first thing I noticed was the strange, chalky smell. I started shaking, and it had little to do with the freezing temperature. Panic was stealing heat from my body, sending pinpricks of ice through me. I could not see the river, but I could hear it, maybe two feet away. I had been lying next to the … the what? The body? The
hide?
I didn’t know how to think of it.
I bolted to my feet. I did not look back as I ran blindly away from the Wampanoag River.
The rest is fragments, flashes of memory. I’ve forgotten the
physical
part of my trip home — as if my mind had separated from the rest of my body, floating outside it, letting my legs stumble over the ground. Thoughts spat themselves into my consciousness, and my brain tried frantically to digest them.
It wasn’t until I’d arrived home that I realized my pants were muddy and wet. I ran straight into the bathroom, stripped, and turned on the shower.
“David!” my mother shouted through the closed door. “Where were you?”
What was I supposed to tell her?
Nothing, Ma. Just a quiet evening in the Ramble, spying on some taboo behavior, then having a nap next to a hollowed-out human. Oh, and by the way, I need to wash my pants out.
Uh-huh. Right.
I wished my dad were alive. He would have believed every word, and insisted on going back with me. Then he would have talked about it for months, embellishing the story each time.
“Proofreading the yearbook!” I replied. “Remember I called you?”
“Until one in the morning?”
“Sorry. I lost track.”
Don’t get me wrong. Mom is cool. But she has this proper, old-fashioned streak. Her parents immigrated to Wetherby from Greece. She was not allowed to wear pants to school, or marry a non-Greek, or work for a living. That last part changed when my dad died of a heart attack. For the last seven years, she’s been working at a paper-tubing factory.