Twisted (13 page)

The sound of my parents yelling at each other woke me up at one thirty. It was an All-Star cage match: Out-of-Control Dadman versus the GinandTonica Momster.

Hannah slipped into my room. “I can’t sleep.”

“I wonder why,” I said.

It had been a long time, but we both knew the routine. I pulled out the sleeping bag from the top shelf of my closet. Hannah crawled into my bed. She had her old Raggedy Ann with her. That’s the kind of thing brothers don’t tell about sisters. I tucked the covers under her chin.

“Thanks, Tyler,” she said.

“Yeah.” I unrolled the sleeping bag on the floor and got in. Mom and Dad were still at it downstairs. Their vocal cords were made of leather. After a while it faded back into a green NyQuil haze, thunder booming on the other side of a hill.

“Ty?”

“What?”

“This is going to get better, right?”

“Right,” I lied.

“Ty?”

“I’m trying to go to sleep, Hannah.”

“I know you didn’t do it.”

I rolled over. “Thanks.”

All the crap I had endured up until then—the face flushes in middle school, the wedgies, the names, being ignored, mocked, teased, spit on, even being hurt by Bethany–that stuff was all kindergarten. This was big league.

Every step in a crowded hall came with a shove, a trip, a couple of quick shots to the kidneys. By lunchtime my notebooks were in shreds, my wallet had been stolen, and my watch was in a million pieces in the Math wing. A couple teachers saw it. They saw it and they saw nothing.

I thought about walking out the front door, just walking, but that would have been a giant admission of guilt, and I was still stupid enough to think it mattered.

Hannah looked me over as I sat down in the cafeteria. “That bad, huh?”

“Worse. You?”

“I’m okay.” Her eyes were still swollen from crying and arguing with Mom the night before.

“Don’t worry,” Yoda said. “They’ll figure out who did it, and everybody will chill.”

“Thank you for lying,” I said. “I feel better now.”

“And Bethany will find out that you are not an evil, perverted stalker, and you guys can hook up again.”

“Are you high?” I asked him. “I’m toast. Done. Fini.”

Hannah dipped a carrot stick in a cup of ranch dressing. “Leave Calvin alone. He’s in shock. He can’t believe that Mom grounded me until graduation.”

“I’m not even allowed to call her,” Yoda said.

Hannah laid her head on his shoulder. “We’ll figure something out.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “Sneaking out to a party is nothing like committing a dozen felonies on the boss’s daughter. If I get arrested, they’ll forget all about grounding you.”

“The police won’t arrest you, because you didn’t do it.” She bit the carrot. “Stop being so negative.”

“I’m going to be arrested, tried, convicted—for something I didn’t do—sent to jail where I will become the girlfriend of a large, scary man, and where I will also develop an addiction to…I don’t know, sniffing bleach or something.”

“Sniffing bleach will kill you,” Yoda pointed out.

I picked up the fork from Hannah’s tray. “Then sign me up. Bethany Milbury will never look at me again. In fact, she’ll forget I ever existed.”

Hannah let out a long and dramatic sigh. Yoda and I waited.

“Okay,” she started. “I hate to be the one to break this to you, but—”

“My life is over? I know that, thanks.”

“No, listen. This Bethany thing? You never had a chance.”

“What are you talking about? She likes me. Well, she
liked
me. Past tense.”

“It wouldn’t have worked,” Hannah explained.

I tried to stab the fork into the table. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Yoda shook his head a little, trying to get her to back down. She ignored him.

“Bethany is popular, Ty.” She said it carefully, as if I had never heard of the concept.

“What’s your point?”

“You aren’t.”

Yoda tried a diversion. “I’ve never understood what makes the popular kids popular. It must be a hive activity, a neurochemical message that all hive members receive, but no one understands.”

“We’re not bees,” I pointed out.

“It’s not that complicated,” Hannah said. “The popular kids aren’t really popular. They’re obnoxiously loud, good-looking, and rich. Nobody likes them, but they rule the place.”

“And everybody wants to be them,” Yoda pointed out.

“Well, duh. When a non-popular kid tries to cross the line, like Ty, bad things happen. You can’t mate a dog with a racehorse. Give me that fork before you hurt yourself.”

They talked about nothing and cuddled for the rest of the period. I drew small blue demons on my hand with a pen.

Somebody poured milk down my back when we were leaving.

Bethany turned up in school for the first time on Friday. She was wearing her black turtleneck, tight black jeans, and new sneakers. She looked like she hadn’t eaten in a month, and her eyes were swollen under the makeup.

They said that her parents were forcing her to go to school as punishment for going to the Rawson party.

Mr. Hughes met me at the front door and informed me that “until the matter was resolved,” I’d be spending homeroom in the main office.

“It would be best for everyone,” he said. “I’m sure you understand.”

Chip Milbury passed me in the hall on the way to first period. He pointed to his eyes, then at me.

Great. Chip was watching. Now my life was complete.

Mr. Salvatore attacked me in English class. “What was Doctor Faustus tempted with, Tyler?” he asked. He was perched on a corner of his desk, smiling like he gave a damn.

“I don’t know.”

“What was the author, Marlowe, trying to tell us?”

“To pay attention in English class?”

A few people giggled. Salvatore stood up. “Did you read last night’s assignment?”

Why was he always doing that? Say “yes,” and I’d be hammered again. Say “no,” and the same thing would happen.

I shrugged.

“Did anyone read last night’s assignment?”

Everyone who was not me raised their hands.

“Someone please summarize
Doctor Faustus
for us,” he said. As a girl sitting by the window explained, Mr. Salvatore took a book from his desk, opened it, and set it on my desk. He patted me on the shoulder, twice, and went to the board, where he started scribbling.

I tried to read, but the letters kept moving around.

I stopped at my locker after English. Mistake. Something accidentally hit me on the right side of the head. It felt like the bumper of a pick-up truck.

Nobody saw anything.

The nurse gave me ice and called Mr. Hughes. An hour later he joined me in the nurse’s office and told me that I would be spending the rest of the day in study hall. He had already talked to my parents. They would be coming to school for a meeting on Monday.

If I hadn’t been so tired, I might have said something.

I went to the study hall room and laid my head down on my books. A trickle of water leaked from the ice bag and escaped down the back of my neck.

As the day wore on, the room filled with bees and emptied, first buzzing, then silence, buzzing, silence, as the members of the hive flew through their rigid, patterned dances. The sound of their beating wings filled my mind and smothered it.

When I finally woke up, the room was empty except for Joe the janitor leaning against a mop and giving me the evil eye.

“Hey,” I said. “Did I miss the bell?”

“Did you do what they say you did?” he asked.

“No.”

He examined the end of the mop for splinters. “I didn’t think so,” he finally said. “Keep your chin up.”

I laid my head back down until I heard him leave the room.

After dinner that night we drove to the photography studio for our annual Christmas photo. We did not talk in the car.

Mr. Gunnarson had a giant mirror on one wall of his studio. Mom dug a brush out of her purse and handed it to me without a word. After I brushed my hair, she handed me my brown felt antlers. I put them on. Mom and Hannah wore antlers, too, along with the stoned reindeer sweatshirts. I wore a red sweater.

Dad was in his suit. He refused to wear antlers, or even a Santa hat. He held the prop, an empty box covered with red-and-green wrapping paper, while sitting in the leather armchair in front of the fake fireplace. A plastic tree poked up at the back of the shot. We all gathered around Dad: Mom to his right, Hannah to the left, me behind the chair.

“No, no, no,” Gunnarson scolded me. “Your head is too far off the ground. I can’t get it in the frame. Let’s try something else.”

Four “something else”s later, we found the right combination: Mom perched lightly on the arm of the chair, Hannah hanging over the back, and me down on one knee to the left, like someone had just been injured on a soccer field. Dad held the empty present in his lap.

“Very festive,” Gunnarson said, clicking away. “Say ‘Peace.’ That’s it, big smiles. Peeeeeace.”

Dad woke me up at seven o’clock Saturday morning.

“No sleeping in,” he said. “I have chores for you.”

It didn’t take too long to climb the ladder and step onto the roof. I planted my butt on the shingles and inched my way up to the peak. An ugly-looking cloud bank was building in the west. The air smelled like winter.

The mail truck was coming down the street, dodging potholes. Our neighbors on either side—we never talked to them—had aboveground pools half-filled with stagnant water. The sidewalk in front of our house was more cracked than I remembered. I shuffled my boots back and forth on a loose shingle.

I studied the Christmas lights that I was supposed to replace. Mom had tried to yank them down, but they wouldn’t budge. From up here, the problem was obvious. After Dad looped the wires over nails he had driven into the roof, he had bent the nails over, so that the lights wouldn’t blow down in a strong wind. Which is why he hadn’t taken them down himself: good idea, bad execution, difficult cleanup job. Story of his life.

And I had forgotten to bring up a pair of pliers or a claw hammer. Bad idea, no preparation, giant mess. Story of my life.

Dad came out of the house, shielded his eyes from the sun, and looked up at me. “How long will it take? I need you to help me down here.”

“I need a pair of pliers.”

“You didn’t bring them up with you? Hold on.”

It only took him a second to find them, and he was back out of the garage. He stood below me. “Catch.”

“No. Wait!”

The pliers bounced off the roof, hit the gutter, and dropped back to the ground.

“I’ll come down,” I said. “I have to go to the bathroom anyway.”

“No, no. You stay put. I’ll bring them up.” Dad stuck the pliers in his back pocket, pushed up his sleeves, and blew out a sharp blast of air as he put his hand on a rung above his head.

“Want me to hold it?” I asked.

“I’m fine.” He climbed five feet off the ground, pulled out the pliers, and held them up. “If you lean down, you should be able to reach them.”

I stretched on my stomach, toes dug in for grip, but he was too far away. “You have to come up a couple more rungs at least, Dad. Or I can come down the ladder.”

He frowned, but he put the pliers back in his pocket and climbed, one shaky step after the next.

“Lean your weight towards the house,” I suggested.

He didn’t say anything, but he leaned and climbed three more rungs, until his head popped over the edge of the roof. There was sweat coating his upper lip, and he was breathing like he just ran the 400.

“Didn’t think I could do it, did you?” He held on to the ladder with a death grip, reached into his pocket in slow motion, then handed the pliers to me.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Don’t mention it.” He glanced around. “I forgot how nice the view is from up here. A man should climb on his roof more often.”

“Yeah.”

“Indeed.” He nodded like we were having an everyday conversation, just two regular guys twenty feet in the air. “It is a nice view.”

He glanced down, then leaned closer to the ladder.

“Do you need something else?” I asked.

He cleared his throat. “Your mother…I’m supposed to talk to you. She thinks I was too hard on you the other night. After the police left.”

I scratched at a spot of rust on the pliers.

“I was upset,” he said. “We were all upset.”

“That’s putting it mildly.”

“About Bethany,” he started. “You could have taken advantage of that situation.”

“Totally.”

“Why didn’t you?”

I grabbed a nail with the pliers and twisted it, freeing the strand of Christmas lights. “It would have been wrong.”

The wind blew through the naked branches of the maple trees, tangled in the strands of Dad’s comb-over, and teased them up straight. He smelled a little, the old-guy smell of dirty socks and underwear sweat. There were black smudges under his eyes.

“I’m proud of you for that, Tyler,” he said. “I just wish you could have applied that thinking to the entire incident.”

I resisted the temptation to shove the ladder away from the house and send him plunging to the ground.

He eyed the Christmas lights. “How long will this take?”

“Twenty minutes, tops, but I need a pit stop first. I drank a lot of juice at breakfast.”

He didn’t move.

“Uh, Dad? You have to go down first,” I said, “because you’re on the ladder.”

“Right.”

I waited. “Is something wrong?” I asked.

He peered up at me, then at the ground again, and then at his hands, which were gripping the ladder so tightly, the tendons and veins looked like they had been carved out of a block of granite.

“I am experiencing vertigo.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m dizzy.”

“Oh, man. okay. Well, I’ll yell for Mom. She can hold the bottom of the ladder for you.”

His eyes widened. “Don’t you dare. I’ll be fine.”

It took me fifteen minutes to coax him down the ladder, one rung at a time:”…move your foot, Dad—no, a little to the left, feel it? Right there. Now move your hand. You have to let go of the ladder first. Right, that’s good. No, don’t look down. The ground is still there. Okay, next step…”

Once down, he stood on the lawn and watched me descend. Sweat trickled off his scalp. When I was on the ground, he said, “Thank you, son.”

Officer Adams interviewed me the second time on Sunday. The interview was only “informational,” he said. “A friendly discussion.” We sat in our living room with my parents on the couch looking like they had forgotten their lines.

He asked the same questions.

I gave him the same answers.

I was beginning to think I needed a lawyer, but Dad said no, it would be an admission of guilt. He would handle it.

Mom gave Dad a look like she was ready to rip out his throat with her teeth.