“Is this okay?” Jake’s eyes scan my face. “Or would you rather just hang out?” His brows rise like it’s a real question, but his hand keeps inching lower.
I never turn Jake down. It’s like my mother said when she first took me to get birth control: if you say no too much, pretty soon someone else will say yes. Anyway, I want it as much as he does. I live for these moments of closeness with Jake; I’d crawl inside him if I could.
“More than okay,” I say, and pull him on top of me.
Nate
Thursday, September 27, 8:00 p.m.
I live in that house. The one people drive past and say, I can’t believe someone actually lives there. We do, although “living” might be a stretch. I’m gone as much as possible and my dad’s half-dead.
Our house is on the far edge of Bayview, the kind of shitty ranch rich people buy to tear down. Small and ugly, with only one window in front. The chimney’s been crumbling since I was ten. Seven years later everything else is joining it: the paint’s peeling, shutters are hanging off, the concrete steps in front are cracked wide open. The yard’s just as bad. The grass is almost knee-high and yellow after the summer drought. I used to mow it, sometimes, until it hit me that yard work is a waste of time that never ends.
My father’s passed out on the couch when I get inside, an empty bottle of Seagram’s in front of him. Dad considers it a stroke of luck that he fell off a ladder during a roofing job a few years ago, while he was still a functioning alcoholic. He got a workman’s comp settlement and wound up disabled enough to collect social security, which is like winning the lottery for a guy like him. Now he can drink without interruption while the checks roll in.
The money’s not much, though. I like having cable, keeping my bike on the road, and occasionally eating more than mac and cheese. Which is how I came to my part-time job, and why I spent four hours after school today distributing plastic bags full of painkillers around San Diego County. Obviously not something I should be doing, especially since I was picked up for dealing weed over the summer and I’m on probation. But nothing else pays as well and takes so little effort.
I head for the kitchen, open the refrigerator door, and pull out some leftover Chinese. There’s a picture curling under a magnet, cracked like a broken window. My dad, my mother, and me when I was eleven, right before she took off.
She was bipolar and not great about taking her meds, so it’s not as though I had some fantastic childhood while she was around. My earliest memory is her dropping a plate, then sitting on the floor in the middle of the pieces, crying her eyes out. Once I got off the bus to her throwing all our stuff out the window. Lots of times she’d curl up in a corner of her bed and not move for days.
Her manic phases were a trip, though. For my eighth birthday she took me to a department store, handed me a cart, and told me to fill it with whatever I wanted. When I was nine and into reptiles she surprised me by setting up a terrarium in the living room with a bearded dragon. We called it Stan after Stan Lee, and I still have it. Those things live forever.
My father didn’t drink as much then, so between the two of them they managed to get me to school and sports. Then my mother went totally off her meds and started getting into other mind-altering substances. Yeah, I’m the asshole who deals drugs after they wrecked his mother. But to be clear: I don’t sell anything except weed and painkillers. My mother would’ve been fine if she’d stayed away from cocaine.
For a while she came back every few months or so. Then once a year. The last time I saw her was when I was fourteen and my dad started falling apart. She kept talking about this farm commune she’d moved to in Oregon and how great it was, that she’d take me and I could go to school there with all the hippie kids and grow organic berries or whatever the hell they did.
She bought me a giant ice cream sundae at Glenn’s Diner, like I was eight years old, and told me all about it. You’ll love it, Nathaniel. Everyone is so accepting. Nobody labels you the way they do here.
It sounded like bullshit even then, but better than Bayview. So I packed a bag, put Stan in his carrier, and waited for her on our front steps. I must have sat there half the night, like a complete fucking loser, before it finally dawned on me she wasn’t going to show.
Turned out that trip to Glenn’s Diner was the last time I ever saw her.
While the Chinese heats up I check on Stan, who’s still got a pile of wilted vegetables and a few live crickets from this morning. I lift the cover from his terrarium and he blinks up at me from his rock. Stan is pretty chill and low maintenance, which is the only reason he’s managed to stay alive in this house for eight years.
“What’s up, Stan?” I put him on my shoulder, grab my food, and flop into an armchair across from my comatose father. He has the World Series on, which I turn off because (a) I hate baseball and (b) it reminds me of Cooper Clay, which reminds me of Simon Kelleher and that whole sick scene in detention. I’d never liked the kid, but that was horrible. And Cooper was almost as useless as the blond girl when you come right down to it. Bronwyn was the only one who did anything except babble like an idiot.
My mother used to like Bronwyn. She’d always notice her at school things. Like the Nativity play in fourth grade when I was a shepherd and Bronwyn was the Virgin Mary. Someone stole baby Jesus before we were supposed to go on, probably to mess with Bronwyn because she took everything way too seriously even then. Bronwyn went into the audience, borrowed a bag, wrapped a blanket around it, and carried it around as if nothing had happened. That girl doesn’t take crap from anyone, my mother had said approvingly.
Okay. In the interest of full disclosure, I stole baby Jesus, and it was definitely to mess with Bronwyn. It would’ve been funnier if she’d freaked out.
My jacket beeps, and I dig in my pockets for the right phone. I almost laughed in detention on Monday when Bronwyn said nobody has two cell phones. I have three: one for people I know, one for suppliers, and one for customers. Plus extras so I can switch them out. But I wouldn’t be stupid enough to take any of them into Avery’s class.
My work phones are always set to vibrate, so I know it’s a personal message. I pull out my ancient iPhone and see a text from Amber, a girl I met at a party last month. U up?
I hesitate. Amber’s hot and never tries to hang out too long, but she was just here a few nights ago. Things get messy when I let casual hookups happen more than once a week. But I’m restless and could use a distraction.
Come over, I write back.
I’m about to put my phone away when another text comes through. It’s from Chad Posner, a guy at Bayview I hang out with sometimes. You see this? I click on the link in the message and it opens a Tumblr page with the headline “About This.”
I got the idea for killing Simon while watching Dateline.
I’d been thinking about it for a while, obviously. That’s not the kind of thing you pluck out of thin air. But the how of getting away with it always stopped me. I don’t kid myself that I’m a criminal mastermind. And I’m much too good-looking for prison.
On the show, a guy killed his wife. Standard Dateline stuff, right? It’s always the husband. But turns out lots of people were happy to see her gone. She’d gotten a coworker fired, screwed over people on city council, and had an affair with a friend’s husband. She was a nightmare, basically.
The guy on Dateline wasn’t too bright. Hired someone to murder his wife and the cell phone records were easy to trace. But before those came out he had a decent smoke screen because of all the other suspects. That’s the kind of person you can get away with killing: someone everybody else wants dead.
Let’s face it: everyone at Bayview High hated Simon. I was just the only one with enough guts to do something about it.
You’re welcome.