08 - December Dread (25 page)

I drew in a deep breath. I wanted that ad removed, now. “Maybe Jules Dahlberg has Internet.”

“Who?” Mrs. Berns asked, handing me her licked-clean plate.

“Jules Dahlberg. She’s a stuck-up girl I went to high school with, and she’s having a Yule party tonight. Patsy invited me. We could go, and I could try getting online there.”

Mrs. Berns removed her cat’s-eye glasses and reclined fully on the couch. “Look, I’m doing an impression of a sleeping old lady. Pretty realistic, hunh?”

“You’re not going to make me go to that party alone, are you? It’ll be full of people I went to high school with, people who hated me.”

She pulled down the afghan draped over the couch and tucked it around her body. “Only jocks, prom queens, and dumbasses hang on to high school this long. Everyone else goes on to better things. Go. Confront your past. Get over yourself.”

I wanted to stick my tongue out at her but her eyes were closed. I settled for giving her and mom a kiss on the forehead and a petting to the animals before I left into the night.

_____

I sat in my car for fifteen minutes working up the courage to go in. During that time, I replayed most of high school on a speed reel. My freshman year, rolling and pinning my jeans at the ankle so they appeared tapered, curling my mall bangs, trading friendship pins, learning to type on an IBM Selectric, eating fish sticks and white bread and butter sandwiches for hot lunch and thinking it was pretty good, messing around with a Ouija board at a friend’s house. Sophomore year, saving up for Guess jeans and Benetton shirts, sneaking out after a basketball game to drink wine coolers out of a two-liter bottle, Ogilvie spiral perms, making honor roll but still sneaking into Mr. Tigner’s classroom at night on a dare to steal chemistry tests, my dad dying in a horrible, public car accident. Everything changing.

I remembered people distancing themselves from me, whispering about me, judging me. Cliques formed, broke up, reshaped, and I was outside of every one of them. I’d show up at school, and only Patsy would hang out with me. Jules Dahlberg with her trendsetting clothes and ability to talk to the teachers like an equal was the worst of the bunch. She couldn’t even be bothered to say “hi” in the halls after my dad died. The school and town pushed me out, and I’d left gladly as soon as I’d graduated. Now I was back, and what the hell was I doing sitting outside of Jules’ house?

“Boo!”

I jumped so high that I cracked my leg on the steering wheel. I glared at the face pressed against the driver’s side window. I recognized Kevin Kamel, a farm boy who took a lot of teasing for smelling like livestock, always needing to rush home after school to do chores, and never being seen without his cowboy boots. He put an end to all that when he beat the resident track star in a sprint our senior year. While wearing his cowboy boots. That made him underground cool, which still hadn’t been cool enough to crack Jules Dahlberg’s clique. What was he doing here?

Kevin made a circling motion with his hands, and I rolled down the window. “It
is
you. The rumors are true. Mira the Maniac has come home.”

“Hi, Kevin.” He had grown his hair out and gotten his teeth fixed. He actually looked kinda hot. What a strange world. “How’re you doing?”

“Happy to get away from the family for a bit.” He leaned his elbows on my door. “How about you?”

“The same.”

He tipped his head toward the house. “You afraid to go in?”

I followed his gaze. It appeared to be a regular old two-story colonial with tasteful brown trim and white shutters, decorated for the holidays with a solitary string of snowflake lights over the door. Inside, however, was the embodiment of nearly every insecurity I owned. “Yeah,” I said, realizing how odd it felt to talk to Kevin like a friend. I couldn’t remember ever saying more than three words in a row to him. I guess I hadn’t broken that record yet.

“Come on.” He opened my door and offered me a hand. “It’s only scary the first time.”

I took his hand gratefully and let him lead me toward the house. He opened the door and pulled me gently inside. A wall of sound and smell hit me—1980s music and keg beer. I was expecting something out of a
Carrie
prom scene, but hardly anyone even glanced at us. I counted nearly 30 heads in the cramped room, and judging by the footsteps overhead, there were plenty more guests in the house. The chatter of cross-conversations was loud, but not loud enough to drown out the Depeche Mode. I felt a hint of a smile as I followed Kevin through the crowd and into the kitchen, where he poured us each a plastic cup of beer from the towel-wrapped keg. I was travelling back in time.

“Is it weird to be doing this legally?” he asked, giving me a wink with the cup. “Takes some of the fun out of it, I’ve always thought.”

“Mira!” I followed the voice and saw Patsy through the crowd. She kept her hand in the air and wove her way toward me. “You made it!” She hugged me.

“It’s my first Yule party.” I indicated the guests laughing and chattering. “Who are all these people?”

She looked around, smiling. “I see you reacquainted yourself with Kevin. About half of the rest of the people are from high school, too, most from our class but a few younger and a few older. The rest are spouses, significant others, or Jules’ friends from work.”

Kevin cuffed my shoulder. “You’re in good hands now.” He disappeared into the crowd, completely at ease. My mental high school diorama, perfectly preserved all these years, was cracking.

“Isn’t he a hottie now?” Patsy asked. “He’s single. Likes to play the field.”

“Kevin Kamel?”

“I know!” she said, giggling. “Hey, come say hi to Jules.”

She grabbed me before I could resist, leading us to the basement stairs and down. I got a lot of smiles and greetings on the way, but as we reached the rec room floor, the memory that I’d been trying to suppress since I pulled into Jules’ driveway fully bloomed. Me, on the chartered school bus, traveling to a Knowledge Bowl meet. It was my junior year, and I had dropped out of every other activity in the wake of my dad’s death. My favorite teacher, Mr. Butler, had convinced me to take part in just one more meet. He was concerned and wanted to pull me back into life, I could see that. I knew it wouldn’t work, but I couldn’t bring myself to turn him down, so I’d agreed to rejoin the team for the regionals in Annandale.

We’d lost, which hadn’t bothered me. What had was the bus ride back, when Jules coined the nickname “Manslaughter Mark” to refer to my dad. It was high school behavior, wicked mean and pointless. After a few minutes of teasing, the other kids on the bus had moved onto another topic, likely the amazingness of Duran Duran or the newest happenings on
Days of Our Lives
, but I’d carried that hot nugget of pain with me every day since then. Usually, though, it was a lot farther back in my mind.

“Jules! I told you Mira would come.”

Patsy dragged me so I stood directly in front of Jules Dahlberg. She was even more beautiful than in high school. Her short dark hair was spiked in a playful, feminine style, perfectly accenting her slanted green eyes and heart-shaped face. Her smile was blinding. She was petite but large-breasted, and for a moment, I had a flash that a younger Mrs. Berns must have looked very similar.

Jules didn’t hug me, but she didn’t kick me, either. “Maniac Mira James. How the hell have you been?”

“Fine.” I took a deep pull off my beer. It was deliciously bitter, not unlike me at the moment. “You?”

“Never better. Except we were just discussing what a bitch I was in high school.” She moved so I could see her cadre gathered behind her, the three sycophants who had shadowed her every high school move. Jules wore purple eye shadow, they bought out the supply at the Ben Franklin store. Jules loved U2, they split up which members of the band would marry whom. “God, you couldn’t pay me a million dollars to go back to that time and place.”

I scrutinized her doubtfully. “You were the most popular girl in high school.”

“Don’t think so.” She shook her head, her smile fading. “That was Natalie.” The mood within earshot immediately dropped, but Jules continued. “I was probably the meanest girl in high school, though. Made up nicknames for everyone, started terrible rumors. Patsy, do you remember when I told everyone you were pregnant because I was mad that you had the same Guess sweater as me?”

Patsy laughed good-naturedly. “That one didn’t stick. You’d have had better luck convincing everyone that I was becoming a nun.”

Jules shook her head. “Still, I was evil.”

“You gotta forgive yourself, Jules,” Patsy said. “I’m sure we’d all be the same if we lost our mom our junior year.”

“What happened to your mom?” I asked, speaking before thinking. The direction of this conversation was making me jittery.

“Cancer. But this is supposed to be a Yule party, so let’s stop with the gloom. I’m just issuing a blanket apology, and then we can move on.” Jules held a can of Sprite up to me in a salute. “I don’t remember having anything to apologize to you for, though. You were always so cool and collected, even after your dad died. You seemed like you were above it all. Man, did I want to be you.” She tapped her can into my cup and made her way toward the Ping-Pong table on the far side of the room where a mock argument had broken out.

I stood exactly as she’d left me. I couldn’t have been more stunned if I’d just been crowned Miss America. Jules Dahlberg was jealous of me in high school. She thought I’d been coasting above it all. Jules Dahlberg, the woman whom I’d spent over a decade resenting for her arrogance, had actually lost her mom her junior year, and I’d been so caught up in feeling sorry for myself and imagining the world against me that
I hadn’t even known
. I wanted to crawl into a hole.

Emily, one of Jules’ former gang, came to stand by me. “This your first Yule party?”

I nodded dumbly.

“It’s a lot like a Christmas party, except Jules isn’t religious any more. The only difference is that instead of exchanging presents, we all write down something we feel bad about or want to let go. Then, we tie it to a Yule log and burn it on a bonfire. Some of the guys are getting it ready outside right now. Do you need a pen and a slip of paper to write down something?”

“Do you have a notebook and all night?”

She laughed, but I wasn’t joking. Mrs. Berns had been exactly right. Well, almost exactly right. Apparently, jocks and prom queens can let go of high school. It’s just the dumbasses like me who let the bad memories fester, or worse, think of no one but themselves. I had some serious mental adjustments to make. It was both exhilarating and terrifying. I reached for the pen and paper Emily handed me and was eagerly writing down the first of many bad thoughts I intended to let go of when Kevin appeared at the top of the stairs.

“Did you hear?” he asked in his booming voice. The conversations in the rec room quieted to a buzz. “It’s on the news right now. The guy in Agate City wasn’t the one. The Candy Cane Killer is still on the loose.”

Forty-one

Jules led me to
her upstairs office computer, through the hot crowd. The atmosphere was palpably different, not subdued like I’d expected. Almost fierce. People leaned in close to one another, flinging threats like knives around the room, promising what they would do to the serial killer who’d taken one of their own and still walked the streets.

Kevin had marched back up the stairs after sharing the horrific revelation that the human hunter was still among us. He was now the loudest. “I hope that freak visits me. I goddamn wish for it. I’ll roll him in candy canes, candy canes and gasoline, and then have him eat a match.”

Chuck Stratman, star of the class of 1988 cross country running team and still built like a 6'6" pipe cleaner, one-upped him. “I’d saw off his feet and feed them to him. Then I’d ask him if he wanted to run away.”

A cold stone lodged itself in my throat. Jules grabbed my shoulders and steered me into the second door off the main hallway. It was blessedly quiet in her dark office. She took a seat at the desk pushed against the far wall.

“Sounds like we’ve got a mob forming.” She circled the mouse on its pad, and her computer screen lit up like a cave fire.

“They’re just letting off steam.” The noise level was rising, and I closed the door. “Right?”

“I’m sure. How bad did you need to get online?”

I crossed the beige Berber carpeting. The room was empty except for a bookshelf full of photo albums and the computer desk cluttered with paper. It had the feel of recently being emptied, and I wondered who’d moved out. “Why?”

She swiveled in the office chair to face me. “Internet’s down. Happens all the time in the country. Stupid dial-up.”

She turned back to face the screen, the green glow reflecting off her like an eerie halo. I was standing over her shoulder as she clicked on the Internet icon one more time for good measure. I couldn’t miss the AA pendant draped over the side of her monitor. My mom had started attending Al-Anon after my dad’s car accident, to “get perspective,” she’d said. She owned and still wore a very similar necklace.

Jules peeked at me and caught the direction of my gaze. She held up her can of pop. “Sober three years.”