Authors: John Goode
Because human beings don’t do what she did to other human beings.
“I am done hating you,” she said, opening her purse. “I blamed you for his death, wished you were dead, and now I realize I was wrong. Riley was Riley, and his death was nothing more than a horrible incident in a series of horrible incidents that make up a life. I lashed out at you, and that was wrong, and I wanted to make it right.”
“If you are going to offer me money, I swear I will knock that wig right off you head.” I was shocked to hear the venom in my voice as I threatened her.
“No,” she said, pulling an envelope out of her purse. “I’m not going to offer you a thing besides my apology. Trying to buy your forgiveness would be as useless as it was insulting.” She held the envelope out to me. “This is not from me. It’s from Riley.”
I looked at the piece of paper like it was a snake.
“Arthur got a ruling, and there is no legal reason that I should be giving this to you.” When it was obvious I wasn’t going to take it, she put it on the counter. “However, there are a thousand other reasons to give it to you, the least being my son loved you with all his heart.” I saw her eyes well up with tears. “And for that I thank you. I never could make Riley happy, no matter how hard I tried. I’m glad you were able to.”
She stood up and smoothed her dress out. “I expect we won’t be doing this again, so let me say this, and I will be gone.” She took a deep breath. “I was wrong, and I am sorry.” I could see her wondering if there was anything else to add, but instead she just nodded to herself and walked out the door.
It wasn’t until Kyle walked out of the backroom looking like he just saw a murder that I realized she was really gone. “What was that?” he asked, looking out the door to see her driving away.
“I have no earthly idea,” I admitted, looking down at the envelope.
“What’s in it?” he asked, walking up to the counter.
“Do I look like I have X-ray vision?” I snapped at him. “How the hell am I supposed to know?”
He sat on the stool and stared at it with me. “So open it,” he prompted.
I looked up at him. “You open it.”
“Okay,” he said almost instantly and picked it up.
“Wait!” I said, stopping him. He froze, looking at me. “No, go ahead.” He began to tear it open. “No, give it to me.” He handed it to me. I just stared at it. “No, you open it.”
In a flash he tore it open, and an envelope and a piece of paper fell out. It was a check and from the way the blood rushed out of Kyle’s cheeks when he looked at it, there were a lot of zeroes on it.
I didn’t care about the check. As far as I was concerned, it was blood money. What I was terrified of was the letter. I could see my name in Riley’s handwriting on the front, and I began to have a panic attack. Last time I was this bad was after he died. I felt my vision begin to pinhole as I struggled to breathe. I felt the world begin to spin as I screamed at myself not to faint in front of the fucking kid.
I don’t even remember hitting the ground.
T
HERE
IS
nothing in the human experience like losing time.
I mean, normally when people talk about passing out, they make it sound like they went to sleep for a little bit, which is not unconscious. When you fall asleep, you’re in an altered state of consciousness. If you’re aware you’re sleeping, you’re in some way conscious. If you are one second sitting up having a panic attack and the next find yourself lying down somewhere else, that is, my friends, unconsciousness. I have had more than a few experiences with it over the years, so I speak with confidence that there is a vast difference between what it is and what people think it is.
But then, life itself is a lot like that. The contents resemble nothing like what is shown on the package when you buy it.
So when I woke up, which is a phrase I loathe, I found myself still in some kind of nightmarish dream state, where the worst things my mind could summon up were presented to me like a waiter offering up the daily special. I knew this because I had to be trapped in some nightmare; otherwise, that would mean Tyler was standing over me, holding a cold cloth on my forehead.
With more strength than I would have expected, I batted his hand away from my person. “Get off,” I said, trying to sit up to get away from him.
That was a mistake.
Seems my body hadn’t gotten all the blood where it was supposed to be yet, because my head spun like a country fair Tilt-A-Whirl as I fell back into what I realized was a pile of clothes. “Happy?” Tyler asked, his face an expression of distaste that had to be mirroring my own. “You want to hiss and claw, wait until you have some balance back first, kitten.” He dropped the towel on my face and looked to Kyle. “He’s going to be fine.”
One plus one equaled a dead teenager.
“You called him?” I asked the shocked-looking Kyle, sitting up slightly. He nodded mutely, taking a half step back. “Why would you do that?” I roared, ignoring Tyler completely. It wasn’t that hard. I had a couple of years practice already.
“Because you tipped over and slammed into the floor pretty hard,” Meathead explained instead. “He wasn’t sure if you were having a heart attack or just doing a pretty fair Judy Garland impersonation.”
I looked over to him. “Get out” was all I managed to say.
He shrugged and looked at Kyle. “Told you so. Make sure he eats something and call him a cab when he’s ready to go home.” Tyler looked over at me momentarily. “He’s nowhere near as fine as he is going to try to convince you once I am gone.”
“Get the fuck out,” I repeated.
“I’m going, I’m going,” he said, holding his hands up in defense. “Let me know if he lives, Kyle.”
There was silence as I waited for him to get out of my shop. As soon as the bell rang from the door closing, Kyle began babbling. “You just fell over, and I didn’t know any adults to call because you don’t know anyone, so I called him instead of 911 because if they took you to the hospital you’d just bitch that I was overreacting, so before you bite my head off, that’s why I called him.”
I counted backward from ten in my head as I closed my eyes.
“I am not mad at you, Kyle. Just go home, and we’ll talk about it later,” I said in the most neutral tone I have ever used in my life.
“He was worried about you too,” he added, apparently thinking my lack of explosion meant I wasn’t as mad as he thought I would be.
Boy, did he read that one wrong.
“Go home, Kyle. Now.” I knew I sounded like an ungrateful bitch, but if this kid kept poking me, I was going to lose it again.
He seemed to hesitate for a few seconds and then looked to the front of the shop. “Can I at least call you a cab?”
“I don’t need one,” I assured him.
“Says the guy who can’t stand up,” he muttered under his breath. “I am going to call you a cab, and you can tell the guy to go away if you want.”
He began to pat himself down and paused. He had forgotten that he’d returned the iPhone Brad had given him last Christmas. I took the pause to drive my point home. “I am fine. I don’t need a cab, and I don’t need any help.”
I saw him seem to teeter back and forth on his decision before he just sighed and gave up. “Fine, but if you die, it’s not my fault.”
He grabbed his backpack and headed toward the front door. “I’m going to flip the sign and lock the door,” he called back to me before walking out.
I fell back into the pile of clothes and took a deep breath. It was not my day at all.
“S
O
YOU
passed out, yelled at a kid who called you a cab anyways?” Nicole said later that night. “Wow, you’re a dick.”
The Valium I had taken when I got home had kicked in, so I wasn’t as upset at her words as I should have been. “Aren’t you supposed to be on my side?” I asked her.
“I’m on your side when you’re right or when I don’t care. Past that you have to convince me, and after that story, you are a dick.”
I had caught her in a rare break from gaming, which meant I had her undivided attention. I’m not quite sure that was a good thing. “He called
him
!” I pleaded with her.
“Oh please,” she said, sighing. “Tyler is not He Who Shall Not Be Named. Let me ask you this. Have you even bothered to tell Kyle the reason you loathe the man so much? Or did you just warn him to stay away from him without adding one specific reason why?”
“I hate you,” I said, taking a sip of wine.
“No, you hate being wrong,” she corrected me. “I just happen to be right.” Her voice grew more concerned. “Look, Mario, if you insist on staying in that godforsaken town, then why don’t you actually take someone into your confidence? Of course, in this case it’s a high school kid, and normally I would be all Chris Hansen on you, but you need to talk to someone about this, and since you are acting like the target demographic for a Disney family series, maybe Kyle is your best bet.”
“I have friends.” I tried to argue with her.
Huge mistake.
“No you don’t. You have people you drink with at the place where your boyfriend was killed, and you have people you talk to when you are medicated enough to go out and gather supplies, but you haven’t had one friend since Riley died, and you know it.”
I put the glass down and leaned forward on the couch as if she were actually in the room. “Actually, the last friend I made watched as Riley died in the middle of the road, so maybe I have a good reason not to make friends.”
I could hear her moving, which meant she was probably doing the same thing. “If you were that concerned about trusting people and making friends, then you would have moved away from there instead of haunting the goddamned town like a hag in a horror movie. Look, either kill the damn kids who go up to Crystal Lake, make friends, or move. Those are your three choices, oh brother of mine. Anything else and you are just slowly torturing yourself for no reason at all.”
We both sat there glaring at each other over the phone, glad the other one couldn’t see it.
Finally, after almost a minute of silence, I asked, “Did you see
Glee
this week?”
“God, what is wrong with that show?” she asked loudly.
We eased back into talking about nothing, but she had been right, and we both knew it. But even that wasn’t my problem. My problem was the still unread letter on the coffee table and my inability to see what was written inside.
T
HE
NEXT
day I called Kyle at home and told him to come down to the store. It was a Sunday, which meant the store would be relativity quiet until church let out. Which would give us a chance to talk.
I had left the envelope at home because if I had it around me, all it would do is give me another panic attack, and I did not have enough Valium to keep passing out indefinitely. I straightened up as I waited for him to get there, practicing my speech the whole time. Finally I turned on some music and let my mind relax.
He walked in the door slowly, looking like he was expecting me to throw something at him. Once he saw I wasn’t rabid, he came inside carefully. “Everything okay?”
“Oh, stop it,” I said, turning the music down. “You act like I have an oven in the back to cook innocent children.”
He took his backpack off and sat down. “I assumed you kept it at home.”
I gave him a withering stare. “You know, I was seconds away from treating you like an actual person instead of a smart-ass teenager….”
“Okay, okay, okay!” he said quickly. “Do actual people find out why calling Tyler is such a bad idea?”
I hated the fact this kid was so smart. And then it hit me: he reminded me of Nikki a little.
Well, okay, a lot.
“Look, do you want to hear this or not?” I asked him.
“Well, technically I don’t know what
this
is,” he said, using air quotes. “But if it explains what happened to you yesterday, then I’m all ears.”
And for the first time since I’d told the cops at the scene, I began to go over the events of the night Riley died out loud. I explained how I had met Riley, we got together, moved here, and tried to be happy. I went into how Riley and Tyler knew each other from school, and the way we invited him to be friends with us since he wasn’t out of the closet yet. I skimmed over how close the three of us were and how much I liked seeing Riley and Tyler together because it was like being able to see Riley before we met in a way. They were both overgrown kids in muscle-bound bodies, and listening to them argue over sports just cracked me up for some reason. I shied away from going into detail on Riley’s and my attempts at setting Tyler up with single, gay friends we knew. And when I got to the end, where Riley got hit by a car full of drunk homophobes and lay dying in the street, we were both crying.
And through those tears, I told him how I’d seen Tyler in his car look me dead in the eyes as I screamed for someone to help… and then drive away in the night out of fear. Neither one of us talked for a while after that. Finally Kyle got us some tissues and asked, “You’re sure it was him? I mean, you know he saw Riley… um, hurt and drove off.”
I wiped my eyes and dug through my pile of CDs to find some upbeat music somewhere. “No, Kyle, I am sure he saw Riley was dying, and he drove off. And I never heard from again. Not a call, not a note, he didn’t even show up to the funeral. He just vanished like the coward he is, and it was as if we never knew each other.”
I slipped in the soundtrack to
Mamma Mia!
If there was anything that could dispel a bad mood, it was ABBA. Lisa Stokke began to sing “Honey, Honey” and I felt some of the darkness recede for the time being. “So calling him was the very last thing in the world you should have done, but you didn’t know, so all is forgiven,” I said as cheerfully as possible. “But if you do it again, I will cut that pretty face from ear to ear.” I saw him pause as I leaned over the counter at him. “All you’d need is white face paint to go as Heath Ledger’s Joker for Halloween. We clear?” He nodded mutely. “Awesome. So, you hungry?”