Before You Go
Authors: James Preller
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Social Issues, #Friendship, #Death & Dying, #Family, #General
For Lisa and Nick
“The stars are not wanted now, put out every one.”
—W. H. AUDEN, “FUNERAL BLUES”
CONTENTS
THE ACCIDENT
This is the moment between
before
and
after,
the pivot point upon which story, like a plate, spins.
See:
Two cars drive down a bleary road. One headed east, the other west. A small animal moves from the shadows to paw the asphalt. Not thirty seconds sooner, nor a moment later, but exactly now.
To the eastbound driver, traveling alone after a long night, the animal appears only as a dreamlike shape, two red eyes floating in the misty wash of headlights. He veers to avoid it and in doing so drifts into the approaching lane.
Music plays from the westbound car, intermixed with teenage voices, laughter. Eyes widen when the car swerves toward them. The driver jerks the wheel and the car cuts counterclockwise, careens across the left lane. A foot stomps the brake pedal, back tires lock and skid, loose gravel sprays from the wheels. The side of the car crashes against a mighty oak that has stood undisturbed for over one hundred years. The front passenger’s door collapses inward, its metal panel crushed like a paper cup.
It happens fast. The span of a heartbeat, the time it takes to squeeze a hand, to shut your eyes and … nothing. Blood flows, bones shatter. It is the slice of a razor: when before becomes after, when everything changes.
And all the king’s horses, and all the king’s men …
There is a moment of stunned disbelief, an absence of movement, the vacuum suck of unreality. The music still plays like the soundtrack to a frozen photograph: a car on the side of the road wrapped around a tree, broken windows, mangled metal, the cold-eyed moon indifferent; a recorded voice bounces off a satellite to sing about a town that seems so hopeless.
After a pause, the summer bugs start in again, the buzz of cicadas, a cricket, the croak of a bullfrog from a muddy pond. Now the screaming begins from inside the car, drowning out the other night noises. Hysterical, high-pitched, piercing. The driver’s side rear door flies open, a figure staggers out from the backseat. The figure turns, eyes wild and unseeing, falls to both knees in the middle of an empty road on a warm, wet, shimmering summer night, battered head in bloodied hands.
Movement appears from inside nearby homes. Shadows cross behind the panes, curtains shudder. A door opens and a shaft of light spills to the ground, stumbling like a drunk on the sidewalk. Phones are found, numbers punched, 9-1-1.
Hurry. An emergency. Car accident. Hit a tree. Hard to see, sounds bad. Morgan Road, please hurry. Woke up to a crash and screaming, terrible screaming.
Come and stop the screaming.
Two of the four passengers will walk away with minor injuries.
A miracle,
some will say.
Thank God, thank God almighty.
The third will suffer a concussion, three broken ribs, cuts, and bruises. The injuries will not be fatal.
The final passenger, who sat in the shotgun seat opposite the driver, never had a chance. Death came instantly, like a curtain closing, a theater turning black.
The night animal scurries into the underbrush, its role in the passion play complete. One car races unscathed into the distance, hurtling east like a bullet from a gun. Taillights dim, then fade. The crashed vehicle plays a song from the radio.
This town, it seems so hopeless, so hopeless.
That’s the scene when you run out of miracles. The light, the light just disappears.
PART ONE: BEFORE
ONE
Jude squeezed his eyes shut, blinking away the sun’s glare, and waited for the eight-fifteen-in-the-freaking-morning bus. On a Saturday, no less. The stop was located beneath the elevated Long Island Rail Road, with rails that hummed overhead and stretched across the length of the island, connecting the farthest points east all the way to Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan. For as long as he could remember, New York City had beckoned to Jude, offering an exotic world of freedom and possibility. The city stood as a skyscrapery refutation of his suburban life, escape only a train ticket and forty-five minutes away.
He sat cross-legged on the curb, leaned back on his hands, and scanned the road for coming traffic. Most people around here drove like psychopaths, and Jude wasn’t eager to have his legs run over. It might ruin his weekend, the bleeding stumps, all that dragging around. Better, he thought, not to get run over in the first place, so he cast a wary eye down the road. Today was the first day of the rest of his life, and Jude would spend it at Jones Beach—starting a new summer job in the food-service industry. There were still a couple of weeks of school left and the grind of finals, but they needed workers on weekends, and Jude wasn’t in a position to make anybody wait. Jobs weren’t easy to find, and his skills, Jude had discovered, were not highly in demand, as he had none.
Barely awake, he had dressed in the required uniform of black pants and orange T-shirt. Because naturally you wear black pants to the sun-baked beach. Jude Fox was on his way to becoming a minimum-wage flunky, a burger-grilling, soda-spilling concession-stand worker.
The morning sun shone not high above the horizon, garish and bright, so Jude stepped back into the station’s cool cement shadows. It was going to be a hot one, the first scorcher of summer—not a cloud in sight, just blue June skies. In truth, Jude didn’t hate the idea of working. He’d heard that beach jobs could be okay, even fun. But Jude was a realist; he knew it would basically blow. Or suck. Strange how those two words,
blow
and
suck
, both conveyed the same and yet totally different meanings. It blew, it sucked: same thing. Weird. He’d heard people complain about their jobs all his life. Why should his job be any different? So he couldn’t help but wonder if getting a job had been a colossal mistake. Sometimes it felt to Jude that he was just like those trains overhead, traveling between two steel rails, the course of his life mapped out long ago. No steering wheel, no brakes. Jude followed the path carved out for him, no different from anybody else.
These are the thoughts you have when you wake up too early on a Saturday morning.
Jude had taken this particular bus many times before, usually with a murder of boys dressed in shorts or baggy bathing suits, with beach towels rolled in tubular fashion or backpacks slung over their shoulders. They went to hang in the sand, admire the girls, swim if the jellyfish weren’t too bad, wander the boardwalk, and later, catch a bus home, sunburned and happy.
A few glassy-eyed stragglers gathered at the stop, mostly young beach workers in Halloween colors. It was too early for the leather-skinned beach crowd. Jude knew a few of the guys at the stop, not interested in talking, so did the chin-lift thing. They were all in the same boat as Jude—or, very soon, the same bus; the learner’s permit crowd, old enough to work an entry-level job, not old enough to drive there.
Jude had considered running to the beach, about seven miles door to door, but that would’ve required setting his alarm even earlier, and then he’d need a place to shower once he got there. His body could absorb a run like that no problem, but it could make for a long day if work turned out to be tough. Maybe another time, after he scoped out the job situation. His dad was already up and out, gone for the day. Jude had half hoped his mother would offer to give him a lift, step up this one time, but he knew not to count on miracles. As a matter of personal policy, Jude kept his expectations low to avoid disappointment. That was the strategy, anyway.
A good-looking girl whom Jude knew a little bit showed up, the beautiful Dani Remson with long legs that went all the way up to her shoulders. She’d had a brief thing with his friend Corey about six months back. Something about Dani had always made Jude uneasy, maybe because she was a predatory goddess with brown eyes that lasered right into him. So, head down, Jude busied himself with the apps on his cell, and that worked sufficiently well. After a teasing, sing-songy, “Mooorning, Jude,” Dani brushed past him to join another girl who stood clutching a can of Diet Pepsi.
The bus came and everybody shuffled onboard, feet dragging. Jude grabbed a seat toward the back, stuffed in earbuds, found the Cure on his iPod, gazed out the window for the ride south on Wantagh Parkway. Jude had been obsessing over the Cure lately, especially the best tunes off
Disintegration.
As a band, they peaked in the early 90s, but Jude liked them anyway. Music was music; it didn’t matter if a song was made fifty years ago in Liverpool, England, or behind some guy’s woodshed five minutes ago. The good tunes
stuck
and the rest dropped away. Some days Jude could listen to “Pictures of You” on an endless repeat cycle, losing himself in the interplay of guitar, synthesizer, and bass. That the Cure’s songs were often dark, brooding, and melancholy only made it all the better. Jude didn’t really go for the Cure’s poppier, radio-ready numbers. He had played guitar for eight years now, practicing four, five times a week. Guitar was his retreat. It was a door closing, shutting the world out, and a window opening, connecting him to something
other
, a rift in space through which he escaped for hours at a time. Jude felt, not without reason, that music had saved his life. But, hey, music made
everything
better—even bus rides to a particular version of sucks called My First Day on the Job.
The bus dropped the passengers off near the huge traffic circle at Central Mall, Field Four. This was the busiest, most crowded, commercial area of Jones Beach, loosely divided into fields. The famous Jones Beach watertower signaled a visitor’s entrance to the beach. The iconic tower thrust skyward at more than 225 feet. It dominated the flat horizon like an extended middle finger. Young children called it the pencil, usually in a happy squeal, for it announced their arrival.
Here you go, happy beachgoers, now pay your parking fee and grab a patch of sand
.