The Boy Who Killed Grant Parker (2 page)

“Okay,” I said as I tried to think of what shirts I owned that didn't include printed designs. Did a Georgetown University sweatshirt count as a printed design? I wasn't sure. But it didn't seem the right time to ask.

“Mr. Grayson, I have a great deal of respect for your father,” the principal said, changing the subject abruptly. He paused in anticipation after he said this, waiting for an appropriate response. I was still shifting gears from Columbine and printed T-shirts and I wasn't sure what an appropriate response should be, so the pause dragged on—from awkward to painful.

Finally I said, “Thanks.” As if I was entitled to some credit for how respectable my father was.

“Ashland is a strong Christian community, as I'm sure you know since your father is a man of God.” I was starting to get the sense that he had practiced this speech ahead of time. Like he had an agenda and had worked out in his mind how to approach it in a roundabout way.

“Yes. Strong,” I said, feeling like an idiot as I said it.

My eyes wandered around the room as I tried to think of something clever to say to alleviate the impression that I was a moron. A large framed print hung on the wall behind the desk, the words
THE PRINCIPAL IS MY PAL—THAT'S THE PRINCIPLE WE LIVE BY
displayed in colorful block letters.

“I've been reviewing your records from your previous school,” he said as he reached forward to lift the papers in front of him, the implied threat made all the more menacing because it was an alarmingly thick stack of papers.

I wasn't sure what to say. I decided to stay silent, not give anything away in case some things hadn't been committed to paper. Better to remain silent, not incriminate myself, than to start offering up explanations.

“Your grades were … unexceptional,” he said, maybe still trying to be polite.

Unexceptional was putting it mildly, though I would often argue with my mom that a C average was just that—average. I didn't aspire to be anything other than average.

I kept silent, not wanting to do anything that would extend my stay in his office.

“It seems that you also like to challenge authority, Mr. Grayson,” Leslie said as he frowned at the second stapled page of my permanent record.

“I went to an all-boys school when I lived in DC,” I said with an innocent shrug. “Pranks are just the usual there.”

“This seems much more serious than pranks.” He looked at me expectantly over the rims of his reading glasses. “These notes indicate that on one occasion there was personal injury to another student and property damage to the school. Does that seem like just an innocent prank to you, Mr. Grayson?”

I shifted in my seat as I tried to let my anger dissolve before responding. If I came across as snide and pissed, it would just make the situation worse. But it was hard—the way he called me Mr. Grayson, the way teachers do as if they are showing a sign of respect for students as grown people when really they are just patronizing us.

As I waited for the acid to dissipate from my tongue before answering, I thought bitterly of Steve Moyo, my underachieving partner in crime for the debacle that had ultimately driven my mom beyond the point of no return.

That Steve had been stupid enough to light an M-80 firework while sitting on the toilet was his own fault. He had definitely been stoned and just hadn't thought through the sequence of events ahead of time. Trying to correct his mistake, he had dropped the firework into the toilet, not knowing it would land with the fuse above the waterline and continue to burn. Though the resulting damage to his ass and the underside of his balls was enough to keep him from sitting comfortably or jacking off for a few days (
a new personal record
), he wasn't seriously injured and his virility was intact. The explosion had cracked the toilet bowl and flooded the bathroom reserved for teachers. Teachers got to crap in private, didn't have to use the multistalled bathroom the students used.

At the moment of detonation I was in the teachers' lounge, loading a bag of contraband for later redistribution from the well-stocked snack cupboards. Steve's injuries prevented any kind of escape, and we were both caught red-handed. I was standing with the door to the toilet open while Steve writhed on the ground, holding his crotch and screaming, “Are they gone? Did I blow them off? Fucking tell me! Don't sugarcoat it, man!” at the precise moment when the track-and-field coach sauntered into the lounge, a newspaper folded under one arm, to take his morning dump.

“I asked you a question, Mr. Grayson,” Leslie said, and brought me back to the present. “Does that seem like a simple prank to you?”

“No,” I said finally, since it was the answer Leslie was waiting for.

“No, what?” he asked.

“Sir?” I hazarded a guess.

“I address you with respect,” he said. “I expect the same in return.”

Ri-ight. Respect.

Other transgressions on my record would be much more minor—tardies, maybe a mention of being caught smoking on school grounds once or twice, and repeated trips to the principal's office for mouthing off to my teachers—but really I had no idea how much information ended up in a permanent record. I wondered idly if this permanent record would follow me to college and beyond.

Leslie allowed his leather desk chair to fall forward on its rocker with an ominous thud. He blew out a weary sigh but said nothing for a long minute. The seconds ticked off on the wall clock as beads of sweat formed at my hairline.

“Let me be very clear,” Leslie said, speaking slowly, as if I might be simpleminded. “If you give me any trouble. Any at all. I will recommend you finish your high school career at the juvenile reformatory in Purcellville. You get me, Mr. Anti-establishment?”

Since I had never considered myself anything even close to resembling a rebel, his threats almost made me giggle with nervous energy. Giggle or pee myself.

“Yes,” I said, though I didn't really. Get him, that was.

“Yes, what?” he asked, his face crimson now.

The corners of his eyes creased into a menacing scowl, and I unconsciously straightened in my chair and cleared my throat before saying, “Yes … sir.… I won't give you any trouble.”

And even though I meant what I said, had no plans to cause trouble, by the end of the day, that promise would be broken.

 

2

I spent most of that first day cussing my mother in my head for making me come to this godforsaken town. Jesus, I had moved five hundred miles from DC to eastern Tennessee (actually, I had no idea how far DC was from Tennessee), but I felt like I had moved five hundred years. Principal Sherman had set the tone before my day even started, and now I was resentful and angry.

My mother really had no room to talk when it came to life choices. She had been a complete degenerate as a teenager and in her early twenties. She married my dad, a student at the Baptist seminary in her hometown of Richmond, Virginia, in a failed attempt to straighten out her life. Within a few years it became painfully apparent that my mom was not cut out for the role of preacher's wife, so she packed up me and her few belongings and relocated to Washington, DC. After that, there had been a revolving door of weirdos in our house—Mom's friends and guys she dated.

My mom was actually pretty cool. I could tell her things most teenage guys can't tell their moms. But since she had been such a fuckup for most of her adult life, I also couldn't get away with anything. She could smell a lie from fifty paces, and she felt like she had some special license to try to make me turn out a saint after the havoc of her own young adulthood.

I had never lived with my dad. Hadn't even really seen much of him for the past thirteen years. He hadn't managed to do much to straighten Mom out. I'm not sure what she thought he could do with me.

It's not as if I were a total rebel or snorted heroin or anything. I just got bored easily. And a small town in eastern Tennessee is about as boring as it gets, so I'm not sure how she thought sending me here was going to keep me out of trouble.

And besides, the town kind of creeped me out. Nothing stayed open past 8:00
P.M.,
and there was nothing but white people as far as the eye could see. There wasn't even a Chinese restaurant. How the hell do you live without Chinese carryout? I didn't even know that was a thing.

I had no intention of forming attachments to this town. Ashland was my purgatory—nine months until graduation and my departure. Until then, I planned to phone it in.

*   *   *

I had known from the start that lunch would be the worst part of the day in my new school. A high school cafeteria is like Dante's vestibule of hell—shedding blood endlessly for nothing but more hell.

When the bell dismissed us to lunch, I hesitated stupidly in my seat and thought about my options. The idea of packing my lunch, which was the equivalent of social suicide at my old school, had been abhorrent to me that morning. Now I wished I had brought a sandwich so I didn't have to face the line for food in the cafeteria or the pathetic search for a place to sit by myself.

The cafeteria food was nothing like what they served at the private school I attended in DC. There, we had been offered fresh fruit and a salad bar and gluten-free everything. The Wakefield cafeteria offered extremely limited options—the color leached from the vegetables by overcooking, the meat the lowest grade rating approved by the FDA for human consumption.

It was obvious that most students at my new school brought their lunch from home, knew better than to eat the disgusting school lunch. I was one of the few who went through the full line.

The most mortifying moment of the day was when I turned away from the cashier with my lunch tray and stood, awkward and helpless, deciding where to sit.

I stutter-stepped as I tried to walk like I had some direction, my eyes searching desperately for a welcoming look or an empty table. Finally, I honed in on a table with only one occupant, a guy who didn't look old enough to be out of middle school and sat with his back rounded in the defensive posture of an inmate protecting his meal. He didn't even look up at me as I took a seat at the opposite end of the table. I kept my earbuds in to discourage conversation, Modest Mouse playing at low volume so I could still hear the buzz of voices around me.

I scrolled relentlessly through my phone, sending out texts in rapid succession to friends back home, hoping one of them would engage me in some kind of conversation. I confirmed three times that I had received no new e-mails other than spam and, after opening my Web browser, quickly cleared the search history on my phone to keep porn sites from popping up at a bad moment.

However desperate I may have been for a social life at my new school, the first offer of friendship I got was not a welcome one. Even though I was painfully aware of how pathetic I looked sitting with just my phone for company, I was less than enthusiastic when a guy I dimly remembered from one of my morning classes approached me, his open and friendly expression demanding that I remove my earbuds and engage in conversation. He was my height but slight, his wiry frame curved like a question mark, and his hair could have used a washing.

As he maneuvered his legs under the table across from me, he introduced himself by saying, “Hey, I'm Don. My family is Methodist, so we don't go to your dad's church.”

“Hey, Don,” I said. “I'm Luke. Agnostic.”

“Hey,” he said, his eyes lighting up with surprise, “that's pretty good.”

Don had an unfortunate complexion that, if the lunch he was unpacking onto the table was any indication, was due to his poor diet and, possibly, lack of personal hygiene. I watched with mild distaste as he unpacked a Lunchable, fruit gummies, and a juice box that promised to contain at least 10 percent real juice.

“We never get new people in Ashland,” he said as he shoved a plastic bag full of carrot sticks, the only organically created part of his lunch, back into the bag and set it aside. “You're, like, the first.”

“Great.”

“Josh,” Don called to the silent, freckled boy at the end of our table. “C'mere,” he said with a wave of his hand. The boy looked over at us from under a mushroom cap of wiry brown hair and then slowly, reluctantly gathered his food and moved down to join us.

Josh said nothing, didn't really even acknowledge me other than to give me an almost imperceptible nod, before resuming his lunch in Don's shadow.

“Josh doesn't talk much,” Don said artlessly.

“Okay,” I said, for lack of anything better, but was distracted by the sight of something across the lunchroom—long, buttery gold curls and a million-dollar smile. A petite girl, her delicate arms and legs brown from the sun, was laughing with her friends as she made her way across the cafeteria. Even from across the room I could tell her eyes were a vibrant sapphire. She was nothing like a DC girl. For one thing she was made up perfectly, like a doll, and wore a conservative plaid dress with a disappointingly high neckline.

Don followed my gaze and smiled knowingly when he saw what had captured my attention. “Penny Olson,” he said. “You can just get that idea out of your head right now.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He snorted. “I mean forget it. Every guy in school is crazy about her, but she's been going out with Grant Parker since last year.”

“Yeah?” I asked. “Who's Grant Parker?”

“Grant Parker is God.”

“If there is a God,” I said, “I'm pretty sure he isn't from Ashland, Tennessee.”

“Yeah, well, Grant Parker can do no wrong,” Don said with a resigned sigh. “Star student, star athlete—and he looks like an Abercrombie model. His daddy owns the feed and farm supply, so they're the richest folks in town. And Grant's daddy's the mayor. Leland Parker is like the God of Ashland, and Grant Parker is Jesus Christ.”