The Danger of Being Me (22 page)

"Three into the fourteen, corner pocket," I told him.  "It's the best you've got."

"Yeah-yeah," Ethan muttered without looking at me.  "Sure-sure."  He snapped the cue ball down the length of the table into the three, sending it the rest of the way to the corner where it nicked the fourteen.  The striped ball caught the corner of the rail and dropped into the pocket, but the three spun off across the felt, clipping the twelve and falling into the adjacent corner pocket for a scratch.  Ethan shook his head, grinning.  "Whoreson."

"`Bout time you showed up," Ben called from his seat along the wall, and I saw Helen beside him nursing a Jolt Cola.  Her eyes passed over me, then to Amber, and back to me again, and a surreal weightlessness settled on me as I watched the past and the present speeding toward each other.  But then Helen just nodded, and the corner of her mouth turned up in a mild grin, and I watched as the past veered to the left in time to avoid a collision.

Winnie sat on a high barstool next to Helen, and a kid leaned against the wall on Winnie's other side.  He was the sophomore from the Writers Club meeting, Rob McCall.  I nodded to him, and thought that Winnie might be looking for a successor to take over the Poetry Page.  Or maybe she just had a soft-spot for cerebral postmodern poets.

I crossed to the cluster of teenagers at the wall, passing a familiar girl at my left.  I realized only then that my sister had staked out the table next to ours with a group of her own friends.  I recognized the girls from the Writers Club meeting, but couldn't identify any of the others.  Regina stretched across her table with one foot on the floor, the other flailing unsteadily as she balanced her cue-stick across two knuckles.  She struck the cue ball high of center.  It hit the opposite rail, ricocheted at an angle, caught the nine ball, dropped it into the side pocket.

I made no comment, approaching Winnie and Helen and Ben along the wall.  I made quick introductions all around, and Ben grinned playfully.  "So you're the one he won't shut up about.  I was sure you were going to turn out to be a figment of his hyperactive imagination."

Helen rolled her eyes.  Ben didn't see it, but Amber did, and she grinned, and Ben grinned wider because he thought she was grinning at him.  Of course he did.

"Benedetto Kelerick," Amber said, giving the name an emphasis it surely didn't deserve.  She leaned toward him in a secretive gesture, and spoke for the rest of us to hear.  "You really think those girls wrote the Jack of Hearts letters to themselves just to get some attention?"

Phil snorted out a laugh before he could stop himself, then coughed to cover it up.  Ethan finally looked up from his game, saw the look on Ben's face, turned to Amber and gave her his most welcoming smile.  "
Mára aurë
."

Amber's eyebrows shot up at that.  "
Rim hennaid
."

Now Ben rolled his eyes.  "Fucking fantastic."

It was the best of times. The worst of times were coming.

If there is any truth to reincarnation, then the eight of us must surely have been a tight-knit clique in another lifetime.  The Bloomsbury Group, perhaps, or the Notion Club.  Amber was soon debating the merits of Sindarin versus Quenya with Ethan and Phil, and even managed to win back some of Ben's affection by complimenting him on his review of
Good Will Hunting
from last December.

The evening progressed in a pleasant blur, like a home movie found in the garage after a summer heat wave.  As one o'clock neared, Amber and Helen played a round of nine-ball, and I heard Phil tell Ethan and Ben, "—talk to this guy tomorrow morning at the ass-crack of dawn."

Ethan drank an Irn-Bru, asked, "On a Sunday?"

"Only time he was free," Phil said with shrug.

Ethan's brow creased as he considered.  "Because his fingerprints were on the John Doe two-dollar bills?"

Phil nodded.  "That's what my dad told me."

"I'd love to see the birthplace of America," Ben said.

Phil stared at him for a moment before realizing that Ben was sincere.  He laughed.  "Are you fucking stoned?  America wasn't born in Washington, D.C."

"Of course it wasn't," Ben insisted, as if it had been Phil who suggested it.  "I was just saying if I got the chance—"

I lost the thread of the conversation as Winnie returned from the restroom.  She caught my eye and angled to me, climbing onto the high barstool between me and Phil.  She watched Helen take an awkward shot at the four, missing while leaving Amber with no options.  Still watching the game, she told me, "You missed the luncheon."

I hadn't thought about the Laureate competition since deserting the library.  I watched Amber line up a bank-shot, and a grin creased my lips.  "Slipped my mind."

"It was good," Winnie told me.  Then she turned to me, and apology flashed across her face.  "You placed third."

I laughed.  "Good enough to get me into
Strophe
."

Winnie smiled.  "Yes it is."  Then she laughed.  "
Incipit
."

"How'd you do?" I asked, leaning back against the wall.

That look of apology flashed in her eyes again, but then it fell into the taller shadow of her satisfaction.  "Second."

"Good," I said, and meant it.  "So who won then?"

This time she didn't answer me, and I watched her eyes shift from our table to the one next to ours.  I saw that Rob McCall had joined his classmates, and I picked my sister out of the group, laughing at something one of her friends had said, leaning a little too comfortably against a kid in a Save Ferris t-shirt.  I looked back to Winnie.

"Regina?" I asked, and my voice carried enough that she heard it.  She cast a glance around the room and found me, paying me no special attention, which was just as well.  I regarded this girl who lived upstairs from me, this girl I really knew nothing about, and I was mostly surprised that I was not at all surprised.  My kid sister had beaten me to win the title of Prophecy Creek High School's first Poet Laureate.  And I didn't mind.  Not even a little.

Her eyes came back to me then, for just a second, and I smiled and nodded.  She flashed me a curious look, just for a second, and then she nodded back and smiled.

An hour later, as the night gave way to early morning, I hunkered over the pool table lining up a shot on the eight ball that would complete an historically lopsided victory.  Ben had sunk the two on the break, then missed his next shot, and I had run five shots in a row before missing a corner-shot on the ten.  Ben had sunk his six ball into a side pocket, then missed again.  I had dispensed with the nine and the fifteen, and was poised for a dramatic win.

I sighted the angle of incidence, needing to beat Ben on something more than a technicality.  As I leaned across the baize, setting the cue-stick into the V of my thumb and forefinger, I caught a glimpse of Ethan and Amber to one side, sectioned off toward the front window as the lights from the street caught their profiles.  They watched me as they conversed, and when I caught them at it, they didn't even bother to conceal it.

Ethan leaned closer and whispered to Amber.  She laughed softly, glanced to him, then glanced back to me, and nodded.  That complicated and unfathomable smile flickered across Ethan's features at that, and he broke away from Amber to join Phil and Helen.

I shoved my curiosity back and out of arm's reach, and leaned over my shot.  "Corner," I said, and drove the pool stick into the cue-ball.  It struck the eight-ball precisely and stopped dead on the felt, all of its momentum transferred to the black ball that shot across the table.  The eight-ball thunked heavily into the corner pocket, and I stood.

Ben glared at the table, disgusted.  He shook his head, then looked at me.  "Well played," he said, which was as close to a compliment as Ben Kelerick was apt to give.

I accepted the praise without comment, and Ben set about the work of returning the sixteen billiard balls to the rack.  Winnie was on-deck, but I wanted to end my streak on this high note, so I offered the cue-stick to Amber as she came around the table.  "You want in?"

Amber looked to Winnie.  "You mind?"

Winnie shook her head as she chalked up the tip of her cue-stick.  Amber moved in to take my place, pressing against me and laying a soft kiss on my mouth as she took the pool-cue from me.  A hazy smile shifted across my lips, and I crossed to the seats against the wall in time to hear Ethan tell Phil and Helen: "Politics gives me hives."

"Ain't that the fuckin truth," Helen laughed.  She drank her soda, then turned to me.  "You done good, kid."

"Ben just needs to be reminded that he's human."

Helen flashed a knowing smile and screwed the cap back onto her bottle.  "That's not what I mean."

I paused, listened to the distinctive vocal stylizations of Art Alexakis.  I started to ask what exactly she did mean, and was cut off when she shot me a wink.  Ethan laughed gently beside me: "If you have to ask, you'll never know.  But when you know, you'll know."  He tapped the side of his nose.  "And you'll never have to ask."

I shook my head, feeling drunk.  Ethan laughed at the look on my face; I laughed at the absurdity of the whole conversation.  Then I asked, "What was that about?"

He smirked. "I'm sure I have no idea what you mean."

"You and Amber," I told him, smirking back.

Ethan glanced to Amber, who was too busy analyzing the break to return his look.  He smiled again, and it wasn't complicated or unfathomable.  It was just sadness all the way to the bottom, like the look of a man with impossible work to do and the infinite will to do it.

He thought for a long moment, and I decided that he wasn't going to answer me.  Then he shook his head, and he told me, "maybe I'll tell you about it later."

3.

Or maybe not.

Because on Monday morning, Mr. Flythe flicked on the public address during homeroom.  But instead of reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, he searched for words before clearing his throat.  "I've learned this morning that ... we've lost one of our own to a terrible tragedy."

The room went silent like someone had hit the mute button.  The book flipped shut in my hands, and I lost my page.  I stared at the yellow bar of soap on the cover with the novel's title carved into it, blinking, thinking.

Then I glanced around the room to take a head-count.  I spotted Phil shuffling a deck of playing cards at the center worktables, and Helen sitting at the computer station, her fingers hovering over the keyboard.  But I didn't see Ben, and Winnie was missing, and even Gale was absent.

Then words burned brightly in my mind for a moment, flashing like heat-lightning. 
Someone else's tragedy
.

"Ethan Gibson and his father were killed in a car-crash late last night on their way back from a Flyers game," Mr. Flythe told us, swallowing so hard that his throat clicked through the entire school.  He paused again, and said, "Let us take a few moments now to honor their memories."

A steel strap tightened itself around my gut.  My lungs burned.  I couldn't breathe.  My fingers clamped down on the book in my hands, and I felt that sweltering scarlet veil swirled around me like a bloody thunderhead, threatening to crush me under its terrible weight.  I sucked in a hard breath that tasted like honey and death in my throat.

It wasn't possible. It made no sense. Ethan wasn't dead.  Of course he wasn't.  He couldn't be dead.  Ethan was the one of the few among us capable of exceeding the escape velocity of this town.  He was an uncommon man with the audacity to turn his back on the machinery of the world to chase after his own improbable ambitions.

He moved, and the universe bent to his infinite will.

And then all at once it was true, because it had to be true.  Ethan was an uncommon person, and this world was not built for people like that. People like him. Except there were no people like him.  There was just him, and now his tragically short lease had reached its date.

Two minutes later, Mr. Flythe cleared his throat again.  "Counselors will be on-hand throughout the—"

Before he could finish, the murmur of conversation flooded back in to drown him out.  Those voices washed around me, crashed against me, and I heard them though I did not hear them.  They spoke the frantic alien words of a gibberish language that I understood but did not know.

I felt like rotting driftwood in a tsunami.

On Wednesday afternoon, I pushed through the double doors of the school and emptied out onto the wide cement forecourt in front of the building.

Ten inches of snow blanketed the campus.  The sky had ruptured on Monday night, emptying itself out relentlessly across the world.  The flag outside the school was lowered to half-staff by Tuesday morning .  Mrs. Kraven pulled Phil and Helen from their regular duties on the paper in order for them to concentrate on a memorial for Ethan.

On Wednesday morning, three dozen students held a prayer group around the flagpole before classes.  Phil and Helen and Ben and Winnie and Amber and Dr. Lombardi and I watched from the edge of the wide cement forecourt, shielded by an awning as snow churned in a shifting haze.  The storm beat its fury against the world, touching down like the whispering of a madman, layers on layers like fresh and unending insanity.  And we said nothing.

Because there were no words.

Now the nor'easter was finally beginning to subside.  Two-foot-high stacks of plowed snow lined the curbs, but the sprawling white sheets stretched across the grass had been left unspoiled.  I drew in a breath and cringed.  The air tasted stale, like the morbid breath of winter.  It tasted dead.  I laughed at the thought, and the sound came out hollow, humorless.  It made me think of black ice.

I stood there in that frozen moment, and watched the flag snap curtly as a bitter breeze sliced across the open grounds.  I watched the sky pressing itself down on the world, the color of brushed chrome, like a massive expanse of dented sheet metal.  I sighed into the grey afternoon, and watched the pale patches of my breaths circle my head in the snow like wraiths from a world-from-before.