Read What Strange Creatures Online
Authors: Emily Arsenault
“Andrew invited you in?”
Kim touched her headband, then pushed a stray strand of hair behind her ear. “Yeah.”
“All three of you? You, Missy, and Jenny?”
Kim bit her lip, thinking. “Mmm. I don’t think Missy was there.”
“So you and Jenny and Andrew were in the basement working on your drawings?”
“Yeah.”
“And then what happened?”
“Andrew . . . Andrew, uh . . .”
In an instant, Kim’s composure collapsed. Her face crumpled. She heaved and then sniffled. It was so sudden and so sad. And she looked awfully small.
“It’s okay, Kim. Take your time.”
“It’s okay, honey,” said another female voice from outside the shot. Kim’s mother, I presumed.
I stared at Kim: minus the crooked lipstick, minus the cell phone, minus the cocktail glass.
“I was in Jenny’s basement?” she said, and Colleen Shipley nodded.
“I was in Jenny’s basement with Kyle,” Kim said, pulling her shoulders up high, then releasing them. “Kyle was teaching me how to kiss.”
“When’s this? The same day?”
“No. I don’t know. It was the third time, I think. We locked Jenny out. She banged on the door, but we didn’t answer.”
“And that’s when Jenny went to Andrew’s?”
“Probably, yeah.”
“Wait. So we’re not talking anymore about the day you saw them kissing, are we?”
“No.”
Kim was clearly frustrated. “I’m talking about the day she DISAPPEARED.”
“Okay. We were going to get to that.”
At that moment a man entered the shot, pulling up a chair.
“Kim,” he said. “I know this is hard. Let’s just take it one step at a time, okay?”
Clearly this was Donald Wallace. I recognized the length of his face and the swoop of bangs across his forehead—more brown then than gray.
“Okay,” Kim said, wiping her nose with the cuff of her sleeve.
“Now, I know you feel bad about what happened to Jenny. We all do. We all feel terrible. But it’s not your fault. And it’s not Kyle’s fault. Nothing you could have done would have changed what happened. We want to start with Andrew bothering Jenny. Because he shouldn’t have been kissing her and touching her if she didn’t want him to, right?”
Kim shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Jenny can’t tell us what Andrew did.” Donald Wallace handed Kim a tissue. “So if
you
saw anything, you
need
to tell us. Okay?”
“Okay,” Kim said, wiping her nose again.
“Good. Now let’s start over. Did you ever see Jenny and Andrew kissing?”
“Yes.”
“Where was this?” Wallace asked.
Kim thought for a moment. “In Andrew’s backyard.”
“When was this?”
Kim looked away from Wallace. “In the summer.”
“Did he try this with you, too?”
“No.” Kim shook her head. “I . . . saw from Missy’s yard. We were looking over the fence, and we saw.”
“Missy saw, too?”
“I think she did.” Kim paused. “Yeah.”
“So Andrew didn’t know you two were watching.”
Kim hesitated again, then nodded.
“I see.
Now
I see.”
Kim sniffled and looked relieved.
Kim had apparently cut that footage from the rest—the screen went blank there. I paused the footage. Colleen Shipley was right. That
was
a little disturbing. Election game-changer disturbing? Probably not. But disturbing nonetheless. I took out my cell phone. I wanted Zach to see this.
“I’m glad you called,” he said when he picked up. “I’ve been worried—”
“Come over,” I interrupted. “I have the footage.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’m leaving in just a minute.”
I minimized the window with the DVD footage and went online to look at Zach’s class blog. I wanted to read Kim’s piece on Jenny again.
The prompt for that week had been:
Write a conversation between your present-day self and a younger version of yourself.
OR
Write about an experience of a song that represents for you a particular moment or era in your youth.
I flipped past Jeff’s piece about “Stranger on the Shore” to get to Kim’s response.
Kim had chosen the second prompt and written about Jenny and the Cranberries. I paused when I got to these words again:
There is, in the end, only Jenny. Pretty like a girl on TV. Pretty like a girl who won’t last. Old as I was at ten, how is it I didn’t know that? How is it that of all the things I told her, I couldn’t tell her this? How is it that I didn’t open that door?
That last line, which I hadn’t much noticed on the first read, made painful sense now. It was interesting that Kim had not chosen the first prompt that week. If she’d been willing to take a step back and see her ten-year-old self from an adult perspective, she might have been able to forgive herself.
I felt rather sad for the smaller Kim. It was very clear to me—and should’ve been clear to any adult, I felt—that she was trying to say something different from what actually came out. Was it so clear to the older Kim, when she watched it?
Could she possibly have forgiven herself, once she saw all that? Maybe she had. But probably not. It had obviously fueled her anger toward Donald Wallace. Maybe he had always been her boogeyman. He reminded her of a mistake she’d made when she was very young, and he became ever more powerful as she grew up. It may well have driven her a little bit crazy.
As I began to click out of this section of the blog, I noted the due date of the assignment: April 12.
I stared at the date. Kim had written it somewhere, hadn’t she? On one of the articles about the Hallidays?
It took me a few minutes to locate the articles—in a pile on my ironing board, under a few bills and a checkbook. I skimmed all the articles but didn’t find it.
Then I found my copy of
Juvie
and flipped through.
Kim had written
April 12
on the section about the kid named “Anthony.” I reread the passage she’d marked:
“I think that a big part of it was that Liam picked me out to harass. If he’d been harassing someone else, I think I could’ve been cooler about it, you know? If it happened to someone else, I’d have told that person, ‘Hey, just tell him you’re not interested. Or tell him to go to hell, if you want. And then walk away.’
“But since it was me, I somehow wasn’t able to do that. In the moment it felt very personal. Like, I was so sick of that shit. Just because you’re a little quieter, a little smarter, a little nicer, people think you’re gay.”
“So your friends wondered about your sexuality?” I try to clarify. “And you went along with them to put a stop to that?”
“I don’t know what other people wonder,” Anthony replies, a hint of impatience in his voice. “I just know I was angry. Not only at Liam. At the boxes people wanted to put me in. That night I didn’t want to be a nice guy. I wanted to tear the fuck out of that box, in a big way.”
“Do you wish now that you had told the guys no when they challenged you to trick Liam?” I ask.
“Well, yes. Of course.”
“Would you say you’re afraid of gays? Or they make you angry?”
“Neither. I’m not like that at all.”
“But do you think there was real anger in what you did? Anger at people different from you? Or was it just about the moment, about the other guys?”
“There was anger, yes. But it wasn’t at people different from me. It came from somewhere deep inside me, I think, and had nothing to do with Liam. I feel like I came to my senses, though, when I saw Patrick whaling away at Liam. Like, what have we done? How did I get here? But by then it was too late.”
“Do you think you are in control of your anger now?”
Anthony sighs before answering. “I hope so.”
I considered April 12. I considered the question about having a conversation with your younger self. I thought about all the terrible situations Kim, Missy, Dustin, and Trenton had been in when they were young and how painful that question could potentially be. Zach certainly knew that as well as the rest of them.
Zach—who, as a kid, had started a house fire to help his mother.
I put down the book. But
Trenton
had started a house fire—under vaguely similar circumstances.
A twisting seized my stomach. How was it possible that Zach’s and Trenton’s stories were so similar?
I hit
EJECT
on the first of Kyle’s DVDs. If Colleen Shipley’s footage was on this DVD, what was on the other? Kyle had assumed that it was more of the same, but given the brevity of the contents of the first, I suspected not. I prayed it was footage of Andrew Abbott’s original police interrogation, as Janice Obermeier had indicated to Zach. Maybe that would have something much more damning to Donald Wallace. And maybe that would ease the suspicion that was creeping up my throat and making it difficult to breathe.
I put Kyle’s second DVD into my computer.
I started to close the class blog to watch the DVD, but then I remembered something my brother had written in his essay “Stranger on the Shore,” and I went back to check.
I didn’t know till after my grandfather died what the song was. He left me his black Buick Regal Grand National with all his cassette tapes still in it.
Why hadn’t this bothered me the first time I’d read it? Maybe I’d been distracted by the weight of Kim’s “Jenny” piece that day. Anyone who read Jeff’s essay would be able to locate my brother’s car quite efficiently in a parking lot or on his street.
Heart still hammering, I hit
PLAY
on my laptop.
The screen framed a poorly lit room—the walls had a sickly yellow glow.
There were two figures slumped down low on a formless brown couch. A soundless TV flashed behind them.
The figure closer to the camera was Trenton Halliday. His hair was longer, but it was clearly him. He appeared to be dozing while holding a beer.
Next to him was another young man of similar build. He was too big to be Dustin, but I couldn’t see his face very well.
“It’s like the kids you went to high school with are sort of dead to you anyway, right?” he was saying. “When you move up and on in your life? So when I think that he’s gone, it doesn’t feel real. Len would be
gone
to me anyhow now, right? That part of it is still surreal. That he’s really dead.”
The voice sounded familiar, but I wasn’t entirely sure.
The guy sat up and stared down at Trenton, then glanced at the TV, clasping his hands in front of him. From his profile I could see it was indeed Zach.
“I kicked him while he was still standing up,” he murmured. “While it was still kind of an even fight. Once he was down, I walked away. I don’t kick a man when he’s down—whoever he is.
“I mean, I learned my lesson. I did the time. More time than I think I deserved, but I did it.”
Zach mushed his hand into his cheek and swiped it clumsily across his mouth.
“Doug, he’s still doing real time. But he kicked Len when he was down on the ground, so . . . you know, get what you deserve. I mean, yeah. I’m lucky I had a good lawyer. Everyone should have a good lawyer. I’m not gonna feel bad about that. My parents work hard for their money, they could afford a decent lawyer, so I didn’t get screwed. It’s a shame some people don’t have that. It shouldn’t be a
luxury,
and that’s a shame. But that doesn’t mean I should feel bad that I had that right.”
“Totally,” Trenton piped up, without opening his eyes.
“And even Connor and Doug didn’t mean for him to die. They just wanted to teach him something. It’s okay to be gay, whatever. You just don’t fling yourself on people. And that’s what he was doing.
“I’m not saying he should’ve died for that. It just went further than it should’ve. Nobody meant it to go
that
far, you know?”
“Totally,” Trenton said again, softer this time. Then there was a
clunk,
and Zach jumped up from the couch.
A scoff came from behind the camera—I assumed it was Dustin. From what I could gather, Trenton had dropped his beer as he’d nodded off. The picture went dark right after that.
All the swear words I’d ever known jammed in my throat at once, so not a single one could make its way out.
When I could breathe again, I hit
PAUSE
on the DVD and tried to do a Google search on “Zachary Wagner” and key words that might fit the crime of his youth: “hate crime” and the like. But I couldn’t find anything. I wasn’t surprised. Based on our ages, the incident would’ve been from before newspapers—or much of anything—was online. Back then “bullying” and “hate crime” weren’t such buzzwords anyway. Such a crime likely wouldn’t have gotten quite as much press at the time as it would now. And then I thought of something else—Zach saying of Anthony’s family,
They were considering relocating the whole family once he finished his sentence. I wouldn’t be surprised if he even changed his name.
And the name “Michael Johnson” had probably been made up on the fly. I hadn’t actually bothered to Google it. But Zach must have known that such a common name would yield nothing definitive or satisfactory.
I hit
PLAY
again, in case Kim had saved anything else on the DVD. There appeared to be a few more minutes of footage left on it. Probably dead air, but I wanted to be sure.
After about thirty seconds of blackness, I picked up my cell phone and called Janice Obermeier. When she answered, I introduced myself as a friend of Zach Wagner’s.
“Oh. Zach,” she said. “It’s been a while since we’ve connected. How’s he doing these days?”
“Not bad,” I said uneasily. “Um, he told me what you said—about Kim Graber offering to show you footage of Andrew Abbott’s original police interrogation.”
“Excuse me?” Janice said. “Kim Graber never said anything about that to me. She said
footage,
but she didn’t specify . . . and I haven’t talked to Zach in weeks. Did you say he gave you my number?”
As she asked the question, a new picture appeared on my computer. It was a fuzzy light blue-gray—as if the camera lens were pressed against fabric.
“Sorry, misunderstanding, I guess,” I said, hung up, and turned my computer volume as high as it would go.