Why They Run the Way They Do (24 page)

We spent three hours in lockdown, the entire student body, nearly three hundred teenagers bolted inside our redbrick and mortar, dropped only these pathetic morsels of information from the loudspeakers: there had been a plane crash; no one from the school was hurt; we would be notified with further information as it became available. But there was more, much more, that the loudspeakers were not letting on. There had to be, because why would a plane crash force the school into lockdown? And what further information could possibly become available? By midmorning rumors were swirling; the general consensus was that the plane had been carrying lethal chemicals and that the town had been poisoned, that our families were dying in their homes and cars and offices and it was only a matter of time before the toxic gasses slithered into our classrooms. By noon half the kids in school were in tears—some blubbered openly, but most cried only the misting, bewildered tears that crept back even as we blinked them away.
There has been a plane crash. No one from the school is hurt
.
You will be notified with further information as it becomes available
. Later we learned that some boys tried to escape out a basement window, that a distraught girl had kicked out the glass door of the principal's office, that one teacher pushed another. The complex system of high school social hierarchy collapsed into a chaotic heap of cliques and types; we were at once unified in panic but each isolated in our own unique dread. No one knew how to behave. We got lost in hallways we'd traveled for four years, forgot our locker combinations, looked searchingly into the faces of unfamiliar friends.

And then, just as it seemed we were about to lose our grip, forever, on the world we knew, our parents arrived. In truth they had been arriving all morning, but they were not allowed onto the school grounds until now, and so as we looked out the windows it seemed as if they arrived en masse, a sea of quivering lips and frantic eyes rushing up the grassy slope to the school. Moments later the front doors burst outward and two hundred and eighty children, momentarily unashamed, collapsed into the arms of mothers and fathers. It was only then we learned what had really happened. For some time we stood in dumbfounded groups around the parking lot. We stood listening to car radios with family and friends until our parents, perhaps only now truly realizing the frailty of the tether that kept us all anchored to earth, took us home.

“Was it on fire?” Toby Hartsock asked me.

I pulled my eyes off Dean—he was mowing the lawn—and turned from the window. “Huh?”

“The plane. Did you see flames and stuff?”

“No,” I said. “Nothing like that.”

I turned back to watch Dean complete his final circuit, the rows in his wake as impeccable as lap lanes in a pool. I was supposed to be watching Toby, babysitting while the Hartsocks and my parents went for their weekly dinner at Ponderosa, but of late it was the elder son who held the majority of my attention. Dean liked to mow the lawn in only his swimming trunks. He didn't even wear shoes.
Living on the edge
, he'd said when I asked him if he wasn't worried about losing a toe. And he'd winked. He winked all the time now, conspiratorially, at everyone. My mother said he was turning into quite a charmer, and it was clear from her tone that she didn't mean this as a compliment.

“I'd 'a kicked sombody's ass up there,” Toby said. “I never would'a let 'em crash it.”

“Toby . . .” I said. But then I didn't know where to go with it. He was ten years old. What could you say? “Don't you have homework to do?”

“Did my mom leave dinner?”

“We're getting a pizza.”

“Is Dean eating with us?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I'm not babysitting Dean. Go do your homework and we'll order the pizza when you're done.”

“You're very inflexible today,” he said, on his way up the stairs. A moment later I heard Dean come into the kitchen and open the refrigerator. He was singing a song to himself. I stepped into the doorway in time to watch a bead of sweat swim down his freckled back to the waistband of his trunks. He was drinking a glass of juice and, with his free hand, picking splinters of grass from his dark brown hair. After a minute he turned.

“S'up, Kit-Kat? You sittin'?”

“Yep.” I blinked. When I needed to, I could blink this Dean away and see the Dean from before, the one who once rubbed his ear wax on my paper cut to seal it.

“Cool,” he said. “You guys getting pizza or what?”

“Yeah, I guess. You want some?”

“Yeah”—(and here a stumble in my heart)—“but I can't. Going out.” He looked at the clock over the stove. “Shit, I'm late already. I gotta grab a shower.”

And then he was gone. I rinsed out his juice glass and put it in the dishwasher, then took it out again, washed it carefully by hand, and returned it to the cupboard. I heard the
thrum
of water hitting the tub upstairs. He was up there, I thought, not ten feet above my head, eyes closed, humming a tune, naked in a hot rain.

The Hartsocks had moved in next door to us when Dean and I were in the second grade. Our houses sat at the end of a dead-end street, and since we were in the same grade and walked to school together, since we each liked knock-knock jokes and KFC, since we both loved to sit in trees or under porches and pretend (sometimes for entire afternoons) to be people other than Deano and Kit-Kat, we became fast friends and remained so until middle school.

If life really can be compared to a hand of cards, I'm fairly certain that those cards remain facedown until sixth or seventh grade and only then do you get to turn them over and see who you actually are. Problem is you've already spent several years guessing what those cards are going to be, betting on your gut instincts, so when you flip the cards and discover that you don't have the hand you imagined—or that you and the person you thought you had everything in common with have very, very different cards—you have little recourse.

So it was with Dean and me. We never planned on not being friends, never intended to go in different directions, never even realized we
were
going in different directions until we'd already gone, but by the time we were thirteen we ran in different circles and had little to say to each other. We were still friendly—we often walked home from school together, and spoke superficially of teachers and kids in our grade—but instead of having after-school snacks at each other's houses in front of the TV, we amicably parted ways at the foot of his lawn.

By high school we were firmly entrenched in our separate worlds: I was band; Dean was basketball. I was newspaper; Dean was yearbook. I ran with a crowd of bright kids who made up for their anxiety by being clever, by mocking everyone who was more popular and ignoring everyone who was less popular. Dean ran with the prettier people, not the idiot jocks but the all-around guys, the ones most likely to succeed at something, certainly, because it seemed there was little they could not do. They could shoot baskets
and
maintain a B+ average. They could take pictures for the yearbook
and
get trashed on the weekends. They could be pals with the girl next door
and
date the most popular girl. Or girls. Lots of them: Rachel Cook, Celie Jenkins, Diana Wollkind, Abby Reed. I could list them chronologically, alphabetically, by height, weight, depth, IQ. I could easily list them in order of who deserved him least.

It had come as a shock to me, the sweaty palms, the thick tongue, the jelly knees. It washed over me during April of junior year, a gradual but steady wave of longing that, on the day I finally acknowledged it, named it for what it was, seized possession of me with a grip so ferocious I lost five pounds in one week and twice swooned to the floor of my front hall after brief exchanges with him in the yard. I was casually dating someone else, a boy from band, but after two weeks of loving Dean I had to break up with my trombonist. I needed to be free to pine without guilt, and once free I pined unabashedly from my bedroom window, from bio class, from the strappy lounge chair on our back deck. I pined in the shower, at my locker, over dinner, through assemblies. I gaped at couples kissing on TV, read sex articles in magazines I'd once sneered at, imagined his hands (hands I'd known when they were hairless, hands I'd reached for climbing trees) sliding up the back of my shirt.

“Pepperoni and onion!” Toby called from the top of the stairs.

I dialed the pizza place. It would be an hour, the guy said, before our pizza was delivered. Everything in town was crowded now. Whoever thought, in Somerville, you'd have to wait in line just to pump your gas?

Psychologists roamed the halls of the high school throughout the day. Walking counselors, they were called, the idea being that if you were uncomfortable sharing your night terrors in private you might be willing to stand in a crowded hallway and, over the din of slamming lockers, shout to a complete stranger that you couldn't get the smell of dead people out of your nose.

Special sessions were set up for “high risk groups.” I was in the We Saw The Plane group with the rest of the marching band and a freshman gym class that had been playing hockey in the west parking lot.

“It sounded like somebody screaming.”

“It sounded like a train.”

“It sounded like a tornado.”

“You ever heard a tornado?”

“No. But I know how one sounds.”

“It sounded like a fucking plane crashing, you guys.”

“It was trailing fire.”

“Smoke.”

“Sparks. Like fireworks.”

“The tail fell off.”

(Sometimes, though I knew this was impossible, I convinced myself that I had seen the reflection of the plane in the instruments, that the bells of the tubas had flashed to me, in an instant, the extraordinary sight.)

“The wing was hanging off.”

“It had already split in two.”

“It was upside down.”

“Okay,” the group leader said. He was no one we knew. He was a specialist, they said, when they introduced him. He specialized in things like this. What other thing was
like this
? I wondered. “That's what you saw and heard,” he said. “Now tell me what you feel about it.”

Silence. Not even a rustle, for probably a full minute. Finally somebody sneezed.

The thing was, really, the thing no one would dare say, is that we were secretly thrilled that something had happened in our sleepy lives, that whatever residual terror seized us in our most vulnerable moments was outweighed by the pride and excitement of seeing four hundred news vans lining the eight dilapidated blocks that was downtown Somerville. It was not that we were happy it had happened; we were simply happy that, if it had to happen somewhere, it had happened
here
.