151 Days (47 page)

“What the fuck are you doing?” he roared, tossing his lunch pail to the side. “Why can’t you just be normal?” I kicked back away from him, but it was too late, I had messed up his daily ritual of coming home from work, changing, and drinking a beer in his chair while watching ESPN. And like an overgrown, muscle-bound baby, he was cranky and going to take it out on me.

The ironic part was that as he hit me, I thought this was as bad as my day was going to get.

After a while he got tired, and I retreated to my room, knowing that after a full day’s work and beating me, my dad would be too tired to bug me anymore for the night. I had no idea if he had heard about Kelly or not, but I honestly didn’t care. I put my headphones on and tried to just focus on my music. For a few moments, it pushed the dark thoughts away….

And then a photo of Kelly’s corpse was put on my computer.

I jerked back and tried to look away, but it was too late. Like an image of the sun, it was burned into my eyes for the rest of time. The lifeless eyes as they stared up, the pale complexion that no matter how hard Hollywood tries to replicate, it can never get right, and the blood… how much blood did he have?

I didn’t get far because when I moved to get up, a hand grabbed my neck and pushed me back toward the photo. I looked over, and out of the corner of my eye saw Kyle. I ripped the headphones off and asked. “Kyle? What the fuck?” My mouth was working faster than my brain again, because I knew exactly why he was here. He knew, he knew what I had done…. He knew what had happened and was blaming me.

He moved my face down toward the photos that now littered my desk. “I wanted to show you the results of your efforts.” He sounded angrier than anyone I had ever heard speak before. “Look at them, Jeremy. This is what you wanted, right?”

I tried to get free of him, but he was holding me there with a death grip. “I don’t know what Sammy told you, but she—” I began, hoping anything would get him off me.

“Don’t lie,” he roared, sounding like he was on the verge of crying. “You did this, so own it.”

I marshaled every ounce of strength I had and pushed back, kicking the chair out from under me as I stumbled back. I glared at him, both my hands balled into fists, ready to fight him if I had to. “What do you want me to say? I posted it? Fine! I did, but he deserved it!”

That was the exact moment I saw Kyle Stilleno move from disliking me to outright hatred. I can’t explain it, but there was something in his eyes that went dark, and I knew I was no longer a human being to him. I was something much, much smaller than that.

“He deserved that? He deserved the top of his head blown off because he couldn’t bear to come to school? His mother deserved to find brain matter falling from the ceiling because you thought he
deserved
it? Tell me, Jeremy, what does someone do to deserve this?”

His words painted an image that made me queasy again, and I felt my empty stomach do a barrel roll as I pushed past the feeling. “I didn’t mean for him to do that!” I tried to reason. “He was an asshole! He picked on both of us! You know that!” He had to know that. Everyone had seen Kelly push Kyle down in the quad, and there were stories that Kyle and he had a literal throwdown in the principal’s office. How could he not see it?

“So you decided to bully him?” he asked me, looking like he was ready to kill me.

“That was payback,” I shot back.

“Well, congratulations,” he said, clenching his own fists. “You sure won that one.” I felt sick again but refused to acknowledge it. “So let me see if I got this straight. If Kelly had bullied you to the point of suicide, then he would have been the bad guy, and you would have been the poor, helpless victim. But you bully him, and he kills himself, and it
still
isn’t your fault?”

I said nothing.

“You were no better than him. No, you were worse, because you know what it feels like to be picked on. You know firsthand what being singled out to be tortured feels like, and you still chose to do it to someone else. He was gay, you asshole! He was gay, and you bullied him.”

He grabbed one of the photos and forced me to look at it. “Well, take a good look, Jeremy, because this is what you did. And you can take these pictures, tear them into shreds, and light them on fire. But you will
never
get these images out of your mind. This is what you have to live with, Jeremy. You caused someone to kill himself. You.”

I closed my eyes, but the image still hovered there in the darkness, taunting me.

He began to walk up the stairs. “Have fun living with that. By the way, you asked if I would have ever gone out with you if you asked. The answer is ‘No.’ I don’t date bullies.”

As soon as he walked away, I broke down and began to cry.

S
HERIFF
R
OGERS

T
HERE
ARE
a lot of reasons to become a police officer.

Some guys do it for the power it gives them; others like the thought of protecting people in general. I’ve heard just about every reason under the sun since I graduated from the academy, but in all that time, not one person ever said they became a cop to kill teenagers.

And yet that was what I was about to do.

Jim Kelly’s voice crackled in my ear. “I got eyes on the campus, boss.”

He had served two tours in the Army and could hit the wings off a mosquito at a thousand yards without blinking. He was the best shot within five hundred miles, so when we found the money in the budget for a Remington 700, he was the only person I allowed to take it home to practice with. I vividly remember watching him pack it up and giving a silent prayer we never had to use it.

Thanks again, God.

“Roger that. Stand by,” I said back, trying to shake those feelings out of my head. I didn’t have time for this kind of hesitation. I’d called this play; now I needed to run it before someone got hurt.

Mr. Raymond was talking to a couple of his teachers, looking like he was as close to falling over from a heart attack as the rest of us. It didn’t help that I had no love for this man already. Walking over to him, I said as uncurtly as possible, “I need you to call for a position check.”

From the look on his face, I could tell I was about as curt as I ever had been with him. “Very well. Do you have the remote set up?”

Foster High had a pretty expensive security system, about the only good thing that had come from a series of random shootings across the country. The teachers were trained to respond to a siren system to communicate. Two blasts meant they were in lockdown; three would mean all clear. One was the signal for them to say if their position was clear or not. We had set up a remote system so we could communicate outside the office. Again, another piece of hardware I had hoped never to use.

Raymond gave one siren call and waited.

There were buttons in each classroom. If the teachers were able, they would push their button to indicate they were in a safe zone. A diagram of the school was being displayed on my laptop. One by one the rooms began lighting up. Each light meant another safe zone, another place I could evacuate right now.

Each light meant the odds of me losing my daughter dwindled.

Stop, do not go there. Stow that shit and focus.

After two minutes the diagram was full of lights. There was only one place still dark—the library.

I asked Raymond, “We have any idea what was going on in the library today?”

He began to shake his head and then paused.

“What? What’s in there?” I prompted him.

“Fucking Stilleno and his club,” he answered.

Goddammit.

Turning away, I said quietly into my mic, “Okay, Jim, our target is in the library, East campus.”

About thirty seconds later, he answered. “Roger that. I have eyes on the library. Not a lot of access from where I am.”

I glanced over at the digital school on my computer. “Move over by East Street. There is a bank of windows there.”

“Eagle one is on the move.”

I couldn’t move anyone out of the school until I could see who we were dealing with. So I waited and counted down the last few minutes I had left to say I had never killed someone on duty.

J
EREMY

I
T
’
S
PRETTY
easy to see how I ended up here, right?

I spent a month or so watching my personal world crumble around me. Kelly’s death became a rallying point in the town, and people actually started talking about him like he had been a freaking saint when he was alive. Kyle used it to get his precious gay-straight alliance pushed through, and once again he was the golden boy of Foster.

While I remained the horrible and unnameable villain.

It was a harsh downward spiral, which of course meant nothing to anyone. I became despondent, stopped going to school, stopped caring about anything. I just sat in my room and tried not to think about the images of Kelly’s corpse. One particularly bad night, I ended up finishing a bottle of something my dad had left upstairs and found out two things at the same time. One, getting drunk numbed the pain slightly and two, I was a cheap drunk. I ended up alone in my room, pondering how I had gotten here and testing for myself how much courage it took to put a gun in your mouth.

Turns out a bit more than I possessed.

It became a morbid game for me after a while, taking the gun and placing it in my mouth. At first it was like a snake, something to gingerly hold, hoping it wouldn’t bite, moving to a more relaxed tone until it became just a bad taste on my tongue. I wanted to pull the trigger, wanted to so badly. The pain, the memories, the complete and utter failure that was my life made any chance of ending it sound like a good thing.

Yet my finger refused to pull the trigger.

Weeks turned into months, and one day I woke up, and Sammy was there in my room. I hadn’t been to school in over a week, and to be honest, it had been longer than that since I had taken a shower. How she got in my house, much less my room, was a mystery, yet there she was. At first I thought she might be some kind of delusional image brought on by my cracking mind, but I quickly dismissed that, because if I was going to imagine people in my room, she wasn’t even on the list.

“Which ghost are you?” I croaked, looking over to my nightstand for my cigarettes.

“The ghost of ‘Jesus Christ, take a fucking shower.’” She handed me a cup of coffee from Nancy’s, which I cradled like a crack addict coveted their pipe. “Seriously, man, there is ripe and there is people complaining because there might be a dead body in here.” She walked over and cracked open the small windows that looked out to the street. The sunlight was almost as unbearable as the fresh air while I sipped the coffee. I liked the dank, dreary style of my pit, and she was fucking it up.

“If I wanted the window opened, I would have opened it,” I pointed out.

She glanced back at me with a pretty upset look. “Yeah, and if I cared, I would have asked.” She began to wander around my room, looking at everything casually like it was a museum. “You look like shit, by the way.”

“So I’ve been told,” I said finally, finding the almost empty pack of Marlboros under my well-read copy of
Catcher in the Rye
. “You done?”

She moved the mouse on my computer and woke it up. “Make any new music lately?”

Obviously she wasn’t.

“No, I haven’t made any music; no, I haven’t been to school; no, I have not showered in a while; and yes, I am thinking about killing myself. Did I cover the rest of your questions?”

She paused and just looked at me like I was an alien.

Ignoring her, I lit the smoke and took a long drag, the nicotine chasing off the last remains of sleep. “Yeah, I said it. I’m a hot mess, and that isn’t saying anything new, so anything else?”

“Your dad was right,” she said, marveling at the train wreck that was me. “You do need help.”

Ah, and the penny finally drops.

“So this is what it takes?” I asked her, flicking my ashes onto the floor. “Eighteen years and nothing, but have a nervous breakdown and suddenly he realizes he has a son. Of course, what does he do with that knowledge? Does he actually walk the fourteen stairs down to the basement to talk to him? Of course not. Instead he calls the person who rolled over on me and told Kyle everything I did.” Her eyes narrowed in anger, so I flicked the butt at her. “Don’t glare at me. You know you did.”

She took a good ten seconds before responding. “Only you could try to frame me for outing Kelly and then claim to be the victim when I tell someone about it. You’re….” She searched for the right word but never found it. “Fuck this. Enjoy your stink, Jeremy. It’s the only thing that will stay with you as you get older.”

She began to walk up the steps and out of my life for good.

I heard a voice call out to her. “Wait.” She paused and looked back down the stairs at me. I looked back, confused, not sure who had said that. Again I heard the voice. “Please don’t go. I don’t… I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.”

She took a few steps back down the steps as I tried to figure out who was talking. “I just sit down here, and all I can see is Kelly, and I ask myself what did he really do to deserve that, and I don’t have an answer. And then I ask, if he didn’t deserve to die, do I?”

She looked shocked and shook her head. “Jeremy, stop.”

I was about to ask her what she was talking about when I saw it.

There was a gun in my hand, and it was pointed at my head.

“Jeremy, put the gun down,” she said carefully, like I was holding a bottle of nitroglycerin, and if she shouted, it would go off. It took me a second to realize it was me and not the gun she was afraid would go off.

“Why?” I asked her. “Who would care? My dad would be happy he didn’t have another mouth to feed. I was horrible to you, so you wouldn’t. Everyone in this town either hates me or wishes I was dead. I mean, be honest with me, Sammy. Who would care?”