Certainty (23 page)

“No, she doesn’t. She just wanted to see my muscles bulging. She could have just asked me to flex. It would have saved us a lot of time.”

She patted his arm. “It is impressive. But I think I found a twinkie from last year. It’s still good, probably.”

He sighed. “Gross.”

I didn’t know how to talk about Kyle in front of Katie. It hadn’t occurred to me that Noah would drive her home every day, but I guess he would. I might as well just jump in.

“Hey, I need a favor.”

Katie removed a few books so I could see Noah’s face.

“Sure,” he answered, a cautious look in his eyes.

“Can you give me a ride home?”

He snorted. “I thought it was going to be important. Like would I donate you a kidney. Yes, I can give you a ride home. Does MacKenzie need one? You guys live right next door so it’s no big deal.”

Hadn’t thought about that. “Yeah, if you don’t mind.” I grabbed my cell phone and began texting her. I was sure she hadn’t left yet. We always walked together. I texted,
want a ride

Yes

Katies locker

I wasn’t sure if she was completely comfortable with him yet.

ok

Katie had finally put all the books back in her locker by the time MacKenzie arrived, dragging her parka behind her on the ground. It was easy to pick out the cute, short girl in pink from the crowd. She watched me as she walked up, and I kind of relished being the center of her attention. When she got to us I picked her coat up.
             

“This was dragging on the ground,” I told her.

“I know. I hate it. It’s puffy.”

Ah. Maybe I shouldn’t get one like it, then.

Noah led us out to his car while I tried like mad to think of a way to get him to drop Katie off first. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and texted MacKenzie.

Can you get noah to drop katie off first? I need to talk to him.

She looked down at her cell, but she didn’t say anything. We all got into the old, very abused Mercury Tracer. The Tracer was missing a hubcab and sounded like a spaceship when he started it up, a high pitched whine that reached a frantic fever pitch.

MacKenzie suddenly said. “Katie, do you want to come over to my house? We can work on that CD for Noriko we promised her.”

“Oh. wow. I forgot about that. Let me ask my mom.”

One phone call later and Katie was going to MacKenzie’s.  I squeezed her hand and she pressed my hand back, pleased with herself. She should be. That was brilliant. I texted her and told her so.

I know
she responded as we pulled into her driveway.

She and Katie jumped out into the rain, screaming like girls.

I hopped up to the front seat and we waved goodbye to them. My house was only two houses away. Not enough time to talk him into this. Oh well.

“We need to go talk to Kyle,” I said.

Noah pulled into my driveway. “Why?”

“Because I think he’s going to…” I paused. Oh please let this not sound insane. “…kill himself.”

He sat there staring at me, the car idling. Then in an eerie moment where he looked as calm and unfazed as his
Yurei
, he simply asked, “Why?”

“I know someone who killed himself, and Kyle is acting like that.” I don’t even know if that was the most convoluted lie or the most convoluted truth I’d ever told. I didn’t have time to sort it out.

“Like how?”

I explained how strange he’d acted the day we’d played paintball and how he’d almost lost it in homeroom with MacKenzie. I threw in the bits about his visit with Derek and MacKenzie’s concern that he wasn’t dealing with it.

We sat there while his eyes went cold and calculating as he stared at the water pouring off his windshield. Then he shrugged. “I need to make sure he’s doing posters anyway. And I think you’re right about him.”

Without any more hesitation he put the car in reverse and pulled out of my driveway with a decisive crunch and some more high-pitched whining. I texted my mom to tell her I was going to hang out with Kyle.

Noah turned on the radio. Music came on, fuzzy and barely discernible, so he turned it up. It didn’t get any clearer but I recognized techno.

“Dude,” I begged.

“Sorry. I get like, three stations. One is country.”

I flipped through every station and found something I liked. I sat back smugly. Until it faded out and we were listening to static. He flipped it off, sighing.

“Nice try.”

“Where does he live?” I asked, hoping it wasn’t too far.

“Uh, out past the main part of town, over the highway.”

We drove until we were out in the fields and farms. Everything was brown and muddy out here, the patches of trees bordering the fields as bare as the fence posts sticking up out of the ground. I could tell the Amish houses because they had no shutters and there were no trucks in the unpaved driveways.

The windshield wipers beat a cadence while we drove in silence. Images from Noah’s future flickered in the back of my mind. I saw him hunched over, alone in a college dorm  just after the accident. I turned to the window and closed my eyes until it was gone.

We finally came to the entrance to a huge development, where the houses looked like they were a mile apart. It didn’t matter which one was Kyle’s, it was bound to be some kind of mansion.

He pulled up to the long driveway of a gigantic house with a sale sign out in front. The brick front had two white columns that went up to a balcony over two black double doors. Black shutters framed the white paned windows and the front walk was lined in stone and manicured evergreens. I cleared my throat. “Wow.”

“Yeah. He’s got it pretty good. Sort of.” He added, “Then he had the accident. I thought he was going to be okay.”

We walked out into the rain, getting soaked right away. Noah rang the doorbell. It must echo like a gong in that place.

The two of us stood there, getting wet. Noah’s brown hair was turning dark as it got wetter, and I could see his breath in the frigid air.

It took three more rings before Kyle finally opened the door,  his iPhone in his hand and his ear phones hanging from his neck. He wore a black t-shirt with some band written in red on it.

“What are you doing here?” he asked Noah, glancing over at me.

“I didn’t believe you were going to do the posters.” Noah explained. It sounded lame, even to me, but Kyle didn’t seem to mind.

“Come on in. You look like wet ferrets.”

It was a really nice house, but it didn’t look as if anyone lived there. It was like stepping into a magazine. He led us through the foyer with a huge double staircase and past a room with an oriental rug and a glossy black baby grand piano. Our sneakers made squeaks that echoed off the high walls. I wondered if we should take off our shoes, but he didn’t say anything. I was used to it at my house, but I didn’t know what to do here.

We passed by the piano and I asked, “Do you play?”

“What?” Kyle looked over at the piano as if it had just appeared. “My father does. For a living. He’s a concert pianist.”

“That’s amazing.”

“He’s never home. And when he is, all he does play on it.”

“So you never wanted to play?”

Kyle looked at Noah, as if they had some private joke. Noah nodded to the piano. “Go for it.”

Kyle walked over to the piano and kicked the bench to the side with his socked foot.  He crouched over the piano as if he were going to pounce, his hair hanging over his face.  His hands came down on the keys near the bass notes and rolled up, the notes filling the high ceiling like thunder and then breaking into a high, sparkling crescendo. His fingers jumped back down and played some kind of classical piece and then ended on an angry, dark, rich chord.

“Or,” he said, his hands finding a melancholy chord. “If you like original stuff…”

The song started out with a few stark notes that rang out and echoed then cascaded into a melody that mirrored itself. The hypnotic phrases ran into each other and hung in my head, yearning and empty. His hands faltered and the notes grew faint, but even that sounded right. I was stunned.

“Dude, that’s incredible.”

He poked at a note, moving away from the keys. “Do you play?”

“Nope.”

He nodded. “Ah. Then you’re easily impressed.”

Noah gave a short laugh. “No, he isn’t.”

I assumed I knew everything that was interesting about people because I could see what they would become. Then again, Kyle broke all the rules. He wasn’t supposed to have a future.

“Posters and markers are in here, but I’ll bring them in the kitchen,” Kyle was saying as he walked through a set of French doors into another room.

“Bring your laptop,” Noah called out to Kyle, taking me to the kitchen. He hopped up to a bar stool at a high counter in the kitchen, his lanky legs wrapping around the legs of the stool.  I sat next to him, putting my elbows on the dark granite counter.

Kyle came back with a few blank posters rolled up under his arm and a box of markers and his laptop in the other, padding across the floor in his socks. He put it all down and Noah opened up the laptop and hit a key to bring it to life. It was a Mac, of course.

The song Kyle had written echoed in my head as Noah pulled up some pictures. Kyle found a picture of Noah on his Facebook and pasted it on the body of a squirrel.

Noah responded by finding a picture of Lady Gaga and pasting Kyle’s head on it.

We printed out a bunch of flyers on Kyle’s laser printer with the seemingly endless supply of ink. Gaga didn’t make it, which was a shame.

I realized we were nearly finished and I hadn’t even begun to talk about Kyle’s problem. I could swear he didn’t even have one. Maybe I didn’t have to.

Kyle went to the fridge and asked us if he wanted anything, taking out a soda. Leaning against the refrigerator was his
Yurei
, staring at me with an expectant look on his face.

Noah and I declined, taking a seat on the stools at the counter.

I needed to say something. What would I say? Kyle opened the soda and closed the fridge, the door touching his
Yurei
, who faded out and reappeared, leaning against the sink.

“So MacKenzie said you saw Derek,” I said and Noah threw me a warning glance, his eyebrows drawn together.

Kyle finished swallowing his Coke and leaned against the counter, facing us, his eyes cautious.  “Yeah.”

“He’s probably going to be okay. There’s a good chance he’s coming out of it,” I said. Don’t ask me to explain how I know that, I prayed.

He twisted the metal tab off his can, his fingers shaking, his head down. “Really? That’s good. Do they know when?”

Now I had to lie. I didn’t know when. I only knew he would. “In a week, they think.”

That threw him, I could tell. Whatever doomsday scenario he had going, I was breaking through it. How determined was he to kill himself? Would this be enough?

“Is he going to be okay?” he asked, still looking down, and tossing the tab on the counter. Noah shifted on the bar stool, rearranging his long legs and looked at me, and I could see he was afraid I would say the wrong thing.

“They don’t know. He’ll probably be fine, though.”

“He was hurt pretty bad,” he said, reaching over flick the soda tab. It spun around and fell on the tiled floor by Noah, who picked it up and slid it back to him.

Kyle spun it again without looking up, his hair over his eyes, and said, “When I had the accident…I didn’t see him. And I was paying attention but I  couldn’t stop fast enough.”

I looked over at his
Yurei
. He was calm, and watching Kyle.

“It was an accident,” Noah said. “It could have happened any of us sitting here.”

Kyle put his head in his hands and dug his palms into his eyes. He didn’t speak for a long while. Noah grabbed his shoulder.

“Sometimes things just happen. You can’t control the universe, you know? And it isn’t going to help anyone if you keep beating yourself up.” Noah sounded a lot like his
Yurei
. I thought about what was going to happen to him in a few years. He was going to be as strong as he was now. Maybe that’s why he would make it through.

Kyle pulled his hands away from his eyes and Noah let go of him. Kyle put the cap back on the Coke. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“It isn’t your fault. Even MacKenzie would tell you that,” Noah said.

Kyle shook his head. “She wasn’t there. No one was. It was just me and Derek, and he probably doesn’t remember it. But I do. I can’t forget it.”

Noah stared back at him. “I know.”

Kyle stood up and sighed, his shoulders sagging. “I’d like to be alone right now. Is that okay?”

Noah stood up to leave, glancing over at me with a resigned look, but Kyle’s
Yurei
was shaking his head at me. He didn’t want us to leave Kyle.