Fault Lines (10 page)

“When we get back by our houses,” I said, “we’re going to have to split up and sneak home in case he’s watching for us out his windows.”

Todd started laughing again. “He can’t see a thing out those windows.”

We walked the long block arguing three different ways about what had happened. We disagreed like the Three Stooges, and I half expected we’d start slapping the backs of each other’s heads or poking each other’s eyes using two fingers formed in a V.

“He shot at us with a real gun!” Todd said. “That was great!”

“What’re you talking about?” Derek said. “The guy’s crazy! What if he’d hit one of us?”

“Whatever!” I said.

What finally brought us together was hearing the car behind us. We all three pressed closer together, because this car was driving slow. Super slow.

“What if it’s him?” Derek said. His voice sounded higher, as if he might cry.

Our shoulders touched as we walked in step together, with Todd in the middle of me and Derek. Then a beam of light swung around and locked on us. We cast a three-headed monster shadow on the gray pavement ahead.

“It’s the cops,” Todd said.

“What do we do?” Derek said, still panicky.

“Just keep walking,” Todd said. “They can’t prove anything. We don’t have any soap or eggs. Except they could take a whiff of our coat pockets and pass out from the smell of Irish Spring in there.”

I couldn’t believe it, but Todd started laughing again. He tried to control it and keep his mouth shut and make the laugh just be a couple shots of air out of his nose. Derek shushed him. But I could tell the combination of him knowing he shouldn’t laugh, and trying to stop it, only made his laughing worse.

The car stopped behind us. We kept walking away. A door opened, there was a pause, then it shut. Footsteps clicked toward us, and Todd’s nose laugh got louder and faster.

“Hey you kids,” the cop’s voice said. He was probably twenty feet away.

Suddenly, Todd took off sprinting. In a split second, I ran too. We left Derek.

I followed Todd into the side yard of a dark house where we dove into some evergreen shrubs along one wall. Sharp branches and prickers dug into my scalp. My hands and knees stung from crawling over twigs and stones sticking out of the cold, damp earth. Todd pulled up to sit with his back to the house and his knees sticking into the shrubs, so I did too.

He chuckled and shook his head. “Man,” he whispered, rubbing dirt off his knees. “I was losing control out there.”

“Yeah, I noticed.”

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness of our hiding spot, Todd’s face came into focus from black to dark grey to lighter grey. I looked at him. Practically stared. I didn’t realize it until he turned his head and our eyes locked. His face looked soft.

I tingled all over so much I worried Todd might be able to tell. I held his stare for a couple seconds that seemed like minutes, thinking this might be the moment I’d get my first real kiss. But when nothing happened, I couldn’t stand it. I looked away.

“We’re doing this again,” he said quietly.

“What?”

We looked at each other. “Creeper’s house,” he said. “We can’t let him think he scared us. We’ve got to get him again.”

I smiled. “Really? You don’t think we’ve done enough damage? With that spray paint? No. I’m done. I think—”

In a rush he leaned over and kissed me on the lips. Super soft, because he wasn’t confident – I think – and he wasn’t close enough to press down or do anything other than touch his lips to mine. Sweet and lingering. He breathed in and out, faster than normal breathing, and my eyes stayed open, I couldn’t help it; I needed to be sure this was truly happening, and it was, those eyelashes so close to mine.

He pulled away slowly, and narrowed his eyes in the blue light of the moon. “We’ll see about that,” he said, and electricity shivered across my shoulders.

He probably thought his charm would convince me to keep going in our war on Creeper – and it was dizzyingly persuasive at that moment, but it honestly had nothing to do with changing my mind a week later when I made the fateful decision to attack Creeper one more time.

That night, I would be influenced by a stronger force and a darker truth.

now

ready or not, here it comes

The weather is unusually warm for the Monday after Thanksgiving – in the fifties. Me and Mom walk into City Hall for court, and she’s acting strangely warm too. I’m still grounded with tons of chores every day, but she keeps wanting to talk about how school is going and how the play is coming along.

Going up in the elevator, she holds my hand for the first time in about ten years. She doesn’t say anything, and neither do I, we just watch the floor numbers light up. But I admit, I’m glad to have her with me. I can’t stop imagining the courtroom in my mind, with the judge high up on a bench, and heavy wood seats and marble floors and walls.

We exit on the sixth floor to a quiet hallway lined with closed doors. Mom lets go of my hand to look at the form we got in the mail with the room number on it. “Six-zero-five,” she mumbles, looking at the room numbers engraved in plaques on the wall.

“This is it,” she says, stopping to make sure I’m okay. “Ready?”

The heavy door sticks when Mom tries to open it, so she gives it a nudge with her shoulder and we spill into the room. To my shock, it’s an ordinary looking office filled with a giant table and high-backed chairs bumping up against fabric-covered walls.

A thin older man with silver glasses and a wrinkled gray suit sits at the head of the table, looking in a file folder and writing something down. Next to him sits a woman with stiff blonde hair, wearing a red sweater with little snowmen knitted all over it, smiling at me. A laptop computer is opened in front of her.

Mom doesn’t seem surprised. “I’m Susan Burkhart, and this is my daughter Danielle.”

“Have a seat,” the man says, waving his arm without looking up.

As soon as our bottoms hit the chairs, the man pulls off his glasses, rubs his eyes with two fingers and a thumb, returns his glasses to his nose and picks up the file folder. He reads from it with his head turned toward the woman. “Case number J-075491, Danielle Lynn Burkhart, Malicious Destruction of Property, first offense.”

The woman’s fingers fly over the keyboard while he talks. He turns to us and keeps speaking, but the woman only types certain parts. Other times, she waits with her hands hovering over the keys. I keep my eyes on her typing. The man scares me.

“You are to be commended for choosing the Juvenile Diversion Program for First Offenders, also known as JDP,” the man says in a voice like he’s reciting a memorized speech. “This is an effort to reduce juvenile recidivism. Here, if the offender is willing to admit guilt, we ask him to take moral and emotional responsibility for his crime. We tailor the punishment and keep close tabs on the progress of our clients. Those who do not re-offend will have their records wiped clean.”

Mom never told me anything about a first-offender program.

“I’m Judge Abrams. Miss Burkhart, do you know what recidivism is?”

“No,” I say, keeping my eyes averted.

“Please look at me.” I do. His eyes are cold blue. “Recidivism is the repeating of behavior, in this case destructive, criminal behavior. We don’t want that, do we?”

“No.”

He leans over the table with his arms out in front of him. His eyes are locked on mine so tight, I can’t blink. “I understand that you’re not doing well in school right now, that you have a lot going on at home. We all have problems to deal with in life. And we all have choices in how we deal with them. You, Miss Burkhart, are at a crossroads. You can choose a path of chaos and unhappiness, or you can choose education, hard work, success, achievement. Which will it be?”

My eyes burn from not blinking, so I sneak in a quick blink before answering. “Success.” I wonder if anyone ever has the nerve to answer “Chaos.”

“Good. I’m here to help you take the first steps down that path. Now, you and your mother have each signed a form admitting your guilt. Firstly, your punishment will involve twenty-five hours of community service to be completed only at a charitable organization approved by the JDP. My hope is that you will learn something about being a contributing member of society, rather than a destructive one.”

He fumbles with some papers. He slides a sheet across the table, titled “JDP Community Service Options.”

“Additionally, you are required to pay restitution to the victim,” he continues, looking into the file folder and thumbing through more paper. “In this case, that would be Mr. Harold Reiber, 3376 Eastlane Drive. Mr. Reiber has provided a written estimate of the cost of replacing the picture window. The total cost of custom manufacture and installation is $578.93.”

Judge Abrams doesn’t look up or react in any way to the window’s cost, but I do. I feel sick. How will I ever come up with that much money? I glance at Mom, and she gives me the look that says,
See what happens when you break a window?

“Last but certainly not least, you are required to write a formal apology to the victim,” the judge says, and he pulls off his glasses. His eyes lock on me again, so I blink. “This letter of apology will first be sent to me for review. I expect it to be heartfelt and detailed in its explanation of what you did and why you are sorry for it. If this letter does not impress me with its sincerity and detail, then I will send it back for revision until it’s right. Understood?”

My head nods, but it isn’t a heartfelt “Yes.” I feel like I have a bobblehead bouncing up and down from someone jiggling it.

The judge takes a few minutes to write some things on a form, and I take the opportunity to frown. The lady in the snowman sweater stares at me with a pity smile, like I’m some half-starved dog on the side of the road.

I feel sorry for me too, not so much for the community service or the cost of the window. The worst of my punishment is having to apologize. How can I pull off a sincere apology to Creeper if I can’t even fake an enthusiastic answer to a judge?

“You have a sour look on your face.” The judge’s voice startles me. “You should be grateful for this opportunity. Things could have been worse for you. So start working on your attitude now.”

He’s right, of course, but I’ve never been good at hiding my true self. That’s how I landed in this courtroom in the first place. Everyone saw the real me that day in November, that day at play practice with Ricky York.

then

my inner donkey brayed

It was only November fifth, and we still had a few weeks before Thanksgiving break would lead us into December, but Mrs. Luna started getting intense. We began meeting for lunch in the auditorium to practice on stage. She said the play was challenging because it coordinated drumming and music with the actors’ words, movements and use of props.

Mrs. Luna also was worried because the office had scheduled the school’s talent show for December seventeenth. That would create a week of conflict over the stage. We had to get serious to be ready for our January opening night, she said.

By Friday, everyone knew what they had to do. Some kids painted sets. Todd and other backstage workers were trying to fold a five-foot-long paper crane for the opening scene plus work on hundreds of smaller cranes that would be handed out to each audience member. The drummers were coordinating with people who would play recorded music at various spots. And all around the auditorium, small groups of actors rehearsed.

Up on the stage, Mrs. Luna worked with Maddy Miskowski and Isaac Adler, a smart boy who played Sadako’s best friend. In the first scene, he helps her prepare for a running race before she falls ill from leukemia a couple scenes later.

I practiced in a far-back corner with Kailyn Whitehead and Ricky York on the journey to spirit land scene. One girl, Lenore Shafer, was one of the smart kids learning the entire play so she could fill in for anyone if necessary. She did Maddy’s Sadako lines for our run-through.

“OK, we’re going to get this,” said Lenore, who had taken charge of our group. “We can do it! Practice makes perfect, right guys?”

“Right!” said Kailyn Whitehead.

I couldn’t figure out Lenore. She was one of the few girls I’d seen who had black hair with light roots. She wore the dark Goth look from head to toe, but she was permanently perky.

Practice had not made anything perfect. Ricky could not get his lines right. Even reading them, he was rough. Now we were supposed to be practicing without scripts, and Ricky still held his crumpled copy in his hands.

We started the scene again with me and Lenore holding hands. We pretended to fly through clouds, watch cranes fly by, grab stars and toss them like confetti. As Grandmother, I was to show her the way as we passed over spirits of a thousand years toward those who died from the bomb. I said my line that was Ricky’s cue to speak.

His part was seven sentences, talking about how he was digging fire lanes when the bomb exploded and lit everything white and melted everything around him.

Once again, we got a blank look from Ricky. He said nothing. He blinked. His index finger poked his sliding glasses back up his nose. Then, when he fumbled for the millionth time with that falling-apart script in his hands, I ripped it away from him.

I flung the pages behind me. “What is your problem? Are you a complete moron, or lazy, or what?”

Ricky blinked a couple times more. His nose twitched like a rabbit to move his glasses up again.

“Say something! You have seven sentences! You’ve had three weeks to memorize! How hard is that? For God’s sake, get a brain!”

I hadn’t noticed the room fall silent. I didn’t realize how loud I screamed. My eyes looked from Ricky’s sad, skinny face, to Kailyn and Lenore frowning, to everyone staring beyond. No one moved, except Maddy Miskowski. She looked right at me for once, shaking her head at center stage.

Then I saw Mrs. Luna, crouched a few feet in front of Maddy, her black hair shining in the stage lights, her fingers stretched out for balance on the stage floor. Her back was turned but her face looked at me – shocked for sure. What else did I see? Maybe disgust. I didn’t know. Mrs. Luna didn’t move, so I dashed out.