Fault Lines (3 page)

Why couldn’t Creeper leave it alone? Why’d he have to be so rotten?

He must’ve seen Dad’s car sitting in the driveway every single day since April twenty-fourth. Anyone could’ve figured out Dad lost his job at All-Tech Automotive.

Even the most thoughtless person would know that machining factories like ATA were closing up and moving away, so it was hard to find jobs for quality control managers like my dad – no matter how great he was at it. And we couldn’t survive on what Mom made working at the dentist office.

If Dad’s unemployment was the loose string in what knitted our family together, then we had to be gentle waiting for him to get a new job. We had to hold it together softly for a while, and eventually Dad would sew it back up even stronger and tighter than before.

But not with Creeper across the street. He found the weak spot smack in-between Mom and Dad – then kept pulling, and pulling and pulling.

Every time he’d stormed our front door yelling about Barney, he loosened the string. Sending in animal control, he exposed a hole. Now with the mailbox, he yanked it wide open.

Dad was right, this poop attack meant war.

I pictured myself marching over there and telling Creeper off. He’d be in his garage like always, wearing a t-shirt under suspenders that stretched his pants over his round belly. He’d be cleaning his guns, or working on his car, and I’d appear out of nowhere, jab my finger at his face, and scream, “It’s your fault! You’re a terrible old man!” Then I’d grab something big and heavy – like a car battery, or a stepstool or something – and throw it at his precious restored Mustang.
Let him see how it feels to have someone damage the thing he loves most.

I was ready to confront him. Go off on him. Make him sorry.

Anger juiced me up.

Except right then a voice in my head spoke – the one that argued the good side whenever I was thinking bad thoughts. It always seemed like that voice broadcast from outside my head, because it talked at me. Gave me advice. Commanded me. But really it was a little splinter of myself trying to keep control.

That voice was smart and calm and certain that it always knew the right thing to do. It urged me to be smart, or healthy, or happy whenever the mad, sad, who-cares-anyway part of me tried to make decisions.

As I crouched there in the bushes, it was my own personal dog trainer voice, its tone – straight from page eight of
Mastering Your Misbehaving Mutt
– ordering me around:
Stop. NO. Stay right there. Do NOT do something stupid. You’ll only make things worse
.

I closed one eye and squinted the other through a hole in the shrub, a periscope zeroed on Creeper’s shabby blue ranch house overgrown with shrubs and trees and vines. My dog trainer voice kept speaking, and I listened to the better part of me, pointing me away from anger and spite toward logic, kindness, strength, love.
Be good
, it said.
Stay
.
Everything will be OK.

I knew that voice was right. Attacking Mr. Reiber wouldn’t help anything. I’d only get in trouble, and make my parents mad, and double their stress, and I didn’t want to unravel my family any more than it already was.

Back then, my good side still held the leash.

now

the questioning begins

It’s impossible to hide in the white light of the police station. The two officers take me into a small room crowded with a long brown table and lots of orange plastic chairs around it. The three of us sit at one end.

Officer Marks, who kept his back to me the whole time in the car, is young and skinny, probably brand new. His head turns back and forth from the older, heavier cop to me, as Officer Simpson asks me questions and writes what I say.

“OK, so you admit to breaking the window in a deliberate act of vandalism,” he says.

“Yes.”

“Besides the window, did you spray-paint the aluminum siding on Mr. Reiber’s house on Friday, November the fifth?”

“Yes.” It’s scary how easy it is for me to lie these days. Not even a whisper of the dog trainer voice has survived. Evil has triumphed, I guess.

“And again, who has been participating in these attacks with you?”

He’ll have to start the Chinese water torture if he wants an answer to that.

I’ll keep saying yes as long as he asks me questions. I’ll take responsibility. He doesn’t seem to care why I did it, but I’ll tell the whole story if he gives me paper and pen to write my confession. I’ll admit every mean thing I’ve done from the moment my good side fell silent and the bad thoughts took control. But I’m not about to give up names.

“I soaped and egged. I spray-painted. I broke the window, that’s it.”

“All right,” he says, his nose and cheeks red, “but malicious destruction of property is a serious charge. Do you understand? I don’t know why you want to take all the punishment yourself.”

He shoves the paper he’s been writing at me. “Read this and sign if it’s correct.”

I sign. He stands abruptly, scraping his chair on the floor. “Your mother is on her way.”

He motions for me to follow and takes me across the hall to a slightly larger, box-like room with no windows – nothing but chairs lining the walls.

“Have a seat,” he says.

I sit in a scratched-up white chair and study the dinged-up white walls and scuffed tile floors. I imagine the angry criminals who must have scratched, dinged, and scuffed up the room. I wonder what juvenile detention will be like, and a shiver runs all over my body.

“I hope your friends appreciate you taking the fall,” he mumbles, and leaves.

Friends? I guess Officer Simpson is using the loose definition of that term. He thinks I’m declining to shine a spotlight on my co-criminals because we’re pals. But Officer Simpson doesn’t know anything. The only friend I’ve ever loved – and honestly, the only true and perfect friend I’ve ever had – is Justine, and she’s long gone.

Grandma says you have to be a friend to have a friend. I blew that a long time ago.

then

I believed right would win

Todd and I weren’t friends when the school year started – even by the loose definition – but we weren’t exactly enemies either. More like two gunslingers who always kept their hands on their gun handles and eyes squinted at each other.

Or, to be more precise, I squinted my eyes at him and he hung around his super-cool mean friends, all of them doing and saying whatever they wanted no matter who it hurt.

The end of the first day of school, Justine slid across the bus seat where we always sat – not too close to the crazy driver, Mrs. Storm, but away from where the loudmouths would be in the back.

“Well?” she said. “My first day stunk. I already have homework. How about you?”

I kicked my fat backpack under the seat in front of us. “Yup.” I plopped onto the cushion hard enough that an air pocket whooshed and see-sawed Justine up and down. “And I’m thinking about complaining to the principal.”

“About the homework?”

“No. About The Ditz.”

At some point, every freshman at Parkside High School got stuck in Beginning Computer Apps with Mr. Fritz, better known as The Ditz because he told lame jokes and gave extra credit to students who brought him ones he’d never heard.

“What’d he do?”

Mrs. Storm hacked a smoker’s cough into her fist as two sixth-grade boys climbed aboard and scanned the empty seats. Then she used the same hand to pat her tall red hair that never moved.

“He let Taylor Rinehart tell a Polock joke in class. With Maddy Miskowski in there.”

Justine twisted her thick hair around one arm and smiled. “What was the joke?”

“That’s not the point. The point is Maddy Miskowski is Polish. A teacher shouldn’t be letting Taylor say Polock jokes when one of his students is Polish.”

“Actually, he shouldn’t be letting anyone tell Polock jokes, no matter who’s in there,” Justine said. “But I still want to hear it.” A smile dimpled her cheeks.

A few more kids stamped up the steps of the bus, and Mrs. Storm stared and snapped her gum, even though the sign above her head clearly said, “No chewing gum allowed.”

“Anyway, you aren’t friends with Maddy Miskowski anymore,” Justine said.

“That doesn’t matter. Oh, forget it.”

Justine pinched my bare arm. “Come on, tell me the joke.”

The bus was filling with kids talking and throwing stuff around.

“Fine,” I said. I lowered my voice to a whisper. “These three Polocks were driving to Detroit. They drove and they drove, and they came to a sign that said, ‘Detroit – left’ so they turned around and went home.”

Justine spit a raspberry and smacked the seat back in front of her. “That is funneeee—” she said, dissolving into laughter.

I shook my head and looked away, only to see Derek bumping side-to-side up the aisle. Somehow, he made skinny look strong – his body a capital T from his broad shoulders down to his narrow hips, accented by the striped shirt tucked in at the belt loosely holding up his jeans. In middle school he used to be the boy who made the inside of my stomach feel like a birthday party full of kids in a jumpy jump.

But I couldn’t like him since Todd moved in last year and they became buds. Todd was nothing but a delinquent. He followed up the bus aisle behind Derek, constantly flipping his scraggly brown hair out of his eyes. One hand held his pants up in front to allow him to walk straight for a change.

I elbowed Justine to quit acting weird. She sucked up her laughing just as they passed our seat, right when Todd took his free hand and shoved Derek so he stumbled and almost fell.

“Did you trip over the ugly spot?” Todd said, clearly referring to me and Justine. My face flushed hot, and I wondered why Derek hung around with a moron.

I breathed in nothing but the smell of warm bodies. I stood and leaned across Justine to squeeze the annoying plastic window locks and let in some air. “I don’t know why they have to start school when it’s still summer out,” I said.

I dropped back into my seat and spotted Taylor Rinehart at the front of the bus. She paused to hike up her backpack, sweeping her hair over her shoulder and glaring at a boy who must have had his foot in the aisle. Then she strolled forward, looking past everyone.

Her usual grand entrance. What came as a shock was the person who popped up the bus steps behind her. Maddy Miskowski.

She didn’t ride our bus. I didn’t know why she was there. I felt my chest tighten, and I wished someone else would open a window for God’s sake.

Maddy handed the bus driver a note. She shifted her hips waiting for Mrs. Storm to read it, and her eyes darted at Taylor’s back, like she wanted her to wait.

The squeezing in my chest gripped my stomach when I realized what Maddy was doing. My best friend all through elementary school. We used to pass as twins because we both had brown eyes and straight brown hair to our shoulders. I always knew Maddy was the cuter one, but it still shocked me in sixth grade when she drifted off to hang with other girls trying to break in to the popular crowd.

She was going home with Taylor. I guessed she finally had broken in.

She took the note from the bus driver and shuffled toward the back, looking down. She glanced up and locked eyes with me.

For a second I stared into her eyes, she looked back at me, and we knew each other. I saw the girl I used to have sleepovers with, eating popcorn in our sleeping bags on the living room floor, practicing hair-dos and makeup, sharing ghost stories by flashlight, revealing our most embarrassing secrets and pinky promising to never tell.

But the moment passed. Her eyes glazed, we were strangers. She flipped her head back and laughed. “Could it smell any more like armpits in here?” she shouted.

The bus engine revved, and Mrs. Storm yelled, “We’re going! In your seats!”

Kids screamed rude stuff as the driver pulled away from the curb. Todd yelled, “Kiss my ass!” Derek shouted, “And smell it too!” Taylor shrieked like a Guinea pig.

The bus driver looked in the rearview mirror. All I could see were her eyes covered in blue eye-shadow up to her eyebrows.

“What’s your beef?” she said in her nasal tone, so “what’s” sounded like “watts.”

The bus exploded in shouts and hooting laughter. Me and Justine hunched down with our knees against the seat in front of us. “Oh, brother,” I said.

I always was glad our bus stop came first, but especially that day. With the bus still rolling, I yanked out my bag and started down the aisle to get a good, long head start on Todd, Derek, Taylor and Maddy. I rushed off and started hiking up the street.

“Hey, wait up,” Justine said, jogging behind me. I didn’t, so she sped up. She was panting when she reached my side. It was blue-sky hot, with the sun angling into our faces, and we didn’t speak.

Taylor shouted from behind. “Woo! Sexy Mama!”

I straightened but didn’t look. Taylor normally ignored us when boys were around, so now she was just showing off for Maddy.

“Gimme that dress to wear for the Harvest Dance!” she said.

She was teasing Justine, who wore a black-and-white, short-sleeved jumper, while the rest of us had on shorts and t-shirts or tanks. So it was dorky, so what? Everyone knew she didn’t pick her own clothes, so what was the thrill of making fun?

Justine’s parents were older – and strict. She used to go to a small private school where all the students wore uniforms, but it only went up to eighth grade. So her mom and dad let her switch to public high school starting this year, but she still couldn’t wear shorts or jeans to school – just skirts, dresses, or pants and collared shirts. She only even owned one pair of skinny jeans she got to wear once in a while, so long as she covered her butt with a long shirt. And leggings? Forget it. I bought her a pair for her birthday last year, and they never saw the light of day.

“You look hot!” Taylor hollered. “Literally!”

I can’t stand her
, I thought. I wanted to run back there and punch her, but again my personal dog trainer voice yanked the leash:
She wants to make you angry. Don’t let her get to you.
Be the bigger person.
And I somehow fought off my urges and kept a grip on myself – though that made me even more mad. I wanted to know if Taylor even had a good voice. Maybe she ignored it, or maybe her mean side was the only one talking, wandering around freely, stomping on people’s happiness, kicking others who just wanted to be left alone.