Fury (3 page)

As Chase snapped the phone shut, he saw the time. He had to hurry.

The tiny bathroom at the end of the narrow hall was clouded with steam. Chase grabbed a now wrinkle-free bright red polo shirt from the shower rod. The pipes shuddered and groaned as he turned off the hot water. He wiped the condensation from the mirror and held the shirt up against his dark jeans, evaluating the outfit. Did it look like he was trying too hard? He applied a dab of gel to his short brown hair and pulled at the cowlick that stuck up like an alfalfa sprout on the left side of his head. Dressed in the polo shirt, jeans, and impeccable
new sneakers, Chase looked like your average preppy boy—not like someone who lived in a tiny trailer on the outskirts of town with his mom.

Which was, of course, the whole point.

Chase checked his phone; there was another text from Lindsay—
I haven’t seen u in a week!
—which he deleted quickly. He was on a schedule: by the time he arrived at Minster’s house, the sophomore and junior girls would have drunk just enough to lower their inhibitions, but not so much that they were too wasted to flirt. (At Tina Hathaway’s Halloween party that year, he’d no sooner convinced a hot sophomore to ditch the crowd for a private make-out session in the woods than she’d pulled down her pants and started peeing on a tree and giggling. He’d had to half-carry her back to the party, where he off-loaded her onto her friends.)

So tonight was going to be a success. He needed it to be. The Ascension Football Feast was in a little more than a week, on January 2nd. The Feast was an annual postseason celebration of the Ascension Warriors, the town’s pride and joy (at least when they were winning), not to mention a major charity event. Most players brought a whole entourage, including parents, siblings, and girlfriends. Last year, he’d arrived alone and felt humiliated when the guys made fun of the fact that he hadn’t managed to bag a date.

This year, his best friend Zach was organizing the whole
event, hoping to raise five thousand dollars for a local homeless shelter. There would be a ton of people there, not to mention news cameras. And Chase was the star.

Chase was a damn good quarterback, probably one of the best in the state. College recruiters had already contacted Coach Baldwin to inquire about Chase’s post–high school plans. And while it would be cool to get a free ride to a quality school—he’d be the first Singer to attend college, and there was no way his family could afford it otherwise—he wasn’t playing for scholarships. On the field was where he felt free, open, smart. He knew what to do, and he had the space to do it. He made the right choices. Sometimes, in the middle of a game, he was surprised to find that he was grinning.

And yet, in the back of his mind, Chase knew that at any moment, everything could come undone. One bad play and it could all close in on you—no holes to run through, blockers and tacklers in every direction. No options.

Smoothing his collar a final time, Chase grabbed his football jacket and closed the trailer door with a satisfied thud, ignoring the fact that it made the whole structure shake ever so slightly.

The night was cold, and the snow that had been forecast was starting to fall. He was trotting toward his car—an old station wagon he shared with his mom—when he remembered that she was working tonight at the convenience store around
the corner. He jogged back to the house to flip on the outside light. He didn’t like to think of her fumbling for her keys in the dark.

Every time Chase left his trailer on the west side of Ascension, he felt like he was emerging from a claustrophobic cocoon. His part of town was right by the highway, and the buildings—trailers, convenience stores, gas stations, water towers—sat almost on top of one another. First he’d pass the Kwik Mart where his mom worked. Out of habit, he always slowed a little, trying to catch a glimpse of her bottle-blond hair. He liked it when she worked the register. That meant she wasn’t doing heavy lifting in the stock room.

A mile past the Kwik Mart, the landscape opened up; the buildings petered out at Williamson Farm, still in operation, with dairy cows and a smell of manure in the air. Here, he’d open his window despite the smell, breathing in the fields, the space, the nothingness. Then several miles of forest, with just a few houses cut into the woods, and then the old part of town, which tried to hold on to historic appeal, with brick buildings, green awnings, and small shops. This was where Ascension’s middle school was, a hulking stone prison. Chase loved driving by it. He never got over the thrill of having escaped.

Then he hit the nicer residential neighborhoods. Everything here looked cleaner, and in the summer, greener. The houses were set about an acre apart, each one claiming a small
bit of woods for itself. Out even farther past the center of town, toward Minster’s neighborhood—where the money really flowed—the lots got bigger, the driveways got longer, the streetlights were fewer. And past Minster’s was the high school, out near the lake, with an expansive campus and a newly renovated football field. It took Chase the whole drive sometimes to start loosening up, to shake off the feeling of the thin tin walls around him, the old food smells that lingered in the tiny trailer air, the sense of smallness and dirt.

But tonight, Chase never shook off the claustrophobic feeling: He kept seeing shapes darting at the edge of his vision, but when he looked, there was nothing but snow, whirling out of the darkness.

He hoped the party would snap him out of his bad mood. He was going to choose his date for the Ascension Football Feast tonight. He was going to pick someone quality, too—someone who would make up for last year. A girl who wasn’t too loud and smiled at the right times and looked good in a dress. Maybe even someone he could talk to for more than fifteen minutes.

Tonight, Chase planned on finding the perfect girl. He needed it. He deserved it.

When he pulled up to Minster’s house, which sat at the end of a cul-de-sac in one of Ascension’s newer developments, the party was already raging. Almost every light in the house
was on, and a group of smokers stood in the driveway, hopping from one foot to the other to keep warm. He jogged up the lawn and pushed through the front door into a large, marble-tiled entryway. A gold-framed mirror hung on the wall, and below it, a varnished wooden bench.

As he did when he entered most of his friends’ homes, Chase felt a moment of unconscious panic. Everything here was so nice, he felt like he shouldn’t touch anything.

But no. He was Chase Singer, and Chase Singer
belonged
. He shrugged off his jacket and threw it on the bench with just a little too much force, glanced one last time at his reflection in the mirror, and began his rounds.

A group of underclassmen were overcompensating for their insecurities by being too loud. Jenna and Ashley, two cheerleaders, were standing with Taylor, a field hockey player, and all three of them were flirting with what appeared to be some extremely stoned lacrosse players. Coming out of the kitchen was Minster himself, looking surprisingly relaxed for someone whose enormous house was full of Ascension high schoolers. It appeared that half the crowd was drinking beer from plastic cups, and the other half was drinking a red-orange punch. The lights had been dimmed, so all the rooms were hazy and full of shadows. Pop music—new, dance-y stuff—thumped from a hidden sound system, and even people who weren’t dancing seemed to be pulsing with the music. Everyone who came in
from the cold took a moment to adjust and to blow on their hands, as though they’d emerged from a long expedition.

He located Zach and Gabby by the keg and the punch bowl and scanned the room for potential hookups. There were some definite possibilities—Jenna or Ashley, of course, and also a throng of sophomores who got giggly as soon as he passed through the living room. This would be fun. He smiled.

He started to tune in to the conversations around him, but then Gabby was calling him over to where she and Zach were standing with Andrea Rubin, Sean Wagner, and Nell White.

“Look who I found,” Gabby said. At one point she’d wanted Chase and Andrea to get together, but Andrea had made it clear that she would go out with Chase only if he paid for everything—an impossibility that Chase resented more than he let on. While Chase wasn’t the poorest kid in Ascension, he was certainly the poorest
popular
kid in town. And he hated that people knew it.

“Hey, man,” Zach said. “Grab a beer—catch up!” He pumped the keg and handed a red cup to Chase, who accepted it and took a big gulp. Something about tonight made him feel like he needed more liquid courage than usual.

“Thanks, dude,” Chase said. “What’s up? Who’s here? Where’s Winters?” He addressed the questions to no one in particular; Gabby took it upon herself to answer.

“We were talking about Miller’s English final and how
impossible it was,” she said. “And everyone’s here. Well, almost everyone. Em should be here soon. I don’t know what’s taking her so long.”

Chase nodded and nudged Nell. “You know that tall sophomore?” Nell was a peer adviser and somehow managed to know every single Ascension student’s name. She followed his gaze.

“The blond one? Jess Carlsen.” Nell paused and Chase waited, expectant. Nell rolled her eyes and went on: “She’s into drama or singing or something. I forget which.”

Zach laughed. “Homed your radar already, huh, Singer?”

Chase held his hands up in mock innocence. “I’m just trying to get to know new faces,” he said.

“You’re tracking new blood,” Gabby chimed in, and Chase could see her ever so slightly tighten her grip on Zach’s arm.

Then, out of nowhere: “Did you guys hear about Sasha Bowlder?” she asked.

At that moment someone must have leaned against the light switch: The overhead lights blazed and suddenly the room and everyone in it was starkly illuminated. For a second Chase had the impression that everyone was frozen. Then the lights were dimmed again.

Chase and Zach exchanged a quick glance.

Zach cleared his throat and asked, “What about her?”

“She tried to commit suicide,” Gabby said, her voice low.

Now Chase felt as though the room had gone dark, even though the lights didn’t waver.

“By throwing herself off the Piss Pass,” Gabby added, referring to the highway overpass around the corner from Fitzroy’s, a local dive bar. Fitzroy’s regulars often stumbled to the overpass to pee when they were having a smoke; hence the nickname. “Didn’t you hear all those sirens earlier? They were, like, earsplitting. I thought there was a terrorist attack or something.”

Zach smiled gently. “Ascension, Maine is hardly a terrorist target, babe. Nothing bad happens here.”

“Well, what happened to Sasha is
bad
,” Gabby said, tossing her hair over her shoulder.

Chase felt something tighten in his chest. Sasha was Ascension’s social pariah, but she hadn’t always been. Memories came to Chase, fast and thick, like a blizzard: Sasha as a young girl, weaving with him around the mounds of trash and broken furniture stacked up around the trailer park. She lived there then, just a few trailers over in lot 37. They played hide-and-go-seek and flashlight tag. And they shared secrets. Some nights, when his dad was too drunk and really raging, his mom would shuttle Chase over to Sasha’s house, just to get him out of the line of fire. And then, when Chase’s dad died in the freak factory accident, Chase stayed at Sasha’s for a full five days while his mom took care of the funeral, the creditors, and her grief.

He and Sasha would share a bed, toe to head, and tell each
other ghost stories into the night. They preferred the fake scary stuff to the real. At least in stories, when you turn on the lights, the monsters disappear. The first time Chase ever thought about girls as anything other than less athletic versions of boys, it was to wonder what it would be like to kiss Sasha.

But then things had changed. Sasha’s mom met a wealthy dentist from York—he swept into Ascension and bought a big house over by the McCords’. Just like that, Sasha wore trendy clothes, could go out for pizza on Friday nights, and could invite people over to watch movies on her big-screen TV. That was sixth grade, and suddenly, Sasha seemed to forget that Chase existed. It was weird—he’d hated her for a while, but in some ways, Sasha ditching him was the best thing that ever could have happened. Because that’s when Chase got it—as long as you’re wearing the right outfits, saying the right things, impressing the right people, you can blend in. It doesn’t matter where you come from, as long as you play the role.

Once Chase saw the matrix, it was easy enough to get in. He talked about girls but not too much. He did well in class but not too well. He excelled on the field, was up for any physical challenge. He became friends with Zach McCord (but never invited him over). Over the course of maybe six months, Chase got in. By seventh grade, Chase Singer was part of the crew. And by the time they got to high school, he was Way In.

Of course, the thing about the matrix is it works the same
way in reverse: Once you’re out, you’re really, really out. Sasha discovered that too late.

The tides turned against her, easily, almost as if swayed by an invisible force.

She tried desperately to keep a low profile, to avoid the smears. No one could quite pinpoint what her mistake had been. Maybe she had been
too
eager,
too
mean. Or maybe it had all started from some small thing, like freshman year when she wore a fluorescent pink sweater to school and was called “Rainbow Retard” for a few days. Or more likely it was when she made the mistake of letting two boys kiss her at a party in the fall that year. In reality, the kissing thing had probably been a last-ditch effort to be liked. But it was too late. After that the rumors started. Countless rumors—Chase couldn’t even remember all of them. Sasha was bi, or she was into porn, or she was just a freak, no further explanation needed.

She began to wear clothes that didn’t stand out—and started to slip into invisibility. She skipped a couple of important dances, she began to slouch down in her seat during class, she wasn’t involved in any extracurricular activities. And though it had happened seamlessly while most people were looking the other way, Sasha had quickly lost everything she’d once gained. It was the easiest thing in the world to make fun of her. Over time, it became a sport. Eventually, she had just one friend left: Drea Feiffer, whose hair color changed weekly from purple
to maroon to jet-black, and whose habit of wearing barrettes, striped socks, and T-shirts featuring Japanese cartoon characters seemed only to highlight the darkness of her general attitude.