Have Mercy (Have a Life #1) (7 page)

              I sat down on the curb and told Captain Kirby I didn’t feel like going home any more. 

She sat down next to me and coaxed Tim’s message out of me.

              “Sonofabitch!  I knew that Rob was a phony!”

              “You don’t know it was Rob!  And you don’t know it was Jane.”

              “Of course it was Rob and your ma.  They were all over each other.”

              “He told us he graduated two
years
ago.  So it can’t be him.  And Jane would never do something like that.”  Something so creepy and weird.  I heard actual alarm bells going off in my head, and I put my hands over my ears.  

              “He’s a liar!   I told you,” she said. “Only a professional liar would say
two
years ago, not
last
year or
this
year.”

              We pedaled to the twenty-four hour Dunkin Donuts and Captain Kirby ordered a box of Munchkins and two Coffee Coolatas. 

              “Do you have a couple of bucks?” she asked me, fishing around her giant pants and coming up empty.  “I’m out of quarters.”  

              “Let’s eat them in the parking lot,” I said. 

              I couldn’t look at nice Mr. Rajeet who owned the Dunkin Donuts.   After he saw me carrying my guitar once, he always told me “I can see you are going to be a famous musician,” and I would correct him by saying “not a musician, a famous rock and roll star,” and he would say, “Okay, then, a famous rock and roll star!  Even better.  Don’t forget to practice today.”  He was always telling anyone who would listen about his two sons in college and how he was working so hard so they wouldn’t have to operate a doughnut shop, so they could operate on
brains
or something instead and have a sparkly and clean and pure future loaded with nice people doing the right thing just like Mr. Rajeet.  If Jane had done this, how could I ever talk to Mr. Rajeet again?

                            “You ought to have a couple of these,” Captain Kirby said, pushing the box of Munchkins at me. 

“You haven’t eaten all day.”

              “Yes, I have.”

              “No, you haven’t.”

              “I’m not hungry.”

              It was five thirty and delivery trucks were on the road and a couple of cars were lined up at the take-out window just like everything was normal.  The Coffee Coolata was sickeningly sweet and I felt like barfing.

              “Well, what are you going to do?” Captain Kirby asked.

              A tractor trailer pulled to the side of the road in front of us and sat there with its motor idling.  The driver probably was going to sleep in the cab.  Maybe when he woke up I would ask him to take me with him to Arkansas, which was where his license plate said he was from.  Weren’t the Smokey Mountains there?  They sounded dark and hidden and I wanted to hide in them with all the other runaway losers and axe murderers.

              “I don’t know.”  The more I thought about Jane sleeping with a high school student the angrier I got.  What kind of a mother does
that
?  What kind of a
teacher
does that?  Why couldn’t Jane
ever
do what she was
supposed
to do, like be a mom who
chaperoned
students not partied with them.  Why couldn’t she stay in her damn Two Cool Society mom box?  It was
icky.

              “At least The Griffin is here,” I said.  “He’ll know what to do.”   Part of me, honest to god, thought that once The Griffin saw what happened because we weren’t all together, he would take us away on the bus with him.  It would be like it used to be when Jane was riding around on the bus and I was riding inside Jane.  Maybe this was a good thing no matter how bad it sounded when you said it out loud.  Maybe when the sun came up, it would turn out to be a giant joke.  The boy was joking.  Bragging about nothing.  L              ike boys do.  Or maybe it was some other teacher. 

I went through the roster in my head again.  Mrs. Horvath?  Please.  Mrs. Thwaite?  Give me a break.  My mother was the youngest and prettiest teacher at Milltown High.  She wasn’t like the others.  Part of me had always been proud of that, but now it terrified me.

              “You can’t go back to how it used to be,” Captain Kirby said, reading my thoughts.  “Believe me, I know.”

              “What makes you think I want to go back to anything?  You’re crazy.”

              “Maybe I’m crazy but I know what I’m talking about.”

              “How can you know anything,” I said, angrily.  “You flunked third grade.”

              “True enough,” Captain Kirby said and she then proceeded to shove Munchkin after Munchkin into her mouth until the box was empty.  “You finished with that?” she asked then grabbed my cup and drained the last of the Coffee Coolatta and threw all the trash in the garbage, picking up her bike and waiting for me to do the same. 

              The sky had become the silver it gets before the sun comes up.  I mean, I should at least
ask
Jane what happened.  Maybe it was a giant mistake.  I mean Jane wasn’t an idiot.  And no one could prove anything happened.   Mr. Dow was always saying that the greatest thing about our country was due process and presumed innocence and a trial by a jury of your peers etcetera etcetera.  Yeah right.  My peers had already chimed in.  And oh my god, what would Mr. Dow say when he heard about this?  He was the only teacher I liked and I pictured myself slinking into his class with a paper bag over my head so he wouldn’t have to look at the person who made the entire high school dirty and full of dandelions.   

              I would talk to Jane and find out it was a great big mistake and she would probably punish me—not let me play in the Trap for a month or wash my mouth out with soap or whatever—for being so disloyal by believing it was her.   And I wouldn’t blame her. 

              I got on my bike and followed Captain Kirby out of the parking lot when I heard the chimes for another message on my phone.  I stopped and pulled it out of my pocket again and looked at the screen.  It was a Facebook message from my half-brother, Isak.  I rubbed my eyes because like maybe I was dreaming. Then I looked again. The message was still there. 

              “I saw on Facebook,” the message said.  “Wow! You okay?”

I guess I expected a crowd of irate villagers with torches out of one of Mr. Dow’s stories of the middle ages to be waiting for me on the lawn.  But it was deserted.  Pizza boxes were strewn around.  Someone had made a pile of them like eight feet tall at the curb and scrawled
THE GRIFFIN RULES
in spray paint on the street in front of them.  Beer cans and plastic cups were everywhere.  Jane’s Kia was parked at the curb in its usual spot.  But there was an empty spot where The Griffin’s bus was supposed to be. 

              “Your dad’s gone,” Captain Kirby said.

              “Yeah.”

              We walked our bikes up the driveway.  The Trap was locked, probably by Tim who understood how much the stuff inside cost, and there was a note taped to the garage door.  “Will whoever stole my bike, please return it.  Thank you, Tim Coles.”

              “Do you want me to come in?” Captain Kirby asked.

              “Nah.  I’m okay.  I mean if you want to you can.  You could sleep in the guest bedroom.  In the bed we made up for Bang.”  I faked a smile. 

              “I should probably check on my mom.”

              “Right.”

              She leaned Tim’s bike against the garage door and started down the driveway.

              “You can take my bike if you want.  It’s a pretty long walk.”

              “No, I want to walk.  I’ll come back this afternoon.” 

              “You don’t have to.”  

              “To see if you’re okay and everything.”

              I looked up at Jane’s bedroom.  The shades were drawn and the awful thought occurred to me that Rob might be in there with her.  I mean, Tim didn’t say where it happened.  I forced myself to walk across the lawn.  The front door was open and when I walked into the house I saw Tim sitting at the kitchen table with my laptop open in front of him.

              “There you are!  Finally!” he said.  “I was going to go looking for you but someone stole my bike.  I was worried that maybe you ran away, but then I knew that wasn’t like you.”

              “I was on my way to Arkansas,” I said, wondering what he thought
was
like me.

              “Huh?”

              “Nothing.”

              He turned the laptop so I could see the screen.  Someone had posted pictures of Jane and Rob (Rob!) dancing at the prom…which wasn’t so unusual, lots of times guys asked chaperones to dance, they feel sophisticated or something because they’re wearing dinner jackets.  But a couple of pictures later Rob’s hand was on Jane’s ass.

              “He’s a senior at Black Eddy,” Tim said.  “He got a girl pregnant there.  You should see what
she’s
saying about all this.  She busted him to his mother.”

              “He has a girlfriend?”

              “
And
she’s
pregnant
.”

              “I heard you.”

              “Yeah, look at this.”  He started keying into her page. 

              “What do I care what some girl I don’t even know has to say about anything,” I said.  I felt calm for a second.  I mean if I didn’t look then maybe everything that had happened and was going to happen would only be real inside the internet which was like a pawn shop or something for the real world but then I felt like barfing again.  “Where’s Jane?” I asked.

              “She came home around three and she banged like hell on the band bus, yelling for The Griffin to come out, and when he did he was just in his underpants.  He said something to her that he must have thought would make her laugh because he laughed, but she didn’t and then they started fighting.  Wow, can they fight.”

              I nodded. 

              “And then someone in the crowd showed The Griffin something on their iPhone—I guess it was about what happened—and they fought some more.  Then The Griffin came into the Trap and told Bang and Raymond to pack it in.  ‘I don’t need this bullshit right before a tour,’ he said, and that Goth girl came flying out of the bus half undressed and Bang and Raymond got on, and the bus backed out of the driveway with the Goth girl banging on the grill yelling that she wanted her jacket that she’s paid a hundred bucks for, and Jane laughed and walked up to her and gave her the finger and stormed into the house, and then they were gone and everyone else left.”

              “Did The Griffin say anything for me?”  I closed my eyes.  “Never mind.”

              “Do you think this means they won’t buy our song?  The Griffin said his manager was going to call me.”

              I wanted to be mean and tell him they never intended to buy his song, that they were just toying with him to amuse themselves like they always did whenever they visited.  “I don’t know what it means.  It’ll blow over.  It always does.”

              “This happened before?”

              “No.  Nothing like this.  But almost.”  My laptop had reverted to my Power Point Presentation on why I should be allowed to drop out of school.  When was Jane going to stop getting all the attention and get out of my way so I could stop living her life and start living mine?  The Griffin would have understood what I needed.  He would have signed and probably given me some get-started money, but because of Jane he left.  She was always ruining everything for me, like a kid kicking a smaller kid’s sandcastle on the beach.  “I guess I want you to go.”

              “Some asshole stole my bike,” he said.

              “They returned it.  I saw it when I came home.”

              “No kidding.  Wow.  You going to be okay?”  I let him kiss me.  I mean, who gets to decide when I’m grown up?  I do.  My first decision in my new role was: I kissed him back.  I didn’t want to miss out on kissing which I actually really
really
liked.  He looked surprised then he hugged me.

              “It’s going to be okay,” he said, stroking my hair.  “It’s just a guy bragging about something that probably didn’t happen.  Everyone will be talking about something else by tomorrow.”

              “You think so?” 

              He hugged me again and it felt like everything was okay, at least until he rode away on his bike.  I went outside and sat on the steps and thought about how long it was going to take me clean up the mess by myself.

Garbage pickup happens Monday mornings so by seven o’clock I’d collected fifteen garbage bags of trash and lined them up neatly on the curb.  The pizza boxes were recyclable so I stacked them together next to the blue paper recycling bin.  I rinsed the beer cans and booze bottles out so they wouldn’t attract hornets and put them out on the curb in the two blue bins for glass and aluminum stuff.  Then I got the hand mower out of the shed—the motorized lawn mower was out of gas, gee, surprise—and mowed down the dandelions.  I sat down on the front steps out of breath and surveyed my work.  We looked like every other house on the street, sort of.  I was trying to think of what else I could do that seemed normal—maybe ask the Tudescos if I could walk their dogs—when Jane came out the door and sat down next to me.

              “It’s bright,” she said, shielding her eyes.  She started to light a cigarette then put it in her bathrobe pocket and smiled at me.

              “What are you so happy about?”

              “I didn’t say I was happy.”

              “You’re smiling.”

              “I thought I’d try it.  Jesus, Mercedes, lighten up.  You are such a downer to be around sometimes.”

              “Did you have fun last night?”

              She stood up, walked a few steps—“Far enough?” she asked—lit her cigarette and squinted at me through the smoke.  “I was working.”

              “Oh, is that what you call it?”

              And all of a sudden she was holding her bathrobe closed with one hand and slapping me a good one with the other.  “That’s enough!” she said.  “What I do is my business.  I’m the mother, remember?”

              My cheek burned and it felt like steam was rising off the tears that were streaming down my cheeks. 

              “Sorry,
Jane
,” I said, “But it seems that what you do is everyone’s business.”  I ran to the Trap door, grabbed my bike and pedaled away as fast as I could.  I’ll go to the funeral home, I thought, and move in with Captain Kirby and her mom.  Of course, Kulick wouldn’t let the Kirby’s beat up old van stay parked there during the day when they had viewings and stuff.    Tim, I thought.  He had an older brother who worked summers for an uncle in Scranton so there’d be an extra bed at his house, but he’d told me he didn’t get along so well with his dad who was always looking for reasons to ground him and they were all probably still asleep.  I rode to the Seven-Eleven and asked for him, I knew he had a Sunday morning shift there, but the manager said he called in sick.  “You look hungry,” he said, “here.”  He handed me a hot dog slathered in mustard.  I told him I didn’t have any money.  “It’s okay. You’re a friend of Tim’s, right?  I’ll take it out of his pay.”  I ate the dog and since I had no place to go I walked my bike home and when I got there, Jane was coming down the steps dressed for school.

              “I’m glad I caught you,” she said, “Principal Thwaite called and wants to see me.”

              “Now?  On Sunday?  It’s Sunday.”

              “It’s probably about cleaning up the mess from the prom.  The post-prom committee probably didn’t show up.”

              “Can’t it wait?” I asked, scared that whatever had happened was going to be dragged into the light for everyone to see and then they would start examining everything about us, about me.  Jane had always insisted that we weren’t like other families.  We were way cooler than families who washed their cars every Saturday and put screens in the windows on June 21 and replaced the screens with storm windows on September 21, because they didn’t have lives like we did.  We were talented and special and we played by different rules.  But people only let you play by special rules when you don’t break any of their big ones.  “Can’t someone else clean up?  Why can’t it wait?”  I started to cry again. 

              “Thwaite said it couldn’t wait.  I’m sorry about smacking you, honey.  You know I have to smoke to wake up.  I won’t be long.  I promise,” she said and got in the Kia and drove away.