Hurricane Kiss (11 page)

“What?”

“Having a coach who thought he had to rip you to shreds before he could build you up.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sports are supposed to build character and teach you about camaraderie, right? But the Briggs way was to shove your face into the ground and make you eat dirt until you manned up and played better. To him, it's a blood sport about winning, no matter the cost.”

“If you could start all over again, what else would you do? What else was important to you?”

“I used to fantasize about doing nothing, total inertia. How pathetic is that? Do you know how it feels never to have time to yourself? To have every minute of your day planned out for you, with no time to just screw around and have fun? With barely enough time to sleep? In my other school I was in the drama club.”

“I remember.”

“My mom was an actress before she met my dad. She kept scripts at home for the movies she tried out for. She was starting to become successful, but then she gave it all up.”

“Why?”

“My dad convinced her it was more important to stay home with me, plus he wanted her there for him when he got home—dinner waiting and all that crap—”

She rolls her eyes.

“That's probably why she got cancer. He gave it to her.” I punch the cushion with my fist. I'm shaking again. I reach for a pill. I'm out. Shit, I forgot. I open the bottle and lick the inside for any powder left, something, anything. She looks at me in shock, pity, whatever, but I don't care. I start to throw the bottle across the room, and then stop. Not with my name on it.

If I was never born, she could have had the life she wanted.

“Why didn't you make time to join drama?”

“Briggs wouldn't hear of it.”

“Why was it up to him?”

“Why talk about it now?” I ask. “It's over.” She reaches for my hand, but I pull back. “I'm not the same person I was two years ago.”

“Everyone changes.”

“You don't understand. No one does.”

There's a crash outside, then another like the building is getting slammed by a battering ram. What's next, the roof over our heads?

“Let me look.” I start to get up.

“Stay River, please.”

Things die down, at least for the next few minutes, and I sit back.

“You know what I read?” Jillian says.

“What?”

“You can't find peace by avoiding life.”

“I'm not looking for peace,” I say.
Maybe justice.
“I'm looking to be left alone.”

Chapter 20

JILLIAN

There's a loud banging outside. “River … what—”

“Quiet,” he says, his face close to mine. He gets up and pulls the knife out of his back pocket. I sit up, fear spreading through me.

“Where are you going?”

“I saw a light somewhere,” he says.

“It was lightning, what else?”

“Go into the girls' room. Don't leave until I come for you.”

“Why?”

“I want to look around.”

“Who could it be?”

He shrugs.

“Briggs?”

“I hope not.”

“So what if he sees you?”

“He has an order of protection against me, OK?”

So it was true.
“Why?”

He doesn't answer.

I enter the dark, airless bathroom. It smells of disinfectant. The black-and-white penny-tile floor is damp and slippery. The steel door slams, and I press my ear against it, which makes no sense.

I don't know much about Briggs, but I remember when Chris Jones, one of the players, told us about the time Briggs took the team out for steak dinners.

“He let us order one-pound rib eyes, double lobsters, anything we wanted,” he said. “As a joke, Clint Hagel asked Briggs if he could order a filet mignon to take home for his dog, and Briggs said yes! He promised us another steak dinner in three months, any restaurant we picked, if we kept it going.”

Coach Briggs had worked at top prep schools on the East Coast, but moved to Harrison when our coach retired. He hit the ground running from day one, changing the way the school thought about football.

Hustle, hit, and never quit.

Our blood, our sweat, your tears.

All it takes is all you've got.

We knew the familiar slogans, but Briggs's mantra was short and concise: “We play to win.” Since he started, more than half of the players had been on track for full scholarships to top schools.

The principal wanted a story on Briggs, so I remember stopping River in the corridor one day to get a quote from him.

“Red,” he said, tugging at my ponytail. He was flirty with everyone. I knew better than to take it personally.

“I prefer, ‘Jillian,' actually,” I said, leaning away.

“OK, Jillian Actually,” he said, straight-faced. “What can I do you for?”

Do me for? I tried to stifle a smile. “Seriously, I'm writing a story on Coach Briggs. What do you think of him?” The smile faded as he glanced away, lost in thought for a moment.

“He's in a ‘league of his own,'” he said, making quote marks with his fingers.

“Want to expand on that?”

He shook his head and walked off.

Another player agreed. “There's no one like Briggs. His whole world is football.” He paused, “Only there's too much practice.” I jotted down what he said and started walking to class, but he caught up to me. “Whatever you do, don't use my name.”

“Why?”

“He'll freak.”

I did name the dad of a player who emailed the school paper after his son left the team due to a knee injury.

“Practice should be limited to no more than two-and-a-half hours a day and twelve-and-a-half hours per week with time off during the summer,” he said. “The demands a coach makes have to be realistic.”

Briggs's response?

“Our ranking speaks for itself.”

The principal was more effusive. “It's an honor and privilege to play for our team,” he said. “No one is forced to. It takes time and commitment. If a player feels the demands are excessive, he's free to step down at any time. I don't think I have to remind anyone that for the first time we're heading toward the finals, and we couldn't be prouder.”

Why were the players so nervous talking about Briggs? Why did Briggs need protection against River? I had heard of orders of protection, but I thought they were for violent boyfriends or husbands. I'd never heard about River getting in trouble, except for the fight with Aidan. Did he threaten Briggs? Fight with him? That would be crazy and hard to imagine. But as Kelly said, maybe he snapped. Maybe the pressure got to be too much for him.

I try to think of what else happened before he left. The only thing I can think of is the fire. Kids talked about it, but it wasn't suspicious. It started in Briggs's office, just before River was sent away. Aside from the smell of smoke, the only damage was to some filing cabinets and the walls around them. It was probably electrical, someone said, because workers had been fixing the lights.

Did River start it? Why would he jeopardize everything to vandalize Briggs's office? We lived next door to each other. I saw him in school and with other people. I trusted him. He wasn't crazy. He didn't seem dangerous.

At least before.

But maybe that was all me. I was needy. That happens when your dad is there one day and gone the next. You never recover from losing a parent.

It was just a kiss.

Kelly once talked about how guys were different from girls.

“Kissing doesn't mean the same thing to them. To guys it's more about what comes next. It's less emotional, especially if you hardly know the guy.”

That struck me as something my grandmother might say. But I didn't tell Kelly that.

Was I crazy to trust River now? He had meant it when he slapped me—I'd seen it in his eyes. Prison changed him. Awful things happened there, everyone knew that. Maybe now he was a totally different person than the one I thought I knew.

Suddenly my whole world seems filled with questions, not answers. Am I more afraid to be inside the bathroom or out? Who would be crazy enough to come here, besides us? I ease open the door and make my way along the dark corridor, my hands reading walls, doors, cabinets, and indentations. If Briggs is here, he'd probably be in his office.

I make my way. English, the science room, another door to the boys' bathroom, the guidance counselor's office, and finally Briggs's office. I walk along silently. I stop just before the office door. The glass window in the door is dark. As I take a step closer, an arm snakes out of nowhere.

“No,” I scream as a hand clamps down forcefully over my mouth, pulling me against a hard body.

Chapter 21

JILLIAN

I work to break free, but I'm held in place, a strong arm around my neck. I try to open my mouth, to bite the hand, but I can't move.

“I told you to stay in the bathroom,” River hisses. My heart is drumming against my chest. Finally, he releases me.

“God, River, what's wrong with you? You nearly scared me to death! I thought I'd help, if—”

“—No, you'd get in the way!”

“I couldn't stay in the—”

“—Let's go back,” he says. “It was probably lightning or … or I'm just …”

Now he's losing it?

Then we see it at the same moment. A light—outside somewhere.

“I'm going out,” he says. “I have to find out.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Yeah, that's the problem.” He rushes toward the door.

“River! You'll get killed, don't!”

“Five minutes and I'll be back.”

There's a thick tree limb outside, and he props it between the door and the jam.

“Stay here,” he says.

“I'm coming with you.”

“Don't!”

I reach for him, but he slips past me.

I go running after him until a gust throws me back against the wall, slamming my arm. I manage to get to my feet. River hunkers down near the building looking everywhere, but there's no flash of light now, nothing. The only movements are random objects somersaulting in the wind. The rain is hitting like daggers against me. River shields his face with his arm.

“Whatever it was is gone. Come back inside!”

“I want to circle to the other side,” he says, edging past me, close to the building. There's a powerful gust and then it dies down. A tree branch the length of a Chevy comes slamming down a few inches in front of us.

“Christ!” River yells, jumping back just in time.

“Can't you see that's a warning? There's nothing out here, River! We have to go back inside.” I grab his arm and pull him back toward the door. “Listen to me, now!”

He crouches down and looks around one more time.

“River!” I scream. “There's no more time!” The wind starts up again, and I reach back and grab onto the door handle to brace myself. But River pulls away and walks ahead until a wind gust slams him into the building.

“Ow,” he shouts, falling to the ground. He's breathing hard, obviously shaken. I run to him and pull him up and toward the door.

We're about to go inside when there's a flash of light in the distance—the headlights of a car. But the downpour is so heavy, it's impossible to tell whether it's coming closer or driving away. River's face looks haunted, scared, his eyes fixed on the lights until the car turns and the red taillights dim, finally disappearing into the distance.

We slam the door behind us, sinking against the wall, catching our breath. “You have to tell me what's going on, River. You almost got us killed out there. Is that what you want? None of this makes sense to me. You have to talk to me. I can't stand it.”

“It doesn't make any difference.”

“How can you say that?”

“Knowing's not going to change anything.”

“If someone was here … what am I supposed to do or feel if I don't know what the hell is going on?” There's a long silence.

“C'mon,” he says. I follow him to Briggs's office. He stops and tries the door. Locked. He digs a key from his pocket and unlocks it, hesitating in the doorway, as if he's expecting Briggs to jump out of a secret hiding place. I follow him in, and he looks around like he's seeing it for the first time. “It's a long story,” he says, finally.

“We're not going anywhere. We have all night.”

RIVER

I spit on Briggs chair, then kick it over and kick it again. It smacks against the wall and ricochets. My heart's in overdrive. Where the hell to start?

The window frames shake so hard my bones vibrate, like I'm inside the spin cycle of some monster washing machine.

“You know anything about a juvie prison?”

She shakes her head.

“It's a hellhole, ten times over. They treat you like a deranged animal they have to lock in a cage. If you don't do what they want, the guards beat you, or just walk out and let the other guys do it. Then they drag you to the shrink who screws you up even more with pills.”

“What kind of pills?”

“Psych pills—pills to make you lose your mind, so strong you're comatose and they don't have to deal with your shit. Pills that they hope will stop your heart so they can bury you.”

“Why did you take them?”

“Why? Because if I didn't they'd lock me in solitary until I ‘changed my mind.' Or one of them would hold me down while the other would force my jaws open and shove them down my throat.”

She looks shocked, disgusted. This is so not her world. It wasn't mine either, but now it is. It'll be part of me for the rest of my life.

“It has nothing to do with you being sick or having anything wrong with you, even though everyone has something wrong with them after they're inside, even if they didn't come in that way.”

Jillian looks at me, uncertain.

“What the pills do is draw a curtain down between you and reality.” I'm realizing it for the first time, now that I'm saying it out loud. “They don't care what effect they have on you. All the guards know is if you're stoned out of your mind you'll be quiet instead of screaming at them or beating up on somebody, and if you happen to freak and go psycho on them, then they're within their rights—or they think they are—to tie you down in an empty room for an eternity so that you can't even get up to take a piss.

“The food is rancid. The place is filthy. Toilets are backed up and sometimes we didn't shower for days or even get toothpaste.” I shake my head. “I fought them at first, fought the pills, fought whatever there was to fight, from the roaches to the spoiled, shit food. I'd lie on my ratty sweat-soaked cot watching bugs crawl up the walls and feeling hot, cold, nearly unconscious, my heart racing, laughing, crying, sick to my stomach puking, eyes seeing, eyes blind, crazy sounds, silence as wide as death, flashing lights, everything, nothing, fantasies so deep and dark I forgot who I was and whether I was alive, dead, or somewhere in between … and all the time I remembered just one thing, how I hated Briggs, how I hated his guts so badly I wanted to kill him.”

I watch her face and say, “You know enough now?”

“God …” She covers her mouth and struggles to take in a breath.

“After a while it was just too hard to keep fighting. I half wanted to die anyway, so I took the pills, even though little by little they destroyed part of my brain, which obviously was the intention of the bogus shrink. If you OD'd, there was one less sorry son-of-a-bitch kid to deal with. What did they care what the body count was? They were getting paid either way, pretending what they did for a living was justifiable. Anyway, they were convinced that we deserved to be there because we were the scum of the earth and a threat to society. And you know what else?”

“What?”

“The more inmates they got, the more money they made since it was privately run, not government. So kids who didn't do anything—kids who jaywalked or threw a cigarette butt out a car window—got picked up and put before a judge who was being paid off by the prisons.”

“Did your dad know anything, didn't he come to see you?”

“It was a ten-hour drive and he had work, so he visited me every couple of weeks. He saw some of what was going on. He's pretty smart. But it was easier to pretend he didn't …”

“Why didn't you tell him what it was like?”

“You don't think I tried?” I ask. “But it was so off the charts he thought I was making it up so he'd feel sorry for me.”

Talking about that place, it all starts to come back to me. “The visiting area wasn't like the rest of the hellhole. It was cleaned up to throw visitors off. And they didn't let outsiders go to our rooms.”

“Why not?”

“Something about disturbing the privacy of the kids, like we had rights. Anyway, my dad is good at deceiving himself. He was a marine.”

“But he must have known something—”

“What he knew was I had destroyed the perfect life he had made for me. All he saw was I tried to quit the team and I was thrown out of school—never mind why—and lost my chance at a scholarship, and no one wanted to touch me anymore. So he figured I deserved what I got and I had to man up and take the punishment.”

I'm shaking all over, sweating harder now, only it's a cold, sick sweat.

“I think when he went to bed at night he probably woke up with nightmares about what my mom would have said if she knew where I was and he was letting it happen. That probably drove him out of his mind—knowing how it would have destroyed her.”

The words spill out in a rush. “The heat was like this. Only worse. There was no air-conditioning, or at least they never turned it on because they didn't think we deserved to breathe. The bed smelled, and if they didn't like the way you looked at them, they beat the shit out of you and didn't let you shower.”

“River, I'm so—” her voice quavers.

“—So that's where I went. That's where they sent me. The MVP. To be rehabilitated—all because of Briggs.”

“Rehabilitated?”

“That's the bullshit they feed the public. They're supposed to purge you of whatever they stuck you in there for.”

She reaches to take my shaking hand. I pull back.

“Was there school? Aren't they supposed to continue your education?”

“The classes were for morons. I usually fell asleep, but that wasn't allowed either.”

“River … I'm so sorry … I know that doesn't make sense now … but I am. I wish I had known. I would have done anything to help you.”

“No one could have done anything.”

“I don't believe that.”

I study her face and turn away.

“I can't believe your dad couldn't have done something to get you out of there.”

“My dad's face told me everything I had to know. Disappointment. He just blamed me for ruining the fantasy world he lived in that would raise him up after a crap day at work and a house without a wife.”

“But you got out—how?”

“One night when he was probably on his fourth scotch, the guilt must have hit him so hard he couldn't stand it anymore because the next morning he hired the best lawyer in Texas. They got me out in like an hour, probably by scaring the shit out of the warden. His timing was impeccable. I left two days before the kid in the next room hanged himself with the rope they used to whip him, and a state investigation broke out. It was all over the newspapers.”

I lean toward her, grabbing her wrist. “Paying judges for each kid they sent away. How's that for justice and the American way?”

“I saw that on TV.”

“If my dad expected me to feel indebted to him, he was wrong.”

JILLIAN

I'm sick inside. My mom gets paid to ask questions when things don't look right. She taught me to do that. So how did we miss something so wrong under our noses? Things were hushed up after he left. Nothing made it into the papers. But being sorry won't help River now. I go in a different direction.

“What was your mom like?”

“There for me.”

Despair. I've never heard that in his voice before. “But your dad always came to the games.” I sit. “He seemed so proud of you.”

“On the field, the only place my dad could relate. That was the reason I started to play. My dad took every win as one for himself too. Other kids could get knocked down, break bones, but not me.” He shakes his head. “This is boring shit. I don't even know why I'm telling you.”

“It's not boring, River.” I need to keep him talking to me.

The building rumbles around us, trembling like it's scared, then it stops.

“Jesus,” River says.

“Keep going,” I say. River gives me a look of annoyance. This is hard for him to talk about. “You can't give up. Your life isn't over.”

“Right … I'm still breathing …” He shakes his head. “You can't know. No one ever tied your hands and held you in a choke hold.”

“Fight back. It's not too late. You can't keep this inside you. It's eating you up.”

“I don't
care
anymore.”

“I know you do.” Anger surges through me. I hate the way he's letting everything that happened beat him down and destroy him. That's not who he is.

He starts to answer, then stops when we hear an earth-shaking boom followed by a creaking groan. River charges down the hallway toward the stairwell.