The Body of Christopher Creed (15 page)

Since I didn't really feel like talking to anybody, I just went to homeroom early and fell asleep with my head on my desk. I woke up because someone was nudging me, and when I opened my eyes, the room was half filled with kids. I shot my head up as Alex quit nudging me from behind. Our names, Adams and Arrington, meant I sat in front of him. There was no getting away this time.

"You didn't even hear the bell?" Alex asked me.

"No." I rubbed my eyes and shivered. I couldn't believe I slept through a bell.

"You look like you're on crack."

"Well, I'm not," I snapped. "I only had next-to-zero sleep."

"Look. Whatever's going on with you, Torey, I'm not the enemy."

My eyes moved past all these kids who were finding their seats, pushing each other and fooling around. Lyle Corsica was sitting just about in the middle, looking up from an Algebra II book. He was watching Justin Briggs and Mike Carroll, two jocks, arm wrestle in the front row. He looked back and forth from Briggs to Carroll sort of cautiously.
He's wishing he could jump into Carroll's set of muscles and walk around in them. He's wishing he was somebody else. He's wondering why his old man had to pass on chicken legs to him, while Carroll's old man is a tennis pro.

I had never given Lyle Corsica a real thought before, and all of a sudden I felt like I could look into his head and see his thoughts. See pain there. I realized Alex had his hand cupped to my ear and was whispering in it. Lyle's head turned, and his eyes caught mine this time.
Adams and Arrington whispering. Nobody's ever whispered anything to me. Nobody thinks I'm that important.

I grinned at him. I had been running my mouth to him on the bus about the weather, the puddles, the snow coming, all this stuff. He should have thought I was insane. Now, here he was looking at me all admiring because some bro was giving me some secret lowdown. I wondered if being a geek made you a better, less judgmental person.

"Where in the hell did you pick up Bo Richardson? I can't see why we should
protect
you if you won't even let us in on what you were doing!"

I jerked my ear away from Alex and turned to stare at his concerned face.

"Protect me from
what?"
I asked.

He looked all around the room in amazement. Flocks of kids were all doing their usual homeroom things—talking, laughing, finishing up the homework they didn't do before. But they had fangs like snakes that came out when something rubbed them wrong. I knew it. I'd been part of it. They could bite. They could ruin my life, turn me and Ali into a sideshow.

"You want all these people looking at you and thinking you're a candidate for Future Convicts of America?" Alex asked, right on cue.

"No." I had two years to finish in this high school. Two years is a long time.

Leandra stuck her head in the door and waved at me. She looked all cute in her jeans and this little tiny sweater.

"Your chem teacher's still out! I'll see you third-period lunch. I'll buy you french fries, your favorite breakfast!" she said in that Southern accent that drove me nuts.

She left, and I felt Alex's eyeballs burning a hole in my cheek. "We're your
friends,
" he reminded me, in that same voice as a teacher....
You're going to
fail
if you're not careful.

I wanted to tell him parts of it. But I knew I'd be screwing up his version of reality by telling him Bo Richardson was a nice guy. And if I told him Bo was going out with Ali? Forget it. He'd tell Renee, and it would be all over school.
Guess who McDermott's doing it with now, oh by the way?

I just got up and wandered out into the hall, forgetting to take the hall pass. I was trying to think up what great lie I could tell the nurse so she would send me home. I leaned against the lockers, thinking how twenty-four hours had turned my whole life into one lie after another. I heard my name in some whisper and looked behind me. Ali was out in the hall, waving the pass from her homeroom so I would follow her. She moved quickly toward the emergency exit, and I followed her.

She shut the door behind us and stared at me. "You look terrible," she said.

I sighed. "This is like some stage show, Ali. I'm lying my ass off every time I turn around. My folks, my friends; I'm about to lie to the nurse. It's like being an actor, only you never get offstage. It's complicated. I want to cut out of here."

She lit a cigarette and blew out a trail of smoke. "You want to go home?"

"Yeah," I muttered. "Go back to sleep, so at some point I can think again."

"Torey, I'm really sorry." She looked sad all of a sudden. "I shouldn't have brought you into all this. You're not cut out for it. Do you see what I mean about your perfect life?"

I didn't say anything. I couldn't think.

"Look," she said, dragging on the cigarette, and I could see her fingers shaking, "whatever you have to do, just do it. If you don't want to talk to us anymore, it's okay. If you have to lie about us, just do it—"

"I don't want to do that, Ali," I snapped. I looked out into the woods and sighed. "Creed ... he's got a real talent for creating problems. Even when he's
gone.
"

"Yeah." She laughed sadly. She stared off into the woods, too. It was a calm, sort of gray day with no wind. I could sense her scanning the trees. Like maybe Creed would just materialize and walk out of them or something.

"I have the diary in my locker," she mumbled. "I went into the girls' bathroom this morning, sat in a stall, and read some more. Kept me from having to be in the cafeteria, you know?"

I nodded, watching the woods alongside her.

"Toward the end, he went to a psychic with that Isabella."

"Really?" I looked at Ali. That didn't seem like something a sheltered kid like Creed would do.

Ali nodded. "She was a relative of Isabella's or something. The psychic told them she saw death in the woods. The death of one of them, I guess."

I felt the skin on my arms starting to crawl as I stared out toward the woods again. I was thinking,
We can be pretty sure it wasn't
her
death. She's from Margate, by the ocean, and there aren't any woods in Margate.

For some reason I thought of Alex and me playing in that burial ground when we were about seven, and walking these woods. We used to walk through there telling stories about the ghosts of dead Lenape Indians. I would get an image in my head of an Indian ghost with a Mohawk and stone earrings and all those feathers. This Indian ghost was always half crouched with a bow and arrow poised in his arms, staring at me like I was an animal and he was hunting.

One time, when I was seven, something materialized about twenty feet in front of me. It looked exactly like this image I had conjured up in my head—crouching Indian, staring, ready to shoot an arrow through my heart. I screamed and pointed, but as fast as the Indian materialized, it disappeared again. I got so freaked that Alex half dragged me by the hair back to tell his dad, the shrink. Alex hadn't seen it.

Dr. Arrington told me that by virtue of the fact that the Indian looked exactly like something I had long been imagining, it had to be my imagination. He somehow managed to calm me down. He was a grown-up and a very confident doctor. Alex and I ended up playing in those woods a lot as kids, and I didn't constantly look over my shoulder. I never did see that Indian again.

But now I was remembering it and feeling like I could see a dead Chris Creed just materialize and walk out of the woods. I watched between the trees, watched for a skinny blond kid to appear and stare back at me. For the first time ever, I thought maybe Dr. Arrington was wrong. Maybe I had some special gift to see things like that. Maybe I saw the Indian exactly like I had been imagining him because the dead Indian somehow "put" the image in my mind before I ever "saw" it. I shivered. Felt like I was losing it.

A sensation came up behind me—breath on my neck. I stood there frozen, knowing somebody was standing there staring into the back of my neck. Just like before, in the basement. I didn't want to jerk around like an idiot this time. But I finally knew it was real because Ali jumped around.

She flew behind me, and when I turned around, she was kissing Bo really big.

I let out a sigh of relief and started to say hey, but they were busy kissing. I figured I would just go pass off my lie to the nurse. I started to move past them, but Richardson grabbed my arm. He gripped me like that until he finished kissing Ali and turned his black-eyed stare to me.

"Your old lady, man. She's a rip. She walked into the lockup this morning and had Chief Bowen's 'nads in her handbag, like, ten minutes later." He laughed. "Goddamn. Next time I get caught breaking and entering, I'll know who to call."

It was a relief to hear a loud voice. I grinned, shaking off my spooks. "So she had to get you out?"

"Yeah. My old lady wasn't home. I lay down in a cell and crashed out."

"Lucky thing she decided to come by," I said, looking him up and down. He was wearing sneakers and smelled like a shower. His hair was still kind of wet. Last night he was brought to the cop station in his socks. "How'd you get other clothes?"

"Your old lady took me home before dropping me off here. She likes me, I think."

She's just doing her job,
I thought, but didn't want to say that. "So ... I guess you broke into the Creeds'."

"No. I didn't break in. You won't believe what happened. You know ol Justin? Chris's younger brother?" He shook his head like a dog, like he couldn't get over something. "He came to the back window just as I jumped onto the ground. He heard me. I seen him and figured,
Oh, shit. Well, you have not because you ask not.
So I asked him. I said, 'Justin, how's about loaning me your brother's diary and not telling your old lady, huh?' He's got Chris's grin, but goddamn, it don't look the same on him. Looks evil. I think it
is
evil. He disappears up the stairs like lightning and comes back about ten seconds later.
Guess
what he's holding?"

Bo was laughing in hoots, but I could only stand there with my jaw dangling. I couldn't get over this. "You mean, he got it out of Chris's picture frame?"

"No. I mean, he had gotten the diary out of the room sometime before. He must have known about it somehow and was scared his mom would get it. He had been switching hiding places—"

"Why would he give it to you?" I asked.

"Because of his old lady! He says to me, 'Take it, get it away from my mom. Just don't forget to give it back to me somehow.'"

Ali made this victory laugh. "Damn, he's got guts."

"There's this pen in it, right? Already I'm hearing cop cars, but I'm thinking they're behind me—they think I'm jumping the fence to run out the next cul-de-sac. Instead of pushing the diary into the bush, where it could get rained on, I just whip out Creed's pen and write Ali's name on it."

"What made you think to do that?" Ali breathed.

"It just came to me." He shrugged like it was nothing. "I been lying for years. Then I wanted to get the book off of me and out of the cop station bad enough—I ain't never lied that perfect before, God Almighty. Hey. I was sorry to do a lie around your old lady, man, she is really juice. But I didn't know what else to do. If they found it on me, that was my life's end. There's no way I would spill on Justin, get the kid in deep shit with his old lady. So..." He knocked Ali's chin with his finger. "You're not all pissed at me for telling Torey's old lady about Albert the Wonder Schlong, are you? Where'd you sleep last night?"

"At Torey's. Greg did, too." She looked kind of worried. "What did you say about my mom? Is she in trouble?"

He shrugged, looking worried himself. "I don't know. You can't think about that, okay? Mrs. Adams is gonna talk to your mom."

Ali rolled her eyes and looked panic-stricken. Bo grabbed her by the shoulders. "Look, I see this happening a lot on my side of town, and it sucks. Parents get all drunk and disorderly, do all these insane things, and the kids protect them like it's their duty. Maybe she'll face the music if she has to. You ain't her Jesus, okay?"

Ali tried to nod, but all of a sudden it's like I was reading
her
thoughts, too.
Where will we go? Where will my stuff be? Will we have to live in my dad's one-bedroom apartment in another state? Will everybody find out about my mom?

I rubbed the back of her neck, and Bo lit a cigarette and handed it off to her. That seemed to make her feel better. She exhaled and stared at the trees again. She told Bo most of the stuff we had read in the diary, including the psychic she read about in the girls' room.

"The psychic told him she saw that he would die in the woods?" Bo asked.

Ali nodded with a shudder. "Something like that."

He just shook his head. "I'm thinking we should find her. Or at least we should find that babe he was going out with and talk to her."

I watched him stare across to the woods. He muttered, "I'm worried the body will show up. If there's a body, it can look like a murder. If he hung himself or shot himself or did something to himself that somebody else could have done to him, Mrs. Creed is going to howl murder until the sun is scared to come out. Maybe the girl knows something. Or maybe she's hiding him and we can all relax."

I told myself I would have thought of that, except that I was really exhausted. The bell rang.

Bo flicked the cigarette into the dirt and glared at me. "Listen, Adams. Whatever you do, don't come up to me in school. Don't even look my way, okay? Ali don't need that right now. If something happens—like you hear something from your old lady, or something awful comes down—just come out here. Inside, you don't know me from Adam. Got it?"

I got it, but I didn't like it. I figured,
Why should I be scared of all those morons passing judgment on me?
But I remembered how I felt in homeroom, and I also knew how Ali would feel. She had enough to cope with.

"I'm going home, anyway," I told them. I didn't feel like being forced into any of these retarded lying games.