The Body of Christopher Creed (2 page)

"Don't give me this I'm-so-innocent routine," I muttered. "You know you bug people. You've probably been beaten on your whole life. And you've probably been letting yourself off the hook lately by saying that once you got to be a junior it wouldn't matter. Well, you're a
senior,
Leo. It does matter. You're in my personal space, so get out of it. Get out of my room. And next time you come in, knock first, got it?"

He backed up, looking all astonished and giving me a few more
Jesus Christs.
I didn't let my eyes wander off of him, though it was hard. I had to keep telling myself that Dr. Fahdi would have said that it's okay, it's healthy, it's good for me. I told myself that people like Leo need you to get tough, or they don't get it. Once the door was shut and he was gone, I told myself the truth, which was that I had been talking to Leo but seeing Creed. And Leo wasn't nearly as bad. I had just treated another person like shit.

Torey, you leave home to escape some stupid thing that makes zero sense. Jesus Christ, are you ever going to get over this?
My fingers were still shaking as I hit the
ON
button and watched the computer go through its steps until the "document recovered" bar flashed on the screen. I relaxed some and looked over the letter, making sure none of the characters had been wiped out.

Dear Alex Healy,

There was a kid in my town named Chris Creed. I wrote the attachment about his disappearance. If the name Chris Creed doesn't mean anything to you, then forget I even bothered you. You can hit "delete" right now. Or if you're into reading stories about people's lives, I don't have anything to hide and you might get into it. It's about everyone you know.

I dragged my eyes out of the middle of the letter and moved the mouse slowly up to the message window and clicked on "attach document." I saw it there—Creed.doc—and the mouse crept down to highlight the file I had not looked at in a year.

Are you ready to go back, Torey? Two years ago you were happy and innocent and oh-so-fucking normal. Are you ready to find the point where you got crushed, look it in the eye, and understand?

"Creed.doc" was still highlighted. Writing it was supposed to bring me some quote-unquote
healing,
at least that's what Dr. Fahdi had said. Maybe it did; who knows? I got a load off my chest. But I was looking for other things, more important things, like the peace you get when things make sense and life seems fair. I never got that peace. Some nights I would remember and write and remember and write, and I was sure I was just being Dr. Frankenstein, trying to re-create a dead human. The dead never come back like they were. Some nights I got convinced I was creating a monster.

I took it in for Dr. Fahdi when I was finished, and I remember him holding all those pages and pretending his arm was weighed down—or maybe it actually was weighed down. And I remember he said to me, "That's an amazing amount of writing for a young man your age, Torey." And I said, "Yeah, well, I got a load off my chest." It wasn't like I had a whole lot of other stuff to do.

But you finish something like that, and the truth strikes you. I knew then that laying out the truth for a shrink wasn't enough. I had to get out of Steepleton. You can't find your life, or your peace, in the middle of a bezillion eyes staring at you.

Creed.doc had been sent across the Internet about eighty times, but the last time I actually looked at the file was when I ran it through the spell-checker before handing it over to Dr. Fahdi. Maybe I hadn't needed to look at it since. Maybe I used to remember every single word. Maybe, finally, I was starting to forget.

I arrowed up and shut the window. The letter bobbed around in front of me, all hazy and floating.

Alex Healy, what I'm hoping is that the name Chris Creed does mean something to you. That probably means that, somehow, I have struck gold.

There's nothing unusual about a runaway these days. There's also not much original about a suicide or a murder. The weirdest fact about Chris Creed's disappearance was that he was just plain gone. There was no trail of blood, not even a
drop
of blood. No piece of clothing on the side of the road. No runaway bus-ticket stub. No money missing from his bank account. No empty bottle that had been filled with pills the day before he disappeared. No missing razor blades. No
nothing.
The only thing we knew was that Chris Creed was not abducted
compulsively by a stranger—because there was a note, which was written at least twenty-four hours before he turned up missing.

Steepleton could have dealt with a runaway, a suicide, an abduction, or even a murder. Other towns survive them. But there are two things our town couldn't cope with, the first being a very strange mess that occurs when the weirdest kid in town suddenly disappears. He's gone, but his weirdness seems to linger. It grabs at the most normal and happy kids, like some sort of sick joke. And then it's
those
people who are acting weird. The other thing the town can't face up to is the black hole itself—the thing that comes out of nowhere and eats a kid alive and doesn't leave a hair from his head.

You can't have a funeral, because there's no body and no evidence that he actually died. But to push for some big-time
Unsolved Mysteries
hunt, a town has to feel sorry for how they mistreated the weird guy who's gone. To feel genuinely sorry, you have to be honest. And Steepleton needs its lies like a toad needs bugs.

To hear some people tell it, I saw Creed dead. I saw him dead, and it made me crazy. There are other people who add to that version of the story—that I actually helped kill him. They say I can't face what I saw,
or what I did,
depending on who's telling the story. They would all say I'm on this giant denial trip if they ever guessed I was trying to find him. Or they'd say that I'm trying to prove my innocence with a search that I know won't lead anywhere. I
am
looking for Creed, and I admit my bolts were not screwed in so tight for a while there. But I've never told myself any lies about it. And I'm sure Chris Creed is alive.

I guess it's up to you to decide whether I'm nuts or normal, and since this is just the Internet, I don't give a
rip what strangers think. It's bad enough to put up with what some of my neighbors think. Steepleton is like most other small towns out there, I guess. Small-town people live up each other's butts, and some people will tell stories about who stinks the worst. I wonder if small towns are America's final kick in the ass insofar as prejudice and judgment are concerned. There are black families in Steepleton, a Japanese family, a couple Saudis, one family of rich Pakistanis. It's not a racial thing like my mom coped with, growing up there. But it's there, part of the little-town mentality, that thing that makes people want to sniff out neighbors who are weird or less fortunate, and talk about those people's bad luck to establish their own goodness. There are also some people who are very sympathetic about what happened to me, and they have been pretty cool.

So when I left, it wasn't entirely to get away from small-town smell-my-butts. I left to get away from death and the fear of ghosts. Small towns grow out of the woods, and the woods are dark and scary. I did see death, and I have seen a ghost. But neither of them was Creed. I will swear to that until I die, though there will always be those feebs who don't believe me. It's their problem, not mine.

Alex Healy, if you are who I think you are, everything I have said in this letter and everything you're going to read in this story will make perfect sense. If it makes no sense, then just write me off as another Internet loony who '$ suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. That part has been medically established.

Three people will bear up to the truth in this attachment. My mother—not that a mom counts for much while standing in her kid's defense. There's a girl, too, who's got a reputation as being, well, not so upright.
And then there's the town's chief of police, an African American who walked the beat in Atlantic City for fourteen years before becoming chief in Steepleton. His name is Douglas Rye, and he became chief about two weeks after Chris Creed disappeared. He read this story and will vouch for every word.

I dropped the window down again, took a breath of cool air, and hit "attach." I stared at the name Creed.doc. It was like the door to a tomb. All I had to do was hit "restore," double click, and the stone could get rolled away. Rereading it away from Steepleton might do a lot for me, but it wasn't as important as finding Chris Creed. I decided,
Attach now, read later. You will find your peace when you find Creed out there somewhere.

But I knew
later
was no further off than when I hit "send." I was ready to go back to death in the woods. It had taken me a year of being away, but I felt my sympathy rising for myself at sixteen, back when I hadn't written much more than a book report and a few dumb songs. I had to see what I was like back then.

Alex Healy, I swear the following account contains no lies. It is one-hundred-percent accurate. People can love their lies, tell their lies, believe their own lies until hell pays a visit. But this whole story is true. That's the point of it.

Victor "Torey" Adams,
Formerly Mr. Ail-American Football Kicker,
Blond Geeky Haircut for Little League
and All That, Formerly of Steepleton,
Southern New Jersey

Being that Sunday
is the first day of the week, I guess Sunday was a fitting day for my life to start to crash. I guess in some people's minds Sunday is an unusual day for bad luck because it's a religious day, and people's lives should get better on a religious day, or at least remain equalized until Monday. I guess those people's lives change on a Tuesday or a Friday or something.

I like to think of it as starting on a Sunday. And that has always made me think it had something to do with God, though I still can't say what, for sure. I have my ideas.

There are plenty of people out there who would probably ask, "How can you imagine God in a foul bunch of happenings, you pig?" I wouldn't like to answer that, except to say that I don't imagine He was up there asleep.

I ended up in the front pew at church—me and my best friend, Alex Arrington. It was a small church, but most of the people in Steepleton went there and made their kids go there. We'd each had the standard argument with our parents—that while we had nothing against God, we didn't learn anything, because church was too boring, and they should not be forcing us to go now that we were juniors. I don't know how Alex's parents combated him. But my dad said he stood by his answer from when I had argued, "Now that I'm a sophomore" and "Now that I'm a freshman." I don't remember those arguments. But arguing with our families about any religious matter always seemed kind of purposeless.

Around Steepleton people could quote scripture, and what do you say back to that?
So, who says the Bible is true?
I wouldn't even push it that far. But I would think,
If the Bible is so magical that people around here quote it all the time, how come it can't perform the magic that would keep church from being boring?
Whatever. We always waited until the last minute to go in. And since nobody likes to sit up front in a church, if you came in last, you were stuck in the front pew.

I looked down the row past Alex to Ryan Bowen and the Kyle twins, Eddie and Pat. Sitting still for an hour was pretty much an endurance test for those three, probably more so than football practice. They're too crazy to sit still, and I don't think they know how to use their thoughts for entertainment value. I don't think those three ever had a thought that went much deeper than,
What's to eat?

Reverend Harmon started with the morning announcements, but my brain was already hooked into the stained-glass window beyond Pat Kyle's head.

The stained glass had been there as long as I could remember, but recently it had started bugging me. I had heard somewhere not long ago that Christ was crucified naked. But in this stained glass, and in every other crucifixion picture I had ever seen, Christ was wearing this little cloth, like a loincloth. It was as if the story had been added to, so as not to disgust people too much. I just got to thinking about that, I don't know why. I wondered if it was a good thing to change a story because the truth was too disgusting. I even asked Reverend Harmon when he came over one night to visit my dad. He said that the truth was less important, in this case, than the impact the truth would have on people.

I remember it gave me a twitch when he said that. I'm not sure why, I mean, it was bad enough to see Jesus hanging there, without Him being naked. But it struck me that the Church is always saying you shouldn't lie, and here was one. Pastor Harmon makes dumb puns all the time, and he said to me, "Torey, it's not a lie. It's a
cover-up.
"

Alex's church bulletin caught my eye. He was writing on it:
You 're staring at my ear.

He handed me his pen, and I wrote on mine,
Above your ear.

He glanced over the Kyle twins' heads, at the air, at the stained-glass window, at the ceiling, and he sighed.

He wrote next,
What are you thinking about, O abnormal one?

After a minute I decided on,
Band. Who's coming over to strum 'n 'drum?

My friends had some clue I was abnormal, though they didn't know the full extent of it. They knew I could stare off into space sometimes and not be hearing them until they shoved me. But they didn't know I could have long conversations with myself about whether Christ should be wearing a loincloth or not. I handed Alex back the pen, thinking I was a fine one to talk about the Church lying.