The Danger of Being Me (2 page)

Ben broke out into sudden fullbawling.  My eyes went wide again.  I looked to Phil, silently blaming him for this turn.  He should know not to let me handle any part of this mess.  What the hell did he think I knew about girls?

"Besides," I tried, "we're going to the high school next year.  Think of all the new girls we're gonna meet."

Ben raised his swollen eyes to mine.  He blinked.  For one glorious moment, I entertained the desperate hope that I had said just the right thing at the right moment.  Then my optimism shattered like glass against concrete as Ben wailed, "I don't want a new girl!  I want
Helen!"

He crumpled into himself, dropping his face into his arms on the tabletop.  I looked to Phil.  He barely glanced up.  I stood from my seat.  "I need a drink."

Phil silently begged me to stay.  I silently told him to get bent as I crossed the room toward the wall facing the parking lot.  I weaved between the tables, passing clusters of students, and saw the drama at our table playing itself out with different characters at many of those tables.

I stepped to the wide bay window, looked out into the crowded parking lot outside foregrounding an early night.  The light of dead stars and unknowable galaxies dotted the darkness.  The Corona Borealis sparkled like a scythe, and Orion winked from the edge of the horizon.  The infinite incomprehensibility of the universe twirled beyond the borders of the world.  I couldn't help smiling.

A flash of icy water against my lips snapped me into my head, and I sipped.  Then I stood again, toweling my cheeks with my shirtsleeve as I glanced once more to the skyscape outside. I turned to cross the room, took a step, and heard a sniffle.  Then I spotted the lone chair facing the parking lot, a girl huddled on the seat, one leg pulled up to her chest with her chin on her knee.

She wore her gentle russet curls tied back with a sheer scarf into a ponytail that looked freshly washed and hastily bundled.  Her bouquet of spearmint and lime flooded my lungs, making me tipsy.  I watched her for a moment, not moving, unsure.  When she made no more sound, I took two guarded steps toward her.  "You okay?"

She looked up then, eyes red and cheeks flushed.  She squinted at me, and whatever she saw in my face made her catch her breath.  She looked as if she saw a ghost in my brushed-chrome eyes.  I looked at her swollen face, realized what a ridiculous question I'd asked.  "Sorry."

"Who are you?" she demanded.

"Michael," I told her.  I shrugged.  "Just Michael."

She watched me stand there, and waited for me to walk away.  When I didn't, she told me, "My boyfriend dumped me."  Somehow that uninflected observation felt like an accusation.  As if I were somehow to blame.  She might have been telling me to spite me.  "My
ex
-boyfriend."

I said nothing.  The girl turned to look out the window into the crowded parking lot, dismissing me.  She stared out into the night for ten seconds, and when I still didn't walk away, she shot me a look.  So I asked her, "Why?"

For one glorious moment, I thought the girl would try to kick me in the shin.  Then that impulse faded from her face, and a strange confusion moved in to replace it.

"Who cares," she spit.  "He's a spoiled asshole."

I nodded.  "Then you're better off."

She looked up, considering me.  Taking my measure.  The February moonlight splashed across her face, and her caramel eyes glittered like golden honey, taking my breath away.  She stood at a point where two roads diverged into a yellow wood, and she looked down each as far as she could, to where they bent away into the undergrowth.

I waited on one of those roads.  I didn't know which.  Her choice made all the difference.  And after a handful of seconds that felt like hours, she made her decision when she told me, "You're named after an archangel."

I flashed a brief smile.  "It's a lot to live up to."

I knew that I was staring at her.  But I couldn't help it.  Because even raw from crying, those caramel eyes still sparkled.  She watched me, and she blinked.

"Amber," she told me.

I shook my head.  She could read my thoughts.  I was certain of it.  She could pluck them out of the frothing mist that curled along the coastline of my mind, like bits of debris floating across the surf.  Of course she could.

She held me with those caramel eyes.  The corner of her mouth twitched as she told me, "It's my name."

3.

I bent toward the newsroom computer, and I wrote.

Eight o'clock came and went, and no one mourned its passing.  Elton John's tenor rang out from the boombox, insisting that Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids.  It's cold as Hell.  I spent an hour digging into the layers of language, brushing away stray phrases to get to that one image that I could never, ever forget.

Those caramel eyes.  I couldn't help laughing at that.  Poets have glorified eyes since time out of mind, and we will for as long as men can breath and eyes can see.

I scrutinized, memorized, immortalized every aspect of that image, and arranged them into a form that has served lyricists for centuries.  In the tradition of Da Lentini and Petrarca and Shakespeare, I made sense of the absurd and the arbitrary.  I returned to that first brilliant image like a refrain, drawn back to that first indelible memory.

That image served as the spine of the poem.  Those caramel eyes.  With that in place, I just picked up the rest of the pieces and put them where they belonged.  When I typed in the final line, inverting the opening line to close the circuit, a charge shot through me.  The fine hairs at the back of my neck stood out as I reread the entire text.

Another masterpiece.  Finished, and free.

I printed the poem, snapped up the page, plucked two markers out of a cup on the desk, found a manila envelope on the center table.  I crossed to the cabinet by the door and hauled out the student directory.  I leafed through the C section until I found Amber V. Chandler's homeroom listed as room C216, on the second floor at the opposite end of the building.  I returned the book, slid the poem into the envelope unfolded, and wrote Amber's name on the front in black.  Then I uncapped the red marker and reached to the upper left corner of the envelope.

The
Creek Reader
got more than its fair share of mileage out of the Jack of Hearts story.  One of the girls on the staff received the first poem, because that guaranteed that it would get noticed.  Winsome Donne edited the paper's poetry section, and she reprinted the poem in the next issue under an anonymous attribution, asking the author to come forward and take his credit.

By October of last year, Ethan caught the story after hearing gossip about seven girls who received similar anonymous poems.  He interviewed each girl, and concluded that Jack chose girls who were perfectly ordinary.  He shared this insight with only me, Phil, and Ben.  I suggested that he identify the recipients by month like Playboy centerfolds.  If Jack intended to celebrate the common woman, I suggested, then we would help.

We would turn them into celebrities.

I pressed the red marker to the manila envelope, and grinned.  When a junior in the Student Council received the first poem of our senior year last September, I invented the theory that the Jack of Hearts as fictitious.

I, too, shared this with only Phil, Ben, and Ethan.  I theorized that the girls receiving poems actually wrote them for themselves in a bid for attention.  Only a poet might hatch such a scheme, I reasoned, and that implicated Winnie, the first recipient, as the mastermind.

It was part joke and mostly deflection.  And it wasn’t a terrible theory, except that I already knew the truth.

But Ben ran with it.  He wrote a sidebar commentary to go with Ethan's article in the October issue, questioning the authenticity of the Jack of Hearts letters, insinuating that the recipients manufactured counterfeit popularity.

The reaction was immediate.  By lunch on the day that the October issue circulated, Ben couldn't walk down the hall without being verbally assaulted by female students.

And it worked out perfectly for me.  Ben's crudeness drew suspicion away from me without vilifying me.  Some people actually believed that Ben himself secretly wrote the Jack of Hearts, and that he meant for his crude commentary to deflect suspicion away from himself.

I sketched the capital J in red into the left corner above Amber's name, then drew a scarlet heart beneath the letter to complete the ideogram.  I spun the envelope around 180 degrees and put a second symbol in the opposite corner.

It liked the work.  I nodded, and grinned.

I attached two loops of masking tape to the back of the envelope, threw on my jacket, and started out the door.  I jogged the hallway, took the stairs three at a time, trotted around the horseshoe of Wing C. I passed Room 215 and slowed, reaching the door to Amber's homeroom with the envelope at my side.  I watched that door standing closed, likely locked, waiting to be tested or abandoned.

Or merely to be marked.

I waited, not knowing why.  Seconds ticked by.  The time felt out of joint.  Uneasy energy pulsed in my temples, thrilling me, filling me with fantastic terrors.  This moment had not been written into the story.  I was sure of that.

I considered that door for longer than any door ought to be considered, and I felt suddenly, hopelessly, out of place.  This felt like a mistake.  I knew that I should turn back, go downstairs to the newsroom.  Pick a different girl to name Miss March 1998.  Leave this door unmarked.

Fiery defiance flashed across my mind.  I slapped the envelope to the door, pressing the adhesive to the wood.

Then I nodded, and turned without another thought.  I headed back to the stairwell and climbed up another flight.  Three balconies made up the third floor, looking down on the auditorium.  A single corridor ran behind them, and I pushed through the door that connected to the highest landing, moving toward the far end of the hall.

After six hours, I needed the cold taste of fresh air.  I climbed the four metal stairs to the far door, hit the bar at the center, and threw the door open.  The fire-alarm that should have sounded didn't.  Teachers whose passion for education rivaled only their addiction to nicotine disabled that alarm long and long ago.  I spilled out into the night, crossed the roof to the rampart above the courtyard.

Merciful darkness pressed down on the campus.  The door clicked shut behind me.  Headlights flared below as a Nissan Sentra swept through the parking lot toward the curving two-lane drive that connected the high school campus to Wenro County Community College.

I pulled the collar of my jacket higher around my neck.  The light of dead stars and unknowable galaxies dotted the sky like crumbs of glass thrown across macadam.  Orion winked in his winter vista.  I smiled at up the Hunter.

Fresh headlights ignited below.  A guttural thumping rose up, reciting the poetry of the urban soul.  A lowered Dodge Neon raced through the parking lot, taking its place near the gym among a dozen other vehicles.  More than a thousand teenagers attended Prophecy Creek High School, but only a fraction of them see the school at night.  Only a slim minority of that fraction sees it from up here.

I stood on the verge of cosmic insignificance, and felt the soft breath of nothingness on my face.  I savored the solace of the empty places, and stared unflinchingly into the abyss as the abyss stared unblinkingly back into me.

I saw what few see.  I followed my own solitary pursuit, and I loved it.  Authors peer into the dark corners where others refuse to look.  That is our duty.  To find the truth inside the lies.  The only truth that matters.

I laughed at myself.  Numbness crept up my arms.  I leaned on the rampart, watching the industrial landscape below.  A wide stone staircase rose up from the far side of the courtyard, ascending to a concourse that stretched back thirty feet to another staircase that led up to the student parking lot beyond.  A brick island stood at the center of that concourse, containing a patch of dehydrated dirt where nothing more than weeds had ever grown.

A bitter breeze sliced across the open grounds, carrying a far-flung grumble of thunder like the night trying to clear its throat.  I turned to the horizon, and saw heat-lightning jittering distantly in the sky to the south, somewhere over Prophet's Point.  Electricity flickered between the charcoal thunderheads, distinguishing them for one instant.

Light twitched across the darkness, and I felt it sizzle in my blood. The visceral thoughts of the universe arced across those black synapses, and I stared beyond the borders of the world.  I felt the elusive texture of eternity.  Because up here, in the spectral darkness and the solace of the empty places, I felt the unspoken voice of the universe brush itself against my mind.  I was certain of it.

Sure.  Standing on a rooftop at eight-thirty at night, I could believe that sort of thing.  I shook my head, and I laughed at the thought.  I couldn't help myself.

Because at that moment, I thought of Regina, and Phil, and Ben.  And the soapstone boulders out there on the timeless island of Prophet's Point, and an operating room.  And lightning.  Of course.  Always the lightning.

4.

It was the eighth day of a sweltering July heatwave.

"You know he's never going to make a move on her."

I looked up from my copy of the
Wenro County Register
.  Phil watched me from across the table, hunched over an open book.  Three more volumes stood in a stack at his right while a closed binder lay on the desk.  He glanced to his right and I looked to my left, spotting Ben from across the library at the microfilm reader.  I shook my head.

Ben sat at the machine as he had for nearly an hour, scrolling through eighty-year-old issues of the
Philadelphia Bulletin
.  He had talked Phil into stopping at the Dickinson Union Library on our way out to the Winslow Graham Mall, and when he stepped up to the circulation desk, he asked the girl: "Read any good books lately?"