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I laughed.
 
“Sure it was.
 
Look, just take the chair.
 
It’s not a big deal.
 
Nobody’s going to think you got rich overnight and went on some crazy spending spree.”
 
I nodded behind him to the trailer.
 
“I mean, come on.
 
Look at where you live.”

“Betsy’s a fine home.”

“You’ve named your trailer?”

“Baby, when you don’t have a woman, you make up something that sounds like a woman.
 
With Betsy here, the least I can do is call out a woman’s name every now and then.
 
‘Betsy, I’m home!’
 
She’s Betsy to me and to the cats.
 
Best woman on the block.”

“A little rusty in the hips.”

“Who isn’t at my age?”

“You’re, like, what?
 
Fifty?”

“I’m sixty-two and feel every bit of it.”

I couldn’t help a smile.
 
“I suppose I should go.”

“Where you off to?”

“Think I might fix the car.”

“Too soon.
 
Give it another couple days.”

He was right again.
 
No car with that sort of damage could be fixed that quickly.
 
I looked at him with an admiration I’d never felt toward him before.
 
Who the hell knew that creepy Jim, of all people, was going to turn out to be one of the wisest men I knew?
 
For years, I’d judged him because of his shoddy looks, because he drank heavily and because he was poor.
 
I’d judged him without knowing him.
 
Isn’t that what people had done to me my whole life?

“You want to do dinner some night?”

He was moving toward the trailer.
 
A group of cats curled around his feet as he spoke over his shoulder.
 
“Sure, we can do dinner.
 
Whenever you want.”
 
He tapped his head.
 
“Just send me a message so I can plan.”

“Will do.”

He reached the door and turned to me.
 
On his face was a sheet of concern.
 
“You watch yourself tonight,” he said.
 
“I’ve got a feeling something’s going to go down soon.
 
Can’t tell when, but it’s coming.
 
Just be ready for it.”

“I’ll let you know if something happens.”

“You do that.”

He stepped inside and closed the door.
 
And then something odd happened.
 
There was a flash and I could sense a faint glow around the trailer.

He wasn’t taking chances.

He just put a shield around it.

chapter thirty-one

I didn’t live far from Jim, so I walked home.
 
When I got there, Alex was waiting for me on my doorstep.
 
He was reading a book and looked up as I approached.
 

“Mind if we talk?” he asked.

“About last night?”

“No, Seth.
 
I want to talk about girls and math class.
 
Maybe shoot the shit over how the Yankees are doing.
 
What do you think?”

“I’m a Sox fan.”

He raised an eyebrow.
 
“Well, at least if we had that talk, it would be nearly as interesting.”

“If we’re going to talk about what happened last night, I want Jennifer here.
 
I don’t want to do this twice.
 
You two mean a lot to me and I’m going to tell you the truth.
 
Call and see if she can come over.”

He pulled out his cell, spoke with her for a minute and then switched it off.
 
“She’s coming.”

When she came, I invited them inside.
 

“You’re right,” Jennifer said when she walked inside.
 
“We do need to work on the layout of this living room.
 
Why is that chair over there?”

“I don’t know.
 
I told you I’m no designer.”

She turned to me and smiled over her shoulder as she walked into the space.
 
I thought she was beautiful.
 
I wished I had the nerve to ask her out.
 
I knew I was falling hard for her, but how could I approach her when it would mean certain danger for her if I did?
 
To protect her, I needed to keep my distance.
 
We were friends.
 
That was enough.
 

“I love it, Seth,” she said.
 
“I love the furnishings and the kitchen is beyond.
 
You even have granite.
 
I think you did well.”

“Must cost a fortune to live here,” Alex said, and the clipped way he said it suggested he wasn’t happy with me at all.
 
Jennifer also caught his attitude and then slowly turned to look at us.
 
She was no fool.
 
“Why am I here?”

“Seth has something he wants to share with us.”

She looked at me and shrugged.
 
“So, what’s up?”

She didn’t know anything, certainly not what happened last night.
 
So, the only way to do this correctly was to begin at the beginning, when creepy Jim gave me the amulet that first day of school, thinking it would protect me.
 

I told them all of it, from changing my appearance to seeing the eight who murdered my parents to how I was making them pay for it now.
 
I kept nothing from them—I just spilled it.
 
Alex didn’t show much surprise because he already witnessed what I was capable of doing, but Jennifer was transfixed, especially when I described what happened the night before.

“I want to see it,” she said.
 
Her cheeks were flushed and I could tell she was uncomfortable.
 
I could feel her mind working.
 
A part of her didn’t believe me and who could blame her?
 
“Do something,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Lift yourself off the ground.
 
You said you could do it.
 
I want to see it.”

I did it for her, raising myself off the living room’s hardwood floor.
 
She covered her mouth with her hand.
 
She looked at the space beneath my feet and the floor and seemed to be searching for some way to call this out as a hoax, that we were just having one over on her.
 

And so I moved right and left, dipped and rose.
 
I didn’t see judgment on her face.
 
Instead, there was confusion mixed with a trace of awe, wonderment and something else.
 
Fear.
 
Of me or for me, I didn’t know, but it was there.
 
A part of her was scared.

“How do you explain this?” Alex asked.

I told them what Jim told me.
 

“The amulets are Native American?”

“He
thinks
they’re Native American.
 
He doesn’t know for sure.
 
All he knows is that they’re old and that each is a piece of someone’s skull.”

“How many others are there?”

“Jim has two.
 
I have two.
 
Another one is out there.”

“Who has it?”

“Don’t know.”

“But you’re probably going to find out, aren’t you?”

“Maybe.
 
They might come for it.
 
They might not.
 
We don’t know.”

“That thing in the air last night.
 
The woman.
 
What was she?”

“A witch.”

“So, now we’ve got witches, too.
 
What does she want with you?”

“Guess.”

“She’s a witch.
 
Why would she need the amulets?”

“Jim said they’d make her even more powerful.”

He shook his head at me and looked away.
 
It was obvious he was either pissed off at me or disappointed in me.
 
It seemed like a bit of both.

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“Don’t you regret any of this?”

“Any of what?”

“Seth, you’ve pretty much become a bully yourself.
 
You’ve become the very person you hate.
 
You’ve hurt a lot of people.”

“If you’re talking about the people who murdered my parents, you’re right.
 
And I guess I have become a bully—to them.
 
And no, I don’t regret a minute of it.
 
They deserved everything they had coming to them.
 
Do I need to remind you why I’ve done what I’ve done?
 
It wasn’t just some random act of cruelty that drove me.
 
It was revenge.
 
My parents are dead.
 
Those fuckers came to our house with gasoline, they poured it around the trailer and they cooked my parents alive.
 
I watched my father burn.
 
I almost died myself.
 
Is that graphic enough for you?
 
Do you want me to describe the smell?”

He held up his hand in a dismissive gesture, which pissed me off.
 
Jennifer came into the living room and joined him on the sofa.

“You know what, Alex?” I said.
 
“I don’t think you get it.
 
I don’t think you want to get it.
 
You’ve had it easy your whole life.”

“You don’t know anything about my life, Seth.”

“Fair enough.
 
So, here’s what I’m going to do.
 
I’m going to really open up to each of you and show you my life.
 
Then you sit there and judge me.”
 

I tapped into the large, flat-screen television resting on the stand opposite them and turned it on.
 
Snow appeared on the screen.
 
Sound hissed into the room.
 
“You’ll only ever know what I’ve been through if you see it and feel it for yourselves.”

“What does that mean?” Jennifer said.

“You’ll see.
 
For a few minutes, you’re going to know exactly what it’s like to be me.”
 

Before they could speak, before they could even react, I shut my eyes and tapped into the movies of my memory.
 
Nightmares unraveled there, which I cast onto the screen.
 
The snow and the hissing stopped, and then they saw and heard all the moments I’d never forget.
 

I was seven and Hastings had me by the back of the neck, forcing my face down into a pile of snow where a dog recently had taken a shit.
 
Same year, only now it was spring.
 
Tyler had just bashed me in the nose during recess and I went to one of my teachers, Mrs. Combs, to ask her to keep him away from me.
 
A gaggle of her favorite girls were with her, just as they always were, kissing her ass and happy to be her pets.
 
When they saw me, they squealed at the sheer amount of blood coming out of my nose.
 

Combs looked down at me with that doughy, angry face of hers and said with her lipstick-heavy mouth:
 
“You probably deserved it.”
 

I probably deserved it.
 
This coming from a teacher.
 
This coming from someone who had the authority to put an end to it.
 
It’s something I’d lived with for years.

The scenes kept coming.
 
I drilled into the amulets and forced them to allow me to remember the worst moments, some of which I’d stuffed so deep into another part of me, even I didn’t remember them because they were too painful to remember.
 

But there they were.
 
A group of kids in middle school holding me down while they burned lit cigarettes into my arms and stubbed one into my ear.
 
Ginny Gibson prompting Rob Maxwell to take the fire extinguisher off the wall outside homeroom and crack it against my spine, which put me in the hospital for two weeks with dislocated discs.
 
Joe Whitehill drop-kicking me in the jaw in gym class when no one was looking.
 
My father beating me when he lost his job, turned to booze and became someone I no longer recognized.

And then the room was filled with every name I ever had been called.
 

It was a bizarre, rhythmic, cacophony of sound—a jumbled chant of the most damning, hurtful words you could imagine—and it literally filled the space as I turned up with volume while other images of my wonderful, spectacular, worthwhile life appeared for them on screen.
 

I opened my eyes for the first time and saw that they were indeed feeling it.
 
Not physically—I’d never do that to them.
 
They were feeling it emotionally.
 
Now they knew what it feels like to know in your soul that you’re nothing better than a day-old piece of shit.
 
What it’s like to be here on Earth only to be abused.
 
What it’s like to know that somebody could stop it all—a teacher, a principal—and help you get through it, though no one ever did that for me until the day I met Alex on the bus and later when Jim gave me the amulet.

I kept at it, the images racing across the screen.
  

They saw what I saw the night my parents were murdered.
 
I made sure they saw every face of those who came out of the night and toward the trailer.
 
I let them watch exactly what each was doing.
 
And then I showed them my father, frantically and pathetically throwing a pail of water into the center of a trailer engulfed in the very flames that consumed him while I had no choice but to leave him and my mother behind in an effort to save myself.
 
I showed them at the funeral, not fully understanding the depth of the situation but nevertheless supportive and there for me.