Spontaneous. Aaron Starmer
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not a suspect. She’s not a suspect.” Dad said it twice because he thinks if you say something twice, the more likely it is that it will be true.
“Well,” Frolic replied, “I’ll be seeing to it that the world knows and understands that soon enough. You have my word.”
I had to say it, so I said it. “And you have ketchup on your face.”
as you might have guessed
Mystery Texter didn’t show up at my house that day or the next. School was shuttered for the entire week, and all its homecoming festivities were put on hold, so the guy certainly had his opportunities to pop in. It’s not like he even had funerals to attend. The Chen family didn’t have the money that the Ogden family had and rumors were that they’d only be inviting close friends and family to Brian’s memorial service. Fine by me. More crying wasn’t going to help a thing.
The support group was canceled because Vince called it quits. He sent us all an email saying he would be pursuing other interests. Presumably, not hanging out with kids made of nitroglycerin. Who could blame him? My parents tried to book some immediate extra sessions with Linda for me, but she wasn’t returning their calls. Either she was throwing in the towel as well, or she was too busy fielding requests from new patients. It’s tough enough when one kid in your school blows up, even if you don’t really know her. When a second kid blows up . . . well, I don’t care if you’ve never even heard of him. You take it personally.
“Kids blow up now. And I’m a kid. Therapy please.”
Every news organization in the world had arrived. Perched on a gorge and overlooking town, the Hotel Covington’s parking lot was a hive of vans with giant retractable antennae. You couldn’t go anywhere without someone shoving a microphone in your face. On the other hand, you couldn’t stay home and zone out behind the TV or mess around on the internet because Covington High was all anyone could talk or write about. You couldn’t even watch things on mute, because people were making explosion gestures with their hands. This included newscasters, which is a bit unprofessional and undignified if you ask me.
To keep my mind off things, I spent a lot of time with Tess McNulty. She hated terms like “bestie” and “BFF,” but Tess and I were two people who knew how to best distract each other, so I think we qualified. We’d been inseparable since elementary school and, at the age of nine, had decided to grow old together.
We were spending a few weeks down the shore at my grandparents’ place after Tess’s dad took off on her and her mother. One evening, the two of us were riding our bikes past these gorgeous Victorian houses along the beachfront, and we spied two old ladies sitting in beach chairs at the edge of a porch. They were wearing kimonos, holding hands, and smoking a hookah while dipping their toes in the sand. Which was obviously adorable.
“Let’s be those old ladies, always and forever,” we pledged with the sunset as our witness.
Ten years later and the pledge remained intact. Only now we were getting around in cars. Since I never drove and she always did, Tess was the captain. And since she rarely partook in mind-altering substances and I often did, I was the wacky sidekick.
In the first few days following the demise of Brian Chen, we must have logged five hundred miles on her Civic. She had a playlist called Drive, Fucker, Drive!, which consisted mostly of songs with loads of swears. Hip-hop, obviously, but also some punk and even some country of the shit-kicking variety. We played it full blast with the windows down and drove west into the hills and farmlands near Pennsylvania, where the autumn colors were popping. We turned off the GPS and took roads we didn’t know.
This was something we’d done before, and almost always the plan was to get into adventures. Though our adventures usually consisted of getting dirty looks from old men as we pulled into rural gas stations. It’s illegal to pump your own gas in New Jersey, so Tess and I would sit in the car with the stereo still on, singing along to songs about being “higher than a motherfucker,” and the geezers would stand there shaking their heads and mumbling under their breaths until we drove off in a fit of giggles.
Of course, Tess was never higher than a motherfucker. She was responsible like that. Me, not so much. For instance, the Dalton twins had sold me some shrooms a few months before. At a farmer’s market, appropriately enough. I’d only taken them once, during a camping trip to the Poconos. They freaked me out at first, but then the experience mellowed and I eventually became “one with nature” and decided I was willing to give them another shot. I’d stashed them in the base of my bedside lamp and had been saving them for an outdoor concert or some event where my ermahgerd-your-voice-is-full-of-rainbows! shtick would be tolerated.
During one of our drives away from memories of Katelyn and Brian, swear-singing with Tess wasn’t helping me forget enough, so I insisted we stop by a Dunkin’ Donuts. I bought a steaming-hot pumpkin latte and I dropped a double dose of shrooms in it.
“You’re gonna make yourself sick,” Tess said.
“The opposite,” I said. “You brew them in liquid first to make sure you don’t get sick. That’s what Native Americans do.”
“In pumpkin lattes?”
“Well, they had pumpkins at least. Thanksgiving. Pumpkin pie. Duh.”
“Yeah. Duh.”
Tess was right. Twenty minutes later I was puking along the side of the road somewhere in the Pinelands. Tess rubbed my back and I imagined her hand was a bear’s paw—but not a scary bear’s paw, a cuddly bear’s paw, a cartoon bear’s paw—and it was at that moment I realized that shit was about to get loopy.
“Someone loves me,” I told her.
“I love you, baby,” Tess said.
“I know that, but I mean a phantom. Someone who lives in space between the spaces.”
“Jesus? Dumbledore?”
“Don’t joke, Tess. You haven’t got your real eyes on.” I meant this last part literally, because instead of her regular brown eyes, she had glimmering diamonds in her head.
“Let’s get you in the car. You can lie down in the back. I’ll play something acoustic. Something soothing.”
“Invigorating. Invigorating. Invigorating,” I said.
“Soothing,” Tess repeated in a voice that fit the word, and she guided me into the backseat.
“He reads my mind,” I said with a gasp. “Do you think he has especially big ears, like satellites that can read brain waves?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Tess said.
As she pushed me on the chest and down into the seat, I handed her my phone, which was queued up to my texts. She took a second to read them and handed the phone back. “See. He loves me,” I said.
Tess leaned in and kissed me on the cheek and I felt little happy ants on my skin. “Well, whoever he is, he isn’t here. And I’m guessing he hasn’t shown up at your door yet.”
“Nope. He’s a chicken. Bock-bock-bock,” I clucked, and I wondered why people said chickens sounded like that because I wasn’t sure what they really sounded like, but I knew it wasn’t that. Definitely not that.
My feet were dangling outside, so Tess lifted and placed them on the seat and closed the door to keep them in place. It sounded like the air hatch on a rocket ship sealing shut. Noise, then silence. Then a few seconds later, noise again and Tess was at the controls, firing up the engine and launching us into space. Music burst from the stereo like bats from a cave and I felt every curve and bump of the road. I laughed hysterically as Tess sang along to some dopey song from the sixties or seventies about two friends and how one will always come running to help the other whenever the other calls out his name. Like a dog or something.
you’ve got a friend
Usually in these situations, we’d end up at Tess’s house.