Going Underground (20 page)

I don't get it. Mom should be happy, like me—and Dad's putting his hand on my face, my head, ignoring the cage and the bird.

Before I can go ballistic with confusion and frustration, Dad makes me look at him, and his simple statement blows up everything in my world all over again, one more time.

“Son, I'm sorry,” he says, looking more miserable than I've ever seen him look. “It's Harper.”

Now

What do you say at a funeral, when you're talking about one of your only real friends in the world, and he's lots older than you, and he died in a bad way?

After all he did for me, helping me keep my shit together and giving me a job and warning me about Cherie every chance he got and searching for Fred and driving me past Livia's and never once judging me for my past, Harper died alone. He bled to death in his little house at the back of the graveyard from esophageal varices—some horror-movie condition that happens to people who drink too much. One of the funeral home reps found him when he didn't come to the door to sign off on a burial plan, and he'd been dead for a while, probably since that morning, just after he wrote the grave list and note for me.

We got the preacher from the church where Harper was baptized, where his father and his grandfather went, and he's talked already, and now he's standing in the newly opened Dogwood Section of Rock Hill with his Bible, smiling like preachers do at funerals, and he's waiting.

He's waiting for me because I'm supposed to say something now.

“I …” I look down at the pine box, which is what Harper bought for himself a long time ago, through Johnston's Mortuary in Duke's Ridge, according to the papers I found in the envelope on his fridge. The envelope was marked
Open this when I croak
, so that was easy enough. It had all his burial information inside, and a lawyer to notify, and that's how we found out that the cemetery, his house, and his piece-of-shit truck are mine when I turn eighteen, and how we knew he wanted a pine box, and which church to go to for a preacher.

The pine box is closed, and I can't see Harper, and I didn't get to see him after he died. It wasn't pretty, according to the doctors.

“I … you …”

My parents stand around the open grave that I dug by myself, and Dr. Mote's there, and Branson, too. Marvin and his mom came, and Cherie and pinhead and their folks. It's Tuesday, but everybody's dressed Sunday-nice.

I keep choking up. My words don't want to come out at all. Everybody looks as sad as I feel, and I know I'm smiling, and that's wrong, but that's what happens to my face when I feel like this. Angry. Alone. Helpless. Made of paper and cut away from the rest of the world. Only the smell of dirt and pines and the first hint of spring dogwoods keeps me anchored to the planet.

I put my hand on the smooth pine, imagining Harper's beer-soaked peanut butter breath. “If I'd been there, I would have done something.”

There. That's something. Better than nothing. It's stupid but true. I keep imagining I could have grabbed him and stopped the bleeding, maybe got him to a hospital in time to save his life. People always think that, right? When bad stuff happens.
If only I'd done this
, or
Maybe if I'd tried that
—but it's all dumb.

Harper's dead, and that's reality, and I have to live with it.

I close my eyes, then open them and try again, keeping my hand on the pine box. “Maybe I should have done a lot more to save you even though you didn't think you needed saving.”

My mother makes a funny little noise, and my father pulls her closer. I'm not sure what she's thinking or why she'd feel guilty about Harper, who was my problem and responsibility if he was anybody's. Marvin's mom reaches out and takes her hand, and they share a look that tells me I have no idea what Mom's really thinking and maybe it's better that way. I can't even handle my own thoughts, much less somebody else's.

For a long time, seconds, then minutes, which seem endless when it's quiet, I can't think of anything else to say to Harper. It sucks that he's dead. It sucks that I lost him. It sucks that he lost himself.

Before I start blubbering, the right words come to me, and my hand makes a fist on the pine box lid. I bang it once and the sound's so loud it's like a gunshot in the graveyard, startling birds out of trees and making Fred sit up straight and whistle in her travel cage that I draped with a black cloth. She's hanging in the closest tree and I don't even care if she calls Harper names. Right now, I'd like to call him a few.

“You deserve better than this,” I tell Harper. I bang his pine box again, and again, and I tell him that, and it's louder each time I'm saying it, and I feel like something in my gut is unclenching and turning loose, flying at the sky like the scared birds. “You gave me a chance, and you deserve better than this. Why didn't you give yourself a chance?”

Bang!

Bang!

The crowd's jumping each time I hit the pine box, but nobody's running forward to stop me. The minister's backing away, giving me more room.

“I don't know what I'm going to do now. What am I going to do?”

Bang!

Because I don't know. No college wants me and I've got a graveyard and an old truck, and all that's doing is pissing me off and scaring me in weird ways and making me sure about one thing.

Bang!

“I know this much.”
Bang!
“Whatever I do, I'm not going to live your life. I'm not going to be you.”

Bang!

The last blow almost knocks the pine box off its stand, but I'm through now. I'm breathing hard and sweating and feeling like I finally, finally said the right thing.

I back away from the pine box and have a weird thought that maybe banging on coffins is illegal and I'm going to be in trouble, but I shove that right out of my brain. My folks and Branson and Dr. Mote are probably swapping looks and murmuring about how to have me carted away.

The preacher doesn't seem able to move even though he's supposed to finish the ceremony now so Harper can be lowered into the ground he's tended since he was a little boy.

My hand hurts.

I finally make myself look at my parents—and I start feeling like the preacher, all frozen with surprise at exactly the wrong moment.

They're crying. They're all crying, even Branson and Marvin and Cherie. Pinhead's the only one giving me
you're-a-freak
eyes, but that's because out of everyone present, Jonas Blankenship is probably the most normal person in the whole bunch.

That's sad. And it's funny.

Thank God I manage not to start laughing—or crying—until I've got Fred and we're walking home, leaving everyone else to watch Harper's pine box slowly disappear under the dirt I piled neatly beside his grave.

Now

I've read about how different types of parrots can be—well, different. South American parrots like macaws and Amazons have to find a lot of food in not a lot of space, so even though they look really different, they tolerate each other and sometimes form “multispecies flocks.”

Bet that's noisy. And colorful. And probably crazy as hell.

African parrots like Fred, though, have plenty of room to eat, but they spend time eating on the ground, which makes them vulnerable to predators from the air. Some bigger bird could just dive down and snatch them up and eat them whole. The thing is, African Greys all look alike, with their gray feathers and red tails, so if I were a big, mean parrot-eating bird in the air looking down on a flock of African Greys, all I would see would be like a moving carpet of gray. I wouldn't be able to pick out a parrot to eat, so I'd blow it off rather than risk diving when I can't tell what I'm grabbing.

This is why Fred doesn't usually accept new people into her “flock,” because she's not sure if they'll get her eaten or killed or something. It's also why she grieves if she perceives somebody in her flock has gotten lost.

I'm sure I'm in for shit when Marvin and I start arguing in my bedroom, because Fred's in her big cage listening. Her eyes look weirdly wide and her wings are drooping, and I know she's sad.

Marvin isn't sad or tense or wary or anything simple like that. He's pissed.

“I have to do it,” I tell him. “It's the only thing that makes sense. It's the only way out I see.”

My already quiet bedroom gets that much quieter. Marvin's got his cookie uniform on without the big rubber hat, and he makes the room smell sweet and chocolatey as he stares at me. Just about everything from the goofball manga books on my little computer desk to the retro Cocoa Puffs sheets and bedspread on my bed seems stupid, especially me. I feel like I'm sticking out to Marvin or like I've changed into something he doesn't recognize, because that's how he's looking at me—sort of new Marvin, but mostly old Marvin, and his face is saying a bunch of things.

I've stuck by you.

I've been the best friend I could be.

I don't ask you for anything, and you can't give me this?

“I have to do it.” The words pop out of me again. “I know you don't want me to, and I'm sorry, but—please.”

“Please what, Del?” He shakes his head. “Shit, man. I'm finally eighteen. You're finally eighteen. It's finally as over as it can get. Why would you crack it all open again?”

I glance down at my sneakers, at the faint brown stains from graveyard dirt, marks that never clean all the way out no matter how much I scrub and rinse. “I think it's the right thing to do for my future, like Notre Dame's right for you.”

Marvin's voice gets hard, and it seems deeper as he raises both hands sideways, like he's about to karate-chop the world. “Because Dr. Mote says it is? Because Branson says so? People haven't exactly given you great advice through this, have they?”

His brown eyes seem like they're on fire. I don't like what he just said because it gives me the sick butterflies like I felt back then, in court, when I was listening to my sentence. When I think I can talk without my voice cracking, I say, “Somebody's got to stop this. The system's out of control.”

Marvin lets his hands drop back to his sides. “It'll be new publicity. News shows and papers and blogs—they'll print stuff about us—about you—all over again, Del.” He turns away from me, staring at Fred's cage, and at Fred. She's drooping big-time now. “I can't go through it a second time, all the reporters, the stories, the calls and letters, watching your life flush down the toilet—no way.”

“I'm not asking you to go with me.” Maybe that'll help. Something needs to. His turned back and Fred's sagging wings are making me too jumpy for words.

“Good, because I won't have anything to do with it.” Marvin tilts his head back. His eyes are closed, but that's about all I can make out from behind him. “I'm leaving for South Bend in two weeks. I can't be there for something like that. It'll be in the papers. It'll be on television. You know how that'll look.”

Ouch.

Yeah. I know.

Marvin doesn't want to be there because it might look like he was supporting sex offenders. Some of the people at Notre Dame probably wouldn't approve.

Absolutely nothing at all to say to that.

He turns slowly to face me, and his expression goes through a lot of funny changes, old Marvin, new Marvin. He looks like he wants to take back what he just said, like he knows how it probably sounded to me. Then his eyes shift off to nowhere, and I'm not sure he's seeing me anymore. Or, he's seeing me, but I'm like a motorcycle rider in his rearview mirror, getting smaller and thinner as he drives hard and fast away from me.

New Marvin wins out, and new Marvin doesn't have anything else left to say because he just might be thinking,
Finally. Let that image in the rearview go ahead and fade
.

I think …

I think Marvin's done.

With the past. With everything we went through. With me.

He's done because he
can
be done, and I'm getting that, even if he doesn't understand it yet, even if he may never put what's happening today into exactly those words.

It's stupid, but I have to try one more time. I have to see if I'm right, to find out if there's any way for us to stay in the same flock. “Don't make me pick between you and doing what I think is right.”

Old Marvin would have frowned, maybe sat down, and at least given this some serious thought. Old Marvin would have considered my side and his side, but maybe I've been asking Marvin to look away from his own side too long, without even knowing it.

“I have to,” I tell Marvin again, and maybe my own voice is different.

New Marvin says, “You're grown, Del. Do what you want.”

Then he's out the door, and he's gone, and the sound of my front door slamming feels as final as my fist on Harper's pine box.

For a long time after Marvin leaves, Fred and I sit in our cages looking at the door with our wings drooping.

Now, Also Known as the Day I Pull My Head Out of My Ass

When people testify before Congress in the movies, it's always in Washington DC, and everything's made out of marble and tile, the ceilings stretch to the sky, and everybody listening looks stern and interested and intelligent. People whisk down the shiny halls, have a moment of angst outside the heavy doors, then walk courageously into the echoing chamber and valiantly say everything that needs to be said.

In real life, there's nothing shiny. There's carpet. Bad carpet. It's old and frayed with multicolored squares. If I look at it too long, it'll blind me. The walls are done in heavy, dark paneling instead of marble, and I have no idea about the legislative people listening to everybody, because Mom and Dad and Branson and I have been waiting six hours for my part, and I've run through the snacks we bought, and I keep going over my notes even though I know I can't memorize them because I've been trying for weeks. I'm not courageous or valiant or anything else. I'm hungry, I'm alternating between roasting and freezing, depending on whether anything's blowing out of the rattling vent over my head; my butt hurts from sitting on a wooden bench with no cushions in the hallway; and I'm nervous.

I'm sad, too. I miss Marvin and I keep thinking I shouldn't be doing this, but then I think about Harper and the rescue rooster and my life, and I get back to believing that I'm doing the right thing. That I'm doing the only thing I can do, even though it'll get me nothing but more trouble.

“They won't vote for it, not when the other party will accuse them of being soft on sex offenders.” Mom rubs her eyes with her fingers, shifting her butt around on the bench next to mine. She's not really talking to any of us, so none of us answer her.

Dad's sitting beside Mom, butt firmly in place, and as people stream past us in the hallway, he says, “They're sticklers for the time limit. They keep a little timer running like it's some kind of swim meet or track race. When it's over, they ask you questions, then say thank you and you're done.”

“Ten minutes goes by fast,” Branson agrees from the bench on the other side of mine. He's holding a black CD player he carried in for me, since I couldn't have walked it through the metal detector. “But the questions can take some time.”

I look at my rumpled, Fred-chewed fistful of notes, then drop them on the bench beside my leg and close my eyes. I'll never be able to say anything I wrote down. It all sounds as lame as the college letters I wrote. How could I be so stupid?

Why
did I ever agree to do this?

I should have let Branson or Mom or Dad or all of them read over what I was thinking about and give me pointers. Maybe they should have written my speech for me.

Dad wiggles closer to Mom. “The audience is good sized for us.”

So casual, like he's wanting to make conversation.

Gee, thanks, Dad; that helps so much.

I wonder if I spur him or peck him in the face, will he give me quiet space like he gives Clarence the rooster?

The doors to the chamber aren't heavy wood. More like leather or vinyl-covered metal. Big and not in sync with the paneled walls or the bad carpet. Nothing matches.

WHAT AM I DOING HERE?

About an hour later, when those doors finally open for me, I'm still asking that question. Then I'm walking down the mismatched carpet, trying not to notice the audience to my left or my right, or all along the back walls on either side of the doors. Reporters. People. Cherie and some other chicks in black. Those things I catch. Everything else I shut out.

Cherie being there makes me feel weird, but also happy, like maybe somebody other than my parents, PO, and therapist actually gives a shit. She gives me a thumbs-up, and I mouth,
Thanks
. I called Jonas when I found Fred, and he let her know everything was okay—even though I still didn't want her coming back to the graveyard. She hasn't, except to attend Harper's funeral.

If I could have brought Fred, I would have, but at least I have her beak marks on my notes.

Um, no I don't. The notes are still on the bench outside.

Oh, wonderful.

I'm a few feet from a long table with a microphone. In front of the long table, more seats line the left and right of the room, sweeping around to center. Most of these seats are filled with men and women with suits and very, very bored or irritated expressions.

My audience.

And I don't have my notes.

I don't even bother glancing over my shoulder at the door behind me, because people are all I'll see. All of them probably hate me or disagree with me, or they're busy making assumptions. Well, not all of them. Cherie's there with her posse.

Branson comes up beside me for a second, but he stops to speak with a sharp-looking woman in a dark suit. She's got dark, angry eyes, and her face kind of reminds me of Fred's—fixed and hard, yet with a secret smile only a few people will ever learn to notice.

Seconds later, I'm seated with Branson and Mom and Dad behind me, and Branson's CD player at my feet. No notes, but there's music even though I'm not sure I'm allowed to play it. Branson thought it was unusual, but he also thought it was “me,” so he helped me out on that part.

The clock is moving.

I'm not talking.

Get off your ass, Del.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

I focus on the bored, irritated people, pretending nobody else is in the room. “I …”

All the faces looking at me from the front. From the sides. From the back. I feel them even though I'm trying to ignore them. From somewhere, I smell french fries, of all things. That's just absurd enough to help me choke out the first sentence.

“I didn't want to come here today.”

The bored, irritated people in front of me, the ones in the suits, the ones with the votes—they wait. I think they're assuming I'm about to tell them who forced me to come.

Run
, my brain informs me, but I ignore that and try again.

“I didn't want to come here today because I've never known how to talk about this, and I still don't. I don't know how to find the words to tell you what happened to me because of the laws, and how the laws are written, and how they affect people my age.”

I smile.

My audience doesn't.

Pick out somebody friendly.
That was Dr. Mote's advice.

Right.

I'm staring at the zombie legislature from hell. Some of these people look so old they might have died last week and somebody forgot to wheel them out. Two of them are sleeping. One's scratching his nose. The nine or ten women, most of them pucker like they ate lemons just to get ready for me.

I pick out the meanest-looking lemon sucker, the one right up front with the flat face and black skirt and jacket, and the black hair pulled back so tight her eyes slant toward the ceiling. She feels enough like Kaison to do the trick.

“When I was fourteen,” I tell her, only I'm really talking to Kaison—or at least a version of him with his hands cuffed and his mouth gagged, duct taped to his chair so he can't do anything to stop me or hurt me, “I had a girlfriend a few months younger than me, and we thought about sex and made decisions we thought were responsible. We didn't take chances with pregnancy or diseases, and we tried to stay within what we thought was right, in our parents' opinions, and in our God's opinion, and in the end, in our opinion.”

Just not in yours, right, lemon sucker?

I'm sweating, and she's still got a flat face with absolutely no expression at all. Maybe she's related to Kaison.

“We found out later that it wasn't right in the law's opinion,” I tell her, determined if nobody else hears me, at least she will. “Because I was over fourteen and my girlfriend wasn't, everything we did was wrong. Or it got made wrong. That part's hard to keep up with. It's never made any sense to me.”

Lemon sucker goes even more sour, and my heart starts bumping the bottom of my throat. I think about my notes outside. Did I say it better in the thousand sentences I scribbled?

Probably.

“What does make sense is this: I was a straight-A student and an athlete, and I had a great girlfriend and a lot of friends. I wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer or a soldier. I never broke any laws, not that I knew about, and I still don't. Now, I can't be any of the things I planned to be. Since I've gotten older, I started wanting to be an avian vet, and I can't do that, either.”

Now I look at my hands, because lemon sucker and all the other sleeping, nose-scratching sour faces are getting to be too much for me. I can't believe these people have control of my future.

“I've applied to twenty-seven colleges, community colleges, and even some night schools. Even though I'm eighth in my class with all As and Bs, I've got a steady job, and I scored in the ninety-fifth percentile on my entrance exams, all of my applications have been turned down. I have to register as a sex offender for the rest of my life, in most states. I'm not allowed to play on sports teams or go anywhere kids might hang out—even though I'm not that old. I haven't used a cell phone or the computer unsupervised in three years. Some parts of normal life—a lot of parts—are closed off to me, maybe forever. All I've had for three years is time and uncertainty and music. Music helped me relax and believe. It helped me keep dreaming.”

I think about my iPod and my music, and now I'm talking to that and maybe to Dr. Mote in my head, and the sour-faced lemon suckers don't even exist anymore.

“Music helped me keep dreaming even though I'm a weight on my family and my best friend, and on any girl who might be nice enough to give me a chance. I don't know how I'm going to stop being a weight. I don't know how I'm going to make it without food stamps and public assistance, because the only job I've been able to get doesn't pay enough to live in today's world.”

Deep breath. Don't stop now.

“All of this happened because I was fourteen and did some things with my girlfriend who was a few months younger than me and who wanted to do them, too. Because of that, my personhood got revoked. I got kicked out of society. It felt like getting kicked off the world.”

The clock's ticking down, and when I look up, my audience looks bored.

Are they even listening?

“When you are lost in space, the world seems bright and vibrant and magical, but too far away to touch.”

Done. Thank God. I did it. I talked to them even if they didn't care.

My knees feel weak as I stand and pick up the CD player Branson brought in for me. I put it on the table beside me, and my finger hovers over the button, and I almost press it. I check the lights to be sure the battery's working.

Why am I not pushing the button?

This was my big plan. Say what I had to say, then screw their question-and-answer session. Just leave them with the music.

Somebody on the zombie panel clears their throat.

Push the button.

It doesn't feel right.

I still listen to music. I still want my music. But I'm not sure I want it like this.

I put the CD player back down. From behind me, I hear Branson shift in his seat, surprised, but I don't look at him. I make myself face the zombies again.

“When you are lost in space, it's like living in an alternative rock song, in the soundtrack of some cheesy artsy movie that makes people wonder about the point of life. I was going to play you a song so you could hear how I've felt, and I was going to leave before the question-and-answer, but I don't think that's the way to go now. It seems too much like the guy I used to be, not the guy I'm trying to become.”

Lemon sucker's looking at the CD player like it's a bomb, but a few of them seem mildly surprised.

“I need a chance,” I tell these people who aren't listening. “I need a future. More than anything, I need the past to be over.”

I hear Mom make a noise. It's just a little sniff, but I know it's her.

I give my state legislature one last look, and I sit back down and put the CD player on the floor. “If you have questions for me, that's why I'm here. I want to answer, so maybe you can change the laws and never let the state or a DA or anybody else do this to somebody else's life.”

There's silence. A lot of silence.

Then lemon face asks, “You say this girl was only thirteen?”

I keep my hands folded in my lap and sit up straight, chin out, eyes focused directly on her wrinkly puckered cheeks. “Yes, ma'am, and I was only fourteen.”

“And you touched her. And she wanted you to touch her.”

“It was mutual, ma'am. We planned everything we did together.”

This is about as much fun as a strip-search, but I think about Fred and everything she must have gone through out in the icy cold by herself. I can be as strong as my parrot, right?

The questions keep coming.

Did your parents know?

Did her parents know?

Tell us what happened with the phone.

Naked pictures?

What part of your anatomy did you photograph?

I answer everything without being sarcastic or asking if any of these people ever really were fourteen, or if they got hatched all ancient and stuck-up from alien eggs or something. Thinking about Livia helps. Her “strong” look. The way she always smiled at me, like
We'll see
, whenever I tried to put her off. She could do this. I can do this, too.

Why did you keep the girl's picture on your phone?

Did you look at it often?

Did you get sexual gratification from looking at the picture?

It goes on and on. They comb through every word, every whisper, every photo and embarrassing detail, even more than the police did. It's being recorded. It'll probably be on television or the Internet. Livia might see it. Cory might see it, or Marvin, or any of my old friends, and I hope I'm telling it like they'd want it told. No matter, I'm telling the truth, all of it, because it makes me feel better about myself even if it doesn't get me anything else.