Hero–Type (5 page)

It worked again this time. "The horse took a bath," he said, sniffling a little bit.

"Yeah, that's right." And pretty soon he was doing all right and I helped him wipe up his tears with the edge of his shirt and we went off to play.

Later that night, when we were home and tucked in bed, I asked Mom why Dad had told us the story about the dead girl.

"Dad just likes for you to know these things. It's important to him."

"Why?"

A troubled look flitted over Mom's face for just a second. Looking back, that was probably my first clue that she was going to leave him.
Us.
"It's just important to him," she said, in a tone of voice that added,
Beats the hell out of me, too.

That story—that day—always pops into my brain whenever I come to SAMMPark, which is actually a lot these days because the park is the Council's official outside-of-school meeting place. It's big enough that we can always find someplace to sneak off to when we need to discuss whatever mayhem we're going to concoct next.

Flip picks me up in his beat-up old orange coupe. We're the last to arrive; everyone else is already at the park. He keeps up a running stream of commentary about the ceremony at the school and all of the great ideas he'd had to disrupt it.

"But out of respect for a fellow Fool, I held back," he admits, then waits for me to fall all over myself thanking him. I'm not in the mood, though, so I just sit there.

"We should do something with the key," he says after a moment, pretending that the silence never happened. "I mean, there's got to be
something
we can do with it, right?"

I think about the key. It's actually on my key chain now, because ... Well, because it's a
key,
right? Not much else to do with it. And besides...

"If we do something with the key, they'll know it was me."

Flip's eyebrows shoot up. "Very true, Fool Kross! Very true. Nicely done. Good show."

Just then, we pass the big sign that reads,
KEEP BROOKDALE BEAUTIFUL
! I bite my lip because Flip is about to say...

"You know the problem with that sign, Kross? It pre—"

"'It presupposes that Brookdale was beautiful to begin with.'"

"Guess I say that a lot, huh?"

Only, like, every freakin' time we drive past it.

"The truth must be spoken." He steers into the parking lot at SAMMPark. "Let us disembark!"

Just inside the entrance is the statue of Susan Ann Marchetti. As he does every time he comes to the park, Flip saunters over to it and slaps it on the ass. "Hey, there, Susie baby!" he calls out. "Lookin' good, sweet thang!"

I hate it when he does that.

"So hot for someone made out of cold stone," he says on his way back to me. "I would have hit that, Kross. I really would have."

I almost tell him that he
wishes
he could have hit that. That Fam only hangs out with him because she's a freshman and she likes having a boyfriend who can drive. But there's no point to it. I mean, Flip once told me that he
knows
Fam is only his girlfriend because it's convenient. He doesn't care. He just likes having someone who hangs on his every word.

But I don't say anything because Flip'll just come back with something I have no answer for. So instead, we head further into the park for the party.

When I say the Council's having a party, you have to realize that a Council party is just the six of us hanging out at SAMMPark until it's too late at night, eating buckets of takeout wings from Cincinnati Joe's and drinking beer in the bushes so that no one busts us and smoking and listening to Flip, who blathers on about whatever wild thoughts have invaded his brain lately—radiation from quasars, prime numbers, college student plagiarism, last night's TV, sex. Whatever.

By the time the sun's gone down and the park has emptied out of the families, we're all pretty smashed, except for Flip, the designated driver. ("Dying in a car wreck isn't Foolish—it's just stupid.") Then again, Flip's permanently high on his own adrenaline and brainwaves, so he doesn't
need
booze or drugs.

Speedo had the foresight to bring a little baggie of pot, so we roll up and light up and sort of blunder around the park, losing more and more touch with reality. It's a great way to access Fooldom. You think and say stuff while drunk or stoned that you'd never think or say otherwise.

I end up lying in the grass near the baseball diamond with Tit, the two of us just staring up at the stars, which suddenly look like giant, winking eyes. I've known Tit the longest of the whole Council. We grew up together in my old neighborhood, back when Mom and Dad were still together. We always end up doing this—splintering off—when the Council gets together. Flip calls us the Subcommittee.

Tonight, it's like the sky is
watching
us from every angle, and even though I'm stoned, this doesn't worry me or make me paranoid. It sort of makes me feel safe and secure. Like someone has my back.

It makes me think of my favorite verse from the Bible. Not that I know much about the Bible, tell the truth. I mean, I'm no scholar or anything. But I paid attention back when I used to go to Mass, and this one verse really hooked me one time when Father McKane was giving his sermon, so I looked it up later.

"Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will
fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered."

That's from Matthew. And what it basically means is that God's watching and he doesn't miss anything, which is a good thing.

And it makes me think like maybe tonight God punched holes in that big black vault overhead so that he could keep tabs on me and keep me from doing anything else really, unbelievably dumb or evil.

It's too late for the dumb, evil things in my past, but maybe there's still time to rescue me from my future idiocy.

Tit starts blabbing about girls.

We Fools, we tell each other everything.

Almost.

We keep no secrets from each other.

Almost.

So Tit's babbling about girls and that makes me think about Leah, and I wonder how the universe can be so screwy that I've ended up in this position—called a hero when I know I'm nothing of the sort.

Flip says that chaos dominates the world. That everything is made up of these things called fractals, which I don't understand, but Flip's brilliant, so I just believe him and he says that with fractals, the
ending
of something is completely dependent on how it
starts.
So what if ... What if I'd never bought the video camera? What if I'd never worked at the Burger Joint two summers ago? Would I still have ended up in that alley? And would the world still believe the great lie, maybe the
ultimate
Fool prank, that Kevin Ross is a hero?

I don't know. I'm not smart enough to know. But I think Leah would probably be dead, if that was the case. So do I have to bear the burden of my guilt to save her? Is that the price I pay?

My head starts to hurt from all of the thinking. Fortunately, Tit interrupts me.

"Who would you do?" he asks. He blows out some smoke and passes his cigarette over to me. The pot and beer are gone, and the two of us are down to two cigarettes, which we're sharing to try to make them last longer. Neither of us feels like getting up to look for the others to bum more smokes.

"What do you mean?"

"C'mon. Of the girls at South Brook. Who's in your top ten?"

I don't want to talk about this. I was enjoying just lying on my back in the cool grass, toked out of my mind on some
other
cool grass, watching God's billion eyes above.

Flip comes over. He's stone cold sober, which seems funny to me, so I start giggling and Tit joins in. "I'm driving Jedi and Speedo home," he tells us. "I'll be back for you guys in like twenty minutes."

Tit goes right back to the question as soon as Flip leaves: "Who would you do? C'mon, man."

"I don't know."

He laughs, spilling out smoke. "Sure you do."

"Doesn't matter what I think," I tell him. "I'm so damn ugly no chick is gonna look at me twice. Much less do me."

He turns to look at me. "You
are
an ugly son of a bitch. I'll give you that. You gotta do something about the zits. You wouldn't be so bad then."

"Whatever." Like it matters. My buzz is slipping away now. Damn.

"But let's pretend that some girl has lost her mind and wants to straddle the Kross-Town Express. Who do you want it to be?"

I shrug, which really doesn't communicate much when you're flat on your back.

"Come on, Kross. Tell me."

"Get off my back. You tell me."

"OK," he says, as if he doesn't care. "Number one is Michelle Jurgens."

"Oh, please! You can't say Michelle Jurgens."

"Why not?"

"Because
everyone
says Michelle Jurgens." It's true. Michelle Jurgens is sort of the Official Wank-Bait of South Brook High, a promotion from her previous role as Official Wank-Bait of South Brook Middle.

"So?"

"So, the whole point of making a list like this is to make it, like, individual, you know?"

"OK.
Dina
Jurgens." He grins.

"She graduated last year, you moron. She doesn't count."

"Fine. Kayla Meyer."

"Not bad."

"Now you."

"No. Keep going."

"I'll give you my top three. Kayla and then, uh, Lisa Carter."

"Lisa Carter? Really? I don't see it."

"Awesome ass."

"If you say so."

"And then, uh, Kyra Sellers."

"Who?"

"Kyra Sellers. You know. Sellers. Kyra."

"I don't know who the hell you're talking about."

"Junior. Wears all black ... Little piercing right here." He points to the corner of his mouth.

"
Her?
" Because now I know who he's talking about, and let me tell you—there is no less doable girl on the planet.

He sits up and shrugs, then flicks the butt of the cigarette off into the bushes. "Something about her ... So, what about you?"

Back to me.

"I don't want to do this."

"You have to."

"Says who?"

"I told you. Come on. I told you I want to nail Kyra Sellers. Come on."

"No." But he
did
tell me.

"Dude, is it a
guy?
Are you gay or something?"

"No!"

"Because I'm cool with that. With you being a fag and all. I don't care. But you gotta tell me the guy you want to do, then."

"Shut up,
Tit
."

"Because I can forgive being gay, but I can't forgive you holding out on me."

"It's just one," I say to him, slowly. I don't want to say it, but it's late and I'm tired and stoned and buzzed and at peace. And it's Tit. He's not just a Fool—he's my buddy.

Besides, God's watching me through the sky, and he wouldn't let me do anything too stupid, right?

"Leah Muldoon," I tell him. "And that's it. That's my whole list."

"That's your whole list?" he asks.

"Yeah." And maybe it's the pot, but I feel relieved to tell it, finally. I've kept it a secret for a long,
long
time.

"Leah? That's..." He shakes his head. "Just one? That's serious, then. That's not just wanting to nail someone."

I don't say anything. What is there to say?

"I mean..." He stops for a second. "It's just weird, man. I don't get it. You never even mentioned her before all this hero crap. At all. Do you even
know
her?"

"I have a bunch of classes with her." It comes out more defensive than I intended, but I don't care. It's true—before I saved her life, I had had maybe three encounters with Leah that you could call conversations. But it doesn't matter. I know all about her. "I know her," I tell him.

"OK..." He doesn't sound convinced.

"She wants to go to Syracuse," I say. "She takes ballet and she's in Drama Club and she thinks she might want to try it professionally, for a little while at least." I can't stop myself. It's like I'm suddenly reeling off this bizarre testimonial to Leah Muldoon. "Her parents have more money than God, but they make her pay for her own car insurance. Every Christmas, she volunteers at the Good Faith soup kitchen with her dad."

Tit stares at me. Oh, crap. What the hell did I do? Now he's going to ask:
How do you know all that about her, Kross?
That's what he's going to say. And then I'll have to tell him. I'll have to tell. God.

I lie there, perfectly still, waiting for him to ask. I wait and I wait and it doesn't come, thank God. Instead, he just says:

"Wow. You've got it bad, huh?"

I don't say anything. It's weird now, having someone else know. Having someone else know a
part
of it, at least.