In Stone (23 page)

“I thought you were dead,” Leah says as she flings back the chair beside me. My eyes pop open. She ensures the chairs metal feet grind along the floor. “Seriously. You scared the shit out of me,” she seethes in a whisper. “Your Mom hates me. She called me an enabler. An enabler. You better tell that boy of yours that if he comes within three feet of me I will knock his ass into next week,” she threatens as she slams her fist down on the tabletop.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“I thought you were dead. But you’re sorry, so I guess we’re straight,” Leah chides. In my peripheral, I can see kids staring. “Aren’t you even going to tell me what happened?”

“I should have called...”

“No shit, Sherlock.”

“I was pretty messed up yesterday.”

“Yesterday? Have you looked in a mirror lately.” No. “You’re covered in cuts and bruises. Did he hurt you? Rumor has it, you were caught up in a fender bender.”

“Jack didn’t make it back,” I confess before she chews my ear off. The words leave a bitter taste in my mouth; make me feel like I might fall apart. Silence. Now I want her to start talking again.

If she doesn’t say something soon I’m going to cry.

“He’s not…you know?” Leah says. “Because he can’t…you know?”

“Die?” I shrug.

Truth is I can’t stop thinking about the moments that I’d missed when he was fighting with the green monsters. I suppose he could have been jabbed by the blade when my attention was fixed on my own fight. I wonder if that’s the reason why he just gave up like that. Was it that he was weak from blood loss or because his body was being shut down by an immortal-killing toxin?

“You look lost.” Leah squeezes my hand.

“We were winning. We won,” I scoff as I try to wrap my own head around how close we’d come to escaping, both of us. I fix a stare on the tabletop like I’m expecting it to produce an explanation. My eyes fog over. “The knife was gone, and we were almost free, but then…” The memory stabs at my chest. I can’t finish. “It doesn’t matter now.”

“What did your Mom say?”

“She’s not talking to me. What did she say when you first told her where I was?”

“As if I would ever narc you out. I kept my mouth shut as promised. Told them I had no idea where you were, or who you were with.”

“But they knew all about Jack, had a sketch of his face and everything.”

“Yeah. I saw it on the news last night.”

“They said some really, really awful things about him.”

Leah puts her head down and starts ripping the cupcake she’s holding into tiny chunks. The air turns prickly. She hisses, once, twice…

“Leah, is there something you’re not telling me?”

“I think I might know who told them about Jack. I wasn’t the only person your Mom called when you didn’t come home.” She bites down on her black-cherry bottom lip. Who the hell else would my mom call? She has no idea who I hang out with in -- or out -- of school. My eyes lift, and I see him, standing in the middle of the cafeteria with The Boob. It’s like a spotlight switches on, shines directly on him.

Mark.

Everything goes blurry; my hands feel as if I’ve stuck them into an open fire. I hear Leah calling my name. I don’t even remember standing up and leaving the table, but my palms are slamming into Mark’s chest. He stumbles backward, shocked, irritated.

“Was it you that told them about Jack?” Push. “Was it?” Push. “Huh?” Push. “Was it?” My heart is thumping so hard I swear you can hear it echo around the now silent cafeteria. Something inside me feels hot and familiar. All I can think about is that Pointy-faced police officer making out that Jack was some sort of grotesque criminal.

Jack, the guy that just saved every ingrate in this room from Armageddon. They have no idea. Every single one of them, with the exception of Leah, is ignorant and small in his shadow. Not fit to breathe the same air as him.

“Yeah, it was me. When the police said you were missing. I knew it had something to do with him.”

I can only see red. Bam! I push one last time. Only this time he doesn’t stumble backward. He flies. One hundred and eighty pounds of solid boy, sailing through the air like a feather caught in a gust. He collides with the legs of a stationary sophomore. The sophomore, holding a tray full of pasta, is startled by the sudden impact, and the tray falls in slow motion. My ex is showered in noodles and spaghetti sauce as he writhes around on the floor, cradling his stomach.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” The Boob shrieks from behind me. My head snaps around.

“Back off,” I growl in a low voice I don’t recognize. My replacement gasps, her eyes roll into the back of her head, and she falls into Leah ’s arms. She’s not dead; her chest is still rising. I taste the blood as it drips down my top lip.

“Dude?” Leah says, horrified as my replacement stirs. She’s just standing there, staring. They’re all staring. A hundred pairs of curious eyes are fixed on me. Dazed, confused, and bleeding, I flee the room.

I’M LIVING OFF ZERO
sleep. I don’t remember the last time I ate, and my personal hygiene is experiencing some serious neglect. I haven’t spoken in so long my tongue keeps going into spasms.

Mom and I communicate in grunts or not at all. Leah keeps calling, but I don’t pick up -- and she daren’t come anywhere near the house in case she runs into Mom. Or in case she runs into me. I can’t decide.

I skip school altogether in favor of the park. I imagine my outburst is still headlining the halls, and I’m scared that if I get angry again I’ll kill somebody. Because I feel like I could. That’s the scary part.

At eleven-thirty on Friday night, I hear mom slink away into her bedroom. Less than five minutes later, everything goes quiet, and I know she’s asleep. I climb out of bed, pull on my boots and coat, duck under the shutter, and climb down the white, wooden trellis.

I’ve become a regular at Saint Sebastian’s.

The inside of Saint Sebastian’s is as much of a mess as the outside. Worse. The benches are all broken. Some are missing. Most are burnt, crumbling lumps of charcoal. Pages of hymnbooks have been ripped up and scattered about the place like snow. There’s a big stone alter at the head of the room. It’s been covered in color. Like a canvas, it belongs in an art gallery.

I light the candles that I brought from home a few days ago, make my way over to a bench, and pull my blanket and sketcher from my rucksack. I sit down, snap off a burnt bit of wood, and continue my charcoal sketch of the torn insides of what I’m sure was once a beautiful place to come and pray.

“So this is where you’ve been hiding.” I hit the ceiling. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.” Leah totters up the aisle, faux fur black coat, her hair purple and her net skirt swishing back and forth.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m on a reconnaissance mission to recover my best friend. What about you?” She slumps down beside me. She smells like a house party, beer and smoke.

“Oh, you know, trying not to think about the boy I left in Hell.”

“Cool.” She slips her hand inside her jacket and pulls out a bottle of whiskey. “You want to get wasted?”

“Yeah.” Leah unscrews the cap off the bottle and hands it to me. I take a long swig. It burns as it slides down my throat. I take another hit and another. The liquid settles hot in my stomach. It makes my lips loose, and my shoulders drop in seconds. I hand the bottle back to Leah. She necks a third. After she’s finished swallowing she sighs. I smudge a line with my finger and wait for the inevitable questions to begin.

“You ready to talk about beating up on your ex-boyfriend yet?”

“Not really.” I throw my sketcher on the floor and tip my head back to look at the sky through a giant hole in the church ceiling. There are a million stars out tonight, bright, silver. A scattering of diamonds. The whiskey makes my head swim. I see Jack’s eyes looking down on me.

“You know we’re going to anyway though, right?” Leah hands me the bottle. Chug, chug, chug. “I’ve seen Beau angst before. But that, that was more like rotating-head, spewing-green-bile angst. Your eyes, they went crazy black, dude.” She slurs. I’d bet my life on that being the reason why The Boob passed out. I’ve seen the black eyes myself; that shit is scary.

“Please, Leah. I will give you a billion dollars if we can talk about something else.” My words cartwheel off my tongue and land on the floor in a dizzying heap.

“You really don’t want to talk about it? Fine. Just answer me one question. Possession, does that actually happen?”

“Totally happens,” I slur. “But no, before you ask, I’m not…at least, I don’t think I am.”

“Good to know.” She takes the bottle from me and holds it up in cheer.

The whiskey bottle is dry. I shed my blanket. Leah sheds her coat. She stands up and wobbles over to the altar. “Hypothetically,” she says, turning around but leaning back on the big stone slab like some 1930’s movie star. “How would one go about subduing a possessed person?”

“Seriously?” I say, laughing.

“I said hy--po--the--tic--leeee.”

“I’m not possessed,” I defend, tripping over stones and bits of wood to join her. I climb, clumsily, onto the altar, lie down, and spread myself out like a starfish. The sky spins. Leah looks over me, her purple hair hanging down, tickling my face.

“Maybe possessed is overly dramatic, but you’re definitely different since you came back from poking around in the bowels of hell.”

“But that’s understandable, right?” I can’t decide if I’m arguing or asking. “I mean, it’s like you say, it was hell, not two weeks in Hawaii.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry. Let’s just forget I said anything,” Leah says, pulling something from the waistband of her skirt. Her iPod. “Let’s dance.” She squints at the tiny white piece of technology, swipes her thumb over the screen, and some angry rock chick starts screaming lyrical.

Leah tugs at my arm, and I flop off the altar, landing hard on my knees. The best thing about being wasted; you can’t feel pain. We both laugh. She keeps pulling until I’m standing, and then we’re dancing. Arms in the air, heads thrashing about, bodies swaying out of sync with the beat.

“You know what else is real?” I say breathless. The track switches, and we’re listening to a man, plucking his guitar and spitting words of hate about some girl called Christine.

“What?” Leah says, wobbling.

“Selling your soul.”

“No. Freaking. Way.”

“Yes, way. It’s totally a thing.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.” I shrug. Leah spins me under her arm. “Jack didn’t say.”

“You didn’t ask.”

We freeze, like we’re five, playing musical statues at a party, and someone just shut the music off. My heart squeezes then splutters to a stop.

“Wow,” Leah says. I follow her gaze to the altar, and there he is. Arms folded across his chest, casually leaning back like he doesn’t have a care in the world. I was wrong; his silver eyes put the stars to shame. He strolls over to the bench, picks up the empty bottle of whiskey, and raises his eyebrows.

“I’m gonna go,” Leah says, going gazelle over the debris and snatching her jacket. She slaps a hand down on Jack’s shoulder. “Super glad you didn’t die,” she says, then makes her way back over to me, mouthing OMG. She plants her lips on my cheek. “Call me, k? And come back to school. I miss you.”

“Are you going to be okay getting home?” Jack asks.

“Pfft.” She swats the air with her hand. “Totally fine.” With that she leaves.

“Hi,” Jack says after a lifetime of silence slips by. He tucks his hand in his pocket and strolls over. “Are you okay?”

I throw myself at him, close my eyes, and just hug him. He hugs me back, tight. We stay like that for forever, the world growing old around us. I don’t want to let go just in case he slips into another black hole.

“Beau, we need to talk.”

“Why? Why do we have to talk? Why can’t we just stand here like this?” 

“You’re drunk,” he says.

“So?”

“What did your friend mean when she said come back to school?”

“It’s nothing.” I shake my head against his chest and make a groaning sound because that’s how I feel about school and everyone in it. “How did you escape?”

“I didn’t. Someone let me out. Beau, what about school? Did something happen?” he pushes.

“They did. Was it Rachael?”

“No. Someone a lot like her though. Tell me what your friend meant when she said come back to school?” He pulls away, lifts my chin, and looks me in the eyes. “Please.” Like I can say no now.

“There was this incident.”

“What kind of incident?”

“There’s something wrong with me. I think you were right. I think the side effects, the demon flushes, I think they might be permanent.”

We sit down. Well, he sits down. I crawl on the bench and put my head in his lap. He slings his arm over me. A week’s worth of missed sleep is suddenly burning my eyes.

“Did you hurt somebody?”

“It was an accident. I didn’t mean it. I was upset about you and angry about the things they were saying about you. I couldn’t help it.” I sigh, drowning in a whiskey haze. “It’s such a mess.” He moves his hand from around me. I tense up, but then I feel his fingers run through my hair, and my body goes limp. Liquid in his lap. “I’m so tired,” I whisper to his knees. The world goes black.