Paranoid Park (7 page)

Maybe they would think it was an accident. Maybe they’d think the guard was goofing around on the job. Or he was drunk. Or he just got too close to the train. People had accidents on the job. It was possible.

I suddenly thought about Scratch. I hadn’t thought about him all night. Scratch. What kind of person has a name like Scratch?

At least he was smart. He was probably halfway to Phoenix by now. He was probably a thousand miles away. Guys like him knew what to do. You don’t turn yourself in. You vanish. He’d beat up some cop in San Diego, and what had he done? Panicked? Called the police? Went crying to his mother? No, he skipped town, he laid low. That’s what they did in the Godfather movie. When the Al Pacino character killed that guy, they just sent him to Italy to chill. You don’t panic. You just hunker down and keep your cool and don’t do anything stupid.

“Hey,” said someone. I looked up. It was Macy McLaughlin, a girl who lived on my street.

“Oh, hey,” I said back. Macy was a sophomore, a year younger than me. She was with one of her sophomore friends.

“What are you doing here so early?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“What are you reading?”

“The newspaper.”

She looked at me funny. She thought it was weird for me to be at the mall reading the newspaper in Burger King at ten in the morning. Which it was.

“I’m checking the sports scores,” I said. “Then I have to get some stuff for my mom.”

Macy studied me with her large brown eyes. She’d had a crush on me in sixth grade. She used to follow me around, leave notes in my locker. I didn’t see her as much these days. She had become one of the cool sophomores. The girl with her was Rachel Simmons, another one of the cool sophomores.

“Okay,” said Macy. “We gotta go.”

“Okay,” I said.

The two of them left. As they walked away, Macy looked back at me. It wasn’t a giggly, crushy look; it was more checking on me. It weirded me out. I didn’t want anyone looking at me like that. Not then.

Walking home from the mall, I thought about my parents. I couldn’t tell the police, because my parents couldn’t take it. They were already barely hanging on. Something like this, it would blow their world apart.

Especially my mom. She wasn’t so stable. And my dad would go ballistic. They would blame each other. They would freak out and stop talking and then the divorce would start that much faster. The lawyers would use it against the other lawyers. My mother would have to think up an excuse for why I was running around loose on a Saturday night. It would kill her if she lost custody of us. She always said that she would never give up custody of Henry and me. Ever. She would do
anything.
She didn’t care.

And my dad. It would look so bad. He leaves his wife, leaves his kids, and then this happens. The people at his work would think he was a terrible person. He might even get fired. It would make us all look horrible. It would be a total disaster, in every way.

For that reason, I decided I would do nothing. That was my new plan. I wouldn’t even debate it. I would just do nothing for a day or two. Let the dust settle. Wait until my head cleared.

This new plan felt right. It calmed me down. That was a good sign all by itself. I said it over to myself:
Just chill for a day or two. Just let the dust settle.

But the calm went away when I walked into our kitchen. On the refrigerator was a message: “Call Jared.”

I went to my room. I didn’t call Jared. I went online and tried a local TV news site. There were no reports about a dead security guard. I tried the Web site for the local paper. Nothing. I Googled various combinations of “murder,” “body,” “death,” and “security guard” with “Portland, Oregon.” Nothing came up. I deleted my search history and logged off.

Then I called Jared.

“Bro, what’s up,” he said. “Where you been?”

“Nowhere,” I said. “At the mall.”

“So, bro, guess what happened to me last night?”

“What?” I said.

“I totally got laid!”

“All right,” I said, sitting on my bed. “Just like you planned it.”

“But
not
just like I planned it,” gushed Jared. “Because I almost got laid by her roommate, too!”

“You did?”

“Dude, there’s so many hot college girls down there! You don’t even know! And people were hooking up. I made out with
three
different girls. And nobody even cared. Nobody even noticed! I’m telling you man, college is the best! ”

“Wow,” I said.

“So check it out. So we’re partying and everything, and we go back to Kelly’s dorm and there’s, like, a bunch of us ... and her roommate starts dancing around, and doing this little striptease. And then she flashes us while the other girls weren’t looking. I swear, it’s like
Girls Gone Wild
down there. That’s all they do is party and get naked! ”

“Wow,” I said again.

“Kelly, from the coffee shop, she was, like... I don’t know... messed up or something. She’s kind of a head case. But whatever. That’s the thing: I coulda had my pick. Like this one blonde chick, she was totally checking me out, like from the minute I got there....”

I tried to listen to his story. I tried to enjoy it. I needed to think about something else. I needed to get out of my own head.

“... but I’m telling you,” Jared was saying, “I am so going to college. You should have seen the frat we were at. Dudes had a flat-screen TV that, like, covered an entire wall. And kegs everywhere. And this pole you could slide down in the backyard-it was like a friggin’ fire station!”

He kept talking. It sounded fun, but it sounded so far away. It sounded like a place I’d never get to.

“So what did you end up doing?” he finally asked. “Did you go to Paranoid?”

“No, I... I just ended up ... hanging out.”

“Did you call Jennifer?”

“Nah, I just hung out.”

“Dude, seriously, if you had been down there with me, you coulda had
any
of those girls. Because they‘re, like, freshmen and nobody pays attention to ’em. I mean, the really hot ones get hit on. But the other ones. There are, like, so many doable chicks down there, just looking for someone to party with.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sounds pretty easy.”

“Bro, it’s
totally
easy,” said Jared. “So wait, did you sleep here last night?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh. Cause there’s this big black footprint on my mom’s carpet. Right by the front door.”

“Oh,” I said. I stood up. “That must have been me. I think I stepped in something.”

“My mom’s not going to be psyched.”

“Can you clean it up?”

“Dude, what am I? Your maid? You clean it up!”

“No. I will. I totally will. I mean...”

“Nah, I’m kidding. The cleaning lady will deal with it. But hey, do you have my Rampage sweatshirt? I can’t find it.”

“Yeah, I borrowed it.”

“What’d you do that for?”

“My... mine got wet.”

“So what exactly did you do last night? Just wander around by yourself?”

“Yeah, kinda, I mean... You know, I can’t really talk right now. But I’ll bring your sweatshirt to school tomorrow.”

“Bro, I’m not really into you borrowing my clothes. Or going through my stuff. You didn’t even
ask.”

“No, I know, I would have, I just—”

“You borrow anything else?”

“Uh... just some shoes.”

“Some shoes? Which shoes?”

“Those old Etnies.”

“Dude, what happened to you? You’re borrowing my
shoes?
Did you borrow my underwear?”

“No,” I lied, “I just... I just got a little wet. And I stepped in something. And I didn’t want to track it all over your house.”

“Just gimme my stuff back. Bring it to school tomorrow. And what’s going on with Jennifer?”

“Nothing. I don’t know exactly.”

“Well if that’s not happening, you should definitely check out Oregon State. I’m serious. I’m gonna need a wingman. I’m not even going to waste my time with stupid high-school girls anymore, not with that kinda action around.”

“No, yeah, it sounds cool,” I said, trying to sound like my old self. “It sounds awesome.”

That night I went to bed at ten thirty, which was early for me. I turned off the lights and lay in my bed.

I didn’t sleep. I lay staring at the floor in the dark. I was tired, more tired than I had ever been. But sleep was impossible. So I got up and pulled my chair to my window and sat, looking at the trees in our backyard.

I dug out an old Walkman and tuned it to KEX. Surely there would be something about the security guard. It had been twenty-four hours.

But there wasn’t. The big news of the night was they had hired a new Portland Trail Blazers coach. The newspeople acted like it was the biggest event ever. I couldn’t believe how much they went on about it. So they had a new coach. Big deal.

I kept tuning my Walkman to different stations. I listened to bits of music. I listened to bits of talk radio. I stared at the trees.

Then I got mad. It made me mad that people always talked about helping teenagers. There was always some new program, some new plan to help kids. There were ads on TV, on the radio. Hotlines, and this and that. But did any of it work? Not in the slightest. Here I was, with a real problem, with a serious problem, but was there anywhere I could go? Who do you call when something
really
goes wrong? Those geeks in the studentcounseling office? When you had a real problem, there was nothing you could do, no one you could talk to. It was so typical. And so unfair. Why didn’t they set up an anonymous number you could call, so you could talk to someone who actually knew something, someone who could give you real advice and tell you what your options were?

For once in my life I genuinely needed help, and where could I go? There was nowhere. There was nothing. And it really pissed me off.

Later, I fell asleep in my chair. I still had my Walkman headphones on, and I must have heard something about a murder. I woke up instantly and turned up the volume. But it wasn’t local. It was the national ABC news. They were talking about a boy in Texas, a seventeen-year-old who had shot his next-door neighbor. He had been sentenced to death and was going on death row. His lawyers were appealing to the Texas Supreme Court; they wanted to get his sentence reduced to life in prison. They said it could take ten years of appeals.

I thought about that. Ten years. Death row. Life sentence. I pulled the headphones off my head and let them drop to the ground. What was I supposed to do?

 

Dear ___,

So that was the first day.

The next day I went to school. I was a total zombie. I stumbled onto the bus, stumbled to my locker. I was so in shock I barely knew where I was.