Period 8 (7 page)

“You've been watching too many
Criminal Minds
reruns, Tak,” Hannah says.

Josh opens another sandwich bag. “Maybe so,” he replies, “but I'm telling you . . .”

“Luckily, it didn't have to be anyone,” Logs says. “Actually that's a pretty sane reaction.”

Hannah laughs. “I thought wrestlers are supposed to be tough.”

“Exactly,” Tak says, “and if I didn't want it to be me, I mean, I wanted
someone
to find her, if she was out there. Kind of cowardly to want her found but let her ghost haunt someone else.”

“Cowardly, maybe,” Logs says, “but I found
myself
looking under some piles of leaves with held breath and gritted teeth.” He surveys the room. “Anyone else?”

Up goes Bobby Wright's hand.

Logs closes his eyes. “I'm not going to win this, am I, Bobby? You will raise your hand at my funeral.”

Bobby pulls his hand down. “I just thought, what if it was over all of a sudden. You know, way too soon.”

“Say more.”

“We thought she was probably dead. At least I did. She was here one day and then just gone, like for no good reason. I just thought, what if that was me? I sit around thinking of all the stuff I'm gonna do someday, you know, when I get it together. What if there's no someday?”

No shit,
Paulie thinks.

“So I'm out there in the woods, thinking, man, I
better
get it together, and I feel, like, ready to do that. Like I crank myself up. And then—and this is bad—they find out Mary isn't really missing and . . .” Bobby shakes his head. “. . . and I already feel it draining out. I know I'm not going to have the guts.” He shakes his head. “I went home yesterday thinking, what a schmuck . . . somebody's gotta die for me to be brave.”

I will get that little bugger into the weight room,
Paulie thinks,
and then I will get him into the water.

Logs walks over and sits on a table at the side of the room. In a low voice he says, “Wow.”

Justin snorts, running a hand through his short hair. “Seems to me that was pretty brave right there.”

Bobby looks off to the side.

“Don't do that,” Justin says. “You feel like you feel because you shrink off all the time. You look right in my eye and say, ‘Damn right it was brave, Justin Chenier.'”

The trace of a smile crosses Bobby's lips again. He glances at Paulie, who nods.

“Fuckin'
say
it,” Justin says.

Bobby looks at the ceiling.

“Don't make me get up.”

“Damn right it was brave, Justin Chenier.”

“A'ight then,” Justin says and turns to Logs. “So, Brother Logs, when we get to hear the
climax
to this saga?”

“Soon as there is one, I suspect,” Logs says.

“Whatever's going on with Mary,” Arney says, “she's not going to let a shot at another four-point-plus GPA and more than a hundred thousand in scholarship money go down the drain. Trust me, she'll come around.”

Paulie has been taking it all in. He frowns.
Ol' Arney. Always in the know. Even when he isn't.

“And I'm guessing I can get her to bring us up to speed,” Arney says. “I've spent some time with her.” He looks at Bobby. “She's more willing to talk about the important stuff than you might think.”

Justin sits up. “You mean . . .”

“Get your head out of the gutter,” Arney says. “I just mean she's not as
surface
as everyone thinks. She's just careful.”

“Mr. Logs,” Paulie says, “If you were sitting in a bar having a beer with your best friend with none of us around, what would you be saying you think happened?”

“You think I drink beer?”

“C'mon, man.”

“I don't know what I'd say, but I get your point, Paulie. This is Period 8, where we let it all hang out. I'm being careful because when we don't understand something, it's because we don't have enough information. Let's keep focused on how you were feeling.”

“Long as we're baring our souls . . .” Heads turn toward Taylor Max.
Baring our souls
comes out sarcastically. She pushes her dark bangs away from her eyes. “I think she was lucky.”

Silence.

Logs says, “Why lucky?”

Taylor hesitates, testing the waters with her eyes. Taylor Max would be pretty, if her life weren't all over her face—and she's tough as nails. Taylor isn't silent because she's shy. Taylor is silent because she doesn't believe anyone wants to hear what she has to say.

“I come here, to this class, to learn something—anything—that goes against what I think the world is like,” she says. “But I always go away thinking I've got it about right.”

She takes in the room again, and says, under her breath, “What the hell.

“I've heard the same stuff everyone else hears,” she says. “Mary's dad is a control freak, makes her give him her cell phone every day so he can look at the call history, calls the numbers he doesn't recognize. He made her sign the ‘Saving Myself for Marriage' vow, or whatever they call it. He's not even religious, just has to have control. Who knows what's true? The only times I've ever seen him, he looked like any parent, kind of quiet, maybe a little stern.”

Taylor breathes deep. “But I caught her crying in the bathroom once last year. She was, like,
way
not Mary. So I said right out what I thought. She didn't deny any of it. If somebody says your dad's a beast and he's not, you deny it.”

Taylor scans the room; doesn't catch any looks of disagreement. She shakes her head. “That shit is poison.”

Silence.

She shrugs. “My mom's been bringing control freaks into me and my brother's lives for fucking ever, excuse my shitty language. They're all the same. Look good at first, start to take over and try to convince you the crap they want you to do is for your own good. I don't know how it works in Mary Wells's house, but the more they get burrowed in the more power they get. If you've got a mom like ours, she's so glad to have a man around the house she'll believe anything. Pretty soon she's just the gravy train for a pig. Good thing about my mother is, she finally recognizes it and gets rid of the bastard. Like I said, I don't know what Mary Wells's mom is like, but I see Mr. Wells and I get a feeling in my gut that is
way
familiar. And if you'd have seen her in the bathroom that day, you wouldn't start asking me a bunch of dumb questions or telling me why my situation is different.”

Nobody is about to do that.

“And by the way,” Taylor adds, “after she gets rid of the bastard? She goes and gets another one. But that's a story for another time.” She puts her head down on her arms. “Anyway, that's why I thought she was lucky. Any escape is an escape. She was out.”

“I'm with Taylor,” Hannah says. “Anybody who has that much control over his kid is creepy. And I'd say that if Mary were in the room.”

Arney Stack stands. “Maybe you guys are right,” he says. “Maybe I do have it wrong, and this is going to sound like some geeky ASB president . . .”

Justin says, “Tell us somethin' we don't know.”

“We have to do something about this,” Arney says. “I don't mean just about Mary, but all of it. There's not much a student body officer can do in a school, it's not like we influence educational policy or anything. But we ought to at least figure out how to have each other's backs.”

Paulie glances at Justin
.

“A lot of us have been in school together four years, some even longer than that. No offense, Bobby, but if your family wasn't in the paper for receiving Christmas charity I wouldn't even know who you are.”

Bobby looks stricken. His family's picture on the front of the Regional section of the local newspaper is the embarrassment of his high school career.

Arney catches Bobby's look. “I didn't mean . . . Hey, man, I just meant we don't have each other's backs like we should.”

Justin puts his head down.

“Look, we're in this together. I get to be student body president because no matter how much I pump iron, I lack the skills to be what I really want to be, which is a super-jock. So I teach myself to speak in public and do the political thing. Hell, Bobby, you're every bit as smart as I am and twice as sensitive, given what you just told us, but somebody's been pushing you around making you think all you can do is survive. Man, go check it out with your parents . . . okay, not
your
parents, but some adult, maybe Mr. Logs, and get him to tell you how many of the cool guys and girls in high school turned out to be duds once they got out in the real world. My dad makes over a half-million a year in one of the most prestigious law firms in this town and he was voted ‘Kid Most Likely to Get Beat Up By Someone from a Lower Grade' in high school. I just meant . . .”

“It's okay,” Bobby says. “I know you didn't mean anything.”

“My point is,” Arney continues, “that one thing the whole student body can do is start recognizing who we all are. I'm ticked off at myself because I've been judging the people who come in here every day and don't say anything. I mean, if I hadn't started getting to know Mary . . . well, I'm just saying we need some kind of decency campaign in this school.
That's
what I'm going to shoot for the rest of my time.”

Paulie thinks,
Arney just fucked Bobby and got Bobby to let him off the hook. Business as usual.

The bell rings and no one moves. Arney picks up his books as if nothing has happened. Gradually everyone else begins packing up and heading out.

“Hey, Mr. Logs,” Paulie says at the door, “can I talk with you a minute?”

Logs slaps his forehead. “That's right, you
said
you needed to talk with me. Sorry.” He closes the door behind Hannah, who just walked by as if Paulie didn't exist.

“Ready for TMI?”

Logs frowns.

“She's the one.”

“The one . . .”

“Mary Wells. She's who I cheated on Hannah with.”

.7

“H
annah was at that debate tournament,” Paulie says.

“I'm not sure I want to hear this. You sure you want to tell it?”

“I didn't, but that was before all this craziness.”

Logs says, “What the hell, this is my last year.”

“So Arney wants me to go over to the Armory and listen to Justin and his new group, and a couple of other groups he's tight with. I'm already planning to go so I say I'll meet him.

“We're early and they've got a bunch of pretenders for the first hour or so, guys whose parents should
never
have given them music lessons, and we're shootin' the shit, waiting for Justin and his guys. I look over at this girl who I catch looking at me and I barely recognize her. I mean, she looks like Mary except she has this
way
low-cut sweater.”

Logs frowns, in disbelief rather than disapproval.

“Swear to god, man, I'm not out looking. I'm not.”

“I believe you.”

“Pretty soon she's beside me. She says hi to Arney and we're watching and she's bumping me, like almost by accident. But then we're talking, almost yelling over the music, 'cause Jus is on now and he's cranking it up, and her hand is on my arm and they start to play a slow one and she asks me to dance. I don't want to, but it's Mary Wells. Even if Hannah's friends see me, it's the Virgin Mary. I could get in as much trouble dancing with Arney.”

“Why do I think you should have danced with Arney?”

“No kidding. Anyway she leans into me, arms around my neck, pressed up against me. This is not the Mary Wells I have come to know and yell ‘Go Team Go' at. The second it starts feeling good, I start feeling bad and I push her away. She backs off a little and we finish the dance and I'm looking around the room and a couple of Hannah's friends
are
watching so I know I need to get my ass home.

“I tell Arney I've gotta cut it short, go up to the stage and tell Justin he rocks, and head for the parking lot. Only when I get to my car, there's Mary goddamn Wells.”

Logs frowns, again in disbelief, though he knows the one guy he always believes is Paulie Bomb.

“She wants a ride home. I ask who she came with and she says, ‘Julie Fricke and some other cheerleaders, but they left,' and something feels wrong, because the cheerleaders stick together. They're jocks.”

“So . . . you took her home?”

“Kind of. I stall for a while, then I see Arney coming out of the Armory and I holler at him. He drives over, rolls down the window, and I tell him to give Mary a ride; she lives on his way. He says no-can-do, he'd really like to but he's headed to some midnight thing with the YFC kids. Are you kidding me? Arney Stack doing midnight come-to-Jesus with Youth for Christ? I mentioned this but he says he'd promised to help them get Johannsen to let them hold meetings in a classroom as long as it was after school. I said, ‘Arney, you won the election. You can't run again, this is high school. Campaign promises aren't even real promises in high school!' but he said something about being a politician with a new kind of ethics, to which I said a
new kind
would be
some.
”

“It's too late to make a long story short, but give it a try, 'cause you are killing me.”

“I'm driving toward her house and she says, ‘Could we just drive around for a while?' and I say huh-uh because ‘I'm promised.'”

“You said you were
promised
?”

“When in doubt, go with comedy,” Paulie says. “So she says, ‘I just don't want to go home yet. My dad . . .' and she lets it trail off, and I'm pissed at my dad half the time—and
really
mad at him the other half—so I said maybe we could drive around a little, but not too long. This felt bad, and I wasn't even
doing
anything.”

“Yet,” Logs says.

“So we drove out past Diamond Lake and then along High Drive and through a couple of neighborhoods and I said I
had
to take her home. We got within a few hundred yards of that long-ass driveway that goes up to her mansion and she told me to stop. I'm goin'
no way
but she showed me her watch and said I did
not
want to be the guy caught driving up her driveway this close to midnight. I thought, most rumors are rumors for a reason and maybe the one about her dad being a teenage boy killer is one of them. So I stopped.”

Logs closes his eyes.

“I told her I'd wait until she got at least to the driveway. She wanted a few minutes to ‘collect' herself, like she was really worried about her old man. Then she started asking me stuff like why I thought she couldn't get a steady boyfriend. She was calm, like she really wanted to know, so I said the dumb-ass thing: I said well, she didn't always look quite as hot as she looked right then, and she asked if I thought she was pretty, and I said sure, everyone thought she was pretty. She asked if I thought she was hot, and I was trying to think of a way to say she was without saying she was hot to
me
. But I gotta tell you Logs, my mind was wandering to a bad place.”

“At this point your mentor would rather hear generalizations,” Logs says.

Paulie snorts. “Before I could say anything she put her arms around my neck and asked if I wanted . . . if I wanted . . .”

“To have sex?”

“Yeah, but she said the
word.
”

This is so far out of Logs's experience of Mary Wells he can barely believe it, even coming from Paulie.

“I don't know if you know what that
does . . .”

“I know what it does,” Logs says.

“Believe it or not, I was still thinking of Hannah,” Paulie says. “I pushed Mary away, but she was like, desperate. It was like some kind of test of life or death or something. This probably sounds like a guy making excuses for doing something spectacularly dumb, but it's the truth. I pushed her away and she started crying, sobbing almost. This is crazy but did you ever have sex with someone because you felt
sorry
for them? That's not
human
, is it? I mean, I can't say I didn't get cranked up;
that's
not human either, but then she was rubbing me and her shirt was off and she was like an
animal.
When it was over I just wanted her out of my car, because
sanity
comes rushing back with . . . well, you know what I'm saying. But she wouldn't get out. She wanted to know if she was
good.
”

Logs simply shakes his head.

“She straightened herself up and asked again if she was good, I mean, like a little kid wanting to know if she tied her shoes right. I said yeah just to get her out of there, then I watched her walk down the road and turn into her driveway, and sat there another five minutes wanting to beat my head against the dashboard 'til I went unconscious.”

“That would have been the smartest thing you did all night.”

“By the time I'd driven two miles, I knew I'd have to tell Hannah. I read Shakespeare; I know about tangled webs. So I did, the very next day, and that was that. So when all of a sudden Mary was missing and then she wasn't, and the more we heard the stranger it got, I started thinking something's
way
out of whack here. I did what I did and it's my fault, but Mary was a whole different girl than the one everyone calls Jesus's mom. I paid attention in psych. That kind of behavior means secrets.”

“What are you thinking?”

“Messed-up room that nobody saw, two-day lag in reporting . . .”

“What I said in P-8 today goes double for your brain, Paulie,” Logs says. “You know what they say about assuming.”

“That it makes an ass out of ‘u' and me?”

“No, that it makes whoever does it an asshole. So sit tight. I've said it before, and I'll say it again—most of the time when we don't understand it's because we don't know enough. We need to know more.”

 

Only minutes before midnight, Logs unlocks the double doors to the pool at the university and lets himself in, grateful that Coach Graves entrusted him with a key years ago. “If you drown in there,” the coach had said with a smile, “I'll tell them you lifted the keys from my jacket.”

Logs doesn't turn on the overhead lights, knowing the glow from the exit signs and the maintenance room will cast enough light to see the end lines and the wall. He and Paulie are connected by water; both go there for solace and both go there to think. He stands on the starting block, breathes deep, and shoots out over the middle lane.

Paulie's right. Something is
off
. He settles into a pace he could hold all night. Even at this age, Bruce Logsdon swims like most people walk. He could almost do this in the dark. He knows in his gut the number of strokes from one end to the other at any level of fatigue. The water is like a womb. It is safe.

As he flips in and out of his turns, he considers what he heard in Period 8 today. He's always known there were stories, but hasn't always known which ones belong to which student. He's always surprised to see where rugged stuff lands.

I wouldn't even know your name.
Arney's words to Bobby Wright. Absent the mindless shot Arney took at Bobby's poverty, they could have been Logs's words, or almost any other kid's in the room. So many times the greatest pain slides in under the radar. He doesn't judge himself by what he's missed, but he's aware it's a lot. Probably this Mary Wells thing will blow over; a feasible explanation will reveal itself and time will pass. P-8 has yielded some unexpected intimacies over the years, but there was a
feeling
in that room today. For a brief moment, mortality raised its head among these kids, and it mined stories from a deeper lode.

 

While Logs cranks out laps over at the university pool, Paulie swamps out The Rocket restrooms, watching the wide-angle mirror for late-night university students pulling all-nighters or the occasional homeless person stepping in to get out of the cold, and feeling the fatigue brought on by a day that started with an early morning swim and is ending with a late-night shift. He is blessed with the part of his father's DNA he welcomes—the ability to operate at pretty much full capacity on five hours' sleep—but the stress of this day is taking its toll. He rolls the mop bucket and cleaning tools toward the back room, preparing to close out the till and lock up for the night, when the bell over the door jingles.

“Paulie Bomb.”

“Hey, Arney, what's goin' on?”

“Had a business meeting with some guys. I'm just headed home.”

“A
business
meeting. What kind of business meeting happens at midnight? And what high school kid has a business meeting
any
time? Man, Stack, you are a different kind of dude.”

“Ah, my old man wants me to learn about investing. Gave me some capital and the guys I'm working with had to meet late. Couldn't fit my school schedule into their business day.”

“Must have been
some
capital,” Paulie says.

“If everything works out,” Arney says, “they'll get a good return. Me, too.”

“I'm closing up,” Paulie says. “Got coffee in the thermoses, but nothing fresh.”

“No coffee,” Arney says back. “I thought you'd probably be here. Wanted to ask you something.”

Paulie stacks the bills in the lock box and opens the overnight safe. “Have to be
real
quick,” he says. “I'm beat.”

“What would you think if I started hanging out with Hannah?”

The bottom drops out of Paulie's gut. He doesn't answer.

Arney says, “You guys are done, right?”

“Hannah is.”

“I know it'd feel kind of funny, but we almost had something going when we were sophomores, back before you guys were—”

“It wouldn't feel funny, Arney,” Paulie says. His eyes go cold. “It would feel shitty.” He picks up a thermos and walks it to the sink, removing the lid and dumping the last of the coffee. “But if you want to go out with Hannah and Hannah wants to go out with you, there's nothing I can do about it.” He puts the thermos in the sink, runs hot water into it. “There's nothing I
should
do about it.”

“I just don't want—”

“Do whatever,” Paulie says. “I made this bed and I'm sleeping in it whether I like it or not.”

“I couldn't let it to get in the way of our friendship.”

“Look, Arney, I'm not gonna be a dick and get in the way if it's something real. If I did,
that
would affect our friendship.” Paulie's doubting the friendship as he says it. “This is just a little quick, is all. Feels like revenge.”

Arney purses his lips.

“Not by you. Hannah.”

“Look man, if you'd rather—”

Paulie throws up his hands, palms out. “Naw, man, do it. If I'm going to purge this shit, I best purge it all at once.”

“Okay, but only if you're sure.”

“I'm sure!” He watches Arney walk toward the door, and slams the safe shut.

 

“Want me to kick his ass for you?” Justin leans against Paulie's Beetle the next day, moments after last bell, watching the building empty.

Paulie laughs. “I could do that myself.”

“But there's a certain pleasure to hiring it done,” Justin says. “Man, that is
cold
. There's
got
to be a code.” Justin is not a big guy; five-nine, a hundred-fifty pounds, with five percent body fat and the strength of guys half again his size. He'd give Arney a run.

“He just asked if it was okay. You know Arney, always testing shit. If Hannah's interested, well, that tells me something about Hannah.” He reaches for the door handle. “Suck-it-up time for me either way. If it's not Stack, it'll be someone else eventually. I can't shut down the head movies no matter who it is. Hannah's pissed and she's pretty good at ‘letting you know how it feels.' Got a feeling I'll be logging some
miles
. On the court and on the sea.”