Random (18 page)

Twenty-six.

Twenty. Six.

That's a long time away. Twenty-six.

“And if they did put you in prison, even after you got out,” Andy goes on, “or, if I'm not mistaken, probably even while you were in there, you could still finish school. That's something, right? That's more than . . . some people got right now. Maybe you should be more grateful.”

I glance over at him again. Andy's face seems more relaxed than it did a minute ago. It's hard to keep up with this guy.

“So how are you?” I say pointedly,
beyond
ready to move on to a new topic.

“How am I, what?”

“How are you feeling? Are you still thinking about driving down this hill and over the edge, or what?”

Andy rears back a little, like he'd forgotten why he was parked at the top of a hill in the first place.

“Not really,” he says, and unless I'm mistaken, he's actually smirking when he says it.

“So you're safe? I can get my brother's car back before he wakes up? I can finally get some sleep?”

The smirk falls off Andy's face, and I wonder if I've just completely blown it.

“Tori,” he says, “you didn't have to come up here.”

“No, Andy, I kind of did.”

Andy slides off the hood and stands, putting his hands on the hood and leaning forward toward me.

“No, Victoria, you kind of didn't,” he says. “Nobody forced you to come up here. I'm glad you did, I really am. But a lot of
people wouldn't have. Especially not on the eve of, shall we say, so momentous a day as you're facing. Do you get that?”

Maybe I get it, but maybe also my eyes are so tired and dried out I feel like scratching them with my fingernails. And the oblique reference to my plea today sends tremors up my legs and down my arms.

“Well, anyway,” Andy says. “Regardless, it was cool of you to come up here. But I understand needing to get home. It
has
been a long night.”

“We should do it again sometime,” I say, joking mostly out of exhaustion, and then it snaps into my brain how many different ways that sentence could be heard. One way is,
Hey, let's me and you get together sometime.

Andy doesn't move. Only watches me.

“It's just that except for Noah, no one else is really talking to me,” I say, for clarification. Andy is definitely not my type. “Not even the people I thought were my friends.”

“Your co-conspirators?” Andy asks, but not in a mean way.

“No, the team. My girls. I thought we . . . I mean, that I could count on them, and . . . it would just be nice to be able to talk to someone or see someone who doesn't hate my guts.”

I think I see something shift in Andy's eyes, but it's hard to tell with the rising sun lighting right into my face.

“Tell you what,” he says. “Call me sometime. You'll get your answer.”

Cryptic, but who cares. It's something.

“Thanks,” I say, not even sure anymore if I mean it.

“Don't thank me yet.”

Clearly enjoying that little send-off, Andy moves to the door, so I slide off the hood and walk around to that side as well, toward my car. Sorry, Jack's car.

“Are you going to be okay?” I say.

Andy turns back to face me. “Actually, yes,” he says. “Thank you for asking. Seriously.”

“No problem.”

“No problem,” Andy mutters back, so quiet I can barely hear him. Not sure why he's repeating it. He starts to duck into the car, but I stop him again because there's just one tiny detail I need to know before heading home and putting this whole weird-ass night behind me.

“Andy.”

“Hmm?”

“When you first called me tonight. Who were you trying to call?”

“I told you. It was random.”

“You just punched in seven numbers and hoped someone would answer?”

“Sure.”

“No offense . . . but that's bullshit.”

Andy grins.

“Okay, maybe not random, exactly,” he says. “More of a misdial.”

“So who were you trying to call?”

Andy's grin blossoms into a smile. He opens the driver's
door, gets in, shuts the door behind him. Starts the engine. Rolls down the window.

“Suicide hotline,” he says. “I must've hit eight instead of nine at the end.”

“You mean my number,
my
cell phone, is one digit away from a suicide hotline number?”

“I know,” Andy says. “Crazy, isn't it?”

He guns the motor.

“Take it easy, Vic,” he says, and, after checking for traffic, pulls onto the 57 and drives on down the hill.

Ugh. Vic. Even under these bizarre circumstances, I hate being called Vic. Must be why Jack does it so much.

There isn't any traffic yet at this time of day, and I watch the little white car until it hits the first switchback. Waiting, I guess, to make sure he's really going to stay on the road and not, you know,
drive off it
.

I get into the car and start it up. Then, again maybe just because I'm that wiped out, I decide to call Andy back. Right now. Now that he's on the road, and safe, I'm going to call and tell him he can squarely go screw himself for dragging me through all this tonight.

I dial Andy's number with the last gasps of battery life on my phone. He doesn't answer, though. It's way too easy to imagine him checking the screen, seeing it's me, and laughing, tossing the phone onto the seat beside him.

I'm about to hang up when the voice mail kicks in.

And when it does, my stomach lurches sideways, wrapping
around my spine in something like terror. Like an icy hand gripped my intestines and spun them on a merry-go-round.

I listen to the entire outgoing voice mail message, which must last only five seconds at most, but which in my body feels like decades. I am old by the time it ends with a beep, older than a high school kid, older than my dad, older than sin.

I do not leave a message. I barely have the strength to tap the end-call button.

Andy lied.

About how much, I don't know. Maybe all of it, maybe some of it, but he lied. And did an exquisite job of it. Maybe Andy's not even his name.

I throw my phone into the seat beside me, and tear off down the highway as fast as I dare, trying to catch up with the fleeing Sentra. Andy can't be too far ahead of me; I could possibly catch up with him before he ever reaches an intersection to town.

I play no music, speak no words aloud or in my head. Just hear the voice mail message skipping over and over from beyond death.

It's not an accident, not a mistake, and not a misunderstanding. It's him.

“Hey, this is Kevin, leave me a message. Later!”

Horses vs. Humans

(continued from first op-ed page)

“Kevin wasn't very athletic,” his mother, Cindy Cooper, reports, struggling to keep her tears in check. “Even back when I was in school, that was always important. The popular people were good at sports, and I wasn't. So I got teased. Everyone gets teased. I don't argue that. But to launch a campaign of relentless attacks on my son because he couldn't, what? Catch a ball? That's absurd and, I'm sorry, sinful.”

A relentless campaign, she said. There's that word again.

The genius responsible for the “faggit” comment was not alone. Other commenters left similar remarks regarding Kevin's sexuality. The irony, if one dare call it that, is that there's no proof Kevin was, in fact, gay.

The question is: Does that matter? Should it? For certainly the people behind the comments—not identified here because of their ages—seemed to think he was homosexual and thus worthy of aggravated ridicule and demonization.

“This online bullying thing, it's out of control,” Cooper says. “The things these kids say to each other, even things adults say. It's awful, awful stuff. Things you'd never say
face-to-face. These kids who tormented Kevin, they're cowards. They're monsters hiding behind Wi-Fi, as if there aren't real people on the other end of the screen. Well, there are. Maybe if they'd thought of that, Kevin would be alive today.”

What will Kevin Cooper's legacy be? That's in the hands of the courts now. But rest assured, we'll be watching.

So will every Kevin Cooper in the state.

~A. S.~

Of course, of course, of course . . .

I will say this, think this, chant this until the world stops turning, if that's what it takes to make me fully accept the enormity of my stupidity.

So clear now. Not that it makes
sense
, because it doesn't, it makes no sense whatsoever, but of course there was something not right about this whole thing, this entire scenario, from Andy's phone call at midnight up till now.

And I bought it. Bought the entire story.

No, wait. I did not! Okay, there were a couple times during the conversation that I worried, that I wondered if he was really in danger. But from the very beginning, didn't I think it was a prank?

How much of Andy's story is true? How much of it could possibly
be
true?

And, most important . . . who the hell is he, and how'd he get Kevin's phone?

For one instant I wonder if I'm in some weird horror story, and that Andy is really Kevin, back from the dead, back to haunt me, back to take me to my own grave.

Except ghosts probably don't need ice chests full of food. No, a ghost would be easier. Less frightening.

The ice chest in the back of his Sentra, the laptop in the passenger seat. Like a . . . my God, like a
stakeout
. He had been up there since at least midnight, maybe earlier. That part was probably true; I'd heard the rain, and the Doppler-effect truck horn as it whipped past him.

And how could he have known my cell phone number ended with an eight? After everything that happened, he really still remembered the suicide hotline phone number? No. He knew my phone number, or had it written down. It was that simple.

But why?

And once again, for anyone just tuning in:
Who?
Who is Andy, and/or who put him up to this? A cop, a detective, some investigator or reporter, even a lawyer maybe . . .

Or—is it revenge?

The oatmeal cookies rumble in my stomach. Poison, maybe. How easy would it be to get away with that, under the circumstances?

I curve to the right and onto a downslope straightaway. I don't see the Sentra. How fast was he going?

No, no, no! I can't have lost him, there's no way, where could he poss—

Gas station.

I spot him standing beside the Sentra at a gas pump in a 7-Eleven parking lot. I stomp on the brakes—thank God it's early morning still and we're outside the main drag so no one rear-ends me. I feel badass for a second, like I'm on a cop show, as I twist the wheel to the right and onto a side street connecting to the gas station parking lot.

I pull into the gas station right behind him. Andy—if that's his name—doesn't even look up, but I can already see his smirk. He knows it's me.

I shut off the car and leap out, racing toward him.

“Who the fuck are you?”

“Why, hello, Victoria,” he says, not taking his eyes off the ticking gallon meter. “Nice to see you again so soon.”

“I should call the cops on you, you bastard.”

“Oh? And accuse me of what?”

“I don't know! Who are you, dammit?”

The pump stops pumping, and Andy puts the handle back in its cradle. Still not looking at me, he begins screwing the gas cap back on.

“Who do you think I am?” he finally says.

“Stop it!”
I scream. “Just tell me!”

Once he has the cap back on and the little gate shut, Andy finally turns to face me. His face is neutral.

“My name,” he says, “is Andrew Christopher Stein. I'm
eighteen years old. I live in Flagstaff. And until tonight, you and I have never met. Does that help?”

Flagstaff . . . that's twenty miles north of here. And the name doesn't sound familiar at all, no more than the name “Andy” did seven hours ago.

“Why did you do this? You were never really going to kill yourself.”

“Not tonight, no. But, Victoria, I have to tell you right now, about ninety percent or more of everything I did say tonight was the God's honest truth. I don't suppose you're inclined to believe that, and that's fine. But, well, there it is.”

“How did you get Kevin's phone?”

Andy smirks again. “Ya know, I thought I heard the phone ring on the way down the mountain. Was that
you
, by any chance?”

Whatever he's doing, whatever he's up to, he's sure enjoying it. I fall back against the hood of my car. My shoulders drop, and I can tell my face droops like that of a five-year-old who doesn't get dessert.

“You left a message, I assume,” Andy goes on. “Funny thing is, I don't know Kevin's password. I don't think his mom does either. The cops can probably get in there one way or another, I'm sure, but I can't. I doubt they'd bother, though. It's really not relevant to the case, or else they wouldn't have given it back to Cindy. That's Kevin's mom, by the way. But maybe you already knew that from court documents.”

“I know who his mom is.”

“Ah, right,” Andy says. “From school, yeah? Or maybe you hung out at his house when you were little kids?”

“No! I did not go to his house, we didn't . . .”

I bite my lip. I've told him way too much tonight as it is.

“Who are you for real?” I say. “Please?”

The smirk disappears from Andy's face. He moves to lean against the trunk of the Sentra so we're facing each other.

“I saw the Facebook posts. But then, I guess, who hasn't? It's so funny to me that people think they can take down a page and it's gone from the Web forever. So lame. There's copies all over. I also saw your, uh . . . ‘apology' letter. The one I'm sure someone forced you to write. Maybe your parents, or the principal, maybe even your lawyer, who knows. And yes, you did say you were sorry. But were you really?
Are
you? Are you really sorry, Victoria?”