Spontaneous (22 page)

Y
es,
this
is what happens when your boyfriend spontaneously combusts in front of you.

You fall to your knees. You press your face into the pavement as the blood drips, thick and languorous, off you, as if it were ice cream in the sunlight. You howl like you've never howled before, and the howl confirms that there are things deep inside you. Things darker than the darkest things you've ever imagined. And you believe in those things. Entirely, without question.

You send a three-letter text—
SOS
—and your parents come to fetch you and you sit on plastic bags in the back of their Durango and you stare out the window at the apple blossoms. You wear nothing but your bra and panties because you can't possibly keep those bloody clothes on your body. When you get home, you rush to the bathroom and lock the door. You shower sitting down and you cry. When the hot water becomes cold water, you shiver and
you know you deserve to shiver. When you can't bear the shivering anymore, you put on pajamas and you crawl into bed.

You pull the shades on the window that your boyfriend once crawled through. You smell the sheets that haven't been washed in at least a week, that hold his scent. You cradle your phone in your hand. You open the novel you started once upon a time, the one called
All the Feels.
You read a passage from it:

Ever since his seventeenth birthday, Xavier had a power. Whenever he touched someone, he took all their feelings. He absorbed them, sopped them up like he was a paper towel and their feelings were a spilled beverage. Then the people died. Because you can't live without any feelings.

You rewrite the passage:

Ever since her seventeenth birthday, Mara had a power. Whenever she felt something, she gave her feelings away. Her feelings leaked out of her like propane from a furnace and people inhaled her feelings. Then the people exploded. Because no one's body can handle such noxious shit.

Then you look at what you've written and you realize something you should have known all along. You're not a hero. You'll never be a hero, or even a good person. You're a villain, always have been. You know now that
All the Feels
was never about a boy who's afraid of his own
feels
. It has always been about you and how the world
should be afraid of yours. That's right. Because all your fucking feels are tearing the world apart.

Like any villain worth a damn, you delete every trace of evidence. You wipe your cloud, your hard drive, your phone. You destroy that book. And you vow to keep your secrets to your grave. You decide that you will never tell anyone, not even Tess, that you killed your own boyfriend, that you killed all of them. That you, Mara Carlyle, are the Covington Curse.

N
o one blamed me for that particular patch of madness. They pitied me, just as they pitied the friends and families of the day's other victims: Jane, Becky, Steve, Taylor, plus two kids I haven't mentioned yet because I didn't witness their demises.

Karl Gunderson, a bony guy who ran cross-country and seemed to have an endless supply of egg-salad sandwiches on his person, blew up while he hid in Room the First. And Teresa Thompson, class treasurer and the only black girl I'd ever known who was a card-carrying member of the Young Republicans, blew up while heading to a back exit of the school, carrying her friend Kacey Neilson, who'd broken her ankle during the melee.

Scientists didn't visit and take samples. Rosetti didn't investigate, though apparently her partner, Demetri Meadows, walked the halls and jotted some notes. Then he passed the baton to Sheriff Tibble, who gave things a cursory look and told our janitor, the affable and always-available widower Mr. Garvin, to “go about his
work.” As Garvin mopped up our seven dead classmates and hosed down the halls and parking lot, Tibble informed the victims' families that they could each collect a bucket of assorted remains. If they were so inclined.

The nearly empty middle and elementary schools cleared out completely. Across town at the Shop City Mall, they canceled classes. Even though we had very little contact with the other students, our predicament was still a “major distraction” to them and the school board decided to, in the words of President Mender, “take a mulligan.” They'd start over next year when the legacy of the senior class could be forgotten.

Meanwhile, the legacy of the senior class was determined to soak itself into the architecture.

That's right, we didn't cancel a single day of school. We returned the Monday after the bloodbath. What other choice did we have? Nowhere else to go, we could hardly give up now. Even though things were destined to change.

It won't surprise you that I was a wreck. I didn't attend any classes that first day back. I sat in the hall, leaning against a locker and I watched my classmates come and go. Their eyes were sympathetic, but the only person who chose to talk to me was Elliot Pressman, Cranberry Bollinger's former flame.

“It'll get better,” he said, putting an arm around me. “And these help.”

He placed two pills in my hand. I didn't even look at what they were. I popped them in my mouth, chewed them, and let their bitterness burn the sides of my tongue.

“You loved Cranberry?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “I used to stare at pictures of her on my phone, but I deleted them because that wasn't helping. I've already sorta forgotten what she looked like.”

Whatever the pills were, they did the trick. For a little while at least. I felt a rush of numbness, then I passed out. Next thing I remember, Elliot was gone and Tess was in his place.

“Honey, honey, honey,” she said.

I stuck up my middle finger.

“What's that for?” she asked.

“I want you to stay away from me. You shouldn't be around someone like me.”

“Honey, honey, honey,” she said again.

There were other kids in the hall and I stumbled up to my feet and pointed at them one by one. “You will die, you will die, and you will die,” I said.

Skye Sanchez shook her head. “We've got AP tests to take and then we will graduate and this will all be behind us.”

“You still believe in a finish line?” I asked. “Fine. Then I'm crawling to it, blind and numb. Who's with me?”

They all stared at me like I was wearing a beard of bees, until an ally finally stepped from the crowd. Greer Holloway, who wore her affinity for drugs quite literally on her sleeve—marijuana leaf tattoos adorned both of her forearms—pulled a joint from her pocket, sparked it up, and said, “A-fuckin'-men.”

Sometimes revolution starts with a single joint and a couple of pills.

Or so said a wise woman once.

Me. Right now, that is.

While I couldn't speak to each individual's state of mind, I can say that once I broke the seal, the collective attitude of the senior class transformed. It became firmly entrenched in unfettered and indulgent nihilism, in an attitude of “really, what the hell can they do to us now?” The night of #ForBilly was sort of a teaser, but fire and vandalism weren't gonna cut it anymore. Hedonism was the only answer.

On Tuesday, in Mrs. Dodd's Old Testament class, kids passed around a bottle of Jameson, compliments of Dougie O'Shea.

“Is this okay, Mrs. Dodd?” Claire asked when the bottle ended up in her hands.

Dodd lowered the Bible and said, “Wine blessed Abraham's army, so why not whiskey for yours?”

Good enough for Claire, and when Claire is swigging straight from the bottle in class, you know the worm has taken a distinct turn. The bacchanalia (a little Latin for you—hat tip to Spiros) started fast and only picked up steam. Our newest video—an hour-long edition brimming with Krook's false proclamations and seven spontaneous combustions—was rushed into postproduction thanks to stimulants and adrenaline. When it had a special premiere that Wednesday, our sideshow suddenly delivered what so many had been expecting. If the comments were any indication, people were both thrilled and disgusted.

About time! This touchy-feely shit was testing my patience.

MY EYEZ! Can someone wash my eyez please?

It goes without saying that Jane was instantly deified, deemed the most tragic loss since Billy Harmon.

I ship Jane and Billy . . . in Heaven!

Those particular words were probably typed about a billion times by frenzied tween fingers. I don't mean to make light of her death, I really don't, but I was having trouble trusting any of my emotions.

For chrissakes, I couldn't even cry for Dylan.

I
didn't cry for my dead boyfriend. It's a terrible thing to say, but it's true. I shed my share of tears, of course, and people thought they were for Dylan, but they were really for myself. I grieved the loss of the girl I thought I was, which was a smart-ass but basically a good person. Turns out I was a smart-ass
and
basically an absolute and total shitstain of a person. I was a psycho who imagined people's deaths and then—guess what?—those people blew up.

Don't believe me? Let's run through the victims.

Katelyn Ogden. I hated her. Sure, we were friendly, but deep down I hated her. Her shit was always
so
together. She could be a tourist on the dark side where some of us lived, then still go back to her sunny existence. I despised that. I'd wished her dead on more than one occasion.

Brian Chen. He snubbed me once and that was enough to inspire my wrath. Then he went on to have this entirely lame catchphrase, while half the things I've said that should have gone viral
never did. No love for “boom-boom bonkers” and so we got boom-boom Brian.

Still not convinced?

Consider Perry Love. I thought he was a homophobic and agephobic douche, and I wanted him wiped off the face of the earth. Ta-da! Wiped. Same goes for his teammates Harper Wie and Steve Cox. How about Cranberry Bollinger? I was jealous of her and she suffered the consequences. The Dalton twins? I was constantly annoyed by them, so they had to go too. Kamal Patel? Don't get me started. Gayle Heatherton? I wouldn't be the first person to think the world would be a better place without mean girls like her. Um, Jane Rolling? Um, duh. Becky, Taylor, Teresa, Karl . . . you get the gist. Even Billy Harmon, I even wanted poor little Billy Harmon out of the picture. Though when it comes to him, euthanasia is the nicest word I can hang my evil thoughts on. Basically, at one point or another, I'd wished all of them dead. And now they were. Spectacularly dead.

All of which leads us to one clear and disturbing fact.

I did the same thing to Dylan.

The first night that Dylan and I slept together, he told me he loved me, and I told him the same thing. Then we did the deed, and when the deed was done, I felt spectacular. But each time we had sex after that, I didn't feel as spectacular.

I told myself it was typical, that first times are always the best. But deep down, there was more to it than that. Way down there in the darkness, I was hiding a secret:

I had imagined my boyfriend dead and that had made me feel . . . well, alive.

On the first night we had sex, it seemed quite likely that things would end very, very badly. Which sent a charge through my body. The possibility that Dylan could explode at any moment was, I hate to say it, a turn-on. But the more sex we had, the less likely that seemed. The explosions weren't happening anymore, so my heart wasn't thumping in the same way. I might not have been able to recognize it then, but I desperately wanted the spontaneous combustions to come back.

Sex on borrowed time. Plummeting plane sex. That's what I desired.

Sex on schedule. Commuter sex. That's what I got.

Now, you tell me: Which sounds more invigorating?

Okay, the latter might, that is if you're a sensible and sane person who's madly in love with your partner. But here's the other thing. The more confident I became that Dylan was going to survive, the less confident I became that our relationship would. I had told Dylan that I loved him, but I had only told him once. There's a reason for that.

I'm pretty sure I never did.

T
his was my fault. I had seen firsthand what I had caused. I had watched so many people, including my boyfriend, disintegrate in front of me. Now how the hell was I supposed to get all that behind me?

What was better for me in the long run? To completely forgot the images, smells, and sounds? Or to remember them forever, like tattoos on my soul that I would notice along the cuff of my conscience whenever I got too happy with my life decisions?

Big surprise: I chose to forget. I went easy on all things popped and puffed and I dedicated myself entirely to booze, because it seemed the substance best suited to amnesia. My incessant drinking was written all over my blotchy face and telegraphed from yards away by my rank breath, but my parents didn't punish me. They consoled me. I could almost hear relief in their harmonies of “we miss him so much too.” I know they feared their time with me was limited. Now that I wouldn't be spending it with some boy,
they were probably a bit happier. I couldn't blame them, but I certainly couldn't tell them what I'd done.

As for Dylan's family, I didn't have a clue what depths their heads and hearts were drowning in. Though on Thursday, I was given a chance to learn. That's when I received a text from a number I didn't recognize. It was a more formal message than I was accustomed to, but the subject wasn't exactly a casual one. It read:

Dear Mara, We know you must be going through a lot of pain right now, but we would be honored if you joined us for a short ceremony to remember Dylan. It will be held at noon on Saturday at the St. Francis Cemetery. Do not worry about dressing up. Simply bring your memories of my son. He loved you so. Kind regards, Denise Hovemeyer

Denise was Dylan's mom's name, but I didn't know it until that moment. As I've told you, in all the months we'd been together, I'd never been to Dylan's house and I'd never met his family. That's mostly on me. I'd never asked to visit, and the few times he invited me, I always told him it was easier if he came to my place. My parents were often at the deli, while his mom was always home.

To be honest, I was scared of the woman. He hardly talked about her, so I assumed she wasn't a pleasant person. I figured she was a mean old widow, a judgy old farmer's wife. I certainly didn't expect her to send such a devastatingly sweet text. I drank vodka and lemonade and read the words over and over until they were a blur. Soon, I was daydreaming about this ceremony.

I pictured Denise as a solid woman with square shoulders and thin lips and I imagined Warren standing next to her at the St. Francis Cemetery, amid countless tombstones bearing the Hovemeyer name. The triplets wouldn't be there because I figured the Rollings, in their grief, would want them far away from this cursed family. So it would be just those two, Dylan's mother and brother, in a cemetery swirling with fallen apple blossoms and the odor of damp spring soil. Oh, I almost forgot! The ice-cream truck would be there too, parked in the grass—a rusty monument to bygone happiness.

Then I pictured what would happen if I showed up to offer my condolences and crocodile tears. Denise would hug me, maybe ask me to call her some nickname, like Ducky or something. I'd sneak a sip from a flask and as all the remembrances were being remembered, I'd have to confess.

“I remember the beginning,” I'd say. “Life was crazy and he seemed crazy and that seemed to fit. But seeming to fit and actually fitting are two different things, aren't they? That's why stores have dressing rooms, right? Dylan turned out to be a special boy, a sensitive soul. But he didn't fit. And I didn't love him. Don't get me wrong. I miss him, I really do, but I also like having only myself to worry about. Now, I can't exactly tell people that, so it's better to drink and cry and appear heartbroken. Which is cowardly, I know. If only I had realized that my dark thoughts about Dylan were there for a reason and that they were dangerous. If only he had lived long enough for me to break up with him. If only in the throes of passion, when he was inside of me—”

Whack
.

I pictured Denise “Ducky” Hovemeyer slapping me across my stupid face because that's what my stupid face deserved. Then I pictured myself stumbling off, guilty of adding one more messed-up thing to the pile of messed-up things this poor widow has had to endure on a daily basis. And finally, being a villain and all, I'd be obliged to steal the ice-cream truck, to drive away in a cloud of dust, chewing gum, blowing bubbles, giving not a single fuck—all my fucks, in fact, flying straight out the window.

It was better for everyone if what I pictured couldn't ever possibly come to be. So I deleted the text and I blocked Denise Hovemeyer's number from my cell. I drank more vodka until I passed out on my bed.