Spree (YA Paranormal) (12 page)

* * *

Later that day the school psychologist started meeting kids in small groups.

Alex and Zipper happened to be in the same group, the ex-boyfriend group. Alex couldn’t believe it, but technically Mrs. Cowell was right. Zipper was my first kiss, my first boyfriend. Alex was my last.

“We just want you to have a place to talk,” Mrs. Cowell said, “to share your feelings and memories of Fay and Cindy.”

Alex just shook his head.

The gesture, ever so small, caught Mrs. Cowell’s eye.

“Alex?” she asked.

“Why can’t you just leave it alone?” he asked. “All week we hear you going on and on about how it’s okay to cry, about how everything will work itself out. It won’t. Fay’s dead. They couldn’t even show her body at her funeral. That’s not all right.”

“No, it’s not,” Mrs. Cowell agreed. “I know if I had a girlfriend—”

“You don’t know,” Alex said. “And she was my ex-girlfriend.”

“Ex-girlfriend.”

Alex clammed up. Zipper just sat there, looking at him. Their auras were so red hot I could barely tell where one ended and the other began.

“Does anyone else feel that way?” Mrs. Cowell asked.

No one else spoke up. A few of the guys, like Tom, were interesting selections. Just a few months ago Tom and Alex were at each other’s throats over me, until Alex moved on, decided I wasn’t worth it. Tom decided the same.

“Does anyone want to talk about Fay or Cindy?” Mrs. Cowell asked.

All eyes shot downward. Mrs. Cowell fished around the room for any wayward glance. She thought she found one in Zipper.

“John?” she asked.

“Zipper,” he said.

Alex murmured. The gesture was not lost on Zipper.

“I didn’t know her,” Zipper said.

In that comment, I felt his sadness. I felt his longing for us to be closer and his pain that we’d never be, not in life.

Mrs. Cowell caught the intonation too.

“Did you want to?” she asked Zipper.

Alex studied the expression on Zipper’s face. For a moment, Zipper’s face trembled with what could almost be called emotion.

“I want this erased,” Zipper said. “I want everything erased.”

“Everything? That’s cold,” Alex said.

“Cold is allowing your girlfriend to get drunk and then drive,” Zipper said.

Alex stood up, standing over Zipper. “Are you deaf?!” he yelled. “She’s wasn’t my girlfriend then! Besides, what do you know about girlfriends anyway?”

Zipper smiled eerily at the provoked figure. Both auras were rippling with red and black energy.

“Alex,” Mrs. Cowell said. Her soothing pink aura spread over theirs as she said: “John is just—”

“Zipper.”

“Zipper is just speaking his mind.”

“If he speaks any more of it I’ll…” Alex began muttering.

“You’ll what?” Zipper asked. “I don’t drive drunk…unlike you.”

Alex turned and went through the door.

Watching Alex storm through the school hallways and out, so that no one would see him cry, was painful. His aura became like blood flowing, wounded as he was. Zipper’s words had hit him hard, mainly because they were words he’d said to himself, and to know that others, outsiders, viewed it the same way simply served as confirmation. He punched a wall and then wandered out a door.

Zipper, still seated, was quiet as a few other kids went on about me. Inside, he was the way Alex was on the outside, angry, incredibly so. His aura was all over the place, surrounded by mocking Takers, and I knew it’d take just one or two more eruptions like this to get him to pull the trigger.

* * *

That night Mrs. Walters shed off the years that stood between her and her high school experience.

She sat at an oak table with her husband, a financier, and talked openly of her day.

“The students are really having a hard time of it,” she told her husband.

“Are all three girls dead?” her husband asked.

He didn’t wait for an answer, but dug his knife into the steak his wife had prepared.

“Aliya’s still holding on,” she said. “I had the kids write poems. I might mail a few out to her.”

Her husband looked up. His brown eyes held hers. “Are you sure that’s wise?” he asked.

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“It’s so close to the event. Do the kids really need to be writing about it?”

“What else is poetry for?”

Mrs. Walters took a sip of red wine, swished it around her mouth, swallowed, and looked at her husband. She was circling around the topic truly on her mind.

“I remember how much writing helped me when Steve got shot,” she said.

Her husband looked down, concentrating on the steak, which was a bit red for his liking.

“I can throw it back on the grill,” Mrs. Walters said.

“No need,” her husband replied.

“I wrote and wrote when Steve died,” Mrs. Walters continued. “I can still remember that day like it was yesterday.”

She could too. I could see her high school self standing in front of a mirror, deciding what to wear. Her biggest challenge of the day was a black blouse Steve liked and a sheik vermillion skirt she adored. The skirt won. It would prove an especially ironic choice of color.

She was in the cafeteria for study hall when the first shots rang out. She didn’t hear them, too busy gossiping with her friends about how far she and Steve went the other night. The moment a slightly less portly Mr. Higgins came stumbling in, his science lecture notes in his hands, she could tell that something was wrong. His face was red and scrunched up, yet he was sweating as he whispered something to the study proctor. The school was going into lockdown. They wanted nothing said to the students to avoid panic. But it was too late. From the far rear window of the cafeteria Mrs. Walters, then just Lisa, saw kids running, spattered with their own blood and the blood of others. She stood there a moment, too shocked to say anything. More observant kids filmed the entire episode on their cells and were texting pictures back and forth. Within a minute the story was around the school and kids knew that something was up, that an explosion had happened by the gym and that people were hurt. It wasn’t until the photos of the kids running towards the cafeteria hallway surfaced that it became clear: students had been shot.

“That psycho,” Paul, a buff jock and acquaintance of Lisa, called out.

Blood stained his legs as he searched up and down to see how bad the wounds were. Parts of kids had fallen on him, but he wasn’t hurt.

“What’s going on?” Becky, a friend of Lisa’s, asked.

“Matt and a few other kids got him,” the kid said. “Not before he fired, though.”

“Who fired?”

Paul looked right at Lisa, his eyes full of hidden light.

“Teddy Berschmire,” he said.

“Crazy T?” Lisa asked.

“He shot…”

Paul couldn’t say it. Lisa just looked at him and started bawling.

“Is he still alive?” she managed to ask.

Paul looked down and lost his eyes to the floor.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

This one moment, born of a demented brain, would come to define the rest of Mrs. Walters’s life. Crazy T may have been obsessed with her, but she launched an obsession of her own: to help kids in need so that they would never turn out like Crazy T did.

How to capture all of that in a poem?

All these years later, she sat eating steak with her husband, still alive, randomly so.

“It must have been awful,” Mr. Walters said in response to his wife’s earlier question. “Could you pass the A-1 sauce?”

Mrs. Walters shook her head, reached for the sauce. Her hand still shook, all these years later, as she handed her husband the condiment. Mr. Walters saw but just continued cutting into his steak. He’d heard the story before. It never ended well.

* * *

That night Zipper was given special orders: make sure the fields were clean for the championship game. It was an exhausting process, cleaning up anything from wrappers tossed carelessly by kids skipping out on gym class to mowing and making sure the field lines were freshly painted. But Zipper had a natural talent for making everything look just perfect.

Zipper sat on the mower, ear buds in, zigzagging along the edge of the pavement, in a circuitous route he had memorized after months of planting explosives.

He hit a snag; there was an explosion—a small one, but one that could’ve blown the whole school away.

Zipper tore out his ear buds and looked around. His boss, Mr. Peterson, a fat, bald stocky man who still bore some signs of his former athleticism, rushed to the scene, beer can still in hand.

“What the hell?” Mr. Peterson asked.

Zipper shrugged his shoulders.

“This piece of crap needs to get looked at,” Zipper said, pointing down at the mower.

“I’ve never heard the thing make that noise in seven years,” Mr. Peterson said. “You must not be handling it right.”

Mr. Peterson went over to the mower, started examining it as it ran.

A pipe choked out some smoke, sounded a bit gruff.

“That wasn’t the sound I heard,” Mr. Peterson said.

“Yeah—it was worse before,” Zipper told him.

“Let me know if it happens again,” Mr. Peterson replied.

“Don’t you want me to stop mowing?” Zipper asked.

“Not on your life,” Mr. Peterson said. “Get these fields ready.”

Zipper smiled, nodded, and then put his ear buds back in. He started mowing again, leaving Mr. Peterson to his beer and a cloud of dust.

THE DAY OF THE SHOOTING: MORNING

Chapter 10

Steph and her friends walked in with the T-shirts she had specially made. On the back, a picture of her mom holding her. On the front, the words, in bright blood red: “Forget Fay.”

In her first position class, the students were already buzzing.

Mr. Higgins knew something big was going on, as he managed to get two phones from the kids in the first ten minutes of class. Teens were never that sloppy with their phones. Something was up.

Then Steph walked in, not even flinching as she headed to her seat.

A group of kids murmurred, looking from their old Bunsen burners to the shirt.

“Steph,” Mr. Higgins said. “Come here.”

Steph marched up to Mr. Higgins’s desk, making no effort at concealment.

“We’re all happy you’re back,” Mr. Higgins said. “None of us know what you’re going through. But that shirt—”

“I have the
right
to wear this shirt,” Steph said.

Her voice didn’t quiver in the slightest; she’d clearly rehearsed the conversation many times in her head.

“Even if you do—” Mr. Higgins said.

“I do,” Steph insisted.

“Does having a right make it right?” Mr. Higgins inquired.

“Did Fay have the right to kill my mom?” Steph asked in reply.

Mr. Higgins took a breath and examined the angry young girl before him. The class was deathly silent, listening, pretending to fool with the burners.

“Fay,” Mr. Higgins pleaded.

“I’m not taking off this shirt.”

Steph stood there, inflexible.

“Why don’t you go talk to Mrs. Cowell?” Mr. Higgins suggested. “You’ll feel better.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Steph said. “And talking isn’t going to make anything better.”

Her aura was so full of vibrant reds, so wounded, so angry.

“The back of the shirt is so beautiful,” Mr. Higgins said. “Your mother would be so proud. Why—”

“Don’t speak of my mother.”

“Please, Steph,” Mr. Higgins pleaded. “That shirt’s hurting some of Fay’s friends.”

“Good. Those alcoholics deserve it.”

“Steph, please change shirts.”

“No.”

“I can’t have you wearing that shirt in this class,” Mr. Higgins said. “It’s hurting your friends.”

“To hell with them. They weren’t even at the funeral. They’re not my friends,” Steph said.

Mr. Higgins picked up the phone and dialed down to Mrs. Cowell. His only words: “Please come immediately.”

I sensed from his aura that this was the only time in thirty years he’d ever uttered those words.

“Really?” Steph challenged. “You’re going to force me out over this?”

“No one’s forcing you out,” Mr. Higgins said.

Mrs. Cowell heard, said she’d be on her way. Mr. Higgins hung up the phone.

“If you force me to leave, if you force me to take off this shirt, I will sue,” Steph said. “You’re obstructing my education, Mr. Higgins, and that I can’t have.”

Steph wore a bitter smirk on her face as she spoke the words.

Mr. Higgins scratched his beard, as if that was somehow the appropriate response. Words failed him.

Steph stared deeply into him, before turning to the class.

“She killed my mother,” she said to the students. “I won’t let you pretend she was some kind of a saint. She was a selfish, slutty, nasty drunk, and I’m paying the price for it. So is her mother and her boyfriend and so is everyone else who hung out with her.”

The kids turned from their thirty-year-old Bunsen burners, certain that this experiment was much more interesting than the one they were conducting. No one said a word, though. Their auras were all over the place, retreating as much as possible from the flaming red sun that was Steph’s aura.

“No one’s denying that you’re paying a price you shouldn’t have to,” Mrs. Cowell said.

She had appeared in the doorway mid-speech, took to watching the exploding teenager before her eyes.

“I’m not leaving,” Steph said. “You can’t make me go. You can’t ignore this!”

“No one’s trying to ignore you, honey,” Mrs. Cowell said.

“Up yours! What do you know?!” Steph asked. “Is it you going to bed every night crying?”

“No, it’s not,” Mrs. Cowell said.

“Then shut up,” Steph said. “Don’t tell me what to feel.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Mrs. Cowell said. “You have every right to feel how you’re feeling.”

“I don’t need patronizing.”

“I’m not patronizing; I’m agreeing,” Mrs. Cowell said. “I don’t know how you feel. Can you tell me?”