The Body of Christopher Creed (14 page)

It struck me that I was describing Bo Richardson's life. I had been thinking about how I would be if I were Greg at nine or ten, and I had just described the worst kid in school. If I were Greg, I would become like Bo. If I had Bo's life, I would be Bo. Probably worse. That was a real awakening thought.

I tried to decide what Ryan and Renee would get out of it if someone forced them to live in Creed's house or Bo's house or Ali's house. If the average Steepleton kids had to walk a mile in one of their shoes, would that make them more understanding? I had this weird feeling that it wouldn't change a lot of my friends. It might scare them or piss them off, but it wouldn't make them understand.

That made me feel all alone and kind of strange, like I didn't know who I was all of a sudden. I had always been just "normal," Torey Adams, that kid who wedged his way onto the football team despite the fact that he can't throw or block.
Well, hell, he can kick, so we'll let him on.
The kid who played guitar well enough for being in high school, but who wrote dumb-ass songs that didn't mean anything. The only thing that ever made me stand out, I thought, was Leandra Konefski—the most beautiful girl in these parts.

Some fear grabbed hold of me—like if I changed too much I would lose Leandra. I had the feeling my new understanding of Steepleton was going to cause a few fights, and it made me nervous.

I came out of my thoughts, realizing that the house was quiet and my mom and dad must have gone to bed. I listened for floor creaking and was sort of aware of having heard some but didn't hear any at the moment. I shot out of the bed, stuck my head into the hall. There was no glow to indicate that a downstairs light was still on.

I stepped close to the wall to keep from making squeaks as I crossed our three-hundred-year-old floors. I pushed open the door to Ali's room slowly and faced an eerie orange glow. She had taken a towel and draped it over the lamp to keep it from shining very bright. She was on the bed in a sweat suit, with the diary hiding her face. She laid it flat and looked at me.

I tiptoed over to the side of the bed and pointed to the wall, as if to say,
Squash over.
She squashed, and I sat down slowly so we didn't make a lot of creaks.

She eyed the ceiling nervously, and I whispered, "If they get out of bed, you'll hear the floor creaking really loud. What's he saying?"

I gripped one side of the diary and pulled it over so that half was in front of each of us.

"His handwriting is terrible," she whispered. "I've only gotten through four pages. It starts last summer. He hasn't said anything about either parent yet. But guess what? You won't believe this. He had a girlfriend."

"No way."

She nodded. "Her name is Isabella."

I looked to where she pointed on a page. His handwriting was mostly scribble, but I could see the name Isabella in a line that I eventually made out to be:
Isabella told me she loved me today, and I promised her that I would come back tomorrow.

"Who is she?" I asked. "There's no one named Isabella in Steepleton."

"She lives in Margate. Chris's uncle owns a coffee shop in Margate, on the boardwalk, and according to this, his parents let him give up his paper route to be a busboy over there. This Isabella is a waitress."

"Wow..." I breathed. Creed having a girlfriend was like Uncle Wiggly going out with Miss America. "I wonder if she's weird, too."

"He said she's beautiful," Ali muttered. She turned back a couple of pages and pointed to the top entry, under the date of June 27.

I read the first lines, which went:
I'm going to describe Isabella, so that even when I'm not with her, I always have a full description of her with me.

Her dark hair dances like an angry sea. Her cheeks glow like soft white lanterns. She is as tall as thunder and as lean as lightning....

I let out a breathy laugh under the weight of this goo. He described Isabella from the top of her dancing hair to the tips of her rosy red toenails. It took up, like, a page and a half. Then he went into how shy and reserved she was, so
not
like the girls from Steepleton, and how it had taken her three days to get up her nerve to talk to him.

I realized when she finally came over to the table I was busing that she probably wouldn't have the nerve to say what was on her mind. I was quite right. When I asked her, "Would you like to walk the boardwalk with me during break?" she looked at me with pure thanks that I had said it and saved her the risk.

As we walked, the sun beat down on us, and it was pure heaven. She was telling me about her family, how her big sister was so unlike her, but I could hardly hear. I could hardly believe this goddess had agreed to walk with me.

I read on and on. Creed was totally smarmy about her, and it went slow. Three pages later, they were still walking on the boardwalk. But a part of me wanted to give this girl a trophy.

"How come one of us couldn't have been nice to him?" I wondered out loud. If this girl could put up with him, I guessed we could have, too.

"Sometimes people need a fresh start," Ali said after a minute. "People have these geeky reputations, but they get with somebody new, somebody who doesn't know about them, and they can change almost their whole behavior."

"Yeah," I agreed. I remembered that last summer Alex had met a girl on the beach in Brigantine. She didn't know that he was class clown and supercomputer brain, and in front of her, he didn't really act like it. I kept reading.

I wanted to kiss her so badly, but I couldn't find the courage. I knew if I waited, the right moment would come. Tomorrow, the next day, or the next. I knew this much, Isabella and I would do a lot more walking and talking. She could talk forever, and I wouldn't care what she said. It all sounded like music, and the words were irrelevant. As we returned, my loins were bursting...

I threw my head back on the pillow and cracked up.

"Shh!" Ali whispered. "We're not going to laugh at him, okay?"

How could you not laugh at a kid saying
loins.
Ali was going overboard with the diplomat routine. I remembered other words Creed could pull out of his head,
winsome, tyrannized, cathartic...

"I can't help it." I laughed again. "Ali, it's like he lived on another planet."

She sighed. "It's his parents. You know, he learned all those words from his father, and his mother kept him so under lock and key."

"What if..." I got this thought. "What if this girl dumped him, or his mother refused to let him see her anymore? And that threw him into a state of depression, and that's what made him flip?"

"I know your mom is convinced about it, but I'm still thinking Mrs. Creed did it. For Bo's sake, I sure hope this diary says something—"

I wanted to check out my own theory. I jerked the book away from her and turned to the end.

The last entry was dated September 10, the day after school started. The entry looked like a list.

1. I have excellent skin.

2. I have a nice arch to my eyebrows.

3. My teeth are straight.

4. I am not fat.

5. I can read music.

6. My mom makes great food, and I have enough to eat.

7. I can pop wheelies on the concrete at ninety-percent pop.

8. I have $3,000 in the bank, which I can claim someday.

9. I have six, no seven, friends on the Internet.

10. Isabella and I are one.

My eyes returned to the sixth thing. It didn't sound like he was pissed at his mom.

"Ali, he is
so
weird. What kind of a list is—"

Ali pointed at the number 10 thing and mumbled, "Whoa. I wonder if they did the nasty..."

I tried to imagine Creed losing his virginity before I did. Another Uncle Wiggly-type of thought.

"Guess she didn't break up with him," Ali murmured. "At least not by September."

"I don't know..." Staring at this silly list, I realized that some of the things Creed was saying about himself were basically true. It almost seemed like an exercise in trying to brainwash yourself into believing good stuff about yourself. I wondered if he had done that in his head the whole time he was growing up.
I'm good at this, I'm wonderful at that...
And maybe he brainwashed himself into believing that stuff, instead of believing he had just been beaten up the day before. It was a weird thought, but that was one weird list.

"You know what?" Ali whispered, running her finger down this list. "He was never ugly. Did you ever realize that?"

I muttered something about guys not looking at other guys' appearances, but she smirked and said that I could be a real guy without being blind. I knew what she meant.

"People are blind," she said. "All they see is a person's reputation."

"Well, this girl obviously saw more," I said.

"I'm going to read this all night if I have to," Ali whispered. "There's got to be something in here to prove Mrs. Creed's guilty—and therefore Bo is
not.
"

I looked at the clock and saw to my amazement it was three-thirty in the morning. I got up to leave but froze, sitting straight up. The early part of the night had been such a brain hag that nothing had been really clear to me. But now that I was this relaxed and tired, the truth hit me.

"Get some sleep. Don't waste your time, because you won't find anything," I muttered. "Mrs. Creed spoke to me. Over the telephone at the ball field. I just thought of it now. Oh my god."

I realized something about this Hitchcock movie that I had stolen the phone-call idea from. When the murderer received his mystery phone call, he immediately asked if it was
blackmail.
He knew he was guilty and assumed the call was for blackmail money. Mrs. Creed asked if this was a
kidnapping.
If she had killed her own kid, she would have assumed it was blackmail and probably would have blurted out the same type of thing. Her knee-jerk reaction would not have been to give me that speech about how nobody takes her baby.

"Maybe she drove him to it, I don't know..." I stumbled. "She didn't outright kill him. You're not going to find anything in there to help prove that. Because it didn't happen. So get some sleep."

The shocks of the night caught up with me full force, and I thought I could roll off the bed and fall asleep on the floor. I mumbled, "Sleep tight," as I left, but Ali didn't answer me. She just stared wide-eyed at the diary, in the eerie glow of that orange light.

I knew we
were in for it the next morning, about two seconds after I climbed on the school bus. Alex, Ryan, and Renee were staring at me all pop-eyed. I wanted so bad to not deal with them. But I had to make some attempt to act normal. I plopped down beside Ryan, in front of Alex and Renee. Ali sat down in front of me.

Ryan was looking me up and down like I was purple. Alex's and Renee's faces crept around so they were practically licking my ears on either side.

"Hear you had a bit of a run-in last night, bro," Alex said.

"We overheard my dad telling my mom that he almost had to book you last night. That's sweet, Torey, real sweet." Renee smirked, and I rubbed my eyes, which after three hours of sleep felt like bowling balls in the sockets.

"Ali, how come you're getting on the bus on our street?" Ryan asked.

Ali was running her mouth to this girl sitting beside her, a quiet girl in some of our honors classes. I knew she was doing it so she wouldn't have to explain herself to the audience behind her. Their eyes came back to me.

"We ... uhm..." I stuttered. "Mrs. Creed has been bugging Ali. We wanted to spy out her window and see if Mrs. Creed did anything weird over there ... you know."

I guessed they didn't.
Ker-BLAM,
the power question came barreling out of Alex: "What were you doing with Bo Richardson?"

"Well, he was there. And, well..." I watched the back of Ali's head, almost hypnotized by it.

"My dad said Mrs. Creed thinks he killed Chris." Renee's eyes burned on me.

I saw Ali's shoulders freeze up. I felt like food for three hungry snakes. I'd known the night before that all this new stuff could make me feel sort of "out there" compared to my friends, but I hadn't known it would happen so fast. I just felt through my gut and blurted out what I felt.

"You guys, this whole thing has gotten way serious. It's too serious, I don't want to yap about it, I don't want to joke about it. I don't want to talk about it."

They made all the I'm-insulted groans, but I didn't let myself get sucked down as they filled the air with comments.

"You think we're gossips, thanks a lot—"

Ryan went, "Torey, bro. We're just glad you're not bones this morning, man. Bo Richardson? Whatever happened, we assured our dad that he forced you into it. Pulled that ... that
stiletto
he carries around on you, or something—"

I stared at the back of Ali's hair. It would kill Ali if I didn't do something.

I got up, walked toward the front of the bus, and plopped down beside Lyle Corsica, who was known as a science geek. There were no other empty seats near him, so there was no way they would follow me. I started a conversation with Lyle, like Ali had started with that quiet girl. I didn't care that they were gawking, probably wondering why I could run my mouth to Lyle Corsica, about I-don't-even-remember-what, but I couldn't talk to them. I kept telling myself I didn't care. I figured I would start to believe it by the time we got to school.

I didn't see any sign of Bo in the cafeteria and hoped he wasn't still at the cop station—as in, his old lady was out drinking again and never showed up to sign him out. My mom said she had to stop there anyway and would make sure he'd been picked up, before she dropped Greg off at school.