The Body of Christopher Creed (6 page)

"I just broke up with Nathan Leeds three weeks ago." She smirked. "To not agree with a girl about someone she's just broken up with is totally heartless. Besides, all I said was that he was a dip-shitz, dork-faced liar who cheated on me, smells, and will never break a thousand on his SAT. What's not to agree with?"

"Whatever. Remind me never to get on your bad side." I laughed. Just a few weeks earlier Nathan Leeds had been her swoonbag love machine. She just got this twitch that she wanted Alex instead. I thought of mentioning to Renee that Alex needed to come to band practice more often but decided I didn't feel like tangling with her.

I spread the note out on the table. Then Leandra and Renee were whispering, their lips moving, like they were trying to absorb every word. I watched Leandra's long reddish hair shine as it fell over one shoulder and dangled almost to her lap. She kind of gasped and looked at me for a moment as my own name came out of her mouth. She had reached the part where he said he was jealous of me. I laced my fingers through hers, knowing she would understand how that hit me. If he had anything to be jealous about really, it was her, I thought.

When we walked down the halls together, people would stare at Leandra, and then at me like I was the luckiest person in the world. And people really liked her, even if she wasn't a huge brain like Renee. I think Renee had read the letter twice by the time Leandra got to the bottom.

"Funny..." Leandra murmured finally. "It sure looks like he was thinking about suicide. But it never actually says he's going to commit suicide."

I looked at how Creed had put it:
I only wish to be gone. Therefore, I AM.

"But look at this." Renee pointed to the earlier part of the note, before our names were listed.
I know that people wish I were dead, and at this moment in time I see no alternative but to accommodate them in this wish.

"That's suicide," Renee said flatly. "That's definitely suicide."

"Yeah, but where
is
he?" Alex asked nervously, looking over his shoulder to see if anyone might put their eyes on this note. He turned back and almost whispered, "Where's the
body?
"

"I don't know," Renee mumbled. "But he was still trying to get attention, like always. Look at the things he's saying
...life and luck and liberty?
" She curled her lip in disgust. "What a crock. I'm surprised he saw himself with so much truth. He always wore that grin from hell. I would have bet he grinned when he slept."

"He probably did," Alex said with a smirk. "I always figured he never was able to face up to how bad his life really was.
Denial,
my dad calls it. He lived in a state of chronic denial."

Even if you were yelling at Creed, that grin stayed plastered from ear to ear. It was like he refused to believe you were yelling. He wouldn't stop grinning until somebody hit him. Then he went totally depressive. I had seen him in a heap on the floor, wailing, after one of the boons hit him. I thought
denial
was an okay word.

"Are we positive he wrote this?" Leandra stared at the paper, looking confused.

Alex shrugged. "Mr. Ames gets the note, and
boom,
the kid is missing. Who else would have written it?"

Leandra's accent came on very thick when she was thinking too hard to cover it up, and it was thick right then. "It does sound just like him. But like y'all just said, Chris never saw the truth about himself. It almost sounds like ... the way somebody
else
would describe his life."

"You're saying that somebody else killed him and wrote the note to make it look like a suicide," Renee said, to clear us up. She spat it out like she was reciting a weather report. She folded her arms across her chest coolly and looked around the cafeteria. "So, who's your suspect? I'd say there're a few in here."

I thought that was vicious but watched as Leandra rolled her eyes sideways jn a suspicious way. We followed them and then looked back at the center of the table. A group of boons was sitting where she had just looked. Bo Richardson was right in the middle of them.

"Bo Richardson?" The words came out of Alex's mouth like he were a ventriloquist. The only time his lips moved was on the
B.
He did a whole line of ventriloquism, grinning like a jack-o'-lantern. "I don't vant to look like I'n saying his nane, cuz he's at the next tavle."

Bo Richardson was a big tough boon, with enormous brown eyes that made him look insane. If he caught you staring at him, he would mouth off at you sometimes, depending on his mood.

He bragged into the gossip channels that he had slashed more than a thousand tires last year, though we figured it was probably about twenty, because he was also known for lying—exaggerating his conquests. Also, he would fight people, which is why he showed up in the principal's office a lot.

"Well, yeah," Leandra breathed while we all just sat there dumbfounded. "Maybe one of those guys could have done it."

"They could use some scrubbing up." Alex smirked.

A couple of them—but Shawn Mathers especially—really did have bad skin. And they dressed way different than us. Our clothes were kind of loose, and theirs were all skintight, like they had to show off their muscles. All these little differences used to seem so important, but now I wanted to figure out this note. I could see I wasn't about to get a word in edgewise by the way Alex was leaning forward and putting his hands up, like
stop.

"No, no, forget the personal hygiene. That's nothing compared to ... the cars."

The girls laughed. That kept Alex rolling. "
Ooo.
Gold fender, blue rusted door, engine of a bus. Tell me, why do they love to make noise? Do they actually think that a souped-up old car with no muffler is, like,
sexy
or something?"

"They think of 'no muffler' the way we think of a Lexus," Leandra giggled, then smacked her hand up to her mouth. She sighed. "Y'all're a bad influence on me. See how I'm gossiping? Every morning I make a deal with myself that I'm not going to talk evil about people. Somehow I never get past third period."

I laughed because it was true. Leandra's heart was in the right place, but her mouth could take off like it had a life of its own sometimes. By third period, she was just getting started some days.

"Don't get Pentecostal on us before noon." Renee kicked her under the table.

"Ouch!" Leandra muttered, moving her legs away. "Don't be making fun of me."

"What are you supposed to say about Bo Richardson?" Renee demanded. "That he's, like, Captain Deodorant with his crew of Zest Boys?"

Leandra had to pull het lips out into her palm to keep them from spreading outward. Alex let out a shameless blast. He wasn't Pentecostal.

"How'd we get on this subject?" I asked. "We were talking about what happened to Creed, and all of a sudden it's who drives a souped-up old bomb car."

"I thought we were talking about a murder," Alex said, "and Leandra was telling us who she thought did it."

"Wait, wait, reality check." I had thought of something. "Tell me what boon could write that note?
I wish to understand life and luck and liberty ... defects I've been cursed with—
"

Renee smirked. "Maybe it was Bo and Shawn Mathers and Dallas Everett. Three boon brains equal one normal brain."

"
God,
remind me never to get on your bad side," I said again, shivering.

Some thought passed through my head that I wished I had stayed outside with Ali. I mean, it's not like I'm some saint who had never ripped on the boons. I'd had my share of fun. I came into school the first day of freshman year, took one look at them, and thought,
What planet did these people drop from?
But now this kid was in the black hole and none of my friends seemed to care.

Even Leandra,
I thought. She wasn't concerned about Chris, she was concerned about whether or not she was gossiping. It was still all about
her.
And they were scoping out boons and pointing the finger. I mean, they were talking about a
murder
here. And for evidence they were bringing up zits, souped-up cars, and people smelling bad.

I didn't feel like telling them I was going to Ali's. I hoped her new boyfriend was a college dude. A college dude might be old enough not to want to whack everybody verbally or make jokes about Creed. My own friends were getting on my nerves some.

I got bummed
out that night. This time Pat and Eddie Kyle showed up to jam, but Alex and Ryan were no-shows. Ryan was the drummer, and what's your group without a drummer? Alex was, like, the center of us, and if he didn't show, we would do nothing. He was just the bass player, and probably the worst musician, but he had all the edge, the energy. Finally the twins said they would haul it down to Wawa to see if they saw Alex or Ryan. They wanted me to come, and I probably should have.

But it was bugging me how Alex and Ryan never took anything seriously. Alex's grades just came to him in his sleep—he never had to study—and the basketball coach was always harping on him that he could start if he would just put out more effort. Ryan just always did what Alex did, no questions asked. Alex was making me think,
Well, I can start making stuff happen without him.
I was the only one who thought about writing our own stuff, so I would start there.

I went down into the basement alone with my acoustic guitar. I sat on the floor with this pencil and a pad of yellow lined paper. I had written songs before. We had even practiced one that I wrote. It was called "A Song to the Blues," and that's about all it was. It goes like this:

So long as I live in this here town
Where there ain't nothing to do but fool around
And there ain't nowhere to go 'round here but down
Might as well make that funny-soundin' sound.
It's called the blues.
Even around here it's called the blues.

I mean, does that totally suck? I was embarrassed I wrote that, especially when it started piling out of Alex's mouth, with our band jamming behind it. Alex and I had our first band fight over that song, because I was wanting to bury it somewhere and Alex was saying, "People around here will like this song, man."

I remember just staring at him, thinking,
Yeah, well, what is wrong with people around here, then?

I sat down there in the basement, hearing the wind blow around outside. The wind was getting on my nerves, because notes floated in and out of my head but nothing was sticking as a tune.

I told myself,
Think of something you want to write about, and then the words will come, brainiac. Do you want to write about ... Leandra? How beautiful she is? How sweet she is?

Blue eyes ... blue as the skies
Baby blue ... I'm gonna roll all over you ...

I snorted out some laugh and tossed the pencil down. Not only were they dumb words, bur they were about as likely as flying off to Mars. What some people don't understand is that Steepleton is a real place, and there are a lot of little places like it out there, that's what I think. And in these little towns live girls who actually do not have sex.

I know, like from watching movies, there is a big portion of the world that thinks girls like Leandra are secret liars. They believe that even the best girls are all ready to dive into the woods with you, and that they're all a bunch of fakes, talking one thing and doing another. Well, I don't know what to say, except if Leandra was a hypocrite, she hadn't shown that side of herself in the five months we'd been going out. You might wonder why a guy would go out with a girl like that. I don't know why.

I knew I liked how people looked her up and down and then stared at me like I was the luckiest guy on earth. They didn't know we weren't having sex; it was like our big secret. But it just wasn't making for a very good song.

People were into sad songs. This Creed thing. I thought back on Mrs. Creed hanging her posters all over the school corridors. I wondered if Chris had run for his life from her, or if she had gotten too mad, clunked him over the head in some fit of domineeringness....

Is he alive, or is he dead?
Freight train running all thru my head ...

I started to write those words. I stopped, raised my eyes slowly from the paper, and stared at the dark wood paneling. The air was moving, almost whispering behind me, only not making any noise. It brought with it this sudden, incredible urge to look behind me. I listened through it, waiting to hear something more ... a rustle of clothing, a whispering voice....It's like somebody was staring at me, like from three feet behind me. It got to the point where the skin on my back was crawling. Finally I pretended I had an itch on my back, so I could jerk around without really looking like I was jerking around. For some reason it was important that I didn't look like I was jerking around.

Alex's bass guitar sat in its stand, and Ryan's drums stood behind them. The metal lettering on Eric's synthesizer sort of glowed in the dim shadow of the corner. I stared and stared at the game-closet door, which was open just a crack, like two inches. The wind banged around outside, and in the basement it started to sound like moaning. The moan got really intense, and the game-closet door sucked almost closed and then pulled out to two inches from shut again. I watched that door moving by itself a few times, and all of a sudden I knew it wasn't moving by itself. I knew somebody had the handle from the inside. Somebody who had been watching me a few seconds earlier. I stood up, silently gripping my guitar by the neck, with my eyes staring at that door like they could fry a hole through it. As soon as I stood up, the moving stopped. The door stayed about an inch from closed as I crept slowly toward it. I stopped about ten feet from it, wondering what to do next. I thought of rushing it, and the vision that Ryan had talked about shot through my head: a couple bloody sneakers swinging out and hitting me in the eyes from where Chris's body hung from the ceiling light. I quietly walked to the door, got my hand around the knob, and pulled very slowly. A black hole stared back at me.