The Boy Who Killed Grant Parker (23 page)

He was thinking someone actually stood up to Grant Parker. And won.

 

35

The next morning I woke with the feeling that something had crawled into my mouth and died. The sound of my hair rubbing against the pillow was enough to make my head pound with a terrible pain. I wanted ibuprofen and bacon and orange juice, but I couldn't bring myself to get out of bed. God, I was so hungover.

I didn't even really remember much of what had happened the previous night. Unfortunately, what I did remember was that I had led Tony and Skip and Chet to the LARPer fort, had stolen the LARPers' beer, and watched passively as the fort had been destroyed and Don was knocked on his ass.

I rolled onto my side, feeling like I might puke. I felt around under the covers looking for my phone and finally found it in the back pocket of my jeans, which were in a wad on the floor next to the bed.

Since I had used all of my energy to find my phone, I lay recovering for a minute while I tried to decide what to do. I wanted to call Don to apologize for what had happened. I never meant for anyone to get hurt, for the LARPer fort to get destroyed.

I unlocked my phone, deciding I would just send Don a text, but as soon as I saw the notifications on my phone I forgot all about Don.

There were seventeen texts waiting for me to read. Three were from Penny and the rest were from numbers that weren't programmed into my phone. People were asking me where I was and what I was doing, or making comments about what a crazy, fun night we had at Delaine's party. All of them wanted me to call or text so we could hang out.

I had two dozen friend requests on Facebook and dozens of new followers on Instagram. I pulled up my Instagram account and scrolled through selfies with people I barely recognized from Delaine's party. I had a big, goofy grin on my face in all of the photos, my eyelids at half-mast, clearly wasted. There was even a picture of me standing in just my underwear beside Delaine's aboveground pool.

Bits and snatches of the night before returned as I studied the pictures. I remembered being in the backseat of the Camaro with Penny, but my mind couldn't hold on to any concrete sequence of events.

*   *   *

Penny's texts had escalated from asking me where I was, to reminding me that I had made a promise to show up for a homecoming planning meeting and was now reneging on that promise. I made it to the homecoming meeting at 12:30, thirty minutes late, my head still pounding, wishing I could go back to bed for a few more hours.

The homecoming dance was being held in the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks Lodge, a massive wooden structure built into the hillside above the lake. It was a popular site for weddings, the only place near town that could hold several hundred people at one time.

I wasn't sure what the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks was, but I assumed the Elks were, in fact, humans. I wondered idly if LARPers grew up to become Elks.

As it turned out, other than wearing funny hats, the Elks were pretty normal guys, even though they went by titles like “Grand Exalted Knight.” Maybe they really were just LARPers all grown up.

The gazes of the men who had once been Grand Exalted Knight followed me from their portraits as I wandered until I found Penny in a large meeting room with a group of about twenty people. There were pizza boxes and two-liter bottles of soda on one table, and everyone sat in a circle of metal folding chairs, Penny standing in the middle of the circle with a clipboard in her hand. Clearly I had missed lunch, and they had moved on to the official meeting.

“Luke,” Penny said, her smile forced, though still seemingly genuine. “Finally.”

“Sorry,” I said as everyone shifted their seats to make room in the circle for me. The groan of metal folding chairs against the floor and the shuffling of papers that accompanied my awkward interruption seemed to last an eternity, but Penny waited patiently until everyone was resettled before starting again.

“So,” she said breathily, with dramatic effect, “we're seriously behind schedule at this point, what with … everything that's been going on. We need to finalize the theme and decide on a band or a deejay right away.”

“I still think my cousin, Ron, would be great as a deejay,” Annette said with a look of appeal around our circle.

“Annette,” Penny said, her voice strained with impatience before anyone could respond, “your cousin does weddings and his playlists are seriously lame. We're not going to dance to a bunch of eighties music at homecoming. I want the whole event to be cutting edge, not catering to the geriatrics.”

“I'm just making the suggestion,” Annette said acidly. “I'm part of this committee.”

“And we already discussed the idea and decided Ron wasn't the right person to play at our event,” Penny said, maintaining the veneer of passive-aggressive politeness that made talking to anyone in Ashland complicated. I realized that the reason why I had gravitated toward Roger, of all people, more than anyone, was that he told it like it was. Never said anything just to appease anyone's feelings.

“So, what's our theme, then?” Annette asked, clearly bristling at Penny's dismissal of her cousin.

“I don't know,” Penny said. “Does anyone have any better ideas than the list of failures we came up with the last time we met?”

No one spoke. Everyone studied their laps or the walls around us, their foreheads wrinkled in feigned or real concentration.

“Luke,” Penny said, startling me. “You're new to the committee. Do you have any ideas for a good theme for the homecoming dance?”

I wasn't prepared for her to suck me into the debate, and in my hungover state I had been more focused on the pizza boxes and sodas than I was on what anyone was saying.

“Uh…” This was a bad start. People were looking to me to say something clever and creative, and I didn't have any idea what they wanted in a theme for a dance.

Nor do I really give a shit. I should have taken four of those ibuprofens.

I cleared my throat, stalling for time. “What if we went … old school,” I said, feeling the idea was completely lame as I said it. “I mean, old school like Biggie Smalls and N.W.A. and Tupac—that kind of thing.…” My voice trailed off uncertainly as everyone's brows wrinkled. People waited for someone to have the courage to shoot down my idea. After all, no one wanted to end up in a coma like Grant, or with their fort burned down like Don and the LARPers.

“I like it,” Penny said, so suddenly that a few people jumped with a start, including me. “I mean, maybe not the idea of old school in the hip-hop sense.” She said this with an apologetic tilt of her head in my direction. “But what if we made the theme old school like in the sense of the history of the school. ‘Old school' is our theme,” Penny said, annunciating “old school” by making quotation marks in the air with her fingers, “and we feature music and clothing styles from the past of Wakefield High School. Like styles that were in when our parents and grandparents went to school.”

“I like it,” someone said, and there were a few murmured agreements.

“Great idea, Luke,” Penny said with a broad smile just for me.

It hadn't been my idea, really, but Penny made it seem like it was, and that felt pretty good. After that I sat back to nurse my hangover while trying to look interested in the brainstorming session that followed.

 

36

On Monday I saw Don in the hallway sporting a scab on his split cheek, his left eye puffy and swollen. He looked right through me as he passed me in the hallway, as if I were vapor. I thought about stopping him to ask if he was okay or to say that I hadn't intended for things to go down the way they had, but anything I tried to think to say felt inadequate and stupid.

At lunch I sat with Tony and Penny and the others, like I always did now, but I kept looking at the table where Don and Aaron and Josh sat.

I was at my locker at the end of the school day when I sensed someone behind me. I turned to find Delilah staring coldly at me, her eyes narrowed.

“Hello, Delilah,” I said.

“Don't you ‘Hello, Delilah,' me,” she said, her tone threatening. “I know what you did on Friday,” she said. “You and Tony and Skip and Chet.”

“I didn't do anything,” I said. “I was there, but I didn't do anything.”

“Spare me, okay? They wouldn't have even known about the fort if you didn't tell them.”

“We just wanted some of their beer. It was no big deal.”

“No big deal? Tony gave Don a black eye and Skip and Chet tore apart the fort. They could have started a major forest fire.”

I rolled my eyes at this. “I seriously doubt a forest fire was ever a real risk. Hey,” I said as it occurred to me that Delilah could help me out, “can you tell me which one is which?” I asked. “I can't figure out which one is Chet and which one is Skip.”

“What?” she asked, her brow wrinkling in confusion.

“I mean I can't tell Chet and Skip apart. It would be weird to ask now. If I asked now they would know I haven't known their names from the beginning.”

“You can't be serious,” she said.

“I tried to figure it out by asking them their real names, you know. But one of them is named Edward and the other is named Walton, and I couldn't figure how they would get Skip or Chet out of either of those names, so…” I trailed off into a shrug to illustrate my bewilderment.

“I mean,” Delilah said, her voice rising, “I can't believe you are asking me which of your henchmen is Skip or Chet after what you did on Friday night.”

“It really wasn't a big deal,” I said. “Don got some crazy idea in his head to stand up to Tony. What an idiot, right?”

She planted one hand firmly on her hip, and her eyes narrowed even more. It was hard to believe that she could still see me through the slits of her eyelids. Like a newborn kitten. But a seriously pissed-off newborn kitten.

“You destroyed the fort, stole their beer.”

“There were, like, a dozen of them there,” I said impatiently. “And they had swords. I can't help it if they let Tony and those guys take their beer. If they wanted it so badly they should have stood up for themselves.”

“Like the way you stood up to Grant?” she asked coolly.

“This was different.”

“How is it different?” she shot back quickly.

“It just is,” I said lamely. I knew she was right, but that fact just made me angry. I didn't like her calling me out.

“They've been terrorized by Grant and his friends their whole lives,” Delilah continued. “You think they were going to stand up for themselves? You think they want to spend their lives looking over their shoulders? Waiting to see which one of them ends up trapped in a gym locker for the night?”

“Nobody knows for sure that Grant was the one who did that to Josh,” I said, coming quickly to Grant's defense.

“Uch.” She threw up one hand in disgust, the other still on her hip. “You're an asshole. You can't stand the thought of your precious Penny not thinking you're the bomb diggity. And now the fort is ruined. That fort has always been a sacred space. The one place people could go to avoid Grant Parker and his posse. And now you're one of them. You're a traitor to your own kind.”

“I'm not a fucking LARPer,” I said, too forcefully. “And anyway, we were desperate. Our party ran out of beer. What were we supposed to do?”

“Try not being an asshole, for starters.”

Who does she think she is?

“Are we done here?” I asked coldly.

She was making me mad—didn't have any right to accuse me of anything. Even if it was something of which I was actually guilty.

“Oh, yeah,” she said, matching me for cold. Arctic, in fact. “We're totally done.”

“Good,” I said, because I had no better comeback.

“Prick,” she said to my back as I walked away.

I let her have the last word and banged my way out of the exit.

 

37

“You've got to be kidding me,” I said.

“I wouldn't joke about something like this,” David Greene said earnestly. “We have an independent committee that counts the ballots. This was all confidential before now, but you won hands down.”

“Homecoming king?” I asked, my voice rising to a squeak.

“Yes. So we'll need to talk about the events for homecoming night. The presentation of the homecoming court…”

“That's impossible,” I said. “I can't be homecoming king.”

But David misunderstood my objection and said, “The votes don't lie.”

“No, I mean I
can't
be homecoming king. I can't do it. I can't get up in front of everyone. If Grant were”—
conscious and able to eat solid food
—“here … he's the one who should be homecoming king. I can't do it.”

“I don't understand what the problem is,” David said.

“My problem—” I said forcefully, then stopped. What was my problem exactly?

If they make you homecoming king, it will look like you pushed Grant Parker into a grease pit, stole his girlfriend, stole his friends, and then stole his crown.

That was exactly what it was going to look like.

It's kind of what actually happened.

“No,” I said with such sudden force that it startled David. “Absolutely not. You'll just have to give it to the person with the second most votes.”

“You want to turn down being homecoming king?” David asked, now looking at me as if I had completely lost it.

“That's it. That's exactly what I want to do. You'll just have to give it to someone else.”

“But tha-that's never happened before,” he said.

“That you know of.”

He shrugged, unconvinced. “Look, just take a day or two to think about it. Penny is going to be homecoming queen, and it would be great to have you two up there together. Everyone thinks of you as a couple now.”