The Boy Who Killed Grant Parker (8 page)

“Hey,” I said through a sigh of defeat.

“Pastor Grayson's kid,” he said, as if the title were an ironic compliment. “What's your name again?”

“Luke.”

“Jesus Christ, boy, what is that smell?” he asked as I leaned over to look into the window and he caught a sudden whiff of me.

“It's shit, sir.”

His left eye narrowed, and I could feel its cool judgment settle on me. “You getting smart with me, son?”

“No, sir. That smell is cowshit. I'm covered in it.”

“What the hell have you been up to?” he asked, neither amused nor sympathetic.

“Just—” I bit off what I was going to say since any explanation I gave would either: one, make me sound like a complete idiot, or, two, take too much energy to explain when I didn't feel like telling the story in the first place. “I fell in a pile of cowshit.”

“When you fell in a pile of cowshit did you also fall into a puddle of beer?” he asked without a hint of humor. “Because I can smell beer on you from ten paces.”

“I had one beer,” I said, hoping that maybe a little honesty would help to keep me out of trouble.

“They have different laws about underage drinking where you come from?” he asked.

“No, sir,” I said, almost impossible now to keep the bite out of my tone. He was exactly like his daughter. Able to put me on the defensive with nothing more than a raised eyebrow or a question.

“You've been in this town all of two weeks and already you're looking for trouble. You some kind of overachiever?”

“Four weeks,” I corrected him.
Each one of them an eternity.
“And I didn't go looking for any trouble. Trouble found me.”

He ignored me, didn't ask me what had happened. “I'm not letting you in my vehicle smelling like that,” he said, “but you'd better go straight home. I won't call your father this time, but next time I catch you drinking, you'll be answering to your folks and to the judge. Get on home now.”

This was my dismissal as his window slid closed and he put the car into gear.

 

10

Monday I avoided any contact at all with Grant and his friends, but it was clear from the way people whispered and laughed behind their hands as they passed me at my locker that the story of my latest humiliation had already traversed the student grapevine. I seethed impotently.

When I entered my American History class at the last possible second before the bell rang, I studiously avoided even a glance in Grant's direction. He sat in the back of class and would occasionally make loud mooing noises when the teacher had her back to us. My face burned as the other students giggled at this childish joke. Though I wanted to haul off and hit him in the jaw, wanted to pound his face into a bloody pulp, I didn't turn to look at Grant, didn't acknowledge him in any way. I stared coldly ahead, trying to exude the vibe that the dry-erase board was the most captivating thing I had ever seen.

Delilah sat two rows over and one seat behind me, and I stole a few glances at her. She never looked up from her note taking and, I noticed, was the only person who ignored Grant's mooing.

When the dismissal bell rang at the end of the period, I took my time gathering my stuff, hoping everyone else would leave before I did so I didn't have to make my way down the hall with them.

Delilah was bent over her backpack, her long hair obscuring her face as everyone filed past her on their way out the door. Grant was making his way down the aisle past Delilah's desk, a smug smile on his face as he mooed again to get one final laugh out of everyone before they left the classroom.

As Grant passed Delilah's desk his feet became tangled in a combination of her feet and her backpack, and he pitched forward violently. His arms went wide as he tried to stop his fall, and his books flew in every direction. The desks groaned against the linoleum floor as his weight shoved them askew, and the sound of his body against the desktops was enough to tell me that the fall hurt more than his pride.

Grant was on his feet quickly, his face red and with murder in his eyes. “What the hell?” he shouted at Delilah, but she didn't flinch.

“You should watch where you're going,” Delilah said coolly.

“You did that in purpose, you crazy bitch,” Grant huffed, but Delilah just waited patiently for Grant to get out of her way.

“Everything okay, Mr. Parker?” the teacher asked. I swear she almost looked pleased.

“You're as crazy as everyone says you are,” Grant muttered under his breath to Delilah. He summoned what little dignity he could and gathered his books. I felt his glare but didn't look up again until he was out of the room. Delilah left for her next class without saying anything to me.

I avoided the humiliation of the lunchroom that day, admitting to myself that Grant had won this round. His object was to put me in my place. And he had. Squarely.

*   *   *

At the end of the school day I took my time getting to my locker. I planned to wait until everyone was gone and Grant and his posse were safely at football practice before leaving the school building. The last person I wanted to see in this world was waiting near my locker.

Penny stood with one shoulder leaned against the wall of lockers as she scrolled through her phone. She looked up as I approached, and smiled in greeting.

“Hi,” she said quietly.

“Hey,” I said, my tone frigid. I was angry about my own feelings of inadequacy, angry because a girl like Penny would always choose a guy like Grant over a guy like me, even if Grant was an asshole and I was a … well, I wasn't sure what I was, but I sure as hell wasn't an asshole like Grant.

“I wanted to apologize to you. About the other night,” she said.

“Apologize for what?” I asked.

“For the joke Grant and his buddies played on you. It wasn't very nice.”

“Why should you apologize for him?” I asked.

“I knew what they were planning to do,” she said with a sigh. “Grant told the guys that afternoon when I was there. I should have warned you or something.”

I shrugged, as if the whole thing were no big deal, then worked the combination lock so I wouldn't have to see the pity in her eyes.

“They can be real jerks sometimes,” she said.

“Just sometimes?” I asked. “I got the impression maybe they were jerks all of the time.”

She laughed at that but didn't agree with me. “I hope … well, I guess I hope you and I can still be friends. I like talking to you. You're not like most other people.”

“Because I'm not a jerk?”

“Exactly,” she said with another laugh. “So? Apology accepted?”

“Like I said, you don't have to apologize for Grant.”

“I think Grant just feels threatened, you know?” she said, her nose wrinkling. “You're new here and all. The girls all think you're really cute.”

“Now you're just trying to make me feel better,” I said, but I wondered if when she said “all the girls” she was including herself. There was no way to ask the question without sounding like I was fishing for a compliment, but I wanted to know. “Why do you go out with him?” I asked. “If he's such a jerk.”

“Oh,” she said, and now the tables were turned and she was working to avoid my gaze. “Everyone wants to be with Grant. But he chose me. That makes it special, I guess.” She seemed to sense my judgment about this being a valid reason for dating Grant and quickly added, “Besides, he's not a jerk all the time.”

“Well, that's good, I guess,” I said as I slung my backpack over my shoulder and shut my locker door. “It doesn't seem right for a girl as nice and as pretty as you to be with a jerk.”

She smiled at that and her eyes widened with sudden interest. “I … I guess I'd better get to practice,” she said. “I'm late. I'll see you around, okay?”

“Yeah, okay,” I said, and thought about her as I walked to my bike, and for most of the next twenty-four hours. I thought about her about as often as I thought about sex … so a lot. And sometimes I thought about both at the same time.

 

11

At home I spent very little time outside my room unless I was working on the Camaro. And I worked three days a week at Roger's garage. It wasn't much work, really. Once I had cleaned the office space and set up a desk calendar to schedule Roger's workload, there was only the occasional busywork. The phone rarely rang, as people would just drop in to see Roger for a quick consultation.

There was only one competing mechanic in town, a young guy who rode Harleys and had a mullet. As Roger told it, only the meth-smoking bikers used the other mechanic. Anyone who was respectable utilized Roger's garage.

For some inexplicable reason, Roger insisted on starting his work day at 7:00
A.M.
By the time I got to the garage after school he would be winding down for the day, he and Tiny sipping on icy cans of Schlitz or Busch beer. Roger usually offered me a beer, and the three of us would sit to watch television in the office. Almost always we would watch episodes of
Law & Order,
and Roger would talk avidly to the characters on the screen, telling them who was really guilty. He was, almost without exception, always wrong about the solution to the crime.

Tiny, when he spoke at all, spoke mostly in grunts, so I had little else to do besides my homework.

“I heard about your run-in with Grant Parker and his buddies,” Roger said to me one afternoon during a commercial break from
Law & Order.

“What run-in?” I asked without looking up from my phone.

“Cow tipping,” Roger said.

“You
heard
about that?” My voice rose with disbelief.

“That was the rumor going through the crowd at the football game Friday night,” Roger said. “Football games and church are where we get all of the news.”

“You never go to church,” I said.

“I don't have to go to church. You see another qualified mechanic living within a hundred miles? No. Which means I do whatever the hell I want. And getting up for church on my one day off ain't one of the things I want to do.”

Tiny emitted an affirming grunt and slurped loudly from his beer.

“Grant Parker is an asshole,” Roger said. “It's in his genes. Leland Parker is an asshole too. We went to school together, though I was a few years ahead of him.”

“Really?” I asked. “How old are you?”

“I'm fifty-one,” Roger said. “Why?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I guess I thought you were a lot older than that.”

“Well, you ain't exactly pretty to look at neither,” Roger said.

“What did you hear?” I asked. “About the cow tipping.”

“Just that you're an idiot, but that part we already knew.” Another affirming grunt from Tiny with the glimmer of a smile through his beard.

“Thanks a lot,” I said acidly. “I hate this town.”

“I don't mind it,” Roger said. “Small-town folks aren't no different from big-city folks. Just less of them, so whatever they do gets amplified a million times. You must have had a kid like Grant Parker at your old school. There's always a Grant Parker.”

“Sure. Yeah,” I said, thinking of Jonathan Bryan III, a kid at my old school whose family had so much money he could afford to wear plaid pants and not get beaten up for it.

“And?” Roger pressed.

“I avoided him like the plague,” I said.

“Well, then, maybe you aren't as dumb as you look. Avoid Grant Parker too.”

“Hey, it's not as if I went out looking to get humiliated,” I said in protest. “He came after me.”

But Roger's attention had already returned to the television. “You gonna take her word for that?” he asked the fictional detective. “She's a hooker, for Christ's sake.”

 

12

It was a Tuesday afternoon and I was hurrying to leave school, hoping to make it off campus without running into anyone.

Life at Wakefield High School had become ritualized torture. More horrible than being forced to listen to their god-awful hick-hop music, worse than enduring a class called Introduction to Agriculture, my reputation had been established based on my two encounters with animals—one wild, one domesticated. At least the Willie the Wildcat video had slipped into obscurity since the night of the cow-tipping incident, which, thankfully, had not been captured in digital.

When I wasn't being ignored by most people in school, I was being teased relentlessly for the cow tipping, mostly because Grant and his buddies wouldn't let it die. They persisted in making mooing calls to me whenever I passed them in the hallway or entered a classroom. And the mascot, Roland, who humbled himself at every sporting event by dressing as a flea-ridden wildcat, would glare daggers at me every time he passed me in the hallway. Sometimes, if he was walking behind me, he would kick one of my heels and make me stumble or drop my books. Roland was surprisingly buff considering he was technically a cheerleader, so I didn't try to draw him into a disagreement, just took my licks and avoided him when I could.

One afternoon I was almost home free, ready to escape school without running into Roland or any of my other tormentors, when I saw Grant and his buddies approaching the lobby at the same time. With a little luck they wouldn't notice me and I could skate through. Maybe the next day I could claim a stomachache and make it through forty-eight hours without seeing anyone from school.

I missed the anonymity of my old school, where you could get lost in the shuffle, fade into the crowd. The misery of loneliness is nothing compared to taking the brunt of public ridicule at the hands of someone as powerful as Grant Parker.

I shifted the weight of my backpack on my shoulder as I filed out the main entrance amid a throng of other students, all chatting happily about their weekend plans. So close. Only a short walk across the bus turnaround to the bike rack. There was no god I could plead with to let me reach the bike and leave campus unscathed, so I just gritted my teeth and hoped.