The Fates Will Find Their Way (8 page)
N
ora and Sissy missed the worst of us. Not
us
—not Danny Hatchet or Chuck Goodhue or Paul Epstein or Jack Boyd or Tommy Bowles—but the boys one year below us. (Mrs. Dinnerman would have said the boys beneath us.) Already things were changing.
But we—yes, this time
us
—had been offered the chance to show our maturity just before graduation. We’d been given the opportunity to choose a movie that we—the seniors—could watch alone in the auditorium, a kind of class date. We’d done the mature thing and invited the juniors. This pleased the school. They took it as proof that they’d taught us correctly, with dignity and class and the desire to share. We’d done the immature thing, though, and chosen
9½ Weeks
. The administration no doubt had wanted to stop it. But they were determined to stand by their choice to give us this small taste of autonomy.
T
he auditorium was new that year, a double-decker affair, with a small balcony to accommodate the growth in numbers the high school was eventually hoping for. If it weren’t for its newness, it might actually have been handsome. Time will tell. It was built on a bluff, overlooking the water, trees all along the steep decline towards the river. (This is the river, by the way, that we were forbidden to visit alone. An insurance nightmare, for sure. It’s also the river where almost every one of us, Trey included, who didn’t even go to school with us, smoked pot for the first time. It was a show of rebellion, of willpower, to defy the school and sneak to the campus-bound riverbank in small numbers. And to do this at night—to deliberately return to the place that held us captive eight hours a day—this was even more a show. But this river, remember, is also the river that runs almost the entire length of the state, that flows through six counties, including the one two over, where they not too long ago discovered human remains.)
On the night of the screening—it was late spring, humid in a chilly way, the cicadas had molted a month early, the sound of their abdomens rubbing against bark was deafening—we posted a couple seniors at each of the entrances. Drew Price and Winston Rutherford took the west entrance. (We paired the two of them because of the massive difference in their heights. At the time, it was probably as simple as thinking that Winston’s six and a half feet looked funny next to Drew’s five feet and change.) Paul Epstein and Jack Boyd manned the east entrance. (Jack was an athlete and a brute, which compensated for Paul’s being such a pushover.) The rest of us were scattered throughout the lobby. Trey Stephens, you’ll remember, was wearing camo where he hid behind the boxwoods outside the east entrance. We said he could come in only after everyone was in their seats. Somehow, allowing Trey on campus seemed more of a breech than sneaking to the river after dark to smoke pot.
At any rate, this stratagem of placing seniors at the doors as though they were guards was to guarantee that the juniors were kept in place. We’d agreed that while we felt we were generous enough to invite them to our movie, we did not feel we were magnanimous enough to invite them to sit with us. (Perhaps this had to do with James McElvoy, the junior who had already dated four senior girls and, if the rumors were true, slept with at least three of them. We saw this as trespassing. The senior girls were ours, whether they wanted us or not. We had them at least through the end of the academic year. It was only fair.)
At any rate, it was our job to ensure the juniors sat upstairs in the balcony. What’s funny now, thinking back, is that the balcony seems the better location, the superior place from which to view the movie. There would have been privacy up there for us and whichever senior girls (if any) had submitted to sitting by our sides. There would have been possibilities. Perhaps. But at the time, the balcony seemed as good a place as any to corral the juniors, merely for the sake of being able to.
The juniors were surprisingly compliant, which disappointed us. We’d expected balking, especially from James McElvoy and his crew of basketball and tennis stars. But the juniors were downright polite about the whole thing. This should have been a warning. It should have, but it wasn’t.
W
ho knows at what point they decided to do what they did? Maybe it was completely spontaneous. One of them started, and another dozen in the front row followed suit. It was probably something as simple as James McElvoy getting a hard-on accidently. It wouldn’t even have been during one of the more vivid sex scenes. It would have been because of the anticipation. Mickey Rourke cutting that red pepper. Kim Basinger in those tube socks. Who of us didn’t have to push down into our seats when we saw those legs, that one foot up on tiptoe, shy, innocent, and yet everything opposite those things? Her hair was wet. That’s a detail every one of us remembered. It was embarrassing, watching him shell and cut the eggs. Watching what we knew or hoped was coming. It was embarrassing, which is what made it so sexy.
We don’t blame his erection. We don’t blame him getting hard. We blame that there, in the balcony, in the front row, James McElvoy unzipped his pants and went to town. We blame that a dozen of his friends sitting to his left and to his right, rather than stop him, followed suit. And we blame that awful moment when the thirteen of them, almost in perfect unison, stood, leaned forward, and finished in the air, their product landing on the heads of almost a dozen senior girls.
Imagine that if you can. It was awful, seeing the girls afterward. There were shrieks at first. Little high-pitched shrieks. At first we shushed them. We didn’t understand. And then slowly, word went around. And we realized what had happened. We didn’t believe it at first. We thought they were being dramatic, looking for attention. Then we heard the laughing, the giggling from above. The lights were turned on.
It was difficult to know how to react—to stay with the girls or to go for the juniors. The girls, the ones who were hit, were almost immediately placed in a protective huddle by the girls who weren’t. They seemed to be taking care of themselves, of their own. Something we’ve never talked about since, something we all hate thinking about, is Sarah Jeffreys. She was there, in the center of the group, clearly with the girls who had been hit. This seemed the most egregious of the juniors’ errors. To touch her again with something she didn’t ask to have touch her, this seemed the worst of their transgressions. And yet, when the reports were finally made, when the school had been notified and the meetings had begun, Sarah’s name was not among those filing complaint. We somehow knew not to say, not to insist, that she too was among them. And the girls protected her. If any of us had ever said anything (which we didn’t), the girls would have denied it. They were loyal like that. Fierce. It was a loyalty and ferocity that frightened us, intrigued us, and somehow separated the sexes even more.
W
hat happened that night after the lights were turned on was what’s been described—the girls huddling, making their exit somehow without having to leave the pack. An amorphous bundle, moving as one, out the west exit, into the parking lot, away from us.
The juniors we watched leave. They were still laughing, James McElvoy at the lead. We watched them vacate their seats, watched them descend the stairs, watched them take the east exit to the lower parking lot. To be fair, Trey Stephens offered to take care of James himself. He said there wouldn’t be the same ramifications for him that there would be for us. He couldn’t get expelled for beating up a kid at a school he didn’t attend. We told each other we were protecting him when we said no. We told each other we were doing the right thing. But what really must have been going through our heads, what we really must have been thinking, was that if we let Trey go after James, we’d have to follow suit. There were thirteen of them, after all. But we were cowards. We stayed in the auditorium, the movie still playing, though you couldn’t really make out the images with the lights turned on full blast. Trey kicked a seat and the bottom bobbed up and down, the noise resonating in the near-empty building. There seemed nothing left to say. We were silent awhile, a few of us even took our seats, but finally Danny Hatchet said he had weed in the glove compartment of his dad’s Nissan, and just like that we trekked down to the river.
For the first time, we didn’t feel afraid of the river or of being caught. For the first time, we sat on the wet bank passing a joint and felt a sort of imperviousness. Whatever we had done, whatever we might do, we hadn’t done and didn’t do
that
. We didn’t do what James McElvoy had done. And for everything in the world that existed to actually be scared about, sitting at the river smoking a joint seemed the least of it. We were growing up. It was one of those moments when you could practically feel the adult pushing out, pushing forward into the world. Perspective suddenly existed where it hadn’t existed before. This was just the beginning of our lives—
our lives
, things that we were responsible for, things that we could control. It seemed all at once too big and too simple an idea.
And maybe it wasn’t until then, down there next to the water, the cicadas louder than ever, that we realized exactly what had happened and the implications of it all. It wasn’t until that clammy, dark silence when we realized just how truly wrong they had been.
D
anny’s dad could be the coolest guy in the world or he could be the weirdest. Again, take the Nissan, for example. Totally weird that he bought a brand-new 300ZX, but totally cool that he let Danny use it whenever Danny (or any of us) wanted after he turned sixteen.
If you caught him on a good day—when you were calling to get Danny to come pick you up from wherever you’d been stranded by your mom or one of your other friends—he might say something like, “Oh, hey, Buddy. I’m doing great. Real great. I’m fixing eggs for my bride, taking my dog out to pee, watching the raspberries bloom.” When things were good—this was before Mrs. Hatchet died—he referred to Danny’s mother as his bride.
When things were bad, he usually didn’t answer the phone. But if he did answer the phone, he usually misunderstood who you were, mistaking you for an adult or one of his coworkers. Either he’d get real quiet, real sad, say things like, “Oh, Buddy, I’m not good. Not good at all. Listen, I just need a little up front,” or he might answer the phone already yelling, already midway into a conversation you weren’t a part of: “Not again. Not fucking again. I’m not going to tell you again.”
When things were bad, we usually just hung up the phone, or wrote Danny off for the weekend, because it was just too difficult to get through to him; because staying on the phone listening to a grown man unravel was just not within our purview at the time. Instead, we’d hang up the phone and call someone else, someone like Trey Stephens, who was almost always thrilled to have an excuse to get out of the house and come get us, no matter where we were or what we were doing, the novelty of the basement bedroom having worn off a long time earlier for Trey Stephens.
T
hings for Mr. Hatchet were almost always bad after Mrs. Hatchet died. He drank more than ever, probably he was doing drugs, too. His clothes went from simply dorky to out-of-date overnight. His breath smelled like canker sores, like horse manure and rotten fish. His hair turned gray.
All that said, we spent a strangely large amount of time with the two remaining, male Hatchets our final two years of high school. Danny’s dad’s place, overgrown with kudzu, was where we all smoked cigarettes for the first time. Mr. Hatchet practically lit them for us. He also bought us beer. Not even Trey Stephens’ dad would do that. It was a haven during the Nora Lindell fiasco—a place we could talk openly without fear of parental interruption—especially on those nights when Trey Stephens would grow suddenly moody and kick us out of his basement.
The Hatchet door was always open to us. And we appreciated that. It was hard to
not
want to take advantage of such generosity. Mr. Hatchet’s place, you’ll remember, was on the short list for where to host the Halloween party the year after Nora Lindell disappeared, but the Jeffreyses won out, what with Sarah’s sad situation and Mrs. Jeffreys’ determination to control our comings and goings. (Probably none of the parents liked the history of suicide in the Hatchet house. Though honestly, can you imagine what an eerie, awesome Halloween party that would have been?)
Mr. Hatchet’s was where we found ourselves the night of the senior movie. It was the only place we could think to go where—stoned, drunk, rowdy, but also sullen with cowardice—we would not be immediately found out, immediately separated, questioned, and punished.
You’ll remember that Mr. Hatchet was already a little punchy by the time we drove over there that night. There were no lights on upstairs, and a few of us suggested to Danny that maybe his dad was asleep and we should just call it a night. But Danny didn’t even listen to us. He just plugged in the code to the garage and stood back while the door opened. The lights were off in the garage too, and it would have been impossible for each of us not to think, for at least a moment, even Danny, about his mother.
Rumors for a long time insisted that it was Danny who found her in the garage. But Paul Epstein, not too long after Danny hit the dog, got drunk on a couple sips of Wild Turkey and, out of nowhere, demanded that Danny set the story straight. Imagine that for a minute. Imagine one idiot sixteen-year-old asking another idiot but grieving sixteen-year-old to give up the goods on how his mother died and whether or not he was really there. It would be easy to blame Paul for his indiscretion, easy to ridicule him for his insensitivity. Except that most of us were just relieved that it hadn’t been us to get drunk and ask, because we’d all been wondering the same thing.
There are lots of ways Danny could have responded to Paul that would have been totally legitimate, totally understandable and forgivable. He could have hit him, for one thing. That definitely would have been justifiable—almost once an hour, from the day he was born, Paul Epstein’s face was begging to be hit square in the jaw. Another option might have been for Danny to cry. It would have been embarrassing as hell, but we would have understood the tears and eventually we could have forgiven them.
The option that was least forgivable, and least foreseeable (at least by us), was Danny having the nerve to paint a vivid picture. But that’s exactly what happened. Who can remember the basement we were in when it happened? Trey’s, maybe? Marty Metcalfe’s, if it was early enough in the evening? The basement doesn’t matter. What matters is that Paul asked a seriously inappropriate question and instead of anyone calling him on it, instead of any of us punching him in the nose, Danny decided to give him—to give us—more of an answer than we wanted and much more than we deserved.
To be honest, when he started talking, he seemed relieved, which makes sense. Mrs. Hatchet was dead. Mr. Hatchet was straddling the fence between occasional sobriety and full-tilt drunkenness. Our high school hadn’t yet hired a counselor. (It would take another year and a missing girl for that to happen.) So it makes sense, a little, as awful as it sounds, that Danny Hatchet might have been thankful when somebody finally asked what happened. Who else would he have been able to talk to in the meantime? No one.
“It wasn’t me,” was the first thing he said. “Kind of wish it had been. I don’t know. I’d have liked to see her one last time alone like that. That’s sick, right? I don’t know. But it wasn’t me.”
For the first time since we’d known each other, Danny Hatchet commanded the room. Chuck Goodhue, Jack Boyd, Winston Rutherford, everyone—especially Paul Epstein—was quiet when Danny started talking.
“She was sick,” he said. “Not like in the brain, like sad or anything. But with cancer. My dad knew. She was sick and she was worried about my grandma taking care of everything and I guess maybe she was worried about me.” He stopped to pick a scab on his forehead. We waited for it to bleed, but it didn’t. “Some days it makes sense to me, you know. Some days I can follow her fucked-up mom-logic.” He picked another scab. This one sprouted a red trickle of blood. “Most days it doesn’t. Most days it pretty much sucks.” A few of us shot evil glances at Paul Epstein, who pretended not to notice.
Danny stuck a hand into his pants’ pocket and, out of nowhere, produced a joint. “Here,” he said. “Somebody light this.” And somebody lit the joint and we all passed it around and somehow, just like that, Danny and his weed, and somehow even his dad, became a fixture during the remainder of our high school lives. Staying with him, being with him, was the best thank-you we could give him for taking one for the team, for guaranteeing that our mothers could never befall the same fate because circumstance wouldn’t allow it, paranoia and serendipity and straight-up shameful superstition wouldn’t allow more than one neighborhood mother to succumb to the same terrible fate as Danny Hatchet’s mom.
A
nd so, yes, the night of the senior movie, the garage door opening slowly in front of us, the lights off, the cicadas screaming around us, it would have been impossible not to think of Mrs. Hatchet alone in that empty cavern of a room. The cold concrete all around her. The storage racks filled with Danny’s abandoned athletic equipment and Mr. Hatchet’s unused tools. The ignition fumes thickening in her lungs. But before any of us could grow overly solemn, a light was switched on from the inside, and at the mudroom door stood Mr. Hatchet, a fresh beer in his hand.
“Boys,” he would have said. “Good. You’re here. I was hoping for company.”
It’s likely that Mr. Hatchet was the first of all the parents to be told what had happened the night of the senior movie. Probably even before the girls decided that they should tell their mothers what had happened, we had already decided to deal Mr. Hatchet in. He was safe, after all. In some ways, no longer a parent. More one of us than one of them.
“If they touched Sarah Jeffreys, I don’t know what I’m going to do,” said Danny.
“You’re not going to do anything, kiddo,” said Mr. Hatchet. “Not your place.”
We were caught off guard that Mr. Hatchet wasn’t as offended as we were, wasn’t as vocally adamant about how far the juniors had crossed the line. We were expecting the angry Mr. Hatchet, the one who sometimes answered the phone in a cold sweat, ready to dismember whoever was calling. But what we got was morose Mr. Hatchet. What we got was sad, disappointed, sullen Mr. Hatchet. “The things people do,” he said over and over again. “The things people do to each other. It’s all too much, isn’t it?” He opened another beer and handed one to Danny. “It’s too much for me,” he said. And more than one of us will swear that he drank that next beer in one easy sip. He lifted the bottle, tilted back his head, and drank. We looked at Danny, who looked at the ceiling, and within five minutes we were standing on the curb, the garage door closing behind us, wondering what the morning would bring.
