The Terrorist (6 page)

In England, they stuck their spaghetti on toast, cut it into chunks, and ate it upside down off the backs of their forks. It was enough to make you throw up.

Billy thought it was awesome. Billy wanted to eat just like the English, and sometimes entire dinners were spent yelling at Billy to hold his fork right side up.

“But why?” Billy would ask. “Do you think you’re being rational?” (“Rational” was on his sixth-grade vocabulary list. Billy took his vocabulary lists seriously.)

“Billy,” Thomas would say, “if you argue with your mother once more, you’re in deep—”

Nicole would frown.

“Trouble,” Thomas would finish reluctantly.

“Daddy,” Billy would say happily, “you almost used a swear. That would be contravening Mom’s bye laws.”

In the kitchen, alone with her empty coffee mug, Nicole wept into her hands. Billy, you contravened my bye laws. You were supposed to stay alive.

She picked up a can of SpaghettiOs and threw it across the room. “This is what I have left of you, Billy!” she shouted. “Why did you take that package? Why didn’t you throw it into the crowd? I don’t care about that woman or that baby! I care about
you!
”

She folded down on the counter, sobbing.

She tried to tell herself that it was a good thing Billy had used his own body to shelter the innocent, but Nicole had given birth to Billy’s body, and the end of that body was
not
a good thing.

Oh! How she wished she could have gone with him. Wherever Billy was now, eleven was too young to be there.

Blessed school.

It swung you along in its particular rhythm, and you had no choices. You sat at your desk in one class, and then you got up and walked to your desk in the next. Teachers talked and blackboards were written upon and papers were passed out and bells rang.

Laura did not focus on anything that was said, but time passed, and that alone was a blessing.

Everybody talked to her—everybody who had not fled because of the bombing. Julie was gone. Kathleen Marie was gone. Michael the Ten was gone, leaving Kyrene, who had adored him.

The remaining students were awkward around Laura. Americans could hug, but they could think of no words. Middle Easterners were more graceful in their speech and often spoke decoratively, with long, ornate sentences. But kids from anywhere had trouble figuring out what to say to the sister of dead Billy Williams.

Laura loved them for struggling.

At lunch, however, everybody stuck like traffic on Billy’s death. And like a traffic jam, they just wished the mess of his death would go away. Now Laura hated them.

She hated the good manners on which she had been brought up (and which had escaped Billy). Her mother would have commanded Laura to comfort her friends and assure them that she was okay.

Laura was having tuna fish on American white bread, the kind Billy approved of. She was afraid to pick up the sandwich. She would crush it. Tuna and mayo would spurt between her fingers.

Kyrene brought up the Thanksgiving dance. She said how awful it was that Michael had left L.I.A. and could not take her; how heartbroken she was.

Laura had to concentrate on opening her paper napkin and smoothing the folds, or she would have screamed at Kyrene:
You fool! Michael’s nothing but a date! It doesn’t matter! He’s not dead!

Eddie had the nerve to fondle her hair, in the old way, as if life were still ordinary. “Laura, I want you to come to the dance with me,” he said.

“Eddie, I’m going to have you arrested if you touch my hair once more.”

“Oh,” said Eddie sorrowfully. “Does this mean you aren’t coming with me?” In spite of the warning, he tried to touch her hair again.

That settled it. Laura was wearing her hair up from now on. It would give her mother something to do in the morning. Braids and twists.

Lunch chatter went on, and Laura found herself sliding into it after all. Perhaps normalcy lurked everywhere. The moment you relaxed your defenses, up it stood, trying to make you forget your mission: finding Billy’s killer.

“Thanksgiving confuses me,” said Mohammed.

“The turkey and the Pilgrim and the cranberry. Where does it lead, and why are we dancing?”

Mohammed was a Ten and a Half. Possibly even an Eleven. Nobody could better fit the horoscope ideal of a tall, dark, handsome stranger. Laura had often imagined herself dancing the night away with Mohammed.

Now she could see that Mohammed was excellent in all ways, but she could no longer see why this might matter.

She wanted very much to speak to God.
How did you decide that a Mohammed or a Kyrene gets to go on living, but not Billy?
she would demand of God.

The answer came as clearly as if He had spoken.
A terrorist made that decision, Laura, not me.

She thought of the terrorism that had happened in Oklahoma City, and the bombing of the Federal Building, where vicious, selfish, evil doers had murdered tiny children and ordinary office workers. She looked at her ordinary classmates. She could not see them clearly.

What Laura saw, instead, were those who had left L.I.A. Guilty people fled. Were the absent kids, therefore, guilty? Did they know something? Or not want to know something? Or were they just prudent—going while they could?

Is who
left
important? she thought. Or is who
stayed
important?

The collection of kids at this table was most unusual: Con, Andrew, Tiffany, Jehran, Eddie, Kyrene, Mohammed, Jimmy, and Bethany. Jimmy had a different set of friends; Jehran wasn’t fond of Americans; Tiffany was too snobbish; Kyrene had always been with Michael.

“You don’t usually dance for Thanksgiving, Mohammed,” said Con.

What a lot of thinking Laura had accomplished between Mohammed’s question and Con’s answer. She must be getting her thinking capacity back. That was good; she had a terrorist to find—but where to start? There were no clues here, just people whose routines had been interrupted, whose friendships had ended, and for whom crowding together for lunch felt better than sitting alone.

“I’ve never heard of a Thanksgiving dance, actually,” Con continued. “It’s because we aren’t home, and turkeys are hard to find in London groceries, and not everybody can go over the river and through the woods to Grandma’s house, so on Friday they’re having a dance to make up for it.”

The Americans grinned because they knew what Con was saying. Nobody else understood a word. Foreigners would never sort Thanksgiving out. It was an All-American secret.

The old sweet tune sang in Laura’s head: “
Over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house we go …
”

Grandma was begging them to come home for Thanksgiving. She herself wasn’t well enough to fly to England. Grandma had to use a walker now because her knees buckled. Every morning she gulped down trays of medication to keep her ailing heart and lungs and joints working. And now her only grandson was dead, and Laura’s parents refused to leave London.

“Because,” Thomas would say hopelessly. “Because … Billy’s still here, somehow.”

Jehran was listening intently to the Thanksgiving discussion.

Jehran had fascinated Billy. Not her perfume, hair, clothing, speech—all of which were exotic and beautiful—but the fact that she arrived at school in a bulletproof limousine. Billy loved that. One of his lists had been Students Who Come to School in Limousines. To Jehran’s limousine, Billy added
bullet-proof.

The police had Billy’s lists. Laura was suddenly afraid Mr. Evans would lose the lists; this important part of Billy would drop behind some gray desk and vanish. Her breath caught in her chest, and she had difficulty swallowing and needed to find a telephone and tell Mr. Evans to drive over here with the lists.

Handsome, blond, American Andrew (a definite Ten) leaned across the table and steered among abandoned sandwich crusts to touch Laura’s hand. People were being social workers around the Williamses. The advice from American friends to her mother was: do normal things. Bit by bit you’ll find yourself back in a routine.

Why would anybody want a routine without Billy?

Actually, now that Laura thought about it, Billy had had many routines; he was a person who loved repetition.

“Laura,” said Andrew, giving her a sweet, grave smile, “if you’re ready to get out of the house a little, I’d love to take you to the Thanksgiving dance.”

Laura could not get over that her friends did not see the gaping, shrieking hole of rage that Billy’s death had ripped in her heart. Everybody at this table (except Jehran, whose Muslim family would never condone such an Americanism as dating) was still thinking of boy-girl activities, while she, Laura, was thinking of revenge.

“Why would she want to do that, Andrew?” said Tiffany crossly. “It’s way too early. Billy’s hardly in his grave.”

Laura did not like Tiff, but there was some annoying requirement when you were out of your country that you had to be nice to your fellow Americans. Even if, like Tiffany, they were worthless fellow Americans.

On the other hand, you could be worthless and still be right.

“She’s gonna dance around the room when her brother’s just been splatted on a moving stair?” demanded Tiff.

“I’m sorry,” said Andrew, horrified. “I didn’t mean Laura should celebrate. I meant going to the dance could be a rest.”

A dreadful thought stood up in front of Laura’s eyes. She did not see Andrew turn for forgiveness and she did not see Tiffany turn for confirmation.

What if Billy’s killer was somebody in school? Somebody right here at L.I.A.?

After all, school had been the majority of Billy’s life. He’d been headed to school when he died. His lists were mostly school lists, and his friends had been entirely school friends.

What did she really know about these kids?

This international set had lived all over the world, not just Hong Kong and Paris and Helsinki, but also stints in Houston and Cincinnati and Atlanta. Plenty of kids from different nations were as good at being American as Laura. Andrew, who seemed so American: Did she know for sure? Andrew could be lying. With that white-blond hair, he could be from Scandinavia, not an American descended from somebody from there.

But did you have terrorists from Norway?

Weren’t terrorists sort of country-specific?

Where was Mr. Evans when she needed him? She had a thousand new questions to ask.

“Where is Billy buried, anyway, Laura?” asked Tiffany, who was on a roll. “You ship the body back to Massachusetts? You didn’t bury him here in England, did you? I mean, won’t you want to be able to visit the grave after you get home?”

Everybody was shocked, even people who expected the worst from Tiffany.

Con, the diplomat’s child, rushed to share a bag of Cape Cod Potato Chips, flown in by her aunt. Airmail potato chips worked out to about fifteen dollars a bag. People crunched gratefully, covering Tiffany’s rudeness and Laura’s silence.

Why was Tiffany full of questions? What if everything Tiffany had said about her family was a lie? And Eddie? And Andrew? And Mohammed? Even her best friend, Con? Who were they, really?

Laura’s eyes burned, dimly seeing the outline of killers where before she had had friends.

A
T LAST LAURA WILLIAMS
had an Extracurricular Activity. Day after day she pursued her new interest.

Bet “Finding My Brother’s Killer” doesn’t show up that often on college admission essays, thought Laura, knowing the essay would be worth writing only if she found him.

School gave Laura a fever. She was hot and shivery from staring at her former friends. She tried to turn them inside out; inspect their secrets and their pasts. There was no time to eat lunch, only time to sit in the cafeteria and examine faces.

Jimmy Hopkins, for example, seemed worth pursuing. He looked Japanese, but his name certainly didn’t fit.

The eyes of a terrorist should be cold and amoral, unblinking and uncaring. Eyes to be afraid of. But in the eyes of Jimmy Hopkins, she could see only curiosity and pity.

“Jimmy,” she said sharply, “where are you from?”

“Los Angeles,” said Jimmy courteously. He ate his chips like a Londoner: squishing the head of each french fry into a puddle of vinegar and salt.

“But what are you, really?” said Laura. “What nationality?”

“I’m American,” he said, trying to be patient. Laura had interrogated almost everybody; he had known his turn was coming. “You want the whole nine yards? A Hawaiian grandmother who was part Japanese and part New England missionary married an Irish grandfather. That’s my mother’s side. I have an Italian grandmother and an origin-unknown grandfather on my father’s side.”

“That’s not enough Japanese blood to look as Japanese as you do.”

“So speak to my gene pool,” said Jimmy irritably. He took the remains of his sandwich to the trash can and got in line for dessert.

“Stop testing people, Laura,” murmured Con, tilting back in her metal chair until she was so close to Laura that conversation was muffled in each other’s hair. Con, as always, looked perfect. She was not beautiful or even pretty, yet she was a Ten in any numbering system. “Billy wasn’t killed by anybody at school, Laura. I know you’re upset, but don’t be melodramatic.”

“Murder,” said Laura, “
is
melodramatic. When you’re murdered by being handed your own personal bomb, it is
very
melodramatic. Billy was somebody’s choice, Con! He was handed his own murder weapon! He had to carry his own death up a stair.”

Every time Laura imagined it, she wanted to yank Billy to safety; her muscles seemed to believe there was still time to do this.

Con nodded understandingly—as if a person who used the word “upset” for Billy’s death could understand. “I’m sorry, Laura,” said Con. “You’re right. It is melodrama. It could be on stage, or be a movie.”

“No! You don’t get it! It isn’t a screenplay. It’s my brother!”

The whispered conversation exhausted Laura. Her strength was dwindling away, just when she needed it most. She had lost rest completely. Her sleep had become a strange shallow thing, a mere trembling on top of sheets.