The Tragedy Paper (16 page)

Notices started to go up and then they came down. This was how it was done, I gathered. A quick hit of information and then it disappeared. Then there was another one, and then that disappeared. The thing was, they made no sense to me. There was always one word out of place, or one word missing. The first notice said
GAME IS CALLED OUT, EVERYONE MUST PLAY, CALLING ALL SENIORS, STAY TUNED FOR
 …

It was posted in the hall and in the bathroom. I read it, but when I went back later to get a better look, sure that I had missed something, it was gone. I looked in the hall where it had been earlier that day, and that one was gone too.

Two days later another one appeared:
GAME IS OUT COLD, WALK THERE FOR FUN, PLAY ONE AND ALL, BLANK WILL BE DONE
.

By then I was intrigued. The word
out
appeared in both, so that must have been code for outing. But it seemed so obvious. If I could figure that out, couldn’t the teachers? On the other hand, they hadn’t been privy to my conversation with Patrick in the bathroom. Maybe an outing was unusual and they would never think of it.

And then one night Patrick knocked on my door.

“Hey,” he said, standing there wearing a white T-shirt with small holes all over it, his jeans, and Black Watch plaid slippers. I did my best to keep my expression neutral. I had no idea what he might have wanted from me.

“Hey,” I said back flatly.

“You busy?”

“Not really,” I said, and then I thought I shouldn’t have given myself away so quickly. What if I wanted an out?

“Good,” he said. “I could use your help.”

“Doing what?”

“Making the invitations,” he said proudly.

“What invitations?”

“For the outing,” he said. “It’s all planned. I just have to let people know where and when.”

It seemed so strange to me that he would ask me for help. I mean, what about all his buddies? That covered pretty much every other guy living on our floor.

“Is everyone helping?” I asked, trying to get a better sense of what was going on.

“No,” he said. “I think we can do it, just us. I thought I’d give you a little insight into what it’s like to be popular, since you probably have no idea.”

Until he said that, I was fairly sure he was playing a trick on me. Maybe he was going to lure me to his room and then tar-and-feather me or something. But after that comment, I knew he was just being his petty self, and I had to admit it, I was curious. And a little bored. I hadn’t run into Vanessa at all that day. “Where do you want to make them?” I asked.

“My room,” he said, gesturing with his arm that I should follow him. “I have all the supplies. But if you have any markers, bring them, okay?”

“Sure,” I said, leaning toward my desk and picking up a Ziploc bag full of colored markers. I also picked up the scissors just in case.

I followed Patrick down the hall to his room. I had looked in sometimes when I walked by and his door was open, but I had never actually been inside. He opened his door and held out his hand, letting me know I should go ahead. His room was so much bigger than mine. It might have been double the size, and I wondered if he had the biggest room on the floor. He had painted the far wall, the one his bed was against, a kelly green color. He had a plaid comforter on his bed to match and a plaid rug. And then I noticed the pictures. They were Scotch-taped to the walls: one of Vanessa in the dining hall laughing; one of her outside somewhere, maybe behind the school; one of her sipping a milkshake adorably while looking off to the side. Patrick watched me but didn’t say a word. I wanted to pretend I didn’t care, that I didn’t even notice. On the lamp by his bed, there was a picture of the two of them together: he was tickling her and she was trying to fend him off, but she was smiling, and I knew her well enough to know it was a real smile. I looked at Patrick as though to say
What now?
As though I didn’t feel like a heavy cloak of loneliness had just been thrown over me that was making it hard to breathe.

“Hey, you’ve got to see this one,” Patrick said then, pulling open his closet door. On the back was a picture that had
been blown up not quite to poster size but bigger than a magazine cover. Vanessa was posing in a green bikini, her body lean and beautiful. I noticed the curves of the cups of her bikini top.

“It’s a good one, isn’t it?” Patrick mocked me. “It was taken last spring, right after school ended, when she came to visit.”

I wondered briefly if that was before or after his mother died. It must have been after. Maybe she was trying to make him feel better. Then I wondered if she knew about that picture and how big it was, or if Patrick kept it in the closet so she wouldn’t see it. I looked at Patrick without expression; I didn’t want to give him anything. But he knew. A slow smile spread across his face, and then he shook his head.

“We better get started,” he said, closing his door and putting a chair up against it, lodging the back of it under the doorknob so nobody would be able to get in if they tried. He must have seen my look of alarm.

“This is top-secret,” he said, and then he opened the side drawer of his desk and pulled out a stack of colorful construction paper and markers. His were Sharpies. Maybe he was going to draw all over me—write things like “loser” and “idiot” before I could escape. I imagined for a minute having to walk through the halls with the writing on me and wondered if it would feel worse than I feel every day, but of course I knew the answer was yes. He gestured for me to sit on the floor.

“So, here’s what I’m thinking,” he said as he took a seat on the other side of a board he had pulled out of his closet. He crossed his legs like a little kid and inched a bit closer. “The invitations should be in the shape of feet. Like each person gets a foot under the door.”

I stared at him blankly. Clearly he was serious about this, whatever it was.

“I keep forgetting, this is your first time,” he said. “You’re a newbie. Okay, so here’s how it works. I’m the chairman—which you probably figured out already. It’s up to me to organize the Game, which you already know is not going to be a game at all but an outing. The point is to bring the senior class together and invite a few juniors who will then carry the torch next year. Sort of like an initiation. You with me so far?”

I nodded.

“Oh, and I forgot to tell you the most important thing: while the teachers are of course expecting the Game to happen, since it does each year, the main point—the real measure of success—is to catch them completely off guard. They can’t see it coming.”

I nodded again.

“And with the outing, they’re going to be completely thrown off, which I’m pretty excited about, if I do say so myself,” Patrick said. Then he looked around like he had lost his train of thought.

“The invitations?” I offered.

“Right, so the invitations have to be great and cryptic, and I want them to catch everyone’s attention, but the point here is to tell them about what we’ll be doing without really saying it—so if, by chance, a teacher gets ahold of one, he or she will not be able to figure out exactly what it says.”

“Sounds good,” I said, reaching for a piece of green construction paper.

“Wait. First, we have to figure out what we want to say,” he said.

I looked around the room to give the illusion that I was thinking, though the truth is I really didn’t care. I was thinking about Vanessa. Where had she been today? Why hadn’t I run into her at all? And then a terrible thought crossed my mind followed by a wave of misery: What if she had been purposefully ignoring me? What if she wasn’t going to find me each day anymore? What if she had somehow changed her mind?

And then, miraculously, as though Patrick had been reading my thoughts, he glanced at the picture taped to the lampshade and said, “Vanessa was sick today. Eve on her hall said she was heaving into the toilet this morning, and then she went back to her room and I guess never left again. I hope she’s feeling better; I certainly don’t want to get it. I was thinking I should do something—she’s probably expecting me to—you know, check on her or bring her some ginger ale and crackers or something. Maybe you could
come with me after we’re done here. I hate being around sick people.”

Even Vanessa?
I wanted to ask, but I didn’t. “Yes, sure,” I said instead, the feeling of relief still spreading through me. I felt energized—happy, even. She wasn’t ignoring me! She still liked me! I wasn’t sure how we were going to check on her, since her hall was off-limits, or where we were going to get ginger ale, but I figured Patrick had a plan for that. So now only the completion of the invitations stood between me and Vanessa.

“It might help if I knew what the outing was going to be,” I said.

“Good point,” he said, reaching over and making a pile of the paper neatly stacked by banging the bottom of it on the board. “I haven’t run this by anyone yet, but here’s what I’m thinking. One week from Wednesday will be the first night of March. I think we’ll throw them off by doing it on a weeknight since usually the Games are played on the weekends. I want to have a midnight sledding outing—at that amazing hill in the woods. I figure I’ll rent the sleds over the next two weeks, stock up on hot chocolate, we’ll need thermoses, of course, and I want to get Kahlúa and some peppermint schnapps, and I have bourbon. Anyway—everyone will meet there when the clock strikes twelve, and we’ll party until two. It will be the coolest senior event ever.”

“How do you know there’ll be snow?” I asked. Patrick looked at me thoughtfully, like that possibility had never crossed his mind. Then he nodded to himself.

“Snow will be icing on the cake,” he said. “It’s not about the snow. It’s not even about the sledding. It’s about having a crazy party.”

As he spoke, he rearranged himself so he was in a kneeling position towering over me, and I realized again how much bigger he was. When he finished talking, he sat back on his heels and smiled.

“So, what do you think?”

What did I think? I thought he was crazy. But did I tell him? No. I knew he meant that hill Vanessa and I jogged by that day I was momentarily blinded. The truth was, I didn’t care. Sledding, a game of tag, a keg party—it was all the same to me unless I could be alone with Vanessa.

“Sounds cool,” I said. “Do you think we should make the invitations in the shape of a snowflake or a sled?”

“No,” Patrick said kindly. “Too obvious. I was thinking Bigfoot.”

“Bigfoot?” I asked.

“Like big feet in the shape that Bigfoot would have,” he said, looking very pleased with himself. “And this is what I think it should say. They all have to be exactly the same.”

He took out a black Sharpie and started writing, being very careful to turn the paper this way and that. When he was finished, he held it up.

“Okay, picture a foot. A three goes here,” he said, pointing to the big toe. “Write ‘Best Prize,’ which everyone knows means ‘number one,’ here. So that’s March first.” This time he pointed to the center of the foot.

He was so close to me, I could smell his breath—a combination of Gummi Bears and mint with a hint of something dark and evil. I inched away as subtly as I could. He didn’t seem to notice.

“Okay, they already know it’s an outing from my other notes. We need to figure out a way to make clear it’s at midnight.”

“How about we draw a pumpkin?” I said. “Would that work?”

“Yes!” Patrick said enthusiastically. “Great idea.”

“Thanks,” I said, surprised to find myself smiling.

“We have the day and time. I think if we write a hill like this,” he said, leaning over a piece of paper and fixing a small hill he had already drawn, which really looked like an upside-down
U
. “The truth is, they’re allowed to ask me for details privately, so I think this is just enough info.”

“Okay, then,” I said, thinking the whole thing was a bit ridiculous and the effort we were putting into this could probably be better spent some other way, but so what? I’ll say this now, in case you didn’t get it, but whatever airs I was putting on here, there’s no question that I was happy to be in on something.

We were quiet for a long time while we started to cut
out the feet. After a few minutes, Patrick put on his iPod, which was connected to a pair of tiny speakers. Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” came on.

“We’ll need to cut out fifty-three of these,” Patrick said, talking over my favorite part of the song, the part that goes
born and raised in south Detroit
. I don’t know why I like that so much. Well, I guess I do know. I have cousins from the Detroit area. Not actually Detroit but a small town called Farmington Hills. When I was younger, we would go visit them. There was a time when my mother thought it was really important for me to know my cousins. I think that started when it dawned on her that I was going to be an only child. So about four or five times a year, we would drive from Chicago to see them. I always liked it, but after a few years my mother got tired of it and realized they were never going to make the effort to come to see us, even though my mother invited them all the time. We stopped going. I could never really figure out why we stopped going altogether—why we didn’t just scale it back to one or two visits a year.

After that, I ended up seeing my cousins at Thanksgiving and sometimes on a summer trip my grandparents organized. But I remember those visits, and I remember being down in their dark basement, the one my uncle had redone with indoor-outdoor carpet and a stereo that was brand-new in 1970, before any of us were even born. We
would turn out all the lights and blast the music. Nobody could see me. I told myself they were my cousins and they had to accept me no matter what. I think that was why I always hoped for a brother or sister, because they would have to accept me no matter what. But on those nights, with my cousins in that dark basement where nobody could see anybody’s face, we would wait at the beginning of the song and all yell that line
—born and raised in south Detroit
—at the top of our lungs. I know this is really pathetic and sad—but looking back, that is one of my best childhood memories. Sorry to get off track; let me get back to that night.