The Truth of the Matter (13 page)

I blinked. I realized I’d been sitting there staring at them. I tried to think of something funny to say—something that sounded normal. “Oh, sorry. What you were saying was so interesting I guess I dozed off.”

It was lame, but it was the best I could come up with. I gathered my books and shoved them into my backpack. Slung the backpack over my arm as I got up and joined Josh and Miler.

“It’s hard to communicate when you’re wrapped in a cloud of loooove,” said Josh, singing the last word as if it were opera.

“Or maybe it’s just hard to communicate with a member of a subhuman species who can’t get within ten feet of a girl without melting into a pile of quivering mucus,” Miler said.

“How can you tell when Josh melts into a pile of quivering mucus?” I asked. “I mean, what’s the difference?”

“Good question,” said Miler.

“Har har,” said Josh, but he smiled nervously because—well, because he always smiled nervously.

Miler and I bumped fists and laughed. My heart felt as if it were made of lead.

The three of us walked outside into the crisp, cool air. We strolled together across the grass toward the cafeteria, nodding or waving every three steps or so at someone we knew.

I heard Waterman speaking again:
We want to rush
the case to trial as quickly as we can and basically railroad
you into prison for murder
.

Prison
, I thought. What would it be like to be in prison for murder? Would they be able to protect me from the
real
murderers all around me or would I be on my own? I could just imagine my mother coming to see me on visiting day . . .

“You all right?” said Miler.

I blinked at him, coming out of my thoughts. “What?”

“You just groaned. Are you sick or something?”

“Oh . . . no, I was just . . . I just remembered I forgot to study for my calculus quiz,” I lied.

“No big deal. You didn’t want to go to college anyway. You can always work at Burger Prince. Of course, if you want to move up to Burger
King
, you will need a BA.”

As we reached the door of the cafeteria, there was a burst of laughter and we nearly bumped into three people coming outside. It was two younger students—and Mr. Sherman. They’d obviously been joking about something together.

“Hey, guys, how’s it going?” said Mr. Sherman, slapping Miler on the shoulder.

Josh and Miler said it was going okay, but all I could do was stand there and stare. Mr. Sherman was a youthful-looking guy, trim and fit with a friendly smile. I’d had him for history two years in a row. Was it really possible he was the one who stabbed Alex Hauser in the chest? Was it possible he was a member of a group dedicated to terrorizing and killing Americans?

“What’s the matter, Charlie?” he said with a grin. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“No . . . hey, Mr. Sherman . . . ,” I answered quickly, but my voice trailed off. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

Sherman gave me kind of a strange look—but then he was moving off across the quad, followed by his two students. I heard the sound of their laughter fading as they moved away.

I was still watching them go as Josh, Miler, and I stepped into the cafeteria.

I’d never really thought much about the cafeteria before. You don’t, you know. It’s just the cafeteria. You go there, you eat your lunch, so what? But now, it struck me— how familiar it was. How reliable the smells of it were. Hamburgers Monday, mac-’n’-cheese on Wednesday . . . The food was—well, it was no better than it is at anybody else’s school cafeteria and we were always making jokes about it—like,

How can you tell the difference between rubber and a
Spring Hill High hamburger?

You can swallow rubber
.

And the colored plastic chairs were uncomfortable and there were all kinds of annoying high school social rituals like this kid won’t sit with that kid, and the popular girls always sit over there and giggle about the popular guys, and the sad-sack guys always sit over there and make snarky jokes about the popular girls, and so on . . .

But it’s strange about this stuff. When you might be about to lose something forever, you begin to think about it in a different way. This cafeteria—with its so-so food and uncomfortable chairs and all the general social stupidity that could keep you awake nights if you thought about it too long—this cafeteria had been a huge part of my life. We’d had some big laughs in this place—me and Josh and Miler and Rick. Like the time Josh was telling some stupid story and gesturing wildly with his milk carton and the milk flew out and hit Mr. Cummings smack in the face. And we’d had some big drama here too, like the time I faced down Mike Hurtleman because he’d dumped Owen Parker in the garbage can headfirst. This is where I was sitting at lunch one day not too long ago when Beth first came up to me, when I first worked up the courage to ask her if I could call her and she wrote her phone number down on my arm . . .

I mean, look, I don’t mean to get all sentimental about it. It was just the school cafeteria. I didn’t want to marry it or anything. But what would it be like when I was eating my meals in a cafeteria in prison and instead of sitting with people who dump kids in garbage cans or write phone numbers on your arm, I was surrounded by guys who would happily cut your throat?

“Dude!”

I blinked. I looked at Miler. “What?”

“It’s just a calculus quiz,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“You groaned again.”

“Oh . . . forget it,” I told him. “I’m just . . .” But I didn’t know what I was just doing.

“Anyway,” Josh chimed in, “there’s the steamy-dreamy love of your vaguely embarrassing life.”

I blinked again and saw Beth waving to me from a table across the room. She was there with Mindy and Jen, a couple of her friends.

“So if you sit with the girls,” Josh said, “does that, like, make you a girl too?”

“Go on,” said Miler. “Have fun. If you need me, I’ll be over here trying to explain to Josh what girls
are
.”

I was walking across the cafeteria toward Beth when suddenly I had the weirdest experience. It was almost like a hallucination. I had this powerful, powerful sense that I wasn’t here in the cafeteria at all, that I was somewhere else, in the woods somewhere, lying on my side in a pile of leaves, twisting on the ground in pain and trying to pull myself out of it because there were bad men hunting me, because I had to keep running, keep trying to escape . . .

I shook my head and the vision was gone. I thought:
That was weird. All this emotion and indecision must be
starting to get to me
. Then I continued walking across the room to Beth.

“Aren’t you going to get anything to eat?” she asked as I sat down across from her.

I muttered something about how I’d had a snack earlier. The truth was, with that lump in my throat, I didn’t think I could eat anything. I didn’t
want
to eat anything. I just wanted to sit there. I just wanted to look at her. I just wanted to be with her. Because I might never have a chance to be with her again.

I sat down. Mindy and Jen started talking to each other, obviously trying to give Beth and me some time for conversation. I tried to think of something to say, something ordinary and cheerful. But my voice kept trailing off, and I guess I kept sitting there for long seconds just kind of gazing at Beth.

“Are you okay?” Beth asked me.

And I said, “Yeah. Yeah. I’m fine. I’m just . . .” And then my voice trailed off again.

And then, just like that, I thought to myself:
I’m not
going to do it. I mean, I don’t have to do it. No one can
make me do it. All I have to do is say no and Waterman
goes away, right? The whole thing goes away just like that. They can find someone else to frame for murder. They can
send someone else to prison to have his throat cut. Someone
else’s mother can sit on the other side of the prison glass,
sobbing. Let someone else leave his life and his friends and
his girlfriend behind forever. It’s probably all baloney anyway.
I mean, Sherman—a terrorist murderer? No way. Maybe this Waterman is just some nutcase who goes
around pretending to work for the government .
. .

As I went on thinking these things, the sadness began to lift from me. It really was as if someone had taken this huge boulder off my back. I began to feel practically lighthearted. Why had I been torturing myself like this? Just because some guy named Waterman showed up and proposed this insane plan didn’t mean I had to agree to it. It wasn’t written in stone or anything. All I had to do was say no, and the whole thing would go away.

I reached out across the table and Beth reached out and we held hands. A surge of feeling for her went through me. It wasn’t the first time I’d felt certain she had been created especially for me, that we had been created especially to find each other and be together.

This is good
, I thought.
This is what really matters in
life. I’m not giving this up for anyone
.

And with that, my sadness was gone completely. I was happy, in fact. In fact, I felt great.

Suddenly, in the blink of an eye, I was in the karate dojo. For a second, I felt confused. How had I gotten here? Wasn’t I in the forest somewhere . . . ? lying on my side writhing in pain . . . ? people searching for me . . . ?

No. No, now I remembered. I was back in Spring Hill. I’d gone home after school. I did my homework. I borrowed my mom’s car to drive to my karate lesson . . .

Now I and my sometime-karate-partner Peter Williams were moving together back and forth across the dojo carpeting. We were doing a paired
kata
, a kind of mock fight where I would move through one memorized series of punches and blocks and he would go through a complementary series so that every time I punched, he deflected it and struck back and then I deflected his punch and struck back and so on.

Sensei Mike moved along beside us, watching us, calling out instructions: “That foot should be right between his feet, Charlie. You’re not close enough. You can’t reach him with that punch. Come on, pay attention, West; you know better than that.”

I was making a lot of mistakes. I knew the material really well and I was trying to keep up, but my mind just kept going back to my next planned meeting with Waterman—tonight. I kept thinking:
I’ll just tell him no,
that’s all. All I have to do is say no and things’ll be back to
normal
.

But at the same time I was also thinking about my friend Alex. Stabbed in the chest, dying in the park, whispering my name with his final breaths. What if it really had been Sherman who’d killed him? What if he really was part of a terrorist organization out to attack America? How could things ever go back to being normal now that I’d heard what Waterman had to say? Once you know something, you can’t un-know it.

“All right, chuckleheads, that’s enough,” said Sensei Mike. “Williams, bow out and hit the changing room. West, stay here and tell me what’s on your mind and why you’re messing up so badly—and it better be something really, really important—like your shoes are on fire or something.”

“No, no, it’s nothing, Mike,” I muttered. I didn’t like to lie to him, but I’d promised Waterman I wouldn’t tell anyone what he’d said. Government secret and all that. I stood there in my karate
gi
, my head down. I was still breathing hard from the exercise. “I’m just . . . distracted, that’s all.”

“Uh-huh,” said Mike. I could tell he didn’t believe me. Mike had this amazing ability to figure out pretty much everything that was on your mind just by watching your karate practice.

For a second, I stood there, not really knowing what to say, not wanting to lie any more than I had to, unable to tell the truth. Then, the words sort of just came out of me: “Hey, Mike, can I ask you a question?”

“No. And don’t ever try it again.”

I rolled my eyes.

Mike pulled his mustache down over his mouth with one hand, hiding a smile. “Go ahead, chucklehead. What question?”

I hesitated. Mike never talked much about being in the Army or what he did in the War on Terror. He never told anyone how the president gave him a medal for running to an armored truck under fire, getting hold of a big .50-caliber gun, and fighting off more than a hundred Taliban to save his fellow soldiers. He never told anyone about getting hit by a bullet that day and having to have a piece of titanium put in his leg where the bone used to be. But I’d looked him up on the Internet and found out all about it.

“You know that thing you did in Afghanistan? That thing you won the medal for from the president?” I asked him.

Mike’s hand went on hovering at his mustache. He did that a lot, usually to hide his smile. Mike always had this smile on his lips and this look in his eyes like he was secretly laughing at something. It was as if he thought just about everything was a joke, as if the whole world was just one big collection of chuckleheads making a mess of things and it was all pretty funny. But now, his eyes had gone serious. The smile that usually hid behind his mustache was gone.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “Yeah, I seem to remember something about that.”

I wasn’t sure I should go on. I knew he didn’t like talking about it. But now that I’d started, I said, “Would you do it again? Knowing you could get killed. Knowing you might never get home to see your wife and daughter. Now that you’ve had time to think about it, I mean, away from the battle, if you could go back and make the choice sort of more, I don’t know, calmly . . . would you still do it?”

For a long moment, Sensei Mike didn’t answer me. The dojo was quiet except for the sound of Pete banging around in the changing room in back.

When he did speak, Mike still didn’t answer me. He just said, “Life’s funny, chucklehead. You only get one and you don’t want to throw it away. But you can’t really live it at all unless you’re willing to give it up for the things you love. If you’re not at least
willing
to die for something— something that really matters—in the end you die for nothing.”