Unlocked (6 page)

Just then, Nicholas emerged
from the bathroom
and saw the card's destruction.
Dude
…, he said,
shaking his head.

A card like that was worth
a few hundred bucks, surely.
I knew a little about baseball
and nearly nothing about hoops,
but even I realized that an MJ card

was sacred.

I tried to stop Blake
but he was too far gone
into whatever dark mood
had taken him. He slid
right past me and disappeared
toward the cafeteria.
For a moment, I considered
following him, but the tardy bell
rang so I just rushed into
English class instead.

After school, I tried to find Blake.
No one had seen him.
And from the hallway whispers,
that card had been the real deal.

When I found him at the Winn-Dixie
the next evening, a pile of spent shells
littering the ground, Blake told me
it was his father's, a basketball
junkie who grew up in Chicago.

That MJ card was from an eBay auction
the week before he headed off to Iraq.
Something to look forward to seeing again
,
he'd joked to Blake, giving him a fake
noogie at Jacksonville International,
where a 747 touched down, ready
to ferry Blake's father away forever.

He had planned on giving it to me,
which floored me, even though
the only thing I had ever collected
were bottle caps, and my dad
threw all those out when I was nine.

Kids hated.

That's what we did.
It's what we do best.
We hate our hair,
our zits, our friends,
our parents.
We hate our hand-me-down cars,
our crappy cafeteria lunches,
our classes, our weather.

We hate, we hate,
we hate, we hate,
all no differently
than how kids
have hated
for centuries.

March 5.
It came to me
at last, thinking
so much of hate.
A little math
assured me
I was right.
It had to be
the day Blake's

father was killed.
March 5.

I told myself that.

For me,
the gun was a hobby,
though on some level
I knew that was a lie.

For Blake,
it was something

more.

These days, he carried it
more often than not.
Even to the movies and Wal-Mart.
I hadn't thought much
of it until now,
late February.

I began to worry
about how much hate
a kid like Blake
harbored, if the mercury
of his own thermometer
ran close to the shattering point.

I began to really worry,
thinking of the list of names
my own heart wanted
to even the score with.

I began to wonder what it really was
that mortared Blake and I together.

Everyone knows why a kid
brings a gun to school.

Columbine. Virginia Tech.

The blossom of blood
as a head explodes.
The holy vengeance
of a thousand, thousand
wrongs suddenly righted.

Red Lake, Minnesota.
Northern Illinois University.

Becky Ann laughed at me
when, in an unexpected burst
of bravado, I invited her
to the Spring Fling Dance.
When I'm dead, maybe
,
she said, yukking it up
with her pals Linda and
the less-pretty Becky.

SuccessTech Academy.
Bard College at Simon's Rock.

Kids mocked my father,
saying he
hace las mesas
spic and span
. He's not
even Latino. My grandmother's
just a dark-skinned Greek.

University of Arizona College of Nursing.
Buell Elementary.

Why didn't people tease Romeo?
He was Mexican and had a faint
lisp. Or Aaron, whose brother
was doing sixty months for grand larceny?
Or anyone anyone anyone
but Blake who ached like
his heart was an old salt mine
now emptied of all worth.

Dawson College.
Platte Canyon High School.

I knew what Dr. Zigler would say,
but those shrink phrases
didn't mean anything anymore.
“Stuck at denial.” “Deferred closure.”
“Antisocial tendencies.”
Language no longer affected us.
That's the power a gun brings.

Essex Elementary.
Notre Dame Elementary.

Eyes shut, mouth fastened tight,
I couldn't move, couldn't
do anything but shake.

Everyone knows why someone
brings a gun to school.

Inskip Elementary.
Bridgewater-Raritan High School.

Blake read Nietzsche
regularly, even
loaned me
Twilight
of the Idols
, which
I couldn't delve more
than five pages into.

Then Blake texted:

if it doesn't kill us,
it makes us stronger

entirely ignoring
that everyone knows
old Friedrich
went nutso and died.

You'll like this
,
Blake promised,
then showed me
how to jimmy open
a maintenance door
to access the roof.

Together, we stood
in the spot I'd seen him
months earlier,
tempting the ledge
with its thirty-foot drop.

He urged me to the lip,
where you could see
the points of trees below
like wide green knives.

Wow, he stood so close
that his soles were half
off into open air, defying
gravity like it couldn't touch him.

Heights aren't my thing
,
I said.
I swear to God
.

He cut me a look.
God
?

We stoned him to death
a few hundred years ago
.

Then he brought out the gun
and sat—feet dangling
into space—while he
polished the barrel with his shirt.
Why'd you bring that here
?
I asked, thinking how trust
can disappear like a star,
vanish so suddenly

without a trace.

Blake said,
What do you mean
?
and I realized I might as well
have asked why he liked
french fries or wore Nikes.

We stayed there for a while,
so high above the rest of the world.
I couldn't shake the feeling
that Blake was convinced
he could stroll off the rooftop
and escape unscathed.

With my Warcraft account down,
I sometimes surfed chat rooms
and just wasted away the evening
while my parents watched TV
and ate Chex Mix in bed.

Without intending to, I clicked
onto a site called Teen Help
and just stayed a voyeur
for forty-five minutes,
longing for Warcraft mayhem
and player-versus-player battles,
wishing I could reenter
a world where the strong
could toss bolts of flame
and fire lightning arrows from a bow.
A world where there were rules
and limits and boundaries.

What I got instead was a mess
of crybabies one-upping each other.
Who cared about acne
or prom dresses or study hall notes?

Finally, I typed it in as fast as I dared.
What do you do when your friend
takes a gun to school
?

The first answer:
You tell him
he's quite the pistol
.

And I logged out, an idiot
for believing this was anyone's
problem except my own.

My heart thudding
away all day long
as I went class
to class, learning
nothing except
a growing appreciation
for the power of fear.

I watched Blake
when he wasn't
looking at me,
trying to see if
anything, ANYTHING
seemed different.

What did I expect?
Devil horns? Maniacal
laughter? A black
cowboy hat and
bandito mask?

Mr. Oliver called on me
again, but all I could hear
was my own breath
thundering in my ears,

a countdown.

He skipped lunch,
but I caught up
with Blake before
history class.
What's going on?

I insisted.

He tried to push
past me, but I
wouldn't let him.

I said,
C'mon
,
even though
the tardy bell
had rung.

He pursed his lips
and cut me a look.
It's not up to us
anymore
.

When he turned
and ambled
the opposite way
to his classroom,
I didn't stop him.

I just stood there
and tried to figure out

who

and what

he meant

exactly.

Blake followed me
home from school,
then took a crosstown
bus back to his neighborhood.

Today, he met me
near the bike rack
and said he had
“something to take care of,”
the words hanging
in the air between us
like frosty December breath.

Okay
, I told him,
imagining boxes of 9mm slugs
and hunting knives and rifle scopes
and blood and brain matter
and screaming and sobbing.

All we'd ever shot? Cans.
And sometimes 2-liter bottles.
And one time, a dead rat.
And the telephone poles.

Why did my mind insist on
such gruesomeness?

Okay
, I told him,
trying not to let horror
erupt on my face.
When he said,
Good-bye
,
I felt it like he'd gut-slugged me,
as if he knew that I knew.

Which maybe was what he
really wanted, after all.

I hadn't had
a friend before.
Not really.

I liked how
Blake gave me
the burned fries
at McDonald's.

I liked the smell
of mint from
the pack of gum
he never opened.

I liked how he
showed me
how to aim
a pistol
with one eye closed—

you cock your arm

just so.

I liked that he
showed me his
secret place
atop the school—

The only place
I can actually think
,
he said.

I liked how
we didn't have
to talk—we just
hung out.

He trusted me
and hated phonies.
I didn't want
him to hate me
like he hated
everyone,
everything else.

Maybe Blake let it slip
about us and the gun,
I don't know.
But Becky Ann believed now,
and I didn't want her
to keep asking me
what it felt like,
holding that heavy steel
so cold in my hand.

I didn't want
anything bad
to happen to Blake—
he lost his father.

His family had money
and the insurance payout
had left them even more,
but they didn't have
anything important.

No store-bought
Valentine's cutout cards
or sudden popularity
was antidote enough
for either of our lives.

We were two losers
who ate too much McDonald's,
played too many video games,
and had families we sometimes
wished we could trade for twenty bucks.

Plus we had a secret.

But it struck me—
Blake and I were not

the same. The toxic world
he lived in felt huge
and free at first,
but it came at a cost
I wasn't willing to pay.

My voice thready,
my pulse double time,
I puffed on my inhaler
as if it'd give me strength.

I puffed again.

That Tuesday morning,
instead of going to class,
I found my dad
in the boiler room, tearing
open a box of detergent.

Sweating from the sudden heat,
my entire body quivering,

I told.

… when Blake went to the john,
washing pretzel mustard off his hands
before returning to English class.

… when the group of policemen
in Kevlar vests and helmets surrounded
Jefferson High, their rifle safeties off.

… when the SWAT team began
emptying rooms, front of the school
to the back, shuttling out streams
of terrified kids as everyone asked,
Is it World War III? What the hell's up
?

… when Lieutenant Duncan of Ocala, Florida
—having realized Blake was in the bathroom,
not L103—ordered the snipers to surround
the east wing and draw a bead on Blake's forehead
as he yelled,
Hands up! Let me see your damn hands!

… as Blake ducked behind the water fountain
and took out the pistol—he had it in his jacket,
the fool, as he did so often then.
Gun!
someone screamed.

Gun! Gun! Gun!

… when Sue—who no one realized
was in the girl's bathroom—came out. The door
banged shut so loudly, it sounded like a gunshot.
Everywhere, screams.

… when someone fired. Blake, terrified, accidentally
fired twice into the ceiling, spraying mineral fibers
like gray snow. The SWAT team, too, was firing.
Everyone was firing.

… when Blake threw down the gun and balled up,
screaming,
PLEASE don't kill me! Please!

… because my father hustled me out into his pickup
in the teacher's parking lot and told me to wait
with the doors locked, head down, before he told
the principal to phone 911.

… because my father's first instinct was to get
me out of harm's way, even though I'd put myself
there again and again for months. I chose it.

… because I deserted Blake, my friend, when
he clearly needed me most.

I stayed home for two days.
I didn't want to return to school,
to see how different it was.

I kept hearing the gunshots,
the wail of so many sirens,
the chatter of police radios
and EMTs and firemen yelling.
In my sleep, in my mind, it was there.

My dad insisted,
I KNEW
that kid was off. I just knew it
.
It's what everyone said now,
as if everyone always paid attention
to Blake and had stories to compare.

He had boxes of ammo hidden
in his locker, the news anchors claimed.
And there were vague reports of
hunting knives and smoke bombs.
He was in our home
, Mom repeated
as she paced our house.
Our home
!