You'll Miss Me When I'm Gone (6 page)

At that moment, Luke realized it was the last glimpse he'd ever have of his son.

“Three and a half minutes,” Andrea whispered. “Oh, Luke . . .”

The car door slammed shut.

With the sun reflecting off the windows, it was impossible for Luke to see what his son was doing inside the vehicle. He stepped closer to the laptop screen. He could still hear that siren in the distance. But it sounded too far away.

“God, no,” he prayed under his breath. “Please, Damon, don't—”

Before he got another word out, Luke saw the bright flash inside the car.

All at once, flames shot out the windows, and the BMW jumped off the ground. The sound of the blast erupted over the webcast. Then the laptop's screen went blank.

Past the gray static on the laptop, a shrill screeching came over the speakers.

It was the sound of Damon's camera phone melting.

CHAPTER FOUR

 

“W
here's Luke?” Spencer asked as he jumped into the passenger side of his aunt's VW Beetle. He was soaked and shivering.

From the driver's seat, Andrea reached over and rubbed his shoulder. “Thank God you're safe,” she murmured.

“You, too,” Spencer said, patting her hand. He pulled away to shut his door and then buckled his seat belt. He glanced at the rain-beaded side mirror. “We're holding up traffic, Aunt Dee.”

Andrea's Volkswagen was at the beginning of a long line of cars in a police-designated pickup area one block from the high school's playfield. The entire school had been in lockdown. Actually, it was more like a lockout. All six hundred and eighty-something students had been corralled inside the fenced playfield. They'd been standing in the rainy drizzle for the last two hours while the police bomb squad searched the school.

Spencer had seen the BMW blown to bits on the webcast. Looking over his shoulder, Tanya had still been talking to the police when it happened. At the moment of the blast, she'd dropped her phone. She started screaming and sobbing. Spencer tried to calm her down, but she pushed him away.

“Where are they?” she cried, barreling through the mob—toward Ron, KC, Reed, and their group. They all looked a bit shaken and subdued. “Are you fuckers happy now?” she shrieked at them. “Look what you did to him!”

Tanya lunged at Ron and started hitting him on the chest. It took two of his friends and a teacher to pry her away. They led her off the playfield. The last Spencer saw of her, Tanya was sitting in the back of an open ambulance with a rain slicker over her shoulders, talking with a policewoman.

After the initial shock, most students became impatient standing out in the rain. But they weren't allowed to leave. Spencer overheard several of them on their phones, complaining to their parents or friends. Some of those outraged parents must have gotten in touch with Dunmore, because eventually he announced over a bullhorn that everyone would be going home soon. But each one of them had to give their name to a cop or teacher stationed at the exits. Kids had their backpacks searched. Spencer noticed they stopped Bonnie Middleton, the pretty cheerleader Damon had named in his tirade as one of his tormentors. She'd been smart enough to grab a sweater with a hood before evacuating the school. She wasn't with the others from her group. Though visibly distressed, she seemed to be cooperating as a policeman led her off the playfield toward an open tent they'd hurriedly set up by one of the fire trucks. It must have been their impromptu command center.

Spencer figured everyone Damon had mentioned in his webcast was being stopped and questioned. Damon had referred to him, too:
You can marry that other woman—and be like a father to what's-his-name—Spencer. He's more like the son you always wanted than I ever could be.

That much was more or less true. Spencer had enjoyed being sort of a surrogate son to Luke. He knew he got along better with him than Damon ever did. And Luke was a real nice guy. Until today, Spencer had felt content—and yes, even kind of smug—about the bond he'd formed with Damon's dad.

He could have told the young, curly-haired brunette policewoman at the playfield's northwest exit that he and his aunt were living with Damon's father. But he knew they would just detain him. Andrea was coming to pick him up, and he didn't want to keep her waiting while the police questioned him. Besides, he had absolutely nothing useful to tell them. So when the policewoman asked for his name, he told her, “Spencer Murray.” He didn't say anything else. He didn't say anything about his strained relationship with Luke's son. And he didn't say anything about how Murray wasn't his real last name.

“How are you getting home?” she asked, briefly glancing up at him from her iPad, which must have had a list of student names on it.

“My aunt's picking me up,” he said.

“We're routing that traffic to Eleventh Avenue,” she said, nodding toward her left. “Go on ahead, Spencer.”

“Thank you,” he said, heading down the sidewalk. He numbly glanced back through the chain-link fence at the hundreds of students still milling around the playfield in the drizzle. They looked miserable, like prisoners.

He was still in a daze over what had happened. He couldn't believe Damon had actually gone through with it. He kept thinking he should have tried a little harder to be Damon's friend, but the guy hadn't exactly made it easy for him. Still, he felt bad, especially for poor Luke.

Spencer took his place with dozens of other students gathered on the corner of Eleventh and Franklin, waiting for their rides. He scanned the gridlocked cars for his aunt's VW. Then something occurred to him. If the police thought Damon might have planted a bomb somewhere else—and it wasn't in the school—where was it?

He imagined Andrea climbing into her VW and turning the key in the ignition—only to set off some kind of detonation device. He'd seen what had happened to Mrs. Shuler's BMW. Or had Damon rigged Luke's car to explode? He'd killed his mother, what would have stopped him from making sure his dad was blown to pieces as well?

After waiting on that corner for another fifteen agonizing minutes, he'd become convinced that something horrible had happened to Andrea or Luke—or both of them. Spencer had watched one kid after another—and sometimes groups of kids—jump into their respective cars and drive away. Only about twenty students had been left when he'd pulled out his cell phone to call his aunt. But then, to his utter relief, he'd spotted the VW.

“Where's Luke?” he asked again as Andrea pulled away from the curb.

“He's with the police—in a seaplane on their way to Lopez Island,” Andrea answered. She was watching a cop ahead of them directing traffic. She looked so tense.

“How's he holding up?” Spencer asked.

She sighed. “How do you think he's holding up? He's devastated.”

Spencer didn't know what to say to her. He turned and stared out the window.

Apparently, the police had determined it was safe enough to route traffic down a road that ran along the side of the school. Three police vehicles were lined up in the teachers' parking lot. Spencer caught a glimpse of two guys from the bomb squad coming out of a side door to the school. They were covered head to toe in olive green protection gear that resembled space suits. In front of them was a bomb-detecting machine—a wheeled device that was a cross between a go-cart and R2-D2. Spencer had seen one in the movie
The Hurt Locker
. A pair of cops—each with a bomb-sniffing German shepherd on a leash—were going from one parked car to another in the lot.

Spencer squirmed in the passenger seat. “Listen, I know you've got enough to worry about,” he said. “But do you think Damon might have done something to Luke's car—or maybe the town house? I mean, if the cops believe he could have set up another bomb . . .”

Andrea nodded. “The police who met us at the theater were thinking along the same lines.” She nodded in the general direction of the dashboard. “They already checked out this heap—along with Luke's car and the house. We're okay, Spence. I think we've seen the worst of it. I just hope Luke gets through this okay . . .”

Spencer sat back, but he still couldn't breathe easy. He pressed his forehead against the car window. Three blocks from the school, they passed a car he recognized—parked on the side of the road. It was Mr. McAfee's black Mustang. Though it was about fifty years old, the vehicle was in pristine condition—except for a scratch that ran three feet along the driver's side.

McAfee had made a big deal about it during his English class one week into the school year. Spencer had just started attending Queen Anne High. At first, he'd thought McAfee was kind of laid-back and cool. But then, someone had keyed his precious Mustang in the teachers' parking lot, and McAfee showed his true colors. He spent the first ten minutes of class time vowing to track down the “worthless punk” who had keyed his car. He was certain that someone in that class was responsible—or at least, that someone in the class knew who was responsible. Then to prove just how much of a dick he was, he gave everyone a writing assignment. “I want a minimum of five double-spaced pages analyzing
Beowulf
, due Friday,” he decreed. “And I'm sorry if it puts a crimp in your weekend, but you'll have a four-page paper analyzing the character of Grendel due on Monday. There will be another four-page paper due on Wednesday, analyzing Grendel's mother. And I'm going to keep this up until someone comes forward with information on who scratched my car . . .”

True to his word, for nearly two weeks, McAfee kept demanding a new four-page essay—every other day. It was a total pain in the ass. What was worse, they never got the papers back. McAfee didn't bother to grade them. In fact, Spencer was pretty sure McAfee didn't even read them. He overheard someone talking about it in the cafeteria: “Dan Flick said he wrote ‘Screw Beowulf and screw you' in the middle of page three in his paper on Hrothgar or whatever the hell his name is—and he never heard a thing from McAfee about it.”

Spencer also overheard—from several different sources—that after the first of these punishment papers were turned in, McAfee secretly excused the guys on the football team from writing the essays. At least that was the rumor, and Spencer believed it. The jocks seemed to get away with murder in McAfee's English class.

Damon wasn't in that sixth-period class with Spencer. Damon had McAfee for second period—along with Reed, Ron, and that tribe. Spencer could only imagine what those creeps must have put Damon through during second-period English while McAfee turned a blind eye. He wondered how McAfee felt now—after Damon's speech and his suicide. Was he sorry—or embarrassed? Or did he just turn a blind eye again?

They never did find out who keyed McAfee's car, but after that incident, he stopped parking in the teachers' lot.

Back when it had happened, Spencer had wondered if it was merely a coincidence that someone had keyed his aunt's VW outside the apartment just a month before.

As he looked at the sporty black Mustang behind them, growing more and more distant in the side mirror, Spencer wondered if the cops and their bomb-sniffing dogs were inspecting all the cars in the vicinity—or just the ones in the teachers' lot.

CHAPTER FIVE

 

D
amon Shuler kept a journal. He could pinpoint the time and date when his life at school took a drastic turn and went to hell. It was sophomore year, during Mr. McAfee's fourth period English class, Wednesday, October 23.

He'd squeaked through freshman year without anyone really noticing or bothering him. A few people knew that his dad was a famous playwright, but that hadn't really won him any friends or admirers—except maybe for Tanya, who was crazy for theater arts. He and Tanya hung out a lot, but he didn't feel all that close to her. In fact, sometimes she was kind of a pest. The truth was he really didn't have any friends.

He figured people like Ron Jarvis and Reed Logan didn't even know he was alive.

In September of that year, he had his first bad brush with Reed Logan. It was sort of a precursor for when things would become terrible a month later.

Reed was the first one to notice Damon's OCD tic—or at least, he was the first one to say anything, and he said it loudly. It happened right before McAfee's class, when Damon was taking his seat.

“Shuler, what's with you and the weird way you have to touch your desk every time you sit down?” Reed asked—for all the students in their English lit class to hear. “Could you possibly be any more of a
freak
?”

Damon didn't realize anyone had been watching him. He'd barely been aware of his own actions. It was automatic. He had to touch the chair and the desk before sitting down. He couldn't help it. Every time he was about to come into contact with something, he needed to touch it. He couldn't explain why. He didn't feel safe grabbing a doorknob until he'd touched it first—and
tested
it. Even if it was a doorknob he used ten times a day, he had to touch it first before he'd take hold of it.

When these tics had started to manifest themselves during his early adolescence, Damon's parents sent him to see a shrink, who prescribed some medication. But the pills made him groggy and kind of stupid. Instead of the meds, another therapist recommended meditation. But that seemed like a waste of time. Damon figured he was fine—so long as no one noticed his tics.

But Reed Logan had noticed.

The next day, as Damon went to take his seat in McAfee's class, Reed offered a play-by-play commentary for all the classmates within earshot: “Watch him touch the chair first—and then the desk, then the chair again . . .”

Damon pretended he didn't hear. But Reed's buddies were cackling. One of the people laughing was Mr. McAfee, standing there at the front of the classroom with his arms folded. Damon thought McAfee looked like an ex-jock gone to seed. He was wearing a loosened tie and had his shirtsleeves rolled up. Damon kept thinking:
He's the teacher. Why doesn't he say something to shut them up?

By the time he was seated, Damon knew his face was red. Still, he refused to look at anyone.

From then on, he did his damnedest to be one of the first students in their seats for that class. If he got there before Reed and his friends, then no one would be reminded of his little idiosyncrasies. No one would make fun of him.

Reed was hardly one to point fingers. He had a fixation with this stupid Dodgers baseball cap he always wore—backward. The blue cap was his trademark. Some of the teachers made Reed take it off while class was in session. But McAfee let him wear it.

It was on that day in late October in McAfee's English lit class when Damon inadvertently made things worse with Reed—and officially horrible for himself.

With his dumb baseball cap on backward and a little askew, Reed was slouched in his desk chair, trying to bullshit his way through an answer to McAfee's question about
The Great Gatsby
. It was obvious Reed had watched the movie in lieu of reading the book. Damon couldn't help rolling his eyes while Reed babbled on and on.

“Damon, I see you making faces like you disagree with Reed,” McAfee pointed out. “Would you care to comment?”

Damon let out a nervous little laugh. “Well, in the first place, while he was talking, Reed said
irregardless
twice—and there's no such word. It's
regardless
, not
irregardless
. I'm kind of surprised you didn't correct him, Mr. McAfee, since this is after all, an English class, English lit . . .”

McAfee narrowed his eyes at him.

But the remark got some snickers from his classmates, and Damon smiled. It felt good to be the one getting the laughs for a change—instead of the one getting laughed at. “And I'm pretty sure he didn't read the book,” Damon continued, “because he slipped and called Gatsby ‘Leo Gatsby,' after Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie.” He rolled his eyes again. “
FYI
, Reed, Gatsby's first name is Jay . . .”

Several students giggled.

Squirming in his chair, Reed glared at him. “And
FYI
, your first name should be
Freak,
you weird, pasty-faced fag!”

The classroom erupted with laughter.

Suddenly Damon was the one squirming in his seat. He nervously glanced at McAfee, sitting at his desk and staring back at him with a tiny smirk on his face. He didn't do anything to silence the guffaws. It was as if he enjoyed watching the humiliation of this kid who had dared to criticize his capability as a teacher.
This is, after all, an English class . . .

Damon realized right then that Reed would always have the upper hand—especially in McAfee's class.

After that, it seemed Reed's number-one mission was to make Damon's life miserable. He was chummy with a lot of jocks, cheerleaders, and people in the cool crowd. Suddenly these people Damon barely knew were pushing and tripping him in the school hallways and the cafeteria. He couldn't pass Ron Jarvis in the corridor without the hulky, good-looking football star knocking the books out of his hands.

It got so every morning, he dreaded going to school. He found hallway routes between classes where he could avoid most of his tormentors. He rarely ate in the cafeteria, and when he did, he didn't sit anywhere near the “cool table.” But one place he couldn't avoid his tormentors was McAfee's English class. None of his other teachers tolerated outbursts and name-calling. But in McAfee's class he was called
freak
,
freakazoid
, or
fag
by Ron, Reed, and their buddies. They always got away with it. After a while, McAfee sometimes discouraged them by smiling tolerantly and saying, “Okay, you guys, enough . . .” Then, after class, he'd be laughing with them and slapping them on the back.

Damon put up with it for the rest of the school year.

And then, at the beginning of Damon's junior year, someone keyed Roger McAfee's prized Mustang in the teachers' parking lot.

McAfee was so stupid—thinking one of the culprit's friends would turn him in if he kept dealing out homework punishment to the students in his classes.

He didn't stop to think that maybe the culprit didn't have any friends.