Character, Driven Read online

  “Do you trust authority?” Zach asked.

  “I work for them,” she said. “Of course I trust them. But if history has taught us anything—and if it hasn’t, I might as well go home right now—it has taught us that people make mistakes. Absolute trust is just as dangerous as absolute distrust. I have an idea. It’s a beautiful day. Why don’t we take our class outside and enjoy a bit of sunshine?”

  Even sophisticated, jaded seniors will whoop and cheer at the news of an outing, reverting instantly to their inner, and outer, child.

  “Recess!” Peter yelled.

  “That’s an appropriate vocabulary word for a Government class,” Ms. Ryder said. We followed her outside, through a door by the cafeteria, about fifty yards from the front entrance.

  As Ms. Ryder continued our discussion of the Tenth Amendment, I kept stealing peeks toward the ambulance. Eventually, two paramedics came out the front door, wheeling a gurney. As they turned the gurney to line up with the open back doors of the ambulance, I recognized the blue shop apron.

  “It’s Mr. Xander,” I said. My gut churned when I spotted bloody bandages wrapped around his head.

  “Shop teacher gets hammered,” Peter said.

  A couple of us glared at him.

  “Too soon?” he asked.

  Nearby, I heard Clovis snort. He wore a chilling grin. It wasn’t merely the grin of someone who had seen his enemy harmed. It was the grin of someone who had engineered that harm.

  Juke raised his hand for a high five. Clovis started to respond, but then grabbed Juke’s arm and yanked it down with enough force that my own shoulder spasmed in sympathy. Clovis leaned close and snarled a warning. Juke responded with a dull nod. I felt a deeper chill as the meaning of all this fell into place with a cerebral clank.

  Maybe I should have known that something like this would happen. Yesterday, when I’d seen Clovis, Burton, Leon, Juke, and Quin clamber out of the woodshop, they were laughing and hitting each other on the arm like a volleyball team that had just won a tournament victory against a stronger opponent. I recalled snatches of their conversation. Their words had meant nothing to me at the time, as I cowered behind my canvas.

  “Upside the head…”

  “… crash…”

  “Like a ton of bricks…”

  “More like a ton of wood…”

  “… has it coming…”

  “No more detention…”

  I was so used to them talking about acts of violence, from real life, TV, movies, and games, I hadn’t connected their words to their presence in the woodshop. Now I knew what they were talking about. They’d booby-trapped the supply closet. Mr. Xander lets us look through the frames he makes, but he doesn’t let students select the wood for their projects. He gets it himself. Today, he got more than he’d expected. There really is a ton of wood stored there.

  I flinched at the thought of a pile of lumber crashing down on someone’s head. That had to hurt a lot more than a football. I hoped he was okay. As I was recovering from my own imaginary encounter with an avalanche of wood, the ambulance pulled away. They had the siren on, but they didn’t seem to be racing off at full speed. I guess that was good. If Mr. Xander were dead, there’d be no siren. At least, I think that’s how it works. If he were dying, or in serious trouble, they’d be tearing around corners to get him to the emergency room. So he was down, but not out. Still, what a rotten thing for those guys to do. I thought about telling someone what I’d seen and heard yesterday, but I had no proof of anything. And no desire to be the next person Clovis set out to harm.

  Do It, Your Shelf

  BUTCH SNAGGED ME at the end of the day. “I need your help.”

  “Okay. Sure. What’s up?”

  “A shelf,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I’m putting up another shelf in my room. You’re good with tools. It won’t take long.”

  “What about me?” Robert asked.

  “That would take long,” Butch said. “And there’ve been enough industrial-arts accidents for one day.”

  Robert and Butch argued about Robert’s lack of manual skills as we walked to the parking lot. Butch’s parents had gotten her an electric car. Since she forgot to plug it in fairly often, she caught a ride to school with Robert most days. He had an ancient Volvo. His parents has insisted on him getting the safest possible car. I didn’t have any sort of car, mostly because my father had insisted on controlling my money so I could get a good student loan. But I didn’t want to dwell on how well that was working out at the moment.

  I got in back, and we rode to Butch’s house. Or mansion, I should say. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but the house was huge, and it had an elevator. Butch’s grandfather had invented something that makes it easier to produce high-grade steel. He’d earned a pretty nice fortune before the American steel industry took a dive. And he’d passed it all along to his daughter and two sons, one of whom was Butch’s father. He was a professor of Medieval Literature at Fairleigh Dickinson. He didn’t have to work. But, as he once told me, the money he’d inherited gave him the opportunity to study whatever he wanted. And there was no point learning about all that literature if he couldn’t pass the knowledge along and share the passion. He told Butch she could study whatever she wanted, as long as she put her whole heart into it. That’s why she’d be able to major in theater. Butch’s mother was involved in a lot of charity projects.

  Since I’ve told you more about Butch, I guess I should give Robert equal attention. He, along with his two younger sisters and his family, had been pretty much broke when they got over here from Jamaica. I don’t know the details. They hadn’t been one of those unbearably poor families you see on the news in places like Haiti. But they didn’t have much, and they’d spent most of what they had to get here. His mom got a job cleaning houses. His dad started out working as a hole digger for a nursery. But he was really good with plants, and the owners quickly realized that he was worth more as a landscaper than as a hole digger. Three years later, he and his wife had their own nursery, and dreams of expanding. That’s why Robert was planning to get a business degree.

  We reached Butch’s house, and I got to work. I wasn’t actually helping her. I was doing the whole job by myself. Her tool skills were on par with Robert’s. She had her newest skulls and ponies piled up on her bed, awaiting their promotion to shelfdom. The smell of freshly unwrapped molded plastic mixed with the bedroom’s ever-present aromatic evidence of Butch’s fondness for cinnamon toast.

  Seeing the piece of pine propped against the wall, I couldn’t help thinking about Mr. Xander.

  “I’m pretty sure Clovis and the Thug Nuts booby-trapped the wood supply,” I said as I opened the package of shelving brackets.

  “Did you see them?” Butch asked.

  “Just about,” I said.

  “Stay out of it,” Robert said. “The bad outweighs the good big-time. At best, they get in trouble. At worst, you get crushed.”

  I looked at Butch. She was the one who cared the most about justice and stuff like that. “I can’t argue with Chicken of the Islands, here,” she said. “Unless you captured them on video. Otherwise, you don’t have any real proof. There’s probably no evidence.

  “There could be fingerprints,” I said.

  “You watch too much television,” Butch said. “It’s not as easy in real life to get fingerprints or DNA.”

  “I guess you’re right,” I said. “But I’d love to see those guys get what they deserve.” I dropped my concerns and picked up the humorously named but highly useful stud finder I’d plucked from Butch’s parent’s toolbox.

  It didn’t take long to put up the shelf. After I was finished, I sat on the edge of Butch’s bed and watched as she arranged the newest members of her skull collection, along with a scattering of ponies and kitties. That took a while, since she ended up shifting a lot of them from shelf to shelf in search of the perfect balance. There were realistic skulls of all sizes, designed to serve v
arious utilitarian functions: coffee mugs, pencil sharpeners, and even a music box that played “Happy Days Are Here Again.” I knew enough not to offer to help. Robert, who also should have known better, tried to make suggestions. After getting rebuffed several times, he decided to drive into town to check out what was going on around the Green.

  “See you tomorrow?” he asked as he headed for the door.

  “Sure,” Butch said. She looked over at me. “Going?”

  “Maybe…” There was a dance at the Crab Locker. That’s a club near the school. The dance started after my shift at Cretaro’s ended, so I didn’t have a good excuse not to go. “I might be too tired.”

  “You’re going,” she said. She turned her attention back to her skulls.

  I don’t really collect anything right now. I have a couple dozen wooden tops of various kinds. My uncle Steve—the same uncle who had been my first and, so far, only art patron—sends them to me when he travels. I have no idea why. They’re fun to play with for a minute or two, but I can’t see myself spinning them for endless hours, building a display case, or subscribing to Top Fancier magazine. I like tennis, but I’m not good enough to go out for the team. I like miniature golf, but I can’t remember the last time I played. Maybe two summers ago. I read a lot, but I don’t really think of reading as a hobby. It’s just something I do. I guess art is my hobby. But it feels weird to call it that. “Hobby” makes it sound like I go out on the weekends with my paint box, meet up with the other art-club members, and sit together, painting pictures at the edge of a scenic forest.

  “Thanks,” Butch said after she placed the last skull on the shelf. She stretched, arching her back and letting out a contented sigh.

  As Butch’s T-shirt rose above her navel, I had a flashback to Maddie, and that first amazing yawn. Butch and I were alone in the house. We’d been good friends for ages, so I didn’t want to have sex with her. No—that’s not the right way to put it. I wanted to have sex with anyone who’d let me. Just so I was no longer a virgin. If Butch didn’t have a boyfriend, maybe I would have asked her to take pity on me. But it felt weird thinking about asking a friend for sex. I wonder whether girls ever thought about boys this way. It seemed like they had it easy, as far as I could see. If a girl wanted to stop being a virgin, she’d have no trouble finding a willing volunteer among her circle of friends and classmates. The whole give-versus-take aspect of sex was almost as difficult to sort through as time travel paradoxes.

  “Hey,” Butch said, tapping me gently on the head with a leftover piece of pine shelving. “What are you thinking about?”

  I guess she could tell my mind was drifting. I panicked briefly, as if I’d been caught with my hand down my pants, then came up with a reasonable answer. “Mortality,” I said, pointing to one of the life-size skulls. “It seems inescapable. Especially within these walls.”

  Butch picked up a small bottle from her dresser. “Speaking of death, decay, and all that good stuff, want a tattoo?” she asked.

  “What? You want to give me a tattoo? Just like that?”

  “It’s henna, stupid,” she said, giving the bottle a shake. “You paint it on. It looks real, but it fades after a while.” She pushed up her sleeve to show the faint hints of her revenge tattoo. “You could do a quote about mortality, like memento mori. Which would be nicely ironic, since the tattoo will be gone a lot sooner than the tattoo wearer. At least, I hope so, unless you do something really stupid.”

  “So that wasn’t permanent?” I thought about my own now-and-forever upside-down tattoo.

  “Are you kidding? I change my mind all the time. There’s no way I’m going to get anything permanent written on my flesh until I’m really sure what I want. And maybe not even then.” She put the bottle back on her dresser. “I mean, who’d do a crazy thing like that?”

  “Yeah,” I said, crossing my legs so another layer of skin and bones covered my tattoo. “Who’d be that stupid?”

  Speaking of stupidity, pain, and permanent damage, while I didn’t have a good excuse not to go to the dance, I definitely had a good reason. I said I wouldn’t talk about this too soon after telling you about Maddie and the window, but let’s rip the bandage off the wound and get it over with. You might want to grab a Coke and find a comfortable seat. I’ll wait.

  A Band, End All Hope

  I TOLD YOU that Paul was a player. He’s also a friend of mine. Sort of. He moved up here from New Orleans three years ago. We started hanging out soon after he arrived, mostly because we both liked to go hiking. That was back when I had lots of time to trek through the woods. I’d usually take a sketch pad. Paul would take a harmonica. He’d spent his whole life around woods, rivers, and lakes. I knew all the hiking trails around here, including some you could get to by bus. I felt bad for him because his folks had lost everything in one of those floods that happened years after the big hurricane everyone always talks about. I think he’d seen people drown, and maybe even get shot, but he never talked about it, except once last year, when we’d shared a bottle of Jack. But that night’s pretty much made up of fuzzy memories and vomit.

  About a year after he came here, he formed a band with Tim on guitar and Zach on drums. Paul played keyboard and harmonica. Three months later, they added Megan Rox, who’d already graduated, as a singer. It turned out to be a smart move. Thanks to her stunning voice and high-energy stage presence, they got pretty popular locally. Paul didn’t have much time to hang out with me once they started playing a lot of gigs.

  That’s not the bad part. Friends drift away all the time. But, at least for me, girlfriends are rare. I started dating Shelly during my junior year. She was a sophomore, slim, with red hair cut short and freckles dusted across her face like the all-American athletic-looking girls in the fashion ads. I’ll save the description of her heart for later. She’d moved to Rismore in February. It took me two months to get up the courage to ask her on a date.

  We’d gone out twice. Once to a movie, and once to the diner for lunch on a Saturday. We were still at the awkward friends-or-dating? stage. But I hoped I’d eventually make my big move from walking side by side, with nothing more than occasional accidental arm contact, to walking side against side, arm around shoulder. I needed to break the ice with a bit of socially acceptable body contact. A dance seemed perfect for that. A nice, long, slow sweaty dance. Chest to chest. Hips to hips in intimate contact. Clutching tight. Grinding. One hand slipping slowly down her back …

  Hang on.

  I hate to break the narrative flow, but I’m going to grab a quick shower. Take a break, too, if you need it.

  [… a wet, steamy interlude ensues for at least one of us…]

  Sorry about that. I’m back. As I was saying …

  Paul’s band, Jersey Bayou, was playing at the Crab Locker. If you head up the hill past the Art House to the traffic light where Vorhees Avenue meets Jefferson Avenue, the Crab Locker is on the right, just around the corner, past the liquor store and the good deli. (The bad deli, where the owner hates students and yells at us even if we buy something, is on the way into town.) If you stay on Jefferson and go west for another mile, heading toward Rismore Heights, you reach the state park. If you turn left at the top of Vorhees, and head east on Jefferson, the Green is two long blocks away. The Krome Kadillac Diner, where the food is far superior to the spelling, is northeast of the Green, downhill, across from the train station.

  Normally, you had to be at least twenty-one to get into the Crab Locker. But every two or three weeks, they had a teens-only event with one of the local bands. Once or twice a year, usually during vacations or around graduation time, they booked a bigger act. Jersey Bayou was just what I needed to get closer to Shelly. They played a mix of fast and slow music. Better yet, Shelly would be impressed that I knew the guys. It would be a perfect way to get closer to her. I asked, and she accepted.

  “They’re a great band,” I said as I paid our way in at the door.

  “My sister heard them last year at
a club in Mendham,” Shelly said. “She told me they were fabulous.” Shelly was wearing a brown thigh-length skirt and a dark blue sleeveless top, giving my eyes a lot of places to avoid being caught staring at.

  The Crab Locker is basically just one large room with dark green walls, a low ceiling, a bar at one end, and a stage at the other. There were bathrooms off to one side, with HE CRAB and SHE CRAB written on the doors, but no other sign of crabs or lockers in the decor. Jersey Bayou was onstage when we went in, tuning up, dwarfed by towers of black amps. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll introduce you.”

  I threaded my way through the crowd. I wanted to take Shelly’s hand, but I wasn’t sure she’d like that.

  I waved to Paul when we got near the stage. He gave me a nod and flashed a smile at Shelly. He totally looked the part of a rock star, with shaggy jet-black hair that just brushed his shoulders at spots, torn jeans, and a purple silk shirt draped unbuttoned over his lanky frame. Oh, crap—“lanky frame” sounds like the kind of overblown phrase Abbie would use in a description. But you get the picture.

  When the first set began, Shelly and I stood in the back, near the refreshment stand, which is what you call a bar when you remove the kegs and stock up on soda. Shelly was swaying to the music, sort of dancing in place. I thought about starting to subtly move along with her, side by side at first, and then shifting face-to-face by means of a slick and rhythmic pivot, turning her solo motion and my solo motion magically into us dancing together. I decided it would be better if I waited until we got closer to the dance floor. Girls can dance anywhere. On the dance floor, off the dance floor, in the middle of an empty room. In a closet. At the supermarket. Probably even in their sleep. It doesn’t matter where they are, or even whether there’s music playing. If they feel like dancing, they dance. Most guys can dance only on the dance floor—if even there. Except for Christopher, who I spotted dancing by himself in the far corner. He was holding a cup full of soda and not spilling a drop. While I watched, two girls walked up to him and joined his dance. He and Brad seemed to have been born popular.