Ecstasy (19 page)

She swiped at the tears and dried the back of her hand on her T-shirt. Her eyeliner was running, so she looked like a cross
between a raccoon and a circus clown.

“Do you want me to get you some Kleenex?”

She shook her head. “They took me to see this doctor and he gave me some medicine, and I guess it’s good for me, but… I just
keep seeing it.”

“Seeing Shaun?”

She nodded, wiping at her runny nose. “It was just so
horrible.
And they don’t even want me to talk about it. They wouldn’t even let Chief Stilwell interview me like he did with Alan. They
keep telling me it’s not healthy to think about it. God, I hate that word so much.”

I put a hand on her knee. It was covered by the hem of her loose denim shorts; below, her pale legs were covered with blond
stubble. “They probably have no clue how to deal,” I said. “Do you think, you know, maybe you could talk to a therapist or
something?”

“Some people said I should. Like, the guidance counselor from school called and I guess she said that. But my folks don’t
want to send me to that kind of doctor. They don’t want me to go to the kind where you talk about stuff. They just want to
send me to the kind that gives you pills. Like I can take a pill and just have everything be okay….”

“What about your brother, Alan? Can he help you deal with your folks?”

“Alan is like… He acts like he’s all strong and everything, but he’s all flipped out too. I mean, you can’t blame him, right?
He lost three of his friends just like that—one, two, three.”

She counted them off on her fingers, then seemed vaguely appalled with herself for doing it. Her moist hand fell to her lap.

“How has Alan been doing?”

“He works out.”

“What?”

“All he does is go to the gym, go running, practice soccer. He says it’s because he wants to be good this season so he can
get a scholarship, but I think it’s just… what he needs to do. I don’t know.”

“And what do you need to do?”

The tears started up again. “I don’t know. But just …not
this.
I can’t take it anymore. I can’t stand Mom and Dad going around like nothing ever happened, like if they just ignore it and
fix me somehow and send me off to some Catholic school it’ll go away. But how am I supposed to ignore it? How am I supposed
to forget… what I saw?”

“Have you talked to anyone about it?”

“Just Lauren, a little. But I don’t think she can take it, because… well, because the same thing happened to Tom. She can’t
stand to think about it.”

“The two of them were really close, weren’t they?”

She snuffled up a great quantity of whatever was running out of her nose, and when she spoke again, she sounded calmer, like
she was being tranquilized by the change of subject.

“Lauren really loved him,” she said. “Not like in a romantic way—she doesn’t go out with high-school boys. But they were best
friends. I think if she’d been into it, Tom would’ve gone out with her in a heartbeat, but he didn’t blame her for not wanting
to or anything.”

“What about Dorrie and Trish? Can you talk to them?”

“They’re kind of closer with each other than they are with me and Lauren. But when I heard Alan talking to Lauren about the
story you’re writing, I thought maybe…” Her voice trailed off, and she seemed embarrassed all of a sudden. “Maybe it was a
stupid idea.”

“No, it’s not. Go ahead.”

“Well…I thought maybe I could talk to you.”

“Sure you can.”

“And you’d want to put it in the paper?”

“That kind of depends on what you say.”

She took a deep breath. “Do you think maybe I could have that Kleenex now?”

I went in to get the box, and I was half afraid she’d be gone by the time I came back out. But there she was, swinging on
the creaky bench, her mind obviously two weeks and ten miles away from my front porch.

I gave her the tissues, and she blew her nose into a handful of them. Then she wiped at her eyes, and when she balled up the
paper, her hands were smeared with black. I offered her a soda, and she took it and popped it open. But she tried to drink
it too fast and spent another minute or so coughing into her fist.

“You probably think I’m a total weirdo,” she said, once she’d caught her breath.

“Not at all.”

“Really?”

It was only one word, but it was delivered so plaintively I had to quell the instinct to hug the poor girl.

“Really.”

“You mean it?”

“Actually, you remind me a little of myself when I was your age.”

She stared at me, mouth agape. “But you’re so smart and pretty.”

Now I
really
wanted to hug her.

“Trust me, Cindy. Being a teenager is the worst. It’s all downhill from here. Er…I mean in a good way.”

“People say it’s supposed to be the happiest time of your life.”

“Nah, that’s a crock.”

“It is?”

“The only reason people want to recapture their lost youth is because they forgot how much it sucked.”

“You really think so?”

“It’s kind of a theory of mine.”

She contemplated that for a while. “But Melting Rock was supposed to be different. It
was
different. Until…”

“Until this year.”

“Yeah.”

“How was it supposed to be different?”

“You know. You were there.”

“Yeah, but to tell you the truth, I never really got it.”

Another deep breath. “Melting Rock was… It was like this place where anything was possible. Like this never-never land, you
know?”

It was a good quote, so I wrote it down. “Go on.”

“It was like this place where nothing bad could ever happen. Sort of like …you know, when you go on a roller coaster and you
get scared, but it’s okay because you know nothing’s really going to happen to you.”

“Melting Rock made you scared? I mean before this?”

“No, that’s not what I meant. It’s more like …you could take risks and be yourself and do whatever you want, say whatever
you want, and everything would still be okay. Nobody would hold it against you later. It was just like… ecstasy.”

“You mean, like the drug?”

“No, not the drug, like the
word.
Like the
feeling.
Just this total perfect happiness, you know? Just for five days a year, but that was enough. And now…now it’ll never be the
same. I wouldn’t ever go back there. Not ever.”

“I can’t blame you.”

“Lauren doesn’t understand. She’s already planning some tribute thing there next year, like planting a tree maybe, plus some
other big thing at the high school. It’s like she gets off on it or something.”

“How do you mean?”

“I probably shouldn’t have said that. It’s probably not nice. I just…Lauren’s always been kind of a drama queen, you know?”

“I thought you said she hardly even wanted to talk about it.”

“I said she hardly even wanted to talk about what
happened.
But doing this whole memorial thing, it’s like her own little holy mission. I mean, I guess I can understand and all, but
I can’t even think about that kind of stuff yet.”

“So… what happened?”

She stared at me, like she wasn’t sure she’d heard me right.

“You really want to know?”

“Yeah.”

More gazing off into space. “My parents say if you’re sick, you go to the doctor.”

“What?” I was starting to wonder if somebody’d spiked her Sprite.

“Like I said before, they took me to a doctor. But not the kind of doctor who thinks talking’s such a great thing.”

“So you haven’t really had a chance to get it off your chest.”

A quick intake of breath, and she started sobbing all over again—and so hard it made the past half hour look like a sneeze.
I just sat there and tried to be nurturing, which I’m not so great at if the patient doesn’t have four paws and a tail. Finally,
the waterworks ran dry and she started talking.

“We were just hanging out, you know?” she said. “I kind of …I always sort of liked Shaun, and I was really psyched he wanted
to hang out with me. I mean, I knew he was tripping and everything, but he told me I could be his guide. Like, Shaun knew
about all that stuff. He read books about what happened in the sixties, about how this guy’d drive around in a bus and give
people acid and open their eyes to all this cool stuff. And I’d never done that stuff before, ’cause I was too scared, but
Shaun didn’t think I was a loser or anything. He said I could trip with him if I wanted, and he’d split the tab with me, or
else I could just stay with him and be his guide and help him deal with all the experiences. And …I kind of wanted to try
it too, because of the way he made it sound, but I thought it’d be cool to be his guide. I guess I was kind of flattered.”

“So you didn’t take any.”

She shook her head. “Just Shaun. And he said he wasn’t sure how long it’d take to start working. He said if it was a regular
dose, it might be an hour or two, but if it was a strong one, it could be just like twenty minutes.

“But it was only maybe ten minutes later that he started to feel weird—I mean not
good
weird,
bad
weird. He knew right away there was something wrong. He said he couldn’t breathe right and his stomach hurt. And I was going
to go for help, but he said he was scared and he didn’t want me to leave him alone. And I know I should’ve gone anyway, but
I couldn’t…I couldn’t just leave him there.”

“Why didn’t you yell for help?”

“I don’t know. I thought I did, but it just all happened so fast. We were inside the tent and he sort of crawled out, and
for a minute I thought he was going to be okay. But then he started having these awful spasms, like his whole body was shaking
and jerking back and forth, and his eyes kind of rolled way back in his head. God, it was so
awful.
”

I patted her knee again and said, “It’s gonna be okay,” or something equally lame.

“But don’t you get it? It’s all my fault.”

“What do you mean?”

“If only I’d gone for help, maybe he’d be okay. But I didn’t. I just
sat
there. I just sat there and watched him die.”

“I really don’t think you could’ve done anything. From what you told me, it all happened way too fast. There’s nothing anybody
could’ve done.”

“But Shaun… He was so scared. So scared and angry.”

“Angry at who?”

She shook her head, like it hurt to have the memory rattling around in there. “When he could still talk, when he thought he
was just having, you know, a bad trip or something, he was saying…he was really mad at the guy who sold him the stuff.”

“What did he say?”

“He kept saying, ‘I’m gonna kill him; I’m gonna fucking kill him.’ ”

“I meant, did he say who it was?” I tried to keep my voice calm. “Cindy, please try to remember. It’s really important.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah what?”

“Yeah, he did.”

“And you told the police?” She shook her head. “Will you tell me?”

“I…You know him. I mean, I know you sort of met him once. I was there.”

“Come on, Cindy. Who?”

“It’s this guy who hangs out with that weirdo with tattoos that Dorrie likes,” she said. “His name is Rob Sturdivant.”

W
hen you’re talking to a hysterical adolescent teetering on the verge of a nervous breakdown, you’re probably supposed to treat
her with kid gloves. For one thing, you’re probably not supposed to jump to your feet, wave your notebook around, and say
the following:

“Son of a bitch, Cindy. For chrissake, how could you not have told somebody about this? Are you out of your mind?”

The expression on her face was blank—so blank, in fact, that I had a feeling the prescription pharmaceuticals had just kicked
in.

“Um…” The swing was jerking back and forth from the force of my exit. “Nobody asked me.”

“What?”

“I…You know, right after it happened, I was, like, totally in a daze, and then I was in the hospital and my folks didn’t want
anybody bothering me….”

“Didn’t you think it was kind of important?”

“I don’t know. I guess I was kind of, you know… unplugged.”

The temptation to harangue her further was great, but I endeavored to resist.

“What else did he tell you?”

“Who?”

Son of a…
“Shaun.”

“Oh. Nothing.”

“You’re sure?”

“Nothing.”

“You know you’ve got to tell the police about this.”

Her eyes went wide. “Why?”

I realized with a start that—
duh
—she didn’t know the deaths hadn’t been accidental. Then I figured the kid’d had enough trauma for one day. “They have to
track down where the drugs came from,” I said.

“Can’t you tell them?”

“What?”

“Please?”

“Cindy, I wasn’t there. You were.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know anything.” She looked like she was about to start crying again, but when I thought she was reaching
for the Kleenex, she grabbed her backpack and stood up. The bag was shaped like a teddy bear, with a zipper down its front
like it’d had the Muppet version of open-heart surgery.

“Where are you going?”

“I have to get the bus back to J-burg. My parents’ll be home soon.”

“Wait—”

“I
have
to,” she said, and took off down the sidewalk.

I thought about chasing after her, but I couldn’t see the point. So I just watched her hustle down the street toward the center
of town, her grape-colored hair flopping surreally over the teddy bear’s smiling mug.

I sat back down on the swing, wondering just what the hell I was supposed to do now. Shakespeare, who’d taken a dim view of
all the jumping and hollering, gave me a wary look as she settled back into her spot.

“Hey, sweetie,” I said. “You got any advice for me?”

She raised an eyebrow. It didn’t help.

Now, the optimal course of action may seem obvious to you—make haste to the nearest officer of the law and spill my guts—but
for me there was another wrinkle.