Eye Contact (34 page)

Morgan thinks if he could get up the guts to ask Chris that, maybe he could tell him how he'd tried to get Harrison put in jail weeks ago. The problem with telling Chris is that it was a stupid idea, and it didn't work. It would also involve telling Chris he saw him get beat up and wet his pants, which is a topic Morgan doesn't feel like getting into right now. He's afraid it might make him start crying or admit some of his own troubles along the same lines, his own day spent in wet pants, a sweatshirt tied around his waist, red lines down his arm where words had been.

Chris doesn't seem particularly happy to see Morgan, but he also doesn't seem
un
happy to have a visitor. He sits up in bed, looks around the room. “You want to see my origami collection?” he finally offers.

Morgan can see it, on the shelf, rows and rows of folded figurines, some so small they look like wadded-up gum wrappers picked up off the street.
Not really,
he wants to say. Instead he points. “You did all these?”

“That's right. On the far left is a giraffe, then a hippopotamus, an egret, a platypus, and a swan, of course. I design my own, which is really hard to do.”

And sort of pointless, Morgan thinks, when none of them look like the animals he's named.

“I could teach you if you want. My mother says most people aren't interested in origami.”

“I'm probably like that,” Morgan says. “Not so interested.”

“Yeah. That's okay. What are you interested in?”

“I don't know.” He almost says some of the old things: Civil War, trains, U.S. presidents, his quarter collection. Instead, he opts for this. “Mysteries, I guess.”

Chris surprises him. “Like what happened in the woods for instance?”

“That's one.”

 

It didn't work. None of it worked.

Chris was going to kill him and now he can't, and finally he's realized:
Why bother not talking now, when it makes no difference what I don't say?

For a day, Chris has been thinking about ways he might kill himself. It seems like the next logical step. He's thinking about doing it the hardest way possible—drowning himself, which isn't easy when touching water makes him hyperventilate. He wants to do it the hard way so that, at the last minute, he doesn't think about any good things in life and change his mind.

He's not even sure if he should bother trying, though, when nothing works out for him. Not planning a murder, not trying to foil Harrison's revenge. Now that he looks back, though, he has to admit it worked for a while. He still thinks of those ten minutes before they walked into the woods as some of the happiest minutes he's had in his life.

For two weeks, Harrison had been talking about breaking Chris's arm for calling the police, and trying to pin the fire on him. He told him people were going to pay him to do it, people who were sick of his ratting-out ways. Chris didn't deny doing it—it was certainly possible that Harrison
had
set it, the way he'd been carrying lighters for years, flicking them at the bus stop, setting everything on fire: blades of grass, farts, the white thread fringe on girls' miniskirts. Once Chris watched him burn a live cricket. As it turned out, though, Chris was wrong. Harrison couldn't have set the fire because he was at school, doing detention when it started.

“I know it was you, and you're going to die, you little piece of freakshit,” he said the day after Chris called the police. Harrison, more than the others, liked to drag things out, spend days talking about what he was going to do, which bones he would break, how he would break them. “First I'm gonna do your arm. It's easier than you think.” The night before it was meant to happen, Chris stayed up late, making a plan. He knew he needed a weapon and an element of surprise. He decided this: he would agree to a face-off, and then he would control it. If he'd known anyone with a gun he would have used that, but as it was, he settled on what he had: his mother's kitchen knife, wrapped in a sock, stored in the bottom of his backpack. He knew he couldn't bring it into school, that if anyone found it he'd get suspended, so he left it in the woods still wrapped in the sock. Knowing it was there was like having a test you knew ahead of time you were going to cheat on, and get away with. It made him feel lucky; made him say “Fine” when Harrison said they should just get this over with and skip third period.

“Okay,” Chris said. “But we should go to the woods so no one tries to stop us.”

Harrison stared at him. “Seriously?”

“Sure. Why not?” Before this, he'd never done anything except beg for these boys to leave him alone.

“You want me to break your arm?”

“Maybe you can, maybe you can't. I know a little judo.”

His eyes narrowed. “How much judo?”

“A little.”

Chris saw then how easy this was; that strength came simply from not looking afraid. Walking out to the woods, he talked the whole time, told Harrison about his hospital stays. “If you break my arm, I figure I might get a night, tops, but that'll be good. They get some stations at the hospital I don't get at home. They also have Nintendo. You'd be surprised what they have.”

Harrison stopped walking. “Are you a fucking freak or what?”

Chris shrugged. “I suppose so. You're not the first person to ask me that. There's one guy on the bus—Neil I think his name is—who asked me that once and I said, ‘Yes, is that a problem?' See here's the funny part. Well not funny, ha ha. But I've occasionally wondered if you
like
being mean or if you feel like you
have
to be so that no one thinks you're a freak, too. But in a way, it's too late, if you don't mind my saying so, because the way you dress and your friends—well, a lot of people think you're a little freaky, too, Hare. Do you mind if I call you Hare?”

“Yes.”

He was enjoying himself so much he couldn't stop. It felt like the best time he'd ever had. “Hare! Hare! Hare!” he called, because in a minute, he'd reach down, pull out his knife, and be the last one laughing.

“Just shut up, freak show. Shut the fuck up.”

He didn't, of course. He kept talking and talking until they got in the woods and then he stopped talking, because he knew, right away, something had happened. They weren't alone. When he went for his knife, the sock was there, but the knife was gone, which meant none of this would work, that he would get his arm broken, and would also get in trouble for the knife.

Now he understands how much he did wrong, all the countless mistakes he made. If he hadn't brought the knife, hadn't stashed it in the woods, hadn't egged Harrison on because it felt so good—if he'd done a dozen things differently, the girl might still be alive and not in his head where she sits, all the time now, wearing her pink dress and telling him what to do.

 

Cara stays at the station long enough to see Harrison Rogers when he's brought in. He's a red-headed kid, covered in freckles, dressed in a black T-shirt, black jeans, and black shoes, trailed by a mother who's screaming about police harassment of a minor. “It's the third time they've questioned him. Three times I'm talking about. Anybody does anything in this town, my son gets interrupted with living his life to talk to police. I'm telling you, I want to talk to whoever's in charge around here.”

She is so loud that even her son seems embarrassed to stand near her. Matt steps forward, holding out his hand. “At this point, I'm in charge. Detective Sergeant Matt Lincoln, ma'am. We appreciate you coming down.”

“You the guy we talked to last time? About the fire?”

“I am. Yes.”

“'Cause he didn't start no fire.”

“That's correct, ma'am. We don't need to ask any questions about that.”

While the mother huffs from side to side, her arms folded across the expanse of her large chest, her son seems to shrink at her side. He leans against the wall, picks at a thumbnail, shoulders hunched, one foot resting against the shin of his other leg.

“It's persecution is what it is, and you better believe tomorrow I'm calling a lawyer.”

Matt lowers his voice to a whisper. “We told you, Ms. Rogers, that you
should
have a lawyer present. We told you what he's here for.” Saying this, he makes it sadly clear: this woman is terrified and putting on a show. She's heard one story and has told herself another—that this is nothing, more harassment because her boy wears too much black to school.

She waves a hand around. “No, no. Let's just get this over with and get home.”

“No, Ms. Rogers, I can't recommend that. We have a lawyer here who can represent Harrison for the time being and also answer any questions you have.”

To Cara it's obvious: Matt doesn't want to take a single step without this, no matter what the woman says. “I have to say, it'll be much better for Harrison if someone is there, protecting his interests.”

She rolls her eyes. “Look, whatever. I don't care.”

Cara watches the boy, and wonders if he hears this. His expression is dead, as if he long ago stopped listening to most of the things his mother says. The look creates a strange disconnect—his face seems much older, as hard as a streetwise twenty-year-old who's seen too many things to register much, but his body is surprisingly small, with boyishly thin, broomstick arms and tiny feet. Registering this, she notices something else: he's wearing slip-on sneakers, like the kind she buys for Adam, who still can't manage shoe tying on his own. They're black, a color she would never buy for Adam, but when she looks a little closer, she sees: they're the same brand, with—she can tell by the way he's standing—the exact same sole.

Here it is,
she thinks.
Here's why it looked like only two sets footprints.

She tries to signal Matt, who has moved away from Harrison's mother to deal with logistics—securing a room, locating the lawyer. Cara slips up behind him and whispers, as he reads a note in his hand. “He's wearing the same shoes that Adam has.”

Matt nods over her shoulder, holds up two fingers to a secretary in the corner. “Room two?” he calls and then turns to Cara. “I noticed that,” he whispers.

And a minute later, they're gone.

 

There are parts Chris doesn't remember at all. He remembers the girl showed up, said she needed to find a man in a wheelchair, that she was trying to help him and he had left. Harrison saw it first, that she was holding the knife.

“Give it,” Harrison said. “Give it here.” He held out his hand, and then Chris wondered if there was something wrong with her, because she didn't do what Harrison said, didn't hand over the knife. Instead, she stared up at the trees, smiling like she didn't hear Harrison at all.

He remembers this: she started singing, which made Harrison scream, “Give me the motherfucking knife or I'll hurt you,” which didn't make sense because he was mad at Chris, not at her, but then he thought about earlier, how having a knife made him strong and not having it paralyzed him. And then it was like Harrison forgot all about Chris, forgot he was even there, because he was just mad at the girl, who wasn't doing what she was told and wasn't scared the way she should be. She was singing in his face, asking him questions that made no sense about people who weren't there, dancing around, holding the knife up. One minute, she was worried about the man in the wheelchair, the next she was leaning into Harrison's face, asking what he called those things on his skin. “Are they still freckles when there's so many like that?”

Chris knew that if she wasn't holding the knife, Harrison would've hurt her. He would've pushed her down to the ground and made her eat a piece of paper or perpetrated one of his other favorite tortures, but that long shiny knife meant she could do what Chris had just discovered. She could say anything at all. “Freckles are like dirt, only they don't come off,” she said, touching his face and then—he still doesn't understand this—she looked down at her hand, saw the knife in it, and dropped it.

Chris had no chance, he was too far away. Harrison grabbed the knife.

The girl floated away and Harrison's voice changed to soft, like he'd gotten a new idea. “Hey, come here for a second. I want to show you something,” he called to the girl as he reached for his pants. Chris thought,
Oh God, he's going to pee on her the way he peed on my shoes.

He unzipped his fly and pulled his thing out. “Come here!” he said, waving at her with the knife. Chris looked away, started thinking of other things, like the English class he was missing, and how in math if they finished their work, they were allowed to read the comics the teacher kept on his desk, how there was one Chris loved with a villain named Viscous Liquid.

“Come here, girlie. I won't hurt you, I promise. I just want to show you something.”

Chris tried to think about Viscous Liquid and his father, Venomous Hate, who set up the laboratory where he grew his only son, a villain who could go from human to liquid and back again in seven seconds.