Freeze Frame (6 page)

“T
here isn't one clock working in this house, Michael.” Mom rushed down the stairs, tugging on some pantyhose, holding Dad's jacket and two ties in her hands. She came back up. “How come the stove is the only…Never mind.”

Dad came out of the bathroom with a mouth full of toothpaste. “What time is it?”

“It's eight thirty-two. We can't be late,” Mom said.

“We won't. Okay?” he replied.

Mom handed me the jacket of Dad's suit she was making me wear and held out a retro, tie-dyed, seventies tie in one hand. “Kyle, you need to wear a tie. Pick one.” The tie in her other hand looked like something Mr. Hammons would wear on parent-teacher night—blue with diagonal rusty-brown stripes. Jason and I cracked up when we saw
Mr. Hammons in a button-up shirt and tie, because he always wore jeans and
SAVE TAHOE
T-shirts. Funny how he thought wearing a tacky tie and an old suit might impress parents more than his
SAVE TAHOE
stuff.

“Kyle? Kyle! Listen to me. We don't have time for your dawdling. Which tie do you want?” Mom held them up against my shirt.

“This one's fine.” I grabbed the retro tie.

“I don't know if I can do this. I haven't even talked to Brooke yet. What are we supposed to do?” Mel came out with curlers in her hair. She was stuffed into a tight black miniskirt and a tube top. Charcoal black paint lined her eyes.

Mom took a deep breath. “You're not going to wear that. You're going to wash off the clown face and put on your dark green dress.”

“Maggie,” Dad whispered.

“And Kyle,” Mom added, “you're
not
going to wear those filthy orange shoes with your dad's suit.”

“Why do you even give a damn about what anyone's wearing on a day like today?” yelled Mel. “Are you worried we'll attract too much attention? I might be wearing an outfit you don't like, but, Jesus, Mom, Kyle
killed
Jason.”

She did have a point. I had killed Jason.

Dad winced. Mom turned crimson. I really thought she was going to smack Mel. But she didn't. After all, Mel
had only said what we all wanted to pretend wasn't true.

“Melanie Ann, calm down. Everybody is upset today. We just need to get it together as a family and be there for the Bishops, okay? This isn't about you. It's about Jason and the Bishop family.” Dad turned Mel around and walked with her to her room. I held Dad's tie in my hands.

“Dad will knot that for you in the car. I need to get ready. Why don't you wait downstairs?”

I hoped Mom's face would lose the bright red color before we got to the church. At least Mel's scene was a good distraction from my sneakers. They peeked out from under my pinned-up pant legs. I hoped Mom wouldn't notice them at the funeral.

176 days down, 189 to go. A bet's a bet.

We had to walk four blocks to get to the church. Mel tripped all the way in her new high heels. When we finally got there, we could only find room in the far back corner.
Everybody
from Carson City was there. I think I even saw Jack, the guy who mows the Bishops' lawn.

I used to be invisible. Jason's friend, the skinny kid, the shadow, the tagalong. But now they all looked at me. They stared. They hummed and clicked their tongues.

My eyes burned when I saw the shiny wooden coffin draped with white flowers and green grassy stuff. Purple light slanted through stained-glass windows, giving everything an eerie glow.

I didn't see the Bishops anywhere. I didn't see Chase. There were two rows of empty pews right next to Jason.

“Kyle, stand over here.” Mom motioned me back into the corner.

People crowded in, pushing, trying to get a spot, craning their necks to see above everyone's head. The air reeked of perfume, incense, and funeral flowers. I pushed my way to the very back corner of the church to get more air. My chest felt tight.

Don't lose it.

Mom's tiny hand closed around my wrist. She pulled me over and put her arm around my shoulder. I could still see the coffin. I couldn't believe Jason was in there. I wondered what Mrs. Bishop had made him wear.

Does it matter what he wears now?

I bet Mrs. Bishop hadn't put on the Swatch. She said gambling was a sin and wouldn't let Jase wear it after she found out where he got it. But he'd earned it. By two seconds. He'd earned it, even if they wouldn't let him wear it. I should've called her and said to put it on. He really liked that watch. But I didn't call. I didn't do anything.

One by one, people went up, looked inside, and left something by the coffin. Even Sarah McGraw brought something. She never even talked to Jase at school.

I tried to loosen Dad's tie but couldn't figure out how to slip the knot down.

“Kyle,” Mom whispered. “Would you like to go up?”

I hadn't seen Jason since Saturday. It was almost like he was on one of his family vacations—just gone for a while.

I swallowed hard and nodded.

“We'll go together.” Dad and Mel walked ahead of Mom and me.

People stared and then looked away. It was like a bad TV movie, the kind they air on all major networks the same night at the same time.

 

ABC:
Killing Jason—The Kyle Caroll Story

 

NBC:
The Murder of a High School Student

 

CBS:
Kyle the Killer

 

I had turned Jase into the movie of the week.

“Come on.” Mom pushed me along.

Mel clutched Dad. My legs felt weak, and I had to stop several times to catch my breath—it came in short bursts. I grabbed my chest to make sure my heart still worked. A numb feeling spread through my body.

Why did I, Kyle Caroll, Mr. Nobody, live, when Jason died? It should've been the other way around. The main character never dies in the movies. It's always his sidekick. This movie was definitely fucked up.

It took forever to get to the front of that church. The
coffin hadn't looked so far away a few minutes before.

Melanie sobbed when she saw Jason. She teetered and started blubbering, “I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.” Dad held Mel in his arms, and they walked to the back of the church.

I'm sorry.
It sounded so hollow, echoing off the church's bare walls.

Mom and I got to the coffin, and I looked in. It was Jason. But it wasn't. Mom started to pull me away, but I had to stand there for a while. It didn't make any sense.

His eyes were closed. His hands were crossed in front of his stomach.

They had cut his hair. He had been growing it out since December. He wanted to look like a real artist, and
they cut his hair
.

He wore a blue suit I had never seen, with the sleeves so long, they covered his wrists. I touched Jason's hand to check for the watch and recoiled from the waxy skin. This wasn't Jason. It couldn't be.

I couldn't have done this. I couldn't have killed my best friend.

I leaned into the coffin and put my head on his chest, listening, hoping that somehow this was a sick joke. Like when your parents really want you to learn your lesson the hard way, so they help you pack your bag to run away. But they fill it with all sorts of stuff, so you drag it halfway down the block and you realize you can't go any farther
because the suitcase is too damned heavy.

Maybe somebody would say,
See, you shouldn't play with guns.
And all of Carson City was in on it. Like in that movie
The Game
—a total setup. We'd laugh, feel relieved, and eat cake or something while listening to some police guy talk about gun safety.

But Jason didn't move. I grasped his suit, my tears staining his starchy white shirt. “Wake up. Please, Jason. Get up. I can't…” The words were icicles in my throat.

There was a powdery, lavender smell in the coffin that itched my nose, like an old-grandma smell. Definitely not a Jason smell. Everything was wrong, out of place. He wasn't wearing the watch.

“You can't be dead,” I whispered.

But he was.

Mom pulled at my scarecrow suit. “Kyle, let's go.”

I stood back, fighting to catch my breath. My heart stopped. I know it did. It stopped pumping blood throughout my body. I gasped for air and yanked on my tie.

How could I say good-bye?

I was ready to walk away with Mom when I turned back and leaned toward Jason one more time. His face looked weird. “Dude, are you wearing makeup?” I'm not the most brilliant guy in Carson City, but I know dead people can't have pink cheeks. I'd seen Jason. He was gray in the shed. Blue-gray, and he hadn't even died yet.

I wiped my hand across Jason's pink cheeks. Powdery blush and brown stuff rubbed off on my fingers. They cut his hair. They blew off the watch. They put makeup on him. I pulled out Dad's old handkerchief and tried to clean it off.

I wiped and wiped, but it was like the makeup was applied with some kind of freakish permanent spray. I had to get it off, though. Nothing else mattered.

Then I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder that ripped me around. Mr. Bishop towered over me. The Bishop family stood behind him. “What do you think you're doing? To my son?”

I held the limp handkerchief in my hand. Nothing made sense—none of it.

“My son is dead. You and your family have no right to be here.
You
have no right.” Mr. Bishop shook. “You have no right,” he whispered, clenching his jaw.

People got quiet. They moved around in their seats. Papers rustled.

“Kyle.” Mom pulled on my arm. “Honey, we need to go sit down.” Dad had turned around and started walking back toward us.

“Kyle,” Dad said, coming up to me, “let's go sit.”

I couldn't move. It was like in the shed. Freeze frame. Pause.

“Get out of here.” Mr. Bishop came closer. My hands
were still stuck on the coffin.

“Enough!” Dad stepped between us. He pried my fingers from the glossy wood. “Let go of it, Kyle. Just let go.

“We're going to sit down,” he said to Mr. Bishop, his voice cracking. “We loved Jason.”

I looked away. I hated to see Dad cry.

Play.

Everything started to spin around me like weird special-effects lighting. Blackness crept through my brain, turning the church blotchy gray with pinpricks of white light. My knees buckled, and I grasped onto the front rail. My body shivered and icy sweat dripped down my back.

Pulling myself up, I stumbled down the aisle, past my parents and the Bishops. I tried to breathe without inhaling the sickening church smells. I yanked at my tie and ripped off the suit jacket. The exit looked so far away. Everybody's faces were blurred and distorted. Dizzying light streamed through the stained-glass windows. Squinting, I kept my eyes on the heavy wooden doors, ignoring the whispers. I rushed outside, tripped down the concrete steps, and collapsed on the lawn behind the dried-up rosebushes. My body heaved and hiccuped until all that came out of me was acidic yellow bile.

I lay on the dead grass and gasped for breath. My head throbbed. The deeper I inhaled, the less air I got.

I'm gonna die. Please let me die.

“Take it easy. Slow your breathing.” Mom's cheeks were wet with tears. She held a paper bag to my mouth and nose.

The world stopped spinning, and everything came back into focus. Dad and Mel stood over me. “You okay?” Dad asked.

No.

I nodded.

Dad helped me up. “Let's go home.”

We walked slowly to the car. “I didn't say good-bye,” I whispered.

I listened as the organ played “Amazing Grace” from behind the heavy church doors. I wondered what other music they would play. What would Jason have liked?

I looked back. Mr. Bishop was right. I had no right. I had no right to be there. I had no right to be.

“K
yle! Kyle, wake up!” Mel leaned over and shook my shoulders.

I sat up and grabbed her. “I can't,” I gasped, struggling to steady my breathing. Nightmare images came back to me: choking, the inside of a coffin, being buried alive.

“You're okay.” She sat down next to me.

I held her tighter.

She circled her arms around me. “I was walking to the bathroom when I heard you.”

I nodded, still hanging on to her pajamas.

“I still kinda need to go.”

“Go where?”

“To the bathroom.”

“Oh. Oh yeah. Sorry.” I didn't let go.

“Kyle?”

I let the fabric slip from my fingers. “Yeah, thanks. Sorry about that.”

“G'night.”

She closed the door and I was blanketed in darkness. I grabbed my pillow and waited until the first purple shades of dawn seeped through my window before I closed my eyes.

 

“You look tired today.” Dr. Matthews handed me a glass of water. “Did you sleep well?”

“Sure.”

Mom and Dad had called an emergency Matthews session. “We're going to try something called association. When I show you a picture, I just want you to tell me the first thing that comes to mind.” She held out an ink-stained picture. “What do you see?”

“A stain.”

She raised her eyebrows. “A stain of what?”

“Black ink.”

She scowled. “And this one?”

“A bigger stain.”

She did one of those hum-sighs. “Think of it like cloud watching. Have you ever done that? Looked up at clouds and found figures?”

 

Chase, Jason, and I had done it all the time. With stars, though, instead of clouds. We named our own constellations. Chase's favorite constellation was the
Taraxacum officinale
—the dandelion. He said it was a very misunderstood flower. At first I thought he was shitting me, but the kid actually found the same group of stars every night. One year for Chase's birthday, Jason and I bought him a star and named it Dandelion because we couldn't remember the scientific name. We thought he'd like it, but he said, “How can you buy something that belongs to everybody?”

We tried to return it, but we couldn't. I kinda felt like shit after that.

 

Dr. Matthews cleared her throat. “You know what I mean, Kyle, about the cloud watching?”

“No. I've never watched clouds,” I said.

Dr. Matthews put the cards away. “Can you tell me about the funeral yesterday?”

I bit my lip.

“Can you tell me about the makeup?”

Trying to save my best friend from an eternity of lip gloss and blush didn't seem so unreasonable to me. I didn't know what the big deal was. Everybody'd just flipped out.

“Did you read Jason's obituary?” she asked. It was as if she knew I'd torn it out the week before and carried it around, too afraid to read the words. “What did you think
about it? The obituary?”

“I didn't read it.”

“Why not?”

I bit my lip harder, until I tasted metal. I looked away, out the tiny door window.

“Would you like to read it?” She handed me a fresh version of the clipping I had crumpled in my wallet.

I blinked, hoping that everything would disappear, that the words would morph like they did in that movie
The Butterfly Effect.
All he had to do was look down at his notebook to change the words, and he'd change the past.

I concentrated on the obituary, but the print stayed the same. The words didn't change.

The obituary depressed the hell out of me. What does any of that say about Jason? Nothing. All it talked about was his church and his mentoring. But what about who Jason really was for the other 163 hours of the week? What about the Jason who was the next Marvel comics artist? What about the Jason who was the best big brother to Chase? What about the Jason who would make a bet on just about anything—and win? What about the Jason I knew—not some made-up, Bible-toting, preachy mentor Jason? It seemed so sad that Jason's parents didn't even know him, like they were missing somebody who wasn't even real.

“What do you think?” Dr. Matthews urged.

Having it in print made it feel cheap—nothing more than headline news. All
Nevada Appeal
subscribers would have read this and thought, “Oh, too bad.” Maybe over coffee they'd
tsk-tsk
and talk about the dangers of Carson City, sorry about the churchy dead kid. Then they'd go on with their regular day because, to them, it was just words on a page.

I handed the obituary back to Dr. Matthews. “I think they didn't know Jason.”

Dr. Matthews nodded. “And you did?”

“Well, yeah. He was my best friend.”

“Would you have written something different?”

 

I would've written about the first time Jason and I got to go camping on our own, up at Marlette Lake. We hiked the five miles up from our families' campground and hung out the whole afternoon, swimming, fishing, and skipping rocks. We started a campfire and ate sizzling, charred hot dogs off sticks that tasted like pine, then bet on who would see the most falling stars. We hadn't even set up camp. We weren't gonna because we wanted to sleep outside, under the stars.

Then it started to pour, one of those Nevada rains that come out of nowhere. We hadn't seen a cloud before the first drop pelted us. We ran like mad to get the tent up when I realized I had forgotten the poles. We ended up scrambling five miles down to our families' camp in sheets of rain, up to our ankles in mud.

Most guys would've been pissed. Jase just said, “Yeah. I could've brought them, too. Whatever.”

That's the kind of stuff I would've written about. It says a lot more about a person than being on the honor roll.

 

“What would you have written, Kyle?”

“Something else. Something real.”

Then we had another one of those awkward silences when Dr. Matthews waited for me to keep talking but I didn't.

She cleared her throat. “Your hearing is coming up soon. What are you feeling about that?”

Maybe it would be easier for everybody not to see me anymore.
I shrugged. “It's not really up to me. After what I did and all, I guess it depends on the laws.”

“What do you hope the outcome will be?”

I deserve to be sent away. My life needs to be put on pause.

“I guess I don't hope for anything, you know? Just waiting.”

“Waiting is hard.”

“I guess so,” I said.

“It might help to fill in the blanks on that day.”

It doesn't matter anymore. Jason is dead, so whatever happened in the shed doesn't matter.

Scene Three.

Erased.

Jason.

Erased.

Now it's my turn to fade out.

 

When I got home from Dr. Matthews's, Mark and Mr. Allison were waiting for me.

“I'm here. I'm not happy. Remember what I said?” Mark asked.

“Um, not really.”

“As long as you stay in line, you and I won't have problems. Your performance at the funeral yesterday isn't what I consider staying in line.” Mark snapped his gum. A blue vein bulged across his temple every time he clenched his jaw.
Snap,
bulge,
pop…snap,
bulge,
pop
.

“Kyle, Mr. Grimes is talking to you. Please look at him.” Mom brought out a pot of coffee for everyone. Dad had picked up a dozen donuts. Grease seeped through the box.

“We need to talk about your behavior.” Mark sat down.

Eight days had gone by. Eight days of meetings with Mark, Mr. Allison, Gollum, and Igor. Eight days of Dr. Matthews and gray pills. Eight days of nothing but
tick, tick, tick.
And we had finally gotten to Sunday morning.

Mr. Allison paced back and forth. “Kyle, we need to talk about everything. Tuesday we stand before the court and Juvenile Master Brown. This is your future—your life.”

Some life.

“You know that the Bishops can speak at your disposition. They have the right to address the juvenile master,” Mark continued. “This can be good or bad. I don't know the Bishops very well, but after the stunt you pulled yesterday at the funeral, I don't suppose they're going to talk very favorably.”

“Kyle, this is really important,” Dad said, sitting next to me.

Snap,
bulge,
pop…snap,
bulge,
pop.
Mark spit his gum out into a napkin and took a bite out of a greasy donut. Glaze stuck to the corners of his mouth. “A homebound teacher will be with Kyle until after the disposition. I don't see how it would do any good for him, at this time, to go to school. My recommendation will be probation—no time served—until he is eighteen years old. This probation, though, can be successful only if he has heavy psychological counseling. I don't see why Kyle should go to a detention center.”

How can I
not
be sent away?

“So he'll be able to come home? For sure?” Mom asked. She had chewed her nails down to nothing.

“It's ultimately up to the juvenile master—the judge—after she reads through all statements. Usually, she'll sway toward the PO and psychiatrist's recommendations. But there are times when things don't necessarily go the way we believe they should. That could happen, for instance, if the DA and the Bishops put forth compelling reasons why Kyle should serve time.”

“Oh, God.” Dad's voice was just a whisper.

It was like I had broken something inside him.

“Let's not even go there for now.” Mark clapped Dad on the back. God, he had to get this back clapping under control. “I have faith in the system,” he said. Obviously
Mark hadn't seen
The Shawshank Redemption
or
The Count of Monte Cristo.

“These things happen,” Mark said.

These things happen.

“But what about college? Getting a job? Voting? Will Kyle be a felon?” Dad rubbed his temples.

Voting? Dad's worried about me voting?

“Juvenile records are sealed. No future employer will have access to Kyle's past. What happened here stays here.”

Buried with Jason.

Dad sighed.
Relieved, I suppose. Good thing murder won't get in the way of a college education.

“Okay, then,” Mark said. “I'd like to have a little time with Kyle.”

Everybody went to the kitchen. Mark and I sat in the living room, the box of donuts between us. “This is your one chance. I'm doing my best to help you, but you've gotta help yourself. And what you did yesterday doesn't help. All of this can count against you. Everything you do from here on out will be put under a microscope, analyzed, and dissected. You've got to shape up.”

I nodded.

Mark scratched the back of his head. “I'll be coming by to help you prep for the disposition. A lot of us here are working hard for you, but your future is in your hands.”

So was Jason's future. In my hands.

Mark said good-bye to Mom and Dad. He put on his black leather coat. “We'll talk soon.”

And then they all disappeared, one by one—Mark, Mr. Allison, even Mom, Dad, and Mel—leaving me alone, staring outside at the Bishops' house.

Neighborhood kids ran up and down the street, playing football like it was a regular Sunday. Like nothing had happened.

Only eight days had passed. Jason was already forgotten.

I figured I knew, then, what death felt like. Nothing at all.