In Stone (3 page)

“I’ll probably drop by the diner to see Leah,” I mumble while washing down the taste of breakfast with a slurp of tea -- raspberry, I think.

“That should be fun.”

“Yeah, as long as she stops trying to set me up with random boys.” I feign disgust.

“Do you think that’s wise so soon after Mark?”

I resist the urge to ask her if I should wait as long as her -- ten years and counting -- before I put myself back out there, but that would be cruel. True, but cruel. Man, my mood is messed up this morning.

Note to self, double-check every sentence today before you say it out loud.

“You don’t have to worry about me, Mom. I’m cement.”

“Cement?”

“You know, solid.”

“Drink your tea,” she chuckles as she heads over to the mirror and starts coloring her lashes with a coat of mascara.

In all honesty, I’m heading to Leah ’s because I need something, anything to distract me. If she wants to set me up with boys today, I’ll let her. If she wants to go naked skydiving today, I’ll go. Anything to give my broken mind a break. With half a slice of toast left, I decide to give up on trying to fish out the edible bits.

“Will you be home for dinner?” Mom asks as I trudge over to the door. I’m about to reply when morning news anchor, Misty Trent, says something that snatches my attention and forces me to take a U-turn. She’s yapping on about an amnesty event taking place in the city today. With a grin that splits her face in two, Misty explains that the amnesty is an annual event set up by the city in an attempt to cut down on knife and gun related crime. In a too bright and cheery tone she says that the drive is strictly anonymous. The synapses in my brain start firing.

“Beau, are you okay?” Mom asks. The mascara wand is frozen above her eye.

“Fine, just catching up on current events.”

“You home for dinner?” she asks again.

“Erm...I’ll probably just grab something while I’m out.”

“Back before ten-thirty.”

“Always.”

The news report has put a spring in my step. I’m skipping up the stairs. It feels like fate. Perhaps that’s dumb, but what with all I witnessed yesterday and the knife burning a proverbial hole in my sock draw, I can’t just ignore it. It’s the perfect no-questions-asked dumping ground.

I head into my room and over to my dresser. With a little apprehension, I open the drawer. The sight of the knife makes my stomach flip.

The knife is road-kill to me, and like road-kill is how I pick it up. Pinching the handle and holding it at arm’s length, I drop it into an old baseball sock and dump it in my bag. The tight, tense knots in my shoulders slacken. I can’t wait to get the knife out of my house for good. I suppose I could dump it in a bin, bury it in the garden, but I want it gone. I don’t want next door’s bloodhound digging it up and dumping it on our doorstep next week. I want it wiped out. Incineration, Misty said. Total, inferno-induced annihilation. It’ll be easy to keep the existence of the knife a secret, to forget any of this ever even happened when it no longer exists. I trot back downstairs.

Across the street the park is being surveyed by three men wearing high-vis vests, and carrying clipboards. A mix of horror and disgust stalks the faces of a small crowd as they mutter to each other about violation and vandals. The park is a mess. Angry splits tear up the concrete. If it’s not sunk, it’s jutting up in serrated shards. A lamp, that’s probably been there since before the invention of the wheel, is bowed. The stone around its base is crumbling and can no longer support it. This kind of damage could incite a lynch mob in a small town like Plumbridge.

Perched on the Delaware Stateline, Plumbridge is the type of town that you can’t see on a map unless you have a powerful magnifying glass and twenty-twenty vision. It’s the type of town that throws community barbecues once a month, and enforces a voting system for every other tree, or lamppost, or goddamn bench that they’re planning to erect. My cheeks flush as the squeak of my garden gate attracts some unwanted stares. I suddenly feel like there’s a huge neon arrow above my head. I know it wasn’t technically my fault, but I know how the park ended up looking this way and to these people that makes me an accessory. I pull my hood up, tuck my chin into my chest, and start shuffling toward the bus stop.

It takes twenty minutes for the bus to get to the city. The grey city with its big, grey buildings and constant flowing river of grey suits. I step off and inhale a lungful of air that tastes of coffee and frustration. The building I’m heading for is a monstrous, charcoal eyesore. Some modern architect has modeled the structure on the prow of a ship. It sticks so far out that it almost meets the road. There are a couple of cop cars parked out front. My stomach makes a not so pleasant squelching sound as I make my way over.

The grey river of suits has seeped inside. I cling to a bright, whitewashed wall as people flow in and out of the foyer. I’m in serious danger of being carried away on the current. I manage to push my way past a million solid shoulders and slip off to the side, away from traffic. My jacket is suddenly stifling. Forget trying to bury my face in my hood, I can’t whip it off quick enough.

How do you ask for directions to an amnesty collection? I know I’m wandering around in a disorientated stupor when I collide with an emaciated chest, draped in a denim jacket.

“Watch it,” a shifty voice warns. The voice belongs to a frizzy-haired dude with small, dark eyes. The felon look. Behind him a door is closing. That’ll be where I’m heading. I mutter a brief apology and step inside.

It’s an intimate room. There’s a table at the head, and behind it are two male officers. There’s a line. I wasn’t expecting that. People seem to be signing a sheet of paper. Shoulders are hunched; heads are dipped. It sort of looks like a regional take on The X-factor, all nerves and anxiety, only there’s less singing and more offensive weapons. I’ve never seen a gun in real life before, and I see three right now. My pulse trips as the alien chunks of metal are passed across the tabletops.

“Excuse me, can I help you with something?” a mousey voice asks from over my shoulder. The voice belongs to a petite blonde woman, cradling a box full of food vouchers. She’s all wide eyed and smiley. She belongs on children’s television, not in a room filled with guns. Her head bobs about as she speaks. A lake collects in my palms.

“I have a knife,” I blurt out. It’s as much of as a surprise to me as it is to the blonde. Her sweet smile falls like a leaf to the floor. Now, she just looks nervous. “Not in like a Mrs. Voorhees, deranged slasher, kind of way,” I try to correct, but simultaneously start stabbing the air with an invisible knife, like I am exactly the sort of psycho I’m trying to convince her I’m not. I have no idea why I’m doing it. Reflex? I stop and slap my own hand away, but only after the woman’s face morphs from nervous to horrified. I notice her free hand creep to her side and slip under her jacket. Is she reaching for a gun?

“Wait! Can I please start that again?” I splutter nervously. “I’m sorry. I’m not a crazy person. I’ve just never done anything like this before, and I’m really nervous,” I assure, holding my hands up in surrender.

The blonde nods slowly. No sudden movements around the crazy girl. I don’t want to be here anymore, so I just go straight back into my explanation, only this time wrapping it in cotton wool. 

“I found this knife in the park near my house. I don’t know who it belongs to, or where it comes from, but I saw your event on the news and thought I should bring it in.”

The women nods. Her hand slips back out from underneath her jacket. My heartbeat slows.

“If you come with me, I’ll sort you out.” She smiles and we head over to the table. “Is it in the bag?”

I nod and go to dip my hands inside my satchel, but she shoots me a Medusa stare. I turn to stone, and her hands pick up from where mine left off.

“It’s in the baseball sock,” I squeak.

It takes her a matter of seconds to retrieve the knife. Her eyebrows shoot up into the middle of her forehead as she inspects it. She squeezes her eyes into slits and works her jaw in circles, trying to figure out what it’s made from and what the scrawl on the handle says no doubt. Good luck with that. A slight shake of her head tells me she knows nothing.

Finally, she grabs a form, fills in the date and time and then writes a couple of lines of description.

“Thank you for bringing this to our attention. Your continued support in community projects such as this is very welcome,” she informs me as she hands over a couple of bits of paper. Her thanks sounds generic, but I won’t take it personally. Concentrating on the slips of paper, I hightail it out of there. She’s given me a five dollar food token and the number of some local drop-in clinics. I hand them over to a homeless guy sitting in a shop doorway as I make my way back toward the bus stop.

The knife is gone. I thought I’d feel better, but now my mind is free to wonder why the almost-corpse exploded in a shower of dust.

THE GUYS OVER AT
GetYourFactsRight.com know almost everything. They know the exact measurement of a fruit fly’s wingspan. They know which letter is used most in the alphabet. They even know how many matchsticks it would take to build a scale replica of the Empire State building. What they don’t know is that bodies can explode into dust. According to Liam, the brain that was manning their online question center all day Sunday, this doesn’t happen. I told him he was wrong, that I’d seen it happen. And he told me that a number of contributing factors -- light, shadows, the reflection from my window pane -- might all have helped to create some sort of optical illusion. I cut the chat short and cancelled my subscription when he started asking about my family’s mental health history. I know what I saw. Maybe I’ll never know why he exploded, but I know what I saw.

Monday, the halls of Plumbridge High are full of students yawning and wiping sleep from their eyes as they trip and crawl their way to class.

Art room A2 is already full of my fellow artistes, smearing blank canvasses with stripes and circles. The smell of P.V.C-based paint hangs solidly in the air. I pause mid-tread to breathe it in. It’s bliss. The sort of smell that I want to eat. Leah is in our usual spot by the window. The best spot because, come rain or shine, natural light pours in through the  giant windows. As usual,  Leah sits so far forward on her stool it looks like she’s trying to make out with her canvas. She has a slushy in her hand.

“Sup?” I greet, dumping my bag beside her.

“Buenos dias,” Leah says. “Como esta?” Leah isn’t Spanish. She just likes to mix up inane chat by throwing some foreign in there.

“I’m good. You got new streaks.”

“You like?” Leah wiggles her head. A vibrant cocktail of blue, green, and pink curls bounce around like excited snakes. “Your new do inspired a change.” She flicks a length of my hair. The hairdressers cut two inches off my brown locks so it sits just above my shoulders. They turned her into a firework display. I should have asked for that.

“I love it.”

It’s the crazy-good kind of extreme. Leah is the queen of pretty-in-punk, has been since she was fourteen. Her skirts are always short. Her tights holey. Her tops decorated with skulls and safety pins.

I like tight jeans and slogan t-shirts. My eyes are really dark, and I have a platoon of freckles camped out on my face. Excessive black eyeliner is my edge. A bunch of kids once called me Goth when I walked by. I can’t be sure if I’m Goth, but then I can’t be sure if I’m not.

“So, what happened to you this weekend?” Leah asks as I pull up a stool and haul my canvas on to my easel.

“I got lost in a Chemistry homework tornado.”

“And by Chemistry homework tornado you mean you spent the weekend listening to sad love songs and sobbing over Mark.”

“Did not.”

“Yeah right.”

“Really. Over it. Finito. Totally forgotten. Like, who’s Mark?”

“Overkill,” she replies bluntly.

“Okay you guys, listen up.” Jan, our pint-sized-pot-of-enthusiasm art teacher,  bounds into the room. She slaps a sheet of paper down onto the projector and flicks on the light. My heart leaps into my throat, and I’m back in  the park on Saturday night, listening to an almost-dead-guy tell me he’s one of the gargoyle. I eyeball the picture projected on the whiteboard. I know this picture. I’ve seen it a thousand times. It’s Notre Dame Cathedral, and casually leaning on one of the stone walls is a gargoyle. It’s just art, right? But I’m locked in a stare-down with the grotesque creature; its giant eyes threatening to swallow me.

“So,” Jan is saying, “given this morning’s headlines, I thought it might be fun to…” 

“This morning’s headlines?” I whisper to Leah. She nods. She’s in the zone;  snapping gum, slushy in one hand, paintbrush tracing lines with the other.

  “Yeah. Apparently, there’s a stone statue thief on the loose. There’s this big who-ha, because a few gargoyles went missing from Saint Sebastian’s over the weekend. They’re worth a fortune you know.” My blood runs cold.

Jan stops talking and starts drawing on the A3 pad she has clipped to the  whiteboard with reckless abandon, steam rising off her charcoal. I’ve never approached painting with caution before, but I draw the first line on my canvas like my life depends on getting it straight.