Jesus Jackson (11 page)

Nineteen

Before I could put the plan into action, I first had to deal with my mother. For obvious reasons, her moods had become a bit unpredictable, and I just couldn't risk the chance that she'd say no (or worse, decide that she wanted to help me with my schoolwork herself). And besides, if I told her that I was going to a girl's house, she would have a whole bunch more questions that I really didn't want to get in to.

The point is that I needed a suitable reason for leaving that night that would not arouse suspicion, and would be impossible for her to turn down. This was not an easy task. And by the time I got home I still hadn't come up with anything. I decided to head straight to my room, avoiding my mother, so I could work out my plan in private.

As I headed down the second-floor hallway, I noticed a light on in Ryan's room. I stopped before walking past the open door: What should I do? If my mom was in there, and I turned around, she'd wonder why I didn't pass. She'd yell after me, make me come back, talk, eat, stay; if I walked past, she'd probably just strike up a conversation…but then again, maybe not. I listened for a second. I thought I heard some quiet crying, and I decided to try for a clean pass across the doorway.

I tiptoed right up to the edge of the door. I readied myself, held my breath, and began my quietest quick-step past the opening. But then, glancing just slightly out of the corner of my eye, I saw that it wasn't my mother in there at all. It was Tristan, lying curled on Ryan's bed. Sobbing into her knees.

I couldn't just pass; it was too heartbreaking. I'd never seen such display of grief—so sincere, so all-encompassing, so
real
. I stood there for a moment watching her, when the strangest feeling came over me—a kind of angry discomfort, making me want to yell at her, or run away, or both. It was so out of place, so wrong for the moment, that it took me a second to figure out what it was. And it was jealousy. I was actually jealous of Tristan's grief.

But I had to ask myself: Why? Why did I want to feel that way? Why did I want to be so overwhelmed with angst and pain that I couldn't even move? I'd been sad, of course; constantly sad. And I'd been angry and confused and everything else you're supposed to feel when someone dies. So why did I want—why did I need—to feel it all more?

I thought about this for a while, as I stood watching her from the hallway, but I never came up with any answers. So I tried to just detach myself from this strange emotional state. I wrote it off as some “stage of grief” the school counselor would try to tell me about—some brief pain to grit my teeth through—and I walked over to sit down beside Tristan on the bed.

Her sobs shuddered to a halt and she peeked one bloodshot eye out from behind her knee.

“It's pretty bad, huh?” I said.

“It just doesn't make any sense.” She was clearly holding back hysteria by a thread. “I mean, he could have gone on with his life…even if I had nothing to do with him, he would have had a
good life
…I know that.” Then she started sobbing, miserably, again.

I would've tried to console her, but I just didn't know how. Not then. Not in the state I was in. All I came up with was this: “That's just not how life works out, I think.” And as soon as that sentence left my mouth, it sounded like the coldest thing in the world.

“Yeah, I know,” she spat back at me. “I get it.
God
has a bigger plan.
God
has a purpose. Ryan is with
God
now, so we should all be so fucking happy for him and
God
and the wonderful time they're having together.”

“That's not what I meant.”

She didn't say anything, not for a while. She just stared at me. And I couldn't tell whether she was mad at me, mad at God, mad at Ryan, or mad at herself, but she was damn sure mad at someone. I started to think about how stuck we all are—every one of us—no matter what we believe about God. If you think that he really is up there in the sky somewhere, controlling you, controlling everyone, controlling everything, then you have to deal with him killing your boyfriend, or your brother, or your son. You have to deal with him letting babies get addicted to drugs, allowing child abuse and murder, permitting genocide and war. And if you don't believe it…well, then you have to deal with there not being a reason for anything at all. You could have never been born, and it wouldn't matter. If someone hurts you, it doesn't matter. If someone dies, it doesn't matter. If they could've not died, or if you could have saved them, then it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference to the universe at all, except that you wouldn't have to feel this way.

So, knowing that there were no words that could make her feel better, I just sat there, letting Tristan glare at me, soaking up her anger until she softened, and softened, and softened, and again began to cry.

She had a few hard sobs—they looked deep; they looked like they shook her through her insides—but then she got herself under control. She sat up against the headboard. She drew her knees into her chest. “I'm sorry, Jonathan,” she squeaked. “I know this is probably harder on you than on anyone, even me, and that you just have your own way of showing it. I'm not mad at you. I'm just…I'm just…” Then she fell back into the tears, but this time even harder, like she had collapsed completely inside herself. Like she was choking.

So then I wasn't quite sure what to do, what to say, how to handle the situation. I mean, do I comfort her? Do I just scoot right on over and put a hand on her back and tell her that it's all right and say something wholesome or optimistic or whatever, just to get her to calm down, or at least to stop crying?

I waited for a pause, but she just kept going. And going. Finally, I patted her on the knee, cautiously, and said something lame, like, “I'm sure Ryan wouldn't want you to be so upset.”

Her sobs slowed to a halt. She looked up at me, wiping her eyes. “What makes you so sure about that?”

“I don't know. It's just something to say, you know, to—”

“I know. I'm sorry. Never mind.” And then she seemed to drift off again, staring at the wall like if I wasn't even there.

I looked at Ryan's alarm clock, and saw that I had better get moving if I wanted to make it to Cassie's house in time. “Well, I've got to, um…change. So…I'll see you around.”

Tristan's gaze wandered over to me. She blinked, shivered. “Bye, Jonathan.”

I took in the room, for the millionth time and for the first. It was all still there, like it always had been: Ryan's trophies and posters, the pictures of him in his uniforms, and one with Tristan at a formal dance the year before. And it seemed foreign for those few seconds. In truth, I hadn't spent much time in there over the previous years…I almost felt like I was trespassing.

“Okay, bye,” I said. And I was about to leave, when it occurred to me that Tristan just might be able to help me with my mission. I swung back around. “Hey Tris?”

“Yeah?”

I felt sheepish, shy, timid. “Before you leave, can you just happen to mention to my mom that there's…I don't know…like a student prayer service or something at the school later?”

“A prayer service?
You
want to go to a prayer service?”

“No. Of course not. I don't even think there is one. I was just wondering if you could maybe mention to my mom that there is.”

It took her a second, but she got it. “Ooooh.” Then she chuckled. “Well, you are in high school now, I guess you have to start sneaking out sometime.”

“Right.”

“So what is it? A party? You better not be drinking on a school night.”

“No, of course not. No party, no drinking.”

“So?”

And here's the problem: I couldn't possibly tell her what it really was (how could I, I mean, really?), so I tried get close to the truth, as close as I could, anyway. I said, “It's…it's a girl.”

“Really? A girl?”

“Yup. A girl.”

“Who is she?” Tristan asked. “Do I know her?”

“Oh, I doubt it,” I mumbled. “She's just some girl…anyway, I've got to go…finish up my homework. You won't forget to tell my mom about the prayer service?”

“No,” she said, but she must have been distracted by some thought. “I won't forget.”

I tried to look sincere. “Thanks, Tris.” Then I made a dash for my room before she could ask any more questions.

Twenty

As agreed, Henry was waiting behind a tree at the edge of my lawn at precisely five o'clock. Getting past my mom was easy (Tristan must have done her job well) so I was feeling pretty good as I walked up and patted Henry on the back. “So you ready, Detective H-Bomb?”

Henry looked up at me, anxiety painted all over his face. “I don't know about this, Jonathan.”

I reached down, helping him up. “What's not to know? It'll be fine.”

“But what about Alistair?”

“Alistair won't be anywhere near that house.”

“But what if he is? What if he shows up unexpectedly?”

“Then we run away. He's not going to do anything to us at his own house.”

“Fine,” he said, stuffing his hands in his pockets. “Let's get this over with.”

So we began the thirty-minute walk to the St. Claire house, and I filled Henry in on the details of the plan. It was really very simple: I go in, and start working with Cassie until I have the lay of the land, then excuse myself to use the bathroom. On the way to the bathroom I stop in Alistair's room and open the window (making sure to close his door on my way back out). Then Henry climbs in, makes a copy of the hard drive on Alistair's computer, and climbs back out when he's done.

Also (as I assured Henry a hundred times during the walk) if for any reason things seemed too dangerous, we'd just abandon the whole thing, I'd finish my homework with Cassie and we'd come up with another idea for another day.

“Just remember,” I told Henry. “We need real,
solid, irrefutable evidence this time, so make sure to get as much as you can from his computer. Videos, email, phone records, whatever. Did you bring something we can use to copy files from his computer?”

He nodded and pulled a tiny portable hard drive from his pocket. “It's 512 gigabytes,” he said. “Should suffice.”

“Good,” I said. “Perfect. But don't lose sight of the other evidence either. If you see a football jersey or a dirty pair of cleats, you grab those too.”

“He's at football practice now, Jonathan. He will be wearing his jersey and cleats.”

“Right,” I said. “Good point. But still, you know, keep an eye out. ”

Henry rolled his eyes. “Sure.”

All in all, it seemed like a solid plan: conservative, uncomplicated, well-thought-out, and with plenty of opportunities to adapt, adjust, alter, or abort. And at the beginning, at least, everything looked quite positive.

First of all, we couldn't have asked for a better house—it turned out to be a sprawling ranch, all one-story, with plenty of tall shrubs around the yard, easily capable of concealing little Henry. So I was feeling optimistic when I stepped up to the front patio and rang the doorbell, finally setting our plan into action.

Cassie's mom came to the door. This, I must admit, was a little disconcerting. I expected her to be home, of course, but in my imaginings I somehow figured that she would be permanently out of sight, holed up in the den or the kitchen like my own mother always was.

“Hi,” she said, elongating the “iiiiiii” in the same sappy, sympathetic way every adult did with me since Ryan had died. “You must be Jonathan.”

I decided that the best idea would be to play up the brokenhearted-brother angle to gain her trust, so I put my saddest, brave-little-man-smile on and said, “It's nice to meet you, Mrs. St. Claire.”

“It's Miss Morrison now, or again, rather, but anyway it's nice to meet you too. Come on in. Cassie's in the kitchen, having a snack. Are you hungry?”

Well, this was good news and bad news: good that Mrs. St. Claire was now Miss Morrison (so I was right about the dad not being around), but bad that Cassie was having a snack in the kitchen, where surely Miss Morrison would want to linger and ask all sorts of questions about how I, and my family, were doing. “Sure,” I said, trying my best to imitate a wounded puppy being offered a bone. “I'd love a snack. Thank you.”

“Of course,” she said. “Right this way.”

She led me back through the house toward the kitchen, and instantly I began inspecting and cataloguing everything I saw. It was a nice house—warm and cozy, decorated in a haphazard country sort of style with lots of wallpaper and curtains, pictures of family on every wall, trinkets and vases and bowls of candy on every surface—in other words, it was the exact opposite of the magazine showroom that my own house was. I also noticed, more importantly, that I was right in my initial assessment of the layout. The bedrooms all seemed to be bunched up at the far end of the house, right where Henry was waiting.

As we turned into the kitchen, Miss Morrison was saying, “Cassie, your friend is…” but I lost the rest of sentence as soon as I saw her. I guess it was because when we first met it was dark, and the next time she was in her school uniform, but this felt like the first time I'd ever
really
seen her. Now, as I said before, Cassie wasn't “classically” pretty the way your typical leading-lady-movie star or fashion magazine cover girl is pretty—her features were somehow sharper, more angular than that, and her eyes, my God, her long almond eyes, pale blue with strawberry eyebrows—one always cocked just a little higher than the other; like she was trying to figure out your secret, or else tease you with her own.

“Hey Jon,” said Cassie in a singsong sort of voice. “Take a seat. Have a brownie.”

Peeling my eyes away from her, I found the next most appealing thing to settle them on: a tray of steaming straight-from-the-mix brownies sitting right beside a frosty bottle of milk. It struck me as so strange (my mother was incapable of making anything so normal). It almost made me laugh, looking so perfect and simple and wholesomely American.

“Thanks,” I said, taking a seat and picking up a brownie.

The brownies were delicious, of course, and I was just about to complement Ms. Morrison, when she picked her purse up off the counter, swung it over her shoulder and said, “Okay, I've got to run up to the school for the parents' association meeting. I'll be back in about an hour and a half. You guys need anything before I go?”

Cassie shook her head as I began to calculate this new turn of events: one and a half hours without having to worry about anyone but Cassie getting in my way. This was well within the time frame I originally had in mind.

“Well, alright,” Miss Morrison called from the front hallway. “See you in a bit.”

“Bye Mom,” yelled back Cassie.

“Thanks for the brownies,” I said.

Cassie looked down the front hall as her mother's steps sounded toward the door, and finally through it. When the screen door slammed, she said. “Thank God she's gone. I was afraid she wouldn't leave us alone if she stayed here.”

“Yeah, thank God.”

She stared straight at me, her face all business. “Okay. So what's your whole deal?”

“My whole…deal?” I said, confused. “I, um…I don't know. I'm just a regular sort of kid, I guess. I like punk music, and skateboarding…but I'm not sure what you're…”

“No,” she giggled. “What's your deal with school? What are you falling behind in?”

I paused for a second, even more confused than before. Then I remembered: Ah, yes. This was my reason for coming over. “Right,” I said. “Sorry. I'm a little flustered these days.”

“Don't worry about it.”

“Math, mostly. And Biology, a little. We haven't really done anything in my other classes yet, as far as I can tell.”

“Well I'm sure you have, but you're right to be most concerned with Math and Bio. If you fall behind in those, it's really hard to catch up.”

“Right.”

“So let's go, then,” she said, snatching one more brownie and popping up from her chair. “Grab your backpack.”

“Okay.” I grabbed another brownie for myself and followed after her. “Where are we going?”

“My room. We can look through my old assignments.”

“Old assignments?”

“Yeah, I'm a packrat. I have pretty much everything I've ever done since kindergarten in my room. We'll just find the assignments you're missing, you can copy them into your handwriting, and we'll be done with the whole homework thing in no time.”

“Wow.” I was impressed.

She paused for moment just before opening her bedroom door. “Then we can pick back up with your whole skateboarding and punk deal…”

I shuffled in, sitting myself down on her thick yellow carpet that was covered in clothes and magazines and schoolbooks. Just from the look of her room, I could tell this girl was unusual—in the best possible of ways. Her walls were a collage of hastily painted patches of black and neon green, surrounded by rock posters and drawings and pixelated meme print-outs and at least a million tiny stickers (mostly pink and purple unicorns, with the occasional My Little Pony thrown in).

I just sat there, taking it all in as she searched through her train-wreck of a closet for the homework. Not surprisingly, it took a few minutes before I realized that, as entranced as I was, I had completely forgotten to look around the hallway for Alistair's room, an open window, or much of anything that had to do with my actual purpose for being there.

From inside the closet, I heard Cassie's muffled voice saying, “Okay, I found Bio. Now where the heck is my math work?”

So I was faced with a major dilemma: I could only really “go to the bathroom” once. If I went right away, then I risked not finding Alistair's room at all (it could have, after all, been on the other end of the house, or even in the basement, for all I knew). If I waited, then I might not have an opportunity to leave Cassie's room until after her mom (or worse, Alistair) returned home.

What I needed was another reason to wander back out into the house, preferably alone. But before I could come up with one, Cassie emerged from the closet with a big stack of papers, sat down Indian-style in front of me, and plopped them all onto the ground. “There,” she said. “Math and Bio, ninth grade. Now let's see your planner.”

“My what?”

“Your school planner. That thing with the school crest on the front that they give you to write all of your homework in.”

“Oh,” I said. “Right”

“You really haven't paid any attention at all in school yet, have you?”

I unzipped my backpack and began fumbling through its contents. “No,” I replied quietly. “Not really.”

She watched me search in vain for a little while. Then out of nowhere, she asked, “Do you think about Ryan a lot?”

Her question froze me. It was the first time someone had asked me about Ryan when I couldn't just shrug and walk away. When I didn't want to just walk away. So I decided to tell her the truth: “Constantly,” I said.

“Really?” She sounded almost surprised.

“Is that hard to believe?”

“No,” she shot back. “You just don't seem so…I don't know…”

“Sad?”

“Yeah. Why is that?”

“I don't know. I
am
sad. But, it's…”

“It's what?”

“It's like I have to concentrate to feel it. And even then, it's far away.”

She slid a little closer to me on the carpet. “I don't think that's so weird. I felt the same way when my grandmother died. And you…this is so much bigger.”

“But shouldn't that just make me sadder?”

She looked off thoughtfully, staring out the window, where a few raindrops were beginning to splash onto the glass. “I think it works the other way around. The bigger something is, the harder it is to feel. The longer it takes to sink in…”

“Yeah.”

“I guess that's why people believe in God. To make sense of it all in the meantime.”

I turned to her, suspicious. “Don't you believe in God?”

“Sometimes I do. And then sometimes I don't. And most of the time I just don't know.” She shrugged. “What about you?”

Figuring, well, as long as I was going with honesty, I said, “No, actually. Not at all. Not even a little bit.”

She looked surprised, and a little curious, as if I'd just revealed that I was really a secret agent. “Not at all? That's pretty bold. Why not?”

“That's a big question.”

“But you must have a reason.”

A million different reasons came barreling into mind, but I couldn't quite organize my thoughts into a coherent or concrete
why.
Before, when I'd been asked this question (like with Mr. Finger) I just brushed it off. Usually, people didn't really want to know why, they just wanted to look for some kind of flaw in your psyche, a trauma from your childhood, or some other “problem” you have that makes you different from everyone else so they could paint you into a corner and not have to worry that they might ever be like you. But I didn't want to do that with Cassie. I wanted to tell her—to try to tell her—why I just couldn't believe. But those days, ever since Ryan and Alistair and Jesus Jackson and the rest of it, my reasons were even more confused and conflicted than ever before. So I just started talking, hoping something coherent would come out eventually.

This is what I said:

“It just doesn't make sense. And it's a little absurd, when you think about it—the whole concept of some white-bearded guy up in the clouds, making every little decision about every little thing in every little person's life. Listening to your thoughts, giving a crap about whether you tell a little lie, or curse, or copy someone's homework.” I gestured down at the stacks of paper, and Cassie giggled, charmingly. “It's all so damned convenient, you know? Life is too complex, too random, and too fucking sad for it all to wind up in some kind of marshmallow wonderland in the sky, where everything that ever happened, happened for a reason. I don't know, it just feels like some cheesy ending to a crappy movie.”