Jesus Jackson (2 page)

Two

Okay, so we've got to rewind here for a minute. I can't really begin with Ryan already dead and Jesus Jackson already trying to sell me his shady services…it just doesn't feel right. So we'll go back a day—twenty-five hours, to be precise—to the morning of the last day in August: the day of the event, the day it actually happened, the day this whole sad, sorry, and absurd story began.

At St. Soren's Academy, the school year officially begins at 8:05 a.m. on the morning after Labor Day. However, the preceding Friday is always bustling on campus, with morning practices for the varsity teams, meetings for the teachers, and, of course, Freshman Orientation—which is precisely where I was at 8 o'clock sharp.

St. Soren's sits at the top of a gradual hill on a small peninsula jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean, with the Sakonnet Creek Ravine forming the border where the school property ends and the rest of the town of Sakonnet begins. The school itself is a great big cinderblock nightmare with a giant concrete cross atop a four-story clock tower, an east wing and a west wing all covered in ivy, and nearly fifty acres of athletic fields stretching from the buildings to the ocean. At first glance, it all has a kind of intimidating grandness, especially when you're looking at it from the last seat on a yellow school bus at fourteen years old, with your hood covering your face, Nirvana blaring in your headphones, and a far-too-tenuous faith in the meaninglessness of everything.

As you may have already guessed, I was hardly excited by the prospect of attending a Catholic high school…not that my opinion was ever really consulted in the matter. Ryan had wound up there (due to a series of a events we'll get to later), he had “thrived” (in my mother's words), so I was going too. End of story.

At any rate, there I was, slumped against the window at the back of the bus, when the driver jerked us to a stop at the front of the school. I turned up the volume, pointed my nose at the ground, and followed the flow of freshmen from the parking lot to the gymnasium, where we were to begin our orientation.

The gym was pretty much like every other gym in the world, with its gleaming wood floor and fold-away bleachers and championship flags displaying the pride and the glory of a hundred old students who just might believe that their records still mean something to someone. The walls were gray-painted cinderblocks reflecting the rows of fluorescent lights shining down from a ceiling that seemed miles above us. There was an old-fashioned, ornate stage cut into the south wall, and above it, a twenty-foot crucifix glared down over the gym in full color and regalia: the nails, the crown of thorns, and a bleeding, emaciated, sleepy-looking Jesus, half-dead in three dimensions.

I had to stop when I saw that crucifix. It had been more than three years since the last time I went to church with my mother, and I'd forgotten just how grotesque a sight it was. It made me smile, a bit, and flush from the almost pornographic brutality of it.

As I stood there, with the rest of the freshman class parting to walk around me, it occurred to me that everyone across the globe, in every church in every city and every town, stared at this exact same image, or one very much like it—and maybe even felt the same brutal rush that I was feeling at this moment. It made me wonder if this rush, this flash of violence and heat, was what some people called the presence of God, or the Holy Spirit, or whatever….

Just as I was having this thought, someone rammed me, at a full hustle, square in the backpack, knocking me flat on my face.

“Jesus Fucking Christ!” I yelled.

Then there was nothing but silence. Great silence. Gargantuan silence. I looked around the gymnasium at the horrified stares of two hundred freshmen, fifty-five faculty, six janitors, two priests, and a nun…not to mention the bleeding, emaciated, sleepy-looking Jesus.

Clearly, I realized, this was no way to start the year.

The only person out of the hundreds who was not glaring at me like I was the son of Satan was the chubby, bespectacled, jittering little Asian kid who knocked me over in the first place. His eyes pleaded with me for help, as if everyone was really horrified at
him
for knocking me over, and I was the only one who could save him.

Unfortunately, such salvation was beyond my power at the moment, but I did manage to wrangle myself to standing, and offer a hand to help him up.

“Thanks,” he mumbled.

“Don't mention it,” I mumbled back.

And with that, the two of us scuffled off to the top row of the old wooden bleachers, doing our best to find a place well hidden behind some of the taller kids in the class.

I should probably mention here that while my brother was a veritable athletic god at St. Soren's, none of those sports-related genes made their way into my DNA. On the contrary, I take almost solely after my mother's side of the family, who, though perfectly “fit” by any standards, have the unfortunate tendency to have zero coordination and never grow—male or female—a solid hair's width over five feet five inches.

Needless to say, at fourteen years old, I still had a few inches to grow to reach even that modest height.

The second thing I noticed about the kid who'd knocked me down, other than that he was the only representative of any minority group whatsoever in the class, was that he was also, perhaps, the only person in the room who was shorter than me.

So obviously, I liked him right away.

As soon as the opening prayers began, I whispered, “Hey, sorry about that. You didn't get hurt, did you?”

He had these thin little, oval-shaped, wire-rimmed glasses, and he glared at me through them as if I'd just insulted his mother. He put his finger to his mouth, let out a sharp “Shhh,” and then closed his eyes, bowing his head in silent prayer.

“Oh,” I stammered. “Right. Sorry. We're…uh…praying.”

He glared at me, clearly attempting something like anger, but he only achieved a sort of comical frown. So I laughed (I couldn't stop myself), but I guess I was a bit loud, because the whole row of kids in front of me gave me the same angry stare…which just made me laugh even harder, until a teacher pointed a menacing finger right at me, and I bit my lip to stop.

After the assembly, they released us to our homerooms, and as the mob of freshmen walked through the halls, I got to take my first real look at my classmates. The only thing different about this group than the one at my old school were the uniforms—plaid skirts for the girls, khaki slacks for the boys, and SSA-emblazoned Oxford button-downs for everyone—but even these couldn't hide their utter sameness to everyone else I'd ever met from every school everywhere.

They all sickened me a little, so I turned up my music, pretended to be looking at something important on my phone and made a beeline for room 209, trying not to think about how I was now sure to spend the next four years of my education the same way I'd spent every other one of the past nine: alone.

Room 209 was the homeroom for students whose last names fell between Roberts and Turkleton. It was a science room, and there were posters of Einstein and Newton beside the chalkboard, shelves filled with Bunsen burners and beakers, and a row of shiny new silver computers on a long, black table by the window. Once inside, we were all arranged alphabetically into rows, with myself sitting firmly between Wendy Spooner and, quite fatefully, my new little Asian friend.

He seemed downright frightened to see me (or else just frightened in general), so I leaned over, extended my hand, and said, “Sorry, man. For…you know…back there. I'm Jonathan Stiles.”

He eyed my hand cautiously. “Henry,” he said, finally taking it. “Henry Sun. And I'm not religious.”

“Um…okay,” I said, unsure how to interpret this. “Well, you looked like you were praying pretty hard back there in the gym.”

“I was respecting the opinions and authority of my high school,” he whispered.

“Alright, alright. Whatever you want to call it.”

“All religion is unbound by empirical data and therefore inherently unscientific and therefore absurd.” He sounded like he'd been practicing this for months.

I couldn't help being amused by his earnestness. “If you say so, man. I just think it's stupid.”

He glared at me again, as if trying to work out whether I was mocking him or not. “Well, yes. But it's only ‘stupid' because it can't be proven through observation and the scientific method.”

“I guess,” I replied. “Did you need observation and the scientific method to prove to you that the Tooth Fairy wasn't real either?”

“Well, no.”

“What about the Easter Bunny, or Zeus, or SpongeBob SquarePants, for that matter?”

Henry blushed a bit, stifling his laughter. “Of course not.”

“Right. Because that would be stupid.”

He took a beat. “Essentially, then, we agree…right?”

“Right. So we can be friends.”

Henry let an awkward, unpracticed smile make its way across his face, as if it hadn't occurred to him that I'd ever want to be his friend, or that anyone would ever want to be his friend. “Good,” he said. “Okay. Yeah, good.”

After homeroom they gave us a tour of the school, which was followed by another assembly (this one thankfully less eventful than the last) before they freed us for the day just after lunch. Nearly nauseated by all of the praying (made tolerable only by sharing snickers with Henry), I decided to take a little tour of the woods behind the school, having been told once by my brother that this was where the upperclassmen went to smoke, drink, make out, and engage in all of the other activities that just might make St. Soren's bearable.

Henry followed me for about fifty paces beyond the milling crowd of freshmen before asking where I was going.

“Exploring,” I told him.

“Umm…why?”

I turned around to stare at him, wondering how sustainable our friendship would turn out to be. “Why not?”

“But what about the bus…,” he began, though I'd already turned to walk away. If we were going to be friends (and I hoped we would), he'd have to step up to a little mischief, and fast.

In all honesty, I expected to make my little exploration alone. But to my great surprise, a little further along, I heard the shuffling of Henry's gargantuan backpack come speeding up behind me. “So what's back here?” he asked.

“I don't know. I think it's where everybody does drugs.”

Henry stopped so fast he almost tripped over his feet. I'm positive that if I told him we were going to attend a virgin sacrifice by a Satanic coven, it wouldn't have elicited such a horrified response. “You're…going…to….”

“I'm joking,” I lied. “Relax. This is just where the upperclassmen hang out.”

His attitude didn't change; not much, at least. Whatever small amount of his trust I'd earned was, at this point, all but lost.

“Whatever,” I said. “Go back and wait for the bus, if you want.”

Henry clenched his jaw, clearly upset by my challenge. But he was unable to stand up to it. “So, there're no drugs back there?”

“Come on now, man, there are drugs everywhere in this corrupt world of ours. Are you coming or not?”

After a moment more of consideration, he dropped his guard and followed me. We both smiled as he matched my pace across the lawn, neither of us aware in the slightest of what we were getting ourselves into.

***

So let me preface this next scene by saying that, at this point, my general view of humanity was that it was all a useless, phony, hypocritical cancer upon the Earth, providing nothing of any good to anyone, while it went about causing endless pain and suffering to every living species on the planet, itself included. Out of the six billion of us walking around on this wretched stretch of sand, there was only one exception in my mind: Ryan.

It didn't matter that I hadn't actually seen very much of him in the past few years (since he'd started St. Soren's, he just seemed to get caught up in the whole high school thing). I mean sure, he was my older brother, and I loved him. But more importantly: I trusted him. I
knew
him. So when Henry and I stepped into the hostile situation we were about to find in those woods, it was Ryan that I first thought of. It was Ryan that I hoped would save me.

This was how it happened:

About twenty feet inside the tree line we rounded a small stone wall to find a group of four football players, padded and uniformed and covered up and down with grass stains and dirt, standing in a little clearing and looking nervously all around. At their feet, just a few yards from me and Henry, was a textbook—a math textbook; trigonometry—on top of which was piled a small (though significant) dusting of white powder.

We stopped in our tracks. To be honest, my first instinct was just to smile and keep walking, as if nothing were odd about the whole scene. But Henry, being the spaz that he was, made the intelligent and judicious decision to scream like a little girl, yell, “Shit! Drugs!” and run madly back toward the school.

Then everything started to happen very fast. One of the football players—this hulking blond giant with squinty little eyes—yelled, “Get him!” which caused a different hulking giant to literally pick Henry up and throw him in the dirt, while yet another one started frantically dumping the coke (or whatever) into a tiny plastic bag.

I tried to make a run for it, but someone screamed, “Alistair, look!” to the squinty-eyed blond one, who promptly jumped at my legs, taking me out below the knees.

And then, a second later: there he was—Alistair—his face mere inches from mine. His hands were on my throat and he was growling: “This all never happened, you understand? You were never here, you never saw this, you've never seen me before—get it? get it? get it?”

I was struggling to breathe. I jerked my head to the left and saw Henry getting similar treatment, but from an even bigger asshole.