Paranoid Park (11 page)

Then on Monday, I went to school and it was all about Jennifer again. She came to my locker and wanted to know if I’d gotten the condoms yet. I hadn’t. Did I want to go get them after school? I wasn’t sure. Maybe.

“What’s the matter?” she said. “Are you mad?”

“No,” I said.

She stared at me. “You sure act weird sometimes. And after what we did. You’d think you’d be a little more happy to see me.”

“Hey, it was your idea,” I said.

“What?”
she said. She took a step back. “What does
that
mean?”

“Nothing.”

“So having sex was
my
idea?” she whispered, angrily. “You didn’t
want
to? You just
went along?”

“No. No, I’m just saying, you were the one who wanted to get
the condoms.
So I thought we would get them together.”

Jennifer accepted this. “Oh,” she said. “Okay. I thought you were talking about something else.”

“No, that’s all I meant.”

“Okay,” she said. “Well... we’ll do that.”

“Okay then,” I said.

Jennifer left me alone for the rest of the day. Then, before last period she told me she couldn’t go; she had an appointment at the dermatologist. That was a relief.

With nothing to do, I found Jared and those guys and skated with them on the steps behind the cafeteria. That made me feel better. I felt like I was getting my skate-legs back. I liked my new board. I could do stuff again.

Later, while we sat around drinking Cokes, Jared told more details about his college trip and the weird college girl he hooked up with. He had told this stuff before, but people liked hearing it again. It was quite a story.

As I listened, I wondered if I would ever tell anyone about my night at Paranoid Park. It occurred to me that I never would. That was the only way. It would be in lockdown. Like when a submarine springs a leak and you have to seal off that part. I would lock down that part of my life. I would close it off and seal it. What else could I do? Risk trying to tell someone? Gamble my whole life on if the police and the lawyers and the judges decided a skater has a right to defend himself? I was sorry. I felt bad for the security guard and his family. But there was no fixing it now. It was done and over with. We all had to move on with our lives.

And if it weighed on me, if it meant some sleepless nights, well, that was a sacrifice I would make for the other people involved. For my parents, for my brother, for the people who had taught me and helped me and invested in my future.

For them, I would bear the burden. For them I would be a man.

 

Dear__,

Having some coffee this morning. That’s one thing I’ve learned here at Uncle Tommy’s: how to drink coffee in the morning.

But anyway-that was the situation. The first couple days were pure hell. The next couple totally sucked. Things got a little better after a week. And at ten days, well, the worst of it seemed to be over, the crisis had passed. I might walk around like a haunted zombie for the rest of my life, but at least I would
have
a life.

Then one night, I came out of the shower and stopped in the TV room to watch the end of
Crossing Jordan
with my little brother. I was drying my hair with a towel when a newsbreak came on. The newcaster lady said something about a scandal with the new Trail Blazers coach. Then she said, “And police now think that the body of a protection officer found dead at the train yard in southeast Portland last week may have been the victim of murder. Stay tuned for all these stories, sports, and weather at eleven.” While she spoke, a little graphic of train tracks appeared beside her head.

Then there was a commercial for the new Honda Odyssey.

I sat stunned, unmoving. Henry sat on the other end, kicking at the base of the couch.

I tried to breathe. I couldn’t. I tried to lift my arm, to continue to dry my hair, but I couldn’t do that, either. I managed one short, stunted breath. On the TV, the Honda Odyssey had a family in it, a happy family, with a dog and kids watching TV screens in the backseat. My stomach tightened up so much I thought I was going to throw up.

I managed to stand up and walk to my room. I sat on my bed and gradually got my breath back. Then I went to my computer. If it was on TV, it would be online. I clicked on the local TV news Web site. It was the main story on their home page:

I read it once. I read it again. Then I clicked on “history” of my Web browser and saw that I had many local news and local crime Web sites up on my computer. I was getting sloppy. I clicked “delete history” and then checked back to make sure everything was gone.

I thought about other things. My dirty shoes and socks, where were they? In the Dumpster, probably safely gone by now. What about my mom’s car? I had cleaned it the other night, scrubbing the seats and the pedals. How about my story? Who knew I went there that night? Jared. What had I told him? I told him I didn’t go to Paranoid Park.

That was my story: I didn’t go to the park. I had to remember that. I dropped him off, drove around, went back to his house. That was it. I did not go to Paranoid.

But what about my skateboard? Where was my skateboard? Could I say someone stole it? Yes! Someone stole my skateboard and used it in the crime! But no, if the police got that close, if they talked to other people at Paranoid that night, they would know it was me. How about Scratch? Could I blame it on him? He took my skateboard and
he
hit the guy! No, no, no, I couldn’t blame it on someone else. What was I thinking? That was totally evil.

But maybe I could.
Scratch was a street person. They wouldn’t believe him. He wasn’t going to college, he didn’t live in a nice neighborhood, they would ... no, no, no ... It was insanity.... I couldn’t do more bad things. I had to do the right thing. I had to do the right thing, now, before I lost my nerve.

I went to my phone and picked it up. I dialed the police number. 555-788-7778, but that wasn’t the right number. I turned back to my computer, but I had already deleted the site. I tried again. It was ... 555 ... 778-7788? That wasn’t right, either. I tried again. 555- 788-7888, but before it rang I hung up. But that was stupid, what if they had caller ID? What if they called me back?

I flew into a panic. I stood up and began pacing my room. Had I saved anything from that night? No. I still had Jared’s jeans. I had to give those back. What about the people on the bridge? The two women? They hadn’t noticed me. They were busy talking. What about the guy on the bike? He might have. We practically collided. And I was so dirty! How could they
not
notice me? But being dirty doesn’t mean anything. I could be a mechanic or a guy working construction or something.

I paced. Again, in the midst of the terrible swirl of my brain, the concept came back to me:
Do the right thing.
I went back to the phone. I picked it up. I stared at the number pad.
I’m a kid,
I thought.
I’m sixteen. Kids screw up. Kids get scared. Nobody’s going to care that I didn’t tell right away. I’ll say I didn’t know what happened. There was a scuffle and then we ran. We didn’t see him get killed. We didn’t even know he got killed.

Of course.
That was perfect. “No, Officer,” I’d say. “We just pushed him and ran away. We didn’t know he got killed by the train. Only when I saw it on the news, and then I knew I should call you right away.”

Okay, that was good. Better to just get everything out in the open. It was just manslaughter, right? Or whatever you call it when someone accidentally gets killed. And I’m a minor. And I didn’t know! That was the key. I didn’t even know that he died!

I dialed the police. Then I slammed the phone down again. No. What if something went wrong? What if Scratch thought I snitched on him? He would kill me. He would have friends in jail who would kill me. If I told the cops about Scratch, I was taking a huge risk. I had to leave Scratch out of it. If I could.

What about footprints? There must have been footprints at the scene of the crime. And blood. Did I track blood somewhere? What about that sports car that saw me skating away from the train tracks? I had totally forgotten about that.

This was getting crazy. I had to calm down. I had to refocus and think logically. Scratch was probably long gone. He had a ten-day head start. He was probably a million miles away in Canada, or Mexico. And he was smart. Wherever he was, they would never find him.

What about witnesses? Who else was at Paranoid that night? The two friends of Scratch’s. They would remember me. Paisley was the girl’s name. And the other guy. I didn’t remember his name. Maybe I never knew it.

More importantly: Did I tell them my name? No, I did not. Did I tell them I had a car? No, I lied and said I didn’t. Did I tell them where I lived? No, I did not.
I didn’t tell them anything because I was afraid of them and I didn’t want them to know who I really was.
Okay, but would they remember what I looked like? Probably not—I was a Prep, completely ordinary; I looked like a million other high-school students.

But what if Scratch went back there? What if they were all together somewhere? And what if
they
get scared and decide to blame it all on me, to protect themselves?

It was a terrible night. I lay in bed, my brain spiraling downward, faster and faster, every possibility I could think of, every course of action, it would all end in disaster. I could feel the weight of it destroying me. No matter what I did, I had killed someone. There was no escaping that. Someone would tell, someone would remember me, something would go wrong. And then the police would come.

I thought about the police. It was really my fear of them that had stopped me from doing anything. But why didn’t I trust the police? And why was I so quick to think of myself as a criminal? Why was I so sure this would all somehow go against me?

I had a revelation then, lying in bed in the dark:
I was a bad person.

I was. I realized it all at once. That explained everything.
Character is fate.
My English teacher had written it on the board at the beginning of school. I had a bad character, I was a bad person, and now my fate had caught up to me.

In my mind I went through every bad thing I had ever done. I’d lied to people, I’d stolen stuff, I beat up Howie Zimmerman in fourth grade. I threw a shopping cart in the Clackamas River my freshman year. I kicked the side mirror off a car once when I’d crashed skateboarding. The list was endless. It covered every stage of my life.
I had just that weekend had sex with a girl I didn’t even like!