Spontaneous (24 page)

T
here were only a few weeks left before graduation when I discovered the squeaky clean underbelly of our seedy school. I was skipping Dodd's Bible-thumping session and stumbling toward the beach when I noticed a light on in a former bio lab. Donations had brought improvements to the building—refurbished theater, cafeteria, and bathrooms were the main ones—but all classes continued to be held in four rooms: Rooms the First and Second, and Rooms the Third and Fourth, which had been added in April. Other rooms were occasionally used for trysts and miscellaneous mischief, but that was always under the veil of darkness.

So when I entered the bio lab to investigate the suspicious brightness, what I found truly shocked me. A dozen students sitting at desks, hunched over test sheets. Skye Sanchez was there. So were Malik Deely and Laura Riggs. Even Dougie O'Shea was hard at work, penciling in bubbles. These weren't necessarily the
smartest kids or the biggest do-gooders, but there was one quality they shared. They could all be accused of having ambition.

School Board President Louise Mender was slumped in the corner, contemplating a word search, doing the duties of a proctor. When she saw me, she put a finger to her lips, then motioned with her chin to an empty desk. At the next desk over, an unmistakable set of bangs hung over a face that was twisted up in concentration.

“Tess!” I hollered.

As Tess's head shot up, Mender's crooked finger shot out. “If you're going to cause a ruckus, then vamoose!”

Which I did. I had no other choice. Shocked by the studiousness I had witnessed, I vamoosed. Vamoosed like hell. I needed the beach more than ever. Sure, there was usually some variety of shenanigans going on there, but it was as close to tranquil as school got. There was always a dune to hide behind, always sand on my skin, always a shimmering dimness.

When I got there, I plopped down and tried to process what I'd seen. It was an AP exam, obviously, because what other exam would a senior take? What I found so mysterious was that I didn't know it was happening. Had I heard and forgotten? Or had no one bothered to tell me?

Either way, it meant I was clueless, not only about what was going on with this school, but about what was going on with my best friend. In years past, Tess and I stressed over exams together, studied together, traded texts as soon as we exited testing rooms to reassure each other that we'd done better than we feared. It seemed such an inconsequential part of our friendship back then. But now? Huge.

I lay back in the sand and I wept for entirely too long. When I finished weeping, I closed my eyes and wondered. Not about where it all went wrong—because I was pretty sure I knew where that was—but about where it could possibly, ever, conceivably go right again. I wondered and wondered and wondered . . . until I heard something. Tess's voice.

“Hey, kid,” she said as she sat down next to me. “I thought you might be here.”

“Well, look who finally found her way to paradise?” I grumbled as I opened my eyes, sat up, and wiped off my shoulders.

Tess kicked her shoes off and put her toes in the sand. “I'm sorry,” she said.

“For what?”

“For not being there for you.”

I shrugged. “You gave it a shot. But I pushed you away. Now I'm trying to figure out what I pushed you into? An AP physics exam?”

“History,” she said. “Physics is tomorrow.”

“So what have you been doing? Studying this whole time? This party not good enough for you?” I motioned to the mounds of sand and to the pool and its wobbly turquoise glow, to the cigarette butts and the empty bottles, to the bikini tops dangling from the graffiti-riddled lifeguard chair.

“I never judged you and the others for how you've been dealing. Some of us are simply focusing on other things. Doing all it takes to move on.”

Then she handed me something. A warm, leathery book with a cover design that resembled a cereal box, but instead of pieces
of cereal, it had small, square pictures of my classmates, piled together in a bowl, a breakfast of smiling faces.

Quaker Life
was the title. It was our yearbook.

I knew Tess had served on the committee prior to The Event, but I didn't know the committee had actually stuck with it afterward. I flipped the book open and began to browse. The dedication at the beginning took up thirty-something pages. A page for every victim. The profiles were glossy and glowing and more or less bullshit.
A rebel with a heart of gold
was printed beneath a goofy still of Dylan that the editors had screencapped from one of the videos.

“The caption wasn't my idea,” Tess said. “I wanted to ask you how you thought he should be remembered but—”

“This is fine,” I said. “What I want shouldn't matter.”

I kept browsing. One small section featured the portraits taken on Picture Day (back before The Event) but only a handful of candids commemorated our peaceful era of learning. Mostly it was our unhinged finale. In fact, the yearbook barely showed teachers or classes or anything that resembled school. Beer bongs beat out Bunsen burners, and to the casual viewer this would have appeared to be a meticulously documented kegger, not a tribute to our education. It was meant to seem celebratory, but to me it seemed sad, and I felt guilty about the massive part I had played in it. It also didn't help that almost all the pictures of yours truly showed me passed out or in the process of passing out, a bottle always nearby.

“They were going for a certain vibe,” Tess said. “I mean, it's what people were taking pictures of and what they said they wanted to
remember. Our perseverance. And I'll freely admit, I was too busy with other things to veto any inclusions.”

“It's fine,” I told her. “It tells the truth. It is what it is.”

“Go to the end.”

I flipped through the final third of the book until I saw it. A full page covered in an old snapshot of me and Tess. We were sitting on the back deck of my house brandishing smiles of pure, if temporary, happiness. The gaps in our teeth told me this was from third or fourth grade, probably not long after Tess's dad took off. Below the picture, Tess had written a message.

We made it
.

I ran my hand across the image, as if I were petting these two innocent girls, imploring them to not give a single thought to their futures. “We're not quite there yet,” I said.

“We will be,” Tess replied.

I closed the book and tucked it under my arm. I was thankful to have it, if only just for that one picture, but I wasn't sure what it was supposed to mean. Was Tess telling me to be proud? Or embarrassed? Was I supposed to be happy or heartbroken to leave this all behind?

“So have you become like my dad and Skye and everyone else?” I asked. “Are you clinging to the hope that it's all going to stop at graduation?”

“No,” she said. “Because that's not science. Science says there's a way to solve this, and I'm working on that. I've been reading about Amur leopards.”

“As one does,” I snarked.

“I'm serious,” she said. “Amur leopards are very rare and hard to
capture, but scientists have recently been keeping tabs on them, thanks to, you guessed it, tiny biological tracking devices.”

“It wasn't me who guessed it, but go on.”

Tess didn't even bother to roll her eyes. She just kept speaking to me in the calm cadence of a teacher. “The scientists start by putting the devices on the liver of the Manchurian wapiti, whose only predator is the Amur leopard. The Amur leopards gobble up the livers, like we gobbled up everything they gave us in the tents, and the devices implant themselves. Well, the bad news for Amur-leopard-tracking scientists is good news for us. A toxic waste spill in the Amur River, where the leopards drink from, effectively disabled the devices early last year. Stands to reason it would do the same to what's inside of us. Now, the chemical compound is hard to replicate, but I have some online friends in the Russian Far East and they've been willing to send me some jarred samples.”

“So wait? You've been drinking toxic Russian river water?
That's
your solution?”

“That's
science
,” she said firmly. “I've been very careful about my intake. It's gross but it's hardly a risk. Besides, it's worth a risk. Because if I disable the tracking device, then I can leave. And if I leave, then maybe—”

I cut her off because I wasn't in the mood for maybe. “You wanna know something that isn't science?”

“What?”

“Our friendship. There's no logical reason we should be friends.”

Tess paused, as if this were something she'd never considered. Then she said, “Freshman year.”

“What?”

“Freshman year,” she repeated. “You and I sat right here. Well, not right here, but close to here, in the bleachers somewhere. We watched a swim meet. Do you remember that?”

“Vaguely,” I said, which had become my go-to answer regarding memories.

“So you don't remember what you said?”

I shrugged. From over the dunes arose a gasp of pleasure. The lure of a shirtless boy had worked on someone.

“We were watching the kids swim back and forth,” Tess went on. “And you said, ‘That isn't a race down there. That's timed survival.'”

“So I was clever,” I said as I stood and stretched my legs.

“Yes, you were, and you still are,” Tess replied, and she tugged on my skirt like she wanted me to sit back down. “High school is basically
timed survival.
But you know the reason it's survival and not certain death? It's because there are edges to the pool. There are ways out. You've been an edge to my pool for as long as I can remember. Since my dad. Since . . . everything that's happened. With your humor, your devotion, your, well, just being you. You've been my way out. I hope I've been yours.”

“You're terrible at metaphors,” I said as I shook my leg to make her let go.

She relented, burying her hands in the sand and saying, “I'm telling you that I love you, but there's some stuff we really need to talk about. I hate to see you give up. You're destined for great things.”

Those words hit me hard, because I had seen who was actually
destined for great things—the kids back in the bio lab. No matter what their AP results said, these were the kids who would succeed. People like me were just standing in their way. So it was best for everyone if I came clean. But I couldn't bring myself to do that yet. Not in front of Tess.

“My destiny is to have another drink,” I replied as I made a visor with my hand and scoped out the easiest route through the dunes to the exit.

“Save the drink for prom,” she called out.

I paused. “What?”

“Next week. Saturday. It's happening.”

“So? You want me to help you pick out a dress or something?”

“No, because I'm too busy and I'm not going. But you should. Find yourself a boy to ask. Ditch all the guilt surrounding Dylan. I know it probably feels like you could have done something to stop it, but believe me, you couldn't. It's time to move on.”

I looked down, chuckled a little at how right and wrong she was, and said, “The only person's fate I can control is my own, huh?”

“Exactly,” she said. “So end the year on a high note. Go out and have a blast.”

No pun intended, I assume, and I'm sure she didn't realize how tragic her words could end up being.

“Thanks for the pep talk,” I told her as I set off into the dunes with the yearbook under my arm. “Maybe I'll try to be there, at least for a little while.”

Y
es, there was going to be a prom. Kids were going to shake their butts to Beyoncé and convince themselves it was the highlight of the year. Perhaps they'd even believe it.

The planning had gone on exactly like it had with the yearbook. Behind closed doors. Or at least behind doors that I didn't open. I was coming to realize that if you don't look for something, then you rarely find it.

The chosen venue was the Hotel Covington. Skye Sanchez's parents ran the place, and while it wasn't exactly one of those grand hotels of yesteryear, it was rather nice—a white pillared behemoth perched along the edge of the Patchcong River Gorge. It was ideal for a prom, and considering that the only people staying in it were a handful of reporters and weirdos still fascinated by the carnage, there was room to spare.

“As far as my parents are concerned, money is money, and thanks to crowdfunding we have enough cash in the kitty to cover
even the most exorbitant cleaning expenses,” Skye told me when I asked her what they might do about a bit of blood in the ballroom. “Besides, I'll be wearing washable shoes and bringing at least two backup dresses. I suggest you do the same.”

“I know I'm late to the game,” I said. “But can I pitch in somehow? Make sure the night is special for everyone?”

“Bring a bunch of Oinkers and I'll fix it so that you're prom queen,” Skye said. “Bring a bunch of Oinkers and a date? I'll make sure he's king. Unless you're going with Tess, that is.”

I shook my head. “I think our Tessy is sitting this one out. I'm flying solo.”

That's right. I wasn't taking Tess's advice about finding some new boy—I didn't want some new boy—but I was still taking her advice. I was going to prom. I had given this plenty of thought. Every time I had kept things to myself, it had ended badly. If not for me, then for the people around me. And I didn't have many people left around me. So it was time to confess. In front of the people I had terrorized. Once and for all. In formal attire. And whatever the consequences of that confession were, I was sure I deserved them.

When the evening finally came, I put on a simple green sundress, the type of thing that always inspired unsolicited compliments, which seemed preferable to rolling the dice and setting Mom and Dad back a few hundred on a frilly nightmare that would make people grimace and say “you look
amaaaaazing
,” through tightly clenched teeth. I wanted to look good, but if I was going to lay myself bare, then I also wanted to look like me.

“You are so goddamn pretty,” Mom said as she held her phone
up and I rocked from one foot to the other on our front steps. She was taking the standard prom shots, the ones that usually feature a tuxedoed fella, or at least a squad of chicks squealing and shouting to celebrate their singleness. But not this time.

“I'm only being myself,” I replied, my eyes on the dandelions that had started their yearly invasion on our lawn.

“We're glad you . . . that you have your wits about you right now,” Dad said.

Translation:
We're glad you're not totally obliterated at this moment
. Which I wasn't.

I looked up and told him, “I want to be sure I make the right decisions tonight.”

“That's wonderful to hear,” Mom said.

“We're sorry Dylan can't be here to share this special evening with you,” Dad said.

Special
evening? That would be a word for it. “Trust me,” I said. “Dylan would not have been into this scene.”

“Well, he was into you,” Mom said. “And who could blame him?”

I didn't want to talk about Dylan anymore, for obvious reasons. So I kissed both of my parents on their cheeks, and said, “You know that none of this was ever your fault, right? None of this will ever be your fault. I love both of you so much, and you've got so much to look forward to in life.”

Which made them cry, of course, but I wasn't going to stay around to watch that, because that's when my ride showed up. I left to go do what I had to do.