The Body of Christopher Creed (16 page)

Ali shrugged, kind of wide-eyed, and said, "Thanks, Torey. Thanks for everything."

I said, "You're welcome," but my voice kind of cracked.

I got in
the car with my dad and faked sleep so he wouldn't ask me stuff. I'm sure my mother had told him that something came down the night before, but the nurse told him my story—that I puked in the John—which gave me an advantage. He wouldn't nag at me if he thought I was sick, but I could feel discomfort wafting off him like a horrible smell.

I felt the bump of our driveway and opened one eye.

"Your mother's not in her office, so if you need her, call her on her cell phone," Dad told me, and I nodded. "She'll be late. She's doing something for that Richardson boy after she gets out of court."

I turned and looked at him. He was staring into the steering wheel, gripping it until his knuckles were white. He hadn't said it mean. He just looked like he was agonizing. I wanted to tell him I was sorry about getting hauled into the cop station. But I didn't want to admit to anything. I decided on something in the middle.

"Bo Richardson's not all bad, Dad. He's got a good streak that ... runs really deep. It's just not ... wide." Whatever. I was tired.

"Your mother said things like that." He let out one of his confused sighs. I grabbed my book bag, and as I opened the door, he let fly with another complete shocker. Up until this point, I had been ready to throw myself onto my bed and sleep. But what Dad said next changed my mind.

He said, "Your mother told me being charged with murder is not the Richardson boy's worry at the moment. Apparently the police told him they confiscated the phone receiver at the ball field to have it fingerprinted. Before they went to the trouble, he confessed to making that phone call. That call could cost him dearly."

I slammed the car door and headed for the house in a complete haze. I didn't even say good-bye. I figured that silence was the biggest lie I'd told so far.

I paced around the house. Bo hadn't even mentioned anything when we were standing outside with Ali. He knew I would go nuts on him. But I should have known he wouldn't let me hang. Now I could only sit around or pace until Ali came over and we figured out what to do about this.
Especially considering that phone call was
your
idea, Torey, you idiot.

I went clomping down to the basement and picked up my acoustic guitar and headed back up the stairs. The basement was spooky. I hadn't spent more than three minutes down there since that night I thought I was feeling Creed's ghost. I passed the kitchen window and decided it was too spooky to be in the kitchen, too. I didn't want to sit in there playing guitar near that window, where you could see the Indian burial ground.

I finally lay down on the living-room rug and stared at the ceiling, playing a bunch of scales and runs in that awkward position. I didn't care, the sound of my guitar made me calmer, somehow. Guitars are like "woobees." They're your security blanket. I lay there playing scales, trying to think about nothing at all.

Clearing my head of the morning, I remembered something that happened the year before, which I hadn't thought about since it happened. The memory just came back to me. I'd had my guitar in the cafeteria, and I was fooling with it for my friends at the table. I got into playing this one thing I had heard on the radio not long before. That was like a gift for me,
hearing
music.
Reading
music was not my gift, it was a pain in my ass. It was too much hard work. But since I could hear something on the radio and, like, see chords in my head, that made reading music seem even more worthless. At any rate, I played this thing I'd picked up on the radio. When I finished I looked up and there were about thirty kids standing around watching me.

They kind of applauded, and I felt dumb being caught off guard like that. My friends were used to me and didn't applaud—they usually just rocked and looked happy. But this weird thing caught my eye that made me forget about myself. These kids standing around weren't all from my neighborhood. Some were boons, some were from the middle-class neighborhoods like Leandra's, and some were from Steepleton. A couple were techies; one was a science nerd. I remember looking at all of them and feeling good about this guitar. It could bring people together, and it didn't matter where you were from.

The part I'd totally forgotten about was Bo Richardson. He had been standing there, too. As we were leaving the cafeteria he shoved me in the shoulder and said, "'S a nice box, man. You let me play it sometime?"

It's not like I was scared of him in that massive group of moving kids, but I remembered the time Creed picked up my guitar in sixth grade. I was funny about people touching my guitars, even Alex and Ryan.

I said to him, "You know how to be careful?"

He looked at me for a minute and then laughed. He said, "You know how not to be an asshole?" and he took off.

I didn't give it a thought at the time because he was always calling somebody an asshole, and I was no different. It didn't occur to me at that moment to think,
Bo Richardson plays guitar, too,
or,
He'd probably get a major thrill out of playing an Ovation because most people would, and I should share and just be cool.
All I thought was,
Sure, screw you, you're calling me asshole, well, what do you expect from that fool.

I shut my eyes and felt them kind of filling up. That's something the guitar could make me do once in a while. I'd play something really sad, and it would fill up my eyes, God knows why, except the music got me.

I sniffed and said out loud, "You know, it's a shame you can't write songs that aren't complete crap. You might be worth something, fool." But I was just telling myself some minor truth to try to get the bigger truth out of my head. Which was, there are all sorts of kids out there with bad luck. And I can't even consider them long enough to let them play my stupid guitar.

I almost jumped out of my skin as the phone rang. I grabbed for it in a haze, thinking it might be Ali. It was Leandra.

"Are you all right?" she asked me. "Somebody said you were throwing up. Y'all didn't look too good this morning."

"Yeah, I'm ... just laying low for now," I muttered.

"Are you crying?"

"No," I said quickly, but she kind of set me off into my craziness. "Leandra, where are you?"

"In the cafeteria. At the pay phone—"

"Leandra," I begged, "do you see Ali anywhere in there?"

I heard a long silence. Then, "No. She's not in here."

I sighed, and she went off, "Torey, what is up with you today? Alex says he knows all this stuff he can't tell. He seems really mad at you. Renee and Ryan are, too. Everyone says you're being really frigid, and Ryan and Renee said their dad hauled you into the station last night and you won't tell them a thing—"

"Leandra, this is really important. If you see Ali, can you tell her to call me? And then don't tell anyone I asked you that?"

The silence was long enough for me to realize I was sounding like a total bastard. I was refusing to tell my girlfriend something and then telling her to get a message to another girl. Deep thinker of the universe, I was too busy panicking to think.

"Torey, what is going on between you and Ali?" she demanded.

"Nothing! Nothing at all!"

"Torey, you cut out of school without even saying goodbye to me—after you've been at a cop station and you've been seen with Bo Richardson, Mr. Dirtbag. And then you can't tell me anything, but you send me off chasing after some turbo slut for you? What do you take me for?"

She was sniffing up tears. I was in shock. How could the truth in life be so opposite from what it looked like sometimes? I couldn't go past that.

It was pissing me off. I said, "Leandra, maybe, just maybe, Bo Richardson is
not
a dirtbag. And just maybe Ali is
not
a turbo slut. Did that ever occur to you?"

"Not from all you're telling me! I only hear what
other
people tell me!"

I don't know what came over me, but I flew out with, "So why do you waste your time running down to the Pentecostal church every Sunday if you come around on Monday calling people dirtbag and turbo slut?"

I heard her gasp, but I was pissed and continued, "What, you think someday you're gonna tell Jesus, 'Well, I called people dirtbag and turbo slut, but that's okay, folks! I was a virgin!'"

"You're crazy! You're ... insane." She hung up.

I clicked off the phone and laid it down next to my guitar. She was right. I was insane. And I totally didn't care. I walked down to the basement and just sat there in the middle of the floor, hoping Creed's ghost would materialize and come mess with me, haunt me, push me over the line to where I would see things. I must have sat down there for an hour. I didn't see a blessed thing.

Ali walked all
the way to our house after school, because she didn't want to get on my school bus and start more talk. She had on her army boots, which turned out not to be real leather. They were soaked through and sort of ruined, and she had these enormous bleeding blisters on her feet. While she sat on the bathtub ledge and soaked them, she told me that Bo had been charged with juvenile delinquency again, this time for making that phone call. I didn't think juvenile delinquency was such a big deal, then she explained to me that it is the only thing a minor can be charged with, even if he commits a murder. So, it could get bad. Depending on how Mr. and Mrs. Creed and the cops played it out, he could do up to six months in Jamesburg for the extortion part.

I swore to her that I would tell the truth, and that just made her wig further. She swore that if I confessed, she would call me a liar and confess to making the call herself. I didn't know what to do. We went into the family room, arguing about it.

Then the phone rang, and Ali was so wound up, she jumped ten feet in the air, then picked up without thinking. It was Leandra.

"Is that Ali McDermott?" she demanded when Ali passed the phone off to me in total panic. I didn't say no, but I didn't say yes. It was along the lines of, "Leandra ... please..." I just watched Ali's eyes rolling back in her head almost, because this was too much.

Leandra hollered through a sniff, "I guess I know who's been making Ali late for cheerleading practice every day!"

It wasn't like I could say it was Bo Richardson and not me. I said, "Leandra, that's bullshit!"

She just said, "Well, Ali's not here at cheerleading, and you're not at football practice, so—"

"I came home sick!" I defended myself.

"You went home guilty, that's what! No wonder you can't look your friends in the eye!" And she hung up.

I got my football practice in, anyway, because I had to tackle Ali in the from yard to keep her from running off. I lay on her chest and shushed her while she screamed, "I can't stay here! I can't stay here!"

After fifteen shushes, she cried a bunch, and I was afraid to get off of her until she stopped, for fear she'd take off into the woods. We lay like that for an eternity.

When she was finally just sniffing, she turned her head from keeping her face halfway in the grass and looked at me. "Torey?" she asked. "Do you ... think I'm a slut?"

I rolled off her on that note. I hadn't been wanting to think of her in terms of sex, but it's hard not to think that way when you're lying on some girl. I sat on the grass, staring at it, trying to catch a full breath.

"No," I said finally. "I think you're confused and ... pissed off."

She eased up some and sighed. "I don't know what I am. My mom has so many boyfriends, I wonder if it's genetic."

I didn't have a clue. I finally said, "If it were genetic—I mean, if it were something like you just get incredibly horny all the time—then it wouldn't make sense. I mean, it seems like your mom could have taken out horniness on your dad."

"It's got nothing to do with being horny," she told me. "God. I don't think I've ever been horny."

I always thought horny and sex went together like hungry and food.

"So, then ... what's up?" I pretended to be all interested in a blade of grass.

"I don't know. For one thing, I really love to piss off my dad. As flirty as my mom is? He's, like, the opposite. He's sort of pristine."

"So ... he knows?"

She looked at me like I was crazy. "No way! It would kill him. I want to piss him off for leaving me and Greg to cope with Mom. I don't want to send him into cardiac arrest or something."

"So ... what's the point?" I couldn't see how she planned to make him mad if he never even knew.

She sighed. "I guess it's just the point that
if he
knew. It makes me feel like laughing sometimes. It's like ... the only way in my life I've ever been mean to somebody."

"Ali..." I trailed off, thinking she was being a lot meaner to herself.

"Yeah, I know it's hard to understand," she admitted. "It's hard for me to understand, and I'm not even perfect like you."

"Christ's sake, Ali." I didn't feel like starting up on that again. My life wasn't perfect anymore, so she was going to start in on my character. No way. "You don't have a clue how weird I am. Nobody does. I'll lie on my bed for hours just thinking."

"Well, I don't think that's so weird," she said with a shrug.

"I do," I argued. "I mean, I'm not sleeping, I'm not moving. I'm just lying there, thinking. And it's about stuff that nobody else would care about."

"Like what?"

I shrugged, recalling the morning last week I woke up at six and lay in bed until seven.

"What it would feel like to be drawn and quartered between four horses," I confessed. I had seen some old movie on late-night, where this fifteenth-century guy had been tied between four horses. At the same time, the riders all took off galloping in four different directions. I had to lie there figuring the thing, from six until seven, where he got separated—at the waist or the legs or the arms—and how long he could have stayed conscious.

"God, that's terrible," Ali breathed. I guessed she knew what drawn and quartered meant.