The Body of Christopher Creed (3 page)

He jerked his head three times down the row, to mean Ryan, Pat, and Eddie. Ryan was the drummer in our group. Pat and Eddie doubled on synthesizer and lead guitar, whichever we needed, and Alex played bass. I was better at acoustic guitar but could switch off to lead. We were almost good enough to have gigs, but not quite.

"We had, uh ... something has happened," Reverend Harmon said over our heads, and I guessed he was finished with the announcements. My eyes floated up off my sneakers as he went on. "Some of you know already that the son of Ron and Sylvia Creed—Christopher Creed—disappeared from school on Thursday and hasn't been seen since."

I felt myself, like, float and drop for a second. There had been some talk in school Friday morning—because a cop car had showed up ourside the main entrance, and two police officers were seen going in with Mr. and Mrs. Creed. No announcements had been made over the loudspeaker, and gossip came down from who-knows-where-it-started that Chris had run away. It was just kids talking, along the lines of "
Where did that twerp get the nerve to take off?" "With his el-strict-o parents, who would have thought he had the guts? " "If I were him I would have run away from this school ten years ago, man. Nobody ever cut him a break.
"

Reverend Harmon went on: "The Creeds have asked to say a word to all of you this morning, and I certainly think that's appropriate ... very appropriate."

I heard the clicking of high heels on the tile floor. It was loud. But Mrs. Creed always had that loud, here-I-come sort of stepping. I saw out of the corner of my eye that Mr. Creed was with her, but his rubber soles hardly made any noise. He was a silent-but-deadly type of grown-up you would no sooner speak to than kick. He was stiff and stern, almost like an old man caught in a middle-aged guy's body. Mrs. Creed did all the talking, usually. He did all the frowning.

Even that day, she came up to the podium while he stood behind her. She cleared her throat a time or two.

"First we'd like to thank all of you who helped search the woods and the creek area yesterday," Mrs. Creed said in this quieter-than-usual voice. "We thank you for ... putting our worst fears to rest. We still believe our Christopher is out there ... somewhere...

Meaning he wasn't
dead.
I tried to look at her, but it was hard. By Friday afternoon this rumor had leaked out that he might have committed suicide, not run away. Probably a lot of kids thought that was really sad, but you heard loudly from the ones who thought it was a riot. At football practice guys were placing bets on how he might have done it. It ran the range of taking an overdose of cafeteria food to swallowing a bunch of plastic explosives he made with his chemistry set. Someone said he had sex with Mary Carol Banes, who could stand to lose about four hundred pounds, and systematically crushed himself. Stupid stuff. It's like there were too many one-liners about it, and I wondered if I was the only one who kept wanting to flinch. I had this thought as I came out of the locker room that night:
This kid who's been around since kindergarten is, like, missing, and it's this matter of principle that we have to laugh? What is up?

"We really appreciate all you've done, but we still need your help. If anyone knows of any reason why ... Christopher would run away..." Mrs. Creed paused. The silence was followed by this huge shifting of bodies in the pews. I guess it was because even Mrs. Creed was circling around the circumstances, which were more than weird.

Chris had supposedly been in the library on Thursday, using the Internet. After school, when the principal, Mr. Ames, was downloading his e-mail, he got a note signed
Chris Creed.
At first they thought it was a runaway note, but by Friday they were saying it could be a suicide note. The note had been very unclear. The grown-ups got together and searched the woods on Saturday, but nobody could find so much as a hair from Chris Creed's head. So, Mr. and Mrs. Creed were hanging on to the term
runaway
with hope.

I got the feeling, seeing the grown-ups squirm, that they wanted to believe the Creeds. In Steepleton parents constantly hagged on their kids about how expensive it is to live here, and how parents make sacrifices so their kids can go to a school where they aren't exposed to violence and terrible stuff. In Steepleton you could ride your bike to the Wawa—our only convenience store—and leave it out front without a padlock. You could always meet your girlfriend after dark because there wasn't any reason for a mom or dad to say that a girl couldn't walk around outside after dark. Even the boons, the really bad kids, went back to the boondocks after school and kind of stopped existing to us until school the next day. Kids from Steepleton played sports, joined clubs, applied to out-of-state colleges, got cars for graduation. There wasn't much to commit suicide over ... if you were looking at surface stuff like that.

But even Steepleton had its weird kids, and Chris had been one of them. I think the worst thing about him was his undying combo of big mouth and huge grin. He seemed to forget from one day to the next who he had pissed off. He'd come bounding up to the same kids who had told him yesterday to get lost like he was their best friend. Like his entire track record as an annoying person didn't exist. In my whole life I had never met another person like Creed.

"We ... certainly don't have any reason to believe that Chris would run away." Mr. Creed had taken his wife by the shoulders and spoken over her left ear. "But that thought is,
er,
a preferable alternative to anything more pressing, and,
er,
sinister..."

His mouth was dry or pasty so that every syllable had this
m'yam-m'yam-m'yam
sound behind it. I watched his mouth, feeling kind of grossed out yet hypnotized.

"...though any decision Chris made was always grounded, quite normal, not a radical type of this,
er,
nature."

"That's right." Mrs. Creed nodded.

Reverend Harmon put his arms around the Creeds' shoulders and bowed his head to pray. I was supposed to have my head bowed, but I forgot, studying Mr. and Mrs. Creed with their bowed heads.

I was thinking,
This hard-stepping mom and this pasty-mouthed father are as clueless as two aliens. Chris Creed is about as "grounded" and "normal" as a chimpanzee. How could people live their whole lives with their kid and not know this?

By the time high school rolled around, most of us had grown out of beating kids up because they were obnoxious, and we hadn't beat on Chris in a year or so. But we had a new group of kids to deal with when we got to the bigger school.

The boons are the kids who come to our school from a certain area in the Pine Barrens on the Mullica River, which we call the boondocks. I'm sure there are lots of boondocky places in the continental United States, each with its own version of boons. In our boondocks, the kids are generally the pickup truck, long hair, muscle shirt, and motorbike crew that we just try to look through in the halls.

The boons weren't above busting somebody up still, if the kid was weird and had a big mouth. One really scary boon—an enormous dude named Bo Richardson—had pushed Chris off the top bleacher in the gym the year before and set him on crutches for a few weeks. Those boons could be scary, but we still blamed Chris as much as we blamed them. He was as weird as they were charged up.

Reverend Harmon went right from the prayer into the Apostles' Creed, and the voices behind me started with the usual droning echo.

I believe in God, the father Almighty,
Maker of heaven and earth...
And in Him, Jesus Christ, His only son, our Lord ...

I might have gotten stuck on the crucifixion, but I had never given any thought to the Apostles' Creed or why we said this thing week after week. It was just something "normal" that we said. And the normalcy of it got me looking at the Creeds like they were normal people again, and if they could watch their kid for fifteen years and see him as normal, I guessed it didn't matter. It's just the way things are. Things don't have to be sane when they're normal.

Alex and Ryan
came from church with me, and we hung out in my basement, waiting for the Kyles to show up for practice. My dad had stopped at Wawa and gotten a bunch of "shorties"—that's a six-inch hoagie—and we were mowing down on them in silence. Ryan sat at his drum set. He would take a huge bite off the hoagie, put it down on my amp, pick up his drumsticks, and go
ba-ba-dee-ba-ba-dee-bay-bo-bam-boo-ssssssttttt,
ending with the cymbal.

It grated on my nerves. With one huge mouthful, he got up, then crouched and tiptoed toward the game closet. He grabbed the knob and jumped back as the door flew open. He stared at the games and then turned to us, swallowing food.

"Uh. He's not in there." He cracked up and then looked miffed as I rolled my eyes. Ryan's dad was chief of police. Sometimes I wondered if he hadn't heard too much gore from his dad, which left him kind of heartless.

"Dudes," he went on, "aren't you scared he's going to, like, show up hanging by the neck on your property? Or you're going to open the laundry chute and watch him spill out, all bloody from a bullet through his brain? He did it
somewhere. Somebody's
going to find the spoil—"

"My dad says something about very sensitive people committing suicide in water," Alex put in. His dad was a shrink. "You watch. Next spring sometime, somebody's going to whip back the tarp on their swimming pool, clear away the brown water, and see Creed with a cinder block roped around his chest. His eyeballs, like, totally rotted through."

"I think he jumped off the dam, and that's why nobody can find the body. It hasn't bloated up, risen to the surface yet," Ryan said enthusiastically. He made some laugh that went, "
hck ... hck ... hck.
"

Half of me wanted to laugh because it made the whole thing seem less mind-blowing. But the other half couldn't get rid of this thought that a kid I knew might have slashed his wrists or hung himself. It was making me want to call my girlfriend, Leandra, and tune these dudes out. Leandra went to a holy roller church, which could be a pain, because she could go off about things like the devil being real and stuff that could make you twitch. But I knew in this case she'd go on about kids who died, going up to heaven, and how Creed was probably very happy—if he had died.

I kept getting this picture in my head of Creed in the sixth grade, the one time I truly whaled on him. I had only hit about three kids in my whole life, so I remembered it. He stared at me right after. Then blood came gushing from both his nostrils, like two spigots. I kept reliving those seconds between him looking so unglued and that blood gushing. I kept wondering if he felt pain. I wondered if I'd left him wishing he were dead.

"I've got it!" Ryan leaned forward enthusiastically. "He hung himself in the woods. And all those searchers were so busy looking on the ground that they never bothered to look
up.
Oh my god. His Converses were probably dangling, like, six inches above one of those searchers' heads, and they just never bothered to look
up.
"

"Yo, we're eating here," I reminded them. "You guys ever hit him?"

"Yeah, once," Alex said.

"Yeah," Ryan muttered. He'd probably lost count. "I think fourth grade was the big year for me. I remember noticing in fourth grade that Creed still sucked his thumb if he wasn't thinking of where he was. We used to catch him doing that, then torture the guy until he cried. It got to be a game with some of us, to see if we could make him cry. Hey, maybe getting hit all the time that year, like, knocked his brain sideways. I think that's what started it."

"
Mm-mm,
you're wrong," Alex said, staring at his half-eaten hoagie. "I hit him in second grade. He was on people's nerves even back then. I brought my Matchbox cars into school. Remember how I had, like, two hundred of them, all in the compartmentalized boxes?"

We grinned, and I rolled my eyes remembering all those cars. Alex used to line them up in the compartments by make and model.

"I remember feeling like King Popularity that day, doling out cars to all my little race-car fans. We were going to make this huge track around the blacktop at recess. Creed kept standing there going, 'You know, there's lead poisoning in those cars. You know, what you're doing is dangerous. You know, you should really seek a more
winsome
pastime.' I remember he used that word.
Winsome.
God. We got, like, five minutes into this broken-record routine, and I just nailed him."

Alex shrugged like it was the only acceptable thing to do. This sort of thing was always going on around Creed.

"I hit him in sixth grade," I told them, feeling some sort of relief at finally letting fly. "I had brought my new guitar to school. After gym I walked into class, and he was standing on a desk doing this Elvis routine with it. I saw the desk starting to rock under his sneakers. I took the guitar, calmly put it in the case, turned around, and just pounded him."

I looked from Ryan to Alex—mowing down on the hoagies around these stupid snickers—and I felt a little pissed off.

"You know, maybe we could talk without laughing about it?" I suggested. "I think we tortured the guy enough when he was alive,
If
he's actually dead."

"Dude, you're like a walking conscience." Ryan cackled. "Don't be so glum. Maybe he just ... ran away. Truth is, can you even see Creed doing something like sticking a gun to his head? Or knocking a stool out from under himself? He was obnoxious but such a wimp. It makes for a much more boring story, but maybe he just ran off. But
damn.
Wouldn't you just love to know what that note said?"

"Of course," Alex and I both mumbled. Everyone and their brother was dying to know what all Chris had written, so that you couldn't tell whether it was a runaway note or a suicide note.

Ryan got to laughing harder. "Who but Creed would send a suicide
e-mail?
A suicide ...
e-mail.
" He was cracking up so much, he didn't notice that Alex wasn't.