The Grievers (23 page)

If Karen said anything after that, I missed it.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the sleek, silver cat on the hood of Frank’s Jaguar creeping over my shoulder and slinking discreetly but decisively into view. When I turned to get a better look, Frank leaned forward to peer past his wife and give me a wave. His roof was down, his hair windblown but stylish, his sunglasses worth more than the car I was driving.

“Asshole,” I muttered.

“You
do
know our windows are open,” Karen said.

“Fuck,” I whispered, pounding the steering wheel. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“Charley?”

Why couldn’t I have been nicer to him? Why couldn’t I have been a better friend? Why couldn’t I have returned his calls or answered his emails? We were supposed to be like brothers—that’s what they always told us at the Academy. We were supposed to be a family. But all I had were a handful of vague memories of walking the halls with Billy and bitching about friends who didn’t know how to be friends, about teachers who pissed me off, about bands that had sold out, and TV shows that had stopped being funny.

When the light in front of us turned green, Frank took off and was already half a block ahead of me when my cell phone went off, taunting me with strains of the theme from
The Jeffersons.
Letting out an aggrieved, rumbling sigh, I hit the gas, and my Saturn lurched forward in a tired approximation of hot pursuit.

“If he thinks he’s getting to this thing before me,” I said, and my voice trailed off as I jerked my steering wheel to the left to avoid slamming into a parked car.

“Why does it matter?” Karen asked, gripping her seatbelt.

“It matters,” I said, though I knew it didn’t.

In my head, at least, I knew it didn’t matter. But in my gut, I had to beat Frank. Just once. Just to prove that I could. Sure, he had the better car, the better job, the better house, the better life, but if I could only make it to Billy’s memorial service before Frank did, then maybe it would prove once and for all that I was the better friend.

Seriously, I thought as I pressed a heavy foot to the gas pedal—fuck Frank if he thought he could tell me what I did and didn’t say to Billy about his haircut. Yeah, I took shots at him from time to time, but we all did, just like we all took shots at each other every chance we got. Because that was the whole point. That was the game and how it was played. You saw an opening and you took it. A failed test, a shitty car, an ugly tie, a festering pimple—even a bad haircut.

And, okay, what if I
did
ask Billy if he cut his hair with a sharp rock? It was funny because it was true. Compared to the moussed-up, slicked-back, butch-waxed, permanent press coifs we all used to wear back when we were kids, Billy’s fine, black hair was a throwback to an age before hairspray. Not that he needed me to humiliate him over it, but what was the point of going to a prep school if not to be tortured day in and day out by your closest friends? And it wasn’t just any prep school, either. It was
the Academy
, for Christ’s sake. The best damn school in the history of the universe.

By the time I caught up with Frank, he was stopped at a light that was about to go green, so I used the opportunity to rocket past him and take the lead. It was early in the morning, and the street was dead. The few shops that were still in business in this part of the city specialized in rent-to-own kitchen appliances and secondhand furniture. All the others were closed for good, windows covered over with newspapers, plywood, or thin layers of soap. Karen begged me to slow down, but it was no use. It wasn’t just Frank I was trying to outrun. It wasn’t even the ghost of Billy Chin so much as the memories of all the shitty things I’d ever done to him.

Junior year, for example. It was the sixty-fifth anniversary of Elvis Presley’s birth, and the tabloids had people sighting the King of Rock ’n’ Roll all over the country. Given that I was a cocky seventeen-year-old asshole with a clunky video camera and a complete lack of respect for anything, I thought it would be funny to shoot a documentary-style movie about the King’s return starring Billy as Elvis. The joke, I explained, would be that nobody would say a word about the fact that Elvis was a skinny Asian kid who played the flute. It wasn’t until I finished running the plan by him that I realized I might as well have called him Rice Dick. His eyes drifted down toward his scuffed black shoes, and his skinny hands twitched at his sides. Was that how I saw him, the look on his face demanded? As the punch line to a joke?

But the joke wasn’t on him, I wanted to say. It was on Elvis. Or his fans. Or all the people who believed he was coming back. That Billy played the flute was just the icing on the cake. Couldn’t he see the humor in that? Elvis Presley returning from the grave as a flautist? A Chinese flautist, no less? Which, the more I thought about it, made me realize that the joke came back to the fact that Billy was Asian, so I dropped the whole subject and told him I was only messing around. Anyone who knew me was also aware of the fact that I’d never follow through with something so ambitious as a documentary, even a fake one, even one shot on my parents’ VHS recorder. So what if I’d already written the script? So what if it called for Billy to deliver his lines like Charlie Chan? Did that mean I was a racist? Did it make me an asshole? Did it put me in the same league as Frank Dearborn?

I barreled past a public high school and a bright yellow sign warning me to watch out for children. The traffic was getting heavier now, the city more dense with bars and gas stations, so I took a sharp left and roared through the underpass that ran beneath the railroad tracks that cut a gash through the city like the stitches running up the length of Billy’s wrist.

He was going back to school for computers, he said the last time I saw him. Because working as a pharmacist? The hours alone were enough to make him—

He shook his head but never finished the thought.

It was New Year’s Eve. Everyone was there. Neil and Madeline. Dwayne Coleman and Sean Sullivan. Even Greg Packer, if only to hit on Karen, and Anthony Gambacorta to sabotage my cell phone. There was music. There was drinking. There were occasional snatches of something approaching wit. On television, there was the countdown, but the volume was low because the ball wouldn’t drop for at least another hour. Beyond that, I couldn’t remember.

I couldn’t remember what song was playing.

I couldn’t remember what food we served.

I couldn’t remember what I was drinking or wearing or even what I was thinking when Billy told me that he was going back to school for computers.

All I could remember was what I said next:

Computers? Jesus, Billy, I’d rather be dead!

I wasn’t being serious.

I didn’t mean it literally.

I just meant that I could never learn code or sit at a computer for hours on end.

What I meant was more power to him, but it came out all wrong, so I laughed to let him know that I was really only kidding, and Billy half-laughed, half-smiled, half-looked at his wrist as if to check the time, as if to make sure I saw his stitches, and said that he was sorry but he had somewhere to be.

Could I have stopped him? Maybe.

Could I have insisted that he stick around? Sure.

But the point is I didn’t, and now here we were.

“Charley, slow down,” Karen said, not for the first time.

Twists and turns. Dips and rises. I roared past a massive open air amphitheater, straddled two lanes as I slowed incrementally out of respect for a Japanese tea garden, revved my engine again as I thundered past a glass-domed art museum that had long since been converted to a municipal office building. All the while, Frank hung tight behind me while Karen closed her eyes and drew one sharp breath after another.

A left turn in front of opposing traffic and two blocks later, Frank and I were neck and neck, rumbling over broken stretches of asphalt. Up ahead, the imposing stone walls of the Academy loomed over the neighborhood, the polished white façade of the Church of Saint Leonard gleaming in the morning sun. If I ran a pointless stop sign and went the wrong way down a one-way street, I could beat Frank hands-down, so I took the turn and blew past a stoopedover old woman in giant sunglasses who was pushing a small grocery cart along the sidewalk. Passing under the stone archway that opened into the Academy’s courtyard, I slammed on the brakes and screeched to a halt in the faculty parking lot mere seconds before Frank arrived.

“I win, motherfucker!” I shouted, shaking a finger in his direction as I leapt from my car. “I win!”

Billy’s face hung larger than life on either side of the church entrance—a real Chairman Mao look, just like the Kibble King had promised. Nazis marched in loose formation in front of the school as a man in a monkey suit unloaded an inflatable trampoline from the back of a truck. Greg’s mother was snapping photographs and cooing at everything she saw, but Billy’s parents just stared at me, mouths agape, from the steps of the church as my cell phone went off one last time.

“Jesus,” I said.

I took an uneasy step backward and slumped against my car.

I sank to the ground and drew my knees to my chest.

Vaguely aware of the people gathering around me, I rocked back and forth and wished the world would go away.

“Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped,” Neil said to Karen, emerging from the small crowd and reaching for my wrist as if to take my pulse.

“Neil?” I said, slightly dazed. “Can you do me a favor?”

“Sure thing, pal,” Neil said. “Whatever you want.”

“Can you destroy my cell phone?”

“Consider it done,” Neil said.

“Oh, and there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”

“Go for it,” Neil said.

“I’ve never actually seen a Marx Brothers movie.”

“Well, yeah,” Neil said. “That’s pretty obvious.”

“You knew?” I asked.

“Of course I knew. I’ve known since tenth grade.”

“You could have told me,” I said.

“Nah,” Neil said, extending a hand to help me up. “It was more fun to watch you fake it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY  

“T
here’s our guy,” Ennis said, smiling broadly and reaching out to shake my hand as I scanned the church for an empty pew.

The man was old, I realized—much older than I usually pictured him. In my mind, he was always my biology professor, a looming presence in a powder-blue lab coat who took no end of pleasure in reminding me that I couldn’t skin a cat to save my life. But here, in the flesh, I noticed for the first time how much his face appeared to droop and sag despite his best efforts to maintain a stiff upper lip, how cold and bony his hands felt when he wrapped his fingers around mine, how rigidly he walked, how often he stopped to catch his breath.

“I’ll have you know that none of this would have happened without Charley,” Ennis said, winking conspiratorially at Karen. “Your husband’s a real go-getter.”

“Not to mention a maniac behind the wheel,” Frank said, clapping Ennis on the shoulder. “Our boy Schwartz could probably drive for NASCAR.”

My first instinct was to say something biting in response, but what would it accomplish? We’d been playing this game for so long, making wisecracks and coming up with clever comebacks until we were blue in the face, and where did it get us? I was twice as old as the child I’d been when Frank talked me into making goofy faces for our freshman portrait, but I was still behaving as if no time had passed at all. If I were still fourteen, I’d probably think it sounded like the greatest thing in the world—like hanging on to my youth forever, like always being cool, like never selling out. At twenty-eight, it was nothing short of pathetic.

So I played along with Frank and Ennis—chuckling awkwardly at the joke about my driving, accepting praise for turning Billy’s memorial service into a three-ring circus—and when the time came for me to say a few words, I took a breath and shuffled, weak in the knees, up the long, marble aisle that ran the length of the church. My anger over Billy’s death still tickled the back of my throat like a nagging cough, but when I took to the rostrum and reached for the microphone, all I could do was remind myself to breathe.