“I don’t owe you a conversation,” Regan spat.
Or maybe she could climb down and just kiss me instead. I’m a guy. I don’t need her words. I need her tongue. And I confess I fantasize about—
The entry stopped dead. No period. Incomplete.
“Damn,” she said, though she wasn’t altogether certain she wanted to read a teenage boy’s sexual fantasies about her. She liked the pedestal talk much better.
On and on she read, listening every now and then for movement near her bedroom door. She laughed and cried at his words, learning about an anguished boy who just wanted to be left alone. He didn’t even need a friend, if they would just leave him alone. Her name popped up frequently, and those were the moments her guilt roared, demanding she stop intruding where she didn’t belong. “You have no right!” the guilt fired along her synapses, and she shook her head to scatter the words—confuse her brain. She couldn’t stop. She wouldn’t.
Brandon Whittaker needs a bullet between his eyes . . .
***
Jeremy tore through his locker, tossing books and notebooks left and right. He dropped to the floor and picked through everything, praying for a glimpse of red to erase the growing panic. No red. He searched again, this time carefully and deliberately stacking his books in one pile, his notebooks in another. No red.
“I left it at home,” he said. “That’s where it is.”
He flew out of the building and ran all the way to his front door. It wasn’t far, but he stood with his hands on his knees anyway, panting hard, trying to regulate his heartbeat. He knew his father was inside, and he knew there would be payback for this morning.
He backed away from the door and crept around the side of the house to his bedroom window. He left it unlocked. Always. For easy escape. He slowly pushed up the sash, listening intently for any movement inside the house. None. He slid the wooden crate below the window and hoisted himself up, wriggling through the small opening and falling as soundlessly as he could onto the hardwood floor. He waited, holding his breath. No sound.
He snuck around the nearly empty room, searching every crack, every hiding place. He found the old carton of cigarettes he stole years ago. An abandoned comic book. A crusty, old comb.
He checked the closet a third time before forcing himself to face reality: the journal wasn’t in his room. The journal wasn’t in his locker. Somewhere in the space between escaping home this morning and visiting his locker a final time at the end of the school day, he’d lost it. Someone may have thrown it away. Someone may have taken it to the lost and found in the office. Someone may have kept it and was reading it now—all his secrets. All his anger. All his resolve. The thought of this infringement sent him into a rage, and he grabbed his desk chair, hurling it across the room where it crashed against the far wall.
“Goddamnit!” he screamed, echoing his father’s favorite curse word when he was drunk and impudent. “Goddamnit!” he yelled again, flinging the table lamp that fractured into a million yellow pieces—stars that fell from heaven and lay lifeless, hopeless on an un-swept floor.
He grunted and grabbed the desk, flipping it over, thinking absurdly of Jesus in the temple, tossing tables and destroying the wares of greedy sinners. He thought of the person who was sinning against him now—the person violating him over and over with every turn of the page. Absorbing his words. Committing them to memory. Storing them away for retaliation.
That somebody would tell the administration at school. Maybe call the police. Jeremy would be escorted to the station, questioned up and down. He’d be arrested for conspiracy to commit a crime. Locked up. Maybe taken to a mental health facility. They’d force pills down his throat. They’d ask him to explain why. They’d try to make sense of his decision based on his home life. They’d blame his father. They’d justify it. They’d make excuses for him, say it’s not his fault. “If you promise to take your pills, we’ll let you go,” they’d say. He’d nod. They’d let him out in a few years. And he’d come back, strapped from top to bottom to shoot them, too.
“Oh God, oh God,” he cried, pacing his bedroom.
He thought about his plan. He thought about the guns in the safe. It wasn’t time. He knew it wasn’t time and yet he’d run out of it. If not now, then when would he get the chance? He heard the shuffling feet—knew his father stood in the doorway. He turned.
“What’s got you so upset?” his father asked.
Jeremy noted the bandage on the side of his face. It was identical to the shit job they did of his own bandage back in sixth grade.
“A lot of stuff,” Jeremy replied, still trembling with rage.
Mr. Stahl scratched his beard. “Well, that’s obvious.”
“Then why’d you ask?” Jeremy snapped.
Mr. Stahl whistled low. Jeremy said nothing.
“You wanna talk about it?”
Jeremy frowned. “With you? No.”
“You wanna talk about anything?”
“Why do you want me to talk to you?” Jeremy asked warily.
“I’m your father. I’m older. Wiser. Maybe I can help,” Mr. Stahl replied.
Jeremy’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head. “Seriously?”
Mr. Stahl cleared his throat. “Well, come on then and let’s have a beer. Nothing like a beer to set things right.”
Jeremy stared.
“You hear me?” his father asked.
“I split your eye open this morning,” Jeremy reminded him.
“I know that,” his father said. “You think I forgot?”
“So you plan to get me drunk and then beat the shit out of me,” Jeremy said. “I’m not stupid.”
“You got that all wrong,” his father replied. “I’m sitting down with my son to share a beer, man-to-man.”
Jeremy snorted. “I’m a man now ’cause I struck you?”
“That’s right,” Mr. Stahl replied. “You stood up for yourself, and that’s what men do.”