He looked less disappointed than personally affronted, like I’d just ruined his Murder, She Wrote moment: Insightful bystander unveils dark truth behind hideous crime.
Even to people who gave Craig more credit than I did—maybe especially to them—the suicide was a puzzle to be solved. He’d been a good boy, and everyone knew good boys didn’t do bad things like that. He’d been a high school point guard with a winning record and a blow-job-amenable girlfriend: Logic dictated joy. There must have been extenuating circumstances, people said. Drugs, maybe, the kind that made you run for a plate glass window, imagining you could fly. A game of Russian roulette gone wrong; a romantic suicide pact reneged; the summons of darkness, some blood magic that seduced its victims on the devil’s night. Even the ones who accepted it as a straightforward suicide acted like it was less personal decision than communicative disease, something Craig had accidentally caught and might now pass on to the rest of us, like chlamydia.
All my life, Battle Creek had reliably been a place where nothing happened. The strange thing that year wasn’t that something finally did. It was that, as if the town shared some primordial lizard brain capable of divining the future, we all held our breath waiting for something to happen next.
THANKS TO SOME AMBIGUOUS CAUSAL link the school administration drew between depression and godlessness, a new postmortem policy dictated that we spend three minutes of every homeroom in silent prayer. Craig had been in my homeroom, seated diagonally to my right, at a desk we all now knew better than to look at directly. Years before, during a solar eclipse, we’d all made little cardboard viewing boxes to stare up into the dark, having been warned that an unobscured view would burn our retinas. The physics of it never made sense to me, but the poetry did, the need to trick yourself into looking at something without really seeing it. That’s what I did now, letting myself look at the desk only during those three minutes of silent prayer, when the rest of the class had their eyes closed and their heads bowed, as if secret looking somehow didn’t count.
This had been going on for a couple months when something—nothing so bold as a noise, more like an invisible tap on the shoulder, an unspoken whisper promising this way lies fate—pulled my eyes away from the lacquered surface scuffed by Craig’s many etchings of cocks and balls, and toward the girl in the very opposite corner of the room, the girl I still thought of as new even though she’d been with us since September. Her eyes were wide open and fixed on Craig’s desk, until they weren’t anymore. They were on me. She watched me like she was waiting for a performance to begin, and it wasn’t until she rolled her eyes skyward and opportunity slipped away that I realized it was opportunity I’d been waiting for. Then her middle finger ratcheted up, pointing to the ceiling, to the clouds—unmistakably, to the Lord Our God in Heaven—and when her eyes dropped to meet mine again, my finger rose of its own accord in identical salute. She smiled. By the time our teacher called, Time’s up, her hands were folded politely together on the desk again . . . until she raised one to propose that school prayer, even the silent kind, was illegal.
Lacey Champlain had a stripper’s name and a trucker’s wardrobe, all flannel shirts and clomping boots that—stranded as we were in what Lacey later called the butt crack of western Pennsylvania—we didn’t yet recognize as a pledge of allegiance to grunge. The new kid in a school that hadn’t had a new kid in four years, she defied categorization. There was a fierceness about her that also defied attack, and so she’d become the two-legged version of Craig’s desk, best glimpsed only from the corner of your eye. I looked at her head-on now, curious how she managed to weather Mr. Callahan’s infamously fearsome glare.
“You have some problem with God?” he said. Callahan was also our history teacher, and had been known to skip over entire decades and wars in favor of explaining how carbon dating was nonsense and all the coincidental mutations in history couldn’t account for the evolution of the human eye.