Echo Page 9

  “You didn’t change your mind about coming today, did you?” she asked him.

  “No,” he said.

  “Okay.” But still she hovered a moment. Then she said quickly, “Just in case you change your mind, here’s the address.” She put a small invitation on the table that read, “Memorial for Mark Thomas.” Then, somewhat flustered, she hurried out the door.

  Justin and his father were left alone.

  There was a kind of vacuum left by his mother’s departure. They sat in silence, but Justin, with his strangely heightened senses, knew that in the silence they were both intensely aware of the other. It was a silence filled with anticipation, like the breath before speech.

  Finally his father lowered the paper. He spoke in a hearty, joking voice that was as false as Justin’s mother’s brightness.

  “So, do you think you can manage to stay out of trouble at school today?” he asked, with a smile tacked on to soften the words.

  “I told you before, it’s not me,” Justin retorted.

  “I know.” His father held his palms out, in a kind of apology. “I understand that. I know it’s not you. But could you maybe just try to avoid him? Just for today?”

  “Avoid him?” Justin’s voice climbed. “How am I supposed to do that? He’s in half of my classes.”

  “Well, just do your best. That’s all I’m asking. It’s just that if something happened today…I don’t think your mother could take it.”

  “I don’t know why you’re assuming that something is going to happen,” Justin said sullenly.

  “Just promise me.”

  Justin felt an unreasoning anger. Why couldn’t his father just leave him alone?

  “I want you to promise,” his father repeated, almost pleading.

  He saw that his father wouldn’t leave off until he got his stupid promise. But you couldn’t force a promise out of someone, Justin thought. And if you tried, you deserved whatever you got.

  “Okay. I promise,” Justin said, taking an almost perverse satisfaction out of the knowledge that the promise wasn’t going to do his father a bit of good.

  29

  Justin almost missed the bus. When his father finally left for work, Justin had to clean the spots of blood on the floor and put some peroxide and Band-Aids on his hand. He almost forgot his bag, and had to go back for it. By the time he jogged, huffing, up to the stop, the bus was already pulling up.

  The doors opened, and Justin climbed the treaded steps. Pausing to check for empty seats, he noticed that this time the whole bus wasn’t staring at him like they had before. Sure, there were a few kids who looked. But all of them, the moment he caught their eye, looked quickly away.

  Justin started walking down the aisle. When the bus lurched forward and he stumbled—for the third time—he thought ironically how this seemed to disprove that old saying that you could learn from your mistakes. That didn’t appear to be part of the rules of this strange day. He wasn’t actually able to change or avoid anything—yet nothing was exactly the same twice.

  This time it wasn’t the embarrassing near-crash of before; it was only a little misstep. And instead of the whole bus breaking into shrieks of laughter, it was only one kid who started to giggle, a nervous kind of laugh.

  Justin glared at the skinny, undersized freshman who was the source of the noise, and the kid cut off that laugh so fast you might have thought Justin had hit some sort of mute button. The kid looked positively scared, Justin realized with satisfaction. But Justin didn’t get to enjoy the feeling for long.

  Walking down the aisle, looking for an empty seat, Justin paused next to a girl sitting alone. He recognized her—and then he didn’t. She had the same long, silky blond hair. But in the other versions she had been pretty. Now as he looked, he could see that she had braces, and pimples dotting her cheeks and forehead.

  “You can sit here if you want,” she said quickly, as soon as she felt his gaze on her, and she reached over to move her bag out of the way. In her reaction Justin sensed the same tinge of fear he had seen in the other boy’s face; but the fact that a girl was scared of him didn’t make him feel powerful. It made him feel like a monster. And, somehow, it made him act like one too. He heard himself saying viciously, “I wouldn’t sit there if you paid me, pizza face.”

  The kids near enough to overhear started to laugh.

  The girl turned her face away quickly, trying to pretend like she didn’t care, but Justin knew better—because he’d spent so much time feeling just the same way. He knew all about knowing that you weren’t quite “right,” that you didn’t fit in, that everyone was staring and pointing and laughing. And now, he thought bitterly, here he was, doing it to someone else.

  Justin hurried past the girl and slid into an empty seat at the back of the bus, but he couldn’t get it out of his mind. He wondered if it was like a kind of chain: You felt this way, and that made you turn and attack someone else and pass along the feeling, and they did the same, and on and on and on. It was like some sort of virus—one that you spread intentionally. He looked up, and out of the window he saw the building that was like a petri dish for the virus.

  They had arrived at school.

  30

  The bus pulled up, and Justin waited until all the other kids had gotten off before reluctantly getting up and shuffling to the front of the bus. He paused at the top of the steps.

  The bus driver said, “I know how you feel, kid. I’d rather go back to prison than have to go back to high school.”

  “I didn’t know you could drive a school bus with a criminal record,” Justin said.

  “Yeah, well, don’t tell anyone. But personally I think it should be a requirement,” the bus driver replied.

  Justin smiled.

  “If I had to go back to high school, you know what I’d do different?” the driver added, as Justin stood, still hesitating on the top step.

  “What?”

  The driver smiled. “I’d drop out.”

  The conversation was comfortingly, reassuringly the same as it had been twice before. It was like a pillar of stability, when the rest of the foundation of the day seemed to be shifting under him—until Justin stopped to wonder why, out of all the students, the bus driver had chosen to confide in him. The man wasn’t exactly the kind to comfort the underdog. You could tell that when he was in school he’d been more the type to beat up the underdog. That was part of the reason he’d gotten such immediate respect from the kids. So why had the man chosen him?

  With that unanswered question still in his mind, Justin climbed the hill to the school with a sense of foreboding.

  The hallway was packed with kids, but as Justin walked down the corridor, most of them tried their best to get out of his way. If they weren’t able to, Justin found himself roughly shouldering his way through. Before, he had been the one who was pushed and shoved, not the one who was doing the pushing and shoving. Hadn’t he?

  At that moment a younger boy stumbled, bumping into him. But it wasn’t like before. This time it was completely unintentional. The boy had been walking with a pack of friends, and one of them had mischievously knocked him into Justin’s path. But even having seen that, it didn’t stop Justin from giving the boy a shove that sent him flying. The boy dropped his bag, and books skidded out across the floor of the hallway.

  Justin stopped to watch the boy scramble to gather up his books. Hadn’t those been his own books before, scattered across the hallway?

  The other students, hurrying along, stepped on the books, and some even kicked the books on purpose as the boy tried to gather them together. The boy’s friends didn’t even try to help. They just stood there, cackling—doubled up and holding their stomachs—to emphasize how funny they found it all. When Justin looked, he could see that the boy was almost in tears.

  He turned away, only to be confronted by another, more familiar scene: Billy was shoving Daniel back into the lockers, saying, “Why are you such a faggot? Huh?”

  Ricky
put in his line, “Yeah. Fairy faggot. I heard you were looking at Billy’s ass in the locker room.”

  Unlike the boy scrambling to get his books, Daniel seemed unfazed by the situation. “That’s not true,” he replied.

  Ricky sneered, “I saw you. I saw you staring at his ass.”

  Daniel shrugged. “If I was, it was only ’cuz I couldn’t help staring at his ass pimples.”

  Billy lunged forward at this, grabbing Daniel by the shirt and slamming him against the lockers.

  “You’re dead,” Billy said.

  As Justin watched, the simmering anger he’d been feeling all morning boiled suddenly into rage.

  “No, he’s not,” Justin called out from where he stood.

  His voice was loud enough that everyone in the hallway turned around to look at him.

  “You’re the one who’s dead,” Justin said. He strode over, stopping a couple of feet away. “It looks like you’re having a fight with your boyfriend,” he sneered, looking at Billy.

  Billy quickly dropped his hands from Daniel’s shirt.

  “Don’t start with me, Justin,” he said, but it sounded more like a plea than a warning.

  “So I’m starting with you? What are you doing?” he said, looking at Billy, then pointedly at Daniel.

  “Don’t take his shit, Billy,” Ricky cried out.

  Billy ignored Ricky and spoke quietly to Justin. “This doesn’t have anything to do with you. So just back off, okay?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Justin said, but instead he took a step closer.

  “I mean it,” Billy said.

  “I’m sure you do,” Justin said, but his tone was mocking, sarcastic. And this time he took two steps forward, so he was standing right up in Billy’s face.

  Billy really had no choice. He gave Justin a rather tentative shove, but that was all that Justin needed—he retaliated with a body tackle, and they crashed back into the lockers. There was a hollow boom as the metal reverberated with the impact of their weight.

  Justin was only vaguely aware of the shouts from the other kids as he and Billy grappled for a hold. Billy’s mouth was right by his ear, and Justin could hear him breathing hard. And then he spoke. He said, “Justin, don’t. Listen, I’m sorry. Okay?”

  No one except for Justin heard Billy’s whispered words. Justin wished he hadn’t either. He wished he were back in the first version of the day, when the whispered words had been a threat rather than an apology. The apology ruined the pureness of his rage. Before Billy spoke, Justin had had the feeling of getting carried along on the crest of a powerful wave, a wave of righteous anger. But the apology had sent the wave crashing down—right on top of him.

  Even though Justin had the advantage, at Billy’s words, he let go and stumbled backward.

  “Go on. Get him, Billy,” Ricky called out, seeing this as an opening. “Why don’t you get him?” Ricky prodded as Justin and Billy stood there staring at each other.

  “Shut the fuck up, Ricky,” Billy said. Then he turned and stalked off.

  Justin turned to escape as well, but of course, instead he came face-to-face with Megan.

  She just stood there, staring at him.

  “What the hell do you want?” he demanded after a moment of heavy silence.

  A hurt look flashed across her face. It was gone in another instant, so fast it was like a single frame in a film. But with his seemingly heightened perceptions, Justin caught it.

  “You know, you’re pathetic,” she said. Then, turning to her friends who hovered behind her, she said, “Let’s get out of here before he decides to beat us up too.”

  31

  Justin sat in the back of the room in English. The whole class seemed to drowse as Mrs. Elmeger droned on.

  “…essentially about a pedophile’s affair with a twelve-year-old girl. Can anyone tell me what device Nabokov used to tell this story?”

  A boy in the back near Justin whispered under his breath, “Yeah, a fucking pencil.”

  A few of the kids around them laughed, drawing the teacher’s attention to the back of the room.

  “Justin,” she called out. “How about you? Can you tell us what device the author used?”

  Justin looked up.

  Everyone in the room turned to stare at him. Justin saw Megan smirking at him.

  He looked down again and mumbled something.

  “What’s that you said, Justin?” Mrs. Elmeger prompted. “We couldn’t hear you.”

  He started to speak, but his voice was hoarse, so he had to clear his throat.

  Mrs. Elmeger crossed her arms, as if to say, “Okay, let’s have it.”

  “Unreliable narrator,” Justin said. “That’s the device Nabokov used.”

  There was a moment of shocked silence. Mrs. Elmeger’s arms dropped back to her sides.

  “That’s right,” she said. “Justin is absolutely correct.”

  Justin wasn’t quite as lucky in his next few classes. He didn’t know the answer when he was called on in math, and he got kicked out again for falling asleep in history. He wondered if that meant something—that he couldn’t seem to stay awake in history. History was something he wanted to forget. Something that caused him to retreat into the oblivion of sleep.

  When the teacher ordered him out of the room, he gathered together his books and shouldered his bag. He knew what was coming. He knew exactly when Megan was going to appear, but when she rounded the corner, this time he tried to just keep walking. The idea of talking to her triggered a kind of panic.

  But Megan stopped and said, “Hey.”

  He couldn’t quite bring himself to simply ignore her, so he stopped as well and said, “Hey.”

  There was a moment of silence, and Justin looked down at his feet.

  “I can’t believe you knew that answer in English earlier,” she said.

  A part of him knew that she was trying to give him a compliment, but it was easier to pretend it was an insult.

  “Why is that so surprising? You think I’m stupid or something?”

  Megan stared at him a moment, then she was the one to look down. She started playing nervously with something in her hand—her lipstick case.

  “N-No,” she half-stuttered. “I mean…I didn’t know it, is all.”

  “Well, I guess some of us are smarter than others,” Justin said. It was as if someone else were controlling the words that came out of his mouth.

  “Why do you have to be such an asshole?” she demanded.

  “Dunno. I guess you just bring out the best in me.”

  Finally she’d had enough. She rushed past him and escaped into the girls’ bathroom.

  Justin turned away and started walking down the empty hall. That’s when he ran into Mrs. Elmeger. It was clear that he was the one who had been awful to Megan, but somehow it didn’t make a difference. He wanted to hurt her, and so he found himself saying, “Do you smell that? It smells like smoke.”

  “I don’t smell anything,” Mrs. Elmeger said, sniffing.

  “I definitely smell it,” Justin said. “And I think it’s coming from the girls’ bathroom.”

  And he felt an awful sense of satisfaction as he watched Mrs. Elmeger push open the bathroom door.

  32

  Justin tried to breathe normally, but it was hard, standing on the stage with the whole class looking at him. Ms. King was standing next to him, with his copy of Macbeth, so she could read the other parts and see where he’d edited the scene.

  He tried to draw as much air into his lungs as possible, and recited his first line.

  “The table’s full,” he said. His voice was husky with fear, but it was okay because it worked with the part.

  Ms. King squinted at the text, and read out the servant’s part in a high, mocking parody of subservience, “Here is a place reserved, sir.”

  The class laughed at her squeaky servant’s voice, and that relaxed Justin a bit, since he felt like the attention had shifted away from him.

  “Where?” h
e asked, and glanced around as if looking for the place.

  “Here, my good lord. What is’t that moves your highness? Gentlemen, rise: his highness is not well.”

  Ms. King changed to a low, throaty tone for the part of Lady Macbeth. She made as if she were addressing the class sitting in the auditorium seats. “Sit, worthy friends: my lord is often thus, and hath been from his youth: pray you, keep seat; feed, and regard him not.”

  Then she turned to Justin and in a harsh whisper said, “Are you a man?”

  She said it with such intensity that he felt the sting of her contempt, even though he knew she was just saying the lines. How must Macbeth have felt, to have his wife speaking to him like that? Especially after what he had done. Justin threw his head back. “Ay, and a bold one, that dare look on that which might appal the devil,” he retorted.

  “O proper stuff! This is the very painting of your fear: When all’s done, you look but on a stool.” And Ms. King gestured toward the empty chair they had set in the middle of the stage.

  “Prithee, see there! behold!” Justin raised his arm and pointed at the seat and the ghost that Macbeth could see, but who was invisible to everyone else. He meant to do it majestically, but he felt his finger trembling. “Look! lo!”

  He remembered picking this speech, thinking that it would be easy for him. It would barely count as acting. For a while it happened to him almost every day. Mark came back in dreams that were so real, Justin could barely tell they were dreams. He would see his brother in the most ordinary situations, doing what Mark used to do, clowning around, watching TV, being a pest. Sometimes he was just his old self. But sometimes Justin saw him as he’d seen him last—with half his head blown away.

  When Justin spoke next, he directed his words to the ghost in the chair. “How say you? Why, what care I? If thou canst nod, speak too. If charnel-houses and our graves must send those that we bury back—”

  “What, quite unmann’d in folly?” Ms. King interjected.