7. Lance
Chapter seven
Lance
Ipull Mom’s old Corolla into the high school parking lot and cut the engine.
My truck is still in the shop—fire damage to the undercarriage and the tires—and the Corolla feels wrong, too small, like wearing someone else’s shoes.
The houses on the way to school have been scrubbed clean of their Halloween paraphernalia.
Parker hasn’t said a word since we left the house. He’s still in all black, which he’s worn every day since the funeral. The cough is better—the antibiotics are doing their job—but he still sounds like he’s breathing through gauze. He’s lost weight he couldn’t afford to lose.
He turned eighteen on Saturday. Aunt Shelley took him to dinner and Mom made a cake for after, and he thanked everybody, and he opened the sketchbook Bree wrapped in about four rolls of tape and thanked her in his new voice.
He did all of it right. But he wasn’t there for any of it. By Sunday nobody was mentioning it.
“I’ll get it,” I say, reaching into the back seat for his bookbag.
“No. I can get it.”
“You shouldn’t be—”
“I can get my own backpack, Lance.”
He says it without heat, which is worse than if he’d snapped at me. I pull back.
We get out. The parking lot is filling up. This year we didn’t turn the porch light on or hand out candy, the first time in my life that’s happened. For a second the ordinariness of everything else is disorienting. Then Parker coughs, and the moment breaks.
I offer him my hand.
He looks at it. He tries to smile at me, but shakes his head.
I put my hand in my pocket and fall into step beside him. That’s twice this morning.
Martha Gillibrand cornered me at the wake four days ago. “What exactly are your intentions?” she asked, with that hard smoker’s stare, and I told her I wanted to take care of him. She looked at me like I’d said something stupid.
“You’re joining the Marines in a few months. You could meet someone on base that knocks your socks off,” she said. “Or you could get hit by a sniper round and that’s the end of you. You sure you want to drag him into that?”
I still haven’t answered her. I haven’t answered myself either.
Farley’s front doors look the same as they did two weeks ago. Inside, the smoke smell that hung in the hallways when it was a shelter has been replaced by floor cleaner and body spray. I hear laughter, and lockers banging, and for a few steps it’s just a Monday.
Then it happens, in waves.
The girl closest to the stairwell notices Parker and her face changes, and the boy next to her follows her gaze, and then the next cluster, and the next. Conversations don’t stop all at once. They die in ripples, spreading outward from us.
The teachers standing sentry outside their classroom doors go quiet. Students flatten themselves against their lockers as we pass. He’s been touched by death, and nobody has told them what you’re supposed to do about that.
Rochelle, who has sat next to him in art since ninth grade, takes a step toward us. Then she takes in the black clothes, the hollowed cheeks, the way he’s walking like the air has weight, and she starts crying and doesn’t say anything at all.
Pete lifts a hand to wave, catches the mood, and lowers it again. Two weeks ago they’d at least have said hey in the hall. Now, he doesn’t know what to say. He looks at the other kids, then at Parker, like he’s waiting for somebody to tell him what he’s allowed to say.
We reach his locker and I see what they’ve done.
Flowers. Cards taped to the metal. A poster-board sign: “Welcome back! We all missed you!” Someone has tied a stuffed bear to the locker handle.
I watch Parker’s face for a reaction, but there’s nothing.
He just looks at it the way you look at a math problem you don’t understand.
He opens the locker. More cards inside, pushed through the slats. Notes in careful handwriting. He stares at them for a long time, then turns to face the hallway.
“Thank you for all this,” he says.
His voice does it. That rasp—the smoke-damaged, broken-glass edge that hasn’t gone away—is the loudest thing in the hallway.
Someone whispers, “Oh my God, his voice.” A girl I don’t know starts crying.
Parker closes his mouth and turns back to his locker.
I take the backpack out of his hand and he lets me.
He’s strung so tight I can feel it when our arms touch.
“Mr. Bishop?” a voice says behind us.
We both turn. Mr. Robillard, our English teacher—a middle-aged man with thinning dark hair and kind eyes—is standing in his doorway.
“Perhaps you and Mr. Broussard would like to wait inside my room to collect yourselves. I have my first period free, and I’ll be happy to write you a note.”
Parker doesn’t answer him. He turns back to the locker and starts going through it, moving cards aside, lifting the flowers off the shelf and setting them down again, looking for something. He checks and rechecks the bottom.
“I can’t find my history book,” he says.
Nobody moves. His textbooks and his homework and his gym clothes and every drawing he ever made are a layer of ash nine miles from here.
He’s just said so out loud to a hallway full of people.
Not one of them knows what to do with it.
He crouches, staring at the contents of his locker as if he’s making an inventory of what’s not there.
“Leave it with me, Parker,” Mr. Robillard says.
“Thank you,” I say. “I think we’d like that room, if you don’t mind.”
Parker doesn’t look at me when I say we.
Mr. Robillard holds the door and Parker walks through it without waiting for me. Behind us the hallway lets out its breath all at once, forty people exhaling together, and then the door closes and cuts the sound off.