Chapter 34 The Past
THE PAST
CAIDEN’S CONDITIONING
Half a pack of Camels lay crushed in my jacket pocket, though I had smoked none. I had lifted them from my father’s toolbox as an experiment. If I inhaled enough poison, would I become immune to it?
Or would it rearrange the molecules of my rage?
I had learned early, when my father’s voice outblared the television and the taste of blood in my mouth became familiar, that the best way to survive was to preempt pain with pain.
Be the hurricane. Get my fist in first, so the next blow, when it came, was only a dull echo. Only a reminder.
I shouldered my backpack and exited the bathroom, moving through the corridor with the slow, deliberate menace of a predator who knew he could not be stopped.
My body, tall and broad and prematurely muscled, parted crowds in a way that was both satisfying and embarrassing. I hated the attention, but I hated being ignored more.
I watched her from the shadowed corner of the hall, arms crossed, my body thrumming with an anticipation that made my teeth ache in my skull.
Amelia.
She stood at her locker, half-turned to shield her notebook from prying eyes, the tawny river of her hair veiling the delicate line of her jaw.
Even from there, I could sense the anxious flutter of her hands as she rifled through the tangle of loose papers and broken pencils.
I wanted to hate her. I told myself to hate her. Day after day, I sharpened that hatred against the strop of my father’s misery, whetted it to a blade thin enough to draw blood with a glance.
But the truth was softer, sourer, nothing like what I wished it would be.
Sometimes when I saw her smile, rare nowadays, more a flicker than an expression, it hollowed something out from my chest, left a cold ache that lingered long after she had gone.
I woke up thinking about that smile, the way she bit her lip when she was nervous, how the tips of her ears went pink when she was caught off-guard.
It was sickening.
I needed to vomit it up, and there was only one way I knew how.
I stalked across the floor, my boots thudding a direct, predatory rhythm.
The other kids in the hallway sensed it and scattered, granting me a berth as though I were a chemical spill.
Only Amelia seemed oblivious, or else so utterly accustomed to danger that she couldn’t be bothered to react.
I slammed her locker door shut with a flat palm. The hollow bang echoed off the cinderblock walls.
Amelia jerked back, cradling her hand, eyes sparking with a flash of terror that quickly fell into the bland defeat I had come to expect from her.
“Move,” I said, my voice low and even, not a request.
She did, her lips pressed tight, knuckles white where they gripped the strap of her backpack.
I watched her walk away, hunched and guarded, shrinking herself down to nothing, and I felt nothing. Nothing but a cold, crawling disgust.
I rounded on the locker, wrenched it open and slammed it three more times, each time harder, bracing for the moment when the metal would refuse me and shatter my wrist.
The pain never came. I was too good at this by now.
Later after school, Dante was waiting by the bike racks, chewing on a strip of beef jerky and watching the sky with the blank patience of someone who expected nothing good to follow the final bell.
I liked that about him. Dante didn’t ask questions, didn’t pry for explanations. He just existed, a constant presence.
When my shadow stretched across the pavement, Dante spat the jerky stub into the grass and nodded, already knowing we’d be walking to the gas station, then to the quarry, then nowhere at all.
We walked in silence, the sound of our boots crunching gravel louder than any words we might have exchanged.
I felt the old familiar thrum of anxiety in my chest, the anticipation of violence, waiting for my father to materialize from behind a parked car.
But the streets were empty. Even the birds had gone mute, as if the entire town had agreed to vanish for the afternoon and leave me alone with my festering thoughts.
We bought two cans of Monster and a donut at the Kwik Stop, then walked the railroad tracks into the woods, where the town gave up and let nature take over.
Dante peeled the donut in strips and tossed each piece into his mouth, chewing with the languid boredom of a cow.
I sipped my Monster, feeling the fizz burn down my gullet, and imagined it was acid, that it would eat me clean from the inside out.
“You coming to mine, or you gotta check in with the warden first?” Dante said, his voice sludgy with indifference. He didn’t look at me, just flicked a lighter over and over, the sparks almost invisible in the broad daylight.
“Not going back there tonight,” I muttered, my knuckles white around the handlebars of my bike. I felt the words as a kind of relief, a counting of hours before the next reckoning. “I’ll crash at your place if your mom’s cool.”
“Your dad a dick again?” Dante asked, eyes on the tracks.
I didn’t answer. I didn’t need to. The bruises on my knuckles spoke louder than words, the way I kept flexing and unflexing my hands as if rehearsing invisible violence. I dragged my boot along the rail and watched the flecks of rust scatter like blood.
“You ever think about doing something else?” Dante continued. “After school, I mean.”
I made a noise that was almost a laugh. “Yeah, like what? Move somewhere else? Or maybe just off myself in the gym weight room and save everyone time.”
Dante shot me a look, only half joking. “You could join the Army. You’d like that. Free meals. Guns. Nobody gives a shit where you came from.”
I considered it, the idea of vanishing into a uniform, letting someone bigger and meaner than my father yell orders at me instead. I pictured my own head shaved, boots shining, a name stitched over my heart like a bandage.
Maybe I’d get so good at killing that the anger would bleed out and leave nothing behind.
I realized, with a kind of sick delight, that maybe I’d even get sent somewhere I could die for real. Make it official. Get a medal for it, if they even bothered to mail one to the ruins of my house.
We cut through the trees, our bodies moving in loose synchrony, the way two stray dogs will walk when neither is quite leader or follower.
If I squinted, I could almost forget who I was, forget the town and its rot, the way everything here seemed pre-digested and shit out before you ever got a taste of real life.
A train screamed by, close enough to vibrate the marrow of my bones, and for a wild second I contemplated stepping in front of it. Just to see if I felt fear, or if the engine would simply flatten me into the perfect shape of my own nothingness.
I didn’t, though. I just watched the graffiti flash past, letters warped and melted together, proof that someone else had left their mark on this place before moving the fuck on.
Dante didn’t say anything, but I could feel him watching, could sense that my friend was waiting for some sign, some slip of the mask that would reveal what was really going on inside.
He would wait forever, probably. I respected that about him, the willingness to let things rot in silence.
We followed the tracks until the gravel ran out and the woods took over, thick and green and pulsing with the exhale of spring. The runoff from the old quarry had formed a pond, its surface a patchwork of algae scum and bottle-green water.
We sat on the concrete lip of a ruined foundation and watched the wind ripples chase each other across the pond, made bets about which branch would fall next from the rotten birch tree on the far bank.
There was a peace to it, in the way a battlefield goes silent between shots.
Dante rolled a joint with the practiced hands of a priest folding a sacrament. I didn’t bother to refuse when it was passed my way. I held the smoke until my lungs spasmed and my vision narrowed to a pinhole.
If I closed my eyes, I could almost pretend it was oxygen. When I exhaled, the world returned, painted in colors I never saw at home.
“You remember five years ago in sixth, when you beat the shit out of Bobby Sandoval?” Dante said, grinding the ash into the concrete. “You knocked a tooth out, man. He still talks about it like it was the best day of his life.”
I shrugged, but the memory came back in full.
That was the first time my father had looked at me and grunted something like approval. The only time I’d eaten a real meal that week because of how proud he was of me, instead of standing in the kitchen, staring at the tile while my father sucked down beer and watched baseball.
“He deserved it,” I said. “Fucker called me a bastard. Wasn’t even original.”
“He cried like a bitch, though,” Dante said, and laughed.
I found myself grinning, the muscles in my face surprised by the motion. It hurt, a little, in a way that felt honest.
We smoked in silence until the joint was spent, then Dante lay back, arms behind his head, eyes half-lidded to the sky.
I felt the darkness at my core, the urge to destroy, but there it ran gentle, slow, like a lazy river instead of a flash flood.
I could almost breathe.
“Wonder what Langston does when she’s not drawing?” I mused, stretching my arms, exposing the band of muscle above my hips. “She got friends. Boyfriend.”
Dante smirked, but there was a new sharpness to it. “You got some kinda death wish for her, man? You always talk about her.”
I almost swung at Dante then and there. The urge came fast and violent, but I channeled it into a sneer. “I don’t give a shit about her,” I snapped, my voice thick. “Just saying. That’s all she is. A sad sack with a pencil.”
Dante shrugged, twisted a pebble between his fingers, and flicked it into the pond.
“She’s not that bad, you know. I had her in class last year.
She’s nice, not like most of those fake girls.
Amelia’s…” He trailed off, then shrugged, a small, private smile bunching the corners of his mouth. “Kinda cute, honestly.”