[kind of long. but give it a chance, will you?]
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Shane Robinson killed Anthony Sawyer.
I heard about it two months after we graduated. The news snapped me straight out of a summer daze. I heard it from Kristin who picked me up one day in her black sedan, blurry and high as ever, telling me to get in the car. And it was the first time we had seen each other since school’s end, but instead of talking we began driving in massive, swooping circles all around this old town, sinking into this humid hot day with the air conditioner cranked up and a token radio station playing static softly... It all melted into the white noise roar of the background: the rush of the wheels under us, the rush of the cold air on our legs, the rush and clang of a fuzzy, forgotten pop song.
“God damn,” I eventually said. “I never thought I’d be done with high school.” I could let the words slip out of me indifferently, as I settled into a sluggish state. We were hurtling through a town I’d forgotten I lived in.
“Yeah,” Kristin said after a very long pause. I could tell by her tone that she didn’t care. In my drugged state, I didn’t care, either.
“Yeah,” I said. And then in silence, we drove on and on through the streets, turning this way and then that way, and then back again. I slumped against the car door. I let the images wave through the window at me.
She dropped me off at home maybe half an hour later, and we sat in her stalled car on the street curb outside my back door. We were dazedly inhaling a pack of cigarettes and blowing the smoke out the windows, reluctantly opened to air out the car. Yeah, and the humid day licked me like dog’s breath, covering and smothering my face. The air was at the breaking point, so heavy it must split soon, and let its rain go and go, drumming people’s lies deep into people’s backyards.
It was pouring by the time she told me.
“Did you hear about Anthony?” she asked, flicking her cigarette to the tar street. The cigarette got murdered and pounded by the falling, beating raindrops.
“No.. what?” I asked. And I knew. I knew what had happened. The creeping thought had been living and breathing in the back of my head for so long now. Drugged and suppressed through summer tv marathons and heavy, hot days, but breathing still.
“God...” Kristin began.
And she got drowned out in the violent rain as I opened the car door, shut it behind me, and walked toward my house. Kristin put up the windows and drove off. I sat on the back stoop, against the muddy screen door, and I felt I should throw up, and make the sick guilt something tangible, spraying all over our back steps. But nothing came. It wouldn't be expelled. It wanted to live inside me, breathing and living and talking. Putting its cold hands on my warm brain. ...I sat on the stoop, watching excess spit come foaming to my lips, and thinking that we weren’t even in high school anymore. We weren’t. No, we were old. And we were all bad, bad, bad.
And we were dead.
And six months ago I smirked and I said to Shane, “Kill him, kill him.” I said, “Kill him.”
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He wasn’t supposed to.
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We had been sitting in front of the facade of the school building-- the one that shrinks with each passing year-- and we had been chatting, ignoring the sand-paper sidewalk and trickling sewer hole underneath our bent knees. We were chatting loudly, mundanely, back and forth, and the smoke ran out of our cigarettes in the shifting wind.
We were discussing how he always hated Anthony, and that’s why he said what he said to him, and seriously, he wanted to kill him. He wanted to and he would. The cops would be all over him, but he still would. And it’s because he’s always hated him, even since elementary school. And he really was gonna kill him. No, he really, really was. He was just waiting till he graduated, then he’d kill him. He didn’t care.
I remember I rocked gently on the lip of the street curb. “You should kill him,” I said. But I was joking. I was joking! You could see it through my tight and twisted smile. It was obvious in my dimples and soft cheeks, my baby face held up in the cold afternoon. You could’ve seen it in my cushy frame. “Yeah, definitely kill him. I’m serious.”
“I want to. I’m serious. I want to, man, I would do that in a second. But, man...”
“What?” I said, playing with him.
But you don't play with the horrific. You don't play with the things that make people's chests heave.
And I’ll remember Shane's face:
Drawn in horrified sincerity, staring straight at me, gaping at me between words. “I’m gonna!” he said. “I’m gonna! Lemme just wait till I graduate. His face will be blood. His face will be blood. It will be meat. Just meat. I swear to you, I’ll kill him. I swear. I hate that kid.”
“Do. It.” I told him. And the words have been crawling through me ever since.
. yeah, i'll work on that. ..i think it was clear when i first wrote it and then i swapped things around and edited too much.
