The loop, p.2
The Loop, page 2
So of course Jake always took an interest in Chris—he’d never scored such easy laughs before.
Chris doesn’t shower for a week. Jake holds his nose, pretends to pass out. “Somebody forgot to take out the trash!”
Comic gold.
Chris wears the same shirt until a hole tears in the back. Jake flicks pennies into the hole and makes the field goal symbol with his arms.
Are you guys seeing this?
Chris’s dad ends up in county jail on petty theft charges. A week later, Jake asks him if he has any big plans for Father’s Day.
Classic!
Lucy never laughed, but she didn’t always say something either. Jake’s cruelty was a spotlight you didn’t want swung your way—last time she told Jake to leave Chris alone, he ended up binder-checking her after class and sent her history notes flying across the hall. When she was on her hands and knees gathering her papers he said, “Clean it up, Loogie. Practice for my house.”
What a crack-up!
High fives were had at her expense. Did Lucy notice Nate Carver laughing at her? She pretended she didn’t.
Now Jake was back at it, holding up limp-wristed hands and mimicking the way Chris’s body was shaking in his seat. His cronies chuckled. Jake bent his head to his desk and pretended to snort a line, then sat back up with exaggerated tremors. The laughter got louder.
Mr. Chambers rotated toward the class, and the laughs cut short. Lucy read Mr. Chambers’s expression: Please—I’m so close to being done with all of you. Be decent for once. Just finish this class so I can start my summer and I’ll only have to see a handful of you at driver’s ed training.
Something in the back corner caught Chambers’s eye. “Ms. Dufrene, can you turn off your phone or does it need to spend the rest of class on my desk?”
Patty Dufrene’s thumbs were a blur, a concerned look on her face.
Chambers walked closer and spoke louder. “Ms. Dufrene, can I have your attention?”
No response.
Chambers walked over and placed an open palm directly between Patty’s eyes and the phone. “Hand it over. You get it back at the bell.”
Patty held her phone long enough to power it all the way down, then handed it to Mr. Chambers with an aggrieved whine. Her eyes followed the device to its resting spot on Mr. Chambers’s desk.
Chambers scrawled more sample problems on the blackboard, his chalk tapping out a robotic rhythm. Loud and persistent as that sound was, Lucy was distracted by a new noise—Chris Carmichael’s desk was squeaking. It reminded her of the time she drove to San Diego with the Hendersons to visit her “aunt” Molly. They’d checked in to a Super 8 at the halfway point down I-5 only to discover that their motel neighbors were having an epic screw session. Lucy remembered how embarrassed her adoptive guardians, Bill and Carol, had been, but mostly she remembered how steady and fast the springs were squeaking and how the woman’s moans sounded more like something she was doing to pass the time until the man finally stopped thrusting.
Honestly, Lucy had thought the whole event was kind of funny, and the sound of Chris Carmichael’s squeaking desk brought that all back.
She was about to laugh until she saw the way Chris’s body was moving.
Something was wrong with him. Very, very wrong.
His narrow frame was slumped, pinning his weight against the metal support tube running from chair to desk. Lucy leaned forward and noticed a thin string of drool hanging from the corner of Chris’s mouth. Sweat was beading on his forehead and soaking through his greasy black locks. His left leg was jerking back and forth at the knee while his foot pressed against the tile flooring so hard the sole was scuffing.
He’s… fighting something. Like he’s trying to force himself to stay at that desk.
Mr. Chambers finally caught on and turned to look at Chris.
“Mr. Carmichael, what’s…”
And then Chris’s neck bent back and he was staring at the ceiling and he yelled, “You promised you’d delete the picture, Ginny. Stop being such a bitch!”
Patty Dufrene stood bolt upright. “Shut your mouth, Chris. How do you…”
Chris kept yelling. “Why am I seeing this? Where am I? I don’t want this!” and then he fell quiet, but the spasms in his body amplified, causing his desk to rock and lift and clatter against the floor. His head swiveled, eyes wide and panicked as if he were trying to see in the dark.
Have his eyes always been so blue?
Lucy swore that Chris had hazel eyes, but now they appeared blue and rheumy. Lucy wondered how that could be, but the thought was interrupted when his back and knees popped so loudly the sound echoed against the ceiling tiles. Lucy recoiled, imagining how that must feel inside Chris’s body—his joints grinding and locking, unable to stop all that shaking.
Mr. Chambers was at Chris’s side then. “We need to give him room until this passes. The key, is to, uh, to keep him from hurting himself. Megan, run down to the office and tell them to call 911.” Then Chambers bent over Chris’s thrumming body and rattling desk. “We need to get him as flat and stabilized as we can. Jake and Michael, you get his legs, and I’ll lift under his shoulders.” The teacher said, “Chris, can you hear me? I need to move you,” and he laced his hands behind the boy’s neck, and that’s when Lucy realized she must have fallen asleep in class, because she swore that at that moment she heard something under Chris’s hair squeal and then Mr. Chambers was backing away with a bloody hand, screaming, “What the fuck?”
And then Jake, forever dull and cruel and incapable of reading the goddamn room, tried to get in one more joke. He leaned toward the back of the class and said, “Chris is shaking harder than his mom’s vibrator!”
But no one laughed. Even Jake’s victory chuckle was cut short because within seconds Chris had erupted from his desk and was on top of Jake, had him trapped in his seat, and in a series of spasms Chris managed to raise one hand and plunge his right thumb directly into Jake’s left eye.
Then in Lucy’s nightmare she saw Mr. Chambers afraid to move forward but yelling, “Chris, get off him now or I’ll have to report this,” as if they were still in a situation where something like the rules of a high school might apply, and Jake began to bleed from the corner of his eye as he unleashed a slaughterhouse squeal and tried to bat Chris away with his arms, and then Chris’s eyes rolled back in his head and a flat, even voice fell from his mouth saying, “Override protocol failed. Ops dispatched.”
Mr. Chambers didn’t seem to understand where the voice was coming from because he turned toward the door of the classroom, looking for the people who might be coming to restore order. After a few seconds ticked by, he must have realized that task fell to him, because he rushed over to his desk and pulled out a small black canister of pepper spray and said, “You have to stop that now, Chris! Stop or I’ll spray you!”
If Chris heard, he paid it no mind. His thumb pressed farther into Jake’s skull. Jake made noises that no one in that room would escape dreaming about.
Mr. Chambers stepped toward the boys and sprayed Chris’s eyes and then aimed the stream directly into the mouth of the young man.
Mr. Chambers gained Chris’s attention.
Chris untethered from Jake’s coiled, screaming body and stood. Blood dripped from his thumb to the tile. The class sat paralyzed, coughing and gagging and trying to breathe fresh air through folded hoodies or sleeves. A crowd had gathered at the door to the classroom, some filming with their phones, some running when they saw Jake’s body shaking its way into deep shock.
Chris straightened and looked at Mr. Chambers, then at his red, slick hand. “This fixes it. What I did. What you did to me. The signal…” His voice started to fade, airway tightening against the pepper spray assault. Chris shook his head from side to side and coughed. He blinked through hideously swollen eyelids. “It’s not so bad, Mr. Chambers. They said I would be smarter, but they lied to me. They lied to my mom. But you—you really helped me. After all this time.”
Then Chris bent forward, his movements finally smooth, and he picked up his precalculus book from the floor. He lifted the thick, sharp-cornered book up in the air with one bright red hand.
“This is the answer. You gave us the answer.”
Then Chris Carmichael took two swift strides toward the front of the room and swung the textbook down into Mr. Chambers’s face.
Mr. Chambers lost his legs and rag-dolled to the floor and then Chris was on top of him with the book raised high and he turned toward the class to speak.
“This makes it stop. This is real.”
He brought the textbook down, using both arms this time. Something crunched.
“I could see it all before, too much, but now I’m here.”
Another swing down. This time the arc of the book splattered the white tile ceiling with tiny red drops. Lucy could swear she saw something pulsing on the back of Chris’s neck as his hair flopped forward.
“We are going to be okay, you guys.”
Another swing. Mr. Chambers’s hands fish-flopped on the floor, his wedding ring ticking against tile, his moaning buried beneath the sound of gargled blood.
“We are all going to be okay.”
And then Lucy leaned forward in her desk because her vision had filled with tiny blinking stars, and she fought to stay conscious because there was a murderer in the room and she could barely breathe from the pepper spray and it was far too late for “Locks, lights, out of sight.” She didn’t know what the hell she was supposed to do. Part of her wanted to jump from her desk and restrain Chris or knock him off Mr. Chambers, but everything was moving too fast.
She heard men yelling in the hallway. Something rolled into the classroom next to Mr. Chambers’s awfully quiet, immobile body, and Chris didn’t even stop to acknowledge the purple smoke coming from the object because he was still swinging his book.
How can he hold on to the book with so much blood on his hands?
Lucy felt oddly guilty for thinking such a thing, but then her thoughts were wiped clear by the smell of the noxious purple smoke and the sudden, thunderous sound of close gunfire and then the sight of Chris’s face slumping loose from his head and slapping against his chest.
The air was toxic with pepper spray and gunpowder and atomized blood.
Screams ran through the room at full surround.
Chris’s body gave one last tremor and collapsed onto Mr. Chambers.
Then the school bell rang.
It was the final shock Lucy could bear. Some distant part of her mind thought, School’s out, and she slid into static, then nothing.
chapter two ESCAPE ATTEMPTS
Lucy’s alarm sounded from the dresser across the room, waking her for another day of playing pretend.
“Yes, I’m fine today.”
“No, I didn’t have any nightmares.”
“Yes, I care whether or not there are fresh blueberries at breakfast. The simple pleasures are important! Where are we without our day-to-day niceties?”
“No, I don’t want another appointment with Dr. Nielsen. And there definitely aren’t any details about that day that I’m concealing from her so she won’t have me committed.”
“Yes, I’m dealing with everything just fine.”
“No, I didn’t have a dream where I posted a picture of Chris Carmichael’s exploding face to my account and then I pushed my phone down between my legs and rubbed up against the flood of buzzing notifications. Because that would mean that something is broken inside of me, right? And I’m doing great!”
“Yes, I think graduating is still important, and yes, it might be good to change schools. But didn’t Nielsen say I needed to confront what happened on my own time? Thank you for being so patient with me. Thank you for reminding me every day that you’ve got my back! Yes, this is our challenge to face together.”
“No, I haven’t had any suicidal or self-destructive thoughts. Trust me, I’m going to be okay.”
We are all going to be okay.
* * *
Lucy knew the Hendersons’ every action came from a place of love. She knew how lucky she was to have Bill and Carol in her life, and how they were afraid she’d go back to being the near-catatonic little girl they’d adopted after the tragedy in Peru.
That being said, there were times after “the incident” when their love felt like a lead fucking apron on her chest and she couldn’t breathe from all the goddamn heartfelt care and protection.
That afternoon she texted Bucket: Dying here. Bill and Carol treating me like a baby deer. Please come pick me up. Let’s go to The Exchange.
* * *
The Marwanis did all right. They didn’t pull St. Andrews or IMTECH money, but Bucket’s dad had his own dermatology clinic, and his mom worked as a dental assistant, so they weren’t hurting. They could have forked over enough cash to put Bucket in an older used sedan, but they wanted him to earn it, so he worked part-time at Culbertson’s Grocery. As a result he always smelled like fresh-baked bread when he came to pick up Lucy.
She dropped into his front seat and inhaled deeply. “I love it!”
“It’s bullshit, though. They don’t even bake the bread on-site. They just pump in this smell to make you think they did.”
“I don’t care.” Lucy sniffed closer and closer to Bucket, like a dog following a trail. “Smells so fucking good!”
“All right, all right. Cool your jets, weirdo.”
“It’s making me hungry, dude. Can we grab some big pretzels before we go to The Exchange?”
“I’ll stop there, but I don’t want anything.”
“Your stomach still all jacked up?”
“Yeah. I mean, I eat, but I don’t feel hungry. My nerves are kind of off now… you know?”
“I know. Can we not talk about it, though?”
Bucket gave a nod and boosted the volume on his stereo. Bass flooded up from the trunk and replaced Lucy’s bad vibes. She couldn’t make out most of the lyrics to the song, aside from some guy with an auto-tuned voice singing, “rub that yayo on your pussy/get that booty numb.” The music hit the right dumb/dead spot in her mind, and she smiled a real smile for the first time that day.
“This is good.”
“Yup. You want mall pretzels or you want to hit the corner market?”
Lucy thought about all the other kids who might be at the mall. Could be Chris Carmichael’s friends. Could be Brady Miller’s friends—Lucy barely knew anybody from Summit Ridge, but they’d had the prior week’s hot tragedy, holding a candlelight vigil for the loss of their classmate. Supposedly he’d been killed by his own mom, which triggered feelings in Lucy that made her ignore the news about that crime in its entirety. Even if they didn’t have to see people directly related to the awful things which had happened, other students would be there, and Lucy thought about how they’d pretend to be interested in her so they could drill down and ask about what had happened in Mr. Chambers’s classroom.
I can’t answer those questions. I don’t want to. I’m not even sure what I really saw.
Dr. Nielsen spoke with her about the way adrenaline affects memory, and how slowly the truth might float to the surface and find its place, and how some of the things she may think she saw were only visions filling in the gap until her true memories were ready.
But there was something on the back of Chris’s neck, right?
She hadn’t yet saved up the courage to ask Bucket what he might have seen.
Her smile dimmed.
Enough of this. Enough thinking. And no mall.
“Corner market’s fine. Can you turn up the music?”
“Sure. AC on or windows down?”
“AC, bitch, so I can keep smelling this crazy-good bread smell.”
She sniffed at him again, closing her eyes, pulling exaggerated amounts of air. Then they both laughed and shared the smallest moment outside their haunted lives.
* * *
The Exchange was cool because nobody went there. Music stores had become halfway museums, the only clients being people so computer illiterate that they still used CDs, and a mix of hipsters, DJs, and old-timers who worshipped at the altars of vinyl.
Lucy liked the quiet mustiness of the place, and the feeling of slowly flipping through their vast rows of records.
Bucket liked it because one of the clerks was a twenty-five-year-old named Toni who was rumored to also be an exotic dancer over at the Boiler Room. She was covered in tattoos and had bright purple hair and big blue eyes, and one time she’d even asked Bucket his real name.
“There’s no way you’re actually called ‘Bucket,’ ” she’d said. “Nobody is called ‘Bucket.’ ”
“It’s my name.”
“Yeah, listen… I know it’s not. I can feel it. I’ve got a few names myself. I’ll tell you what. I’ll tell you my names first, then you tell me yours, and we’ll be good, right?”
Bucket squinted. Lucy had been impressed by how he’d stood his ground against Toni’s charms.
Toni leaned forward across the counter. “The truth is, I have three names. There’s Toni. It’s what everybody calls me. And then there’s the name my parents gave me, which is Antoinette—way too fucking fancy for me to use on an everyday basis.”
It was Bucket’s turn to lean forward. She’d suckered him in by dropping that f-bomb. She wasn’t talking to him like he was a kid. He loved it.
“Then there’s my third name, and I only use that in one place.” Bucket’s eyebrows raised. Lucy knew what he was thinking—The rumors are true! Toni really is a dancer. “So this doesn’t go beyond here, but sometimes I go by the name Amity.”
“Wait… Amity? Like in Jaws?”
“Well, that’s not where I got it from, but sure. I like it because it sounds cool to the clients I work with, but I really like it because of what it means.”
“Friendship?”
“Yeah. That’s what my other job really is. My clients think it’s one thing, and it can be that, but a lot of times they don’t see what I’m really giving them. They need someone to say, I’m here for you, and I’m open to you. You can trust me. I can listen to you. I will look at you because you matter. I’m your friend. People are lonely, you know?”
