December Park(52)

“Hey, man,” I said, putting one hand on his shoulder. “Hey . . .”

Adrian sprung up, startling me. His face was red and wind chapped, and there were tears leaking from behind his glasses. The kid was laughing. “That was awesome!”

“Yeah?” I said.

“I can’t believe it,” he cried. “That was great. That was . . . f*cking great.”

“Jeez,” I muttered, though I was smiling now right along with him. “You kiss your mom with that mouth?”

“Fuck,” he said again, his laughter subsiding, his respiration heavy. “Fuck it, Angie. Fuck it.”

I suddenly felt very sad for him. Had he had even a single friend in Chicago?

Once he got his laughter under control, we wheeled my bike through the break in the guardrail and then down the sloping embankment until the trees grew thicker and the ground leveled out. Broken bits of glass and shards of metal sparkled from a particular patch of dark ground, remnants of Audrey MacMillan’s car accident in October. The scattered detritus would probably be here until the next ice age.

I let my bike fall into a nest of brambles, then swiped the hair out of my eyes. Even in the midst of winter and with the branches bare, the woods were still thick and insulated from the rest of the world. The ground was hard, and the tallest trees seemed to reach up with their skeletal branches to poke holes in the gray fabric of the evening sky.

“Okay,” I said. “So we’re here. You gonna tell me what’s going on?”

Adrian kicked around in the dead leaves, turning over large stones with his shoes and bending down to examine the random whatnot that captivated his attention for a few seconds here and there. For all I knew, he was deliberately trying to ignore me. I didn’t understand any of it, and I wondered what the hell I was doing out here with this strange kid, humoring his obsession about a murdered girl.

“Before I tell you,” he said after I’d expelled a pent-up breath and dropped onto a moss-covered deadfall, “can you tell me something? Something personal, like a secret?”

“What?”

Adrian peeled off his giant backpack and tossed it on the ground beside a craggy-looking oak tree. “If I’m gonna tell you a secret, I want you to tell me something, too,” he said, sitting down beside me on the fallen tree. “This way, we’re even.”

I had no idea what he was going on about. Every fiber of my being beckoned me to stand up, dig my dirt bike out of the bushes, and climb back up the embankment, yet it seemed like some outside force kept me plastered to my seat on the dead tree. Even down here in the woods, the wind was strong and biting, and I felt my cheeks growing numb and the moisture around my eyes freezing to solid crystals.

For one insane moment I thought about the time I’d nearly drowned in the Chesapeake Bay after falling over the side of a johnboat when I was seven or eight—how the black water had wasted no time swallowing me up and dragging me down, down.

It had just been Charles and me on the boat that day. We had puttered in and out of coves and eventually found our way into the open bay where the waves were great and angry beasts. Charles had pointed out the face of the immense cliff that was the ass end of Harting Farms. The cliff’s face was pocked by countless bores in the rock, reminding me of photographs I’d seen in National Geographic of holes in the rock face where cave-dwelling Indians lived.

I’d gone overboard. My entire body suddenly went heavy, and then the cold attacked me and burrowed its way straight through my flesh and into the channels of my ears and the marrow of my bones. Ice water filled my lungs. I was rendered blind. Charles had fished me out and dragged me back onto the boat where I coughed and sputtered and vomited brackish water onto my sneakers.

And while I sat there gasping for air with Charles thumping a heavy fist against my back, I couldn’t shake the sheer terrifying helplessness I had felt when I’d gone under that black and brine-tasting water. I could swim, but I could have just as easily drowned. The panic had set in as quickly as a pistol shot, and it consumed everything else. Everything.

I shivered at the memory. Glancing over at Adrian, I said, “Do you know the reason I’m in your English class?”

“I heard you shoved some teacher and they moved you.”

“Mr. Naczalnik.”

“They call him Nozzle Neck.”

“Yeah, I know what they call him,” I said. Even after all these months, I still hadn’t told this to anyone. Not even Peter. I didn’t know how I felt about telling it to Adrian, but it seemed like the right time, the right thing to do.

“Anyway, that’s not what happened. See, we had to write an essay in class about something that had had a profound effect on us. I couldn’t write anything at first. I kept staring at the clock and looking around the room. Then I thought of something and I began to write. But when Naczalnik asked to turn the papers in, I refused. He came to the desk and grabbed the pages from me. I pulled them back. I told him I didn’t want to turn in the paper and to just give me an F. But he kept pulling the papers from me. The papers ripped and he fell backward over a desk. I didn’t push him.”

Adrian was silent for a moment. “What did you write about that you didn’t want him to see?” he said eventually.

“I wrote about my brother, Charles, and the day he saved me from drowning in the Chesapeake Bay.”