We Are the Light(38)

I’ve been telling myself that maybe winged Darcy is testing me. Or maybe she’s helping me build up a tolerance for being apart from her, because I knew from the start that she couldn’t stay with me here on earth forever.

Maybe she’ll show up tonight and all will be well?

Let’s just go with that, shall we?

Moving on…

All of the original Survivors’ Group members—except you and you know who—immediately agreed to be in the movie. But DeSean Priest said he didn’t want to play the doctor who—as a by-product of the drug he’s trying to invent to cure his young daughter’s stage-four cancer—accidentally develops radioactive neon-green sludge that he tries to get rid of by dumping the runoff into a sewer grate, not knowing that a local teenager has been using the town’s underground pipes as a secret hideout, where he also raises mourning doves to honor his deceased brother who was a big fan of birds. The radioactive sludge combines the DNA found in all the feathers on the sewer floor with our hero young Earl’s DNA, which spontaneously makes feathers shoot out of every inch of his skin and, ultimately, turns him into the Mighty Mourning Man.

Since DeSean is the town’s local pediatrician, he worried that his being seen on-screen experimenting with non-FDA-approved substances—even under the mask of fiction—would send the wrong message to his patients. Eli and I tried to convince him otherwise, but he wouldn’t budge and eventually talked Ernie Baum—everyone’s favorite local butcher—into trading roles with him. We had cast Ernie as a butcher named Eddie, thinking he could bring a lot of realism to the part. But it turns out that Ernie liked the idea of playing a “mad scientist” and had even brought a copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the table read. Robin Withers had given him the classic when he came to the library asking for something to help him prepare for acting in the movie. Ernie promised to train DeSean in the fine art of butchery so that his knife-fighting scene might look realistic. We reluctantly agreed to allow the switch. To be honest, Eli and I didn’t feel great about having our casting questioned, but when we saw how much energy the newly placated Ernie and DeSean brought to the table read, we knew we had made the right call. Sometimes you have to bend to not break, as they say.

The table read brought us back once again to the library conference room, only this time it was Eli who made the speech. After saying “full disclosure,” he explained that our film would officially serve as his high school senior project, which he needed to complete in order to graduate. He said he hadn’t walked in the graduation ceremony with his class for obvious reasons—meaning no one wanted him there. I could tell all of The Survivors felt a little bad about that reality, which provided a lot of extra motivation for what we were all about to begin doing.

Eli said he hoped to submit the final cut of our monster movie to film schools so that he might gain admittance for the winter semester. His goal was to leave Majestic by January.

I hadn’t heard that before.

He had his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his shorts and his voice was shaky. There were a lot of “likes” and “ums” sprinkled throughout his speech, but no one really minded.

The number of times people looked over at me, however, was disconcerting. I was seated directly to the right of Eli, and everyone was sitting in a large circle, so, at first, I thought maybe the angles were playing tricks on my eyes and everyone was really looking at Eli, because he was the one who was speaking. But the more I observed, the more I understood that people were looking at me and smiling like they were proud of yours truly, but I really couldn’t understand why.

When everyone thought Eli was finished, the room gave him a polite round of applause, but it turned out he actually wasn’t done.

Over the clapping, Eli blurted out, “I’m not like my brother, Jacob,” which made everyone stop clapping.

The silence was intense.

I don’t think Eli had meant to say those last six words out loud, because he looked over at me with a fresh panic in his eyes, and then he burst into tears before running out of the room. Isaiah instinctively jumped up out of his seat, but I was already chasing after the boy and so I raised a hand in the air, meaning I got this.

I followed Eli out of the library and into the woods beyond the parking lot. When I finally caught up to him, he had picked up a fallen branch and was beating an oak tree with it, using both hands to swing the dead limb back and forth like a giant’s baseball bat.

He was screaming that he knew about the guns and should have told someone and now all those people in there were smiling and helping. And he could have prevented the tragedy if he had said something to someone about his brother’s ever-increasing weapons-and-ammo collection, and the fact that Jacob had grown dark; and was talking about disturbing things; and was listening to depressing music; and had been spending a lot of time in the forest an hour or so away from Majestic illegally shooting animals; and had a growing collection of raccoon and fox skulls; and was always bragging about how good of a shot he had become, even literally saying he “could take a life without feeling a thing” and—

When Eli really started to spin out of control, I wrapped my arms around the boy, forcing him to drop the tree branch, which thudded down on the forest floor. Then I said, “You are not your brother. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“But I could have said something! I should have called the police! How can I ask those people to help me now?”