Interim(23)

“Regan Walters.”

The secretary typed her name into the computer, then picked up the receiver.

“This is Pam from Ridgeview High,” she said. “Uh, no—” She glanced at Regan. “—it’s not about her clothes.”

Pause.

“Oh, I see,” Pam said, laughing. She looked at Regan and winked. “No, no, she’s sick. Or says she’s sick.”

“I am sick,” Regan grumbled.

Pam ignored her. “Uh huh. Okay, well, I’ll send her home. Did she drive? She walked? Oh, well then maybe you could pick her up?”

“I can walk.”

“Okay, she’ll be here in the front office,” Pam said. “Yep, you’re welcome, Mrs. Walters. Bye bye.”

“I can walk home,” Regan said as she watched the secretary hang up.

“In your condition? No way. You need to stay right here until your mom comes. Well, unless you’d rather see the nurse.”

Pam smiled pleasantly. Regan plopped onto a couch and waited. Her mother took her sweet time getting to school, and Regan had to bide hers with an English class novel. That was until she could hole herself up in her room for the rest of the afternoon to have a one-sided screaming match with that boy.

When she was safely locked away inside her bedroom an hour later, she tackled the journal once more. It was a new entry.

I’ve had several weeks to think about it, and I’m not going to scratch it out. Those were my feelings about her on the first day of school, so they stay. But I realized I could never say that to her face, and I would never want to. I don’t believe it anyway. If she were to smile at me, acknowledge me again in even the slightest way, I wouldn’t say, “Fuck you.” I’d smile back. I’d smile back because I’d remember the Regan from sixth grade who stuck up for me. I know she’s in there. She doesn’t belong with those people. They’re awful. She’s good. She’s goodness, earning a place on the imaginary pedestal I built for her. I’m waiting for her to climb down and get face-to-face with me. Have a real conversation about her cowardice.

“I don’t owe you a conversation,” Regan spat.

Or maybe she could climb down and just kiss me instead. I’m a guy. I don’t need her words. I need her tongue. And I confess I fantasize about—

The entry stopped dead. No period. Incomplete.

“Damn,” she said, though she wasn’t altogether certain she wanted to read a teenage boy’s sexual fantasies about her. She liked the pedestal talk much better.

On and on she read, listening every now and then for movement near her bedroom door. She laughed and cried at his words, learning about an anguished boy who just wanted to be left alone. He didn’t even need a friend, if they would just leave him alone. Her name popped up frequently, and those were the moments her guilt roared, demanding she stop intruding where she didn’t belong. “You have no right!” the guilt fired along her synapses, and she shook her head to scatter the words—confuse her brain. She couldn’t stop. She wouldn’t.

Brandon Whittaker needs a bullet between his eyes . . .

***

Jeremy tore through his locker, tossing books and notebooks left and right. He dropped to the floor and picked through everything, praying for a glimpse of red to erase the growing panic. No red. He searched again, this time carefully and deliberately stacking his books in one pile, his notebooks in another. No red.

“I left it at home,” he said. “That’s where it is.”

He flew out of the building and ran all the way to his front door. It wasn’t far, but he stood with his hands on his knees anyway, panting hard, trying to regulate his heartbeat. He knew his father was inside, and he knew there would be payback for this morning.

He backed away from the door and crept around the side of the house to his bedroom window. He left it unlocked. Always. For easy escape. He slowly pushed up the sash, listening intently for any movement inside the house. None. He slid the wooden crate below the window and hoisted himself up, wriggling through the small opening and falling as soundlessly as he could onto the hardwood floor. He waited, holding his breath. No sound.

He snuck around the nearly empty room, searching every crack, every hiding place. He found the old carton of cigarettes he stole years ago. An abandoned comic book. A crusty, old comb.

He checked the closet a third time before forcing himself to face reality: the journal wasn’t in his room. The journal wasn’t in his locker. Somewhere in the space between escaping home this morning and visiting his locker a final time at the end of the school day, he’d lost it. Someone may have thrown it away. Someone may have taken it to the lost and found in the office. Someone may have kept it and was reading it now—all his secrets. All his anger. All his resolve. The thought of this infringement sent him into a rage, and he grabbed his desk chair, hurling it across the room where it crashed against the far wall.