Expelled(58)

I can’t be here any longer. I stand up.

“Theo?” she says.

But I can’t answer. All I can do is run.

Reeling, half blind with revulsion, I manage to stumble my way outside. The sun’s like a punch in the gut, and suddenly I’m bending over, dry-heaving on Sasha’s front lawn.

When I’m done with that, I start running home.





55


Our minivan’s actually in the driveway for once, but I don’t call to my mom to let her know I’m here—I just grab the keys from their hook and run back outside.

“Theo?” Her voice comes through the screen door. “Is that you?”

I put the car into reverse. “Gotta go,” I yell.

She calls out something else, but I don’t know what it is and I don’t care, either. I’m already backing into the street.

I head east toward the edge of town. Past the Matheson’s shopping center and the hideous corporate office park, the speedometer ticks a few degrees right of 75 and stays there—that’s all the power the old Honda’s got.

The windows are down and the air rushes into my face, and I wish I could keep on driving forever. I wish the radio worked so I could drown out Sasha’s words. I wish most of all that I could go back in time and somehow make the last year simply not happen.

I can’t believe what life has done to me—or what life has done to her.

Now, by some miracle pushing 80, I shoot by a van that says DANIELLE’S DOGGIE DAYCARE, and the driver—Danielle, presumably—gives me the finger. So she doesn’t like being passed on a double yellow? Whatever. I flip her off right back. Fuck you and your little dogs, too.

I can’t tell if speeding’s making me feel better or worse. My heart and head are both pounding. Sasha and her father. What in the hell is wrong with the world? How could a man do that?

I see a sign for the highway that’s a couple of miles up the road. Once you’re on that, it’s just two hours to the city. If I go there, I won’t know a soul, and no one will know me, and maybe I won’t feel so much like stabbing knives into my eyes. Or finding Matthew Ellis and somehow running him over with my mom’s Honda.

I press even harder on the accelerator. The minivan shudders, strains. The engine screams. And then twirling red-and-blue lights appear in my rearview mirror.

I pull over to the side of the road and slam my fist to the dashboard. “Shitpissfuckdamn,” I yell, which is what my dad used to say.

The squad car glides to a stop behind the van, and a bowlegged officer walks up to my window and bends down to look in.

“You realize why I pulled you over today?” the cop asks. Then he lifts his knockoff Ray-Bans and peers into my face. “Well, what do you know. You’re Theo Foster, aren’t you?”

Jesus, I think, he knows who I am from seeing my face all over the news. Could today get any single shred worse?

I nod. “Yes, sir.”

Now he’s leaning his elbows on the door. “You’ve had a rough time of it lately, haven’t you?” he asks.

The sympathy in his voice is not at all what I was expecting.

“Yes, sir,” I say again.

“I understand. I knew your dad,” he says. “We used to play racquetball together at the rec center.”

“You did?” I squint at him. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him before.

“For two years, son. He had a wicked backhand and a killer pinch shot,” the cop says. “What a terrible thing to happen to him. I’m so sorry.”

But I’m so wrecked I can’t even accept this stranger’s kindness. The world is full of horrors I’m only beginning to understand. “He did it to himself, remember?” I ask sharply. “It’s not like he got diagnosed with a goddamn bullet in his brain stem.”

The cop’s face crumples. “Oh, son, he got delivered a death sentence just the same. He couldn’t…” He shakes his head. He looks almost overcome. “It was too awful. I might’ve done the same thing in his place. I thought about that a lot. There just was no good choice.”

But I’m not in the mood for thinking about my dad, because the more I think about him, the more shattered I feel. Maybe there was no good outcome, but there was a good choice.

It just wasn’t the one that he made.

“Are you going to give me a ticket?” I ask through gritted teeth.

The cop shakes his head. “Not today. But I don’t want to see you zipping down the road like this again, Theo Foster. There’s a big curve before you hit the interstate, and I’ve pulled more than my share of kids out of mangled Chevys because of it.” He pats the roof of my mom’s old beater. “Now you turn around and go back home. Give my best to your mother. Tell her Officer Todd Tucker is thinking of her.”

He stands there on the side of the road, watching as I drive back the way I came.

What am I supposed to do now?

I grip the steering wheel. Hell is empty, and all the demons are here—isn’t that what Sasha said?

I think about her dad—an abuser. And mine—a suicide.

Are we, too, a couple of disasters in the making?

I really hope not.

I squeeze my eyes shut, count to five, and then open them again. I’m still on the road. It stretches out straight in front of me. It doesn’t care which way I go.