“Jack,” he said. “Let me inside your head for once.”
“I can’t,” I mumbled. I turned from him and went to the sink, pressing my face against the glass of the mirror. He reached out to touch my shoulder, and I didn’t mean to, but I pulled away.
I instantly regretted it. We were standing on the precipice of something, and I was pushing us over the edge.
He was silent for a moment, and then he spoke.
“You know, Jack, I’ve tried. I’ve really tried. This has been going on since I first met you.”
I went somewhere deep inside myself. I knew this would come…I’d known it all along.
I’d willed it into existence.
“But now you’re farther away from me than ever. I understand you’re scared, and not just of those phone calls. I get that. Trust me, if anyone knows fear, it’s me. But if this is going to work, if we’re going to…I just can’t keep hiding out like this, like some frightened fucking animal.”
When I didn’t answer, he went on. “You know how I feel about this place, about the assholes that go here. Well fuck them all. Seriously, fuck them. Jack, come on, look at me. You matter more to me than these shitty people with their heads so far up their own asses they can’t breathe or think of anyone but themselves or anything but their own ignorant bullshit. Jack. Answer me!”
A thousand words were caught in my throat, swimming through my mind, but I couldn’t speak.
I heard him leave then, heard the door swing shut, the sound echoing into the cold chamber of everything I was making myself lose.
42.
The rattlesnake was enormous, monstrous.
Its long, meaty body writhed in pain in the giant oven that was slowly burning it to death. Someone tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a spoon. I’d have to eat it when it was done cooking.
I woke up gasping for air. My lungs on fire. Mom was there, rubbing my back. “You’re alright,” she said soothingly. “It was just a nightmare.”
My sheets were sticky with sweat. I was shaking, terrified, the horror and the panic rising in me from some primal place. My teeth chattered as she put a cool hand to my forehead and rubbed my shoulders.
“It’s okay, baby,” she said. “Everything’s alright now.”
I let her tuck me back in, let her bring me water and feel my forehead again, gauging my temperature. Soon the chills ceased and I stopped shaking, the heaviness setting in as I settled back down. I could see her wrinkles in the darkness, the familiar shape of her face, all the lines and creases, the way her hair fell forward down her shoulders.
“Mom,” I whispered. “Something bad is going to happen.” It was something I used to say when I was little, when I would wake from a bad dream, a long series of night terrors I used to get when I was nine or ten.
She dutifully said her lines.
“No, no,” she said, her voice a balm. “Everything is going to be just fine. When you wake up in the morning, everything will be better.”
For the first time in a while, I felt love for her. Deep, endless rivers of love, warming me as I fell back into a stone-cold sleep.
In the morning, I fished through my drawers, finally settling on one of my favorite shirts, a white graphic tee. On the front was a black-and-white photo of a handsome young James Dean, smoking a thin cigarette. I spiked my hair up in the front, checking myself out in the mirror. I looked good. I look good. I feel good, I told myself.
It was warm and sunny that day, a cool breeze following me as I biked the two miles to school. Today would be different, it would be better. No one would try me today.
Things were going well until second period, when I went to my locker.
Carved into the metal was the letter “F”, revealing the cold gray steel underneath the sickly orange paint. It’d been done with a key or a knife, something that could allow for a quick and easy cut.
I scouted the hallways for someone watching me, someone waiting for my reaction. But there was no one there that I knew, just pools of freshmen floating along aimlessly, happily oblivious.
I breathed deeply, forced myself to relax. They can’t hurt you, I told myself. They’re just trying to rattle you.
I opened my locker.
Inside was a thick piece of rope fashioned into what looked like a noose. A pink sticky note had been stuck to it, along with the words in barely eligible writing: No one would miss you. And beside it, a badly drawn cartoon of Riley Adams, naked and covered in black scribbles.
I slammed the locker door so hard it rattled.
I felt myself getting hot all over, and suddenly it was hard to breathe. Things were tunneling away from my vision, the ground pulling me underneath.
There were voices, a security guard snapping for me to move along, someone asking if I was okay. We were moving. Things were fuzzy, blurry. In my mind’s eye, I was in the backyard, running away from Daddy, heart racing, cold adrenaline sweating off me. I had to move quickly or the monster would catch me. Everything was very bright.
I didn’t come to until someone laid me down on my back. I stared up at the ugly school ceiling, white with black spots.
The school nurse was sitting on the edge of the sick bed, taking my pulse with two fingers. She had a placid, small smile
