The Sorrow King Page 3

  The students would never see her in the school again.

  Dave sat in his chair, looking over at Aaron and saying, “That bitch is fucking insane.”

  The rest of the class didn’t know what to say. Even though their adrenaline was pumping, they sat silently in the classroom, left to stew in some kind of electricity. Alison was now crying also. She stood up and said to no one in particular, “I have to go home,” before leaving the classroom. A few minutes passed before McFee came in to question the class about what they had just seen.

  Steven said nothing.

  The morning passed, a slow haze.

  Steven had no friends. This was only his second year at Gethsemane and his friend of last year, Jeff Campbell, moved to Connecticut when his father had to relocate. Therefore, his lunch breaks were spent alone. He had discovered it was too humiliating and depressing to sit in the cafeteria all by himself, or to uncomfortably pretend he was sitting with some other losers at a table, so he went through the line, got a chocolate milkshake, two chocolate chip cookies, and found somewhere around the school to hide and eat. Today, he figured he would be able to go out to his battered black truck in the parking lot. He didn’t think anyone would notice or care, what with everything else going on. Outside, he might even be able to enjoy a smoke after eating and get back in time for Calculus, that mindboggling rape of a class.

  Walking out of the cafeteria, preparing to take the most deserted hallway that would lead outside, he spotted the girl he had seen on his previous night’s wandering. He stopped where he was and stared, unaware of how this would appear to anyone who might be looking at him.

  It was her.

  She sat at a table with some giggling freshman girls. Only she wasn’t giggling along with them. She was reading a book and he tried briefly and unsuccessfully to make out what it was. Sitting there, the meager sunlight floating in from a window, he thought she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. Not beautiful in the same way as the make-up and clothes junkies sitting next to her. Beautiful as in perfectly natural and probably unaware of this natural perfection. Straight orange hair hung to her shoulders. Her skin was very pale, contrasting against the gray of her sweater. He filled in the green eyes and sparse freckles he knew would be there if he were closer.

  A large boy with a tray full of food nearly ran into him and Steven’s stupor was broken.

  Right. He was on his way outside. And while something inside of him told him this would be a perfect time to go over to her table and maybe mention something about seeing her last night, some other thing, some other feeling kept him from doing that. All those giggling girls were probably just waiting to laugh at him if he did anything like that. That was the voice he followed. That was the voice that had probably kept him completely friendless so far this year. It was the voice of reason and the voice of fear.

  He shrugged off the thought, shrugged off the voice, and continued outside.

  Once out there, he looked up at the sky. Low gray clouds hung overhead, meager beams of sunlight radiating downward, and he briefly imagined some intricate pattern, a code, scrawled on the bottoms of the clouds where they were just a shade darker.

  Stratus, he thought, continuing to his truck parked on the far side of the lot. He parked far away just in case of a chance opportunity such as this one.

  The only decent thing about his truck was that it was equipped with a CD player and good speakers. He put the key in the ignition, turning it back toward him so the stereo came on. A CD was in the player. It was a sad, moody CD. The singer sounded tortured, accompanied by a single sparse guitar. It was a CD he listened to when he was sort of depressed and he had been sort of depressed for a couple of years now.

  He finished his milkshake and cookies and contemplated going back into the school before thinking about how much he would rather go home and take a nap instead. Turning the key the other way, the truck started up, shaky and sputtering at first. But, he discovered, if he turned the stereo up loud enough it almost blocked out every indication the truck was dying. Feeling slightly guilty about taking advantage of the sad chaos of the day, he pulled out of the parking lot. When he got home, he would call his dad at work and give him the heads up, just in case the school decided to call there.

  Steven didn’t want to worry the man.

  Chapter Four

  The Park at Night

  Steven lay in his bed with the cordless phone against his ear, listening to it ring on the other end.

  After about six rings, a voice said, “Bookhaven.”

  “You really should change the name of your store,” Steven said. “‘Bookhaven’ sounds religious. Are you a religious bookstore?”

  “Hello, Steven.” It was his dad, Connor. “To what do I owe this call?”

  “Just calling to let you know that I left school. They’ll probably call you at work, wondering where I am. Tell them their lunch left me with crippling diarrhea.”

  “Are you feeling okay?”

  “Physically, I guess.” It was always Steven’s goal to make his dad think he was far more depressed than he ever actually was. The more he could convince him he was a teen-on-edge, the more the man caved to his wants and desires. Although, managing a used bookstore in Alton, Steven understood his dad did not always have the means to meet every want and desire so he tried to keep them to a minimum.

  “No crippling diarrhea, then?”

  “No.”

  “I guess you’ve heard about the . . . uh . . .”

  “Suicide? Yeah, it really brightened my morning.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “No, he was a middle schooler.”

  “Christ . . . Just a kid.”

  “Yeah, well, so I took off. I didn’t figure they would really notice if I was gone.”

  “You didn’t take off to kill yourself, did you?”

  “Wow, that was in poor taste. I guess you’ll just have to find out when you come home.”

  “I’ll probably find you unconscious but I’m pretty sure you’ll still be breathing.”

  “You know we’re both going to hell.”

  “That’s where all the interesting people are.”

  “Yeah yeah. Says the manager of a religious bookstore.”

  “So, well, get some rest or whatever it is you need. Try not to leave the house. It’s always incriminating when you call in sick and people see you traipsing about town. It makes me look like a neglectful parent.”

  “Oh, you are.”

  “Thanks. That makes me feel a lot better. So, since you have all of this time on your hands, what’s for dinner?”

  “Well, your Visa’s in the cabinet so I was thinking pizza’s looking pretty good.”

  “Ah, the quintessential chef. Give him a phone and plastic and he will create miracles.”

  “The cutting edge of cuisine. What time you gonna be home, old man?”

  “Oh, you know, whenever the psychic vampires will let me leave. Probably around seven or so.”

  “All right. I’ll leave you some pizza.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Just for you. Don’t you have work to do?”

  “Always brisk. I probably should be pandering some smut to a morbidly obese housewife out on leave. Talk to you later.”

  “Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  His dad hung up the phone. Steven flipped the OFF button on the cordless and tossed it onto the beige carpeted floor, lying back in his bed and looking up at the olive drab parachute draped over his ceiling, losing himself in the folds and the slightly musty smell.

  Lying there, he found himself more concerned with this Jeremy kid’s suicide than the others and he couldn’t really figure out why. He thought it had to be because he had written his name down on a piece of paper probably about the time the suicide was happening. Maybe he had some kind of telekinesis he didn’t know about. Maybe the next time he wrote down a name in his notebook he should find out where that person lived and rush to his hous
e, trying to talk him out of it like there was some kind of hostage crisis.

  Steven couldn’t see himself doing that. He lay there in the silent room and slowly drifted off to sleep.

  Connor Wrigley pulled his loudly whirring Honda up in front of his small house, the car dying before he could even put it into park. Well, he thought, that makes things easier. He put it into park and took the key out of the ignition, hoping the car would start in the morning. It was already growing dark and chillier outside. Connor looked forward to daylight savings, that mysterious time of year when whoever controlled time just decided to skip an hour so it would be daylight longer.

  He walked into the house, knowing if Steven was home it would be unlocked. It was. He walked in, hungry, hoping to find pizza waiting for him in the kitchen. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t. Steven probably hadn’t gotten around to ordering it. In fact, he assumed the boy was probably still asleep in his room.

  Connor didn’t think he could blame him. Steven had been through a lot over the past couple of years. First, losing his mother to a nasty and rapid moving colon cancer and then moving to Gethsemane to live full-time with him. Connor liked having him here. He wished the circumstances could have been different but he considered himself lucky to have Steven all the time and he considered himself lucky Steven was who he was. He figured there were a lot of teenagers who would have taken their frustrations out in a lot of other ways besides sleeping.

  Still, there was something about Steven that unnerved him. There was something about him being here that made Connor slightly anxious. Connor knew where the unease stemmed from. It was from a single incident at Alison’s funeral and he had been meaning to ask the boy about it but they hadn’t really had any “big conversations” since he had moved in. Maybe, since Connor had had him just about every weekend since he was four, it just wasn’t that much of a transition. Or maybe they were both just a little bit afraid of what might come out of the conversation. Like opening Pandora’s box.

  Connor put the two books he had brought home from the store on the teeming bookcase next to the archway that led to the kitchen and thought about waking Steven up. Reaching his door, he decided against it. Connor held sleep with a kind of holy reverence. Let Steven get his sleep out while he could. Once he reached the adult world, he would be lucky to get eight hours a night. And if he ever got some form of management job, he would be lucky to get any, especially if he inherited the anxiety gene that clung to Connor’s nerves night and day.

  He pulled off his corduroy blazer and flung it over the back of a chair. He went to the cordless charger in the kitchen and, seeing that the phone was not on it, figured it must be in Steven’s room. So he went into his own tiny bedroom, picked up the ancient rotary phone and dialed the number to the pizza place he had, sadly, memorized. He ordered a large sausage pizza and a two liter of Coke and felt relieved that food was on its way.

  To an outsider, his evenings could probably be viewed as a kind of subtle travesty. They were all pretty much the same. He turned on the classical music station that came in from Cincinnati, pulled a book off the shelf, took a Rolling Rock from the refrigerator and began his night of reading. This usually continued until about midnight when he carried his book into his bedroom and read until he fell asleep. Some evenings, Steven would wander out and turn on the television. Sometimes, the boy would pull a book off the shelf and read it with the same voracity his father had probably read the same book some fifteen years ago.

  Steven’s reading followed a similar pattern also. He had started with Stephen King, Clive Barker and Anne Rice, with some Peter Straub or Dean Koontz thrown in for good measure. Basically it was blood, blood, and more blood though. Now he was moving onto the Beats—Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs. This meant Connor would probably have to keep a close eye on him to make sure he didn’t begin a life of rampant drug use. He knew the boy had a good enough head on his shoulders not to try any of that shit, though. Well, Connor would be a hypocrite if he came down on him too hard for trying it. Just so long as he didn’t get carried away.

  He took a sip of his ice cold beer and began reading his book. Sometimes he felt like he just read for the sake of reading. Tonight’s offering was some godawful fantasy novel with wooden characters and a hackneyed formula that had varied little since Tolkien. But he had a strictly enforced “read to the end” policy and he intended to do just that. Nevertheless, he was somewhat thankful when the pizza guy rang the bell.

  The bell must have awakened Steven, who came stumbling out of his room looking somewhat dazed.

  “Hey there,” Connor said, carrying the pizza across the living room and putting it on the coffee table. He couldn’t remember the last time they had eaten a meal at the kitchen table that currently played host to a dying spider plant, assorted bills, and junk mail.

  “Hey,” Steven said.

  “Good job on that pizza ordering.”

  “Sorry. I fell asleep.”

  “It’s okay. It managed to find its way here.”

  Connor threw open the top of the box and grabbed a slice. Steven opened the two liter and took a drink directly from the bottle, knowing that his father never drank soda, and sat down between the couch and the coffee table. Connor sat on the floor in front of his chair.

  “So,” he said through a mouthful of pizza, “how was your day today, besides the unpleasant morning news?”

  “It was strange.” He told him about Ms. Hennessy.

  “Really?” Connor said when he was finished. “I would never have guessed her the type.”

  “You know her?”

  “Yeah, she comes into the bookstore all the time. She is like, uh, an English teacher. I think more of them could spend a few minutes in a bookstore.”

  “You never mentioned seeing her.”

  “Well, if you’re wondering, we’ve spent more time talking about Kafka than we have about you.”

  “So no private parent-teacher conferences?”

  “Okay, you caught me. I actually hired her to spy on you. I don’t even think she has a real teaching degree but a small school like Gethsemane, you know, things slip through the cracks. And when I said that she came in every now and then what I meant to say was that she comes in every evening after school to give me her daily report. If she tells me something I don’t want to hear then I wait until you go to sleep, inject you with something so you stay that way, and then I fill your head with all kinds of subliminal messages. ‘Dad is good. Dad is great. I will always listen to Dad.’ That kind of thing.”

  “Sick bastard.”

  “It’s what I have to do to feel good about myself.”

  “By the way, if you see her again, tell her I think Smoltz deserved to get smacked.”

  “You know me—always a big violence advocate.”

  Connor thought now would probably be a good time to have a discussion with Steven. He could use the suicides as a launch pad, to see if they were affecting him or if, hell, he didn’t know, to see if the boy had ever thought about killing himself, maybe, but he let the chance slip by. The silent eating had begun. Besides, if Steven wanted to talk about something, he’d bring it up.

  Steven reached for the remote control and flipped on the TV, putting an even more definite end to their conversation. Connor took another slice of pizza and returned to his chair and his book. Periodically glimpsing away from the elves, wizards, and dark lords, he looked at Steven like he was actually going to catch any great emotion in a mostly deadpan face.

  The boy was unreadable to a frustrating degree, he thought, knowing he was exactly the same way.

  After his bountiful sleep and a good meal, Steven was full of energy. Already past midnight, this did not make the prospects of getting up for school the next morning very pleasant. He hadn’t heard his father retire to the bedroom yet but he felt sure he must be in bed by now. The man was usually like clockwork, one of the most routine specimens Steven had observed.

  He grabbed a faded black hoodie with
holes aplenty and zipped it up over his long sleeve t-shirt, hoping it would be warm enough. The hoodie had large pockets so he slid his portable disc player, loaded with the eels’ Electro-shock Blues. He decided not to turn it on until he got outside.

  Opening his door, his father surprised him. He was just coming out of the bathroom, ready to turn into his own bedroom.

  Damn, Steven thought, just a minute too early.

  “Going somewhere?” Connor asked.

  “Just out for a little walk.”

  “Kind of late, isn’t it?”

  He knew his father only said half the things he did because they were things he imagined a responsible parent might say. He knew just as well as Steven did there wasn’t any harm in him going out to walk the streets of Green Heights at this hour. Statistically, at the moment, he stood a better chance of killing himself than he did of being abducted or murdered.

  “I know it’s late but, well, I took that nap and I thought this would be a good way to burn off some energy so maybe I can get a little sleep before school.”

  “Always putting school first.” Steven couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not.

  What followed was an awkward moment, Connor standing there scratching his thin brown beard and Steven standing there kind of dancing from foot to foot.

  “Well . . . is it okay if I go?” he asked.

  “Oh, yeah, just . . . stay out of trouble. Watch out for roving packs of skinheads, pedophiles, werewolves, vampires—you know, the usual townsfolk.”

  “You bet, I got everything I need—silver bullets, nuclear weapons, crucifixes—you name it.”

  “A plunger?”

  “As always.”

  “Excellent. You would have made a good Boy Scout.”