What They Always Tell Us (5 page)

On-screen, a guy wearing just his underpants is creeping out of a tent to go take a piss in the woods. If James was at home now with Alex—and shouldn’t he be, rather than here in this awful hotel room?—he would tell Alex to start covering his eyes, because a half-naked boy creeping out in the woods when a masked killer is on the loose, well, anyone with a brain knew what was coming next.

“He’s toast,” Preston says.

Preston is good company. He knows to let James lie there in peace. And lie there he does, until his eyelids feel too heavy to remain open. With his eyes closed, it’s only a matter of time before he falls into a dreamless sleep.

Both he and Preston wake up sometime after nine—too early. But James feels surprisingly alert and refreshed, while Preston groans and moans.

Outside, in the nippy morning air, Preston is worthless when it comes to changing the tire—James basically does it by himself.

“What you gonna do today?” Preston asks, once James has finally secured the spare tire onto the Jeep. “Call the cops on that crazy bitch?” He is smoking—a cigarette this time—and he takes a drag and then busts into a big grin.

“Nah,” James says, wiping his dirtied hands on his jeans. “I guess I’ll just go home and chill out. Do some homework. I just hope my parents don’t get home till late, so they won’t see the tire.” He’s still torn about what to tell them.

“Well, call me if you want to throw the football or come over or some shit like that.”

“Yeah, I will,” James says. “Thanks for, you know, coming here.”

“Sure thing.” They knock fists and then Preston pops into his BMW and zooms out of the parking lot. Probably going home to sleep some more, James thinks.

After turning in his key at the front desk to a sallow-faced older man wearing a maroon vest over a white shirt, James drives home, the roads mostly empty except for churchgoers. He stopped going to church regularly about a year ago. Alex stopped, too, and their parents have given up nagging them to come along on Sundays. Not that they’re religious freaks or anything. James thinks they just go because all their friends do, or maybe just out of habit.

The calm he felt the night before has vanished, and when he turns into his neighborhood—loftily called Woodland Heights—his belly clenches. It hits him then—the thought that Alex may have done something to himself. That, in his absence, Alex may have succeeded this time. And that James would be to blame and that his parents would never forgive him and that their worlds would fall apart.

But as he rounds a corner and heads to their house, he sees Alex in the yard, wearing jeans and a purple T-shirt. And he sees that Alex is not alone. That kid who lives across the street is talking with him, the weird one with crazy red hair. They both turn and stare at James and his Jeep, and the little boy says something to Alex and then darts across the street.

James pulls into the driveway and parks. Before he gets out of the car, he looks over to see if Alex is looking at him. That’s when Alex holds up his hand in a slight wave and smiles. Not a big smile, not a huge grin. It’s more tentative than that. But it’s a smile, something he hasn’t seen Alex do for a long, long time.

Alex

“I
’m glad to see you boys didn’t burn the house down while we were away,” Dad jokes when he and Mom get back from the wedding that Sunday afternoon. Alex is in the den, watching TV, but he gets up to greet and hug them. Alex is glad to see them in good spirits; his dad is a jokester at heart, but lately he hasn’t been making his usual jokes and comments, at least not around Alex, as if jokes are inappropriate now, after what happened.

“Yeah,” Alex says. “We didn’t trash the house too much.” He smiles.
See,
he thinks,
I can make jokes, too. Everything doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom,
he wants to say.

“Where’s James?” Mom asks.

“Upstairs,” he says. That’s where James has been ever since he got home from the La Quinta, in a seemingly bad mood.

At dinner, a few hours later, Mom and Dad talk about the wedding—Dad says it must have cost a fortune, and Mom says the flowers were a little tacky for her taste but that overall it was nice. Alex and James just sit there and listen, really.

“And you guys had a good weekend?” Dad asks.

“Yeah,” James says.

Alex nods in agreement, before glancing briefly at James, who looks guilty and nervous.

“But I ran over a nail or something, because my tire got busted,” James says.

“Oh, no,” Mom says. “How did that happen?”

“I don’t know,” James says. “On the way back from Preston’s last night? I made it home okay. But I put on the spare this morning.”

Dad says tomorrow he’ll go with him to the tire store to get a new one. “Tires are expensive,” he adds.

“I
know,
Dad,” James says. “If you want me to pay—”

“Don’t be silly,” Mom says. “It was an accident.”

Alex looks over at James, and he knows he is lying about something. Not that he cares. But it’s funny, he thinks, how he can just
tell
such things about James—the way his face gets slightly flushed, how his eyes flutter, how his mouth tightens.

“And you had an okay weekend, honey?” Mom asks Alex.

“Yeah,” he says. “I mean, it was boring, but fine.”

Both his parents look at him and nod, like they’re relieved he didn’t have something awful to report. “Boring is good sometimes,” Dad says.

The next week passes slowly for Alex—five days of school, therapy on Wednesday, a lazy Saturday spent reading and daydreaming in his room, and now this dull Sunday. The weather has been a roller coaster, mild one day, cold the next, then wet and cold, then sunny again. It’s like fall and winter are duking it out for control; winter will likely win out after Thanksgiving, which is still about a week and a half away.

This Sunday evening it is chilly but not frigid, and just as the sun is setting and the streetlights around the neighborhood flicker on, Alex decides to go for a run. He puts on his sweats and laces up his jogging shoes. He hasn’t jogged for many months—he just hasn’t felt up to it—but he used to jog all the time, to clear his head. Tonight, after being trapped in the house all day, his legs tingle with nervous energy, demanding to be used.

He passes his mom in the kitchen as he heads toward the garage door. “I’m gonna go for a jog.”

“This late?” she says, stopping the onion chopping and glancing at her watch. “Okay, but be back within the hour for supper.”

He heads off on what once was his usual route—down the street, left on Country Club Way, then straight ahead to the golf course. The country club borders the neighborhood, so anyone can jog along the golf cart trails, at least after the golfers have finished for the day. Alex’s breathing is pinched in the cold evening air, but still, the coldness feels good on his face, and soon he starts to feel that once-familiar clearheadedness.

The grass along the course is brittle and brown, but the putting greens are still a bright, emerald green. The country club groundsmen dye the grass during the winter so golfers can still see where to hit the ball. It’s a goofy-looking landscape, little green islands floating in a sea of yellow-brown. Tall pine trees line the fairways, and the dropped brown pine needles litter the edges of the asphalt pathway. The trail snakes this way and that, up hills, down hills, dictated by the layout of the golf course.

Up ahead, Alex sees a jogger coming toward him. It’s a guy wearing white sweats and a crimson sweatshirt with a hood. Could be anyone. It’s not like Alex is the only jogger who lives near the course. He usually runs into middle-aged men who are out trying to lose a few pounds. But this person moves like he is young, someone lean and crisp.

Alex is hell-bent on passing with nothing more than a nod, whoever it is. Plus, the guy’s face is shrouded, and it’s getting dark. But just as Alex passes, the guy calls out his name.

Alex stops and turns back, and the mystery person peels back his hood and reveals himself to be Nathen Rao. James’s buddy.

“Hey, man. I
thought
that was you,” Nathen says.

Nathen has always been nice to Alex, even after the incident. Some of James’s friends make Alex feel awkward, nervous. Like Greer, who always talks about the girls he gets with, like it’s a sport and Greer is the best at it in the world. Or Preston, who sneers at Alex and looks at him like he’s defective. Or else they ignore him—which is fine by Alex. But Nathen is different—friendly, comfortable to talk to. Nice. Whenever Alex saw him after the incident, he didn’t avoid the topic like so many others. He asked how he was doing, did he feel better? Alex has always liked him—and felt shy around him.

“Yeah,” Alex says. “Just thought I’d go for a jog.”

“I didn’t know you jogged.”

“I used to, all the time. This is my first time in a while. I’m out of shape.”

“Ah, well, you’ll get back into it.” Nathen wipes his brow with his sleeve. He’s breathing heavily. His black hair—usually combed back and styled—is flat and matted.

Alex nods, doesn’t know what to say, really. He wants to get back to running, before it gets too dark, while he has momentum, but it also feels nice talking with Nathen, even if it is just stupid, meaningless small talk. Then he remembers that Nathen is on the cross-country team at school. “You training?”

“I guess you could call it that. Our meets are over, for the most part, until spring. But coach keeps us in shape.”

“Yeah,” Alex says. “I bet.”

Nathen smiles at him like Alex just said something funny. His big white teeth, set against his creamy brown skin, seem to glow in the dusk. “Well, I better get going. But I’ll see you at school tomorrow!” He taps Alex’s shoulder with his fist, like play boxing, and darts off again. Alex watches him run off at a pretty fast pace before he resumes his own jog.

His breathing is labored, and his legs get tired and stiff, but he keeps going, jogging for over half an hour. In a way, seeing Nathen has given him a weird sort of energy. As he continues his route, an idea sets in his mind:
If I jog every night this week, I will get better. Faster. It will become easier.
It’s a goal. Something to strive toward.

He exits the golf course and picks up speed. He rounds the corner and sees his house up ahead, the lights blazing through the windows. There is dinner to eat, homework to tackle, but it doesn’t seem nearly as dreary to Alex as it did just an hour earlier.

The next morning, Alex wakes up, showers, dresses, and eats a bowl of Cheerios in the den, watching the
Today
show as his mother busies herself in the kitchen before heading to her job at the historical commission. His father reads the paper while eating his grapefruit and boiled egg in the breakfast room. James usually grabs a banana on the way out. They drive separately to school—James in his Jeep, Alex in his white Honda Accord. His mother says driving to the same building in two cars is a waste of gas. And it is. But James usually stays late for extra tennis practice, and Alex comes home right on time. Plus, it would probably kill James to be stuck in the car with Alex, forced to chat with him.

Central High is a big school—so big that it is divided into two campuses. The freshmen and sophomores go to Central West, on the run-down side of town, while the juniors and seniors go to Central East, which isn’t that far from the university. It’s the nicer-looking school, newer, but it still looks like a prison.

And in many ways, it
is
a prison, to Alex at least, trapped there all day, inside its pale walls with linoleum floors. It’s a two-story, U-shaped building, made of dark red brick. Big black screens cover the windows—to conserve energy, the school board says—and the back parking lot is surrounded by a high chain-link fence. Alex pulls into a spot farther back, away from where other students have parked and clustered. Inside, the school smells of bad cafeteria food and cleaning supplies.

First period is American government with grumpy Mr. Wiley, then it’s chemistry with Mrs. Alexander, followed by trig with Mrs. Summers, who is young and surprisingly pretty for a math teacher. Nothing unusual happens today. Alex sits in his uncomfortable seats and pays attention and feels just like another student. None of his friends—well, his ex-friends—are in his early classes. This used to disappoint him, but now, he knows, it’s a blessing.

Advanced English is fourth period, his favorite class. He likes the work (the reading, writing, analyzing), and the teacher, Mrs. Winters, who’s sarcastic and no-nonsense and funny. She doesn’t treat Alex like some fragile head case, like some of the other teachers. After English, it’s time for lunch, and Alex heads for the library, where he sneaks nibbles from a package of peanut-butter crackers he buys from the vending machine, does his homework, and daydreams. Luckily James has a different lunch period, or else he might comment on his absence from the cafeteria or, worse, feel obligated to have Alex sit at his table. When Alex returned to school after the incident at the beginning of October, his old lunchroom pals would set their bags and books on the empty seats to discourage him from even
thinking
about sitting with them. At first he sat alone, on the other side of the cafeteria, where most of the black kids sat, in an odd habit of mutually agreed-upon segregation. Some of the black kids gave him funny looks, but most just ignored him. None of them, at least, prevented him from sitting near them. Eventually Alex figured out that he could sit in the library, where his solitude wasn’t so obviously on display.

The librarian is a fortyish woman with short, curly brown hair. She always wears long pleated skirts and buttoned-up white blouses, like it’s her librarian uniform. She never smiles at Alex. She probably hates him because he never checks out any of the books. The only other people in the library are Valerie Towson, a quiet, mousy black girl who’s a senior, and a boy named Jess Blankenship, a math geek with no personality. Great company he’s in. They all sit alone, at separate wooden tables, their faces buried in homework.

Today Alex pulls out a notebook and maps out a jogging plan for himself. This week, he decides, he’ll keep to the same path and the same distance. But next week he’ll need to go farther, longer. He figures the golf course runs about three miles, give or take. So he could always run the course twice, to increase the distance. Or he could run through the neighborhoods—his and a few others—that border the course. Nathen Rao lives in one of those neighborhoods—Pinehurst—with his parents, professors at the university. He maps out two weeks’ worth of jogging regimens, and after that he will see how his body is holding up.

The bell rings—time for Spanish class. As he trudges up the south stairwell, he sees James and Nathen.

“Hey, buddy,” Nathen says, passing and, just like last night, play-punching him on the shoulder. Alex tries to say something back, but he feels like he has twenty pieces of bubble gum in his mouth, so he just nods and smiles. He continues up the stairs and he wonders what James—who only looked at him, not even nodding—is thinking, what expression he wears. It makes Alex smile to think about.

In Spanish it is “conversation day.” Mr. Ramos, who is actually
from
a Spanish-speaking country, unlike Alex’s southern-twanged tenth-grade teacher, assigns him to chat with Patty McPherson. He notices that Tyler and Kirk, who sit in the back, are conversation buddies today. Lang is also in this class. It’s like a minefield. But when they do have to talk to each other, at least it’s in a foreign tongue.