Cold Calls (6 page)

The same voice asked, “What if I don't write anything?”

“Then you don't get credit for the assignment and I get to call your folks and tell them that you can't go back to school. Which is fine by me. My paycheck will be exactly the same either way. Now, the rest of you had better start writing.”

Eric clicked his pen and opened the cover. An empty page with thin blue lines stared back at him. It was the same type of booklet they used for midterm essay tests, and he could hear every teacher he ever had telling him to rewrite the question at the top of the page because it would help him think of what to write. But he knew exactly what he had to write, the kind of things they were looking for him to say, saying it so it sounded the way they needed him to sound, whether he meant it or not, all those English classes about “knowing your audience” paying off.

He rewrote the question, then skipped two lines and started.

I was accused of—

Accused?

It would be great if that's all it was.

If he was simply
accused
of bullying, he wouldn't be here, his parents wouldn't be mad, he'd still be on the team, and maybe—
maybe
—April would talk to him again someday in this lifetime.

But he wasn't accused of anything.

He was guilty.

Eric crossed out the words, skipped another line, and started again.

I picked on—

Picked on? Cute.

You pick on your friends, teammates, girls who are one of the guys. It's what you do when you hang out, the thing that separates friends from strangers, the familiarity that made it funny and forgivable. But Connor wasn't a friend.

He crossed it out and skipped a line and told himself to just write the damn thing.

I bullied a kid.

He looked at the sentence.

Closer, but still not there yet.

Not “a” kid, a specific one.

A kid who never did anything, who didn't deserve any of it. A kid with a name.

I bullied Connor Stark.

Okay, how?

I called him names like—

That sounded stupid, and he crossed it out before he finished the thought.

I spoke insultingly to the young man at my school—

That sounded weird and somehow worse. He thought for a moment, then tried again.

I knowingly used insensitive and/or derogatory terms pertaining to sexual orientation to hurt another human being.

Better.

He was surprised he remembered it almost word for word from the
LGBT Diversity Education Facilitators' Handbook
.

That
had been a great weekend.

April's older brother helped organize the summer training sessions during Gay Pride week at his college. He'd gotten April and Eric guest passes, even to the parties. They couldn't drink, but it was still a riot. Garrett wouldn't let them sleep in the same bed—
she's my kid sister, bro
—but they had time alone when Garrett was busy. They didn't push it, didn't go any further than they had gone before, but that was okay. It wasn't like it was his first or anything. Hers, yeah, but there was no rush. It'd happen when she was ready, and even if it didn't, that was okay too.

Because it was different with her.

Different and better.

Everything changed with April.

Especially him.

And then he'd thrown it all away.

Eric shook his head clear and read the line again:
I knowingly used insensitive and/or derogatory terms pertaining to sexual orientation to hurt another human being.

It was accurate. It didn't say anything, but it was accurate.

Part of him wanted to write down everything he
had
said, word for word, put it out there in all caps, like it must have sounded when he said it. It didn't make any difference that he hadn't meant any of it. He'd said it and April knew it and that was it. And he knew as soon as he had said it that he would always be
that asshole, Eric.

If he had just beat the kid up, it wouldn't have been as bad. Even the mac-and-cheese attack. But no, he had crossed the line, not with what he did but with what he had said. And not all of it, just three words.

Gay. Queer. Fag.

There were other words—nouns and verbs and adjectives, and words that used to be worse—but those three words were the ones that would hurt April the most.

And those were the words he had had to use.

The caller said so.

The other words? Just filler.

Eric took a deep breath and held it.

If I could go back,
he thought,
would I do it again?

Would I still say those things if I knew everything that would happen?

How much trouble it would get me in?

How bad I'd “disappoint” my parents?

Hurt April?

If I could go back, would I do it all again just to keep my so-called secret, keep that one stupid picture from getting out?

Eric thought about it for half a second.

Hell, yeah.

Down the hall, a door slammed, breaking his concentration. He stretched and looked around the room. A few of the others had their heads down on their desks, either done writing or done trying. The headscarf girl was still at it, the pages of the blue book filled, her tiny writing moving into the margins. The nervous kid was chewing on his pencil, deep in thought. Greg, the guy with the tribal tattoo, was already halfway through his blue booklet. Annalise was busy drawing pictures on the blank pages.

Eric stretched again, turning so he could see the goth girl.

Her book was closed, her pen down on the cover. She leaned on her elbows, her hands folded and resting against her forehead, eyes closed, lips silently moving, her face wet with tears.

T
HE ORGANIST HELD THE LAST NOTE OF
“I
MMACULATE
Mary” until the stained-glass windows rattled, then he stopped cold, letting it echo across the wood ceiling like rolling thunder.

Not bad for a hymn.

Shelly listened as the organist shut the cover on the keyboard and locked the choir-loft door behind him, coming down the side stairs to the vestibule, joining the other old people as they shuffled out to the shuttle bus that would take them back to the nursing home.

She had the whole place to herself.

There probably was an altar boy or two in the back and some usher counting the collection-plate take, but out here where the pews were, it was empty and she was in no rush to leave.

There were two services at this church, 9:00 a.m. and noon. The noon service would be more crowded, since that was the mass with the priest who spoke English. The priest who did the early service was from someplace in Africa, and if Shelly didn't know the liturgy by heart, she wouldn't have had a clue what he was saying. As for the sermon, he could have been calling for a revolution for all she could make out. A lot of churches were doing that now, bringing in priests from Africa or China to make up for the shortages over here. Nonna Lucia didn't like it one bit. To her, every priest had to sound like Father DiPonzio, with a nice Italian accent, just like Jesus. It didn't matter to Shelly. She didn't come for the priest.

It had been different over at St. Mark's. The church was smaller, but more people came, and there were four services on Sunday and one on Saturday night, but why someone would spend any part of a Saturday night in church was beyond her. She used to like to go to the 10:45 service on Sunday mornings, since that was the one with the full choir and more songs, and Father Caudillo's homilies were usually funny and never depressing. The last time she had gone to confession it had been with Father C. He had listened quietly as she said what she had to say, and somehow she got most of it out okay, then he did his best, saying something about God's love and forgiving oneself and the difference between guilt and shame and what sin meant, and he told her a bunch of prayers she should say, as if prayers were going to make everything sunny and bright. She had said them anyway and—surprise, surprise—things started to change. Not a lot, no, and really slow, but it was something, or at least the hint of something.

Then the phone call.

Shelly closed her eyes and slouched down, letting her neck rest on the back of the pew.

Seriously, God, why you gotta be like that?

She knew there had to be
some
punishment. You don't commit a crime that big and expect to walk away. Maybe God was just picking up the slack for the judge. But it wasn't the voice of God that had her doing things she never thought she would do, things she hated doing but didn't have a choice about. Not a real choice, anyway.

She knew what would have happened if she hadn't done what the caller demanded, and she knew she couldn't go through that again. Better they think she was a bully than know the truth.

But what if she could have done things differently? Not with Heather Herman, but with the freak on the other end of the phone. What if she had the power to go back and start again?

Shelly smiled and imagined a better reality.

First, she needed to find out who was behind the calls. That had been her original plan. She'd thought it was going to be easy—download an app or something. They do it all the time on TV. What had come up on Google, though, was way, way over her head, so that plan fell through. But she was daydreaming now, and in that reality she'd get the number and she'd ring up the caller, playing it off movie-villain cool. “Hi, this is Shelly. Let's talk.” Then there'd be that moment when whoever it was on the other end would realize they'd made a terrible mistake. It would be her mature tone and easy manner that would make the caller sweat, wondering what Shelly would do next. It didn't matter that Shelly had no idea what that sort of thing would sound like—that wasn't important to the fantasy. After that, she'd make it clear that if there were any more calls, any more threats, there'd be a shit storm of trouble. And not law trouble either.
Real
trouble—the kind you can't get out of on a technicality. The caller would have squirmed at that, would've been like, “I swear, I'll go away, you'll never hear from me again. I'll never tell anybody what you did, how you killed that—”

“You are displaying much happiness on your face,” the priest said, stepping back when Shelly jumped, her stifled gasp sounding like a scream in the empty church.

“I am most very sorry, miss,” he said. “I did not mean at all to frighten you.”

“No, it's all right.” Shelly put her hand over her racing heart. “I was just thinking about something, that's all.”

“I, too, often sit here and think. May I?”

“It's your church,” Shelly said, sliding down to give him room to sit.

“It is more your church than it can be mine, as I have only been blessed to be here for two months.”

“That's about a month longer than me.”

“So then we are both new members. I am Father Joseph Mwojt, but please call me Father Joe.” He held out his hand and she shook it.

“Shelly,” she said.

“I am from the city of Nimule, at the very southern tip of South Sudan. And yourself?”

Shelly smiled back. “I used to go to St. Mark's church in Lockport. Ever hear of it?”

“There was a St. Mark's in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, but I assume that is not the one you mean.” He laughed, and Shelly thought that even that had an indecipherable accent.

“I enjoyed your sermon today.”

“Impossible. I myself could not understand what I was saying half the time.” His smile was blinding white against his skin.

“Okay, so I didn't follow it all, but what I heard sounded good.”

“Do you mean the beginning part when I said ‘Good morning,' or the end part when I said ‘God bless this day'?”

“Both. The stuff in the middle . . .” She shrugged, and that made him smile more.

“It was from the Gospel according to John, the story of Jesus and the woman who was to be stoned to death for her crimes. Do you know this story?”

It figures,
she said to herself, and sighed. “Yeah, that's the old ‘He who's without sin cast the first stone' one.”

“Yes, you are one hundred percent correct. This is a very good Bible story, and it is also a humorous paradox, as none of us are without sin and therefore cannot condemn the sinner.”

“Well, that's Jesus for you,” Shelly said, trying to ignore the memories the story had sparked.

“Even those who think that their sins are secret must know that nothing is secret from God.”

“Great, thanks for the reminder.” She picked her hoodie up off the pew and stood. “Good luck on your sermon next week.”

“Thank you, Miss Shelly,” Father Joe said, stepping into the aisle. “God willing, I will speak on Proverbs nineteen-five. Do you know this as well?”

“Not off the top of my head.”

“I am sure that you will recall it. It is all about the mortal sin of bearing false witness.”

Shelly shook her head as she looked up at the stained-glass window high above the altar. “Seriously, God?”

“Excuse me, please?” Father Joe said.

She sighed again, and this time it trailed off into a hollow laugh. “I said, see you later.”

E
RIC RUBBED THE SLEEP FROM HIS EYES, TAPPED OPEN
the app, and checked his text messages.

His parents had his phone—probably would for weeks—and while it was a pain in the ass, it wasn't the end of the world. A couple of clicks and a password and every text that was sent to his phone now appeared in a box on the screen of his iPad. Texting back was harder, but only because he wasn't used to the wide keyboard.

Nothing new had come in since midnight, when Duane had texted updates from Frederico's house, claiming that he and Sophia were busy getting busy. That's how Duane would have said it too—
busy getting busy
. And that's why Eric knew Sophia would have laughed and walked away.