Come Sit By Me (6 page)

I TRIED.
I REALLY DID
. Got to page 55 before I gave up. Took me two and a half hours. It made me see why everybody today reads vampire novels. I believed Terry when she said she was the only person in the class to finish the book.

Remembering that made me decide to call her. I pretended that I needed some help on the football game story. Before I could ask her anything, though, she said, “I heard you were out with Colleen Donnelly.”

“Right. I guess we should bring out a special edition about that.”

She didn't get it. “What are you talking about?”

“Everybody seems to know I was out with Colleen. My sister, you….”

“Well, people saw her go off with you after the football game. I guess you went to the cemetery.”

“Don't you have spies there too? You should know how long we were there and what—” I couldn't quite say “what we did” to Terry. I was afraid she already knew.

“I don't know why you're upset,” she said, “unless you're ashamed of something.”

She had me there. Still, I replied, “I just mean it's not anybody's business who I go out with.”

“Well, partly it's because people are curious about you. You're from New York. You got Cale's locker.”

“Not
my
fault.”

“No, but you keep asking people about him.”

“Asking questions is part of being a journalist,” I said, hoping to make her feel guilty.

“Are you going to write a story about him? Because you know Ms. King won't let us publish it.”

“Maybe I'll start an underground newspaper.” That sounded good. The sort of thing a kid from New York would do.

She didn't have a response to that, so I knew I'd hit a nerve. I pressed on, “The first person I'd want to interview is you,” I said. “I know there's something you're not telling me about Cale. Did you ever have any kind of conversation with him?”

Still no answer for a second. Then in a low voice, she said, “Yes.”

I was excited, because to put Terry on the defensive was an achievement. “What about?”

“You know, I told you I was the only one in Ms. Hayward's class to finish reading
Look Homeward, Angel
?”

“Yes.”

“Well, even though he wasn't in the class, Cale was reading it too. I thought that was kind of…well, it wasn't his kind of book.”

No shit. I didn't tell her that it wasn't
my
kind of book, either.

“But one day, at lunch, I was sitting by myself. Almost everybody else had finished and had gone outside. I had stayed behind in class to go over some math problems with the teacher. Anyway, all of a sudden, there he was, standing there looking at me. I was creeped out, and pretended not to notice. But he said, ‘I see you're reading that book.' Actually, I had been reading it while I ate.”

“Right,” I said.
Never waste time eating when you could be reading too
.

“Well this was right after…you know about him and Donna?”

“Yeah, he asked her for sex.”

“So it ran across my mind that I might be his next choice. Really embarrassing to think he would have started with her and then I was second choice.”

I smiled. Terry would hate to be second at anything.

“But he wanted to talk about the book. That was all. He sat down. Across from me. I looked around, but nobody seemed to notice, so I didn't tell him not to. I was curious, that's all. I mean about what he would say.”

“I can understand that,” I said.

“He told me he was reading it, and I asked why. He said he'd taken it out of the library because his grandmother asked him to.”

“I heard she died.”

“It was her favorite book, and she was blind, so she wanted him to read it to her. And then, like you heard, she died. Before he finished. But he was determined, I guess, to finish it anyway. By himself. Sort of in her memory. I thought that was sweet.”

“But it was too hard for him.”

“Yes, it would have been. Well, then he asked me to…I don't know…he wanted me to
help
him with it.”

“Help him? How?”

“He said he wanted to
discuss
it. But, you know, he wasn't the sort of person you could discuss a
book
with. I had a feeling he wanted me to sort of explain it. Walk him through the story. Help him finish.”

“So, did you?” I thought I knew the answer.

It didn't come right away. “I didn't have
time
,” she said. “I was taking a senior-level lit class, and advanced science too. Pre-calculus. And really…” It was hard for her to say this, I could tell. “He was kind of
needy
, and if people had seen me sitting around with Cale, they would have thought
I
was doing what Donna wouldn't.” She looked at me, and I could see it bothered her.

“It's O.K.,” I said. It crossed my mind to say
At least you got a Miata out of it
. My mind runs that way, but I had enough sense to keep my mouth shut. “Look, you couldn't have known. He shot the librarian, anyway.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Well, she was on his case about returning the book. And he wouldn't.”

“How do you know that?”

Of course I couldn't tell her, so I just asked, “Do you ever think you were lucky he didn't shoot
you
?”

“Sometimes,” she admitted. “And then I wonder if maybe he was just out to shoot
somebody
, not a specific person. Everybody thinks he was trying to get back at Donna, but I don't know. How could he have known she was going to be there? But then if he
didn't
have any special targets, if he was just mad at the world, I wonder…if it would have made a difference if I'd been nice to him.”

“Probably not,” I said. But of course that was just me being nice to
her
.

AFTER DINNER,
I finished my homework and the article on the football game too. That left me looking at the book sitting on my desk. There was nothing on TV, so I surfed the net for a while. I discovered that Colleen had a Facebook page. It didn't tell me much, except the names of the groups and movies and TV shows she liked. I'd have to remember to like them too, if the subject came up. Besides
Gossip Girl,
she also liked
Once Upon a Time
. Really? All right, I could forgive her. I could forgive her for anything if she ever spoke to me again.

I stared at the picture of her, remembering what her boobs felt like. Too bad she wasn't one of those girls who take naked selfies in the bathroom mirror and then email them to their boyfriends, who promptly post them online. Or maybe she was that kind of girl. I would be glad to help her with that. Somebody would tell me. North would know.

I found a website that promised to have a plot summary of
Look Homeward, Angel
. It turned out that it just gave you the summary of the first part of the book. To get the second and third parts, you had to pay a fee. I should have known nobody would read the whole thing for free.

I learned from the summary that the first part of the book ends when the hero is twelve. For such a young kid, he certainly had his mind on sex a lot. He didn't actually
have
any sex, but he thought about women he knew who were cheating on their husbands, and also about prostitutes. That made me think that if I somehow read farther into the book, he might actually
have
sex. But probably not. Ms. Hayward wouldn't have been able to assign it if it did have sex in it.

Which only made me think about Colleen some more. I sent her a message asking if she would be my friend on Facebook. Made me feel like a complete dork. I went to bed and read some more of
Look Homeward, Angel
. There was one good thing about it: it made me fall asleep. Reached page 64.

I got up in the middle of the night and looked to see if Colleen had agreed to be my friend. No response yet.

Sunday was a wasted day. I sat in front of the television watching football with my dad. Bonding. I tried to read the book at the same time, but that was pointless. As long as there was anything to distract me, I couldn't pay attention to the rushing torrent of inchoate words cascading down the milky-white, brittle pages. There. I started doing it too. That's the way he writes.

Sometime in the afternoon, about the thirtieth time I checked, Colleen did accept my Facebook friend offer. For some reason, that made me feel a lot better. I almost phoned her again, but I decided why take a chance on spoiling my mood? She might think I was stalking her.

During a commercial, I asked my dad how much of the book he remembered. He said not a lot. I asked if he remembered what happened to the angel of the title. It seemed to me there was almost nothing in the book about it. So why the title?

He told me that at some point the stone angel that is made by the hero's father is bought by a woman who runs a house of prostitution. She puts it over the grave of one of her girls. Dad couldn't remember why. Which was interesting, because in Hamilton's cemetery, the angel is over the grave of a woman who, by the standards of that time, must have been a sinner.

“Why did you get so interested in this book?” he asked.

“I don't know.” I didn't tell him that it was because Cale had been reading it. Good thing Susan wasn't around, or she'd have blabbed.

“It's not going to do you any good to read it,” he said.

That's why Dad writes about business. He thinks you should only read books that tell you stuff you need to know.

What did I need to know? Nothing. But what I
wanted
to know was why Cale shot those people. I admit it.

Thinking about it that night, I realized who could give me some information I needed to know.

After social studies class, I asked Mr. Barnes if I could interview him after school. He gave a kind of nervous giggle, which he did quite often. Kids had learned to imitate it so that as soon as he giggled in class, about five echoes would come from around the room. That often made him giggle a second time, setting off a chain reaction.

“Why would you want to interview me?” he asked.

I realized I had taken the wrong approach. “I'm one of the editors of the school newspaper, the
Treasury
,” I replied. “And we're doing a feature story every issue about outstanding teachers.”

He gave me a kind of crooked smile. “I'm sure you wouldn't want to use me for such a feature.” But I could see he was ready to believe me. Everybody loves to be flattered, my dad says.

“Oh, sure we would,” I told him. “How long have you been teaching here?”

“Fourteen years,” he answered.

From the looks of him, I had thought it must have been twice as long. His suit looked older than that. “Well, see, that probably makes you one of the teachers who's been here the longest.”

“Bob Nosker and Mary Hayward have been here longer,” he said.

“O.K., well, I'm sure we'll get to them,” I said. “But my assignment is to interview you.”

He finally agreed to meet me that afternoon when school was out.

I decided to cover my ass by telling Terry what I was going to do.

“If you were going to interview somebody, you might have picked an interesting person,” she told me. We were eating lunch. I would much rather have sat with Colleen, but she was with the rest of the cheerleaders, and I didn't have enough nerve to crash their table.

“Don't you think he's interesting?” I asked. I was only half-listening, because I was watching Colleen to see if she might be looking in my direction.

“No, and neither do you,” she said. “Would you mind looking at me when you're talking?”

I shifted my eyes.

“I know what you want to do,” said Terry. “You want to ask him if Cale knew who was going to be in the library that day.”

I knew Terry was smart, but I didn't think she could see through me that easily.

“Listen,” she said, “I'm sorry I told you about me and Cale.”

“I won't mention it to anybody else,” I said.

“One of the reasons I'm sorry is that it just made you more eager to ask people about him.”

“I probably would have asked Mr. Barnes anyway,” I said.

“The only way you might find out what motivated Cale was to read whatever he wrote on his computer. But you can't do that, so give it up.”

I was tempted to say that she had already told me one of the things that might have motivated Cale. And then there was the story about him and Donna. That was motivation. But I didn't bring that up. I wanted to stay friends with Terry. And be managing editor. “Anyway,” I said, “I just wanted you to know that I'm going to write an article about Mr. Barnes.”

“If you do, don't mention anything about the kids he sent to the library.”

I nodded.
To die
, I thought. It'd be a bit too dramatic for the
Treasury
.

Colleen's locker was in the same row as mine, and I followed her as she went to get her books for the first class after lunch. “Hey,” I said.

She looked at me with what I thought counted as a smile. “Hey.”

“Did you think about Friday night?” I asked her.

“Yeah, oh yeah, it was fun,” she said. It was a real smile now.

“I meant next Friday,” I said. “You want to go out again?”

“Oh, well, I have to see what North wants,” she said.

“What does that have to do with it?” I wondered if she thought she wouldn't be safe with me unless North went along, but that seemed ridiculous.

“Sometimes he likes to trade,” she said. “But I'm sure it would include you. He's always asking about you.”

I wasn't exactly sure what “trade” meant, but I was more interested in the other thing. “Asking about me? What does he ask about?”

She looked away, as if she realized she shouldn't have said that. “Oh, you know, just how you're doing.”

“How
am
I doing?”

“You're doing fine,” she said with a smile that was intended to remind me of last Friday. And it did.

The second bell rang, meaning we were already supposed to be in class. “Let me know about Friday,” I said.