Authors: Alex Flinn
Fade to Black (12 page)
I have to let him go. I will let him go, but I want him to understand.
He still hasn’t answered, so I repeat. “I can’t get you sick, man. God, you think I’d want to go to school here if I could get people sick? You think I’d even be around my family?” I want him to … see me, Alex. Just Alex. I want someone to see me, even if it’s Clinton. “I just want to be—a regular person until I can’t be anymore. You need to believe me. Get it?”
He looks at me for a long time, like maybe the big behemoth is actually
thinking
. Finally he nods. “I get it.”
I feel like I’m practically shaking. At least, I’m trying pretty hard not to. When I look at Clinton, maybe he is too.
I hold out my hand.
“Go ahead,” I say. “Nothing will happen.”
He doesn’t move. Part of me’s loving it, this ability I have to make him sweat. But I need him to shake my hand for real, not because he has to.
So I keep holding it out. I’m wondering whether I should just
not
push it. He said he understands. Maybe that’s enough. I know I could get him to do whatever I want, just by threatening to tell them he did it. But I don’t want that. I want him to believe me. So I don’t say anything.
Finally he takes my hand.
Wednesday, 9:20 a.m., Memorial Hospital
His hand’s not bleeding or nothing, so probably it’s okay. It’s not like I have much choice in the matter. I mean, if I shake his hand, there’s this little chance I might get AIDS. But if I don’t come to some kind of understanding with this guy, there’s like a 100 percent chance I’m in deep shit. And even the school nurse said AIDS gets in through blood and … well, fluids, so if you aren’t swapping any, you should be fine. At least, that’s what I’m telling myself now. I’d feel better with gloves, but it’s probably okay. It’s okay. It’s okay. So I do it.
His handshake is firm and dry and somehow, I know it’s okay. I wonder what made me tell Crusan that junk about Mom and Dad. I never told my so-called friends that. I sort of thought Crusan might understand, might even know something about disappointing parents. I wonder again if he really got AIDS from a transfusion. I don’t think so.
But asking again would be a deal breaker, so I keep it zipped.
It’s like this special I saw on the Discovery Channel once (okay, it was Mel who watched it, but Dad and I were in the room, playing blackjack) about lepers. That was this real bad disease where people’s body parts fell off. It was in the Bible. They used to think it was a curse from God—like some people think about AIDS now, I guess, like people deserved it because of something they’d done. And they put them in special places so other people couldn’t get it. But it turned out you couldn’t get it from someone who had it. Dad said he wouldn’t want to hang with them anyway, and I agreed with him then.
But now I’m thinking maybe Dad was wrong about things. A lot of things. I mean, it’s been three days, and he hasn’t returned a stinkin’ phone call. He said Mom didn’t want him involved with us—but I heard her, calling and calling, and he hasn’t called back. Man, this was important. If I was with him, and not Mom, I might be in jail now.
Jail
.
I let go of Crusan’s hand. I start to wipe my palm on my jeans. I stop myself when I realize he’s looking at me.
Stupid
.
I say, “Sorry, man.”
He shrugs. “We don’t have to be friends.” I can hear in his voice that he doesn’t want to be friends with me anyway.
“What do you want from me then?”
He looks down. “Nothing.” He shakes his head. “I don’t want anything from you.”
“But you’re going to tell them it wasn’t me, right?” I don’t get this guy. He dragged me here for—what? Just to chat?
He nods. “I’ll tell them it wasn’t you that morning. And the other stuff, the rock and the notes in my locker and stuff…” He shrugs. “I guess we’ll see what happens.”
“You want me to confess, don’t you?”
I sure don’t want to. Mr. Eutsey said they might not believe Daria, on account of her being retarded. So I don’t have to confess anything. Not unless that’s part of Crusan’s deal for telling them I didn’t do Monday. I still don’t get what his deal is.
“You don’t have to,” he says.
“But you must want something from me?”
He thinks about it. “Well, yeah, there’s one thing.”
“What is it?”
Shit. What is it already?
“Just leave my family alone, okay? My mom, she wants to leave town over this. I hate it here, but we can’t afford to leave. I can’t make you stop it, but would you … just be decent, huh?”
I nod. I know that now that I’ve talked to the guy, face-to-face, man to man, I couldn’t go shoving secret notes in his locker anymore anyway. It’s hard to explain, but once you look someone in the eye like that—I mean,
really
look at them—it’s like you can’t
not
look at them again. You can’t not see them. It was a stupid thing, throwing that rock. Stupid, and mean, too. I know that now.
“I’ll tell them I threw the rock.” Even as I say it, I’m thinking,
Are you nuts, man?
“I said you don’t have to.”
“I know I don’t have to, but I will. I just… I want to get it over with. I want this over. And…”
I don’t finish. What I’m thinking is something like, I want to make it right. He was decent when he didn’t have to be. I want to be decent too.
He examines my face, then gestures at the door. “Then why don’t you go get those cops in here?”
I do.
Wednesday, 10:30 a.m., Mrs. Taub’s office, Pinedale High School
Mama says
,
it is fine
.
Alex Crusan saw
.
Alex Crusan
knew
.
Not Clinton
who hurt Alex
.
But Clinton
threw
the rock
.
They know that
because of
me
.
Mama says
I am still
a
hero
.
Wednesday, 11:00 a.m., Memorial Hospital
After Clinton and the cops leave, I go into the bathroom. I want to see my face in the mirror. The verdict: could be worse. The cuts look pretty scary, and it will be another week before I can get the stitches out. I won’t go to school until then. If it was up to Mom, I’d never go to school, but we compromised on this.
When I was a kid, I was in the hospital once with pneumonia. I cried the whole time. I missed school, missed my friends. I wanted to get out.
These past two days, I’ve hated being here, but not because I missed anything on the outside. So far I’ve had nothing on the outside. But I want to now.
I go back to my bed and press the button for the nurse. When she shows up, I ask her, “I’m sorry to bother you about this but … will I have scars all over my face?” This is suddenly intensely important to me.
She looks at me a second, then says, “Didn’t the doctors tell you about taking care of yourself?”
They might have, but I might not have been paying attention.
“I’m not sure,” I say.
She rolls her eyes. “What you want to do, hon, is wear a hat and use suntan lotion—SPF thirty, at least, every time you leave the house for the next few months. Six months to be safe. Then you should be okay. Maybe you’ll have some little marks, but they won’t show to anyone who doesn’t know they’re there, you know? Nothing worse than a pimple, hon.”
I nod. “Thank you.”
“Hey, you’re a good-looking boy. Gotta take care of yourself, right?”
Much later, I turn out the light and lay back for my last night in the hospital bed. It’s only nine, but for once, I’m ready to go to sleep. Today was a good day. I feel like, maybe, I actually got through to Clinton. I made him understand. Maybe he’ll even tell his friends. Maybe.
Okay. Doubtful about telling his friends. But I know that talking to Cole did something for
me
.
But I know that I have to talk about what happened to me. And to do that, I’d have to tell the truth about how I got sick. It shouldn’t be that big a deal—it’s nothing that earthshaking. Except that Mom and Dad have been going with that Ryan White/Innocent Victim transfusion story for so long that it
seems
like a big deal. It seems like they’re ashamed of me, is how it seems.
I push the thought out of my head. My mother said she isn’t mad at me, and I have to believe that.
I turn on the light and sit up. Maybe this won’t be an easy night like I thought it would be.
How My Life Changed Forever
by Alex Crusan
This whole thing started because Austin Ionata’s older brother knew how to get us into a college party.
It was the week after my sixteenth birthday. Austin and Danny and I were at Austin’s house. We always hung there because Austin’s parents were never around, never hovered over him, unlike mine, who’d follow you into the bathroom if they could get away with it. We’d stolen a bottle of vodka from the liquor cabinet and were playing Quarters. I never drank much, and I was sort of flying before the bottle was even half empty. So I was glad when Danny said, “Let’s order a pizza. This is boring.”
After Austin ordered the pizza, I called home to let them know I wouldn’t be there for dinner. Austin’s brother, Mike, who was a freshman at the university, came in when the pizza did.
“Hey, pizza.” He opened the box and peeled off two slices. He folded them and shoved the whole mess into his mouth.
“Hey!” Austin said. “That’ll be five dollars, please.”
“Put it on my bill,” Mike said. “Or better yet…” He finished wolfing down the two slices and peeled off another.
“Hey!” Austin said again.
Mike took a bite, doing a major cheese pull with it. “You want to go to a party?”
“A college party?” I said. “We couldn’t go without ID.”
“Nah—this one frat has all their parties off campus now. Makes it more … interesting without the campus police around.”
So, of course, we were going. But, also, of course, I had to call home again. I told Mom I was staying over Austin’s.
“Are his parents there?” she said.
“They always are.”
A sigh. “Be careful, Alejandro.”
“I always am.”
When I hung up, Danny said, “It’s so lame, you having to call your parents all the time, Crusan.”
“Hey, Danny,” I said, “ever think maybe your parents don’t make you call because they don’t care if you get home?”
Which shut him up.
The party was at an apartment complex near school. There were at least two hundred people there, spilling out of the building and into the parking lot. Some guy stopped us at the entrance. I wasn’t really worried about passing for a college student. People always thought I was older because I was tall. But when the guy stepped in front of me and said, “Fifteen,” I stopped.
“No, I’m…”
Mike nudged me. “He means fifteen dollars for the beer and stuff.”
I wasn’t sure I’d drink anything. I wasn’t drunk anymore, but I felt sort of halfway there, halfway human, halfway alive. But I paid my fifteen dollars anyway, got a wristband, and followed my friends to the keg.
I got a beer and sipped it. My friends went off somewhere, gesturing to me to follow. But then a bunch of other people got between us, so I lost them.
It got darker, and people kept coming, and I held tight to my cup, which was sweating and half gone warm and funny tasting. Some people were dancing in the grass, and I saw Mike with some guys drinking out of funnels. The music was an electronic haze, hanging in the trees. People were moving in and out of their own shadows, and I knew I shouldn’t be drunk. I hadn’t even had very much. But I felt like when I was a little kid and sick, when you wake with these fever dreams and everything feels half real, half not. I could feel the pizza like it was clogging my head, in there with the music, and finally, the beer became too hot even to pretend to drink. I dumped it out, got another, and held the cold plastic cup to my forehead until it hurt. Then I thought, Maybe go ahead and drink it.
With the first sip of beer, I felt my stomach lurch. I went off into the bushes and puked, felt a little better, then puked some more and felt a lot better. I started looking for my friends, but everyone looked the same, all black and white, and the heat of the crowd brought the sickness back. I finally went and sat on the steps leading to the upstairs apartments. I figured I’d watch until one of them came by.
I heard a voice behind me.
“You can’t sit here.”
At first I wasn’t sure she was talking to me. I didn’t answer.
“Hey!” A hard tap on my shoulder. “You can’t sit here, asshole. You’re violating the fire code!”
This time I twisted to see where the voice came from. A girl. A tiny girl. In the gray haze from the party, I could make out her short haircut and that she was pretty. Her arms were loaded down with books.
“Did you hear me?” she said.
Finally I said, “Yeah, I heard you. I just…”
“Stupid frat boys, think you can party every night, sit anywhere you want whenever you want, think no one else has the right to study or sleep or anything.”
“I’m not a frat boy,” I said, sort of amazed she’d think I was old enough, this close. “This is my first frat party ever. My friends brought me, and now I lost them, and I was… You live here?”
“Right.” Her voice was a little less hostile. She was a college student, nineteen, maybe twenty.
“I’m Alex.”
“Leigh.” She stared at the step. I was still in the middle of it.
“Oh … sorry.” I scooted over an inch so she could pass. “Look, I needed to sit down a minute. I got a little sick, okay? I don’t usually drink much, and I guess…”
She didn’t move past me.
“It must suck, living here, having all this noise all the time.” I considered my stomach. Better. Puking had helped. I didn’t even feel drunk anymore. Or, at least, I didn’t think I would if I could get away from the pounding, pulsating music that seemed to make my bones vibrate. Suddenly I wanted out of there more than anything.