The Body of Christopher Creed (7 page)

My arm whooshed through the air, waiting for something to bite me, kick me, reach for my throat. I found the light string and pulled. A bunch of games stared back at me. The word
Sorry
stood out, off a game box half covered with dust.

I clicked off the light, closed the door, and shook off some crazy urge to look in the dark corners behind the big gas heater. I turned toward my yellow writing pad and the pencil lying on top, and I walked quickly toward them. Without looking in any direction, I picked up the pad and pencil and went up the stairs. I made sure I didn't run. But when I got to the top, I was kind of huffing, the hair on the back of my neck still standing straight up. I closed the door behind me.

I almost jumped out of my skin as my pager went off and sent jolts of vibration into my hipbone. I looked at the number. Leandra.

She always paged me, instead of calling, because she didn't want to interrupt band practice. I wished Renee would be so cool. I dialed Leandra's number.

"Hey," she breathed, without even asking if it was me, "I just got back from cheerleading practice."

"I thought your practices got done at six," I said, giving the basement door one more shove to make sure it stayed shut.

"Seven tonight. Whew, I'm starved."

I could hear her opening her refrigerator as I opened mine. I saw the orange juice container and pulled it out. I tried to shake off my willies without letting on to her that I had them.

"Why seven?" I asked casually.

"Because of Ali McDermott. She was late again. So, we had to stay after for an hour. It's the fourth time in two weeks. Girl's gonna get herself kicked off after one more time, and some of the others are really starting to rag."

I really didn't want to hear a whole crock about Ali. Leandra was like Ali in the sense of not
liking
to gossip. She said her youth group pastor used to give the kids speeches on the subject. The difference was that Leandra had to work at it, whereas Ali came by not gossiping naturally.

"So, are you still on the bottom of the pyramid?" I asked, because I really wanted a new subject.

"Yes," she snorted. "Why do I have to be so tall? I'm always in the back or on the bottom. I always have to catch people—"

"Tall is good," I tried to assure her.

"Yeah, tell that to my knees since, thanks to Ali McDermott, I had to be on the bottom for an extra twelve pyramids."

I sighed. Her mentioning Ali so soon again meant she was dying to tell me this thing.

"I've heard so much about Creed, I'm not sure I can take a load of grief about Ali," I said. "Let's talk about the band."

"Oh, it's not a load of grief," she told me. Leandra was pretty well tone-deaf and didn't really appreciate the band. "I'm not totally mad at her. I mean, if my parents split up out of the clear blue, I'm sure I'd take it hard. Who knows, I might do some wacky stuff. I just hope I wouldn't be off doing the nasty with some guy when I was supposed to be at cheerleading."

I rolled my eyes.

"When she finally did get to cheerleading, she had a bunch of leaves in her hair," Leandra went on.

"Maybe she thinks she's an Indian," I muttered.

"
And...
you know that little suede doodad she's been wearing around her neck? It looks exactly like those things all the boons wear. So people are saying some boon guy gave it to her, so now she's doing it with a boon."

"Maybe she likes little suede doodads," I snapped, but I wanted to kick Ali. I couldn't figure why she was bringing this kind of talk down on her head. I mean, every school has a few girls who go down like subs, and we had more besides Ali. But mostly they were bigmouths and kind of nasty looking, the kind who would do anything to get somebody to go out with them. Ali was cute, could catch anybody she wanted to, if she wanted to. It didn't make sense.

Leandra was quiet for a moment and said in a real confused voice, "Why are you standing up for her?"

"Leandra..." I stumbled. "I just don't think Ali was off doing the nasty in the middle of cheerleading, and adding a boon to the story just makes it sound even more retarded. People should cut her a break."

"Well, she's not cutting us much of a break," she continued. "She'd rather get us all in trouble, while being out in the woods with one of those greasy ... nary-a-haircut ... foul-smelling ... tattoo-loving—"

"Leandra! There was no boon!" I snapped.

I heard my voice bouncing around, and became sort of aware that even my own thinking was a little cockeyed. We're talking about a boon off boffing one of our friends, and I'm more concerned with the
who
than the what or the why or the where.

There were about thirty boons in our school, maybe seven in the junior class with us. There were a couple boon girls in college prep, I think, but no boons were in the honors program with me. Most of the boon guys were in votech, which meant they went to class on the other side of the building. I realized I had never really talked to a boon. They did look gross and kind of mean, and we'd all heard about Bo Richardson slashing tires and pushing Chris Creed off the top bleacher in the gym.

"I don't understand you," Leandra came back at me, sounding hurt. "I come in here all starved, at a quarter to eight, complaining some, and you're making it sound like I'm some sort of gossip hag."

"No..." I groped, confused. But I was having a thought that was stirring me all up. "Leandra. Have you ever smelled a boon? I mean ... did you ever stick your nose up to one, breathe in through your nostrils, and, like, fall down because the stench was so bad?"

She stayed quiet for a moment and finally spat out, "Why would I want to be sticking my nose up to a boon? Are you insane tonight'"

That was her answer; that's how she knew boons stank—because I was insane tonight. She spouted off some more.

"
...got
to be Dallas Everett, Renee decided. She got all talking about how Shawn Mathers has so many zits you'd have to
swim
through them. And Bo Richardson wouldn't enjoy
any
girl unless he was
raping
her at
knifepoint.
Dallas could be cute. If he didn't have all those
tattoos
—like, what's he
up
to now?
Fifteen
or so? But there's none on his
face,
so..."

She was on a roll tonight. I sighed pretty loud, but I don't think she heard me.

"But I think Renee's going overboard," she went on. "I mean, it could be some college guy from Stockton. I mean, they've got cars, and they're not all nailed down to school when they're not in class. Doing a college guy would make a girl sort-of-like sophisticated and above high school kids. Doing a boon would make her psychotic."

"That's really generous." I scratched my foot, though it wasn't itching.

"Torey..." She sighed a long one, like she was getting the drift of my tone of voice. "If something is totally bothering me, don't you want me to tell you?"

That was the thing with Leandra. She never viewed herself as a gossip hag when she got on one of these rolls. She just thought she was troubled about something and needed to vent. Usually I didn't mind, and sometimes it was actually a laugh. I didn't know what was coming over me. Maybe I had just never heard so much goo in one day before. It struck me that Leandra and I spent a lot of time on the phone doing this. Me listening to her blow a ration of grief about somebody else.

"I have to go." I told her I would call her back later, and then I figured I could tell her I fell asleep, if I wasn't up for it.

I went into my bedroom and lay there on the bed for a long time. Every time the wind moaned I would wonder if Creed's ghost was in my basement, his undying grin leering up the stairs. When the wind died down I would wonder if he was alive out there in the woods. I don't know which thought bothered me the worst. I figured if he was out there alive, walking around, he would be completely scared and cold and maybe wishing he was dead.

There had been times when his grin faded, and I remembered those times as I lay there. There were times when he crossed his own line into complete sadness. His only trigger seemed to be physical pain—like just after somebody hit him. And at that point, he would look so hurt, so depressed, so ...
suicidal.
It struck me that he probably wasn't despairing over his shiners and bruises. He was seeing himself at that point the way other people did—as a social 'tard, an obnoxious reject.

Yeah, I decided. Creed absolutely could have written that letter.

And yeah, he could also have been murdered—I didn't totally deny that. What bugged me was how quick people were to think that he had been murdered, that he could never have written that note. It was easier to point the finger at somebody else. If Creed had written that note, we would have had to point the finger at ourselves, or at least take a good long look at our ways and agonize over questions. Like, could we have played it out differently? Could we have been nicer? Do we have a heartless streak, and can we be bastards?

Easier to blame the boons. Yeah, hell, they sure looked the part—they sure smelled and all—with all their backyard-made tattoos.

Maybe it was my time in life, or maybe it was this whole thing with Creed. But something inside of me felt totally ready to be completely nice to the rejects—people like Creed, the boons—and to be somebody who's not so drowning in surface junk.

Then again, I could be nice to boons without wishing one on Ali, I reminded myself. Her being with a boon would create a major set of problems for her. The way most kids hagged around school, she might as well get her GED and just never show up again. I told myself that for Ali's sake her boyfriend ought to be some college dude.

This load of thinking was making me way tired. I slept about ten hours that night. It was the last good night's sleep I would have in months.

I thought that
sleeping so much would take away my bad mood. It didn't, really. In homeroom I decided to rip on Alex about band practice. He swore he had been home the whole night, that he had been working on this history paper we had due next week. He swore Renee wasn't with him.

"Yeah, since when do you
not
knock out a history paper ten minutes before it's due?" I asked him in disgust. "Could you at least have called?"

"Well, you could have called me," he said, like I was his mother. "Hey. Guess what? I remembered this one time I hit Creed that I totally forgot about. Can you believe I hit him twice and totally forgot about the second time?"

"If you can forget band practice you can forget anything, I guess," I muttered, but he ignored me.

"We were about twelve years old, and I was riding my bike to Ryan's and passed by that old Indian burial ground behind your house."

"Lenape Indians' burial ground. Yeah." It was in the woods out behind our property, though whether it was an actual burial ground was unproven. All we ever dug up as kids were a few arrowheads.

"I saw Creed coming out of there, and he had this piece of paper," Alex went on. "He showed it to me from, like, ten feet off, and wouldn't let me come any closer. He said it was his treasure map, and he had just buried treasure in there."

"He
buried
treasure in the Indian burial ground?" I asked. I'd heard of kids digging in there. I'd never heard of anyone burying anything in there. Leave it to Creed.

"Yeah. And he was being so obnoxious with this map. He kept waving it by the corner and going, 'I would venture to say that my treasure will be very valuable someday ... I would venture to say that it wouldn't be wise for me to share it with you.'"

"His smart-mouth mode," I said, and shuddered. "'I would venture to say...'"

Alex laughed. "And 'Suffice it to say.' He always said, 'Suffice it to say.'"

"Right." I laughed, too.

"So, he's dangling this treasure map in front of me and telling me he doesn't want to tell me what he just buried." Alex laughed again. "We were, like,
twelve
years old, not
eight.
He thinks I'm gonna beg him to see this treasure map, right? What would make him think that a twelve-year-old would want to play pirates? First I grabbed the map and was going to tear it into a thousand pieces. I couldn't look at it, you know, give him the satisfaction. So I tried to tear it. But he had sent it through one of those plastic machines, so that it was inside something that felt like a place mat."

I cracked up totally, despite myself. "You mean he
laminated
his treasure map?"

"Yes. And he was all looking at me like
nanny-nanny-boo-boo
when I couldn't tear it. So I just threw it down and hit him."

I was still laughing. "Oh my god. I would keep that story under my hat. Because if not, everyone's going to be digging for Creed's treasure in a few weeks and keeping me awake all night."

Alex shook his head. "Actually, the Indian burial ground is not the main attraction. All of a sudden the Pine Barrens is. Did you hear about Mrs. Creed in the Wawa last night?"

"No," I told him. "I was sleeping early."

"You shouldn't sleep, man, you miss everything."

"That's why I was sleeping."

He wouldn't take the hint. "Ryan was down there and came to my house all freaking. He said that Mrs. Creed had been in there, like, three times, looking to guilt kids who had not helped her search the woods for Chris on Saturday. Renee and I were afraid to go down to Wawa after that."

"Oh, so you and Renee sat in your house instead of hanging at Wawa?" I blasted. "Don't give me this history-paper shit."

He got kind of quiet, like,
Ooops.

I looked up at the clock. Five minutes until the bell. I really didn't feel like hearing this.

"Mrs. Creed talked to Mrs. Kyle one of the times she was in the Wawa last night." Alex grabbed my arm, like this was totally important in comparison to his lying in my face. "She says she and Mr. Creed really want to believe Chris ran away. But she said she had kept every dime of his paper-route money for six years. He's got three grand in the bank. She's been watching the bank account—like, going online for the balance three times a day—and not a penny of it has moved. In other words, he hasn't touched his bank account, and no money is missing from anywhere in town. No money, no bus ticket. No muscle, no surviving in the woods. Yeah, she's starting to think he's dead. She's saying somebody else wrote the note to make it look like a suicide. And what really happened is that one of the boons—probably Richardson—killed him and dumped the body. In the Pine Barrens, maybe the boondocks."