Kevin O'Brien - Disturbed

Chris shook his head. “Not really.”

I don’t want to talk to anybody , he felt like saying. I just want to be left alone. He still couldn’t believe his former guidance counselor and friend was dead. If it weren’t for Mr. Corson, he never would have made it through last year. The only person he wanted to talk to right now was Mr. Corson, and he couldn’t.

His dad hugged him again. He always smelled like the Old Spice cologne Chris gave him every Father’s Day. “Thanks, Dad, I’m okay,” he murmured. He grabbed his books and his jacket.

He heard the car horn honking — four times. That was Courtney’s signal. His ride to school was here. Molly called to him from upstairs to take a couple of her Special K breakfast bars “to keep body and soul together” until lunch — whatever the hell that meant. She had some weird expressions — like that one, and beats having a sharp stick in the eye , and six of one, half a dozen of the other, and a bunch more. Maybe they were Midwestern expressions or something. He wasn’t sure.

His dad had married Molly less than a year ago, and it had seemed way too rushed for Chris. He’d still been adjusting to his mother moving out and his parents divorcing, and then wham , his dad got remarried. Suddenly, this pretty artist was taking his mother’s place. Nice as Molly was to him, Chris still couldn’t get used to her constant presence in the house.

He yelled upstairs to her that he wasn’t hungry; then he hurried out the front door.

“Did you hear about Corson?”

It was Courtney calling to him from the open window of her red Neon.

Chris was halfway up the driveway, but he could see the iPhone in her grasp. Courtney Hahn was always texting or Twittering. That damn iPhone was practically glued to her hand. It didn’t matter to her that it was against the law in Washington state to operate a handheld phone while driving. Courtney considered herself the exception. Her and her iPhone — it was one of several things about her that drove him crazy for the two months they dated last year. Still, she was blond, pretty, and popular — so for a while, he’d convinced himself that he was damn lucky to be her boyfriend. Well, maybe not that lucky. Except for feeling her breasts on a few occasions, and three intense make-out sessions during which he’d come in his jeans, they’d never gotten very far in the sex department. They’d had a pretty amicable breakup, probably because they hadn’t been all that crazy about each other in the first place. But Courtney was a good kisser — and a good sport. As part of her campaign that they remain friends, she still gave him a lift to school in the mornings.

“Did you hear the news about Corson?” she repeated, glancing up from her iPhone keypad for a moment. “Somebody shot him. . ”

Chris nodded glumly, and then he opened the passenger door and scooted into the front seat.

“If you ask me, it just proves Corson was a major perv,” Courtney’s best friend forever , Madison Garvey, remarked from the backseat. “The guy probably went to the Arboretum last night to have sex in the bushes or something. Ha! He went there to get blown, and got blown away instead.”

Chris buckled his seat belt and sighed. “Gosh, Madison, think maybe you could wait until lunch — or at least third period — before you start making bad jokes about our guidance counselor getting murdered last night? I don’t think his body’s cold yet.”

“Yeah, Maddie, shut up,” Courtney said. With a tiny smirk, she glanced in the rearview mirror at her friend.

“Oh, kindly remove the sticks from your butts and get over yourselves,” Madison muttered, eyes on her cell phone. Like Courtney, Madison was blond, but almost albino-pale with a slightly goofy-looking face. She had her feet up on the back of Chris’s seat. She wore her bright orange Converse All Star high-tops today. She’d made that brand of gym shoe her trademark, sporting it in several different colors and patterns. Madison didn’t wear any other kind of shoes in public. She’d even worn Converse All Star high-tops — silver — to the prom last year.

Madison lived with her divorced mother in the three-bedroom house next door to Chris. Courtney’s family was across the street and two houses down. Along with two more families, they all lived on the same North Seattle cul-de-sac, which had been part of an ambitious development that started two years ago — and never got finished. A dozen beautiful, distinctive, modern houses were supposed to go up, but only five were completed. Construction halted when the recession hit. So several lots on the cul-de-sac were bare — or occupied by half-finished skeletons of houses. There still weren’t any sidewalks yet, and not quite enough streetlights. At night, it was always dark and slightly sinister, because the cul-de-sac lay in the shadow of a forest. The street was named Willow Tree Court, which Chris thought was pretty lame, since they never got around to planting the willow trees on the barren divider strip down the middle of the curved, dead-end roadway.

Chris glanced at the NO OUTLET sign as Courtney came to a stop at the end of the block. It amazed him that she managed to navigate the road with only one hand on the steering wheel and her eyes on her iPhone eighty percent of the time. Whenever he rode in the car with her, Chris figured they’d end up dead poster kids for the dangers of driving while texting. Then people at school would be making the bad jokes about them — rather than about Mr. Corson.

“Tiffany thinks one of Ian’s wacko parents shot Corson,” Courtney announced, glancing up from her phone for a few seconds while she turned left at the intersection.

“Shauna agrees with me,” Madison said, consulting her phone from the backseat.

“She thinks Corson was meeting another guy there at the park for some kinky sex thing. I mean, really, his car just happens to break down at a park at night — with a ton of bushes. Major perv alert! Corson was just asking for it.”

“C’mon, shut up,” Courtney said, slowing down to a stop at a traffic light. “You’re talking about Chris’s hero .”

“Oh, yeah, that’s right. Chris used to think Corson peed perfume.”

Both girls laughed. But Chris remained silent. He kept his head turned away and stared out the window — at a dead gray cat on the side of the road.

“Honey, I talked with him,” Jeff sighed. He was wheeling the tall recycle bin toward the end of the driveway. Molly walked alongside him with a Hefty bag full of cans. She’d put Erin on the school bus five minutes before, and now Jeff was about to leave for work.

“Obviously, Chris is shaken up,” Jeff went on, talking over the bin’s squeaky wheels. “But he’ll be okay. We just need to downplay this thing. If he sees you making a big deal out of it, he’ll start thinking it’s a big deal—”

Molly stopped in her tracks and set down the Hefty bag. The cans rattled. “Jeff, honey, it is a big deal. The man was murdered.”

“What I’m saying is, if you — if we make a big to-do about this and fuss over him, Chris will end up rehashing the entire episode from five months ago — and he’ll be blaming himself all over again.”

“He blamed me, too,” Molly murmured.

“You did the right thing,” Jeff said, setting the receptacle by the end of their driveway. He grabbed the Hefty bag from her and leaned it against the bin. “Personally, I’m not shedding any tears over the guy’s demise. I’m not as forgiving as my son is.” He rubbed his hands together to brush off some residue from the bin handle. “Anyway, for Chris, let’s just downplay this whole thing, okay?”