M Coe - New Veronia

“What are you talking about?” Jay was starting to piss me off. “I have a great memory. An elephant memory. For reals.”

“Whatever you need to tell yourself.”

We lay there in silence for a long time, and I thought that Jay had probably fallen asleep and that maybe I should pinch him or whisper something nightmare-inducing into his ear for being such an off-target dick about my memory, but then he spoke.

“You think he’ll tell the Eye Whites what we did?”

Of course he was talking about the Zimzee. That same anxiety I’d quelled earlier by counting everything started to swell in my throat. A low-grade panic had followed me ever since that last time in New Veronia, and the constant dread was wearing me down.

Night had buried the twilight; the only things I could see to count were the stars; after I’d done them, I started counting up things from my memory, like the houses on my street, the rotating meals served in the high school cafeteria, every single friend I’d ever had—that last number wasn’t big—and then I subtracted Toshi. Tosh was gone.

“If he tells, that ruins all my plans,” Jay said. “They’ll think I’m sick. That something is wrong with me. But maybe they wouldn’t believe him, or I could kill him.”

I punched the beanbag chair I was sitting on, and I was surprised at how good it felt, so I punched the floor. The hard wood of the treehouse balked my fist. “Toshi is gone . You’re so upset about what that Zimzee man did to us, and look at what we did to Tosh. Basically, we’re no better than him.” The reverberation of my punches shuddered through my body, and something about the frequency of the vibration uncoiled the cold, dark portion of my brain inside which I had stored the details of that night with Toshi. Once the memory was freed, I’d never be able to stuff it back.

“Don’t you fucking compare me to that swamp monster,” Jay said. “If you can’t see the difference, you’re crazier than I thought.”

“Fuck you,” I said, because he had to be feeling the same icy burn of shame and guilt that I did; I couldn’t handle the burden of being alone in this.

Jay curled up into his beanbag chair and, after a while, his breathing steadied into sleep. I felt exhausted, too, but my mind raced; I couldn’t relax. Something was bothering me, something about what we’d done to Toshi and what had happened afterward. I had this image of Tosh hanging from a rope like the one the Zimzee had tied around Dinner, hanging from a tree right over the spot our crew used to stand before school, but that couldn’t be a real memory… or maybe I’d seen it on the news? My head throbbed.

The black backpack sat like a shadow at Jay’s feet. Carefully, quietly, I eased it over to my side of the treehouse and dug through its contents to find the note that Toshi had left for Jay. It was zipped carefully inside an interior pouch meant to hold pens and pencils. I waited a long time for my eyes to adjust to the dark, and then I read.

Jay—

I had to do this, to kill myself, because I couldn’t stand it anymore. The way Bennet and you embarassed me was the worst. I would never be able to live this down, so I have to end it. I can’t live another day.

With a growing apprehension, I read it again, and a third time, until something clicked. Embarassed. That was the problem: it should have had double R’s. Toshi had been amazing at English; even under duress, he never would have misspelled this word. The handwriting looked pretty much like Toshi’s, but maybe it had been copied from something else Toshi had written. If the note was a fake, then Jay must have lied to me, but I couldn’t understand why. There was some huge flaw in the way I’d pieced everything together. All the things I thought I knew—about Toshi, about Jay, about my dad and mom, even about myself—kept shifting, when they should have stayed fixed in place, frozen in memory. I pressed against my forehead in a feeble attempt to fit me back together.

Holding the note, I straddled Jay in his beanbag chair so that he couldn’t escape. “What is this?” I said as he startled awake. “Toshi didn’t write this note. Did you write it? Is he even dead?”

Jay’s body trembled beneath me. “What are you talking about?” he said.

I punched him in the side of the head in the stagey way I’d learned in theater, not to hurt him, just to let him know I needed answers. “Tell me,” I said.

It sounded like all the night animals and insects had fallen silent to give Jay’s words more room. Someone was burning trash far off and the dirty smell tendriled faintly through the tree branches.

Jay closed his eyes, making his whole face a shadow. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I plugged him again, this time to make his ears ring.

Jay popped his jaw and then said, “I guess I wrote it.”

Even through my fury, I marveled: Jay was a brilliant actor, to have made me believe that Toshi was dead; with his skills, I would have landed the lead in every school play. I wanted to shove the paper down his throat, but it was better to preserve his offense. “If Toshi is alive, why did we run away? What did we do all this for?”

“The stuff we did to him that night,” Jay said, “he wanted it.”

“No,” I said, “what we did was evil. Just like that man we ended up with. Worse. Toshi was crying, he said no…”

Jay tried to sit up, but I kept him pinned.

“You don’t get it,” he said. “Toshi and me, we’d been doing that for months. Getting off that way. He wanted me to do it. It was weird: he liked it. But maybe that night was too much, because he got mad, and when I found him the next morning, he started threatening me, said he would tell the whole school…” Jay’s hot breath repelled me.

“Toshi was going to tell everyone at school? You were… for months ?”

“You don’t understand… he was different… hairless… they are over there, where there are less women, and this is a thing, they do this to each other over there, so they’ve become more woman-like, and it was just something we did, kind of like I was fucking any other girl.”

Small bursts of light popped in front of my eyes, and I couldn’t tell if they were fireflies or my synapses firing. “And he was okay with it? When you did that?” I thought about Toshi sneaking into Stella’s room; he’d stuck my cock in his mouth without any cajoling from me. Maybe what Jay had made me do to Toshi hadn’t been completely evil.

“But that last morning, when I went back to my house, to get supplies before we went hitchhiking, he was waiting for me in my room. I don’t know how he got in there. But he had proof, he had evidence about what him and me had been doing together, and he was going to tell. So that’s why we had to go far away.”

“That’s why we ran away. Not because of the police or juvie or anything like that. Not because Toshi killed himself.”

“Toshi was always the woman. I mean, that’s the only way we did it. But even so, my dad would murder me. If Toshi told, my dad would hear about it, and I’d be dead for sure.”

My emotions were tangible; they were choking me. “ You made up his suicide,” I said. “ You wrote the note.” Inside of me whirled fear and disbelief and anger and self-hatred and jealousy, too. I felt jealous that Jay and Toshi had carried on this secret relationship without me, that they had excluded me from the group. It was crazy to feel jealous about this, but I did, and I knew that I would have to punish Jay for it.

“It was him or me,” Jay said. “My dad would’ve lynched me. This was the best thing I could think of.” He sounded like he was practically begging me. Jay needed me, I saw now. This whole trip, he’d been getting weaker, and I’d been picking up his slack. “With Toshi gone like this,” he said, “you and me could move on; I wanted to make it easier for you, this way it was easier to forget him. It was his fault we had to run off: first he asked for it, but then he snapped. I don’t know why. It wasn’t our fault.”