“Sure.”
“And Mr. Marwani?”
“Ben’s the one who’s belching right in—”
“Mr. Marwani?”
Bucket huffed. “Sure.”
The class fell into a lull then. The too-brief excitement had drifted to nothing, and Mr. Chambers’s monotone continued to recite the magic terms all the students would need to memorize before their next shot at the SAT’s, and the school’s meager, outdated cooling system did what it could to battle the desert heat, which transformed their big beige brick of a school into a low-key oven. For a moment the room drifted into a kind of soporific peace.
It was so surprisingly calm that it took a few minutes before anyone in the room even noticed the way that Chris Carmichael was twitching at his desk.
* * *
Jake Bernhardt sat right behind Chris, a few desks back from the front of the room.
Chris’s family lived way out in Cascade Woods, a ramshackle assemblage of manufactured homes and trailers notorious for their meth lab explosions. You did your best to not take a wrong turn in Cascade Woods, lest you end up with some ganked-out tweeker shotgunning your ass with rock salt (or worse—rumors said there were bodies buried in the deep boonies).
Jake’s family hailed from Brower Butte, and their property was so sprawling that they’d devoted a huge chunk of their backyard to an elaborate racetrack for Jake’s remote control cars. At Jake’s house, you did your best to jump from the roof outside Jake’s window to precisely the right deep spot in the pool, lest you end up with a busted ankle like the one that cost Bradley England his senior football season.
So of course Jake always took an interest in Chris—he’d never scored such easy laughs before.
Chris doesn’t shower for a week. Jake holds his nose, pretends to pass out. “Somebody forgot to take out the trash!”
Comic gold.
Chris wears the same shirt until a hole tears in the back. Jake flicks pennies into the hole and makes the field goal symbol with his arms.
Are you guys seeing this?
Chris’s dad ends up in county jail on petty theft charges. A week later, Jake asks him if he has any big plans for Father’s Day.
Classic!
Lucy never laughed, but she didn’t always say something either. Jake’s cruelty was a spotlight you didn’t want swung your way—last time she told Jake to leave Chris alone, he ended up binder-checking her after class and sent her history notes flying across the hall. When she was on her hands and knees gathering her papers he said, “Clean it up, Loogie. Practice for my house.”
What a crack-up!
High fives were had at her expense. Did Lucy notice Nate Carver laughing at her? She pretended she didn’t.
Now Jake was back at it, holding up limp-wristed hands and mimicking the way Chris’s body was shaking in his seat. His cronies chuckled. Jake bent his head to his desk and pretended to snort a line, then sat back up with exaggerated tremors. The laughter got louder.
Mr. Chambers rotated toward the class, and the laughs cut short. Lucy read Mr. Chambers’s expression: Please—I’m so close to being done with all of you. Be decent for once. Just finish this class so I can start my summer and I’ll only have to see a handful of you at driver’s ed training.
Something in the back corner caught Chambers’s eye. “Ms. Dufrene, can you turn off your phone or does it need to spend the rest of class on my desk?”
Patty Dufrene’s thumbs were a blur, a concerned look on her face.
Chambers walked closer and spoke louder. “Ms. Dufrene, can I have your attention?”
No response.
Chambers walked over and placed an open palm directly between Patty’s eyes and the phone. “Hand it over. You get it back at the bell.”
Patty held her phone long enough to power it all the way down, then handed it to Mr. Chambers with an aggrieved whine. Her eyes followed the device to its resting spot on Mr. Chambers’s desk.
Chambers scrawled more sample problems on the blackboard, his chalk tapping out a robotic rhythm. Loud and persistent as that sound was, Lucy was distracted by a new noise—Chris Carmichael’s desk was squeaking. It reminded her of the time she drove to San Diego with the Hendersons to visit her “aunt” Molly. They’d checked in to a Super 8 at the halfway point down I-5 only to discover that their motel neighbors were having an epic screw session. Lucy remembered how embarrassed her adoptive guardians, Bill and Carol, had been, but mostly she remembered how steady and fast the springs were squeaking and how the woman’s moans sounded more like something she was doing to pass the time until the man finally stopped thrusting.
Honestly, Lucy had thought the whole event was kind of funny, and the sound of Chris Carmichael’s squeaking desk brought that all back.
She was about to laugh until she saw the way Chris’s body was moving.
Something was wrong with him. Very, very wrong.
His narrow frame was slumped, pinning his weight against the metal support tube running from chair to desk. Lucy leaned forward and noticed a thin string of drool hanging from the corner of Chris’s mouth. Sweat was beading on his forehead and soaking through his greasy black locks. His left leg was jerking back and forth at the knee while his foot pressed against the tile flooring so hard the sole was scuffing.
He’s… fighting something. Like he’s trying to force himself to stay at that desk.
Mr. Chambers finally caught on and turned to look at Chris.
“Mr. Carmichael, what’s…”
And then Chris’s neck bent back and he was staring at the ceiling and he yelled, “You promised you’d delete the picture, Ginny. Stop being such a bitch!”
Patty Dufrene stood bolt upright. “Shut your mouth, Chris. How do you…”
Chris kept yelling. “Why am I seeing this? Where am I? I don’t want this!” and then he fell quiet, but the spasms in his body amplified, causing his desk to rock and lift and clatter against the floor. His head swiveled, eyes wide and panicked as if he were trying to see in the dark.
Have his eyes always been so blue?
Lucy swore that Chris had hazel eyes, but now they appeared blue and rheumy. Lucy wondered how that could be, but the thought was interrupted when his back and knees popped so loudly the sound echoed against the ceiling tiles. Lucy recoiled, imagining how that must feel inside Chris’s body—his joints grinding and locking, unable to stop all that shaking.
Mr. Chambers was at Chris’s side then. “We need to give him room until this passes. The key, is to, uh, to keep him from hurting himself. Megan, run down to the office and tell them to call 911.” Then Chambers bent over Chris’s thrumming body and rattling desk. “We need to get him as flat and stabilized as we can. Jake and Michael, you get his legs, and I’ll lift under his shoulders.” The teacher said, “Chris, can you hear me? I need to move you,” and he laced his hands behind the boy’s neck, and that’s when Lucy realized she must have fallen asleep in class, because she swore that at that moment she heard something under Chris’s hair squeal and then Mr. Chambers was backing away with a bloody hand, screaming, “What the fuck?”
And then Jake, forever dull and cruel and incapable of reading the goddamn room, tried to get in one more joke. He leaned toward the back of the class and said, “Chris is shaking harder than his mom’s vibrator!”