Final Destination 3, page 8
part #1 of Final Destination Series
Kevin could not let his father see him cry, but tears were never far from the surface. The pain of losing sweet, saucy little Carrie and his best and oldest friend in one freakish accident was more than Kevin could handle. Everything he saw or did reminded him of one or the other, tearing off the fresh scab over and over so it never had a second to heal. He spent that first weekend locked in his room, beating his fists against his pillow and hating himself for being so weak. He thought of Carrie scolding him about telling her to take the backseat with Wendy. He should have insisted; then she would still be alive.
He missed Carrie so badly, her smell and her laugh, the comfort of her warm little body curled against his and her earthy, voracious carnality, but any thoughts or feelings that were even remotely sexual filled him with tortured confusion and anguish. If he thought of someone else, he was instantly torn by a swift and powerful shame, as if he were cheating on Carrie. If he thought of Carrie, he would be crushed by sadness and depression and the loss of the future they would never have together, or worse, haunted by the horrific memory of finding her ruined, bloody remains.
And in the end, the thing that obsessed him night and day, the thing he could not get out of his head, was everything he had done wrong that night. Why hadn't he done something more to save Carrie? Why hadn't he listened to Wendy and lent his voice to hers to get Jay and Carrie off the doomed ride? But deeper and more disturbing than that, was the question of how Wendy had known the ride would crash.
Time passed, but it never got easier. The hurt just matured, like wine, growing darker and more potent. He went back to school, just to have something to do, but he found he could no longer relate to any of his friends, callow jocks who all just wanted to punch him in the shoulder and laugh it off. They even talked about hooking him up with some slut they knew who had no gag reflex and would make him forget all about the whole thing.
In a surprising show of compassion, Kevin's father had agreed to let Kevin keep Jason's dog, a goofy boxer bulldog mix named Betsy. Jason's mom could barely take care of herself in the aftermath of the accident, and her sister wanted to take Betsy to the pound. He couldn't let that happen. Kevin thought his father was going to wig out about it, but instead he just nodded, patted Betsy's head and said, "I like a bulldog."
Dumb, sweet Betsy made things a little easier for Kevin. She seemed to have no idea that anything was amiss. Just when Kevin would think the pain and grief was going to crack his skull wide open and splatter the walls with his tortured brains, Betsy would come over and put some disgusting, slobbery squeaky toy in his lap. She would look up at him with that smushed face and crooked goofy underbite, and he would have to laugh. She made the passing days almost bearable.
Graduation had snuck up on him. It seemed impossible to Kevin that two whole weeks had passed, and yet here it was, the night before graduation. Everyday things were continuing to happen all over the world, things that Jason and Carrie would never see. News events were taking place that they would never know about. New songs hit the carts, songs they would never hear. Movies came out that they would never watch. It seemed so horrendously unfair. Sleepless and wired, and tormented with unrelenting guilt and sadness, Kevin found himself poking around online, looking up information on precognition, psychic visions, and anything that might give him some kind of insight into what had really taken place that night. What he found chilled him deeply. He knew he had to find Wendy and talk to her about the things he had uncovered. She was the only one who would understand.
7
McKinley High School
It was raining, a soft, steady patter, streaking the dusty gray windows that served to break up the monotony of the long, locker-lined school hallway. It was the last day of school and the building was nearly deserted; only the occasional junior scurried past for a last minute final. Wendy drifted through the halls as quiet and pale as a ghost. She had a gold embossed envelope in her numb fingers. Inside would be her diploma. She hadn't even bothered to look at it.
Wendy passed a colorful, student-made memorial shrine to the victims of the crash, but refused to look at that either. She had seen it once before on her way to pick up her diploma. She didn't need to see it again. She didn't need all their eyes looking out at her, happy cheerful eyes that never imagined they wouldn't make it to graduation.
The shrine was a collection of photos, pasted to white poster board and surrounded by handwritten notes, flowers and candles, all sitting on top of an old trophy case. Jason, who had been one of the most popular boys in the school because of his athletic prowess and outgoing personality, had the biggest picture –the flawless, posed photo that would have been his yearbook picture- in the center position. Wendy knew how strong and handsome and alive he looked in that picture. She didn't have to look again. His picture was surrounded by shots of the others who had died in the crash –Carrie among them- all smiling out from their cheesy yearbook photos as if nothing bad could ever happen to them.
She continued down the hall until she reached her locker. She fumbled with the lock and yanked it open. A picture of Jason was taped to the inside of the door. This was not a stiff, posed shot like the one that had been chosen for the shrine. This was a laughing, candid photo that Wendy had taken herself. Jason was roughhousing with his dog Betsy, and the dog had managed to sneak her blocky, tan head up through Jason's defending arms. She had plastered her sloppy, pink tongue across his cheek, right at the moment that the shutter clicked. Wendy didn't look at the photo. Tucking the gold embossed envelope under her chin, she began pulling her belongings out of the locker –books, sweaters, gym clothes, sneakers, notebooks, her pencil box- and gathering them up in her arms. She stepped back and almost closed the door, then, still without looking at it, she pulled the picture of Jason off the door and put it face down on top of the pile. She hip checked the locker door closed, then started back down the hall.
Wendy passed the memorial shrine again, but then slowed, awash with a sudden chilly dread. She stopped, hesitant and conflicted, then looked up at the shrine. Jason smiled down from his oversize picture. Wendy cursed herself and clenched her teeth. She could feel the sadness beneath her frozen shell scrabbling to get out.
The glass-encased candle at the center of the shrine was flickering, as if a mischievous wind were toying with it, even through all the others burned straight and high. She frowned at it and it blew out, a gray curl of smoke rising up from it, inexplicably sinister, like a cobra rising from a basket.
Unnerved and confused, Wendy backed away from the shrine. She turned, crossed to a trashcan and dumped all the stuff from her locker into it. Jason's picture fluttered to the bottom after the rest. She had to force herself not to snatch it out again. This was closure. This was the end of a chapter in her life. She didn't need to carry any of her old life with her when she moved on. All she needed was the diploma in the gold embossed envelope, her ticket to Yale, to a new life. It was time for new beginnings. Time to bury the toxic tangle of painful emotions deep inside her, until they froze to death.
She turned deliberately away from the trashcan and started resolutely down the hall. Behind her she heard a voice.
"Wendy?"
It was Kevin. She recognized his voice, but she didn't want to talk to him right now. She didn't want to talk to anybody. She sighed as she heard his footsteps following her. She pushed through the double doors at the end of the hallway and stepped out into the wet, gray lunch quad.
Raindrops rippled the puddles that grew in the cracks of the concrete. Under the shelter of the small, covered area by the water fountains, a group of students sat around one of the orange cement tables and signed each other's yearbooks. Wendy saw them and steeled herself. They were the survivors, the ones that had got off the roller coaster before the crash. She would have to walk past them to get the parking lot, and she hoped none of them would call her over.
Though divided by their membership to different cliques and by their varying social status, the crash and its aftermath had drawn the survivors together. This was partly due to the typical uneasy comradeship shared by those who had survived a common tragedy. Partly, it was because the other students had become shy about talking to them and had begun to shun them. Wendy knew this wasn't because of a lack of sympathy on the student body's part, but rather because of an excess of sympathy that made them excruciatingly uncomfortable. It was hard to know what to say. At what point was it appropriate to stop saying how sorry you were and to start joking again? How did you keep the superstitious fear out of your eyes when you spoke to someone who had given Death the slip? The students had solved this uncomfortable dilemma by not talking to the survivors at all, and consequently, they had drawn together as a group. Strangely, Wendy's sister Julie had taken to hanging on the edges of the group. She was there now, sitting with her friends, Perry and Amber.
Wendy didn't join them because it was a group she didn't want to be a part of. She didn't want to talk about the crash. She didn't want to relive it. She didn't want to try to answer the questions everyone asked about how she knew the crash was going to happen, and the darker, unasked questions that burned in their eyes. She didn't need to talk. She was just here to clean out her locker and pick up her diploma.
Julie looked up from paging listlessly through the yearbook as her sister passed. Wendy frowned. Why was Julie hanging around with the survivors? It was almost like she was there as a weird sort of stand-in for Wendy.
"What is she doing here?" Wendy overheard her sister ask no one in particular. "Wendy said she'd never come back to this place. I told her I'd pick up her diploma for her."
Ian McKinley, who sat near Julie and Erin, looked up from writing his first name above the gold leaf raised letters of "McKinley Senior High" on the yearbook cover. He shrugged and looked back down at his work.
"I hate my stupid name," he said, crossing out the word "McKinley" on the cover and writing Equinox instead. "As soon as I turn eighteen, I'm changing it to Ian Equinox."
"Equinox?" Lewis said. "Dude, that's totally queer."
"Won't your family cut you out of the will if you do that?" Erin asked. "The McKinleys have owned this useless burg, lock stock and barrel, for three hundred years. You may be a black sheep, but you're still the only heir."
Ian made a disgusted face. "What do you care?" he said. "Fuck 'em and fuck their money. They don't own me. They hold all that money over me like it's the most important thing on earth, but do they ever give me a cent? Do they send me to a decent school? No. I'm stuck here with the peasants at McKinley High, driving a shitty car and working a shitty job for minimum wage just to get by, to 'build character' as my old man likes to say."
He began drawing an old, World War Two style bomb, dropping out of the sky toward the gold printed line drawing of the school on the cover of the yearbook.
"You better watch it with that kind of shit," Erin said, frowning at the drawing. "If the school Gestapo sees that, they'll claim it's a bomb threat and make you disappear."
Ian shook his head wearily and transformed the cartoon bomb into a fat hotdog on a bun with the caption "Just eat it!"
"No sense of humor in this happy little post-Columbine world we live in," he said.
Across the table, Lewis, in his usual black and silver sports gear, was drawing too. He hunched over his graduation cap, a look of intense concentration on his face, as he used a silver gel pen to painstakingly draw the Oakland Raiders' helmeted skull and crossed swords logo on the mortarboard.
Next to him, Ashley and Ashlyn were both writing in the same yearbook, using black sharpies and putting hearts over every "I" in their words.
Frank Cheek slid in beside Ashley and pushed her open yearbook over to her, smirking.
"Here you go," he said. "I drew a picture too."
Ashley glanced blankly at the open page and did a double take. Her jaw dropped.
"Oh," she said, grabbing the book and scrubbing out the offending words and pictures with her sharpie. "You are so sick. I have to show this to my mother."
Frank's eyes lit up. "I've seen your mom." He said. "She's a total MILF."
"What in the world are you talking about?" Ashlyn asked.
"You know," Frank replied. "Em-Eye-El-Eff. Mom I'd Like to-"
Ashley cut him off, face twisted with disgust. "Oh gross. God. Get away from us."
Julie watched as Mr. Smith, the eleventh grade social studies teacher and staff advisor to the yearbook committee, hurried out after Wendy, hunching in the light rain. He called after her.
"Ah… Wendy?"
Wendy turned, reluctant to stop.
Mr. Smith caught up with her, puffing and red from the effort of pushing his chubby short legs to catch her. He looked more than a little uncomfortable talking to her, like everyone was these days.
"Hi, Wendy," he said. "Sorry to bring this up. I know things have been… well… difficult lately, and I don't fault you for forgetting things, but… um… would it be possible to return the yearbook camera today?"
Wendy nodded and turned back to continue toward the parking lot. "It's possible," she replied.
She could tell that Mr. Smith was irritated by her non-committal answer, but was reluctant to scold her because of what had happened. Did everyone on earth think she was some poor, fragile little victim, who needed handling with kid gloves or she would wig out and start predicting more deaths?
Behind them, Kevin Fischer came out of the school. Wendy saw him scanning the quad and her heart sank when he spotted her. He started trotting after her.
Great, she thought. Now what?
Mr. Smith frowned, not pleased, but still trying to put his displeasure in the safest most non-threatening terms.
"Wendy, listen," he said. "I'm not trying to…"
"I'm sorry, Mr. Smith," Wendy cut in. "I'll have Julie bring it back in the next day or two, okay?"
"Thank you, Wendy," Mr. Smith replied, sounding as if he had somehow dodged a bullet. "Good luck at Yale."
Wendy didn't answer. Mr. Smith could not seem to get away from her fast enough. She sighed and continued on toward the parking lot. She passed only a few feet from the table where Julie and the crash survivors were sitting, but she didn't look their way. She didn't get five steps before Kevin finally caught up to her.
"Wendy," he said, sounding slightly hurt. "I was calling you."
She didn't slow down. "I know," she said. "I heard you."
"I just…" He faltered. "I want to talk to you."
She shook her head. "I gotta get back home," she said. "I just came here to pick up my diploma."
She held up the gold embossed envelope like it was some kind of protective shield.
"So you're not going to graduation tonight?" Kevin asked.
She shook her head, a terse, dismissive motion. "No."
Kevin reached out and took her arm, turning her around to face him. Wendy clenched her teeth and fists. Couldn't he take a hint? She glared at him, ready to give him a piece of her mind, but the look in his eyes made her pause. He had a serious side to him that she had never seen before. The goofy, jock clown he had been before the crash was submerged, buried. There was stony grief and a new kind of maturity in his wide, solemn face. He had seen bad things, and it had changed him, made an adult out of him in one terrible night.
She still didn't want to talk to him. She knew all about it, how terrible it had been. He couldn't tell her anything she didn't already know about growing up too fast.
"You're not the only one in a fucked up place, Wendy," he said. "We're all devastated. It might be good to be with some people who are going through the same bad shit…"
"At graduation?" Wendy interrupted. "What could feel good about sitting around in ugly gowns and goofy hats, listening to solemn, bullshit speeches about how a part of our lives are over and it's time to turn the page? I had enough of that at the funerals. I've already turned the page. I'm already gone. You're looking at a ghost."
The kids at the covered table looked up, listening, curious.
"Fine," Kevin said. "So don't do it for yourself. Do it for Jason and Carrie. It's their graduation too."
"Do what for them?" Wendy asked, impatient. "It's not like they're going to be pissed if I don't go. If you die and there's nothing, then they're just dead and they don't know either way. If they're in heaven with Lincoln and Gandhi and John Lennon, you think they're going to care about our stupid little high school graduation?"
Kevin looked offended at her lack of sentiment. "Well," he said. "It wouldn't hurt to honor them, you know."
"And I already honored them at their funerals, and everybody else's funerals. I've done all the honoring and remembering I'm going to do. I'm done. I'm alive. That's all I care about. Once I pull out of that parking lot, I am so out of McKinley it isn't even funny. Without Jason, what else is there here for me?"
Wendy saw Julie look away, hurt. Wendy didn't mean to cut her sister and her parents off along with all the rest of the town. She just couldn't help it. It was the only way she knew to stay sane, to keep everyone and everything at arm's length.
Kevin frowned too. He tapped the center of his broad chest with one hand. "I'm here," he said. "I made a promise to Jay that I would take care of you. I don't back out on promises."
Wendy rolled her eyes. "Come on," she said. "You made a promise to take care of me on the ride. For three minutes. You weren't making a promise for a lifetime."
Kevin looked away, embarrassed. "That's not the point," he said. "I owe it to Jay. I don't want to fuck up again and not help you when I should have…"
Wendy sighed. "Kevin," she said. "Trust me, I'm fine. You don't have to do this. Listen…" She paused, uncomfortable. "I don't mean to be cold, but the truth is that if it wasn't for you being Jay's best friend and me being his girlfriend, you and me wouldn't really have hung out. We don't even like each other."
