The Taking of Jake Livingston, page 14
It’s . . . a skinny, jointed fiber, like a piece of string. I drag it out of my ear canal. At the same time, hair follicles lengthen on my head, my curls straightening like springs pulled to the max, until my hair is falling in front of my face in drapes of straight black.
And the fiber stretches ever longer from my earlobe.
No, not a fiber. A leg. Two legs, creeping out of my ear cavity and catching my upper ear. A spider. Bulbous and brown with black patterns, wrenching itself out of my listening hole.
Blood trickles down my jawline as the spider crawls up the side of my face and nestles in my hair. I slap at my head and feel nothing but my head. Hair still short, despite what it looks like in the mirror.
I’m imagining this.
Aren’t I?
The spider crashes in the sink bowl, leaving a streak of my blood in its wake, boogying its legs.
The left side of my face is a hole for the wind to blow straight into my brain.
Whispers . . . whispers I can’t make sense of. Whispers and the taste of blood, and then bile, roaring up my throat. Me, bending over the sink to throw it up. A cockroach squiggling out the drain to greet me.
One roach, two roaches, three roaches. Four. Skittering up the basin with urgency.
“Oh . . . my God . . .”
It’s like . . . a flood of roaches escaping some colony hidden in the pipes of my house.
Is this real?
“What’s happening?” I scream to the sky, like God will answer me. Like he ever has.
I stagger back and fall on my butt and reach for the cabinet under the sink—backward and forward at once. My body doesn’t know what to do.
Sawyer is watching himself in the mirror, staring at an empty reflection. “I believe you took something that belongs to me.”
There must be some cleaner I can spray them with. The cockroaches spread. Yes, there must be a tub cleaner that should do the trick and kill them . . .
“Why would you do that, Jake? What are you hoping to find in the pages of that book? An explanation for why I thought to kill? Why I keep killing? Don’t you think you could just ask me instead of going behind my back?”
“You never . . .” There are so many roaches. “You never talk to me normally.” Roaches falling like BASE jumpers to the floor, spreading across it, on a mission, it seems, to fill the gaps in the tile—to eat the whole bathroom alive. “Get the fuck out of my house.” My voice is low and clear.
Sawyer snaps to face me as a wind rushes through the space, blowing him backward, smearing his visibility through the cool air.
“Jake!”
A fist explodes against the door. I grab the doorknob and pull myself to my feet as a roach skitters up my naked leg.
Benji bangs the door while I shake all over. “Hey, Jake! You wanna shut up?”
“You want to know why I killed them?” Sawyer’s struggling to stay in one piece, with his eyes sinking through the veins behind his face and gashes tearing into his arm, sending a smoke of blood into the air.
The banishing . . . it kind of worked that time.
It’s kind of working.
“I killed them because they hated people like us. They hated gay people. People who hate gay people don’t deserve to be here. Don’t you think that?”
I know what he wants—to be in my head. But I’m in control now, and as I blink at the walls, at the roaches, their guts splatter and evaporate, like Sawyer’s skin. I can make this stop happening. My eyelids are a pair of Whac-A-Mole mallets tied to their life spans.
I find myself in the mirror again—kinky curls, brown eyes and skin. Back to normal.
No roaches.
There were never any roaches.
I imagined them. Sawyer imagined them . . . for me?
There he is, still watching me from the other side of the bathroom, like he’s waiting for an answer. And the roaches crawl up the side of his face, disappearing into his ears, hair, and head.
A grin flashes across his face, and his expression softens, like he’s warmed to me now and wants to just be friends. “Don’t you agree? Don’t you think everyone who wants to keep you from Allister deserves to die?”
“GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!”
The shout sends ecto-mist ripping through his body so he rips apart at the cheeks and chest, his body splitting open at the neck and knees, until he pops in a burst of red smoke and then exits through the crevices of the door.
The shower curtain flaps like a sail, and the hinges rattle behind him.
I want to believe that’s the end.
I escape the bathroom, enter my room, collapse on the bed, and tuck myself under the covers. The night darkens.
If he gets into my head again like that, I will lose. My ear is still sore from that wraith spider, and my skin crawling from those roaches.
The bugs . . . the bugs he played with in the forest, which he was so upset with his sister for throwing out. That memory forms a source of his strength and his terror now. He can raise it at will and use it against me.
I rise out of bed and swipe the book out from under it. If I get into his head, I could know what to expect. None of his tricks would surprise me, because I’d know everything he wrote about. And I’d always be one step ahead.
I don’t have much longer, because I can’t take much more of this.
I’m nearly at the end of the book—just a few entries left.
Nearly to the bottom of what turned him into the monster he is today.
Sawyer
Dear Diary,
I don’t know what day it is. This may be the account of the end of my life. But I’m not sure yet. Today went very badly. I stayed home. Wore the XL shirt from Lanier Lake Vacation Bible School all day because it reminded me of the gown I wore in the clinic. Felt too depressed to move, but I went to the couch when Uncle Rod came to fix the ceiling fan.
He called me back into the room, so I mustered up the strength to return. He was on a little stepladder, fooling with the fan. Said he wanted me to watch him do it. Took the fan blades down. Didn’t offer any instructions. Just wanted me to watch. Asked me about college. I told him I hadn’t decided yet if I wanted to go. Spotted Momma’s tote bag on the counter—she’d left it and would probably realize when she got to the diner.
Rod came off the ladder, said my momma was speaking up for me again and I couldn’t let her keep doing that. I said I know, I gotta stand up for myself. He said if I leave this place he’ll miss me, and I said me too, even though that was a lie—I don’t care about my relationship with Rod at all.
He took off his tool belt and left the room. “Come on, Sawyer.”
I followed, we stopped in the den, and he held out his arms for a hug. “Bring it in.”
I know Uncle Rod isn’t a hugger. I wasn’t thinking. Just doing what he said. So we hugged.
I don’t think Rod has friends.
He stuck his fingers through my belt loops and unbuttoned my pants. “Just relax.”
I thought for some reason of when I went fishing with Bill. We caught fish and just watched them flop on the deck with the hook stabbing their lip, throwing them back when they were almost out of breath.
Rod’s fingers grabbed my hip bone and guided me to the couch. Unzipped his own pants behind me.
“I have to go to the bathroom.” I was gonna throw up and couldn’t do it on Momma’s couch.
“Don’t worry, Sawyer,” he said. “It’ll be fine.”
“Can we go to my room?”
He put his hand around my mouth. “Shh.” His beer breath sprayed across my ear.
The hot taste of the roast beef I had earlier surged in my throat. “Please, can we move?”
Finally, he agreed to move.
I heard the bugs through the walls of the house. They should’ve been in their little holes. It was getting cold. But the cicadas were thriving, chirping like they were cheering someone on. And I wondered which of us—me or Rod—deserved to be punished as the whole forest hummed with the throttle of revenge.
Walking down that tunnel to my room with his hand on my shoulder was the last moment I was free. My jeans were still bunched around my ankles, so I had to waddle. I thought I would trip. Rod’s hands would not let me go.
In the room, I broke for the closet with such speed he had to let go.
“Sawyer!” He yelled at me like I was his dog who’d escaped a leash.
I dove for the guns in my closet and grabbed what I could.
I swung it around and hit him in the jaw. He stumbled backward with his hand on his chin. I came out of the closet, AR-15 trained at his forehead.
“Back away from me,” I commanded.
He did, holding up his hands, smiling nervously. “Sawyer . . . come on now . . .”
I told him to take off his clothes. The words came out in a panic. I didn’t know the next thing to do.
“Sawyer . . .” He took off his shirt. His body was pale. His hair wrapped around his navel like a parasitic snake. Nothing I’d ever want to see.
I began to lower the gun, but the taste of vomit came back.
“Drop it, Sawyer.”
Momma had appeared in the doorway, forgotten tote bag strung over her shoulder. She was holding a revolver, and it was pointed at my head.
There were so many questions that no one around me had answers for.
Like, why do I exist? What is the purpose of me?
No one ever gave me a good reason to get out of bed every day.
“Drop the gun, Sawyer,” Momma demanded, her voice shaking. “Now.”
“I don’t know what happened, Joy,” Rod said, putting on his best scared face. “He just . . . He just turned on me like this.”
My heart sank to the bottom of my chest. My momma looked back at me like I was a violent stranger, someone she’d never even seen. Believing every word of his lie.
I dragged the barrel down to point at Rod’s kneecaps.
How many legs would you need to survive?
Momma’s finger played at her trigger. “Sawyer . . . ,” she warned.
I fired into Rod’s kneecap, and blood splattered from his knee, like it was eager to leave him. Shells from my weapon jumped over my shoulder.
A little laugh came out. Die, I thought as his face twisted and he tipped to one side, a circus freak with a broken stilt.
A scream. A BANG! And my shoulder burst open in bloody strips of fabric. An ache screamed through my tendons, veins, and fingers.
A wispy trail of smoke curled out of Momma’s weapon. Her arms rattled like maracas. She shot me, and her mouth dropped open like she couldn’t believe what she’d done.
But I could.
I stormed past Momma, out of the room, as she pressed herself into the wall.
“Sawyer!” she cried, pained and pleading.
“Shoot me!” I screamed. “SHOOT ME ALREADY!”
It’s what she always wanted, to get rid of her crazy son, and that was her chance to end me.
But she didn’t. She let me run away. So I swiped the keys to Rod’s truck off the den table. One arm was bleeding, the whole sleeve soaking up the blood. In my free hand, I held the gun.
And this is my final account. It’s over.
Rod, how far would you have gone? Momma, are you ready to tell every parent in Heritage who loses someone how you failed as a mother and shot your own son because he was trying to stop your brother from raping him?
Police: I’m about to take my AR-15 into my school and kill as many people as possible. I’m bleeding, can’t even feel one arm, and I will bleed out and die alone in Rod’s smelly truck. Mother doesn’t want to take me to the hospital, so nobody will take me to the hospital. I’m going to die, and I’m not going quietly. No political statement or whatever. I don’t give a fuck, but after everything, I am not gonna die alone. That’s a rip-off. Life is not fair. Everyone will know it. Goodbye.
Jake
Jake?” Ms. Kingston calls, snapping me to awareness.
You’re at school, I remind myself. “Here.”
Not in Sawyer’s world. Not living the last journal entry before his death. Even though it’s been wedged like a wonky nail in my brain pattern ever since I started reading it a few days ago.
Everything is tipping back and forth like a slow, depressing earthquake.
I feel bad for him, and afraid of him. I don’t know what to make of those two feelings warring inside me, and maybe I just shouldn’t have read the fucking thing or stolen it in the first place. Has it done me any good? I mean, knowing the details of his life has shown me what aggravates him. That gives me ammunition in dead world, provides the opportunity to turn his fears against him in a way that might kill him. But I barely know how to conjure things, and especially not how he can—not whips, not spiders, and especially not a swarm of cockroaches. And even if I could, what power would those projections wield against him, anyway?
I haven’t been sleeping, just swinging through my two locations. School, home, school home school home—can’t I go somewhere else? The sun comes and goes. The desks and counters and chairs and beds change. I can’t focus on a single thing that’s said to me, because I’m thinking of what I’ll do to Sawyer when he comes back. What he’ll do to me.
Ms. Kingston is still talking. “What’s with the hood? Take it down, please.”
I don’t have time to argue. “I’m cold, though.”
Nobody should be allowed to tell me what I get to wear. This morning I stood at my closet and reached past my blazer and dress shirts to snatch my hoodie off the hanger—one I rarely wear in public, and especially not with the hood up, for fear I’ll get in trouble.
But today, I wanted to be comfortable. Something about being hunted by Sawyer Doon makes this schoolteacher lady feel . . . small.
“Jake,” she says. “It’s not cold in here.”
“It is to me. I’m African American, ma’am. My homeostasis is not built for cold weather. So I feel it even though you guys don’t.”
A round of laughter follows. A few “whats?” I don’t mind the attention. All I’m doing is telling the truth—I get colder because I’m Black. It’s not that hard to understand.
Ms. Kingston is red, embarrassed, and intrigued. She tilts her head at me like I’m a curious creature under a microscope—one she could squash with the heel of her boot. It’s an evil, dehumanizing, calculating stare. One practiced to strike intimidation into hearts like mine.
I stare back. There are worse things out there than falling out of favor with a white woman who graduated from a college because her family had the money to send her there.
I turn to look at Fiona, to see how she’s processing all this, and find a gleeful smile on her face—she’s living for it. She, too, is down to risk being pushed out of a room she was never wanted in to begin with. And that’s why I love her.
“Um, anyway.” Ms. Kingston rolls her eyes and gives up. “Back to the topic at hand. We’re talking about The Crucible today.”
She fills the center of the room, looking down at her little stack of papers. I notice how her gray turtleneck shrouds every piece of her torso, neck to waist, so only her hands and face are exposed. The hands look older than the face.
She reads something. “Raise your hand if you think the events of the play fulfill the spell Abigail cast in the woods with Tituba earlier on in the play.”
Half the hands go up, and half stay down. Fiona’s stays down, so I keep mine down. I haven’t read the play. It’s never worth it to fake it.
“Anyone care to elaborate on their choice?” Ms. Kingston says, surveying the room with boredom and then landing on Chad, who’s whispering to his friend about something not at all related to the book. “Mr. Roberts?”
Chad snaps to face her. “Oh, sorry, what was that, ma’am?” People laugh—they love his little performance. “Wait, did you ask about Tituba? I think it was all her fault.”
More chuckles. Ms. Kingston rolls her eyes, but there’s a smirk on her face too.
She regains her composure and asks, “And why is it Tituba’s fault?”
“Because everybody knows Tituba bewitched Abigail and forced her to do everything. It was obviously slave revenge.” More laughter.
Like trapped spiders eating my heart from the inside out.
“Soooo,” Chad goes on, knowing how each word will tear me down, relishing in it. “Tituba is basically manipulating everyone to turn against each other so she can enact world domination.”
Black people are always the punch line of a joke—it’s maybe why none of the books we read have Black people in them unless they’re slaves.
Ms. Kingston glances in my direction and then stands up straight, shaking her bangs out of her face a little. “Anyway, no—I don’t think that’s what Arthur Miller actually intended.”
I love how we all just move on.
“It’s English, right?” Chad takes up space, too much of it, really—always sits with his legs so wide everybody around him just has to adjust. One elbow is resting on Kristen—the girl to his left, who he’s been dating since he broke up with Laura a week ago. “We’re supposed to be able to make our own interpretations, right, because that’s what English is for?” Chad says. “My impression is it was Tituba’s fault. Think about it. Who would have known if it was Tituba?”
I take out one of the drawing pencils in the side of my book bag. I bring them because in my distraction I like to doodle. I put the pencil through my tiny sharpener and touch the tip. It’s sharp as a needle. The page in front of me darkens as I outline a sketch of a spider.
“Very funny, Chad,” Ms. Kingston says. “But that’s not what Miller was trying to—”
