The Book of Michael Read online

  “What’s over?”

  “Your time with us,” he said matter–of–factly. “You’re going home.”

  “Tell me what’s going on,” I demanded. It wasn’t sinking in.

  “I don’t really know any more than the fact that you get to leave.They didn’t tell me why.Your parents are on their way. It’s been nice knowing you.” Again, totally deadpan. “Come on.We’ll send your things along after.”

  “After what?”

  “After you leave.”

  “Now?” It’s odd, isn’t it, that I wasn’t jumping up and down, that I was confused instead. And scared. I started to cry. Gus pretended not to notice.

  “You read a hell of a lot of books,” he said.“Anything good?”

  My eyes were somewhat out of focus.“What?” I asked.

  “Any recommendations?”

  “I dunno.You pick one.Take anything you want.”

  “Hey, thanks. Maybe I will. Now come on.” He touched my arm and I almost shook him off. But I realized it was a gentle touch, or a professional one. Gus had never been a bully.

  He led me through the jail and back out through the security gate. It had been almost six months to the day since I had walked through there. Six months since I had given up all hope. And now this.

  My parents were waiting. My dad was crying and my mom was holding back the tears. Alongside of them was one of the administrators. I’d only seen him a few times. He was one of the people in charge here. Man in a business suit whose stock in trade was felons.Now he was losing an item in his inventory. He handed me a document–a letter or something in an envelope. “This makes it official,” was all he said.“Sorry this had to happen to you.”

  An apology.The man was trying to apologize to me for the ruin of my life.

  My father hugged me so hard I couldn’t breathe and then my mother was kissing my neck. “Let’s get out of here,” she said, sobbing now.

  I’d like to tell you it was a happy moment. I’d like to say we walked out into bright sunlight and had a kind of celebration. But it wasn’t like that at all.

  It was raining.We all got wet walking to the car. I felt cold and my bones ached. I had a pain inside my chest–holding something back, I expect. Crying now but not crying. I sat in the front seat by my dad and my mom got in the back.

  My father was a having a hard time driving. “Did they explain to you what happened?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not really sure what’s going on.”

  “We knew you didn’t do it,” my mother said. “We never gave up believing in you.”

  My father was crying some more and he wasn’t driving very well. For some reason, that concerned me more than knowing why I was released.“They never gave you a chance,” he said. “The bastards never gave you a chance.”

  “Calm down, Alf,” my mom said.“Watch the road.”

  The wipers were flapping back and forth. The visibility was bad. “Slow down some.”

  He slowed the car and peered straight ahead into the rain and gloom. There was a lot of traffic on the road. I noticed that my own breathing was funny and my hands were sweating. It occurred to me again that maybe I was dreaming. I had lost the ability to find the dividing line between what was truly real and what wasn’t. That had started soon after the murder, right through the trial, and my ability to make the distinction had slipped even further away during those six months of incarceration until I played almost any scene as if it could be real or fantasy. I just wasn’t sure of what was what. Maybe that’s why I was not really reacting to the fact I’d been freed.

  I was afraid to ask the question: “What happened?” I was afraid that once I said it, I’d receive some ludicrous explanation and it would prove this car ride with my parents was something in my imagination.And there was a bubble in my brain bursting with the possibility that someone was going to tell me this: the “mistake” had to do with Lisa. She was still alive. This was impossible but if I was in dreamland, then anything was possible. And I hungered to hear that my memory was false.

  “I’m going to pull off the road so we can talk,” my father said, clearly still very shaken by the emotional impact of the day. He pulled into a Burger King but left the car running and the windshield wipers going. My dad touched my shoulder and I looked into his eyes, realizing how much of a toll all this had taken on him. My mother leaned forward and touched me on the cheek.

  “It wasn’t fair what they did to you,” she said. “But now everything will be different.”

  “What changed?” I finally asked.

  “Miranda Morgan. She confessed.”

  “Miranda?”

  “You used to go out with her, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, my God,” I said. This was the first piece to a horrible puzzle I would now have to fit together.

  “They didn’t even believe her at first,”my father said. “They almost didn’t tell us or tell anyone.They had tried you and convicted you and they wanted it closed.”

  “Why would Miranda do it?”

  “She admitted to doing drugs. Serious stuff. Crystal methedrine.”

  “But that wouldn’t make her kill Lisa.”

  “When the police told her to go home, apparently she came back with the knife. Some dried blood was still on it.They checked the DNA.”

  A car stopped alongside of us in the parking lot.Two adults and three kids got out of the car.They were getting wet from the rain and the kids were giggling as they all ran for the door of the Burger King. DNA. I had come to know those as three horrible letters of the alphabet. I had been convicted by DNA. Lisa and I had made love that afternoon. My DNA proved that. The prosecutor was proud of his case, his science, his conviction.

  “But why?” I asked no one.

  “I don’t know,” my mom said. “I don’t know if she said why. It must have been the drugs.”

  But it began to sink in. Everything about Miranda began to flood back into my memory. I opened the door and threw up on the pavement. I heaved my guts until there was nothing left and when I looked up, I saw the family that had parked alongside of us. They were at a table by the window looking out at a boy vomiting all over the tires of their car.

  Chapter 4

  Miranda came into my life because I wanted to be bad. When you are a teenage guy and you are heading into your bad phase, when you are pissed off at the world and want to make a statement about how screwed up it all is, when you are cynical and smart and thinking about turning dangerous, you better hope that a good friend comes along and sets you straight. Or you better hope that you run into a really intelligent and sweet girl–one like Lisa.

  Unfortunately for me, Miranda came along before Lisa.

  I had been doing okay in school up until that year. I hadn’t really given my parents a hard time about much of anything except wanting to stay up too late and maybe hang out with the guys. (The “guys,” my so–called friends who would quickly turn their backs on me after the murder.The guys who would give TV interviews for the news people and say they “could see it coming,” or “he seemed like anybody else. It goes to show you can’t trust anyone.”)

  I was reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac. I wanted to be a wild one like the author and his friends from that other time and place. I was listening to old Metallica and Iron Maiden. I hated most contemporary pop music–the whitey white pop stuff and the commercial black rap music too. I was independent of all that. I wore an old, beat–up, brown leather jacket and shredded jeans. I had a few piercings but it wasn’t like I was a show–off. I had one tattoo on my thigh of a snake biting into a rat. I was already regretting the tattoo. But Miranda loved it when she saw it for the first time.

  I didn’t know where I was going with all this. I drank some beer and I scored some weed to smoke, then graduated to selling small amounts. Only to my friends or people I trusted.

  That’s how I met Miranda. I trusted her. She seemed… oh God, do I have to say it… she seemed very sexy and bad. And it was both of
those elements that attracted me to her.

  She hated her parents and, although she lived with them, they didn’t much seem to be part of her life. I envied her freedom. I knew she had had sex with a couple of guys I knew (guys I detested, actually) and I could see she liked me. I’d never had sex and I figured here was my chance with a really hot girl.

  If I were really an adult, if I was like a religious type or giving a moral lecture, can you see how I could use this story? I’d say: Can you see the pattern? Can you see what I did to myself? Can you see how easy it is to slip over to the dark side? To let Satan take over your life? To make one or two wrong turns and ruin your life?

  Maybe some day, if I live long enough, I might just do my own version of that. Or write a book about it like those other assholes who totally messed up their lives and then wrote memoirs and later showed up on Oprah exaggerating and lying about how really bad it was.

  Only I wouldn’t have to lie.

  Miranda was a big mistake.

  She too was not of her time and place. She wore tight black jeans. She had big hoop earrings. She had a tattoo on her ass that said,“Screw you.” She had long, dark hair that fell straight to her shoulders. She wore dark mascara makeup around her eyes that made her seem dark and mysterious and, yes, dangerous.

  Her father was a criminal lawyer and her mother owned a string of dry cleaning stores. They had lots of money. And absolutely no control over their daughter.

  So I sold her some weed and then we smoked it after which we went downtown and–her idea–took nails and wandered down several city streets scratching the sides of cars that we figured belonged to people with lots of money.We were particularly hard on SUVs.“Only assholes drive SUVs,” Miranda said.“It’s not like these people need it for driving in the back woods. They drive out of their heated garages and they drive to the Gap store.They have no life.They deserve this.”

  They deserve this. This was one of the bitchingly illogical things that Miranda said about doing anything nasty to anyone. I know that, in her head, this is how she would have referred to the death of Lisa. She deserved it. Only she didn’t.

  I think you should know, just for the record, how quickly I fell from grace.

  At twelve, I was still attending Sunday school and getting little awards for such a good attendance record.At thirteen, I was doing well in school and earning merit badges in Scouts. Like I said, I was thinking about becoming a doctor when I grew up. Or a professional hostage negotiator. At fourteen, my taste in music changed. And I was reading books and watching rented videos about young men– usually American or British, in their twenties–who took drugs, slept with hookers, and woke up feeling sick and empty. I was actually thinking that this was the life I wanted. They had it made. All that fun, all that pain. And then, telling the tale. I wanted to be like them.

  I’m not saying I was corrupted by the books or the music or the movies. It doesn’t really work that way, just in case you are wondering.We young men turning bad figure out how to do it one way or the other.

  Miranda was my ticket. A dream come true.

  I felt guilty about the automotive damage. I really did. Plain stupid. Miranda took me to a rave, even though we both agreed they were for rich loser kids. But we went anyway and took something–E, I suppose, or something someone claimed was Ecstasy.We both went out of our heads but it felt really great and, as soon as I recovered, I wanted to do it again.

  We “borrowed” her father’s SUV–I know, I know–when her parents were out of town and we drove way out of town into some wilderness roads, stopping only occasionally to have sex in the back seat. Or outside on the ground. And it was pretty wild.

  I hate to sound like such an idiot but I have to tell you that I thought I was in love with her. “Sex is love,” is the way Miranda explained it. “It’s the same thing. Anyone who says otherwise is so full of bullshit that they don’t deserve to live.” In Miranda’s book of wisdom, a lot of people didn’t deserve to live.

  ***

  Miranda liked stealing things from rich–ass stores. She had a credit card and could have afforded most anything and her old man would pay for it. But she liked the thrill. You’ve heard this one before, I know.A bit of a cliché but there it is. She didn’t even mind getting caught.

  There was other stuff. And if I’d had two eyes in my head, if I’d had half a brain, I could have seen that it was all bad news. She was bad news. She told me that she beat the shit out of another girl that she hated for being so popular. She told me this but I thought she was making it up. She told me that she had “used emotional restraint.”

  “Excuse me?” I asked.

  “I used restraint. I could have killed her. I had a knife. But I didn’t.”

  We were both high and I thought she was making this up. Just trying to get a reaction out of me.

  “You were kind,” I said (still thinking it was a joke). And I laughed.

  I did a lot of laughing in those days. But it wasn’t like the laughing I did in Scouts or with my parents or my friends that I used to play soccer with. Miranda had taught me this snickering nasty laugh.We were laughing at the world–how screwed up it was, how stupid people were.And it somehow signified how superior we were to all that. Superior and bad and living by our own rules. Like a modern day Kerouac, maybe, and his girl.

  I’d stopped selling weed. I was a very small player and thought no one would care. But, one day, after a visit to the principal’s office for a minor outburst in English class where I called Mr. Davis a bastard, I learned that the principal knew that I’d sold some grass.And that the cops knew. And even though I was only this teenage punk with some spare change from his sales, I was a link in a chain and somewhere down the line, my fun would end.

  I was bad (and working hard at it) but I wasn’t stupid. So I moved quickly out of retail altogether. My parents never had a clue. But certain teachers were watching me. And I drew a lot of attention to myself by the way I looked. Long scraggly hair–partially hanging in front of my face. My bad–ass clothes. My attitude.

  Then one day some kids had a protest at the school–the good kids, the ones who wanted to change the world. Pen Walker, an old Scout buddy and former soccer teammate, asked me to join them.

  At noon, instead of going to the cafeteria to eat lunch (or in my case, walking out into the woods to smoke a joint and a pair of cigarettes) a group of students were going to protest in front of the school with signs. The issue, according to Pen, was that the school was buying supplies from a corporation that was importing them from Indonesian factories where children were used as cheap labor.

  Why I was supposed to give a rat’s ass about this, I don’t know. Maybe one part of me had been brainwashed during all those Sunday school sessions into thinking that I was supposed to support good causes.

  “We need your help,” Pen said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “A lot of kids think you’re cool.”

  I looked at Pen, the quintessential nerd. I was impressed that he was willing to make some noise and break some rules, and I had to give him some credit for that. Cool was not a word in my vocabulary but I understood his point. A bunch of clean–cut geeks and nerds with placards looks somehow not right. I would spice things up. I would draw attention to the event.

  “You’d be helping to bring an end to sweat–shop abuse and child labor in the Third World,” Pen said.

  “Bite me,” was my conditioned response to such bullshit. But I volunteered anyway because I knew Pen and his weak posse of noodles needed me. And because I thought it would be fun.

  I don’t know where Miranda was. I suppose she had other business during that noon hour. I knew she’d been moving into some other recreational drugs. She was always two steps ahead of me. She didn’t seem to have any emotional baggage or any ties to old girlfriends from the past. She danced to the beat of her own loud drummer. And I knew if I ever really tried to keep tabs on her it would piss her off. And who knows what she’d do t
hen?

  So I demonstrated, had my little sign… what was it? End Child Labor. One buddy had a sign that simply said: Think about who made your pencils. That one made me laugh.There were about twenty of us. It was all very, very lame walking back and forth there on the sidewalk with a bunch of other kids laughing at us and the principal, Mr.Tyson, just poking a look out between the blinds in his window.

  What was a fella to do? I figured I had no choice, and if we were going to save some little bastards from such hard work in Asia, we had to get more serious.

  “Let’s go out into the street and stop traffic.”

  Which we did. Amazingly, the nerds followed their bad–ass guru.We took it to the streets.Well, one street anyway.Twenty dweebs and a young guy who looked–to some, I reckon–like a young Charlie Manson. Cars squealed to a halt. Angry drivers yelled at us.This felt much better. Most students stood on the sidelines and egged us on–kind of like they used to do when two grade school idiots got into a fist fight. I saw Miranda now and I waved for her to join us, but she shook her head no. I could see from the look in her eyes she was really buzzed.

  But you can see that by now I had the audience I wanted. And I wasn’t going to take up the chant about pencils and office supplies. “Save the Children!” was my first shout. And that felt pretty good.We were standing in the street with our placards and we’d stopped the midday traffic. It was only a matter of time before someone got real pissed off and started beating on us. And I couldn’t wait to see a nerd or two get wonked. But I was preparing for a quick exit when the time came.

  More car horns, a few more students joined us. One of them, I realized in retrospect,was Lisa. Maybe that was the first time I really noticed her. I’d seen her around but she had always been somehow distant and aloof. And she’d never given me the time of day.

  The principal was out of the school now and talking on a cell phone.