The Book of Michael Read online

  “Nothing.” I said it out loud.

  I had nothing to lose. I had already lost it all. I was free.

  ***

  Strangely enough,my parents almost tried to stop me.They thought I had lost my mind.“Why today?” my dad asked.

  “What do I have to lose?” was my answer.

  He looked me in the eyes and drew a deep breath. “I’ll drive you. When do you want to go?”

  “Now,” I said.

  “I’ll call Mr.Tyson and tell him you’re coming.”

  “Tell him I look forward to seeing him again.”

  My mother looked stunned.

  Sudsy, predictably, was walking out to his car just as we emerged from the house. He scowled at us. Bastard number one. I took this as a good omen.Yes, I could do this. Bring ’em all on.

  ***

  Mr. Tyson was remarkably cool about my arrival. Professional, I suppose, but down–to–earth.

  “Michael, this isn’t going to be easy.”

  “I know.”

  “Good. I put together a schedule for you that I think will work. Each of these teachers has indicated they want to help.”

  “I’d prefer I didn’t get any special treatment.”

  “Right. It’s just that some teachers said they’d be uncomfortable having you in the classroom. And, frankly, there are some teachers here I don’t trust.”

  “Wow,” I said, wondering why he offered up that bit of news. “Really?”

  “Really. Don’t ask me to name names. You know that the other students will be watching you. I don’t know how you’re going to handle that.”

  “I don’t know either.”

  “Then I guess you play it by ear and see how it goes.”

  I wanted to say something sarcastic but didn’t. I liked Tyson now, realized I never knew him at all. I had always thought he was an asshole. Now he had just earned himself membership in a small circle of people who I believed were on my side. And that circle was mighty small.

  There was an awkward silence as we waited for the bell that indicated the end of first period. He handed me a piece of paper with my schedule printed on it. “Mr. Gelbert’s English class, Room 314. You want me to walk you there?”

  “No,” I said. “I’d rather do this on my own.”

  “Brave man.”

  ***

  Gelbert had been coached, I could tell. He nodded when I walked in and pointed to a seat by the windows. I avoided eye contact, heard the murmurs, kept my own attention on Gelbert. He didn’t say a word about me and acted as if I wasn’t there. “Can someone tell me what an oxymoron is?” he asked.

  Paired opposites. But I didn’t say it out loud. A burning cold. Jumbo shrimp. Military intelligence.

  Nicole Watkins, Lisa’s friend, raised her hand. I remember hearing her say that she wrote poetry. “It’s when you put together two words that seem opposite in meaning.”

  “Right you are,” Gelbert said.

  I was looking at Nicole now and she noticed. She looked back at me and smiled. I turned away and my eyes scanned for the first time the others in the room.A couple of guys were staring at me and turned away. Another girl was looking at me and turned away as well. She looked frightened. I hadn’t expected that.

  I decided to be the last one out of class when the bell rang. I had survived one period of school. My heart was beating fast now. I felt a panic attack coming on. Maybe I couldn’t do this.

  Mr. Gelbert was arranging his papers. He said nothing to me. Nicole and Pen Walker were hanging back. When I stood up to leave, they did so as well.

  Nicole spoke first. “I know you miss her. We all do.”

  “Yeah,” I said and wanted to say more but couldn’t.

  “We’ll walk you to your next class,” Pen said.“What do you have next?”

  I checked my schedule and saw that I had Chemistry. “Mrs. Krause.The chemistry lab.”

  “She’s tough,” Nicole said.“You good at science?”

  “No,” I said. “I suck at science.”

  I felt funny being escorted this way to my class. But it was a good thing. My heart was still racing. My legs felt wobbly as I was delivered to Krause’s class. I’d heard bad things about her but as soon as I walked in the room, I understood why she had been on the selected teacher list. She was tough but fair and she wouldn’t let anyone in her class get away with anything she didn’t like. In her chemistry lab I’d be safe.

  ***

  Surprisingly, that day, almost all of my battles were internal. Nicole sat with me at lunch.“I want to talk to you about Lisa sometime. I need to talk to you about her.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But not yet.”

  “Let me ask you one thing.”

  “Sure. Just one.”

  “Did you love her?”

  “Yes.”

  “She was my friend. I’d known her since we were ten. I miss her.”

  “I miss her too,” I said and the tears began to well up in my eyes.

  “Sorry,” Nicole said. And then she touched my cheek. After that we ate in silence.

  I was on my own after that. Walking the crowded hallways. Kids looking at me. Curious. I was both a freak and a celebrity and I wanted to be neither. I tried to avoid eye contact but sometimes I caught a girl staring at me. Get used to it, I thought to myself.

  The guys were less discreet. Dean and Wentz were a couple of guys that Miranda had introduced me to once. Druggies for sure. They caught up with me on my way to Spanish class. “Must suck to be you,” Wentz said right away.

  I shrugged.“Yeah, big time.”

  “What was it like screwing Lisa Conroy?” Dean blurted out.

  I realized then that the bastards had found me. I’d been coached by both Louis and my grandmother on this. And between bouts of reading Heart of Darkness and The Sound and the Fury, I’d been flipping open my I Ching book to random passages as Phyllis had suggested. Hexagram 26 had jumped out at me. Ta Ch’u.The energy that you build up from waiting with awareness will be necessary for the difficulties ahead.

  I said nothing but walked on, my eyes trying to focus on the light coming through the doors at the end of the hallway. It had all been on the news, I realized. People thought they knew everything about me and what had happened. But they knew nothing. Nothing at all.

  Chapter 17

  I was alone when I walked out of school in the bright sunshine of the afternoon. I didn’t see what was out there to greet me. As I shaded my eyes, I think I was having some kind of flashback from much younger days. Back when I’d come out of school and all I could think about was riding my bike or playing soccer with some guys at the park. Back when leaving school in the afternoon filled me with the thrill of freedom. And fun. Right now it all seemed a long way from fun.

  I guess they saw me before I saw them. Action News. Channel Seven.“He’s over here,” I heard the woman say. Cindy Something. I saw the Action News truck in the background. I saw the satellite dish on top. Capable of live broadcast, I supposed. Once a weather girl, Cindy was now a newswoman. She’d shoved a microphone in my face before outside the courthouse. Her and so many others. Always rude, always insistent. My parents had tried to keep me shielded from the news stories but some got through. Cindy had me pegged for a murderer from day one.

  I could have run for one of the buses. Any one would do. I had a feeling the bus drivers wouldn’t let on a TV reporter. Instead, I stood my ground. You’ll get past this. Or the Biblical words of Phyllis: This too shall pass.

  The sun was still in my eyes so I was squinting. Cindy was right in front of me and her camera guy, lens to the eye socket, was literally running to get in close—I knew how they did it. I knew enough about TV. A wobbly tight shot on anybody’s face makes them look nervous and even guilty. I thought of putting my hand up to the lens like the celebrities do when they are sick to death of intrusion. But I knew how that played on TV too. It looked bad.

  “Michael Grove,” Cindy said, as I stood there, a crow
d of students now pulling into a circle for an audience. “Michael Grove, can you tell us how it feels to be back in school after all you’ve been through?”

  The handheld mike was hovering inches before my mouth. I froze. Hawker had trained me, nearly brain-washed me, into not speaking to the media. Any media. “They can do anything with what you say. Anything. They have total control over what they want the audience to believe.”

  One of my grandmother’s favorite expressions, ironic given her current circumstance, was, “When in doubt, just breathe.”

  I was breathing. Heavily. And the mike was picking up all of it, I’m sure.

  Cindy didn’t quite know what to do with the dead air. “You must be quite happy to be here today with all your friends.”

  It was supposed to lead me somewhere. I did a quick scan of the faces around me. I didn’t see any friends. I saw a lot of teenagers who had fully believed I had killed the girl I loved. The story had been drilled into them by people like Cindy, professionals whose careers had ascended in coverage of my tragedy.“Friends?” I accidentally asked.

  Cindy saw the confusion in my eyes and, realizing she was blowing it, turned to a face in the crowd. A younger guy edging up to the front, wanting to be seen on TV. Cindy asked him,“How do you feel about having Michael Grove back in your school?”

  The kid was a couple of years younger and had a baseball cap on with the phrase Mo’ Money. He looked straight into the camera as if he’d been waiting for this opportunity but then suddenly seemed to get nervous when he realized he was on TV. The mike was in his face and all he could finally do was shake his head and say, “I don’t know, man.”

  The cameraman was tilting his head back towards me, afraid I would edge away. Figuring I might just run. I thought about running just then. I put it back on a small list of things I wanted to do. Run like the wind. I wanted to feel the wind in my face. But not now. Cindy lowered the mike, dropped her persona, came closer to me and said, like she was my best friend in the world, “Look, I know this is not easy. But now you have a chance to show them you are normal. Can we try again?”

  Try again. Um. What did she want me to say? That it was good to be back? Good to have lost more than eighteen months of my life to courtrooms and prison? Good to try to pick up where I left off without Lisa?

  I saw Nicole pushing through the crowd, trying to get to the front, trying to catch my eye. I think she was one of the few in the crowd who knew what I was feeling. Something was starting to emerge and I realized I’d have to talk. Maybe now was the time. What was about to surface was anger. I was torn. Reason said to shut the mouth. Keep it shut. Emotion told me to go volcanic. Give Cindy Whatsherface full frontal feeling. My life has been ripped away from me, you asshole, and you helped do it.You, the judge, the jury, the viewers, and a lot of these silly turds at this school that you think are my friends.

  The mike was nearly touching my trembling lips, the cameraman had his focus just about as tight as he could on what must have been a contorted, tortured face. I could feel myself shaking, vibrating with anger. But before I could spew the words, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I almost jumped.

  “We’re pleased to have Michael back with us in school,” Mr. Tyson said, looking straight at the camera. “He’s decided to pick up where he left off.And now I’m afraid that I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  He said it in a tone of voice he had once used when giving me a lecture about smoking marijuana before classes. He used the same tone of principalian authority on Cindy and her camera guy.

  “All we’d like is to give Michael a chance to speak for himself,” Cindy’s camera guy said.

  Tyson was cool as ice. He’d removed his hand from my shoulder. He knew kids didn’t like that sort of thing. But it had worked. He had taken charge. I was off the hook.

  Cindy looked back at me again, hopeful. She knew she had blown a good chance for a scoop.

  “You’re on school property,” Mr. Tyson said to her again in the coolest of cool voices. “I have to ask you to leave.” He too knew that he might appear on TV, that it could be twisted any way the producer wanted to slant it. But he was going the distance.

  “It’s okay,” I said.“I just have one thing to say. Let me say it.”

  Cindy was back to me, leaning in with her mike.The camera’s dead dark eye was on me.

  “It’s good to be back,” I said. “It’s good to be back in school.”

  Cindy waited for more but I refused to give. I had offered up the blandest, most vacuous lie I could have, and then I walked away and got on my old bus. I sat alone in the back and waited as other students boarded the bus. Some stared straight at me, some had the courtesy to pretend they had no interest.

  I could see Mr. Tyson ushering the TV people back into their truck.The camera was getting one final parting shot of the bus. And then Pen Walker sat down beside me. “You did good. What a pain in the ass those people are. I haven’t watched TV since I was thirteen.”

  It was an odd thing for a person to say, but maybe not Pen. It reminded me of something Lisa might have said. In fact, I remembered she had said that she never watched TV. “How can you do that?” I asked, assuming that TV was just a part of everyone’s everyday life, love it or hate it. How could anyone just not watch TV?

  “You just turn it off and leave it off,” Lisa had said. “Or you simply don’t have one in the house.”

  Pen opened his backpack just then and took out a folded piece of paper.“I was holding off on this, but you might need it.”

  Even as I was unfolding it, I recognized the handwriting. “What is it?”

  “It’s a poem, man. It’s a poem she wrote that I was going to use in the school’s literary magazine. But I didn’t.”

  The words were a blur, but the gentle, feminine handwriting was unmistakable. It was hers.

  “It’s a poem she wrote for you,” he added. “That’s what she told me.”

  I was afraid to read it. Afraid of how it would make me feel, maybe even afraid of what it had to say. “How come she didn’t show it to me?”

  “I don’t know. She said she kept rewriting it. She didn’t want you to see it until she got it right.”

  The bus stopped and Pen got up. “See ya in school tomorrow,” he said.

  “Yeah, see ya.”And he walked down the aisle and was gone.

  I folded the poem and put it back in my pocket. And I waited until I was within the safety of my room at home before I dared to unfold it and read the words she had written.

  Medicine Walk

  (for Michael)

  When you believe you are beyond repair

  let go.

  When you cannot be saved by all your friends

  when you cannot be saved by yourself

  remember that I love you

  and deliver what is left of you

  to that place we have shared

  in our hearts.

  Use whatever means to get close

  but then you must walk the final path

  and if you cannot walk, then crawl.

  It is your only hope.

  The word “sacred” could scare you off

  so be silent

  be there

  and do not ask

  about why things are

  the way they are.

  Just promise that we will always share

  the sweet geography of us

  alive for all time

  beyond fear and change,

  a quiet place

  in the wilderness

  of our love.

  Chapter 18

  The poem stayed with me for days. No. It stayed with me from then onward. It’s still with me. When I first read it, I realized I was still in love with Lisa. I still have the poem and I look at her handwriting sometimes.The way she shaped the letters.They are like flowers. Sometimes I just stare at a word. Sometimes I think there is more to the words. When you believe. When you believe and what you believe rules everything. Yo
u are beyond repair. That was almost too much.

  In my room, with Lisa’s poem. Then. I had believed I was already “beyond repair” but I had never found the words. Lisa had written this poem for me. But I didn’t know how or why. It was like she knew I would need this message from her—from beyond her death. And it was a poem of instruction. When you believe you are beyond repair… you must do these things.

  So, as I tried to fall asleep that night, my first night after my attempt at parachuting back into the world to be normal, I “delivered” what was left of me to that shared place we had found, that sweet geography.

  And slept deeply. Then awoke and, for the first time since the day of Lisa’s death, I believed repair was possible. I found a small reserve of inner strength that I did not know was there.

  Such strength did not fully carry me through a second day of school. But it helped. The second day was not easier. Someone scrawled some words I will not repeat on my locker with a permanent marker. It didn’t really make any sense at all but they were words that required janitorial assistance. It was a powerful reminder that there were some in the school who still hated me. If I was not the murderer, I was somehow still an accomplice of a murderer. I was the reason Lisa was murdered.

  Be silent. Be there. Lisa’s words were the mantra to quell the panic attacks in Chemistry and English.

  But it did not help at all when Mr.Tyson showed up in class in the early afternoon and asked me to walk with him out of the classroom.

  “It’s your grandmother. She’s in the hospital. Your parents called and they said you’d want to be there.”

  “Is she bad?”

  “She’s in the hospital. That’s all I know. C’mon, I’ll drive you.”

  On the way,Tyson tried in his own way to give me a pep talk. He did it poorly and I liked him even more for that. “You’ve been dealt a rough hand, Mr. Grove. From what I can see, you are stronger than most. You’ll get past this too.” Then he handed me rosary beads. I didn’t even recognize them at first. “Do you believe in God?” he asked.