This is Not the End Read online

  The blond man turned back toward James as he tossed the camera aside. James couldn’t distinguish his face from that distance, but then the man was turning, one arm slung across the seat next to him, and the Escalade backed up.

  The panic built. This is silly. Still, James checked the end of the train, willing it to speed up, speed up, speed up, and just get past already.

  Fifty yards.

  Twenty-five. The blond man put the Escalade in drive and started off through the parking lot as James sidestepped toward the last car.

  Ten yards.

  Five. Two. One. And then it was past, its fat backward engine announcing its retreat as James rushed up the embankment until he was standing on the tracks. The black Escalade reached the end of the parking lot and turned right. By the time it occurred to James to get the license plate, the street was empty.

  James skid-slipped down the embankment until he was standing against the other fence. He watched the intersection where the Escalade disappeared and wondered why he felt like he’d just missed something terribly important, something big and scary and very, very bad. He headed off to school along the tracks, all the while searching the streets to his right for a glimpse of the automobile.

  As he replayed the image of the blond man with the camera, James trudged slowly over the rocks. Along the tracks, past Main Street and three other access holes leaking children, he saw that thin, light face over and over, until he found himself at the hole in the fence that led to the back fields of George Washington High School.

  Ducking through the hole, James noticed Nick Schroeder and a small group of beauties and ogres standing off to the right amongst the ruins of the community center playground.5 He immediately doubled his pace, disappearing into the river of kids as he locked his gaze straight ahead (while keeping track of the group in his periphery). He sped across the soccer field toward the back of the school.

  This is probably as good a time as any to explain something about James.

  Nobody likes him.

  It may sound harsh, but it’s true. You wouldn’t like him if you knew him. And oddly enough, you wouldn’t quite be able to articulate why. No one could. “Just something about him.” That’s what people always said. James had, in fact, come to grips with this aspect of his interaction with the outside world in the last few years. He always said the wrong thing at the exact wrong time, always smiled when he should have frowned. It was like everyone in the world was dancing to a song he couldn’t hear. People often found they felt a bit anxious or slightly depressed whenever he was near. Some people—the very sensitive—would even feel a little nauseated.

  While almost everyone seemed to find James’s presence unpleasant, it had an especially profound effect on Nicholas Allan Schroeder. Nick is a difficult child to describe, regardless of the objectivity of the narrator. At times he seems such a cliché that it’s difficult to believe he’s real. It’s also difficult to believe he exists in total ignorance of his clichéness. Do people like Nick watch The Karate Kid and identify with Johnny?

  Still, Nick was real, and he was tall and strong, and he did have blond hair (though not as blond as Johnny’s), and he was the point guard and captain of the basketball team as well as a wrestler over whom the varsity coaches were already drooling.6

  Nick had a physical reaction to James. Simply seeing James caused the muscles of his back to tense, his teeth to grind. Nick hated the way he felt around James, and being sixteen, he expressed this by beating the crap out of him, by tipping over his lunch tray and tripping him. At this point their interactions were routine for both of them.

  At the edge of the blacktop, James snuck a look back to find Nick and his group heading toward him, though seemingly still unaware of (or unconcerned with) his presence. James made his way around the building, steeling himself with two deep breaths before he rounded the corner to the front of the school.

  A large, concrete apron sat before the front doors like a wagging tongue. Little knots of students stood wasting time, separated from each other by only a few feet geographically but by an invisible line of absolute truth socially.

  The dance never changes for kids like James: Don’t engage the groups. Don’t court rejection and mockery. But don’t sit out there alone either. Predators always look for prey that’s been detached from the herd.

  James edged along the wall until he was a few feet from a congregation of popular juniors. Far enough away that they’d probably just ignore him but close enough that, to an uninterested glance, he may appear part of the group. He heard snatches of their conversation: girls they were chasing and debating, a fight that may or may not have happened, and a tale of a five-on-one ass-whipping that was most likely apocryphal. Still, it was another reminder to James of the life he was not leading. The boyfriends and girlfriends and friendship and arguments and drama, the sexual adventures—hell, even just kissing—the intimacy and betrayal of teenage life, happening all around him, without him. It was impossible to not feel stunted in his small and lonely world. It was impossible to not arrive at the obvious conclusion—Something’s wrong with me.

  “Nick,” Colin O’Connor shouted, and James looked up to see Nick and Gail come around the side of the building with LaMarcus and Jess trailing. James, torn between the urge to watch Jess’s beautiful citrus legs and the need to avoid Nick’s attention, settled on the safe alternative and eased farther behind the juniors.

  The bell rang and James, waiting until Nick and most of the others had made their way in, hitched up his bag and turned to walk inside. As he did, though, he saw the blinds on the nearest window snap shut. It was just some random classroom. Just blinds closing. But it happened so suddenly, and he wasn’t sure, but he could’ve sworn there’d been eyes there. Like someone was watching him.

  1. Orange Danish, for those unfortunate few who’ve never experienced them, are cinnamon rolls covered in orange-flavored icing. Pillsbury makes a fine version.

  2. James’s middle name (it’s a long story). Within the last few years James had asked his mom to refrain from using that particular sobriquet unless she was positive that no one was around.

  3. That island in the Pacific that disappeared, the tallies from the Great Drought last summer, updates on the fallout from the India-Pakistan nuke skirmish, etc.

  4. The Composite Story of The Eights, as Passed to James by General Consensus—The Eights was the second-largest building complex in Stone Grove. The largest was the abandoned ChocoMalt factory, and these two were intrinsically tied to each other in the mind of the town.

  ChocoMalt was started in the 1930s and was soon the second-largest chocolate malted milk producer in the US, behind Ovaltine. In the 1960s, they built their new central factory here in Stone Grove, and in a matter of years, it was the town. The president of ChocoMalt, Gary Gilmore, donated a lot of the money to build the high school (which is how it got the unfortunate original moniker of Gary Gilmore High School, which was changed in 1983 after a town-wide vote), and the company was almost completely responsible for the modernization of the town hall/police and fire complex. By the 1970s, just about everyone worked for ChocoMalt, and no major civic decisions were undertaken without Mr. Gilmore’s insight (okay). In fact, a few times ChocoMalt even paid their taxes early simply because they knew the town was low on funds.

  Then, as often happened in the 1980s, everything turned to hot garbage. It had been noticeable for a while, and even as the town and ChocoMalt tried to show the world a brave and happy face, they continued to hemorrhage. Until, in 1987, two years after Mr. Gilmore’s death from an opiate overdose that was written up as a slip in the shower when his son convinced the police it would be in everyone’s best interest if this was handled with some decorum, the company finally shuttered its doors. An apocalyptic portion of the town was out of work. The factory, which took up nearly one-tenth of the real estate in town, sat empty and quickly became a petri dish of dares and ghost stories and Satanists and gangbangers and smoking weed/tripping/
rolling/etc.

  Now, at about the same time, the City of Chicago finally accepted the fact that perhaps stacking the impoverished in thirty-story slums was not the best idea, and so they began to tear down the projects (Cabrini Green, Henry Horner Homes, Robert Taylor Homes, etc.), relocating families into the south and west sides of the city but also into mixed-income properties they were building in the outlying suburbs. Stone Grove had no idea how to function without ChocoMalt’s input and attorneys, no idea even what it was they wanted (except, of course, for it to be the 1970s again). So, in 1991, a private developer, in concert with the Chicago Housing Authority, paid a one-time fee for the right to build mixed-income apartment complexes along the tracks off Madison Avenue. Section 8 residents moved in, and the remaining apartments slowly filled with others moving west. The demographics of the town changed. The old residents talked about how the town used to smell like chocolate, as if they were remembering some Oz-like make-believe world, though it seemed what they really meant was that the town used to be all-white and all-middle-class and all-employed (regardless of skill set) and the world generally didn’t used to be such a scary place.

  5. LaMarcus Daniels, Gail Asbury, Maria Montero, Jess Gerber, and Lucas Astrauskas—introductions to follow later, as necessary.

  6. Of course, it’s only fair to mention that Nick was the youngest of five brothers, known throughout town for their unyielding toughness and occasional cruelty. Kevin, John, Pat, and Steve Schroeder ranged from 19 to 24 years of age, and between them they had served two years in juvenile detention facilities, 17 months in county jail, and had a combined 6–2 MMA record. They considered Nick soft, and so made a concerted effort to harden him, as if he were being hazed into his own family. So who knows? Maybe if Nick had been born into a different family, he’d be a completely different boy. Sadly, though, he was not, and the reactionary bundle of defensive rage known as Nick Schroeder was what the world got.

  3. George Washington High School Gets a New Librarian

  Mrs. Windermere was clueless. Everyone knew it, and frankly she could give a damn. She was sixty-two years old and probably should have stopped teaching when she was fifty-two. She no longer had any patience. She no longer cared. In fact, she no longer liked any kids except the really nice and exceptional ones (and if that’s the case, then you just don’t like kids). Her white-and-gray curly hair was almost as unkempt as her clothes, as if she didn’t feel her job deserved even the niceties of grooming anymore. She was the very definition of burnt-out; she was also James’s first-hour geometry teacher.

  James sat in his seat, devouring a battle between Wolverine and Sabretooth as random clusters of students trickled into the classroom. The second bell, which announced the beginning of classes, had not yet rung, and while most students liked to cut it close, milking as much hallway social time as possible, James always felt he was more likely to be left alone once in class.

  He smelled her before he saw her, and a Pavlovian smile inched across his face as he looked up from the X-Men to see Dorian walk in talking to Jess, both with their arms crossed over the books pressed tightly to their breasts, pictures of youth and purity and all that Sweet Valley High folklore. That smell of Dorian’s—shea butter, vanilla, and Sweet Pea7—it was an obsession. It barely had to tickle the teensiest bit of his nose and his body woke up and his heart beat with a terrible/wonderful fear, a roller-coaster fear: slowly climbing up, up, up.

  Jess peeled off, and Dorian looked over and caught James’s smile and nod. She smiled back and waved, and Mrs. Windermere chewed on the end of her mechanical pencil, stumped by what she felt was a particularly difficult crossword clue,8 fighting the urge to Google it. Dorian was one of the only people (though if we exclude family, she would be the only person) who was outwardly nice to James. He could tell he bothered her sometimes too, but since the Incident last year, she’d been nothing but kind; and Dorian’s kindness was no small thing.

  Dorian Delaney was one of the most popular girls in school, and the fact that she not only didn’t shun James but was actively nice to him would be social seppuku for anyone else. Dorian, though, could pull it off. She was pretty and smart and funny, and the teachers liked her as much as the students did. The janitors, if polled, probably had nice things to say about her. People tended to describe her as adorable and beautiful and talented, and they hoped their daughters turned out like her.

  A big part of this, of course, was a result of her singing. She was the closest thing George Washington High School had to a celebrity, having sung the national anthem at a NASCAR race, a minor-league hockey game, and a pro soccer game at Soldier Field, not to mention singing “O Holy Night” on the local NBC Christmas Eve Gala program two years prior. She’d been operatically trained since she was just a bit more than a baby, practiced every day after school and on the weekends, and sometimes even missed school to perform. Everyone was pretty sure that someday she’d be famous, and you don’t risk alienating that just because she’s nice to the weird kid who gives everyone the creeps.

  James watched Dorian. She was so beautiful it hurt. Pale white skin like a shook sheet coming to rest on a clean bed. The straight, light-red hair that hung just below her shoulders was the same color as her freckles; and the freckles, which were everywhere, grew darkest over the bridge of her nose and across her cheeks. James once told her it looked like the mask Robin wore, but she didn’t smile. Thin and meticulous, she’d always been one of the shortest girls in her class so that she gave off the impression of being breakable.

  The tan speaker box up in the corner of the room emitted an electric scratch and burped to life, followed by a whisper of feedback and Dean Worthington clearing his throat. “Good morning, students and faculty. Handling the announcements today will be student council secretary Mitch Toller.”

  Sssht. Silence.

  Then the pop of the feed returning and the shuffle/crinkle of paper. “Uh, good morning,” Mitch Toller began. “The, uh, the freshmen girls’ volleyball team traveled to Huntington to take on the perennial power Wildcats. Great passing and communication led to a . . . to a . . . twenty-five-to-sixteen victory.” Ssht—pop. “Go, Cardinals. The varsity girls didn’t fare as well, losing a tense game that was much closer than its twenty-five-to-two score.” Paper shuffling. A cough, a throat cleared. “Hey, everybody, if you haven’t . . . heard, Camera Club is more than just . . . taking pictures. Also, you, uh, you don’t even have to have your own camera. Come by Room 813 today after school to check it out. Br-bring a friend.” Shuffle, shuffle.

  James reached into his bag and pulled out his sketchbook.

  “And finally, school librarian Mrs. Hauser will be away for the remainder of . . . of the year. There will be an inter-interim, uh, librarian. Please introduce yourself to Mr. Moon when you see him in the library, and give him a big Washington welcome. Uh, okay, that’s it for announcements. Thank you, and have a great day.”

  James wasn’t surprised. Mrs. Hauser probably had cancer or something. She always looked sick, but that could’ve just been from sitting in the library with her Diet Cokes all day.

  Mrs. Windermere took attendance as James opened his sketchpad, which was in fact his only possession of any real psychic value to him. James drew. He drew well and often, and when he did, he forgot about the world around him or he twisted it into his own creation: a world where he wasn’t ignored and stomped and floating alone. He opened his mind and let everything pour onto these pages.

  James began to draw. He wasn’t even paying attention, just half listening to Mrs. Windermere and sneaking looks at Jess’s legs and the side of Dorian’s neck as his pen moved across the page. It wasn’t until the bell rang that he looked down and noticed what he’d been drawing: the black Escalade.

  Lunch, like gym and before and after school, could be a dangerous time. It allowed for gatherings and groupthink and kangaroo courts, and it was for these reasons that James attempted to remove himself from the entire exercise. He sat mostly alone, t
hough nobody could sit completely alone, as there simply wasn’t enough real estate in the cafeteria for the physical manifestation of ostracization. Most of the outcasts sat clustered at the two tables farthest from the windows. And castes existed even within this motley gathering of losers—second-and-third-level misfits—so that some people managed to be rejected by multiple groups of descending popularity each day. James avoided most of that, though. For some reason, the other pariahs tended to ignore him.

  James stacked his french fries in overlapping rows on the dry, rectangular pizza sitting on his yellow tray, and he was sad. He was profoundly sad. While he was often bullied and ignored, and while he rarely (if ever) felt that other people wanted to connect with him in any way, what he experienced now was a crippling sadness. James pictured himself diving off that catwalk last night, and the falling felt like flying. It all felt like relief.

  He wondered if he’d go back tonight. He wondered how many nights he’d have to go back until he wasn’t too scared.

  James noticed the heat of imminent tears and took a massive bite of fry-pizza, and as he did, as he looked up and began to masticate the antisocial mouthful, he saw a man watching him.