Infernal Revelation : Collected Episodes 1-4 (9781311980007) Page 2

  Hugh nodded and rested his forehead against the guard-rail. "Fuck cops, man. Your dad's like all the rest. Ain't no difference."

  Gideon took a long slow draw off of his one-hitter, held it in for a three-count, then slowly exhaled. "He's worse, man."

  "Yeah," Hugh took the pipe from the redhead. "He's like, fucking, king cop in this shit-burg."

  While Juan was nearly emaciated-looking and Gideon overweight, Hugh was almost rotund from a diet that consisted chiefly of soda and snack-cakes. He refused to cop to more than husky.

  The pot wasn't really helping. Gideon was feeling calmer, but more depressed. He stared past his boots towards where the water-tower's girding cast a shadow across the gravel far below.

  "Not about that," Gideon said. "He's like, my dad, right? But not my dad."

  "Oh," Hugh said. "Because you're, like, adopted. I got it."

  "I feel you, man." Juan patted Gideon on the back. "It's like... Richard's not my dad either, you know? Just some fucker who married my mom."

  Gideon swung his feet idly. "It's not the same. Richard, like, he taught you to shave, right?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Man, when I was twelve? I tried to get fucking Bill to show me how to shave, and he just fucking yelled at me to get out of the bathroom."

  "Cold, bro." Juan glanced sideways at his friend. "Yo, what the fuck you talking about, peach fuzz? You don't need to shave."

  Gideon's face reddened, and he let out a sharp laugh. "Asshole!"

  Hugh ducked back as Gideon made a lumbering swipe towards Juan, careful not to drop the pipe as the slimmer Latino rolled away along the tarnished steel walkway surrounding Laton's water-tower.

  When he got tired of chasing his friend around, Gideon sat back down and reached into Hugh's bag. "Ew, what the fuck is with this old-man beer?"

  "It's what my dad likes to drink, man."

  Gideon suppressed a shudder as he pulled the can's tab. "Nasty shit."

  "Better than that hipster shit you like."

  The redhead just took a swallow, then passed the can to Juan.

  Juan examined it speculatively. "No it ain't."

  "Fuck ya both, then," Hugh said, grabbing the can back from Juan.

  Gideon's smile faded as he watched his friends tussle. They didn't get it. Not really. Juan had grown up without a dad before his mom remarried, but at least he had his mom. Bill had always only looked after Gideon grudgingly, like it was a job, like he didn't really care about his son. Bill was different with Dale, but Gideon couldn't remember if things had been different before his wife Linda had died. He liked to think so.

  Juan opened his mouth and let a loud belch echo forth. Hugh gave him a high five, then yelped as he leaned too far over, and the flesh of his thigh under the hem of his jean shorts rolled over out of the water-tower's shadow and onto the sun-baked hot-side.

  Gideon stifled a smirk, and stared down at the gravel far below again. "What are you guys thinking of doing after graduation?"

  "I'm going to head up to Odessa and get some puss-ayy." Hugh stuck his tongue out.

  "What, like with a whore?" Juan said.

  "No!"

  "Ain't nobody fuck your dumb ass for free."

  "That's not what your mom said last night."

  Juan stopped laughing. "Hey man, don't talk about my mom."

  "Your mom's hot," Hugh said.

  "Not cool man."

  "To be fair--" Gideon started.

  "You both shut the fuck up," Juan said.

  "You know who else is hot?" Hugh said. "Lily."

  "Baker?" Gideon asked. "I heard my dad saying that she's out of the hospital."

  "Oh shit yeah," Juan said. "Too bad her boyfriend would kick your ass if you made a move."

  "I ain't afraid of him." Hugh said."Punk-ass bitch."

  "Nah," Gideon said. "Derek's okay. He's cool."

  "Man, no he's not." Hugh made a sour face.

  "Just because he's not a dick like Barny doesn't mean he's cool," Juan said.

  "I've never had a problem with him." Gideon said. "Derek. Fuck Barny."

  "He's still a fucking sheep, like the rest of the assholes in this town," Hugh said.

  "Yeah, fuck this town," Juan said.

  "Fuck it," Gideon said, not talking about the town. "I got to get to class."

  "Why?" Hugh snorted.

  Gideon didn't answer, grabbing his backpack and swinging down to the water-tower ladder, frustration and annoyance buzzing in his skull. Hugh and Juan were probably going to kill the whole day on the tower, drinking and smoking, throwing rocks at the windows of the model houses nobody ever looked at across the tracks. Gideon had spent most of his junior year with them there, talking bullshit philosophy, listening to them talk about girls they wanted to bang, wasting away the hours.

  It didn't feel like enough anymore. It was just... pointless. Superficial. This was it, senior year, and all Gideon could see ahead was this yawning abyss of shit minimum wage jobs in a world that was circling the drain. He wanted to help, to do something to make the world a better place, but with school, with Bill, with everything, he just felt powerless.

  But what Juan and Hugh were doing, what he used to do... it just felt like killing time, waiting to get old so he could stop giving a shit.Waiting for the world to end.

  Gideon dropped the last few feet to the gravel and grabbed his bike. He spared a last glance up towards his friends, then past them, past the water-tower to the Church of Christ Everlasting billboard. Religion was, in his opinion, just another snake-oil panacea sold to keep the sheep blind to the wolf in their hen-house, or some shit, and Evangelical mega-churches were even more full of it than most. No matter how progressive they pretended to be.

  It always brightened his day to see the phallus someone had spray-pained on church-founder Reverend Carter's lips. The sheriff had, of course, suspected Gideon, going so far as to check his hands for spray-paint, but there hadn't been any proof. Like he wouldn't wear gloves.

  Gideon's eyes narrowed as he gazed at the billboard. Someone had added something to it. Shading his eyes with his hand, he was able to make out some kind of geometric symbol between Carter's eyes, circles and triangles connected with straight lines. It didn't look like paint... it looked like someone had taken a blow-torch to it.

  He smiled as he hopped on his bike. That was pretty cool, whoever had done it, whatever it meant.

  ***

  As if the dreams weren't bad enough, a dull aching headache dominated Lily's first day back to school.

  "I wanted to come back Monday," she said, "Just making it up and down the stairs was a huge deal."

  Derek slipped an arm around her shoulders. Though they'd been on the phone every night since she'd woken up, the first time they'd managed to see each other was when he'd picked her up for school.

  "I'd have stopped by to see you, but your dad said you needed your rest." He lowered his visor against the rising sun, orange light painted across his lips and chin.

  "I know," Lily took his hand in hers. "He was probably right."

  "You're just lucky it happened over break. You didn't miss anything too much."

  Lily drew her hand away. "I don't feel lucky."

  Derek turned his pickup into the school's parking lot. "You know what I mean. You're alive. No broken bones. No brain damage."

  She nodded and unclipped her seat-belt. "I just want to get back to a normal schedule. Classes. Track. You."

  Her boyfriend pulled into a parking spot and, finding her hand again, squeezed it gently. "I can help you with that last part."

  Derek climbed out of the truck. Lily had a brief moment of vertigo as he passed in front of the hood, a sort of queasy deja vu that lasted a moment but almost took her senses away.

  He opened the door. "Are you okay?"

  "Yeah, just... yeah."

  He helped her step down to the curb and slipped an arm around her waist.

  What was that? Derek in front of the car was so familiar
in such a strange way. Was that part of the dream? A part she couldn't remember?

  "Don't forget your bag," he said.

  "Right."

  They walked together towards Laton High School's brick facade.

  ***

  "They're staring."

  "You're the most beautiful girl in school." Derek smiled. "I got used to guys staring at you a long time ago."

  "It's not like that," Lily said. "It's like... do you remember kindergarten?"

  "Barely."

  "Do you remember when I started?"

  "Of course."

  "Yeah, I got a lot of attention then, too."

  "You were a cute kid. And funny. And smart."

  "And black."

  "Lily."

  "It's true, Derek. Don't pretend it's not. I'm the only black girl... the only black person in town. First one most of you ever met. Still the only one most of you know."

  "Nobody thinks of you that way," Derek said. "You're not 'the black girl.' You're Lily Baker, track star and valedictorian."

  Lily wrinkled her nose. "Salutatorian. Lucas is valedictorian."

  Derek slammed a fist into his palm. "Year's not over yet, Lil."

  She laughed and hugged him, nestling into his side as they entered the building. Derek was right, it wasn't the same thing, not really. She might not have the luxury of ever really forgetting she was the only African-American in Laton, but the rest of the town seemed to have gotten used to it. They still made a big deal about it in small ways -- it was really uncomfortable how often gazes turned towards her in civics class every February -- but Laton was a good town, with a progressive church, and tolerant people.

  This attention was different, though. She could feel the stares, stares at her, stares at the girl who had survived unharmed while one of her friends had ended up dead, and the other seriously injured. She could almost hear the whispers, the rumors spreading like a cancer, eating away at her reputation.

  "Do you know what happened?" she asked.

  He didn't need to ask her what she was talking about. "I was in Boston."

  "Have you heard anything?"

  "Nobody's said much." He stopped and turned towards her. "Nobody's blaming you for anything, Lily."

  "Maybe they should. Maybe it was my fault."

  "It was an accident."

  A spark of anxiety welled up inside her. "You don't know that. Nobody knows that. Nobody knows what happened, and I don't remember."

  "Lily..."

  She shook her head, clenching her eyes shut. "I'm sorry."

  "For what?"

  "How was Boston?"

  Derek paused, leaning against the bank of lockers to their side. "Boston was... okay, I guess. I was worried about you. Came home as soon as I could."

  "Are you going to go?"

  "I don't know," Derek said. "It's on my list. We talked about this."

  "I remember." She stepped away and turned towards him. "We need to really talk about it. About us."

  Derek nodded. "Yeah. But that can wait."

  "Derek--"

  He raised his hands. "Until you're feeling better. I don't want to add more stress to what you're feeling, okay? So... let's just let it be."

  Lily bit her lip. "Just for now."

  "Just for now."

  "Okay." She gave him a quick hug. "I should get to class."

  Derek checked his phone. "We have a few minutes."

  "Yeah, but I need to get the notes and assignments I missed." She cringed inwardly as the lame excuse slipped from her lips.

  "Okay. I love you."

  "Love you," Lily said, squeezing him again.

  She walked with swift steps down the hall, not turning her head to look at the classmates watching her. Lily held her head high, but it was all she could do to keep from breaking into a run before reaching the corner, to force herself to slow her brisk pace. She felt hot, flushed, her arms and legs tingling, the panic threatening to rise up from her quivering stomach. It was too much on her plate, too fast. Her father had told her to pace herself her first day back. Why hadn't she listened?

  She hadn't meant to bring up Boston. Again. That was one of the last things she remembered talking about before the accident. A conversation with her boyfriend over the phone, or rather an anti-conversation, where both parties touched on but didn't discuss the prospect that one of them was going to go, go to school thousands of miles away, almost literally as far as one could travel from the other without leaving the country.

  What was there to discuss? Derek was a football star. He had options beyond Dallas, beyond anywhere Lily was willing to go.

  Not like she didn't have options. Not like she didn't have her own pick of a half-dozen schools. It just so happened that Boston College wasn't one of them.

  The way they hadn't been talking about it, the way that they'd argued around it, the harsh tones, him hanging up on her for the first time ever... why had she brought it up? Was it that less painful than the way she felt about Ashley and Lauren?

  Maybe she'd hoped it'd distract her from what had happened to her friends. The way she'd left them behind. The way she was fine, almost without a scratch. It hadn't.

  Instead, the ickiness she felt about her fight with Derek blended together with her survivor's guilt into a frothy cocktail of self-loathing. Was this any different, causing him pain to deflect her own?

  She could feel the pity of those she passed in the hall, and turned into Mrs. Criske's class with a sense of relief, only to see that pity nakedly mirrored on her teacher's face.

  Great.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It wasn't as bad as Lily had feared. Not really. Not until lunch, anyway.

  Everyone was just so supportive, so understanding, so concerned, and that support manifested in someone in each of her morning classes having taken plenty of notes for her. She was able to withstand the token concern from her instructors in every class (she knew they had to say something, but every class? Really?) and bury her face in the notes given to her. Her classmates' neat penmanship -- three out of four times Jessie Ross's, apparently -- provided her with an avenue of escape into trigonometric functions, Spanish verb conjugations, and 19th-century social movements. She sat in her desk, up front in each class, pretending to ignore the hot stares burrowing into the back of her skull as she carefully transcribed notes from Jessie's notebook.

  Carl Moser had taken her notes in Art History, a class she did not share with Jessie, and his sparse lines about Edgar Degas barely took ten minutes to copy. She was forced for the rest of class to watch Mr. Jeffries lecture, forced to acknowledge the concern in his eyes whenever he looked in her direction, forced into awareness of Ashley's empty seat next to her.

  It was almost too much. Almost. But she made it to lunch by fuming over what a poor academic Carl was, and how awful his writing was.

  Lily stopped at the entrance to the lunch room, looking it over, seeing the cliques starting to form as students grabbed their trays or sat down with their brown bags. There were no notes here, no droning lecturing voices to shield herself from the concern and care of her peers. She would have to withstand their looks, their questions, their accusatory stares for nearly a half-hour. Would they question why she had survived when Lauren hadn't? Would she have an answer?

  She fought down the urge to panic.

  "Oh, excuse me, Lily," said a quiet voice behind her.

  Jessie Ross, a slight pale girl, daughter of Laton's other deacon, was smiling at her. Their families were friends, even if the girls' interests didn't intersect beyond the church.It wasn't that Lily didn't like Jessie, but she found the depth and intensity of the other girl's religious faith... unsettling.

  Lily searched the other girl's face for accusation or suspicion, but found none.

  She stepped aside to let Jessie pass, but stopped her half-way. "Jessie, do you have the notes for chemistry and civics?"

  Jessie nodded slowly. "Yes, of course. They're in my locker. Did you want them now?
"

  Lily stepped back into the hall, a light touch on the elbow guiding the other girl to accompany her. "If we could go get them, that'd be great."

  "Sure, I guess." Jessie lead the way back down the hall to her locker. "Though I could just give them to you in class?"

  "I'm not feeling well," Lily said, and it wasn't really a lie. "I might go home early, so I thought I'd get them from you now. Just in case."

  Jessie blinked and nodded. Lily was grateful she didn't press the issue, and saw nothing but simple goodwill in the other girl's eyes.

  She felt a sudden irrational spike of resentment towards the other girl. It must be so nice to live life so simply, without guilt, without boyfriends, without anything beyond the church's guidance. It must be so nice to have such a strong faith that there aren't any questions, to give yourself completely over to a higher power. Lily loved the church and what it did for people, but she didn't live it, like Jessie did. Like it was her whole life.

  Jessie didn't seem to notice as Lily almost physically recoiled from the wave of vitriolic guilt washing through her. Where had that come from? Jessie was a dear, and Lily had never had such strong negative feelings toward anyone.

  "Th-thank you," she managed.

  "No problem," Jessie said. "I will pray for you. And for Ashley."

  "Thanks," Lily said, watching as the other girl walked, unburdened, back up the hall towards the cafeteria.

  She shook her head, heading towards the stairs. She couldn't handle this. Not right now. Where had that negativity come from? Jessie had never been anything but kind, never had anything but a good word for anyone. She didn't deserve that sort of resentment. It wasn't her fault. It wasn't her fault that Lily had lived while Lauren had died. It wasn't Derek's fault. It wasn't any of their faults.

  Her headache was getting worse, crackling at the edges of her vision. She couldn't be around people right now.

  ***

  Lily had never skipped a class in her life, but she knew where kids went to do it.

  Laton High's roof was accessible through a door that was supposed to be kept locked, but nobody had fixed that lock in the four years Lily had attended school there. She'd never been up there, but a teen's instinct figured out the purpose of the cinder block propping it open, for sure enough, there was no handle on the other side. The sun above kept her warm, while the wind's gentle caress fanned her hair out behind as she walked to the rail overlooking the athletic field.