Here’s the opening scene to something I’m noodling around with, a YA thriller tentatively titled AFTERMATH…
I thought it was all over and that maybe I could start to move on (ha!) and then Mr. Williams came to me one night. Late. My parents were asleep and I was pacing the house because sleep and I were mortal enemies at this point. Seventeen years old and I was certain that I would never again have a good night’s sleep. My nights would be long, silent stretches of frustration larded atop fear, until the pressure of the two finally forced me to pass out somewhere far from the shores of midnight.
There were drugs to help, of course. I’d been offered them. They worked. Sort of.
Pacing the house. Because at some point, you’ve stared at your phone too much and you start to resent the bedroom. When hardcore insomnia is your boon companion, you learn to wander. And when your parents and younger sister are all light sleepers, you learn to tiptoe. So that was me, for weeks, a creeping shadow in my own home.
That night, the night Mr. Williams came and started it all, I was in the living room, staring at the blank, gray rectangular eye of the TV. I could have turned it on, but there was no point. It’s not that it would keep me up — life was doing that just fine — but rather that TV didn’t soothe. It wouldn’t help me sleep, and anything that wouldn’t help me sleep was useless to me.
My phone blipped at me. I stared down at it, confused. It was almost three in the morning, and it had been a while since I’d seen 3:15am, so I was hoping I’d zonk out soon. But that little blip shook me out of my staring contest with the quiescent TV and I gawped stupidly at the text notification for a few seconds before swiping it open.
Fel Dad: Are you awake?
I never even considered not answering. I tapped Yes.
Fel Dad: I’m outside.
I wondered if this was a waking dream. Or maybe just a plain old sleeping one masquerading as the waking world. But I drifted over to the steps, down into the foyer, and peered out the peephole. I recognized Mr. Williams, of course. He had been telling me to call him Brad ever since my third date with Fel. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it, though. He was Mr. Williams, for God’s sake.
He wore a denim jacket and baggy sweatpants. He hadn’t shaved in a while and it didn’t look like the sort of carefully cultivated face-shrub Millennial dads go for. It just looked sloppy and tired and sad.
Sort of like Mr. Williams. And me.
I turned off the alarm, wincing at the loud Alarm…Off! pronouncement that I hoped wouldn’t waken anyone, then slipped outside.
“Mr. Williams.”
“Brad,” he said.
“Right. Sure.”
He jammed his hands in his pockets and said nothing. I joined him in silence. Better with someone than not, right? Two dudes unable to sleep, being quiet dudes together.
“It’s about Fel,” he said, staring off into the night. Too much light pollution for stars. My dad once told me that when he was a kid, you could look up in the sky and see something other than the occasional plane or satellite. I suppose that’s nice. Sort of like a movie.
“I miss her, too, Mr. Williams.”
“No, no, it’s not that.” He drew in a breath, then blew it out in a long, shuddery stream, as though he couldn’t quite bear to let it go. I knew the feeling. Sometimes I inhaled and just held it there for a while. Just to feel like there was something I could hold onto that couldn’t be taken away until I decided to let it go.
“He didn’t kill her.”
I choked on my exhale, and in a moment, I was there again. Skidding around the corner to the band room. I had a text from Jonah that Carson was down by the gym and I totally broke lockdown to haul ass to the band room because Fel had texted me from there when it all began. So I was the first one to see.
Well, second, if you count Carson, who’s fucking dead now, and good on him for that. The one good thing Carson did with his life was end it.
Skidding around the corner. There’s the smell of brass instruments and bow rosin and something else underneath, something we all know from super-cold days and nosebleeds.
“Mr. Williams…”
“Brad.” There was a bite to his voice. A harshness in his tone. Like it mattered — really mattered — that I call him Brad.
“I saw her. I was…I was there.”
He glanced at me with something like pity. Close, but not quite. I’m not sure what it was. Maybe he regretted making me relive the moment in the band room. He shouldn’t have. I relived the moment all the time. It was constant. An overlay on everything else I thought and saw and remembered. He might as well regret making me breathe.
“I know you were. I know what you saw.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Sorry. I’m a little drunk.”
I hadn’t realized. My parents don’t really drink, so most of what I know about drunk people comes from movies and TV, which I guess exaggerates a lot. Because Mr. Williams seemed pretty sober to me. He wasn’t slurring his speech or moving herky-jerky or anything like that.
“Carson Mathers did not kill Felicity, Gabe.”
He stared into my eyes as he said it. I swallowed like I’d bitten off part of the fork.
“Mr. Williams—”
“Brad,” he growled.
“I came around the corner and she was—”
—she was covered in her own blood. She was sprawled on the floor of the band room. There were sheets of music scattered all around her and two music stands knocked to the floor near her. Her long blonde hair covered her face, the ends fanned out in a slick of blood. I knew the moment I saw her, but I ran to her anyway, stupidly screaming her name
(Stupidly because for all I knew Carson was right around the corner with his dad’s AR, ready to pop back in and put ten thousand rounds into my dumb ass.)
and racing to her side.
Until you’ve slipped in your girlfriend’s own blood, you haven’t really experienced hell.
His eyes were furious and blazing as he glared at me. Was it alcohol? Again, I’d never really seen a drunk, much less a mean one. Was Mr. Williams going to haul off and pound the living hell out of me if I didn’t agree to his ridiculous statement that Fel hadn’t been killed that day?
“We buried her,” I told him, speaking slowly. Some part of me knew that if I yelled loud enough, my parents would hear and wake up. Probably in time to pull Mr. Williams off me, if it came to that. “We buried her and she—”
He laughed. It was short and ugly, but still recognizable as a laugh.
“I know that, Gabe. I know she’s dead. I’m not saying… I’m just saying Carson’s not the one who killed her.”
Funnily, we could have gone on for quite a while that night, going back and forth like one of those old vaudeville routines my dad watches on YouTube. But in that moment, it all clicked for me and it all made perfect sense.
Carson had killed six that day. Not seven.
Someone else had killed Fel.