Katzenjammer, page 4
Ken and his friends sauntered off, still laughing.
It didn’t surprise me that some people didn’t like Jake. Everyone knew Jake, and everyone either loved him or hated him, and some probably loved and hated him. But it did surprise me that Ken Kapoor hated him, because Ken didn’t seem to care what anyone did enough to hate them.
I’m glad Jake’s in high school now, Jeffrey said after Ken and the others were well out of earshot. It’s weird, though, because I’m kind of sad about it, too.
Why? I asked.
Because he’s my brother, Jeffrey said. When we were little, our dad used to say we were each other’s right-hand man. And I know he’s a dick, but without him I’m alone.
Maybe these particular memories are just to remind me how much I hate Jake.
The Brothers Blumenthal
“Yes,” I say. “Julie Wisnowski. We think she got in a fight with someone and they cracked her head open on the pavement in the courtyard.”
“Maybe she shouldn’t have gotten into a fight with them, then.” Jake stows the harpoon gun somewhere below the desk and pulls out a wooden baseball bat. You’d think this would be less threatening, but the baseball bat has a circular saw jammed into its tip with blades that look like shark teeth. This is the kind of weapon someone makes when they want to joke around about hurting people. Jake comes out from behind the desk, balances the teeth on the floor, leans on the bat. “Why should I care? What you weirdos get up to out there is your own problem.”
“I’d say it’s everyone’s problem when someone gets murdered,” I say, eyeing the bat. “We don’t feel safe now.” Not that we did before, but now we’re getting killed in supposedly safe places like the courtyard instead of in the hallways by Laserbeams. “The sooner we can find out who did this, the sooner everything can go back to normal.”
Jake scoffs. Jeffrey shuffles uneasily beside me. We all know there is no normal, but sometimes we have to pretend.
“Okay,” Jake says. “I’m still not following. What did you come here for? We didn’t do it, and if you thought we had, you wouldn’t have come here. Don’t tell me you expect me to send someone out to investigate? This place is a stronghold. We stay in here because of the assholes out there killing people. Your wanderers keep trying to pick us off.”
“There’s only one now,” I spit. “Mark. The others disappeared. And they’re not our wanderers. They attack us, too.”
“We weren’t sure if anyone here had heard anything,” Jeffrey says, cutting me off before I can say more. “I know you pay the Hands for information about what’s going on.”
Jake’s mouth twists up in a cruel smile. “If you want information, Jeffers, you should go ask Time and the Hands for it yourself.”
Jeffrey visibly shudders. He has to grab the sides of his head to keep its movement from disorienting him, destroying any hope he has of keeping his reaction a secret. Asking Time and the Hands for help isn’t really an option; Time always charges a steep price for his information.
“But to answer your question,” Jake continues, “no, I haven’t heard anything from the Hands. Though it could be because they’re the ones who killed her. You never know—that Time, he’s a wild card. Maybe he finally decided to try out the Big Bad Sacrifice.”
The Big Bad Sacrifice is the name someone gave to the theory that eradicating the kids who have changed will let everyone else out of School. We’re all such clever people here.
“I don’t think Time’s stupid enough to believe killing us will reveal the way out of this place,” I say. I am careful not to move. Not to shift my weight, twitch my fingers, even tilt my head. Perhaps it makes me look less human, but it also makes me look less vulnerable. “But not everyone is smart like him.”
Jake stares at me. His eyes begin to boil over. “What are you implying?”
Jeffrey looks at me in alarm.
I stare back at Jake. “Are we really going to pretend you don’t have an issue with us? That if anyone was going to test the Big Bad Sacrifice, it wouldn’t be you?”
“I think that’s a bit of a strong accusation to make.” Jeffrey turns to me, his head vibrating with worry. “Right, Cat? I mean, none of us would do that. Or even think of it.”
“We’ve thought about it hard enough to name it,” I say.
Jake begins spinning the baseball bat; the floor squeals softly in pain. He stares at us with that dead-eyed predator look he’s always had. Before all this happened, I thought that was a sexy smolder, something he’d worked on to pick up his various girlfriends. Now I see the blankness for what it is, the lack of conscience between his ears, the dark wasteland in his head broken only by the strobing lights of instinct.
“I won’t let you do this,” he says finally.
“Do what?” Jeffrey asks, his voice weak.
“Let you pin the blame on us to divert attention away from yourselves.”
“You can’t be serious,” I say. “We didn’t blame it on you. We came for help.”
“Serious as a heart attack,” says Jake. He jerks his chin toward the door. “They’ll believe me, if I say it. It doesn’t matter if it’s true. You may think I’m the only one who hates you here—”
I can’t help the snort.
“—but no one would bat an eyelash if I decided to cancel our truce.”
“You can’t do that!” Jeffrey takes a step closer to Jake, and Jake steps back, dragging the bat’s saw blade against the floor. Jeffrey doesn’t seem to notice. He holds his hands out. “Please, Jake, don’t do it. You don’t have to help us. We’ll leave, okay? We’ll figure it out on our own. If . . . if you cancel the truce, that could start a war. We don’t—that’s not—it won’t help anyone stay alive.”
A muscle clenches in Jake’s jaw. “Jesus, Jeffrey. I can’t believe you’re my brother. You’re pitiful.”
Jeffrey flinches. “I think there’s a better way—”
“Than what we have right now?” Jake asks, his voice getting louder. “Than no one getting out and nothing ever changing, except your freaky faces? Yeah, there is. And if it means you all die, I’m not going to stop it from happening.”
Jeffrey takes a step closer to his brother. Jake backs up behind the desk, raising his saw-blade bat. I grab Jeffrey’s arm to reel him back, but there’s no need. The bat isn’t meant for him.
“Remember that thing Dad used to say?” Jake asks Jeffrey. “When we were little, before he left us? That we should always be there for each other?”
“Right-hand men,” Jeffrey says.
“That,” Jake says.
Then he slams his right hand flat on the desk, and with his left hand brings the saw blade down with such astounding force it slices clean through his wrist.
.13.......
The crack of the bat through bone.
Eighth grade.
We were the oldest kids in the middle school, and most everyone who had made things hard for us before—the Lanes, the Raphs—had moved on to high school. Some were still there, but they were easy to ignore. I had Jeffrey, who was growing too quickly for his clothes to keep up, and my art, which still didn’t include flowers. I had my mom, who let me help with her newest gallery exhibit, and Dad, who paid me to help him organize his finance work.
My life that year was a long, soothing string of white noise, familiar and unbroken.
Except for those times when I went to Jeffrey’s house, and Jake was there.
Then the cymbals crashed and drums exploded and trumpets blasted in my ears until I couldn’t talk or think or even move properly. It felt like someone had shoved oiled ball joints into my sockets and my limbs were flapping around in every direction, heedless of where I told them to go.
One time we walked into Jeffrey’s kitchen and Jake was at the table with his homework, and he looked up and said, Hey, Cracks McGee, to Jeffrey, and before Jeffrey had a chance to respond in his breaking voice, Jake looked at me and said, Heeeere, kitty cat.
My face lit up like a firecracker. I stood in the doorway while Jeffrey asked Jake not to call me kitty cat and retrieved two cans of root beer from the fridge and a large bag of Skittles from the pantry. Jake ignored him and went back to his homework.
The cymbals and drums and trumpets in my heart beat too hard against my ribs all the way back to Jeffrey’s room, where we played video games and got a sugar rush from the root beer and Skittles and made each other giggle until later that night when my dad finally came to get me. I didn’t know what Jake was, exactly, or why my body rebelled so harshly against me when he was around, but I knew I needed him the way I needed sunlight. It hurt, knowing he was there, but I couldn’t touch him, couldn’t speak to him, as if we were on two sides of a thick glass wall.
Eighth grade wasn’t so bad, because I only saw Jake sometimes. Jeffrey talked about him occasionally—less and less as the year went on—and a few days after seeing Jake, the white noise always settled down, and everything returned to the way it was supposed to be.
In eighth grade I didn’t have to deal with all the other girls who liked Jake. I didn’t have to see him every day. I was okay with thinking about him from afar, sitting in English class and daydreaming about what it would be like to date him, what it would be like if he didn’t make fun of me. It eased the ache, if only for a little while.
Crack
I have seen more blood today than I ever want to see again.
The desk is coated with it. So is the bat. And the rest of Jake’s arm, and his face. It drips in syrupy rivulets to the floor.
I don’t know what to do. It’s everywhere.
A moment after Jake slices off his own right hand, he tosses the baseball bat at Jeffrey’s feet and screams for Raph.
Raph nearly knocks the door down. I grab Jeffrey and we’re running, shoving Raph out of the way, sprinting down the long hallway, past the smoky rooms and the violent games. When we reach the door, a crossbow bolt slams into the wood next to my head. I yank Jeffrey through.
“They won’t follow us here.” I repeat it over and over, yelling at first, then softer and softer, until we’re far away from administration.
School is quiet. We’ve been too loud.
Jeffrey lets me pull him like a paper doll, no matter what direction I turn, even when I get a little lost. After several minutes of this, I realize how heavy his hand is in mine. Now he’s more like a bag of cement. I stop in the middle of a hallway, against a tall, dark row of lockers, long abandoned by their owners. Jeffrey hesitates for a moment, face frozen and eyes fixed on his feet, then slumps against the lockers and slides to the floor. Tiny dark spots of blood have begun to dry on the front of his sweater vest. I kneel in front of him. There’s a small fleck of blood near the corner of his face that I want to wipe away, but I have no way to wet my fingers.
I see the moment Jake sliced into his wrist over and over, like a rotating image in my head. I already know it will be in there forever. Violence leaves scars.
“They won’t all believe him,” I say. Quietly, though nothing seems quiet enough for these dark hallways. “Not everyone in administration is like Jake. And we can keep the others out here safe. We can keep them in the Fountain Room, and they can always stay with a friend. It doesn’t have to come down to a fight. They won’t leave administration, and we don’t have to make them.”
Jeffrey’s eyes squeeze into pained lines. His mouth can never close, the same way mine can never open, and now the downturned corners and the square teeth give him that anxious, frightened look he wears far too often. He holds the sides of his head, like he’s trying to squeeze it back into its old shape.
“Jeffrey,” I say. I grab his forearms but don’t try to pry his hands away.
“Why did he do that?” he says. “Why did he throw the bat at me? Why did he make it look like I did it?”
I say nothing.
“I didn’t want that,” he says. “Why did he just cut it off like that? I didn’t want him to, I didn’t mean to make him mad, I didn’t know he’d think we were accusing him—”
“Jeffrey,” I say. His eyes become circles again when he looks at me. “I’m sorry.”
He finally lowers his hands.
“I have to go talk to him,” he says, grabbing the locker dials to pull himself up. “He’ll still listen to me—I can still be useful to him—he’ll listen.” Jeffrey starts walking. I grab his arm and the back of his sweater vest to slow him down.
“You can’t. Jeffrey, you can’t! He did that—he made it look like you did that to him—to make sure they’ll never let us into administration again. As soon as Raph sees you, he’ll put a crossbow bolt through your head. Come here.” I yank him back, only to see the hurt on his face, the strangely constructed, crayon-drawn hurt.
Then he looks over my shoulder, and his expression morphs gently into surprised panic.
“It’s Mark,” he whispers.
As slowly as I can, I look behind me. Standing shrouded in the vast darkness at the far end of the hallway is Mark. I haven’t seen him in a long time. He played games in the Fountain Room, when we had them. But then he stopped talking. He left the Fountain Room and didn’t come back.
Puke-yellow fur covers his body. His snout hangs open in a lopsided smile and one of his ears is missing. Grease stains his round white belly. He looks like he should be dancing for kids at a pizzeria, but instead he’s been thrown to the wolves in School’s hallways.
“If we look away, he’ll go,” Jeffrey says.
I nod. When Mark stopped talking, he started operating like all the lost students operate; he wanders the hallways by himself, no longer even attempting to communicate with the rest of us, and if you see him, you need to look in another direction. Give him permission to leave. He does not want you to stare. If you stare, he will attack.
Slowly, Jeffrey and I turn away. I’m still holding Jeffrey’s wrist, squeezing as tightly as I can.
clack clack clack clack clack
I whip around and find Mark closer than before. His bulging white eyes stare straight at me, emotionless, empty. He approached faster than I thought he could, but he stands perfectly still now. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe not all of the lost operate the same way. I’m suddenly having trouble even remembering what other lost students I’ve encountered.
“We need to go,” Jeffrey says.
I refuse to take my eyes off Mark.
“Now.”
“Where?” I whisper. “He’s blocking our way to the Fountain Room.”
“Where do you go?” he asks. “Your place. You always come from the other direction.”
The boiler room. It has been my spot for as long as I’ve been here, and I’ve been careful to keep everyone out of it, including Jeffrey. But I don’t know what demon has wormed its way into Mark, and I don’t plan on letting Jeffrey stay here to find out.
“We’ll have to run,” I say.
.14.......
Freshman orientation.
End of the summer.
Jeffrey and I sat in the middle of the auditorium.
The athletic director was onstage explaining to us why we should go out for sports. A lot of the faces in the crowd were familiar to me, faces I knew from middle school, from the river. Plenty of others weren’t familiar at all. Our high school was big and pulled from a lot of middle schools. I spotted Sissy and Julie together with other girls I recognized, diligently taking notes. A few rows up from them was Ryan Lancaster, hiding in the shadows at the top of the auditorium, writing something in a giant three-ring binder and slowly turning his head back and forth like a security camera surveilling the crowd. I slouched down in my seat to avoid his notice.
Jeffrey slouched down as well and leaned toward me to ask, Do I have something on my face?
No, I said. Why?
Because those girls keep looking at me and laughing.
I glanced past him and saw the girls in question. I didn’t know them, but they looked fairly standard.
I think it’s because you’re wearing a sweater vest, I said.
Jeffrey flattened his hands over his new charcoal sweater vest.
But I like my sweater vest, he said.
The girls probably thought he was some kind of loser. But anything Jeffrey wore, he wore so earnestly it was impossible to make fun of the way he dressed. These girls must not have gotten the memo.
Want me to go make them stop? I asked.
I didn’t think anything I said to them would actually do any good. With my luck they’d start making fun of me, the weird girl with the eyes looking different directions, wearing a black turtleneck in August. In my defense, the fabric was light and I knew we’d be in air-conditioning all day. I doubted they’d care about that, though.
No, Jeffrey said after a second. It’s fine, I just don’t get it.
What’s not to get?
What’s in it for them? Hey, look at the kid wearing the sweater vest, isn’t that so weird that he’s wearing a sweater vest, how out of touch is he, let’s laugh about it, ha ha ha. Like, why do they care that I’m wearing a sweater vest? Is the sweater vest attacking them?
I like your sweater vest, I said.
He turned back to me and smiled, his storm cloud dissipating. Jeffrey didn’t normally have storm clouds—usually they only formed when he was frustrated about something with Jake or his mom—but when he did, it was best to shoo them away as fast as possible.
It helped, too, that a second after I told him I liked his sweater vest, a large boy tripped up the auditorium steps, and the girls broke into another loud round of giggles. The boy who’d tripped grabbed the aisle railing to pull himself back onto his thick legs. His skin was splotchy with color. He wore fraying jean shorts and socks of that special color that only occurs when something white has been worn too often.
