“Come on. It would be easy. Toshi”—I winced—“he’ll be okay. Maybe he’ll forget about the whole thing. I mean, Tosh is understanding, right? We’ll talk to him, or…”
Jay’s shoulders started shaking then, and I feared that some malevolent insect had bitten him, coursed its poison into his veins—but he was crying. “What’s wrong?” I said, trying to tramp down the panic evoked in me by Jay’s tears. I’d never seen his façade crumble this way before. “What’s the matter?”
He fought with his body and soon the spasms stopped, but for a second there, he had emitted the same sorts of noises as when he was imitating some dumb, emotional girl.
“Fuck,” he said, “don’t ever tell anyone about this.” He gasped once, twice, the air shuddering through him. “But Toshi,” he said. “It’s Tosh. He’s dead.”
The slope of the underpass seemed to steepen, and I plopped backwards onto my bottom to keep from following the flow of concrete down to the earth. “He’s not dead. We didn’t do anything that bad to him. Remember? He’s not dead.” Our skimpy meals and thirst and lack of sleep must all be working together on Jay, making him act crazy. “We just need some food and some rest and stuff; then don’t you think you’ll feel better?”
“He is dead. He killed himself. After the thing we did. I should have told you before, but, I don’t know, I didn’t want to say it. You might have done something stupid.”
“No way,” I said. “No he didn’t. Your imagination made this up. What are you talking about? You’ve been with me the whole time. Maybe this was a nightmare, one that you remember way too much.”
“I didn’t want to have to show you this”—Jay reached into the backpack—“because I knew that you would freak, but Toshi left this in my room. He wanted me to find it. And I did this morning, when I went back to get the supplies, when you were waiting in the woods.”
Jay handed me a piece of paper, a letter. It was a note signed by Toshi. I didn’t want to touch it; I read it as fast as possible. I had to do this… you embarassed me… I would never be able to live this down.
“He wouldn’t go through with it, though,” I said. My words were tumbling one on top of the other. “Maybe he only wanted to scare us.” I brushed hard at my arm, but the bugs I’d felt crawling there were nonexistent. I thought about how Toshi had bludgeoned that dog caught in the bear trap, how he’d been so intent on putting her out of her misery. I thought about how I’d decided, in a moment of fear, that it would be easier to kill myself than let Jay know the truth about what had happened between me and Tosh that night in Stella’s bedroom.
“I figured it had to be a joke, too,” Jay said, “but right after I found the note in my room, I turned on the news to check, and they were saying stuff like local boy commits suicide, possibility of foul play, blah blah blah, all this stuff, and then they flashed a picture of Toshi from the last yearbook.”
“No way,” I said. “No fucking way.” My whole body was fighting this information; my pores were tightening up against the intrusion of it. “That one where he’s wearing the bowtie?”
Jay nodded as he reached over and took Toshi’s note from my hand. The paper sliced the pulp of my fingertip and I squeezed it to make the blood well, to prove to myself that I was alive and this wasn’t just a dream.
“At first I was only having fun.” He closed his eyes, but kept talking. “When we ran out of New Veronia, I mean. It sort of made the whole thing more exciting, running away from Knees after what we did. It was like an ending in a movie, I guess. I was maybe going to hide out with you for a day or whatever in the woods, mountain man up, and then go back. It’s fun camping. Shooting squirrels. Getting away from the parents. I never thought we would really have to run.”
“No way. No, no, no.” All of a sudden, I could see myself from above, as if my eyeballs were hanging from the rebar that bristled the bottom of the underpass. My body looked sad down there, insignificant, with hairy ankles and a t-shirt stain shaped like a banana. I chewed the inside of my cheek and, rather than feel the rubbery skin between my teeth, my dangling eyeballs saw the contour of my cheek cave. Being removed like this, muted, let me bear it.
But then Jay snapped my body back together when he uncovered his eyes and looked at me. “Don’t you get it? Toshi killed himself, but it’s like we killed him. It really is. We can’t go back.”
My stomach shrunk down to a point, a sort of needle jabbed into my core. I doubled over, nursing it. “Please tell me this isn’t true. It can’t be true, because if it is, then nothing will ever be the same for us.”
Tears were silently coursing down Jay’s cheeks, a bizarre transformation of his face which made me understand that he was serious. This realization paralyzed me, and I traveled deep inside myself, searching through the crannies of my mind to see if there was a way I could will myself back, to travel back to before any of this had ever happened.
I couldn’t tell how long it was before Jay sat up and poked me. “We’re basically on the run from the law now,” he said. “I mean, maybe not, depending on if Knees talked to anyone or whatever. Before he…. But the news did say ‘foul play.’ Maybe he left someone else a note, too. Maybe they’re after us. And so what would one more tiny crime be?”
“What are you talking about?” I sat up straight—my whole body felt achy, as if I’d hiked a hundred miles—and brushed away some bits of grit stuck to my face.
“I’m talking about supper.”
I nodded, relieved that we were moving past the topic of Toshi. If we were going to make it—it was cruel, but—if we wanted to survive, we needed to block him out, to forget as well as we could. We were alive, and in order to stay that way, we couldn’t dwell in the world of death. One more mention of Toshi might break me down completely, and I was done crying in front of Jay, so I took the memory of that last night in New Veronia and rolled it up tight, then tucked it down into the folds of my brain.
“I got to eat,” Jay said.
The underpass smelled like metal and wax and puke. Because my hunger prevailed despite this stench, I knew that I needed food, too, and soon. I could feel my bones growing inside of my skin, stretching out my organs, pulling my stomach thinner. Growing pains, my dad used to say when I’d rub my shins and complain. I asked Jay, “Are you saying we just steal? From where?” Taking Tony’s mattresses, which had already been thrown out, was one thing; stealing from a store was another. Back in the fifth grade, a cashier had caught me lifting Necco wafers, and the horror instilled in me by the cashier’s anger, the mayonnaise-smelling room they’d locked me in before the policeman came, the policeman’s huge teeth, and the spanking my father inflicted on me made me wary of trying the experiment again.
Jay popped into a crouch and swiveled his head from side to side. “I see supper at…that gas station over there.”
The Mobil’s sign glowed at us from maybe a quarter mile off. “It’s late,” I said. “Don’t you think they’ll notice a couple of kids sneaking around in there?”
“We snatch some shit, then we take off. Totally out of this place. That’s the beautiful thing about being on the move: you don’t stick around long enough for people to notice you.”
Jay had already made up his mind about what we were going to do. Maybe I was feeling kind of down about Toshi; and running away without saying goodbye to my dad, even though he’d been basically awful lately, not like a dad at all; and scared that we were getting closer and closer to my mom, who had made it pretty clear my whole life that she wanted nothing to do with me, and how would she take it when I showed up at her house in Florida with a ravenous disrespectful Jay in tow when I was supposed to still be in Delaware; and also my stomach was eating itself, making me miserable from the inside out. All these bad feelings resigned me to tailing along behind Jay as he walked into the Mobil store.