Playlist for the Dead

7. I Don’t Want to Grow Up

I WAITED UNTIL I GOT HOME to look at the envelope Mr. Beaumont had given me, once I’d shut myself up in my room. It was full of pamphlets—on suicide, grieving, depression, anger management. The suicide one was loaded with statistics. Someone died by suicide every fourteen minutes or so, which seemed crazy high to me, and a million people a year attempted it. It was the third leading cause of death for teenagers, and boys did it more often than girls. Girls tended to use it as what the pamphlet called a “cry for help,” though it sounded more like an attention grab to me. They would slit their wrists but cut the wrong way, or take a bunch of pills when they knew someone was likely to find them. Boys were more definitive. Hanging, shooting, jumping off tall things.

I could just imagine Mr. Beaumont giving a pamphlet like this to Ryan. He’d probably jump all over the fact that Hayden had used a girl’s strategy. Leave it to the bully trifecta to come up with reasons to mock him even after he was gone.

The lack of sleep was starting to make me dizzy so I lay down on my bed for a while and tried to take a nap. But my head was still spinning from all the different things going on—Hayden being gone, of course, but also Astrid, and the Archmage. Except I was pretty sure I must have dreamed the Archmage. I wasn’t in the habit of falling asleep in my desk chair, but there was a first time for everything. I tried to put it out of my head but just when I thought I was about to drift off there was a knock at the door.

“Mom, I’m trying to sleep in here.”

“It’s not Mom.” I opened my eyes. The door opened and Rachel came in my room wearing her usual outfit: a very tiny skirt and so much makeup it looked like she’d spray-painted it on. Funny, when she didn’t have on a fake face she and Mom looked a lot alike—both were tall, with long brown curly hair and big brown eyes. But while Mom looked tired all the time from working, Rachel looked like she worked at one of the makeup counters at the mall. Which was actually her dream job. All that makeup made her look old, though, almost as old as Mom. If she just took off half of the makeup and gave it to Mom, they’d both look great.

Not that I’d ever say that to either one of them. I wasn’t a complete idiot.

“You haven’t stepped one foot in my room in at least a year,” I pointed out. “What are you doing here?”

She looked around at the band posters that covered every inch of the walls not already taken over by my bookshelves. “It hasn’t improved much. Listen, Jimmy’s coming over for dinner and I need you to get your ass downstairs ASAP and make this as painless as possible.”

“I totally forgot,” I said, and closed my eyes again. “Mom said something this morning. I think I’ll just stay up here.”

I felt the weight of Rachel sitting down on the edge of my bed, which was weird enough that I opened my eyes again.

“She probably didn’t tell you she’s decided to cook,” Rachel said, wrinkling her nose. “There are so many ways this could turn into a complete disaster that counting them is making my head explode. I need you to get my back on this one, little brother.” She looked at me with what I could only assume she intended as puppy-dog eyes. All I could see were cracks in the makeup as she widened her eyes as far as they could go.

Still, Rachel almost never let herself get into a situation where she owed me a favor. This could be fun. I stood up slowly, feeling pretty dizzy. “You owe me big,” I said. “But I must have misunderstood you. You said Mom’s cooking? Does she want you guys to break up?”

“That might be the strategy. Cover for me for a bit, okay?”

She disappeared down the hall, and I was left to face the prospect of Mom in the kitchen all by myself. Jimmy was already sitting at the kitchen table by the time I got downstairs. I’d never met him—Rachel had never invited any of her boyfriends to anything involving the family, and this one didn’t go to Libertyville High. As soon as I saw him, I understood why she’d never brought him around: he looked like any parent’s worst nightmare. Tattoos, stretched earlobes, studded leather jacket, the whole thing. I’d have expected someone who looked like him to be lounging, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth even if he was smart enough not to smoke inside. But Jimmy was sitting straight up in his chair, hands folded in front of him like he was at a business meeting. Mom was at the stove, stirring something in a pot billowing with smoke, which was already making me nervous.

Jimmy stood up and held out his hand. “How you doing, man?”

“Not too bad.” I shook his hand. His grip was firm, but he didn’t do that thing guys do sometimes where they almost crush you so you know how manly they are. “So you’re here for dinner, huh?”

Jimmy nodded and tried not to look worried.

“I hope Rachel warned you to eat first,” I said.

“Not nice,” Mom called out.

“Need some help over there?” I asked.

She turned around and I could see beads of sweat on her forehead. “I might just take you up on that, Sammy.”

I hated it when she called me that, especially in front of Jimmy. It almost made me wish I hadn’t offered. But I didn’t want her to burn the house down; we’d avoided fires in the past, but narrowly. There was a macaroni-and-cheese incident that I was still trying to forget, and some stains in the ceiling brought back memories of exploding eggs every time I looked up.

I walked over to the stove and looked into the pot, waving away the smoke to see a sludge of white and brown and black, though I couldn’t identify anything that actually looked like food. “What is that?” I asked, wrinkling my nose.

“It was supposed to be risotto,” Mom said. “With mushrooms and—”

She was interrupted by the smoke alarm. I reached over and shut off the burner, then took the pot and put it in the sink while Mom disabled the alarm. I hoped Jimmy wouldn’t notice that we had a system. “What do you like on your pizza, Jimmy?” I asked.

Rachel laughed behind me. I turned and saw she’d changed into a slightly longer skirt, taken off a little bit of the makeup. She looked just respectable enough to make Mom happy. She must really like this guy. “Nice outfit,” I said.

“Jerk.” She pinched my arm, hard, reactivating the soreness from the bruising, but it made me kind of happy—she used to do that when we were younger, when I’d follow her around just to get her to pay attention to me. Negative attention from her was just as good as positive, when I was little.

“I can eat anything,” Jimmy said.

Mom sighed and went to get her wallet.

“Sausage and peppers it is,” I said, and went to call it in. We weren’t exactly kosher. Sausage and peppers was my favorite; Rachel usually lobbied for Hawaiian, but I figured she wasn’t about to fight with me in front of her new boyfriend.

After I hung up I sat at the kitchen table with Jimmy while Rachel helped Mom scrape the burned risotto off the bottom of the pot. We sat and stared at each other for a while. It felt like he was waiting for me to say something, but Rachel must have warned him that I’m not exactly the world’s best conversationalist. “Rachel says you’re into music,” he said finally.

I nodded, though I was surprised she’d told him something so positive, at least compared to what I would have imagined she’d say.

“What are you listening to these days?” he asked. I’d changed from my relish-crusted Metallica shirt into a vintage Coca-Cola T-shirt I’d found at a thrift store. “Mostly alternative stuff, am I right?”

I leaned back in my chair and crossed my arms. Yeah, he was right, but who was he to judge me just on my clothes? Had he looked in the mirror lately? “The Ramones, right now.” It was sort of true; it was what had been on the playlist when I’d listened to it on my way home from school.

“Good stuff. I’ve been digging the Clash lately, myself. I’ll burn London Calling for you if you don’t have it already. You’ll like it.”

That was actually pretty cool of him. Maybe he wasn’t as bad as I thought.

Mom and Rachel came back in and started setting the table with paper plates and plastic silverware. As if we were really going to cut up our pizza. “So how’d you get into the Ramones?” Jimmy asked.

Rachel snorted. “Since when do you listen to the classic stuff?” She turned to Jimmy. “I made him listen to every album I ever bought and the only stuff of mine he ever liked was indie.”

To his credit, Jimmy didn’t change his facial expression at all. “It’s all about variety, man,” he said, and held out his fist.

What the hell. I bumped fists with Jimmy and said exactly what I was thinking. “I started listening to the Ramones because Hayden put them on his suicide-note playlist.”

The kitchen got really quiet, and I knew right away I’d gone too far.

“Sammy, now might not be the time,” Mom said finally.

“No, it’s cool, Mrs. Goldsmith,” Jimmy said. “I kinda went through something similar myself.”

“You did?” I asked, before I could help myself. I wondered if Rachel had known. Mom and I both looked over at her. Mom’s mouth was hanging open.

Rachel shrugged, but she didn’t look that surprised.

“I moved here from Chicago last summer,” Jimmy said. “I had this friend who was going through some stuff, and he offed himself. In my house, with my dad’s gun. I’m the one who found him.”

For a second I found myself thankful that Hayden had chosen the method he did. I couldn’t imagine my last memory of him involving blood. It made me nauseous just thinking about it. I looked over at Rachel again; now she looked a little shocked. I figured she’d known the basics but not the details.

“It’s why we left,” he continued. “None of us could stand to be in that house, and my mom kept saying how terrible it was to live in cities, all the awful things that happened there.”

“Kind of ironic, that you’d move here, and then…” My voice trailed off. I wasn’t quite ready to say it out loud.

“Yeah, that’s one word for it. It would have been a lot harder if I hadn’t already met your sister.” He smiled at Rachel, and she smiled back. I could see how into him she really was. Even Mom was starting to warm to him. “I loved Chicago—I just wanted to leave the house, not the city. It was my dad’s idea to take off for cow country.”

“Corn, not cows,” Rachel said, and squeezed his hand. I’d been tempted to say the same thing, but let’s face it, there were some cows.

“Anyway, I couldn’t talk to anyone about it back home, and I didn’t really want to talk about it here, but now that it’s been a little while I can think about it more clearly. So if you ever need to talk, you can talk to me. Maybe not now, but someday.” I wondered if my sister had put him up to it, but that would be so not like her. And he looked like he really meant it.

“That’s a very nice offer, Jimmy,” Mom said.

I could see Rachel trying not to smirk. This couldn’t have gone better if she’d scripted it herself. She looked over at me, willing me to say something.

“Okay, thanks,” I said. I was starting to like him, despite myself. Too bad he hadn’t showed up before Mr. Beaumont. Then I could have at least said I had someone else to talk to.

The doorbell rang before we could say anything else. Finally, food. It seemed like everyone was grateful to have the pizza to focus on for a while.

“Tell me about your first day back,” Mom asked, after we’d all started eating.

“No big deal,” I said. I really did not want to talk about Mr. Beaumont.

“You missed the first few days when everyone was talking about Hayden,” Rachel said. “Now they’re all talking about what happened to Jason Yoder.”

I turned to her so fast I almost hurt my neck. “What happened to Jason?”

“You didn’t hear? This rumor started going around that he’s gay, I guess. And then, no one knows exactly what happened, but the police found him tied to a telephone pole outside the Blue Star bar. Buck naked. He didn’t press charges or anything—I guess he hoped no one would find out. But people always do. Everyone’s talking about it.”

Libertyville was a pretty conservative town. Even though Iowa was progressive in being one of the first states to legalize gay marriage, it hadn’t trickled down to us quite yet. I hadn’t heard the rumor about Jason, but that wasn’t surprising—I wasn’t exactly clued in enough to be part of the rumor mill. But I’d heard about the Blue Star bar. It wasn’t officially a gay bar, but in the scheme of our small town, it basically was.

The idea of Jason Yoder—one macho third of the bully trifecta—being tied naked to a telephone pole was a weird image. It was probably his worst nightmare.

“Rachel, there’s no need for that kind of gossip,” Mom said. “That poor boy.”

“Poor boy?” I said, feeling myself getting angry yet again. “He was a total bully who treated Hayden like crap. I’m not sorry.”

“Sam!” Mom snapped. “You don’t have to like him, but you shouldn’t say something like that.”

“What’s to be sorry about, anyway?” Rachel said. “You didn’t do it.”

“Of course not. I just meant I’m not sorry it happened to him. That guy was an asshole.”

“Language, Sam!” Mom said. “And besides, we’re not the kind of family who wishes bad things on other people.”

Maybe you’re not, I wanted to say, and I could see Rachel was thinking the same thing.