Playlist for the Dead

11. The Mariner’s Revenge Song

THE HAND ON MY SHOULDER was gentle, but the voice was rough. “Get up, you stupid punk. This isn’t your fucking bedroom.” I opened my eyes. Standing right over me was a very angry man with a mustache and a 7-Eleven button-down shirt. His face was framed by the glowing pinks and oranges of a really amazing sunrise.

Sunrise?

Shit.

I stood up quickly and brushed the guy’s arm off me. He must have been the morning-shift dude; that plus the sunrise meant it was probably around six a.m. Mom would be home at seven. I had to go. “Leave me alone,” I said to the guy, and stood up. My whole body ached and I could hear my back crack as I straightened. As soon as I was fully awake I realized that a) I probably had a huge black eye from Trevor punching me, b) my head was killing me, and c) there was a better than fifty-fifty chance I was going to have to puke. Apparently I was having my first hangover.

“Don’t come back,” the 7-Eleven guy yelled as I went to get my stuff from the party.

Whatever, that guy would forget what I looked like after ten minutes, anyway. I wasn’t worried about him; I was worried about whether I’d make it back to the house where the party was without throwing up. I also had to take a piss in the worst way. I’d heard that heavenly forces watched over drunks and stupid people, and since I felt like both I figured I probably had some luck coming. It arrived in the form of a cluster of bushes big enough to duck into, where I took care of both problems. I still felt like shit, but shit felt a whole lot better than where I’d started.

The party must have raged on well past curfew, because the door was cracked open when I got there and I could see people all crashed out in the living room. I crept in as quietly as I could and made my way upstairs to the room where I remembered leaving my stuff on the bed. Two people in semi-undress had fallen asleep on top of it, but I managed to get everything out from under them without waking them up, which seemed like some kind of miracle.

I practically crawled out the way I came and buried myself in my sweatshirt as soon as I got outside. My cell phone and wallet were still in my pockets, and I checked the time to make sure I still had some leeway before Mom got home. It was only 6:20, so I was fine. But seven text messages? That couldn’t be right.

I scanned them as I walked home. They were all from Astrid.

Where are you? Text me back.

Every half hour, from three a.m. on. Same message, but I could almost feel the urgency increasing with every one she sent. Something bad must have happened. The time stamp of the last message was less than a half hour ago, so I took a shot.

You still up? I wrote, once I’d made it into the house and up the stairs to my room. Everything okay?

It wasn’t even a minute before my phone rang.

“Where have you been?” Astrid said, whisper-yelling. She must have been at home.

I was too embarrassed to tell her I’d fallen asleep on a bench outside the 7-Eleven. “I crashed right after I got home from the party,” I lied. Again. “Shut off the ringer on my phone. I just saw your texts when I got up to go to the bathroom.”

“Thank God,” she said.

“Why, what’s going on?”

“You haven’t checked Facebook yet, have you?”

“Nope. I haven’t even gotten out of bed.” That was true, except for how I’d just gotten in it. Also, she clearly hadn’t yet figured out that I wasn’t on Facebook. I didn’t need hard evidence of how many friends I didn’t have.

“Well, you’re going to want to take a look at some point,” Astrid said. “Someone beat the crap out of Trevor last night.”

My stomach lurched. “What?”

“The cops found him in an alley this morning. He’s got a concussion and two broken ribs. Looks like someone took a baseball bat to him.” She sounded almost excited, but she was probably wired from being up all night.

“Is he going to be okay?” I’d wanted to see him get what was coming to him, but not like this. Just because he was a jerk didn’t mean he needed to be pulverized.

“Yeah, he’ll be fine, but he’s done with sports for the year. Maybe even next year at college, too.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “We just saw him. Where were Jason and Ryan?”

“Nobody knows,” she said. “Nobody really knows anything. Jason’s still laying low after the whole Blue Star thing, and Ryan’s parents apparently are such a mess that he hasn’t left the house since, you know. Trevor was on his own last night. His parents freaked out when they woke up and realized he’d never come home, and they called the cops to look for him.”

“I thought the police didn’t get involved unless someone had been missing for, like, two days.”

“Justice works differently on the east side of town,” Astrid said. I noticed she didn’t say “their side,” or “our side” and it made me realize I had no idea where she lived. Now didn’t seem like the time to ask, though.

“Did they find out who did it?” I asked.

She hesitated. “That’s the thing,” she said finally. “Trevor says someone clocked him on the back of the head and he doesn’t remember anything after that. Never saw the guy. But some people on Facebook are saying…”

“What?”

I heard her take a deep breath. “People are saying it was you.”

I started to feel dizzy. “Me? How?”

“Everyone saw you guys getting into it at the party, and they heard him threaten you. People think you went home, got a bat, and went after Trevor because you couldn’t handle him without a weapon.”

So much for making new friends. They all already thought I was some sort of vengeful maniac. “I would never do that,” I said. “You know that, right? Please tell me you know that.”

“Of course,” she said. “I’ve just been trying to find you so you’d hear it from me and not someone who thought it might be you. And besides, from what Trevor said, this all happened after midnight, and I saw you leave the party way before that. I told people you went straight home.”

“Right,” I said. “Home.” Now I had to feel guilty for lying, on top of everything else.

“I just wanted to make sure you were okay,” she said. “I’ve got to crash now—I’m totally exhausted.”

“Of course. Talk soon.” I hung up the phone, and my stomach heaved. I hoped I didn’t have to throw up again. The fact was, I had no idea where I’d been when Trevor had been attacked. I assumed I’d been passed out on the bench, since sitting down was the last thing I remembered before getting up; it only made sense that I’d spent the whole night sleeping there.

But what if I hadn’t?

I’d never been as angry at anyone as I’d been at Trevor. At the party last night I’d wanted something bad to happen to him, and in some ways I wanted to be the bad thing. Who was to say I hadn’t actually done it, in some sort of drunken blackout rage? Wasn’t this why drinking was supposed to be such a terrible thing? Had I finally snapped and gone over the edge, like the loser in one of those songs on Hayden’s mix?

Just then I heard the ping of my Gchat window opening up. I crawled back out of bed and over to the computer.

ArchmageGed: Two down.

At first I had no idea what ArchmageGed was talking about. I was so tired I could hardly focus, and I was still dizzy from all the booze. But then I remembered what he’d said after Rachel told me about Jason: One down, two to go.

Was he talking about the bully trifecta?

Except that left me with even more questions. To start, how did ArchmageGed know the two attacks were related? And ArchmageGed didn’t just seem to know about the connection; he was all but taking credit for the attacks. But he wasn’t real; he was either the ghost of my dead best friend or some sort of hallucination on my part, either of which meant I was nuts, but which also meant there was no way he could go around beating people up. The only thing I knew for sure was that I’d written off the idea that someone was trying to screw with me. Not at this point.

I so wished my head weren’t spinning; it would have been hard enough for me to puzzle through this if I were sober and well rested. But I had to try. Okay, so if ArchmageGed was counting down, that meant Ryan was next. Normally I wouldn’t think that was too big a deal. I wasn’t all that broken up about Jason getting humiliated, although I didn’t think outing someone was cool; I was pretty disturbed at the extent of Trevor’s injuries, but I wasn’t exactly weeping with despair that someone else seemed to hate him as much as I did. The thought of something bad happening to Ryan seemed almost fitting, given that I viewed him as the most responsible for Hayden’s death.

But I’d told Mr. Beaumont that it wasn’t my job to decide who should pay for Hayden’s death, and I thought I meant it. The problem was, as far as I could tell, there were only two people who viewed the three of them as the source of most of our problems, and one of us was dead.

Was ArchmageGed trying to tell me that I’d done it?

I didn’t exactly have a good alibi for either event. I’d been on my computer Gchatting with the Archmage, who wasn’t real, when Jason got hit, and as far as I knew I’d been passed out on a bench in front of the 7-Eleven last night. And I was covered in bruises—from Jason knocking me into the pew at the funeral, from Trevor punching me in the face, and who knew what else? Could I really be sure that all my aches and pains were from the things I remembered? Was it possible that I’d attacked Jason, or Trevor, or both? And that they’d fought back?

I couldn’t picture it, and yet I supposed it was possible. More likely than ArchmageGed doing it, that was for sure. I was so confused.

Once again I was going to have to go without sleep, because there was no way I could go back to bed now. My nerves were all jangly; I had to do something. Hayden’s playlist was supposed to give me answers, so I pulled it up on my computer and looked over the songs again.

Hayden had included an epic from the Decemberists, my all-time favorite band. I remembered the first time we’d gone to the mall together by ourselves. We were eleven and my mom dropped us off with clear instructions: two hours, no purchases over two dollars, no McDonald’s. We broke the last two rules immediately, ordering five dollars’ worth of totally random stuff from the McDonald’s value menu and splitting everything, which was awesome but made us feel sick. We’d sat at the table and he’d listened to me bitch and moan about my dad, who had canceled yet another visit. He lived in California now and never invited me and Rachel out there—couldn’t afford the tickets, he said. He would come to visit when he wanted to hit up his own parents for money, money they didn’t have either, though I knew they always gave him something. Kind of sad when you get old enough to realize your dad’s a d-bag.

“You’re lucky you’ve got your mom,” Hayden would say. “One good parent’s better than two shitty ones.”

He would know. He rarely invited me to his house, and at first I’d thought it was because he was embarrassed that his family had money when mine so clearly didn’t. But after I’d been there a couple of times I figured out that it was really about his parents. His mom wasn’t afraid to express her disappointment with him in front of me, and his dad was almost never around; when he was, he joined the party. His brother picked on him at school, and his parents picked on him at home. Even at that young an age, I must have started to understand that there was nowhere he felt safe except with me.

There was one other safe place, of course: the ITC. Our happy place. I’d never been allowed to buy comics—they were expensive and my parents thought I’d stop reading “real” books. Which turned out to be kind of accurate, though it still didn’t mean they were right. Hayden, in contrast, already considered himself a collector. He made a point of buying the first issue of every new comic that came out, just in case one of them took off and the original turned out to be worth something. His parents, like Mom, didn’t approve, but his father was a money guy and thought it was important for Hayden and Ryan to have allowances so they learned how to budget. I think maybe on some level he also respected that Hayden was thinking about his hobby in terms of investment, though he never actually said it out loud. God forbid he actually praise Hayden for something.

That was the day I discovered how into comics Hayden really was. I’d borrowed copies of all the old Batman series from the library, but he was into way different stuff. He introduced me to all the comics written by people from the bands we liked—there was one from the lead singer of My Chemical Romance, and one from the guy from the Dandy Warhols, even one from a bunch of members of the Dresden Dolls. I figured there had to be one from Colin Meloy, lead singer of the Decemberists. “He’s all literary, and his wife’s a graphic artist—there’s no way he doesn’t have a comic if all these other guys do.”

This led to our first fight about music, the first of many, so many I couldn’t count. I wish I’d realized how important those fights would be to me. Maybe I’d have realized how much fun they were.

I couldn’t believe Hayden wasn’t into the Decemberists—they were smart and creative and weird, all the things he loved. But maybe they were too smart; it pissed Hayden off when there were words in the songs he didn’t know. I thought that was part of the fun, but he didn’t see it that way. We were still yelling at each other right up until the time my mom showed up; I made her play all ten minutes of the live version of “The Mariner’s Revenge Song” in the car on the way home, which finally shut us up. We sat quietly through the story of two men figuring out their shared history after being swallowed by a whale. “Sounds like klezmer music,” Mom said, wrinkling her nose, but we ignored her. Hayden didn’t even say good-bye to me when he got out of the car, just thanked my mom for the ride and gave me a little nod.

“Everything okay?” Mom asked. “You guys were kind of quiet back there. Did you have a good day?”

“The best,” I said, and I meant it.

The fact that Hayden had put the song on his mix seemed in some ways like a peace offering to me. Unlike some of the other songs where we’d fought and the song he liked made it on the list, he’d picked the song that was from my favorite album, even though the Decemberists had eventually changed their style on the last album and made Hayden a fan. He could have picked one of those songs, and it still would have meant a lot to me, but the fact that he’d picked this one meant even more.

But it still wasn’t my favorite of their songs. Which meant there had to be another reason he’d chosen it. It was, after all, a song about revenge; maybe it was that simple. Was it some kind of clue? Or an instruction? Had Hayden been directing me to take revenge on his behalf? Or could it be something even stranger? ArchmageGed had manifested himself in my room; maybe it wasn’t impossible that he could do it somewhere else. Crazy, sure, but not impossible.

But if ArchmageGed was Hayden, I couldn’t imagine it. The Hayden I knew would never have done something like that. Then again, the Hayden I knew wouldn’t have killed himself, either. And I didn’t think I was capable of hurting anyone, not like Jason and Trevor had been hurt, but Hayden had done something I couldn’t see coming.

Who’s to say that I couldn’t, too?