Playlist for the Dead

24. For Emma

RACHEL TOOK ONE LOOK AT ME as I came downstairs Saturday afternoon and sent me back upstairs to change. “Which part of ‘mudding’ did you not understand? You’re going to be covered. Find something crappier.”

I wasn’t exactly dressed fancy, but when I saw Rachel and Jimmy I understood. They were both wearing all black, with raincoats and big clunky boots—Rachel’s were rubber, Jimmy’s were combat, duh—and while I wasn’t familiar enough with Jimmy’s wardrobe to tell, I knew Rachel’s clothes were really old; I recognized her leggings as ones she usually reserved for use as pajamas. I put on an old sweatshirt, my oldest jeans, and winter boots and got the nod from Rachel.

“What exactly is happening here?” Mom asked. “You all look ridiculous.”

I didn’t point out that, as far as I was concerned, Rachel and Jimmy tended to look kind of ridiculous all the time. Not to mention that Mom was wearing her work outfit; her scrubs today were covered with little ducks.

She must have seen me looking at her. “Don’t say it,” she warned, and then turned to Jimmy. “Drive safe,” she said. “You’ve got my whole life in your car.”

Jimmy gestured as if tipping his chauffeur hat. “I’m on it, Mrs. Goldsmith.”

We still had a few days to go before Halloween, but the air was chilly, and Rachel’s hair tangled in the wind as we walked outside to Jimmy’s car. I wished I’d brought a coat, but I had a long-sleeved T-shirt on under my sweatshirt, and I hoped it would be enough. “You’re sure this is a good idea?” I asked as I got into the backseat, surprisingly clean given how much trash was in the front.

“Don’t ask me,” Jimmy said. “This was all your sister’s idea.”

“You need to get out more,” Rachel said. “And won’t your girlfriend be there?”

“We haven’t exactly formalized our relationship,” I said, but I blushed anyway. So annoying.

We passed the rest of the drive quietly, listening to Jimmy’s radio blaring out some whiny-voiced old singer wailing about Tom Sawyer over the insistent screeching of several guitars. I tried to block it out of my head by thinking about Hayden’s playlist; my favorite song on it was by Bon Iver, a band that was really just one guy, but he had this amazing high voice—not anxious and jangly like the guy singing now, but soft and throaty, almost feminine. Hayden had been pretty aggressively not into it when I’d made him listen, but he’d softened his stance over time, and I wasn’t surprised to hear a song about lost love on the mix, not after everything I’d learned.

It took about twenty minutes to get to wherever it was we were going. I wasn’t sure whether to think of it as a party or a drag race or what, but regardless, we ended up deep in a field that I was guessing had recently been stripped of soybeans—it was too flat for corn. The rain from the other day had left it nice and muddy, more so than some of the other fields we’d passed.

The real benefit of this area, though, was that the field bordered a large expanse of trees, which blocked the field from the road and provided some shelter in case it started to rain again. I could see that some people had started a bonfire in an expanse between two patches of trees, and there were a couple of kegs set up nearby. There were already at least thirty or forty kids milling around the area where the kegs were set up; I was relieved to see that Rachel was right, that there were people from all different social groups here, and everyone seemed to be getting along fine.

Next to the kegs was a kind of makeshift parking lot with a bunch of cars in it, and then, of course, there were the trucks. At least ten of them, lined up on the side of the field, where a long piece of white tape marked what apparently was going to function as a starting line.

“There’s a finishing line way out that way,” Rachel said, pointing. “Check out the middle, though—that’s where the action’s going to be.”

I followed her finger to a spot I had to strain to see at first but that I could tell was the wettest part of the field—the ground had sunk a bit, and the fading sun glistened on pools of oily water, making little rainbows like I used to love seeing in parking-lot puddles as a kid.

I looked back over the row of trucks. It was easy to pick out Trevor’s, the red monstrosity covered with obnoxious bumper stickers. IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED, MAYBE YOU’RE A LOSER, and LOST YOUR CAT? TRY LOOKING UNDER MY TIRES. Classy.

A few trucks down was a more modest-looking pickup, one that I could picture actually hauling stuff on a farm, a faded blue Ford with patches of rust. Must have been Eric’s.

“Looks like everyone’s over by the kegs,” Jimmy said.

“Might as well drink up,” Rachel said. “It’s cold, and things won’t get going for another hour or so.”

I remembered the party: the beers had helped, until I’d gotten too drunk. The trick for me seemed to be to nurse beer and stay away from the whiskey. I followed them past the trucks, looking for Astrid and her friends, but it took me a minute to find them; I saw Damian’s beard, then Jess standing next to him. Astrid and Eric were standing a few feet away; Astrid’s long platinum-blond hair was free of streaks and bundled into some kind of knot on the top of her head. She was whispering something to Eric, who looked angry, and grabbed her arm. She pulled away from him and stormed off, ducking behind the back of the row of trucks until it was hard to see her. “Actually, I’ll meet you guys over there, okay?” I said.

I walked back to the row of trucks, where Astrid was kneeling behind Trevor’s, pulling things I couldn’t quite see out of that bronze backpack of hers and piling them on the ground. “Hey,” I said.

She looked up, startled. “Sam! I didn’t expect to see you here yet.” She stood up and put her hands on her hips, almost as if to block my view of her backpack. But it was too late.

“Apparently,” I said, and gestured to the pile. “What are the potatoes for, Astrid?”

She twitched as if I’d hit her. I saw several expressions flicker across her face. Trying to figure out what approach to take, I figured. “I’m so glad it’s you!” she finally said. “Going old school for this one—potatoes in the exhaust pipe. If you stuff a few in there, they should shoot out when Ryan revs the engine. It’ll make a huge boom and scare the crap out of him. Then Eric can run him down for real. If he cooperates. It’ll be amazing.”

It took me a minute to process everything she was saying. For this one? Run him down for real?

I’d done some research before I talked to Eric, just to see what kinds of pranks someone could pull in a situation like this; I’d read a million articles on the potato thing. Which meant I knew that the potato thing itself wasn’t going to work; either the potatoes would fall out or the truck wouldn’t start. There was like a one-in-a-million chance that the potatoes would actually shoot out like she thought, but even if they did, they could really hurt someone.

Was that what she wanted?

My mind was racing; I could feel that my mouth had dropped open, and I probably looked like an idiot, but I couldn’t help myself. Because finally I was putting it together.

“For this one,” she’d said.

Time for act three.

I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to yell or run away. My ears were ringing even though neither one of us had said anything for at least a minute. No, not you, I thought. I’d wanted it to be someone else, but not like this. Finally some words came out, in almost a whisper. “It was you? All along?”

“At your service,” she said, with a little bow. She was trying to sound casual, but I could see her starting to shake. I couldn’t even imagine what she was seeing in my face now.

“I don’t—I can’t—” I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t even know where to start.

“God, Sam, I thought of all people you’d understand,” Astrid said. Her lip curled up and I couldn’t tell if she was sneering or trying to keep from crying.

“You let me think it was me!”

“Come on, you couldn’t really have thought that.” But there was a catch in her voice; she was trying to sound tough, but it wasn’t working.

“You have no idea what I was thinking,” I said, and I knew it was true. All this time I’d thought we’d understood each other, but I’d been wrong all along.

“Besides, it was better if you didn’t know,” she said. “You couldn’t get in trouble if you didn’t know the details. And I really liked hanging out with you, getting to know you—I thought you’d get it, but I wanted to be sure. I dropped enough hints; I thought you’d figured it out.”

I thought back on our conversations about karma. Had it just been her code for telling me all along? Her way of telling me not to worry, that I hadn’t done it? That she had me covered? It couldn’t be.

“Was it just you? Was it Eric, too?”

“Not exactly,” she said. She sounded calm; apparently if she’d had the urge to cry, it had passed. “He drove the night I got Trevor. But he was kind of pissed at how it all went down. I don’t think he realized just how mad I was. It’s a good thing I didn’t need his help—it’s not as hard as you think to knock someone out when they don’t see you coming.”

The baseball bat probably contributed to that, I thought. “What about Jason?” I asked. “Eric said he hadn’t seen him since they broke up. Was he lying?”

She shook her head. “Damian helped out with that one. We were so angry at what Jason and those guys did to Eric that we had to do something.”

“So none of this is about Hayden at all?” It was bad enough that Astrid was behind all of this, but somehow the idea that it was unconnected to Hayden made it worse.

“Of course it’s about Hayden,” she said. “That means Ryan’s the most important, for his sake and mine. But this part won’t work without Eric. I’ve been trying to make him see that, but he’s obsessed with taking Ryan down on his own.”

I took a step back, almost involuntarily. I felt the need to be farther away from her.

“Oh, come on, Sam,” she pleaded. “Don’t be like that. You know they’re monsters. They ruined Eric’s life, and Hayden’s, and Jess’s, and mine. And yours. They were destroying everything they touched and no one was doing a damn thing about it. I’m so sick of them being able to get away with it. Someone had to do something. You have to understand that.” She reached out toward me, as if to take my hand.

But I pulled back farther. “You hurt people,” I said. “Badly.” My voice was getting louder.

“They deserved to be hurt. A lot worse than anything I did. Jason mostly just got humiliated, and Trevor’s going to be fine.”

“What about what you were planning with Ryan? What did you think would happen, if it worked?” Now I was yelling. People were starting to look.

She shrugged.

“Did you even care?” My voice cracked. I couldn’t remember ever being this angry. Not at someone I could confront.

I’d been so worried that I was responsible, and then that Eric was, that it hadn’t even occurred to me to consider the possibility of Astrid being involved. To think about how I might feel. But now I knew.

It was awful.

It was so awful that it overshadowed my relief at the knowledge, finally, that it hadn’t been me.

Astrid must have seen something in my face. “I did it for Hayden,” she said softly.

As if that made it better. But it wasn’t even true, not really. “You did it for yourself,” I said, just as quietly.

She looked at me, as if trying to think of the words that would fix things. But there weren’t any. I felt like everything I knew about her had turned out to be a lie. I’d thought we were the same, that we’d been lucky to find each other, especially now, but maybe it wasn’t good luck. Maybe this was just another horrible way of reminding me that I really had lost the only true friend I’d ever had.

There wasn’t really anything I wanted to say to her, except one thing. “Please don’t do this,” I said. “Let Eric handle this his own way.”

She nodded, then knelt back down and started picking up the potatoes and putting them back in her bag. “I thought you’d understand,” she said, not looking at me now.

In some ways I did, but not in the ways that mattered. She wasn’t who I thought she was, who I’d wanted her to be. And now I had to face being alone again.

I walked away.

I hadn’t asked Astrid a lot of the questions I’d meant to; I wanted to know how much Eric knew, if her other friends did too, why she’d decided it was her job to take the bullies down in the first place. But did it matter? I’d lost her—or she’d lost me, really—and with that, I’d lost the prospect of a new group of friends. Maybe the problem was the whole idea of groups; as soon as more than two people got involved in anything, so many things could go wrong. There was the bully trifecta, three idiots all but sharing one brain; Astrid’s old cheerleader friends, who’d dumped her when Ryan did; her new friends, helping her plot revenge against the bullies without even seeming to realize that they were condoning violence themselves. I was almost inclined to think that what they were doing was worse—there was no question what the bullies were, because they did most of their harm in the open, but Astrid’s crew did everything in stealth, leaving someone like me to take the blame.

Who needed a group? What was so bad about having one best friend, anyway?

I missed Hayden as much as I had since he died. I missed him so much I finally didn’t even feel bad thinking about it; I just sank into it, let it roll over me in waves. It was the closest I’d come to crying, and if I hadn’t been like two feet away from a field full of people I mostly didn’t know or couldn’t stand, I might have just said fuck it and started bawling.

I didn’t, though. Not that I cared so much about what any of those people thought of me most of the time, but I had some pride. And there was no way, absolutely no fucking way, I was going to stand around crying in a cornfield—soybean field, whatever—and let Astrid and her friends think she’d reduced me to tears. But I couldn’t seem to manage standing up anymore; I let myself fall to my knees and stared at the ground, trying to pretend everyone else was gone. I heard the song I’d been listening to in the car playing over and over in my mind, with its references to loving people who lied to you. That wasn’t going to be me. I was done with lies, with secrets and hidden things. I would get over Astrid, in a way I might never get over losing Hayden. I was fine with being alone.

And then I felt the tap on my shoulder.