“A friend told me.” Jenny nodded at the door. “You heading out?”
“Yeah.”
I zipped my bag shut and we left together.
“Where did you get the idea for your story?” she said.
And again, I felt embarrassed. My story was about a man walking through the town he’d grown up in, making his way back to his childhood home. In my head, he was being hunted for something, and wanted to revisit the past one last time—go back to a place where the world had still felt open and full of possibilities. It wasn’t clear whether he made it home or not; I ended it just as he was arriving at his old street, with sirens in the distance. I’d pretended to myself that it was clever and literary to be ambiguous like that, but in truth, I hadn’t been able to think of a better way to finish it.
“Have you read The Stand?” I said.
I wasn’t expecting her to have, but her eyes widened.
“Oh God, yeah. I love Stephen King! And I get it now. The Walkin’ Dude, right?”
“Yeah, yeah.” Her enthusiasm fired my own a little. “That guy really stuck with me … even though, you know, he turns out to be the Devil or whatever. But at the beginning, when he’s just walking, and you don’t really know why? I liked that a lot.”
“I did too.”
“Have you read any other Stephen King books?”
“All of them.”
“All of them?”
“Yeah, of course.” She looked at me as if the idea of not reading all of them was insane. “He’s my favorite author. I’ve read most of them two or three times. At least, I mean.”
“Wow.”
Later, I would learn how true this was. Jenny was a voracious reader. Partly that was because her family was poor and books were a cheap form of escapism, but it was also just the way she was. Right then, I was just amazed that she’d read more King than I had.
“I’ve read most of them,” I said. “Some of them more than once.”
“Favorite?”
“The Shining.” I thought about it. “Maybe.”
“Yeah, it’s difficult to pick, isn’t it? They’re all so good.”
“What about you?”
“Pet Sematary.”
“Oh God, that one’s horrible.”
“I know—I love it.” She grinned. “The ending! Bleak. As. Fuck.”
“And you like that?”
“Sure. They’re meant to be horror stories, right? And obviously they are, but look at The Stand. Lots of bad things happen, but in the end the good guys basically win. And in The Shining, yeah, it’s sad and everything what happens to the dad, but the kid’s okay. Pet Sematary, though. There’s just no hope there at all.”
I nodded, but also recognized the sad resignation in the way she said it. A part of me wanted to tell her that not all endings had to be hopeless. But then we walked out into the main playground, and faced the sea of children and the gray landscape around us, and the words wouldn’t come. On good days, it was possible to believe I was going to escape Gritten when I grew up, but the truth was that very few people around here were going to have anything but difficult, miserable lives. There was no reason to think Jenny or I were special, or that our endings would be any happier than most were.
I looked to the right. James was waiting for me at the far end of the gymnasiums.
I hitched my bag up on my shoulder. “I’m off this way.”
“And I’m off the other. That’s the way it works.”
Which seemed an odd thing to say. But then I remembered how I never saw her at breaks and lunchtimes—how she seemed to disappear in the same way as James and I did. I wondered where she went: what forgotten part of the school she had made her own, and what she did there.
“Have you read ‘The Monkey’s Paw’?” she said.
“I don’t think so. That’s not Stephen King, is it?”
“No. It’s a short story—an older one. It’s quite similar to Pet Sematary, though. You might like it.”
“It sounds good.”
“It is. I’ve got it at home. I could bring it in for you to borrow? I mean, only if you like.”
Some people might have added the qualification at the end to avoid the embarrassment of being turned down, but Jenny sounded relaxed about it—like it genuinely didn’t matter to her one way or the other. She’d come across as a loner before now, but it was remarkable from talking to her how self-assured and at ease in her own skin she seemed. It was as though the world were something she could take or leave, and it felt like some weird kind of privilege that she’d chosen to connect with me.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’d really like that.”
Then I went to meet James.
And Charlie and Billy, of course.
* * *
In the weeks and months that followed Hague’s accident, the four of us had started hanging out together.
I was never sure how it happened. It was a little like how we’d found ourselves walking back from the field together that day—as though it only appeared to be accidental. But I know it was mostly because of James. He became fascinated by Charlie after what happened that day, Charlie encouraged the attention, and it was the attraction between the two of them that gradually brought the four of us into closer orbit. We began spending more of our time together. On weekends, Charlie would take us on treks into the woods talking about ghosts, and at school we spent our lunchtimes in Room C5b.
The room was in the basement of the school, down a secluded flight of stairs at the end of the main corridor. I remember there was a dark alcove at the bottom, with an ancient elevator that looked like the doors would screech if they ever opened. As far as I could work out, there were no corresponding doors above, so I assumed it must run to a floor below even the basement. A boiler room, perhaps. Some dank, wet place full of rusted, clanking pipes.
The only other door down there was to Room C5b, which I imagined had been a classroom once. There were skewed rows of dusty desks at the front, but also comfy chairs at the back of the room, giving it a ramshackle, piecemeal feel, as though the furniture had been gathered from different secondhand shops over a period of years. The room was like a part of the school that had been forgotten, and I suppose on that level it was an appropriate place for the four of us. We would meet there and lounge around. Eat lunch. Chat. Sometimes we’d use the old stubs of chalk to write song lyrics on the blackboard at the front. Nirvana. Pearl Jam. Faith No More. Whatever we wrote stayed there until we rubbed the words off and wrote something else.
Charlie and Billy were already there when James and I arrived one day. Billy was slouched in an armchair, reading one of the guns-and-ammo magazines he was obsessed with. He looked up briefly, to make sure we weren’t a teacher finally coming to evict us all, then continued reading. Charlie was in his usual seat at the far end of the room, high up behind a solitary oak desk. He didn’t acknowledge us at all. His attention was focused on a notebook on the desk in front of him. He was holding a pen above the page, as though poised to make a decisive mark.
I led the way through the maze of furniture.
“Hey, guys. What’s up?”