October 9, 2023
Peripheral Visions: All the Secrets in the World
Kilian Melloy READ TIME: 31 MIN.
Peripheral Visions: They coalesce in the soft blur of darkest shadows and take shape in the corner of your eye. But you won't see them coming... until it's too late.
All the Secrets in the World
Billy Benso was gone, and it was obvious he had known that he was leaving. Mr. Felagi, who teaches gym and biology, stood across from me as we stared at Billy's locker. Felagi reached over and fingered the padlock, which hung open and slightly askew.
"Broken?" he muttered.
"Not broken," I told him, reaching over myself and taking the lock out of the latch. I held it up for Felagi to see. "He didn't bother to secure it."
"He wanted to make it easy for us to clear out his locker," Felagi said.
"He wanted us to know that he was planning to run away," I said.
Billy's parents had been in touch with me two days earlier: Their son had not come home. Had he been at school? The attendance records – including in Felagi's biology class – showed that he had been there in the morning, but he had not returned after lunch.
Billy's parents fretted that he had been kidnapped – a growing problem in an America that was impoverished, with gangs flooding the streets with pills, powders, and guns, recruiting some teenage males and holding others hostage.
But the kidnapping theory was laughable. Billy's parents weren't rich. In fact, they weren't both his parents; his father, Rudolph, was in the process of having his wife declared unfit under the new Faith and Family laws, and though his girlfriend, Maisie, had tried to pass herself off as Billy's stepmother, she had not yet completed her own divorce.
Rudolph barely made enough to support his brood of offspring, all of whom lived with him and Maisie, not to mention Maisies's two kids, in a trailer at the edge of town. Billy needed to take the bus to school every day, which was a further testament to his family's financial straits.
I was the principal. It was my job to know these things.
I swung the locker door open. Billy's schoolbooks were stacked in a jumble, as if he'd simply tossed them into the locker on his way out the door... which was probably just what had happened.
"Do you think he really ran away?" Felagi asked. He'd always been rather slow, which made him a perfect schoolteacher in America's post-Department of Education era.
"I don't believe that he was abducted, sold into slavery, or became a porno star," I said, ticking off the top three rumors that were circulating around the school.
"But do you think it was because...?" Felagi bit his lip and looked away.
I'd informed Billy's parents that he was gay the week before. It was what the law required. Students who tell their teachers and friends to use different names and pronouns for them? They have to be reported. Students who are caught with gay-themed contraband? Same deal. And while none of that was true for Billy, I'd had to inform his father that Billy... well, Billy just seemed like he was probably gay.
"He was always kinda faggy," Rudolph had said over the phone, his voice swallowed by his heavy breathing. Rudolph was a destruction worker, employed by the state for the ongoing demolition of government buildings – the courthouse, the social security office building, the library, every building that taxpayer dollars were once wasted on. He was at work when I called. Of course; was I going to be working, myself, outside of office hours?
But Rudolph was also obese, a real feat for someone of his limited means in an economy like ours, especially with all the shortages.
"Kinda faggy." The words bothered me for some reason, but so did the panting way Rudolph said them. Was he out of breath because he had been swinging a sledgehammer, breaking brick off of brick as he contributed to the deconstruction of the federal and state governments? Or was he just a slob, weak and on his way to one or another lifestyle disease? Good luck to Rudolph if that was the case. There wouldn't be any health care for him. I wondered if his other kids would, as Billy was rumored to have done, start walking the streets, servicing the politicians and CEOs and preachers who condemned gays and sex workers by the light of day (and TV cameras), but indulged their pleasures in the dark of night.
"The law is the law," I told Felagi.
"But it wasn't like he actually did or said anything," Felagi argued. "Maybe he was just... I dunno..."
"Artistic?" I sneered. "Like that's not the same thing?"
Felagi stared at the floor.
"He was in the drama cub, for Christ's sake," I said.
Felagi could have turned me in for that blasphemous remark, but he didn't. I knew he wouldn't. That would take too much spine.
"All I mean," Felagi said in a fading voice, "was he was a good kid."
"You think so, huh?" I reached into the locked and pulled a skinny blank book out from under the textbooks and spiral multi-subject notebooks. "What do you say we have a look at his scribblings and then decide?"
"You really think we ought to... I mean, maybe that's for his parents," Felagi said.
"Aren't we being contrary today?" I smiled at Felagi, who shut up immediately. All the teachers know that I'm not someone you want to have yelling at you... but you really don't want me smiling at you.
I flipped the notebook open. It was only about sixty pages in total, thirty long sheets stapled together in the middle and folded over, the kind of cheap notebook they sell at Brasco's on 36th Street. A strange thing to see together with those relatively expensive spiral notebooks, which cost about $13 each. Where had Billy gotten the money for stuff like that?
There was something lodged in the pages. I shook the notebook and it fell out: A crushed flower.
A white lily.
Felagi stared at the incriminating flower, which lay on the floor. "I guess," he said, "I mean, what straight kid would have that in his notebook?"
I shook my head. If Felagi was that clueless, I wasn't going to fill in the blanks for him. The white lily was the symbol of Youth Promise, the all-white elite organization for boys that President Kirsch had established his second year in office... twelve years ago.
Youth Promise was still going strong, right along with the Kirsch administration. Of course they had offered it to him, probably handing it over in some quick, obscure fashion that would have felt mysterious. People who think of themselves as elite have a fondness for that kind of shit. But however it was done, offer it to him they had – a signal the meaning of which he would have intuited.
It was so much better to get them excited, to treat them with a sense of special attention, to get them to sign on willingly, instead of having to conscript them.
Felagi, of course, would never have been offered a white lily, and probably would never have known what the flower symbolized. To Felagi the flower was proof that Billy was more than "kinda faggy." To me, though, it was another sign of the boy's hard-headed, iconoclastic nature. He'd crushed the flower in the pages of his scribble-book with the same contemptuous amusement as he regarded everything else.
I started reading where the flower had marked the book, as Felagi, not knowing what else to do, simply stood there in silence. I took my time, in no hurry to finish or to dismiss Felagi. Let him stand there.
***
I hope you do something good with this, whoever you are. Maybe dad, maybe Mr. Hoskins or Miss Beyle. Maybe Principal Furiosi. I hope you're Principal Furiosi. You know we call you Mr. Spurio, right? Like, Mr. Fake, Mr. Fugazi, Mr. Bogus? So friendly, always the students' pal. Which is why they spell "principal" the way they do. Your favorite joke. You tell it at every student assembly, every prayer afternoon, every Kirsch rally: The Princi-PAL. What corn, what bullshit, what corney bullshit. You and my dad would get along well. I call him El Fake-O.
***
I snickered to myself. Felagi looked up in mild alarm. I ignored him.
"Not by a long shot, kid," I said softly, to myself and to Billy. I flipped through the book's pages: Lots of teenage rambling, lots of CRT stuff about the exclusion of what Billy called "people of color" from the upper reaches of the military, from congress, from law enforcement, and even from the better schools like this one, which Billy only got into through a combination of luck and test scores and... well, let's just say, the powers that be had a reason for wanting to keep watch on him, and not simply leave him to the vagaries of what most school kids have to go through.
I put the white flower back into the book to mark where the diary ended, then flipped back to the beginning and started at the start. A few pages in, a cluster of key words caught my eye.
***
I can't explain it, but there's this girl who tastes different. And there are a couple of boys, too, who taste like she does, but they act like assholes. She's not like them. She's creative. She gets put in the hall all the time. They call it detention, I think they are just putting her on display. She paints rocks and offers them for sale. I heard one of the tasty boys tell her that she wasn't gonna get $6 for any goddamned painted rock, but maybe if she was selling blow jobs instead. You'd think he would be nicer to her – he can tell, she can tell, that we are all alike. But he's a scared little quisling. He'll just do what he can to fit in, even if that means bullying her. But she just smiled at him. That's the kind of person she is. I want to be like her.
***
That, I thought, would have been at his old school, back in Ohio, before his parents split up and his dad brought him and his siblings here to Indiana. Her name was Sabrina. She had been a grade above Billy until she got held back, ostensibly for her grades and disruptive behavior, but in reality because the powers that be wanted to get her and Billy in the same classroom and see what might happen. The asshole boys Billy was writing about were Troy Jenkins, Mark Hovington, and Alan Yerkolis. Alan was in the same grade as Billy, and the other two were in Sabrina's grade – before she got held back, that is.
Troy and Mark were in the Army now, training for special ops. Alan, well... poor Alan. He had been destined for the intelligence agencies, and he could have had his pick if he'd played along or been made of sterner stuff. Neither of those prerequisites had been true. I don't know if they buried him in that mass grave in Rhode Island or just used the big microwave incinerator at the Dayton Internment Camp – Daytonau, they call it. That's the official name of the camp. Like Birkenau. I can't believe the juvenile stuff that gets approved these days.
I scanned through the next few pages. A year went by in the life of Billy Bento.
***
I hate that little prick Costello Meyers. Always hassling me. But today I –
Let me start over. I used to hate Costello Meyers. But today after gym class when we were taking showers he asked me told onto this ring he had been wearing. It was too big for his finger and he didn't want it to fall off and go down the drain, or leave it out where some other boy might steal it. I mean, I knew it was his dad's ring. He's been wearing it for a couple of weeks, ever since his dad killed himself. I mean, I can't help it, I feel sorry for him. He's a son of a bitch, but.
Anyway, Costello hands me his ring and he's in the shower soaping up and talking to me while I stand there near the lockers, holding his ring, and I feel it. I see it. I go through it. His dad – and his uncle, too. The ring is full of it. The ring is full of black stuff, like tar, like pitch. Pitch black. Sticky and flowing into me and that's when I understand what Costello's problem is. I feel sick. I think I might throw up. Costello is in the shower getting clean while his goddamn ring, his goddamn life is filling me with filth. He has to suck their cocks. That's what they do to him, and other stuff too.
Costello gets out of the shower and I don't think he knows I can see it, but then I think that he knows it without knowing it. He wants me to understand. He's like my dad: He's like El Fake-O. One night last year El Fake-O sat me down after he got back from work and while he was drinking a beer he started telling me all this stuff about his dad and how his dad never taught him anything.
"The only thing my dad taught me was how to hate," El Fake-O said. I could taste it under his drunkenness: He was apologizing. He wanted me to understand and to forgive. He didn't think he had any choice but to do the same thing his dad did to him, to do the same thing all over again.
That's what Costello is doing. He gave me his ring because he thinks he doesn't have any other choice, and he senses without even knowing it that I will see, I will taste. I will understand. And that blackness, that tar. It was full of fear. Costello thinks he's going to become his dad and end up like his dad and die.
What the fuck. Why do I see this shit? I have my own problems. I don't want everyone else's.
I'm sorry for Costello but I can't help him. And fuck him for putting his shit on me. And I still hate him.
***
Reading his words, I was not surprised. What Billy was talking about was very familiar to me. Like Billy, I felt sorry... sorry for Billy.
A few pages later:
***
I knew Costello was going to do it. I didn't have to touch his ring or anything, it's just when he looked over at me in class yesterday it was suddenly like he was screaming it in my face. "I'm going to bring my dad's gun to school!"
I thought the police took his dad's gun after he killed himself. I don't know why I thought that. And I thought Costello would never want to touch the thing that his dad used to kill himself. It has to be so full of hate and terror. It's going to make him sick. Maybe it makes him sick just being in the same house with the gun. Costello's mother sometimes holds it in her hands and thinks about killing... herself, maybe, or Costello, or Costello's little sisters. I don't know. But the image of her sitting with the gun in her hands and a blank look on her face, that image comes to me along with Costello's plan to bring the gun to school.
And when he showed up this morning I knew he had it in his old-fashioned burlap rucksack, I could taste it. I could almost see it. I could taste it on Costello, too – the rage, the hate, the horror. Doing what he thinks he has to. What he thinks he can't not do.
I asked for a hall pass to do to the bathroom and Miss Mertz smiled. She likes to make me wait. I acted like I had to pee real bad. Finally she decided I was gonna piss myself and that would be a bother because the room would stink. She gave me the hall pass. I didn't have to pee, but I did anyhow, and when I came back I "accidentally" kicked the rucksack. Costello left it next to his desk. He's not supposed to but kids do stuff like that all the time. I made sure to kick it so that it would fall over and spill. The top wasn't tied. It was kind of open. So things came falling out and the gun was there. And stupid Miss Mertz didn't even see it so I had to kick the goddamn gun right at her desk and then act surprised and scared and then the whole room was kids screaming.
And Miss Metz saw it then and Costello got scared and ran. I didn't see it, but I heard the school's police officer tackled Costello and punched him up pretty bad. He's in juvie now, I guess. I hope he doesn't die. He probably will. Or else they'll send him to the Army and make him fight the Canadians for their water. I hope he doesn't die. I guess he probably will.
***
Costello. I knew that name from the files they sent when they made sure Billy ended up at this school – my school.
Costello, like the comedian. Like that musician whose songs they banned. I knew I had read about that kid. Did he die? I couldn't remember. It didn't matter. Alive or dead, he was another body cast aside, just more collateral damage.
***
It never occurred to me to try and warn anybody about Costello, but Alan thought of it. I knew Alan was like me, he can smell or taste these things about people. But I didn't know he could tell in any detail what people were planning... except, I guess Costello was so upset and mad that I wasn't the only one who heard him screaming his plans. He was like a siren. I heard him. Alan heard him. Did Sabrina hear? Was that why she wasn't in class? Did the other guys hear him? Did they care?
The other guys were talking about it but I didn't know what they were talking about. Sabrina explained it. Alan told one of the ladies in the principal's office and she told the principal and Alan is gone now. One of the guys, Mark, is Alan's next-door neighbor. He woke up at, like, three in the morning and the cops were there. The cop cars were in the street but the lights weren't flashing. The cops didn't shout orders or break in the door. There was no guns being fired. They just knocked at the door and when Alan's dad answered they talked with him and then they went in the house and then they brought Alan out and took him away in a van.
Mark saw all of that, and he knew why they were there. He smelled it on them. At school this morning he smelled it on the lady in the principal's office, and on the principal, too. They were all in on it.
I hope Alan will be okay. Kids made fun of him and said he was weird, and he was. A little robotic, a little drawn back into himself. But I can understand. I want to hide, too. I do hide. But I have a façade – the sarcastic kid, the troublemaker who doesn't really make any trouble. The teachers don't like me. I can smell that on them, too, but if they really saw me they would like me even less.
And I would probably be taken away in a van in the middle of the night.
***
Well, I thought, he was right about that. Unless, of course, he accepted that white lily. He would have picked up on the reason for the flower. They always do, and that's why the flowers are offered to them.
For a few pages after that, the book was nothing but Billy complaining about his parents fighting, his mother's screams late at night, his shock at hearing his dad sobbing after he came rolling in drunk from a bar... I flipped through the pages quickly, skipping ahead.
And now.
To now.
***
New school. A lot bigger than the old one. I hate these people. I miss Sabrina.
I don't know why I'm at this school instead of one of the regular ones. Dad told me that it's because of the tests we did last fall – I scored high or something. He didn't seem too happy or proud of me. But that's not new, he never liked it when I got a good grade on my homework or report card even though he used to yell at me about it if I got a C, but I could always taste it on him: He was only putting on a show for Mom. Pretending to be concerned. When the only thing he was concerned about really was getting to the state liquor store before closing time.
***
I flicked a page; two pages; three. Observations and wisecracks about the school, the students and teachers ("Ms. Jalleno looks like she had got more than her share of Denisovan DNA in her"), the bus ride to and from school every day. I knew he must have written about that first time we met.
And... here... it... was.
***
There was a big school assembly today, even stupider than the usual pep rallies and prayer meetings. The principal – Mr Sterno or something – wanted to give us all a rousing welcome and let us know he's there for us. "One thing you should remember," he said with his hand wrapped around the black microphone, "is that I like to put the 'pal' in 'principal.' If you need anything... really, I mean anything... you can come to me. I'm on your side, kids. I promise."
After the assembly, the teacher from home room, Miss Quisling, well thats what I call her anyway, she took me over to meet the principal. She said that he likes to meet all the new students one on one for a few minutes, just to get to know who they are. It was weird she said it that way, because usually how you say it is 'get to know you,' not 'get to know who you are.' But she was distracted. Excited, worried. I don't know if she's in love or something. Maybe the way she smells when she sees the gym teacher, Mr Felagi, has something to do with it. He was there too, talking to some other people, and the two of them had a glance and a smile.
***
I looked up at Felagi, who was leaning against the lockers by now, looking bored. He noticed me looking at him and straightened up right away. I went back to reading, but not before I filed that little bit of intel away. Felagi, I thought to myself, you old dog.
***
The principal looked at me and got a big fake smile. Well, it looked fake. But I could hear... sense... okay, smell, that his pleasure was also sincere. It made me a little suspicious. Like, why's he so happy to see me? Why's he interested in me?
I should fill in something I didn't bother to write about before. I got a job at a junk shop a week after we got here. The place is run by this guy named Fitzsimmons. He doesn't smile a lot but I can smell how keen he is on me, and I tell exactly why. Fitz has this creep friend who comes in the shop and he's... I mean, Fitz is lonely and he's gay and I kinda don't blame him if he wants to be friendly with me. Maybe he's got the hots for me, maybe not, but he never actually tries anything or says anything. But this friend of his, Teddy, he's just a damn paedo. He reeks of it. Teddy always talks about me like I'm not there. "How's your little protégée today, Fitz?" The one time he did talk to me was when I was looking at the old post office, this big building made with gray stones and it has these kinda Greek columns. It's the kind of building my dad tears down, and it makes him sad and I kinda think it's part of the reason (but only part of) why he drinks. But I was looking at the post office and suddenly Teddy is right there and he's grinning at me and the full force of his sick yearning is splashing down on me, and it's disgusting. "Look who's here, it's Fitz's protégé," he said, with that same insinuation in his voice, the same nasty hinting way he draws out the word when he says it to Fitz, like it's dirty because it's in French or something. And he says, "So, protégé, what you doing hanging around this part of town?" And I'm not hanging around, I've got to get going, and I tell him that, and he says to me: "So, where you running off to? You got a girlfriend or something? You hot to go and see her? She keep you on a short leash, or does she let you play?"
And I say, I don't have a girlfriend. And I really don't want to talk to him and he's oppressing me with his sick yearnings, it's like a ton of cold sea water.
And he says, "Come on, of course you do. A good looking kid like you?"
And he's not just being nice, he really does think I am good looking and I wish he didn't.
And he says, "So you fuck her? Sure you do," he says before I can tell him no, and never, and I don't even have a girlfriend, and it's none of your goddam business. And he says, "You like fucking her? Does she jerk you off?" And he grins when he says it and his eyes are glinting. "Do you like that well enough? Or are there better things out there waiting for you to try them?"
And I walk away, and I feel him behind me, like an invisible hand reaching out with fingers ready to close and grab and drag me to fuck knows where, and I start running. And I still feel him back there and he's just standing still and watching me run but he's laughing.
So I know what it smells like when someone wants to be friends and I know what it smells like when someone wants something from you they know they shouldn't, but they're not gonna apologize for it. And that's what Principal Furnace, or whatever his name is, that's what he smelled like. Not a pervert – like that damn Mr. Tottencourt, the English teacher, who smells just goddam rank any time any of the girls are around him – but the principal smells like he wants something from me. He's not gonna say what it is but he expects me to know it or figure it out. And he's waiting for me to offer it to him.
"Nice to meet you son," Principal Fonebone says to me, or whatever his name is.
I can't help it: His weird mix of genuine interest and insincerity makes me sarcastic. Well, everything makes me sarcastic, but usually not reckless, but something about him triggers me and I say, "You want to be my 'pal'?" And he laughs, and he smells fresh and clean, like he just had his first honest thought or feeling in years, and I can't help it. I like him a little, just for a minute. I want to smell the way he does right then. I want to have a sense of – whatever it is he's got going on right at that moment. Like somehow the world lines up just right. He's humored by me. He thinks I'm smart.
And then I smell something else on him: He's a little worried. Whatever he wants from me, he's worried I'm too smart and he won't get it.
But none of that is on his face or in his eyes. He asks me questions about where I am from, when I got to town, do I like it at the school? And, isn't it nicer than the typical nasty public school? And he congratulates me and says it was because of my good test scores that I got in and America needs to invest in its young people. Or anyway, people like me. And he believes all that shit too, though it doesn't give him the same happiness as he had a minute ago.
"I'm here for you any time you need something," he tells me, before Miss Quisling tells me it's time I get to my next class.
Like hell he is. I can smell a liar. I can smell a cheat and a narc. As I'm walking away from him I pick up something else from Principal Fork-Eye: He smells the same way the teachers did that turned in Alan back home. It's so obvious that they look for kids like me, and Sabrina, and Alan, and the other guys, and then they... I don't know what they do. I kinda scares me.
But maybe they give us money and shit? Like when the government used to give perks to really good hackers?
Sabrina told me that they want kids like us because we can "smell the misdeeds of others." That's her turn of phrase. I liked it. I never thought of this knowing things about people as a kind of smell before she put it that way, but it really is. Sabrina's right about all this. That's why I started using her word for it.
But here's the thing I don't understand. Why? Why are they interested in us sniffers? That's Sabrina's word again, she called kids like us "sniffers." I always laugh when I think of her using that word, like we're dogs running around picking up on all the world's secrets with our noses.
Maybe that's why they want to know who we are, maybe that's why they want to gather us up and use us or whatever it is they do with us. We can give them all the secrets in the world.
****
Well, I thought, sort of. Billy was a smart kid, but he was naïve. He wasn't wrong; no, they do want to gather up all the "sniffers," as Billy called them, and I liked that word. I thought I might start using it, too. But there was more to it than that: More than the uses for military intelligence or domestic surveillance. It was the most primal of human motivations, almost as basic as sleep or sex or food: We don't like it when someone's different. Because who do they think they are? Because we need them to be the same as us, to validate us, to keep us secure in the illusion of our natural and unearned superiority.
And how does someone different – a "sniffer" – like me get to use that "we?"
Well, that's primal too. We co-opt those who are different. We make them vow their loyalty to us, for our ends and purposes. We make them sniff out others of their kind and either rope them into the bargain or eliminate them.
That's the sweet scent and the secret of the white lily. And that, too, is one of the secrets of the world.
Billy would have known all this if he would just have stand still and listened.
But he ran away. And now, flipping through a few more pages in his diary, I saw how he managed it.
***
It turns out that Mr. Timmons is here, teaching at this school. I haven't seen Mr. Timmons in a couple of years. He was a teacher at my old school when I was 12 and 13, but then he didn't come back after the summer one fall, and I figured he got a job with benefits, like he was always saying he wanted to. Maybe something with the government. He was a chemist, he could go to work with the war department and make some good money, but he said he didn't agree with gassing villagers and killing babies.
Well, now I found out where he went, he's been here.
He didn't seem particularly surprised when I went up to hm and said, "Hey remember me? Billy Bento?" He just kind of looked at me and shrugged, like, So what? But then we started talking about the old school and I told him about how my old man and my mom broke up and my old man moved us here along with his girlfriend. And now I'm here on account of my test scores.
And he smiled at that, and I could tell there was something. Some glimmer or wisp or something. Something I couldn't quite get hold of. Mr. Timmons was never like other people, he's hard to read, he's hard to smell. But I can kind of, almost, catch a whiff of... something.
***
"I'll bet you can," I said aloud, forgetting myself. Felagi stirred, but knew I wasn't talking to him, and kept quiet. I ignored him. The story was getting to where I needed to go. I flipped ahead a few days, then a week, and found the next mention of Timmons.
***
So Mr. Timmons and I have been talking a little here and there, and he's made some hints and finally today we really did talk. Mr. Timmons said that it's not a coincidence he's here. He said that lots of sniffers end up at this school one way or another. Still not a majority of kids or anything, but he said there are lots of us here, and I have to admit I didn't notice it. I just hate it here, that's all I can tell you. I don't make friends, I keep to myself, I don't want to be outed.
But Mr. Timmons said that he's a friend and an ally and he came here specifically because a lot of sniffers are here. And I asked, "Did you know about me already?" And he said, "Yes, of course, I could tell. I'm not a sniffer myself "– he said, and I thought, of course not, that's what you would say – "but," he said, "I do feel bad for the way you are treated. Like you're not even human beings. Like you are property or like you're freaks, or even like you're criminals, just because of who you are and not because you're done anything wrong."
Then he started talking about how everything is labeled "freedom" – like all the new laws and all the groups that are dedicated to hunting down different groups of people and sending them to the camps. But it's not freedom at all, he said, that was America as it used to be, before people got mean and greedy and scared, just like THEY want us to be. And I really got a whiff of something with that THEY. Mr. Timmons is angry about it. He really does want to help,
Mr. Timmons said he's part of some kind of railroad. I'm not sure if he means an actual railroad or some kind of secret group, but I think it's a group, because he said he helps kids like me get away from THEM. I don't think any real railroad could operate that did something like that. I don't know where kids go when this railroad helps them escape. I mean, where is there to escape to? But Mr. Timmons says that they can help, and they do help, and he wants to help me.
Even if there is nowhere that really is safe, I don't want to be here. I don't want to be in that fucking trailer with my dad and that slut going at it in the next room, and then my dad saying things like "You better not be jerking off, that's a sin," and, "I know what boys your age do, but try to be a man about it and do it with a girl." I mean, god damn. Why do older men care what teenagers do? Dad's a little too much like Fitz's horrible friend, always making innuendoes. He wants me to be more like he is – a whoremonger, that's what he is. He's disappointed in me, I could always smell that on him, it's stronger than the smell of booze. But I mean, who does he think he is? Who does he think I am? I'm not his property, and it's none of his god damn business.
***
I flipped through a couple more pages of Billy's distaste for his dad, for his dad's girlfriend. He wrote that she's a needy... well, that's not a nice word for women, even if a woman's not a nice person, which, according to Billy, she was not.
But all that was beside the point. I could read the details later, but there was information still in the diary that I could use right away.
***
So Mr. Timmons has a plan. He's gonna give me a ticket for a bus, only it's a special bus, not part of the usual bus line schedule. It looks like any other bus, but it only has one destination and one kind of passenger. He gave me the ticket and he told me, "Next week."
So next week I will go to school in the morning like always. I won't say anything to anyone. I won't say goodbye or make any smart-ass remarks and try to be clever. I'll just do everything as usual. But I'll tell dad's protégée – ha! That word comes in handy! – that I am staying late after school to work on building sets for the school play, and I'll stay overnight with a classmate. She'll love that. She says I need to make friends. She's the one who made me join stupid drama club in the first place.
By the time they realize I am not coming home, I will be long gone, and I'm not coming back.
But I worried that I'll be leaving others like me behind, others that Mr. Timmons might not be able to help. I have been super careful, but I think Principal Spurio is on to me anyway. And not all the kids have seen what I have, or know what I know – not all of the kids have a Sabrina or an Alan to help them figure out what a huge goddamn lie everything is. It's all here to control us, show us what we're supposed to see, keep us away from the truth. You can't say anything or they will know. They watch, they listen.
But I smell.
And since Mr. Timmons said that there are lots of other sniffers at this school, I have sniffed a few out, I think. There's Ricky, in my biology class (where they teach us that God created Adam and then created Eve to be his humble servant and baby machine). And there's this girl named Shea, but I don't like her, she doesn't even know who she is and her nose has led her to me and she's clingy and whiny and says she had a crush on me. She doesn't. She just senses we're alike, and she's too stupid to realize it.
And so is this other kid, Tomas, who's tall and really good looking and really fucked up. He was going to bully me... I could smell the testosterone and aggression on him... but then he decided he liked me, and it's for the same reason Shea likes me. Only Tomas didn't bring me a ring at lunch time and tell me it used to belong to his grandma. That was Shea's trick. I gave Shea's ring back to her and tried to be nice, and almost told her that I wouldn't be coming back. I mean, this was just yesterday! It's like she senses that I am about to make a move, she's feeling desperate.
I almost feel sorry for Tomas though. At least Shea has a big brother and a family that love her. Tomas is on his own. Really on his own, he has a mentor or something, but he has his own apartment even though he's only seventeen because his whole family died, and everyone knows they were sent to the camps. No one knows why Tomas was spared and is in this school and gets his own apartment. The Theopublican kids – "Young Conservatives," they call themselves – say Tomas is the poster boy for how the government really does help. But once you know what's really going on, you see the reason Tomas is still alive is they – THEY!, I mean – think they can use him.
Shea and Tomas. What will happen to them?
And others. Maya. Jan. Nucky. Bromfield; he never goes by his first name, because he has a twin brother and their names rhyme. And Clark, too, and Janice, or I guess she spells her name Janiss. She got reported for that, because it's not how her name is spelled on her official records, but that's how she hands in all her homework.
And there's Jimmy Tatson, and Jonas Brueller, and Marcy Street, and Lex Lundgren. And I don't know any of them, but I know who they are, I know they are like me. I hope a few of them will be on that bus too, but Mr. Timmons says he can't give me any names. We're all on high alert, he says, and on our best behavior until we're safe.
***
And that was it. That was the information I needed. I knew about one or two of the students Billy mentioned, but I didn't have all those names – not until I read them in Billy's diary. Thank you, Billy, I thought; you've done your job, and I've done mine.
***
And the kids we're leaving behind? Mr. Timmons says someone will help them, but it won't be him because he will be on the bus with me. Mr. Timmons says that it's getting hot for him here. In any case I'll probably be the only kid from this school on the bus, because we don't want to raise suspicions. It will be strange enough that he and me will both go missing, but Mr. Timmons says that he's planted evidence to throw off any investigations. I don't know what that means, but I can smell it on him: A sense of guilt. I think he's framing himself for my disappearance, somehow. I guess he is responsible, when you get down to it, but he's gonna make it look worse than it is. I mean, like something it's not. A murder or something. Or a kidnapping that somehow goes wrong. And people will think he's a natural born killer, because... Mr. Timmons says it's getting hot for him because a few people know that he's half Jewish and half Hispanic, and the Morality Police are saying that both of those groups are evil by nature. Everyone's afraid another purge is coming soon, which means more roundups and people being sent to the camps.
Getting hot for him. Is that another way of feeling people's misdeeds, the ones they have done and the ones they are planning, sometimes without even admitting it to themselves? I wonder if maybe Mr. Timmons really is like us sniffers, only he doesn't know it.
He says I have to leave everything behind. He says I have to leave my diary behind, too. I asked if it would get people in trouble, and he said that if I just leave everything in my locker others in the railroad... friends of his, people who are also in the school... they will clean it out and burn everything. The school is gonna replace all the textbooks anyhow because the school board that just got appointed says that all the books except two are full of gay socialist propaganda. I guess straight socialist propaganda would be fine. But anyway, if I leave the diary with the text books, it will be found by friends who can use it, or else it will be burned by people who don't know to look in my diary, and either way leaving it behind is the safest thing for everyone. It's always possible, Mr. Timmons says, that the bus will be stopped and boarded at a checkpoint, and so we have to have all our props in order: We're on a class trip! Nothing to see here, officers!
I hope Mr. Timmons is right and nothing goes wrong. I hope we get where we are going. I hope we really will be free. I hope the other kids will be all right. But things could always go wrong. I just have to hope they won't. If they do, I'll still be safe. Mr. Timmons says don't worry about that. "Nothing will go wrong," he tells me, and I like to think maybe, somehow, he has a way to know that for sure. "Your diary won't fall into the wrong hands," he assures me.
It makes me wonder what the right hands are. Maybe Miss Quisling isn't such a spineless rag after all. Maybe even Principal Furiosi could actually be a good guy, just someone caught in a hard place. I mean, wouldn't it make sense? A sniffer in charge of a school where sniffers are directed, only he's not there to monitor them; he's there helping get them to safety. Maybe that's why he likes me, that's why he had that moment when he was free of guilt and fear. He's helping people like me, like us.
So, just in case this diary doesn't get burned, and to whoever is reading this... I hope you do something good with this, whoever you are. Maybe dad, maybe Mr. Hoskins or Miss Beyle. Maybe Principal Furiosi. I hope you're Principal Furiosi. You know we call you Mr. Spurio, right? Like, Mr. Fake, Mr. Fugazi, Mr. Bogus? So friendly, always the students' pal. Which is why they spell "principal" the way they do. Your favorite joke. You tell it at every student assembly, every prayer afternoon, every Kirsch rally: The Princi-PAL. What corn, what bullshit, what corney bullshit. You and my dad would get along well. I call him El Fake-O.
But maybe your mask hides real friendship. Maybe you will be the one who helps those kids who can't get out, not yet.
***
Yes, I thought, having arrived back at the pressed white lily. I fingered the dried flower before closing the diary around it. I will be helping those kids, I answered Billy in my thoughts. Helping them find their place in the world, the only place the world allows them. The only place they can survive. A place that makes them too valuable to kill, even in a world that hates outsiders and anyone who's "different."
"Different." The meaning gets more broad and comprehensive every day. Once we get rid of everyone "different," will anyone be left? Will "different" be the one thing that makes us all the same in the end?
Felagi was looking up the hall at someone walking our way. "I'll take care of this, you go on," I told him. "It's almost time for your next class anyway."
I could see it about him – the relief that he didn't have to be involved with any of this any longer. But he hesitated: "He was one of them, wasn't he?" Felagi asked. "The special kids, the ones the government people want us to watch out for?"
"That's just a rumor," told him, but I threw in a hint of a smile to excite his fear and paranoia. Felagi would never be someone entrusted with the truth; he's too prone to believing in conspiracy theories. Only people who can see clearly, sense correctly, what the world around them is made of can navigate the smoke and mirrors that have been deployed and the confusion that's been sown.
Felagi left in a hurry. Timmons walked up slowly.
"Get what you needed?" he asked.
I raised the diary. "You read this?"
"No, didn't have time or opportunity," Timmons said. "I just got back from Kansas."
"How's the kid doing?"
"He's pissed. He figured it out halfway there. I mean, I thought those kids couldn't sense me..."
"Says in here he mostly couldn't," I told him.
"Well, he could enough, I guess. The security guys had to tie him up until we got there, or he would have crashed the bus or jumped out the window or something. And the first thing I did when I got back, like, twelve minutes ago, was to call the kid's dad and explain that he wasn't a runaway; he's clairvoyant, and we took him in."
"What did he way to that?"
"He said, and I quote, 'Don't bring him back here.' " Timmons sighed. "You good?" he asked.
"I'm good as long as I'm doing good," I told him.
"Yeah. Figure Billy will end up doing good, too?"
I weighed the diary in my hand. It was heavy with Billy's words, with his anger... and also with Timmon's question. "I don't know," I told him.
But I honestly hoped he would. There's no room anymore for anything else, not in the world as it's become.
Next week we join in a journey of human destiny... or perhaps more than human destiny... when we meet the "Denisovans."
Kilian Melloy serves as EDGE Media Network's Associate Arts Editor and Staff Contributor. His professional memberships include the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association, the Boston Online Film Critics Association, The Gay and Lesbian Entertainment Critics Association, and the Boston Theater Critics Association's Elliot Norton Awards Committee.
