Chapter One of FORT WAYNE: A NOVEL

 

CHAPTER 1

SAMARA

You know how at funerals, they only say good things about the deceased? This is how I'm going to talk about my childhood, which is thankfully over. I met Avery Baker when we were in special ed together. He had wild, dark brown curly hair and sharp angled eyebrows. Whenever I noticed him looking at me, it was like he was trying to figure out what to do with me.

 

Rumor had it that he killed another kid and somehow got away with it. Some versions of the rumor had him beating a boy to death in front of the class, other versions had him stabbing a girl. But every version involved multiple eyewitnesses watching him getting arrested. And yet there he was, in class and on the bus with me and other kids.

 

Would the powers that be really let a killer finish high school? How could they be sure that he wouldn't snap again? His very presence made me curious. And if he were to snap again, it would have been better if he came after me instead of someone who wanted to live.

AVERY

Everyone who grew up in Fort Wayne remembers that one little blonde girl who went missing and ended up on national television. Nobody in Fort Wayne remembers Ronnie Barker. Nobody gave a shit about him. Not even me, not at the time and it's too late to give a shit now. But his story deserves to be told. It's not what you wanted to hear about, but it's shorter than my story. And maybe it kind of explains how I turned out.

Ronnie sat next to me in kindergarten, first grade, third grade, and fourth grade. Our names were next to each other in alphabetical order. He was fat and he smelled like smoke all the time. I hung out with him at recess, not because I liked him but because he grossed out all the other kids who wanted to fuck with me.

In middle school, he would buy my Ritalin for $5 a pill. I hate drugs, and I refuse to take them. But it seemed like such a shame to waste them, and $5 is $5. This is why I never considered him to be my friend. Many arcade machines of the era warned us that "WINNERS DON'T DO DRUGS" and "FRIENDS DON'T LET FRIENDS DO DRUGS". Well I took that to heart and decided that Ronnie could not have possibly been a winner or my friend because I was totally letting him do drugs.

He did make people laugh sometimes, although he stole jokes from me. The school bus driver would set the radio to a station that played love songs and country music. The girls liked it and the boys hated it. I told him once, "Boy band music is like sucking dick. Country music is like sucking your dad's dick." He would repeat this over and over again to everyone else. The other kids claimed that he was admitting to giving head to his own father. I'm not sure if he ever knew his father.

In the 7th grade, he developed bad acne that made him repulsive to all the girls he was starting to have feelings for. I didn't date anyone at all before that point in middle school: flat chested tweens were no match for the busty porn stars in the magazines that I swiped from Dad. I let Ronnie borrow the July 1991 issue and he never returned it. All those magazines are gone now, all the same articles and pics are online, but I still remember that. I forgave him, because I was making $70 a week from him.

One day on the bus ride home, he opened up his dirty Detroit Lions backpack that I used to give him shit about.

"Look in here," he said with a smile.

I looked inside. I just saw his Spanish book that he liked to draw graffiti in, some old comic books, and his three ring binder with the ball point pen drawing of Pamela Anderson.

"Ronnie, I don't want your help with homework."

"Look closer." He opened the bag wider. There was a metal grey thing among the papers. If he was this proud and this secretive, it had to be a weapon. Since it didn't look like a knife, either he had a gun or wanted me to think that he did.

"Is it real?" I whispered.

He nodded. The two girls in front of us were chatting about last night's episode of Beverly Hills 90210. Monica and Stacy were just pretty enough to get me to stop thinking about my porn stash, but I didn't really have anything in common with them. They didn't look like the type to have a porn stash.

"Where did you get it?"

"I saw a car drive up and toss it in the dumpster at our apartment. I didn't recognize the car, but it had Illinois plates. I figured it would be something that he didn't want nobody to find if he came that far just to throw something out right before trash pickup. He had it wrapped up in a plastic sack with some other garbage, thinking that nobody would look through it. But I found it."

"Does it work?"

"Dunno. Bout to find out."

He pulled the gun out and I flinched.

"You're scared," he teased. He put the gun up to the right side of his head. He closed his eyes. His face was blank, neither smiling nor frowning, in a way that I only saw when he was taking a test and I was trying to copy off of him.

"I feel like I'm about to step through a door." Stacy and Monica giggled, blissfully unaware of what was happening right behind them. Part of me wanted to tell them to duck just in case. Part of me wanted to invite them to watch.

"Ronnie, we go through doors every day. The school has doors, the bus has doors, my house and your apartment have doors-"

BANG! It was so loud that at first I thought it was a bomb disguised as a gun. Bright red blood and goo covered the shards of the bus window. Ronnie groaned, then sank out of his seat to the floor. The girls in the seat in front of me saw this and started screaming.

"Stop setting off firecrackers!" yelled the driver. "I will stop this bus if this happens again!"

Poor Marty the Bus Driver. I never learned his last name, but word got around that he was a Vietnam vet with PTSD. So of course, kids had been lighting off firecrackers on the bus since August. Maybe it was divine intervention that kept the bus from burning or crashing, but I don't know why a kind and loving God would allow middle school kids to have free will.

Stacy got up and ran down the center aisle. "Marty! Marty! Avery just shot Ronnie!"

"Sit down!" Marty yelled.

Monica looked at me and the red smear on the glass. Her eyes got wide and she ducked. "Stop the bus!" she pleaded.

Marty did stop the bus. Some kids scrambled out of the back emergency exit, which set off an alarm. Other kids ran towards the front. One grabbed the door lever and opened the front exit. Marty got up from his seat. I was the only one he saw who wasn't trying to get away. He saw the blood on the shattered glass, then bolted out the front door.

There were abandoned backpacks and books on some of the seats. One black shoe with a bow on the toe sat in the middle walkway. I went out the front exit, looking for a girl with one bare foot so I could tell her she left her shoe behind. But all the kids were gone. A line of cars was waiting behind the bus, obediently waiting for the stop sign on the bus to be retracted. I saw Marty shuffling away as quickly as a man with an artificial hip could be expected to. He walked up to the driver’s side of the blue station wagon immediately behind the bus and banged on the window.

“That kid has a gun!” he yelled while pointing at me. “He shot another kid! We have to get out of here and find a payphone!” The driver allowed Marty to get into the back of the car, and then sped off, with tires squealing. All of the other cars behind the bus followed suit, perhaps realizing that it wasn’t normal for a school bus to have its rear emergency door open.

It didn’t feel right for me to leave Ronnie behind on an empty school bus with its exit alarm going off. But I figured there wasn’t anything I could do for him, so I just walked the rest of the way home.