End of Watch (Bill Hodges Trilogy #3) - Stephen King Page 0,49
and take drugs to blot out their terrible lives. She is ashamed of her hair, hanging smoothly to her shoulders. She is ashamed of her clean white kneesocks. She is ashamed of her skin color because it’s the same as theirs.
‘Hey, blackish!’ It’s a yell from the other side of the street. ‘What you doin down here? You got no bi’ness down here!’
Blackish.
It’s the name of a TV show, they watch it at home and laugh, but it’s also what she is. Not black but blackish. Living a white life in a white neighborhood. She can do that because her parents make lots of money and own a home on a block where people are so screamingly non-prejudiced that they cringe if they hear one of their kids call another one dumbhead. She can live that wonderful white life because she is a threat to no one, she no rock-a da boat. She just goes her way, chattering with her friends about boys and music and boys and clothes and boys and the TV programs they all like and which girl they saw walking with which boy at the Birch Hill Mall.
She is blackish, a word that means the same as useless, and she doesn’t deserve to live.
‘Maybe you should just end it. Let that be your statement.’
The idea is a voice, and it comes to her with a kind of revelatory logic. Emily Dickinson said her poem was her letter to the world that never wrote to her, they read that in school, but Barbara herself has never written a letter at all. Plenty of stupid essays and book reports and emails, but nothing that really matters.
‘Maybe it’s time that you did.’
Not her voice, but the voice of a friend.
She stops outside a shop where fortunes are read and the Tarot is told. In its dirty window she thinks she sees the reflection of someone standing beside her, a white man with a smiling, boyish face and a tumble of blond hair on his forehead. She glances around, but there’s no one there. It was just her imagination. She looks back down at the screen of the game console. In the shade of the fortune-telling shop’s awning, the swimming fish are bright and clear again. Back and forth they go, every now and then obliterated by a bright blue flash. Barbara looks back the way she came and sees a gleaming black truck rolling toward her along the boulevard, moving fast and weaving from lane to lane. It’s the kind with oversized tires, the kind the boys at school call a Bigfoot or a Gangsta Large.
‘If you’re going to do it, you better get to it.’
It’s as if someone really is standing beside her. Someone who understands. And the voice is right. Barbara has never considered suicide before, but at this moment the idea seems perfectly rational.
‘You don’t even need to leave a note,’ her friend says. She can see his reflection in the window again. Ghostly. ‘The fact that you did it down here will be your letter to the world.’
True.
‘You know too much about yourself now to go on living,’ her friend points out as she returns her gaze to the swimming fish. ‘You know too much, and all of it is bad.’ Then it hastens to add, ‘Which isn’t to say you’re a horrible person.’ She thinks, No, not horrible, just useless.
Blackish.
The truck is coming. The Gangsta Large. As Jerome Robinson’s sister steps toward the curb, ready to meet it, her face lights in an eager smile.
7
Dr Felix Babineau is wearing a thousand-dollar suit beneath the white coat that goes flying out behind him as he strides down the hallway of the Bucket, but he now needs a shave worse than ever and his usually elegant white hair is in disarray. He ignores a cluster of nurses who are standing by the duty desk and talking in low, agitated tones.
Nurse Wilmer approaches him. ‘Dr Babineau, have you heard—’
He doesn’t even look at her, and Norma has to sidestep quickly to keep from being bowled over. She looks after him in surprise.
Babineau takes the red DO NOT DISTURB card he always keeps in the pocket of his exam coat, hangs it on the doorknob of Room 217, and goes in. Brady Hartsfield does not look up. All of his attention is fixed on the game console in his lap, where the fish swim back and forth. There is no music; he has muted the sound.