Helltown - Jeremy Bates Page 0,27

he spotted the road and wished he’d taken the case of beer from Noah’s Jeep before he and Steve had left for the hospital, because if he’d ever needed to get shitfaced, it was right then.

Jeff, he thought. A paraplegic.

Austin blamed himself and the others for this sad fact. Steve had said they had to move Jeff or he would have been barbequed alive. Fine. Austin agreed with that. However, it was how they moved him, half dragging him like he was a heavy side of beef—that he couldn’t get out of his mind. They should have kept their cool, made a litter, carried him properly.

Austin lit a cigarette and inhaled greedily.

Jeff. A paraplegic.

The words were like oil and water, chalk and cheese. They had no business being grouped together. Maybe if Jeff had been some poor slob the idea of him wheeling around in a chair for the rest of his life wouldn’t have been so hard to accept. But Jeff was the poster boy for success and vitality. Austin had met him on the first day of grade nine at Monsignor Farrell High School. Austin had been sitting in the back row of third-period math when Jeff had strolled through the door seconds before the bell rang. He had been tall even then and could easily have been mistaken as a senior. His blond hair had been brushed back from his forehead, his maroon school golf shirt perfectly fitted, his gray slacks pressed and creased, a preppy sweater draped over one shoulder. He swept his eyes across the room, then started down the aisle to the empty desk next to Austin, poking students with his pencil along the way, eliciting nervous chuckles from the victims. Ten minutes into the lesson he made a pssst noise and passed Austin a note. Austin opened it and read the three words: “Suck my dick!” He was so surprised he laughed out loud. Mr. Smith, the bespeckled teacher with a bushy brown mustache and yellow sweat stains under his arms, paused in his explanation of the course outline and asked him what was so funny.

“Nothing, sir,” Austin replied.

“Stand up, Mr.…” He checked the roll call. “Mr. Stanley.”

Austin stood up.

“Now tell the class what is so amusing.”

“Nothing, sir.”

Mr. Smith crossed the classroom and collected the note from Austin’s desk. He read it, his face impassive. “Who gave this to you?” he said.

“No one, sir.”

“You wrote yourself a note?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you laughed at your own note?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’d like to see you back here during the lunch break. Do you understand, Mr. Stanley?”

“Yes, sir.”

After class, in the hallway bustling with students, Jeff found Austin and hooked his arm around his shoulder. “Thanks for not ratting me out to Armpits,” he said.

“No problem.”

“What’s your name?”

“Austin.”

“I’m Jeff. I’ll see ya round.”

After that day Austin and Jeff started hanging out more and more. Their personalities complimented each other in so much as they were both smart-mouths and troublemakers. Yet this was as far as their similarities went, because while Austin despised sports and could barely keep his grades above water, Jeff made the varsity golf and baseball teams, graduated with a 4.0 GPA, and was one of three students named valedictorian. And while Austin dropped out of community college and ended up buying a crummy bar with his grandmother’s inheritance and battling alcohol addiction, Jeff went the Ivy School route and was now trading securities at a top tier investment management firm, living the dream.

Was living the dream, Austin amended.

A paraplegic.

Fuck.

Cherry had moved away from the burning BMW and sat beneath a large tree with a thick trunk, wanting to be alone. The fragile calm that had existed since Steve and Noah left with Jenny had deteriorated quickly. Mandy was a total mess, while Austin seemed ready to explode. She didn’t blame either of them. Mandy had dated Jeff for four years; Austin had known him since high school. This was the reason she hadn’t mentioned the plantar reflex stimulation earlier. She knew there was a chance Jeff could be paralyzed from the waist down, and she didn’t want to verify this was the case, for it would only demoralize the others further. But Austin had totally wigged out. He had been slapping Jeff, inadvertently moving Jeff’s neck, which could compound his spinal cord injury. So she told him to scrape Jeff’s foot, and the diagnosis turned out to be as bad as she’d feared.

Cherry herself remained clinically detached to Jeff’s predicament. She wasn’t close to him like