The Body of Christopher Creed

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Reader Chat Page

  Chatting with Carol Plum-Ucci

  Copyright © 2000 by Carol Plum-Ucci

  Author interview copyright © 2008 by Carol Plum-Ucci

  Reader's guide copyright © 2008 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  Publishing Company

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

  or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval

  system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should

  be submitted online at www.harcourt.com/contact or mailed to the following

  address: Permissions Department, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing

  Company, 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  First Harcourt paperback edition 2008

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Plum-Ucci, Carol, 1957–

  The body of Christopher Creed/Carol Plum-Ucci.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Torey Adams, a high school junior with a seemingly perfect life,

  struggles with doubts and questions surrounding the mysterious disappearance

  of the class outcast.

  [1. Missing persons—Fiction. 2. Peer pressure—Fiction. 3. Emotional problems—

  Fiction. 4. High schools—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.P7323Bo 2000

  [Fic]—dc21 99-44212

  ISBN 978-0-15-202388-1

  ISBN 978-0-15-206386-3 pb

  Text set in Sabon MT

  Designed by Lori McThomas Buley

  DOM H G F E D C

  Printed in the United States of America

  This is a work of fiction. All the names, characters, places, organizations, and events

  portrayed in this book are products of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to

  any organization, event, or actual person, living or dead, is unintentional.

  To Ellen ...

  & Sara, Colleen, Merc, Nathan,

  Krystle (rest in peace), Amber, Joey,

  Dave, Ricky, Jon, Brandon, and all

  the other teenagers who have so

  richly blessed my life...

  One

  I had hoped that a new start away from Steepleton would make my junior year seem like a hundred years ago, rather than just one.

  Granted, senior year is not a great year to be switching schools, especially if you played football, baseball, had a decent blues band going in your basement, and had known the same kids since forever. I kept telling myself at first, Hey, going to boarding school will be like leaving for college a year early. It's cool. But that's a hard argument to hold on to when you're looking at people whose average age is fifteen, and when we're still living under a 10:00 P.M. weekend curfew in the dorm. At first it was a weird change. But staying in Steepleton after all that had happened would have been weirder.

  Mostly Rothborne has been good. It wasn't more than a couple months before I could actually concentrate in class and get decent grades again. I could spot guys from the dorm as I walked into the dining hall, and I could pull up a seat next to them and goof around. I asked a girl to the movies once, and she said yes. Nobody stares at me here. Nobody is suspicious of me. That part is gone.

  I'm not saying that life has been perfect. There's the roommate thing. Cartright is pretty cool—he's a crew maniac who also loves pranks, embellishing his own girl stories, and shooting the bull late at night with me. But he's got his own set of ideas—like when to finally nod off and put out the light. And if you have nightmares, flashbacks, and other sleep screwups, it's not easy lying awake in the dark.

  While I had many days of cracking into campus trees from zero sleep during the fall, this spring I've only had a couple. In some ways I'm just your basic guy again. I do have a ponytail, and most guys around here have nubs, which is more the style, if there is a style these days. Around Easter I took to adding little goofy things to it. A seagull feather, a clamshell on a suede leash, a rabbit's foot. Some girl asked me last week if I was running a dead-animal farm. I felt my face turn all red, but deep inside I was kind of happy about that remark. She was the first person at Rothborne to take my meaning. Well, sort of. I like animals and all, but I'm not obsessed with animals.

  I don't let myself get too crazy when people start asking questions, like, "So why'd you come as a senior?" or, "You could pass for a model if you'd cut that hair, so why don't you?" It's always the girls who ask the stuff. Most guys are content to accept you just because you're cool and don't make waves.

  But about a week ago this guy down the hall from me, Leo, barged into my room when I had the door shut. People sort of avoid Leo, though it's kind of hard to explain why. He's a tall guy with brown hair who looks like everybody else. He likes to hang out in the union and shoot the bull. He's just a little "sideways," if I had to describe him. He always talks about girls, but he stares at guys.

  He came into my room without knocking, and I clicked out of my screen without even looking to see who was there. I should have known it was him, because most people would knock if your door was totally shut, but Leo never cared.

  "You wanna go to dinner, Torey?" I could feel him looking, though I was watching my screen, scared to death my latest letter would fly back up there, just because I didn't want him to see it, and then my secrets of Steepleton would get air-waved to the entire student body. Only Cartright knew bits and pieces.

  "No, I'm ... doing something. Thanks."

  He wandered in and landed on Cartright's bed, and his look turned into that stare that some guys don't like.

  "Nobody wants to go to dinner," he said, picking up Cartright's naked-lady alarm clock, which Cartright insists helps him concentrate on his physics.

  "Go by yourself," I said, faking a stretch to counter my thumping heart. "Or ask Burke or Melefanti. They'd eat five times a day, if they could."

  I wanted to flip a game up on the screen but was scared of my spastic streak. I knew that letter would come flying back if I touched anything.

  "You play that guitar pretty good." He jerked his head toward my Ovation.

  "Thanks."

  Bunch of kids got to ogling about my guitar playing this spring, when I finally started playing for other people again. That shocked me, because my friends in Steepleton had been used to it and didn't usually make a big deal. My music teacher here asked to record a couple songs I wrote. At first I thought he was being nice, but then I would hear the stuff other kids in my music class wrote and I would think, Puke, that's so ... doofus and normal. But my songs were too wrapped up in Steepleton. I wasn't ready for it if someone happened to see through all my symbolism.

  I could feel Leo staring.

  "Somebody said you used to play football," he said.

&n
bsp; "Yeah."

  "You don't look like a football player. What'd you do to lose all that weight? Get sick?"

  I wondered who told him about football. Sometimes Cartright said I mumbled in my sleep. Maybe I had made football commands in my sleep.

  "Yeah, I got sick," I mumbled. "Something like that."

  "I hear your dad owns a huge engineering firm and your mom's a lawyer."

  He watched me, and I tried not to squirm. If I let on that he'd miffed me, I would at least have to let fly with the fact that everyday questions miffed me. But I was starting to realize that I was sort of an unusual case. Lots of kids had lived with only one parent, and if they did have both, usually it was just one who had the great job.

  "Your house is, like, three hundred years old, right?" he asked.

  "Right. I think Melefanti's in his room..."

  He didn't take the hint, and I watched him turn Cartright's clock over and over in his hands. Cartright would kill Leo if he saw him handling his naked-lady clock. Leo put it down and stood up, moved toward the window. He lifted my guitar case, spinning it this way and that.

  I could feel an ache shoot into my knuckles, remembering ... Set of nostrils, huge grin, dual streams of blood closing the space between them, grin collapsing over red teeth. This aging memory that somehow crept up on me every couple months still hadn't lost its zip. In one sense Cartright was a great roommate for an only child like me, because he didn't normally touch my stuff. But somebody around here was bound to pick up one of my guitars without asking.

  "You can play it if you want," I said, but my voice cracked.

  I saw the case slowly sink down until it sat on one of his sneakers. He was smiling, watching me big-time.

  "You're just saying that. You look like you don't want anybody touching this guitar. Why not?"

  People didn't like Leo. I guessed he pried into some guys like this, and stared, and it got them thinking he was gay. Not that gayness had to be a hot issue around here. There were two other gay guys in our dorm. But they were, like, Hey, I'm gay, so, like, deal with it. So there wasn't much to deal with. But you could sense that Leo was struggling with something, and it made you struggle, too.

  His watching me—it did something to my insides. I wanted to get up and hug him, something. I didn't. I just watched him back, wondering about myself, these twitches. Maybe you're gay, Torey. Maybe you're gay, and Leo is gay, and that's what's bothering you.

  I couldn't think if I'd ever had a gay thought before. But all of a sudden it was me staring at him, and he was looking away. He slowly put the guitar case down where he'd found it, and stared at the wallpaper on my screen.

  "What were you doing before I came in here?"

  "You ask a lot of questions," I muttered, gripping the mouse in my lap. "Do people ever tell you that?"

  "Yeah. All the time."

  "So why do you ask so many questions, then?"

  I watched him shrug, staring at my screen like there was something infatuating about it.

  "People used to say I was weird," he said. "I used to care. But I don't anymore. People shouldn't care, people shouldn't use words like weird once you hit junior year. Everyone's weird. That's the way I look at it."

  I watched him. Something about being weird had made me switch schools. His words got ahold of something inside of me, and all of a sudden I wasn't so terrified of him. He came toward me, and I didn't move, didn't think about what he was going to do. But he didn't touch me, and when he didn't, I gathered it was a good thing. Somehow I knew down deep inside what was up.

  He reminded me a lot of Chris Creed. I hadn't said more than two words to Chris Creed since I punched him out in sixth grade. But when a kid sits behind you every day since kindergarten, sits across from you in Sunday school, belongs to your pool, annoys you in Cub Scouts, and throws a thousand balls over your head in Little League, you don't have to like him in order to love him. Sometimes I thought I would give anything to hear from Creed again. It was Chris's and Leo's similarities that were making me tingle, not anything about sex.

  But this tingle, it was making me wish I could rip out my memory bank just so I could connect with people, without the stupid thoughts weaving my stomach into a hellhole, like someone out here would actually ask me some insane question, So, you fell on a guy's decaying body in the woods?

  It's not Chris standing here, it's Leo, I told myself, but in a real sense he was Creed. He was an out-there type of guy who could make you uncomfortable, make you want to avoid him. He was hitting ALT+ESC, so he could see for himself what I was up to.

  I hit the OFF button before I had a chance to try out my spastic streak in an ALT+ESC fight with him. He just looked at me again, like there wasn't the slightest little thing wrong with what he had just done.

  "Leo, let me explain something to you," I heard myself say. "When you go into a room, you knock first. If you start asking people questions and they start tilting back in their chairs, it means they don't want to talk about it. It means if you look at something on their computer screens, they're likely to knock your brains out with a baseball bat."

  "Jesus..." He stared at me for all he was worth. "I just wanted to see what you were up to, that's all."

  "Don't give me this I'm-so-innocent routine," I muttered. "You know you bug people. You've probably been beaten on your whole life. And you've probably been letting yourself off the hook lately by saying that once you got to be a junior it wouldn't matter. Well, you're a senior, Leo. It does matter. You're in my personal space, so get out of it. Get out of my room. And next time you come in, knock first, got it?"

  He backed up, looking all astonished and giving me a few more Jesus Christs. I didn't let my eyes wander off of him, though it was hard. I had to keep telling myself that Dr. Fahdi would have said that it's okay, it's healthy, it's good for me. I told myself that people like Leo need you to get tough, or they don't get it. Once the door was shut and he was gone, I told myself the truth, which was that I had been talking to Leo but seeing Creed. And Leo wasn't nearly as bad. I had just treated another person like shit.

  Torey, you leave home to escape some stupid thing that makes zero sense. Jesus Christ, are you ever going to get over this? My fingers were still shaking as I hit the ON button and watched the computer go through its steps until the "document recovered" bar flashed on the screen. I relaxed some and looked over the letter, making sure none of the characters had been wiped out.

  Dear Alex Healy,

  There was a kid in my town named Chris Creed. I wrote the attachment about his disappearance. If the name Chris Creed doesn't mean anything to you, then forget I even bothered you. You can hit "delete" right now. Or if you're into reading stories about people's lives, I don't have anything to hide and you might get into it. It's about everyone you know.

  I dragged my eyes out of the middle of the letter and moved the mouse slowly up to the message window and clicked on "attach document." I saw it there—Creed.doc—and the mouse crept down to highlight the file I had not looked at in a year.

  Are you ready to go back, Torey? Two years ago you were happy and innocent and oh-so-fucking normal. Are you ready to find the point where you got crushed, look it in the eye, and understand?

  "Creed.doc" was still highlighted. Writing it was supposed to bring me some quote-unquote healing, at least that's what Dr. Fahdi had said. Maybe it did; who knows? I got a load off my chest. But I was looking for other things, more important things, like the peace you get when things make sense and life seems fair. I never got that peace. Some nights I would remember and write and remember and write, and I was sure I was just being Dr. Frankenstein, trying to re-create a dead human. The dead never come back like they were. Some nights I got convinced I was creating a monster.

  I took it in for Dr. Fahdi when I was finished, and I remember him holding all those pages and pretending his arm was weighed down—or maybe it actually was weighed down. And I remember he said to me, "That's an amazing amount of writing for a
young man your age, Torey." And I said, "Yeah, well, I got a load off my chest." It wasn't like I had a whole lot of other stuff to do.

  But you finish something like that, and the truth strikes you. I knew then that laying out the truth for a shrink wasn't enough. I had to get out of Steepleton. You can't find your life, or your peace, in the middle of a bezillion eyes staring at you.

  Creed.doc had been sent across the Internet about eighty times, but the last time I actually looked at the file was when I ran it through the spell-checker before handing it over to Dr. Fahdi. Maybe I hadn't needed to look at it since. Maybe I used to remember every single word. Maybe, finally, I was starting to forget.

  I arrowed up and shut the window. The letter bobbed around in front of me, all hazy and floating.

  Alex Healy, what I'm hoping is that the name Chris Creed does mean something to you. That probably means that, somehow, I have struck gold.

  There's nothing unusual about a runaway these days. There's also not much original about a suicide or a murder. The weirdest fact about Chris Creed's disappearance was that he was just plain gone. There was no trail of blood, not even a drop of blood. No piece of clothing on the side of the road. No runaway bus-ticket stub. No money missing from his bank account. No empty bottle that had been filled with pills the day before he disappeared. No missing razor blades. No nothing. The only thing we knew was that Chris Creed was not abducted compulsively by a stranger—because there was a note, which was written at least twenty-four hours before he turned up missing.

  Steepleton could have dealt with a runaway, a suicide, an abduction, or even a murder. Other towns survive them. But there are two things our town couldn't cope with, the first being a very strange mess that occurs when the weirdest kid in town suddenly disappears. He's gone, but his weirdness seems to linger. It grabs at the most normal and happy kids, like some sort of sick joke. And then it's those people who are acting weird. The other thing the town can't face up to is the black hole itself—the thing that comes out of nowhere and eats a kid alive and doesn't leave a hair from his head.

  You can't have a funeral, because there's no body and no evidence that he actually died. But to push for some big-time Unsolved Mysteries hunt, a town has to feel sorry for how they mistreated the weird guy who's gone. To feel genuinely sorry, you have to be honest. And Steepleton needs its lies like a toad needs bugs.