Come Sit By Me

  COME SIT BY ME

  THOMAS HOOBLER

  Booktrope Editions

  Seattle WA 2015

  Copyright 2015 Thomas Hoobler

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

  Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

  Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

  No Derivative Works — You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

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  Cover Design by Yosbe

  Edited by Ross Hardy

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to similarly named places or to persons living or deceased is unintentional.

  Print ISBN 978-1-5137-0030-4

  EPUB ISBN 978-1-5137-0061-8

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015910195

  table of contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  I: Paul’s Book

  chapter one

  chapter two

  chapter three

  chapter four

  chapter five

  chapter six

  chapter seven

  chapter eight

  chapter nine

  chapter ten

  chapter eleven

  chapter twelve

  chapter thirteen

  chapter fourteen

  chapter fifteen

  chapter sixteen

  chapter seventeen

  II: Caleb’s Book

  III: Paul’s Book

  chapter eighteen

  chapter nineteen

  chapter twenty

  chapter twenty-one

  More Great Reads from Booktrope

  I want to thank all the members of my team on Booktrope who contributed to this book. You guys are all true pros!

  Ross Hardy, editor, for teaching me about shotguns and all sorts of guy stuff.

  Michelle Pehlman, proofreader, for her sharp eyes and for doing far more work than duty called for.

  Yosbe, cover artist, for creating the best cover any book of mine ever had.

  Kellie Sheridan, book manager, for her heroic efforts to get me onto social media and create my platform, and lots more.

  I was lucky to find you all—Tom

  “One may have

  a blazing hearth

  in one’s soul,

  and no one

  to come sit by it.”

  —Vincent Van Gogh

  I

  Paul’s Book

  chapter one

  YOU PROBABLY HEARD ABOUT IT. Hamilton, Pennsylvania. What’s the first thing you think of? School shooting, right? Crazy kid with guns went ballistic. Interviews on TV with people who said, “Nobody ever thought we’d see this in a town like ours.” Lines of kids being paraded out of the school, hands on their heads.

  Not that any of those kids had done the shooting. No, that’s just the general reaction of people in authority toward kids. Line them up and have them put their hands over their heads. Somebody must have done something.

  The kid who did the shooting was inside. Cale Peters. He was the only one, even though the reporters found it hard to believe one lone kid could hold off the police and kill as many people as he did.

  Cale killed himself too. At least that was the official story. But the coroner’s report was sealed, so nobody will ever know. At least not for seventy-five years, which is how long it will be before the report becomes public. They even kept the place where he was buried a secret. I guess so nobody will dig him up and make him put his hands over his head.

  I didn’t live here then, so I only know what was on the news. See, I know you’re wondering why anyone would move into a place like Hamilton after what happened. As a matter of fact, lots of people were moving out. Cale’s parents left, and so did the parents of most of the kids he killed. Who would want to drive past the high school and be reminded of what happened to your kid?

  They weren’t the only ones who moved. Other parents decided it wasn’t a good place to raise their kids. Something bad happened here, and it left a mark on everybody. The innocent and the guilty.

  That meant there were a lot of empty houses in Hamilton. For sale. Cheap. A great opportunity, said my father. He bought one of the houses.

  See, as Dad explains it, he can work anywhere. He writes articles for business magazines, and keeps in touch by the internet and email. Does telephone interviews, and once in a while goes to conventions. “Writing is the only kind of work where you don’t need to get out of your pajamas,” he says.

  He actually does get out of his pajamas. I don’t want you to think he’s any weirder than he is.

  Part of it has to do with the fact that Mom died. I’m not going to say too much about that. Cancer. She was 43. I don’t even like to see the number 43 any longer. Anyway, if she had lived, a lot of things would have been different. We sure wouldn’t have left New York. Dad always points out how expensive everything was there, and now we have a big house that’s about ten times the size of our old apartment. But it just feels more empty without Mom.

  I know it’s wrong to feel this way. She’s not coming back. But I keep thinking if she did come back she’d be looking for us in our old apartment. She wouldn’t know where to find us.

  Anyway, it’s just me, my little sister Susan, and Dad. Not enough to fill up the house. Never will be.

  Of course another big advantage of living in Hamilton, my dad likes to say, is that the school is free. No tuition, like there was in New York. I pointed out to him that the school here may be free, but nobody at my old school ever shot up the place either. “And that’s why Hamilton High will be doubly safe,” said my dad. “They’ll have guards and cameras all over the place. Lightning never strikes twice, you know.”

  In the same place, he meant. Usually Mom would finish his sentences for him. Now Susan and I have to do it.

  They actually closed Hamilton High School for the rest of the year. Had to clean up, and hope that when it reopened, everybody would have forgotten all about it.

  Yeah, right.

  Susan and I went there with Dad a few days early to register. Susan would be a freshman. (In New York, it would be sexist to say “freshman,” but here nobody minded.) It was going to be my senior year—another reason why I wanted to stay in New York and graduate with all my friends. Anyway, I didn’t expect to make any friends here. Get through the year, ace the SATs, and then go to college someplace. You know the drill.

  They gave me my classroom assignments and my schoolbooks, which as usual weighed about a ton, and assigned me to a locker. Dad wanted me to take the books home and check them over, maybe get started early. That would have been an excellent way to get tagged as the class nerd—to be shunned at all costs. So I carried them to my locker. Corridor 3, Row A, number 105.

  I saw a few other kids in the corridor, but they were standing around talking to each other, obviously old friends. So I didn’t try to be Mr. Hi-I’m-Running-for-Class-President. I’d wait until I got a signal that if I said, “Hi,” somebody might say hello back.

  I closed the locker, spun the built-in combination lock, and turned a
round. A girl was there, close enough so that it was obviously me she was looking at. Maybe too close, even.

  She was O.K. looking: reddish hair cut short but not too short, pale blue eyes on the other side of a pair of glasses, a reasonably good body, as far as you could tell since she was wearing a sweatshirt. But it was obvious that she didn’t go all out in the glamour department. No contact lenses or eye makeup, just a dab of lipstick not terribly well applied, plain gold studs in her ears, jeans that weren’t particularly tight-fitting, a green sweatshirt with the school’s team name: HAMILTON PATRIOTS. In the center, the picture of Alexander Hamilton that you see on the ten-dollar bill. So if it wasn’t glamour she was trying for, it must be brains.

  “Hi,” I said, since I figured the look she was giving me was signal enough.

  She just nodded, and I thought for a second she was going to shoot me down. Way to go even before school starts, right? But then she said, “You’re new, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “How about you?” Maybe we could bond, I thought. Two newbies looking for love. Or maybe just friendship.

  “No,” she said. “I’m the editor of the school paper. I just didn’t recognize you, so I thought you must be new.”

  “My name’s Paul,” I said. “Paul Sullivan.”

  She let that sink in. I guess she was a deep thinker. Not one to respond without a pause. “Terry,” she said. Another pause. “Schwartz.”

  “Short for Teresa?” I asked.

  “Nobody calls me Teresa,” she said, as if I’d suggested we run off together.

  “You mind if I ask how come you’re the editor of the school newspaper?” Another reason I didn’t want to leave New York was that if we’d stayed, I might have gotten that job. “I mean, since school hasn’t even started yet,” I added.

  She shrugged. “Ms. King appointed me. She’s the moderator. She realized that I should have the job. I’m the best qualified person.”

  “Ms. King hasn’t met me yet.” I don’t know why I said that.

  Terry peered at me through her glasses. Her pale eyes made me feel like I was a specimen on a slide. “You like to write?” she asked.

  “My father’s a writer,” I said. As if that made me one too.

  “He is?” she said. That got her attention. “What has he written?”

  “Well, he writes articles for business magazines.”

  “Oh.” That’s the usual reaction. Everybody loses interest when they learn Dad doesn’t write best-selling novels about vampires and zombies. I don’t know why he doesn’t. Everybody else does.

  “Well,” Terry said after another pause. “I could use a managing editor. But you don’t know anything about the school.”

  “I know the one big thing,” I said.

  She gave me the long stare again. “You mean the shootings.”

  “What else is Hamilton High known for?”

  “That’s true,” she admitted. “I was just curious to see who they gave Cale’s locker to.”

  It took me a second or two to catch on.

  chapter two

  IN NEW YORK CITY, it’s not considered all that strange if you don’t have a driver’s license when you’re a high school senior. But in Hamilton, if you’re not at the DMV to take your test on the morning of your sixteenth birthday, you stick out as a weirdo. I mentioned that to my Dad when I told him that he and Susan could go home without me, because I was getting a ride.

  “Some teacher will drive you home?” he asked.

  “It’s a student, believe it or not,” I answered.

  “Well, that’s good. You’re making friends already,” he said.

  “It’s not a friend,” piped up Susan the snoop, who had seen me with Terry. “It’s a girrrl.”

  “Oh.” My Dad sounded surprised. “Fast worker,” he said, with a smile.

  “She’s just the editor of the school paper,” I told him. “She’s going to give me a job.”

  Dad nodded. “Be home for dinner,” he said.

  Hamilton High is new, built way out on the edge of the town by itself. Some kids come from twenty miles away or more. School buses bring the younger kids, but all the juniors and seniors have cars or pickups, so there’s a huge parking lot. Terry had a dark green Miata, with just enough room for the two of us in the tan leather bucket seats. “Nice car,” I said.

  “My dad said that if I got all As my first two years, he’d get me one for my sixteenth birthday.” She started it up, and shifted into reverse. It was stick shift, and she clearly was pretty good at it. We started off a little faster than my dad drove.

  “Buckle your seat belt,” she reminded me. My head snapped back as she accelerated. I began to feel I was riding with Danica Patrick.

  “He didn’t think I could do it,” she added.

  “Who? Your dad?”

  “Yeah, because Ms. Hayward never gives As.”

  I remembered that name from my class schedule. “She teaches world literature.”

  “To seniors,” said Terry. “I took English lit from her in sophomore year. Everybody else in the class was a junior. I got the only A.”

  We were in the main part of town by then, and suddenly she downshifted and the car lurched forward. She was aiming at a parking space that was about to become empty. She got it too. I began to realize that Terry pretty much got whatever she was aiming at.

  I thought we were going into the pizza parlor that was right in front of where Terry parked. Instead, she started down the sidewalk and we wound up in Hamilton’s version of a health food store. “PEACEFOODS,” the sign outside read. A girl behind the counter waved at her as we came inside. Terry waved back, and said, “Hi, Opal.”

  There were a few tables and chairs against a wall, and Terry and I sat down. Opal came over and said, “How was your summer?” She had pimples and hair that was too-obviously dyed blond. She wore a body-length apron with a slogan that said, “HEALTH IS GOOD FOR YOU.”

  “Pretty good, and you?” Terry responded.

  Opal shrugged. “I mostly worked here. Got some overtime because of the tourists.”

  “You have tourists here?” I said, amazed. I couldn’t help myself.

  “They come to see the school,” Opal explained. “Morbid, huh? Who’re you?”

  “He’s new,” Terry said. “His name is Paul Sullivan, and he’s from New York.”

  “I hadn’t realized I lost my voice,” I said.

  “She’s like that,” Opal told me. “If you’re going to go out with her, you’ll have to put up with it.”

  “We’re not going out,” I said.

  Opal wrinkled her nose and looked me over. I was getting used to it. “Did you ever go clubbing in New York?” she asked.

  I thought of saying yes, just to get a reaction, but I was afraid I couldn’t carry it off. “No,” I admitted.

  “He doesn’t drive, either,” said Terry.

  “You can do better, Terry,” Opal said.

  I cut off that line of thinking. “You going to take our orders?” I asked. Pretty rude, I admit.

  Opal wrinkled her nose again and gave me a dirty look.

  “Be careful how you treat somebody who prepares what you eat,” advised Terry.

  “I guess because you’re from the big city you think you can lord it over us,” Opal said.

  I was starting to regret I had accepted Terry’s offer of a ride. I wondered how long it would take me to walk home. There was a chalked menu on the wall, and I pretended to study it.

  “I see you’ve introduced kiwi fruit smoothies,” said Terry, before I could decide. “Are they any good?”

  “You know I never eat the stuff here,” Opal replied. “But Nick says they’re not bad.”

  “We’ll have two,” Terry said. Seeing that I was going to object, she added, “If you don’t like
yours, I’ll pay for it.”

  It wasn’t terrible, I admit. Not pizza, but not cabbage rolls either. But I wanted to get back to the main order of business. “How do you know they gave me Cale Peters’ locker?”

  Terry didn’t look up from her smoothie. “They gave us lockers in freshman year, and we were supposed to keep them for all four years. Mine was on the same corridor, opposite side. I guess you got his because you’re new.”

  “Yeah. A vacancy,” I said. Something made me want to go back and take another look at the locker. Now that it wasn’t just an ordinary empty locker.

  Terry knew what I was thinking. “They cleaned everything out, scrubbed it, and then painted it inside and out. There’s nothing left of him there.”

  “What did they find inside?”

  “Ammunition. He carried a lot with him, but I guess he thought he might have time to go back and…” She trailed off.

  “Reload?”

  She shrugged, as if that was obvious.

  “I thought he shot himself,” I said.

  “That’s right,” she replied.

  “So why shoot yourself if you’ve got more ammunition?”

  She gave me a kind of funny look. “You planning to do it right next time?”

  “No, no,” I said. The last thing I wanted to do was get typed as a potential maniac. Not in this school, for sure.

  “Maybe he thought he was about to be caught,” Terry said. “I’m sure he planned to kill himself all along.”

  “I guess so,” I said. But it didn’t add up to me. I figured I should change the subject, but I couldn’t. I kept thinking about the locker. And the ammunition. “What was he like?” I asked, figuring that was safe enough. Better than asking, “Do you think I’m anything like him?”

  Terry tilted her head and looked away. “Everybody asks that. I’ve thought about it, and really I think a lot of what people say about him was made up afterwards. He wasn’t a good student, but neither are a lot of kids. Maybe he was slower than most, but I don’t recall that anybody was afraid of him. You know, like they thought he was going to start killing people. He was just sort of weird.”