The Fate Intercessor

Chapter 6: What Rian Knew

Hale never showed up behind the field house.

I waited twenty minutes on a patch of dead grass, with the wind coming off the lot and the practice squad shouting somewhere out of sight. Nobody came. Finally Owen Pruitt wandered around the corner with his hands in his pockets and said Marcus had walked straight out the front gate during the assembly and hadn’t come back. Dre had called him twice. Nothing.

“He’s done this before,” Owen said. “Every year, around now. He just goes.”

“Go where?”

Owen shrugged, but his eyes slid east, toward the park, and that was all the answer I needed.

Ridgeway Park was half a mile from the school, and the bus didn’t go there. I walked. The sun had started to slide behind the apartment blocks by the time I reached the gravel lot at the edge of the trees, and the air had that metal taste it gets in October, right before the cold really settles in.

There was a trail past the baseball diamond. I didn’t need to look for it. My feet knew it. That scared me more than anything else that day. Rian’s body went down the path without asking me, past the bench with the missing slat, past a tree somebody had carved a heart into, and every step it took, the knot in my chest pulled a little tighter.

The trestle came up out of the woods all at once.

It was smaller than I’d pictured. Old railroad ties gone gray and soft, rusted rails still bolted down, maybe forty feet across, with nothing under it but a drop to the creek. The water was low and brown now. It barely made a sound.

I stopped at the edge where the path met the first tie, and the wall in Rian’s head came down.

I didn’t get a warning. It went all at once, like the floor of a house giving way.

It was cold. That was the first thing. Cold enough that the cigarette smoke hung in front of our faces. Kyle Brandt was sitting on the rail with his legs hanging over, doing the thing where he blew rings and acted like he’d invented it. Jonah Pike was next to him, laughing at everything. I was fifteen. I had a hoodie two sizes too big, and I wanted so badly to be there that it made me sick.

Then I heard him. Hey! Hey, wait up!

Theo Hale came running down the tracks with his backpack bouncing, eleven years old, a kid who’d spent half his life trying to keep up with his big brother’s friends and never once been invited. He was red in the face from running. He was grinning like he’d found us by accident.

Go home, Theo.

I said it the way you swat a fly. Kyle snickered. Theo’s face did something small and awful. It folded up, just for a second, and then it set, and he lifted his chin the way kids do when they’re not going to cry.

I can do it, he said. I can cross. Marcus lets me.

Nobody asked.

I can!

And before any of us said anything, he’d stepped out onto the rail.

I remember Kyle going quiet. I remember thinking, with a thin little thread of hope, that he’d get halfway and turn around, and it would be funny, and we’d all go home. He was doing fine. He had his arms out. The wind caught his jacket. He got about twenty feet over the water, grinning back at us, and then his sneaker slid on a wet tie.

It didn’t take long. That was what I couldn’t forgive afterward, what Rian couldn’t. It took no time at all. One second a kid was balanced on a rail, and the next there was only the sound of the water taking him.

I felt Rian stand up. I felt his hands go cold. I felt the full, flat, stupid weight of what he was looking at, and I felt the part of him that should have run to the edge, should have jumped, should have screamed, and didn’t. He just stood there. And somewhere behind him, Kyle was saying, quick and low, Oh my God. Oh my God. We have to go. If we’re here, we’re done. Come on, he can swim, he’ll get out. Come on, Rian.

And Rian went.

That was the thing. That was the whole thing. He didn’t push anyone. He didn’t do anything. He turned around and ran with the others, down the path, through the trees, and by the time he reached the road he’d already started rewriting it in his head. We weren’t there. I didn’t see anything. He said it to the detective three days later, in his mother’s kitchen, with his hands flat on his knees and his voice perfectly steady.

I came back to myself on my knees in the gravel.

I wasn’t crying, exactly. Rian’s body was, though, and I didn’t have the first idea how to stop it. It came up through my ribs in big, ugly hitches, and I let it. There wasn’t anything to do with it except let it.

Because it wasn’t mine, and it was. The guilt had gone through me like a nail. I’d felt every bit of it: the cold in the hands, the lie in the mouth, the two years of lying awake at three in the morning with the sound of the water. Rian hadn’t been a bad kid. He’d been a scared one. Scared kids do bad things, and then they spend the rest of their lives trying not to look at them.

I thought about Owen Pruitt in that stairwell. About his face. I hadn’t stood up for anybody. I’d done the same thing as Rian. I’d found the soft spot and leaned.

“That’s the weight,” the Intercessor said, close by.

I didn’t look up. “Is this what you wanted me to see?”

“It’s what he wanted. He just didn’t know how to ask for it.” The voice was quieter than I’d ever heard it. “That’s the work, Cal. You don’t fix the thing. You carry it, until it can be set down by somebody who’s brave enough to.”

I wiped my face with the sleeve of Rian’s hoodie and got up.

Then I saw the figure on the trestle.

He was standing about halfway out, right where Theo had been, with his back to me and his arms hanging at his sides. Navy jacket. Broad shoulders. His shoes were on the very edge of the tie, and the water was a long way below.

“Hale,” I said.

He didn’t turn around.

“Friday,” said the Intercessor, almost gently. “I told you it breaks.”