The Smaller Evil Page 6

  Only they hadn’t told him how.

  So he did nothing but stand there.

  He watched the wind rattle the trees below.

  He watched the needles fall from the branches.

  State your truth, they’d told him. State it loud. And why was that so hard? Why would it be easier for him to run and hide or claw his skin or simply swan dive to his death rather than do what was being asked of him?

  His knees trembled, but he kept standing there. Right on the edge.

  But Arman also kept thinking. Of what he’d left behind. Of what he’d found in the short time he’d been here.

  Like the cook’s affection.

  Like Mari’s kindness.

  Like Beau’s blind faith in him.

  And he thought of the people below. Surely they already knew the truth about how pathetic he was. Standing up here for so long, it wasn’t something he could hide.

  So it doesn’t matter what you say, he told himself. Speak or don’t speak.

  No one’s listening anyway.

  That’s when Arman took a deep breath and leaned forward. He cupped his hands around his mouth and then he shouted out the words he didn’t want to admit, but which lived and breathed in the rawest parts of his being.

  A moment later, on the wide wings of the dark night wind, a hundred echoing voices from the clearing below rushed Arman’s truth right back at him.

  “I don’t belong here!” they cried. “I don’t think I can change!”

  DOING YOUR BEST.

  There’s an unfair assumption, you feel. That by design you don’t believe the things you say. That your every word, every deed, is meant as magic. As misdirection. From this follows the notion that what is calculating and deliberate must also be false. That if something is true, it must be obvious, and therefore easy.

  But the truth is never easy. Your own father taught you that, in his slick way, with his cool power of persuasion. “Never tell them what they want to hear,” he’d whisper. “Tell them what they’ll never know.”

  So what you know is this: The truth is something that can be knotted and dark and rooted so deeply that no one even remembers how it came to be. It can be utterly painful. It can be unspeakably cruel.

  It can also be very hard to swallow.

  That’s where you come in, all sweet talk and honeyed tones. You have the power to make the truth taste richer than the kindest lie. You don’t lure the innocent into darkness so much as you open their eyes to the vast night sky. That is your gift.

  The only lies are the ones you tell yourself.

  That you’re a good person.

  That you’re doing what’s best.

  8

  AND THEN THERE WAS LIGHT.

  Lots of it.

  Arman stared down from the edge of Echo Rock. He was awestruck not only by what he’d done, but what he saw. Nearly every single person below had brought with them some object of illumination—hidden from sight before but now out in the open—flashlights, lanterns, headlamps, even those glowing sticks children wore around their necks on Halloween. There were candles, too, scores of them—long tapers threaded through Dixie-cup bases, flickering votives held inside Mason jars, even thick pillars gripped in gloved hands—all lit so quickly it was as if a switch had been flipped. The whole clearing, dark one moment, was now brilliantly aglow. Tiny earthly stars danced in every dimension: their warm light bouncing off granite, shooting up into the trees.

  Arman’s heart swelled.

  It was just so beautiful.

  The night breeze ruffled his hair, his skin tingled with rare pleasure, and Arman didn’t want to move. He didn’t want to leave this moment. He didn’t want to change one damn thing. Yet even in the midst of such beauty and awe, he could still feel the telltale scrabble of rising panic. Was he supposed to have brought something? Was he meant to have a light of his own? Maybe his small part was what was missing from this breathtaking whole. Maybe he was screwing up a responsibility he didn’t even know was his.

  Shit.

  With newfound worry came familiar guilt, and Arman fled the rock. He found the trailhead and scrambled back down to the clearing, carefully navigating the steep terrain so as not to fall to his death. Landing on the forest floor, however, he had no time for questions; he was greeted too quickly by joyous faces and kind words and outstretched hands that clapped his back and squeezed his shoulders and told him how brave he’d been. Arman did his best to stand tall in the face of such praise and admiration. These were things he definitely wasn’t used to and probably never would be. Hell, he’d only done what had been asked of him on Echo Rock because he was too scared not to. It’s not like that was real bravery.

  Was it?

  Then Beau was there. He emerged like a vision from the sea of strangers to throw an arm around Arman, to give him a hale pat and a hearty hug, and in the wake of his presence, Arman couldn’t help but feel good. Well, better, at least. Less frantic. More in control.

  “Wonderful job up there, Arman. Really wonderful.” Beau grinned, and the light he held in his hand was the brightest of all: an old camping lantern, one powered not by batteries but by kerosene, its fat wick brazen with greasy flame-heat. “I knew you could do it. Now you know, too.”

  “Thank you.” Arman squirmed. He hated to sound boastful but didn’t know what else to say.

  “You ready for the walk back?” Beau asked.

  “I think so. But do I need my own light? I didn’t bring one.”

  “Of course you don’t need your own light,” Beau said. “You have ours.”

  • • •

  It took Arman a moment to realize what was happening. Actually, it took him a moment to realize anything was happening at all.

  Without a word, a group of maybe a dozen or so flashlight and candle and lantern holders—Beau included—slowly separated themselves from the crowd and began to surround Arman. In a deliberate sort of way. They moved in unison and linked their arms. They wrapped themselves around him and closed their human circle in tight, then tighter, until he was the sole point of darkness in the center of their light.

  Once formed, the circle began to move. Slow, deliberate steps. Like a walking wave. Their momentum pushed Arman along with them, herding him away from the clearing, back onto the trail.

  Arman hopped on his toes and looked around. He wasn’t the only one being separated from the group. Kira and Dale were also being corralled into their own glowing circles, along with all the other people who’d braved the climb to the top of Echo Rock and confessed their most-intimate truths. Each and every one of them was being swallowed up and subsumed into a ring of luminescence. A symbol of protection, perhaps. Or containment. Arman wasn’t sure which word best described the act of Quarantine.

  Either way, he moved as he was meant to. He had no choice in the matter. While the group surrounding him was determined in their silence, it was clear that this was how they were going to hike back down the mountain—with them herding and him obeying. Arman didn’t think he much liked this turn of events. Not one bit.

  But you can do it, he told himself, and that’s what propelled him forward. This was just another test. Another way to prove his strength. And while Arman didn’t care for tests or any evaluation of his merit, he understood the pragmatism of it all. Otherwise how would anyone know what he was capable of?

  Least of all, himself.

  9

  “TELL US WHY YOU DON’T belong.”

  The words hung in the cool night air. Startled, Arman glanced over at the woman on his left who’d spoken them. She wasn’t anyone he recognized, but she was one of the people gripping a thin candle sleeved by a Dixie cup meant to catch any dripping wax. She held the candle low, by her waist, so that her face was hidden in shadows.

  That’s when Arman realized the woman was speaking to him.

 
“Wait, what?” he asked.

  “On Echo Rock. You said you don’t belong here. Tell us why.”

  Us? Arman looked around. Saw pairs of eyes watching him closely. Not Beau’s, though. The circle had shifted somewhat—their arms now unlinked—but Beau still walked at the front. Always the leader. Arman could only make out his back. His square shoulders.

  Those strange flowy clothes.

  “Why, I don’t know why,” said Arman.

  “Sure you do,” called another voice. “You said it, didn’t you?”

  “Tell us,” insisted a third. This from a man on Arman’s right.

  Arman blinked. “I really don’t know. That’s the truth. I guess—I guess I just feel like anytime there’s the potential for something good in my life, I fuck it up. So I don’t belong anywhere. Not anywhere I want to be.”

  “Tell us what you fuck up,” the man said, and there was something in his tone that felt like an affirmation of Arman’s guilt. Of his inevitable fucked-up-ed-ness.

  “Everything,” he said. “My family. My social life. The basketball team I went out for in eighth grade. A church group I tried joining in tenth. Even coming here. I mean, all I ever want is to feel a part of something. Instead I’m always the piece that doesn’t fit.”

  “How’d you fuck up your family?” another voice asked, but Arman couldn’t see who it was.

  “I fucked up by being born,” he mumbled.

  “Bullshit!” someone behind him called out.

  “No self-pity,” shouted another. “Everyone your age says that. You’re not special.”

  “Be honest,” the first woman told him firmly. The one with the low, drippy candle.

  Arman’s throat went dry. Was there a point to all this? Was he supposed to feel like he was on the verge of passing out or throwing up on his shoes? If that was the case, well, then things were going just great. And he wasn’t lying. His birth was the unfortunate glue that had kept his parents together long after they should have been apart. Those were the years that broke his mother; left her estranged from her family and more bitter than ever when the inevitable split did come. “Fine. For starters, my mom doesn’t like me. She divorced my dad when I was nine and got remarried to a guy who hates my guts. He treats her like crap. In return she treats me pretty crappy, and honestly, I do the same to her.”

  “That’s it?” the woman asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m kind of moody. And I’m anxious a lot.”

  “So your being anxious fucks things up?”

  Arman’s head grazed a tree branch as he walked, dumping a flurry of dead leaves into his hair. “No. I mean, it’s not just being anxious. It’s my whole brain. Who I am. I can’t do things sometimes. I get overwhelmed. So I don’t do anything. It’s gotten me in trouble since I was a kid. My mom’s had to deal with that, I guess.”

  “How’d she deal with it?”

  “Took me to a doctor.” Arman held a hand in front of his face. He didn’t want to run into anything else he couldn’t see.

  “What’d the doctor do?” she asked.

  “Put me on medication.”

  “And now you don’t get overwhelmed anymore?”

  “No, I still do.”

  “Then what’s the point of the medication?”

  “The point is that I don’t get in trouble as much. I can focus. I can finish things that I start.”

  “So you take pills, not to feel better, but to finish things that you start and to stay out of trouble?”

  “I guess.” Arman squinted into the darkness ahead. “Are we almost back now? My legs hurt. I’m tired.”

  “Jesus,” someone behind him muttered. “What’s with this kid?”

  “How’s school for you then?” the woman asked. “Is it better? Now that you’re on medication?”

  Arman snorted. “No. I hate school.”

  “What do you hate about it?”

  Was there something not to hate? “It sucks. People don’t like me. And I don’t mean they dislike me either. They just don’t notice me. Do you know how many times someone’s turned off the classroom lights while I’m still in the room? Students. Teachers. It doesn’t matter. They don’t see me.” I’m a ghost, he longed to add but didn’t. Even he knew how pathetic it would sound.

  “Are you only worth what other people see in you?” the woman asked.

  “Yeah. Sure. How people value you determines how they treat you, right? Well, people treat me like I’m invisible. And you know what? Maybe I am.”

  “How do you treat yourself?”

  “The way I deserve to be treated.”

  “Where’s your dad, Arman? Your real dad?”

  “Nowhere good.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means he’s in prison at the moment. He’ll be there for a while.”

  “Why’s he in prison?”

  “Uh-uh,” Arman said, and one of his legs was really hurting now. The left one. He’d banged it climbing up that rock. “No way. I’m not going to talk about my father. He’s not important.”

  “Why are you bleeding?”

  A surprise: It was Beau who’d asked this question. He’d even turned around to do it, and unlike the rest of the group, he held his lantern up to his face as he spoke, showing the warmth of his expression. The wisdom in his eyes. For a flash of an instant, Arman met his gaze.

  Then he looked down.

  Fuck. He’d scratched open the scab on his arm. Not only that, but he’d dug deeper into the wound. Without even realizing it. Blood dripped freely down his wrist. Arman yanked his shirtsleeve down and pressed hard on the gash. Tried to get it to stop.

  “Why are you bleeding?” Beau asked again.

  “I don’t know,” Arman snapped. “I just am.”

  No one responded to this. Not verbally, at least. But the group stopped walking, their glowing lights coming to a sudden halt. This meant Arman had to stop, too. He stood in the center of all those watching eyes. Kept pressing at his arm.

  “What’s going on?” he asked. “Why aren’t we going anywhere?”

  Still nothing.

  “Hello?”

  One by one the people around him sat in the dirt. They held their candles and flashlights and lanterns beneath their chins, so that the lower halves of their faces were visible. It was like watching the tide roll out from the beach to expose the glittering life below, but it was what didn’t come into view that made Arman’s heart stutter. He didn’t see any of the other groups. There were no bobbing lights in the distance. No Kira. No Dale. Worse, he didn’t even recognize where he was, didn’t remember passing through this grove of eucalyptus trees or walking along the edge of this fog-filled ravine.

  Arman wiped his nose with his sleeve. Glanced back at the people surrounding him. Their wall of watchful eyes and flickering candles felt less like protection and more like he was about to be burned at the stake.

  “Fine,” he said flatly. “I made myself bleed. Is that what you want to know? It’s something I do when I get stressed. I can’t help it.”

  “Why are you stressed?” Beau asked.

  “Because of this . . . what we’re doing right now. I don’t want to bare my soul to strangers. That’s a shitty thing to have to do. For me, at least. That’s not why I’m here.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “How can I know unless you tell me?”

  Arman made a gasping sound. He clawed at his throat, digging his nails as deep as they would go. “I’m here to make you proud of me!”

  “Me?”

  “Yes!”

  There was another beat of silence. Then: “Sit down, Arman.”

  He shook his head. “No. I want to go back. I’m sorry. I don’t want to do this.”

  “Sit,�
� Beau commanded.

  So he sat. Right in the damn dirt.

  Beau leaned forward. Took both of Arman’s hands in his. The kerosene lantern burned bright between them, and Beau held on to him for what seemed like forever.

  He held.

  And held.

  And held.

  “I can feel your pain,” Beau said at last. “It’s hot. Like a fever. Your sickness runs deep, son. No wonder you’re willing to spill your own blood to get rid of it.”

  Arman stared at the ground. “Whatever.”

  “Do you understand that I want to help you?”

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  “Then you have to trust me.”

  “I do. It’s just—”

  “And you have to help me in return.”

  “But how can I do that? I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I don’t know anything!”

  “Stand with me.” Beau got to his feet. Arman got up with him but staggered, woozy, as spots flashed before his eyes.

  “I’m fine,” he said, but Beau grabbed on to him. Held him steady. Then he pushed Arman’s shirtsleeves up. Exposed his bleeding wound and all the scars of wounds long past.

  “You have to stop hurting yourself,” Beau said softly.

  “I know.”

  “I mean it. You’ve been taught to turn your pain inward. But that’s wrong. It’s sick. Do you understand me?”

  Arman nodded. “I . . . I think so.”

  “No!” Beau hissed. “That’s your whole damn problem, thinking. Ever since the day we met, you’ve told me what you think about things. But you don’t feel and you don’t do. Not in any meaningful way. Feeling and doing, they’re more important than the thoughts inside your head. They’re our primary channels to health. To immunity.”

  “Huh?” Arman shivered. He couldn’t even pretend to comprehend what was going on.