Free Paranoid Park by Blake Nelson Page B

then I knew I should call you right away.”
    Okay, that was good. Better to just get everything out in the open. It was just manslaughter, right? Or whatever you call it when someone accidentally gets killed. And I’m a minor. And I didn’t know! That was the key. I didn’t even know that he died!
    I dialed the police. Then I slammed the phone down again. No. What if something went wrong? What if Scratch thought I snitched on him? He would kill me. He would have friends in jail who would kill me. If I told the cops about Scratch, I was taking a huge risk. I had to leave Scratch out of it. If I could.
    What about footprints? There must have been footprints at the scene of the crime. And blood. Did I track blood somewhere? What about that sports car that saw me skating away from the train tracks? I had totally forgotten about that.
    This was getting crazy. I had to calm down. I had to refocus and think logically. Scratch was probably long gone. He had a ten-day head start. He was probably a million miles away in Canada, or Mexico. And he was smart. Wherever he was, they would never find him.
    What about witnesses? Who else was at Paranoid that night? The two friends of Scratch’s. They would remember me. Paisley was the girl’s name. And the other guy. I didn’t remember his name. Maybe I never knew it.
    More importantly: Did I tell them my name? No, I did not. Did I tell them I had a car? No, I lied and said I didn’t. Did I tell them where I lived? No, I did not. I didn’t tell them anything because I was afraid of them and I didn’t want them to know who I really was. Okay, but would they remember what I looked like? Probably not—I was a Prep, completely ordinary; I looked like a million other high-school students.
    But what if Scratch went back there? What if they were all together somewhere? And what if they get scared and decide to blame it all on me, to protect themselves?
    It was a terrible night. I lay in bed, my brain spiraling downward, faster and faster, every possibility I could think of, every course of action, it would all end in disaster. I could feel the weight of it destroying me. No matter what I did, I had killed someone. There was no escaping that. Someone would tell, someone would remember me, something would go wrong. And then the police would come.
    I thought about the police. It was really my fear of them that had stopped me from doing anything. But why didn’t I trust the police? And why was I so quick to think of myself as a criminal? Why was I so sure this would all somehow go against me?
    I had a revelation then, lying in bed in the dark: I was a bad person.
    I was. I realized it all at once. That explained everything. Character is fate. My English teacher had written it on the board at the beginning of school. I had a bad character, I was a bad person, and now my fate had caught up to me.
    In my mind I went through every bad thing I had ever done. I’d lied to people, I’d stolen stuff, I beat up Howie Zimmerman in fourth grade. I threw a shopping cart in the Clackamas River my freshman year. I kicked the side mirror off a car once when I’d crashed skateboarding. The list was endless. It covered every stage of my life. I had just that weekend had sex with a girl I didn’t even like!

    At dawn I fell asleep for a few minutes, and then the alarm went off. I had to go to school. I went to the bathroom and not even the hottest water in the shower could loosen the tightness in my back and neck. My whole body was like a throbbing knot. In the mirror, my face was swollen and blotched red. I looked so terrible I thought for sure my mother would say something.
    But she had her own problems. I ate breakfast and avoided the newspaper that Henry had spread over the table. I was a bad person. I had accepted that over the night. I was evil and I would die and then I would be off the planet and that would be good. It would be good for me. It would be good for the planet.
    Then I started to cry. I