The Loop - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jeremy Robert Johnson is the author of the critically acclaimed collection Entropy in Bloom as well as the breakthrough cult novel Skullcrack City. His fiction has been praised by The Washington Post and Publishers Weekly, authors such as David Wong, Chuck Palahniuk, and Jack Ketchum, and has appeared internationally in numerous anthologies and magazines. In 2008, he worked with The Mars Volta to tell the story behind their Grammy Award–winning album, The Bedlam in Goliath. In 2010 he spoke about weirdness and metaphor as a survival tool at the Fractal 10 conference in Medellin, Colombia. In 2017, his short story “When Susurrus Stirs” was adapted for film and won numerous awards including the Final Frame Grand Prize and Best Short Film at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival. Jeremy is intermittently social over at Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter @JRL_Is_Probable.

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Chapter One: A Reportable Incident

chapter one A REPORTABLE INCIDENT

Lucy wrote “Fucking animals!” on a piece of notebook paper, and around those words she drew arrows pointing in every direction.

She wanted to rip the page from her binder and slide it to Bucket, but he was stuck two rows over, separated from her ever since Mr. Chambers caught them giggling at the absurd photoshopped pics on Bucket’s phone.

Lucy missed sitting next to Bucket, and more with each passing week. He was the only other brown kid in class—hell, one of only four at the whole school—and it was calming when he was with her. She didn’t feel so… examined. Bucket would never dare to touch her hair, or say he was “jealous of her tan,” or worse yet, call her “exotic” and make her feel like a creature at the goddamn zoo.

But now he was across the room, face buried in his textbook, and she was alone, and she wished she’d never laughed at that picture of Wilford Brimley riding a manatee into an old-timey western sunset, yelling something about “diabeetus.” If there was a dumber way to lose access to her best friend, she couldn’t think of it.

Honestly, they could have been in worse trouble with the phone event. If Mr. Chambers had swiped deeper into Bucket’s image files instead of turning the phone off and placing it on his desk, then he might have found the dozens of pictures where Bucket had pasted shots of himself into screencaps from lesbian porn: in some he gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up; in others he sipped on a cup of tea, pinkie out, or casually sat between two women who were about to, according to the film, “try kissing a little, just to see what it’s like.”

Bucket claimed his obsession with the videos came from his “model girlfriend back in Cali who totally went both ways,” but Lucy had her doubts. Still, she wanted to understand Bucket’s fascination. She even tried watching a clip from his favorite site—notjustroommates.com—but found the footage did little for her. She spent the day in a funk after that, hoping some switch would flip in her head and allow her to like girls. Seemed like that would be easier, somehow, especially once she went to college and left the uppity bitches at Spring Meadow High far, far behind.

But no—it was still Nate Carver’s big hands and wide back and perfect smile she thought of when she rubbed against her pillow at night. Even worse, Nate was one of them: he lived on Brower Butte in a house so big it gave her vertigo if she looked up to its peak, and like most of the other rich kids in town his parents were both employed at St. Andrews—the hospital and IMTECH were the only two places in Turner Falls for making serious money, at least until the data centers opened. That hospital money meant Nate got a brand-new car for his sixteenth birthday. When he posted up on the basketball court, he wore custom shoes, which he bragged had to be insured before they could even ship. His brother was at Harvard, and Nate claimed he was headed there himself. Said his grandpa’s name was on a plaque at the library. “I’m a slam dunk.”

Lucy knew at least twenty kids smarter than Nate, but none came from money, and zero percent of them would ever feel comfortable describing themselves as “a slam dunk.” So when Lucy thought about Nate, she wished for two very different things at the same time: his beautiful body on top of hers, and his beautiful body utterly destroyed in a fiery accident involving his fancy new car and a telephone pole.

Lucy tried to focus on Mr. Chambers at the front of the room, but the dull hum of something about partial derivatives was interrupted when Ben Brumke unleashed a bone-rattler of a belch and the kids around him in the back corner moaned and raised their sleeves to their faces, anticipating the gut-rot stink of Ben’s homemade protein shakes. Bucket, who often made the mistake of expressing his feelings aloud, said, “Brumke’s eating roadkill again,” and a few in the class laughed. But then Ben threw his pen at Bucket and said, “Shut your face, Sandy,” and Mr. Chambers cleared his throat in a way that let everyone know they needed to calm down or face a lecture.

Half the kids at school called Bucket “Sandy,” ever since they found out he came to the States from Pakistan, and all the kids knew what was really being said. Lucy got her share of nasty bullshit too—plenty of “Loogie” and “Go back to Mexico” and “taco bitch” and “donkey fucker,” and after a while she didn’t even care enough to tell them she was actually from Peru. She didn’t feel like they deserved to know any true things about her, and she could imagine all the Paddington jokes at her expense. More than that, she didn’t want them being able to research why she had been adopted by the Hendersons in the first place. Lucy Henderson had it bad enough—god only knew how they’d treat Lucia Alvarez, especially if they knew what her birth parents had done…

Lucy looked back at Bucket, the way he was holding in his anger. Their sophomore year had been so bad that they both ended up needing bite guards at night to save their teeth from grinding. Bucket’s jaw was clenched now, his hands white-knuckled around the edges of his desk. Bucket made eye contact with her and Lucy did her best to send a message with her face.

This is temporary. One more year, and we both leave this podunk hillbilly bullshit town forever.

Turner Falls, Oregon, in the rearview mirror. Middle fingers up as we drive.

We leave these fucking animals behind.

Bucket took a breath. He released his death grip on the desktop.

Mr. Chambers sensed the tension and turned toward the class. “I know it can be tough to focus this close to the end of the school year, but we’ve got one more chapter to cover before the final on Thursday, and then we’re done for the year. Can we keep the insults to a minimum, Mr. Brumke?”

“Sure.”

“And Mr. Marwani?”

“Ben’s the one who’s belching right in—”

“Mr. Marwani?”

Bucket huffed. “Sure.”

The class fell into a lull then. The too-brief excitement had drifted to nothing, and Mr. Chambers’s monotone continued to recite the magic terms all the students would need to memorize before their next shot at the SAT’s, and the school’s meager, outdated cooling system did what it could to battle the desert heat, which transformed their big beige brick of a school into a low-key oven. For a moment the room drifted into a kind of soporific peace.

It was so surprisingly calm that it took a few minutes before anyone in the room even noticed the way that Chris Carmichael was twitching at his desk.

Jake Bernhardt sat right behind Chris, a few desks back from the front of the room.

Chris’s family lived way out in Cascade Woods, a ramshackle assemblage of manufactured homes and trailers notorious for their meth lab explosions. You did your best to not take a wrong turn in Cascade Woods, lest you end up with some ganked-out tweeker shotgunning your ass with rock salt (or worse—rumors said there were bodies buried in the deep boonies).

Jake’s family hailed from Brower Butte, and their property was...