The Intruders Read Free

the same table at lunch, of course, but would wind up at one nearby, close to Gary’s line of sight. She would engineer “accidental” bumps in the corridor but manage nothing more than nervous laughs. I even saw her a couple of Fridays out at Radical Bob’s, a burger/pizza place where people tended to start the weekend. She would stop by whatever table Fisher was sitting at and deliver some remark about a class or assignment, which would fall to the floor like a brick. Then she would wander off, a little too slowly now, as if hoping to be called back. This never happened. Other than being mildly perplexed, I doubt Fisher had the slightest clue what was going on. After a couple weeks, a deal was done in some gilded back room—or the backseat of a gilded car, more likely—and one morning Gary was to be found in the company of Courtney Willis, textbook hot blonde. Life went on.
    For most of us.
    Two days later Donna was found in the bathtub at her parents’ home. Her wrists had been cut with determination and only one testing slash on the forearm. The adult consensus, which I overheard more than once, was that it could not have been a fast way to go—despite a last-ditch attempt to hasten progress by pushing a pair of nail scissors deep into her right eye socket, as if that crescent scar had been some kind of omen. There was a handwritten letter to Gary Fisher on the floor, the words blurred by water that had spilled over the edges of the tub. Lots of people later claimed to have seen the letter, or a photocopy, or overheard someone saying what was in it. But, as far as I know, none of this was true.
    News spread fast. People went through the motions, and there were outbreaks of crying and prayer, but I don’t think any of us were shaken to our core. Personally, I was not surprised or even particularly sorry. That sounds callous, but the truth was, it felt like it made sense. Donna was a weird chick.
    A strange girl, a dumb death. End of story.
    Or so it seemed to most of us. Gary Fisher’s reaction was different, and at the time it was the most surprising thing I had ever seen. Everything was new and strange back then, events backlit by the foreshortened perspective of a fledgling life. The guy who did something halfway cool one time became our very own Clint Eastwood. A party that happened a year before could take on the status of legend, generating nicknames that would last a lifetime. And when someone went tearing out into the farther reaches of left field, it tended to stick in your mind.
    On the following Monday, we heard that Fisher had quit the team. All the teams. He stood there and let the coaches bawl him out, then just walked away. Maybe these days you’d get some kind of slacker kudos for that kind of shit. Not in the 1980s, and not in the town where I grew up. It was so out there it was disturbing—the Alpha Teenager Who Resigned. Fisher became the guy you’d see wandering across the campus in transit between the library and class, as if he’d slipped into Donna’s slot. And he worked. Hard. Over the next months, he hauled his grade-point average up, first a little, then a lot. He went from being a C student—and some of those had been massaged through sports prowess—to B’s and some regular A’s. Maybe he was getting parent-funded extra tutoring after school, but actually I doubt it. I think he just jumped tracks, decided to be some other guy. By the end you hardly ever saw him except in class. The masses dealt with him warily. No one wanted to get too close, in case the madness was catching.
    I did see him this one afternoon, though. I’d been out training for our last-ever track meet and stayed on after the rest of the team left. Theoretically I was practicing the javelin, but really I just liked being there when no one else was around. I’d spent a lot of hours running that track, and it had started to dawn on me that the end was coming and some things were happening for the last time. As