So Shelly Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2011 by Ty Roth

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

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  eISBN: 978-0-375-89792-4

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  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part Two

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part Three

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Afterword

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  Most of us like to believe that we are born to do great things, maybe even to be famous. Truth is, we aren’t and we won’t.

  Instead, we are of the anonymous dark energy that accounts for nearly 96 percent of the universe. Sure, in our corners of wherever, we may play relatively significant roles and accomplish important “stuff” like earning good grades and incomes, falling in love, raising families, maybe even advancing worthy social causes, but in the cosmic picture, the vast majority of people—dead, living, or yet to be born—had, have, or will have no freaking clue that we once were, are, or will be.

  Sucks. Doesn’t it?

  “So, what’s the point?” you ask.

  I can tell you. Better yet, later on, I’ll show you. But don’t be disappointed when you realize that you’ve heard it before, and that, deep down, you already knew the answer.

  Are you ready?

  Love and death.

  In the end, that’s all there is. Do those two things well, and you may have a chance at something close to a meaningful existence. Screw them up, and life is pretty pathetic.

  “Okay,” you’re thinking. “Love, I understand.”

  But do you? We throw the word around so much that it is nearly meaningless. We’ve reduced the experience of “being in love” to that which can be summarized in a pop song or portrayed in a chick flick. Then we’re angry and disillusioned when love disappoints. Here’s a little secret: love always disappoints. It’s the conscious choice to love someone or not to love someone, despite the disappointment, that makes it beautiful.

  And it is beautiful. I know that now.

  “Fine,” you say. “But isn’t this focus on death a little morbid?”

  I’ll admit, there was a time when I would have said the same thing. Not anymore. Death exists. You can piss and moan about it all you want, but it still exists. And I can guarantee you this: unless you learn to wrap your brain around the fact that you are eventually going to die, you’ll never wrap your arms around the less certain fact that you are currently living.

  “How do you know these things?” you wonder.

  I know because two friends, Gordon Byron and Michelle (Shelly) Shelley, showed me that love and death are far more complicated than your teachers, your priests, and pop culture want you to believe. Until a few months ago, Gordon and Shelly were classmates a year ahead of me in high school. They’re the reason I wrote this. They’re the ones who showed me that no matter how young or old you are, you’d better start living and loving to the fullest right now. And if, by sharing their stories, I can prove that to you, it might make my having lived worthwhile.

  I’m Keats (rhymes with “sheets”). I’m dying. And I don’t mean in a someday sort of way, but as in sooner rather than later. I can’t tell you exactly when or of what just yet, but trust me, I know. It’s the curse of the Keatses. We die young: my paternal grandparents died before I was born, both of my parents died before they reached forty, and my brother is next door wasting away to nothing as I type. The Disease, as Tom likes to call his tuberculosis, is rapidly decelerating his functionality to zero.

  That’s right, tuberculosis.

  I know what you’re thinking. “Americans don’t die of tuberculosis. That’s some third world shit.”

  Well, they do sometimes, in poor neighborhoods, especially when their immune system, like Tom’s, has been weakened by diabetes. Add occasional heroin injections to the mix and the lungs become a breeding ground for the bacterium called Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which gives its name to the Disease. If you’ve never been poor, you’d be surprised at what poor people do … or do not do. There are approximately thirteen thousand new cases of tuberculosis reported every year.

  Tom’s death march follows four years of watching our father waste away from ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease). (More than five thousand new cases of ALS are diagnosed in America each year. The vast majority of those diagnosed die within four to five years). Shortly after our father died, our mother died from apathy and self-pity (no statistics available).

  Prior to the events I’m about to relate, I tried to cocoon myself, to hide from death. However, all I accomplished was to hide from life. Now I’ve accepted my premature mortality as a matter of fact, and I’ll confront whatever assassin God, nature, or chance sends for me.

  Yeah, yeah. I know what you’re thinking. “Aren’t you being a little irrational? Oversensitive? A bit of a hypochondriac?”

  Am I? Approximately eighty thousand young people (between the ages of fifteen and thirty) die every year, and that’s just in America. I know. I’ve done the research. (The statistics are a coping mechanism that I’ve yet to relinquish, but I’m working on it.)

  The good news is that in the three months since Gordon and I said goodbye to Shelly, my fatalism has fueled the urgency with which I now try to live, and it has prompted me to record the events of this story while I’m still around and able.

  A brief but necessary disclaimer: much of this account is a piecing-together of events that I didn’t witness and conversations in which I did not partake. The bulk of my knowledge was gained as I listened to an increasingly inebriated Shelly deliver a monologue spanning nearly ten hours and covering close to eighteen years of her and Gordon’s lives. My re-creation is as faithful as possible to the truth as regards the personalities, philosophies, and conversational tendencies of those involved. But after all, who’s to say what’s truth? Who’s to say what’s not?

  ALAS! THEY WERE SO YOUNG, SO BEAUTIFUL,

  SO LONELY, LOVING, HELPLESS, AND THE HOUR

  WAS THAT IN WHICH THE HEART IS ALWAYS FULL,

  AND, HAVING O’ER ITSELF NO FURTHER POWER,

  PROMPTS DEEDS ETERNITY CAN NOT ANNUL.

  —GEORGE GORDON,

  LORD BYRON, DON JUAN

  1

  It was the last day of school and the first day of summer. One of those limbo
days, when you’re not quite sure if you’re ending or beginning. Either way, my junior year was over, and I hoped I’d never see another one like it. However, there was one more thing Gordon and I had to do before I could put the year fully to rest.

  The gym was hotter than hell, but Gordon leaned back, as cool as ever, in one of the ungodly uncomfortable metal folding chairs that were arranged in a semicircle around a makeshift altar on which rested a black marble urn containing the ashes of our mutual best friend, Shelly. Gordon’s plan was to steal the urn, drive to Shelly’s, break into the pool shed where she’d kept her beloved boom box, shoot over to the island in one of Gordon’s powerboats, and then spread her ashes while playing her favorite song from a disc she had bequeathed to me prior to her death. Not much in the way of funeral tributes, but all so Shelly.

  According to Gordon, it was what she wanted, which, I know, leads to the question: Why would a healthy eighteen-year-old have thought to share her final wish at all, unless, of course, she knew her death was imminent? And if Gordon knew her demise was coming, why didn’t he tell me? It seems obvious now; most things do in retrospect. But since Gordon and Shelly had been friends and neighbors for their entire lives, I figured her final wish had been the product of whimsical childhood speculation, protected by a secretly sworn pact. Shelly was a dreamer like that, full of “What if’s” and “If only’s.”

  Even if I had thought to ask the right questions at the appropriate times, the answers would have come too late to change the outcome. Anyway, even knowing what I know now, I probably wouldn’t have changed a thing.

  In theory, Gordon’s plan was simple. In execution, it was not.

  Trinity’s gymnasium was packed for the early-evening wake with awkward teenage mourners—awkward, of course, because, while most present had flushed a goldfish or two or lost the occasional grandparent, few had attended a wake for someone their own age. Shelly’s death was doubly aberrant, considering how extraordinarily alive she had always been—so alive that even the memory of her felt more vibrant than the breathing bodies that sat all around me. I, however, felt right at home. In just the past two years, I’d attended funerals for both of my parents, and Tom was, as I’ve said, not far behind.

  Due to Shelly’s fall-semester expulsion from Trinity, the school’s administrators had hesitated to grant her father’s request for the use of the gymnasium, which was the only venue big enough in all of Ogontz, Ohio, to accommodate the large outpouring of young mourners. I’ve learned that although there is a seemingly endless list of indiscretions that one may perform without being excommunicated from Trinity—including exposing yourself to a junior varsity cheerleader, screwing your English teacher, and stealing and consuming communion wine from the school chapel, all of which Gordon committed with relative impunity—writing a measly five-hundred-word essay on the necessity of atheism that, against all odds, gets published in the “My Turn” section of Newsweek is not on it. It was only Mr. Shelley’s record of consistent and generous donations that convinced the administration to allow the wake to take place on school grounds.

  But his donation, of an amount that only he, God, and Monsignor Moore (the pastor at All Saints Catholic Church) knew, was not an act of selfless grief. The public wake at Trinity was a transparent ploy by Shelly’s father to keep her friends (think Gordon) away from the official funeral services. A members-of-the-family-only gathering was planned for the next evening at their home, with a funeral mass at All Saints scheduled for the morning after.

  Like Gordon’s, Shelly’s family lived on a peninsular strip of beach-lined property that juts into Lake Erie, separating the lake from the Ogontz Bay. Locals call that strip the Strand. Seasonal residents from nearby Cleveland and Toledo, and from as far away as Columbus, Cincinnati, and Detroit, populate the majority of the sprawling lakeside mansions during the summer, but a handful of Ogontz’s gentry call Acedia, a gated community on the Strand, home. The ultra-exclusive subdivision was intended to be named for Arcadia, the idyllic rural region of southern Greece, but when the wrought iron gate with the subdivision’s name artistically rendered across the top arrived misspelled, no one bothered to have it corrected or to look up the meaning of “acedia,” which is “spiritual or mental sloth.”

  Most of the “mourners” had hardly known Shelly, but it’s hard to resist any chance for drama or dressing up when you’re a teenager in Ogontz. And drama there was.

  Shelly’s disappearance and the subsequent discovery of her body, washed ashore on a small Lake Erie island, had earned her the sort of attention that nothing in her lifetime ever had. Several national cable networks had sent reporters and camera crews, intrigued by what they called Shelly’s “socialite” family and her connection to Gordon, but the reporters immediately lost interest when foul play was eliminated and her death was ruled an accidental drowning. (Each year, fewer than 3 percent of all deaths of teenagers between the ages of fifteen and nineteen are caused by accidental drowning.) The cameras immediately moved on to their next fatality, this one having been bled dry. (A Class IV hemorrhage, which involves the loss of more than 40 percent of a person’s blood, often results in one’s bleeding to death.)

  Despite the whirring of my mind and the turning of my stomach, I sat relatively still and looked around me. Even with the ceiling exhaust fan humming, the humidity inside the gymnasium refused to vacate the premises, as if its stultifying presence were necessary for the somber occasion and it felt obligated to fulfill its solemn duty. Oblivious to the heat, like a mannequin in some men’s boutique clothing store, Gordon lounged and waited for the opportune moment.

  I sweat and bit my nails while I waited for Gordon’s cue. In my ill-fitting hand-me-down church clothes—I rarely went to church anymore, but that’s what my mother had called any pants other than jeans and any shirts with buttons—I looked like a Geek Squad trainee. Gordon, in contrast, sat unfazed inside a maroon athletic-cut dress shirt open at the collar and tucked into a pair of black designer dress slacks. Unable to subdue my admiration—even on such a somber occasion—I stole sidelong glances at his freakishly good looks. Waves of thick brown, not quite black, hair poured to midway down his ears. The tousled longish locks epitomized the cavalier nature of the mind they concealed. His muted blue eyes peered hawklike over perfectly symmetrical and impossibly high cheekbones curtained by sideburns. I realized then for the first time that it was his mouth to which one was powerlessly drawn. It was almost a girl’s mouth: lips full, moist, and ruby red that closed over and guarded the pleasures and words waiting to rise from his tongue.

  “Now, Keats.” Gordon didn’t ask; he commanded and snapped me out of my reverie.

  He never called me John.

  “Now?” I looked around at the klatches of kids milling about on the gym floor. “There’s too many people.”

  “Exactly. No one’s paying attention to Shelly.”

  Before I could fire a second round of protest, Gordon was up and moving toward the altar. Like a child on parental heels, I followed. En route, I glimpsed Principal Smith with his arms crossed, standing beneath one of the side baskets and engaged in an earnest conversation with Father Fulop. (The puns are obvious and often employed: “Father Fulop Shit,” “Father Feel Up.” You get the picture.) He is Trinity’s youth minister, spiritual counselor, head of the theology department, and first-class douche bag.

  We passed a group of pouty-faced senior girls actually bitching about it being “so Shelly” to upstage them on the weekend of graduation.

  Without hesitation, in a sweeping three-quarters overhand motion, Gordon grabbed a glass vase filled with red and white (Trinity’s colors) roses off of one of the faux marble pedestals arranged on either side of the altar. Dumping the flowers, he continued toward Shelly’s remains, scooped the urn from the altar top, replaced it with the completely dissimilar vase, handed the urn to me, and then proceeded toward the receiving line at the gym entrance.

  Struggling to match his pace and to hide in hi
s expansive shadow, I shoved the urn beneath my arm, inside my jacket. Thinking back, I should have known better than to fear being anything but invisible next to George Gordon Byron.

  With typical nonchalance, Gordon continued toward the Shelley family, who, like most in the Trinity community, had grown to hate his guts. No one, however, disliked Gordon as much as Mr. Shelley, whose loathing was well earned. More on that later.

  “Sorry for your loss,” Gordon said. His extended hand was immediately rejected with an if-looks-could-kill stare from Shelly’s father, who was, as of yet, oblivious to the fact that we had stolen the last of his daughter. “Right. Well, fuck you too.”

  As Shelly’s father lunged for Gordon’s throat (after accidental deaths, homicide is the most common cause of death among young adults), I managed to slip, unnoticed, out of the gymnasium with Shelly.

  Seconds later, Gordon emerged with shirt tousled and neck scratched, but he smiled with devilish glee.

  2

  To even begin to understand Shelly, you have to risk knowing Gordon. To know Gordon, you have to consider the Tim Burton movie-in-the-making world that was his childhood.

  Most of what I know of Gordon, outside of Shelly’s epic monologue, I learned in snippets from Shelly or gleaned from the few-and-far-between conversations I had with him, but I have to believe that much of what he shared was, to say the least, embellished. Anyway, he is not the type of person one knows so much as knows of. Some things I learned from the publicity that followed the publication of his bestselling fantasy novel. In the spring of his eighth-grade year, Gordon finished his novel and Googled New York City literary agencies until he found the one that was the largest and most prestigious. By June, Gordon and his mother had signed contracts enlisting Martin Literary LLC as Gordon’s representative.

  With a keen understanding of the marketplace and the particular needs and interests of the various major publishing houses, Ms. Mandy Martin had Manfred placed within a week, with a healthy advance and a major—but nonnegotiable—request from Adam Pandroth of Pandroth Publications: “Make Manfred a vampire. That shit sells.” (No one has ever died from a vampire bite.) After a quick rewrite, a professional edit, and an unusually high marketing budget for a first-time and teenage novelist, Manfred was fast-tracked for release the following summer.