Black Box: Book Three

49~ The Spire in the Woods (Part Two)

A few days after Rob's suicide, a handful of young reporters showed up at school trawling for quotes. Before the faculty could chase them out, they pushed hard for someone, anyone, to give support to the lone-wolf-school-shooter angle. Rob's real friends flatly refused to speak to the reporters, but there's a certain element among young people who only want attention, and the same kids who showed up for the grief counseling, despite never having been particularly close to Rob, were the first in line to provide quotes.

The next day, the local paper was filled with statements like, "'No one really knew him,' says student Melissa Bennett." For Fletch it was a slap in the face.

"What? 'Cause she didn't know him, nobody could?" About a week or so after Rob died, Fletch resumed picking me up in the morning. "I don't count? Murph doesn't count? Fucking bullshit!"

Listening to him rant about the story in the paper made me think that maybe I should have spoken to the reporters. I wouldn't have pretended to have had any special insight into Rob's mental state, but it might have been nice for his friends and family to have seen something simple and honest, something that didn't fit into the lone-wolf narrative. Even if it was nothing more than saying, "He had friends. They're just not talking to you because they're grieving, you heartless parasite."

I wish I had done that, but I didn't. I also wish I could tell you that I was the one who wrote an Op Ed the following week roasting the reporters for coming into a school and pushing students still reeling from the shock of losing a classmate into spouting a whole bunch of pop-psych, pseudo-scientific nonsense, but that wasn't me either. That was some senior I didn't know very well.

I had made a few tenuous attempts at getting Fletch to open up about Rob. The best I had managed was to get him ranting about the kids in the grief counseling sessions that didn't belong. Talking about them got the normally placid Fletch so angry I thought he might have an aneurysm. After that, I quickly gave up.

Once I resolved not to pry into Fletch's life, our morning rides settled into something almost comfortable. Our casual friendship was like a knee recovering from an injury: fine so long as we didn't put any weight on it. And that was still the state of things the day we returned to school after Drew DeLuca's birthday.

Today, tracking down the story that lead me to the Spire would have been a piece of cake (for me, anyways. For you, I've changed too many details). I could have typed that little rhyming snippet of Rob's suicide note into Google and had my answer in seconds. But the Internet wasn't as robust back then. Hell, I'm pretty sure in 1999 I was still using Hotbot.

Nonetheless, from the second I returned from Drew's until school started on Monday, I spent every waking minute scouring every Haunted Places book and paranormal website I could find, looking for the phrase, "And every hour, I see her face, as she runs the endless race," or some variation. By the end of the weekend, half the contents of my bookshelf had been redistributed throughout the house, and I had skimmed countless Geocities pages, scrolling past dancing ghost GIF after dancing ghost GIF until my eyes bled, but still had nothing to show for it.

I knew I couldn't bring it up with Fletch. Not directly, at any rate. Rob's death was still a raw nerve. So I went to the only person who knew even more about ghost stories than I did: Scary Kerry.

Growing up in the woods of New Hampshire at the foot of the White Mountains wasn't all bad. My school had a hiking club that also taught us elementary wilderness survival skills. It was immensely popular, mainly because it culminated in a week-long hike, which meant you got to miss a week of school. As freshmen, my friends and I all signed up to go together that fall, but two weeks before the big event, I came down with a case of antibiotic-resistant strep throat and had to have my tonsils removed. Fun.