Wearing My Smile | ✔

Monday, April 2nd, 2007

Late afternoon

Cold, nondescript grey room with grey metal chair and grey metal table. The bulb right above me was too bright. I sat in front of the uniformed man, calling himself Sergeant Jones, with his kind eyes and greying hair around his ears. Apparently, he knew me. He knew my father. Sometimes I forgot what a small town our place was, Sam, so much that everyone knew everybody else. He called a name and I thought perhaps I'd forgotten it because of how unfamiliar it had sounded. I felt as though I was underwater. “Rumon White?” he asked. “That's your full name, isn't it?”

I didn't know if it was. I'd always been just 'Roo'. “Yes.”

“We're sorry about this, but we need to check some things before we can decide the final verdict.” Final verdict. How detached and clinical it had sounded. As if someone hadn't just died.

“It's alright.” My voice didn't sound like mine. It was just a croak. There was no trace of me anywhere.

“Okay. According to the report, you were the last person Samson Brown had seen before his death?”

I saw you in the corner of that room, staring at me the way you did sometimes, as if I was a puzzle and you couldn't quite figure me out. I looked down to your mouth. It was a mass of red, your jaw unhinged from its socket. You nodded your head. I replied, “Yes.”

“When was the last time you saw him before that?”

“27th of March 2007.”

“So six days prior?”

“Yes.”

He wrote it down and asked, “What did both of you do or talk about on that last day? Do you have any idea where he'd been in the last six days?”

I remembered the fight and your back as you were leaving. “We had a fight about his drinking before he left, but it was… I don't know. It's just a fight we have sometimes. I didn't know where he was going or where he'd been, no.”

“Did Samson realize that he was a minor and therefore shouldn't have drunk alcoholic beverages in the first place?”

It felt as if I was being choked, but my voice was steady when I replied, “He was well aware.”

Sergeant Jones wrote that down. “Did he try to contact you in the past six days?”

“No.”

“Not at all?”

“When Sam—I mean, Samson decided to leave, he usually did it to clear his mind for a while. I couldn't. It was never possible for me to contact him then. He usually came back before late at night.” Playing in my mind was the back of the police checking up your corpse, whispering to one another, Where did he get the gun?

He wrote that down then finally looked at me in the eyes. “How old are you, Rumon?”

A trick question. It must have been. Ringing in my ears was the loud sound of your gun, your soft apology, my scream. The night was silent, moon fat and full in the dark sky. A sharp tang of blood in my nostrils and the tip of my tongue. “Seventeen.” Just like you were, but I didn't add.

His eyes, Sam. His eyes looked so sad that I felt my eyes blur. There was a regret there, so much understanding that it made me feel sick to the stomach, as though he had seen this before and wasn't that just terrible, Sam? To see the scenes of your death over and over again? Different person, different boys, different faces? He said, “Your eighteenth birthday is in a week.” And I hated it, Sam. I hated it that he reminded me of how I'd get to turn eighteen while you wouldn't. I hated the breath I took in every second you had stopped breathing.

But I didn't say any of it. My hands curled into fists under the table, but I bit down the insides of my mouth until a metallic taste of blood came to ground me.

He looked conflicted then. He wore a face of a person who knew he shouldn't have done it, but he gripped me briefly on my shoulders, as if conveying how sorry he was and I found that I hated his comfort too. I wondered when I had turned into that hateful person you specifically told me I would never become. He cleared his throat and asked, “Okay, could you please tell us again the events from the start?”

I threw a glance at you, but you were no longer looking at me. Instead, I saw your profile from your side as you looked up to the lamp the way you did when we were eleven and you were playing with the sun rays between your fingers. You were clean, no dirt or blood on your body. Blond hair tousled like you'd just woken up from your sleep, soft, glinting under the light. You saw me looking and you smiled. I could almost hear your laughter.

Everything was shaking. The room, my hands, my voice, my fingers. That room was a confession box and my sin poured out of my mouth like poison, dripping black onto the neat grey floor, and you were my victim.