Power of the Worm

Was I the one who started the fire? Was I the one who killed them all?

Be honest—that’s what you want to know. That’s what you’re dying to ask me.

Was I the one who crept through the frigid December pre-dawn to the three-bedroom home at 44 Evergreen Lane, dribbling a thin stream of gasoline from a grimy red can across a frostbitten front porch? Did I saturate the kitschy welcome mat that instructed me to wipe my feet before coming inside? Was I the one who dumped foul-smelling fluid over the walnut credenza and cutesy coat rack in the breezeway, who splashed it on the elliptical exercise machine gathering dust in the den?

Was I the one who tiptoed up the carpeted stairs to the cold hardwood landing, the can glunk-glunk-glunking beside me, trailing an eye-watering vapor as Dad snored and Mom was deep under a sleeping-pill spell?

Was I the one who lurked outside of five-year-old Tommy’s room as he slept, the cold yellow glow of his night-light flaring through the gap at the bottom of the door? Was I the one who, upon reaching my own room at the end of the hall, drenched my bed, my clothes, my movie posters, my video games, my whole life, saying to hell with it, to hell with everything?

You want to know: Was I the one who burned my family alive?

Maybe you’re like everyone else here in Polk County, Texas—the police chief, the prosecutor, my teachers and classmates who told TV reporters that I was violent and strange and bound to snap sooner or later. Maybe you’ve already made up your mind that I did it. And I could tell you you’re wrong, dead wrong.

But would you believe me?

###

It was two weeks before the fire and Luce was sitting across from me in the cafeteria, her shiny black hair slinking over her shoulders like an oil slick as she fished around inside a plastic bag for the last of her lunch. She plucked out a three-inch-long gummy worm, red at one end and blue at the other, inspecting its limp form in the harsh fluorescent light.

Luce (short for Lucy, which was short for Lucinda) and I sat alone at one end of a long plastic table, quarantined as social pariahs from the rest of our classmates. We were both in “slow learners” classes—me for dyslexia and Luce for untreated ADHD—and each of us counted the other as our best and only friend. The student body buzzed around us, carrying lunch trays and trading gossip and paying us no mind at all.

I was too anxious to eat anything that day. My stomach twisted itself into a knot as I watched Luce hoover up gummy worms, which is all I’d ever seen her eat, at school or otherwise. She was rail thin, and I wondered if her mother fed her at home.

“Why don’t you just kick him in the balls?” she said to me while idly probing the worm with her long, bony fingers. “He’ll never see it coming.”

“Because I’m a chickenshit,” I said. “That’s why.”

She was talking about Cole Flickermann, who’d had it out for me since the beginning of my senior year. He would push me into lockers or shove me into closets or humiliate me in the hallway whenever the mood struck him. He reserved the worst of his abuse for right after the lunch period—I guess bullying is more gratifying on a full stomach. Cole was a year younger than me but three inches taller and fifty pounds heavier and was a linebacker on the football team. I figured fighting back might just make things worse. At least I still had all my teeth.

“You could tell your parents, have them call the school,” Luce said. Her pale, narrow face was screwed up in concentration as she brushed a few excess flavor crystals from the worm’s S-shaped body. They filtered down like snow onto the table.

“Nah, won’t work. Dad hates me even more than Cole does. Mom will be too conked out on wine and Xanax to care. You’d think, with all the money we make from the firm, they could at least buy a conscience.”

Luce didn’t argue. A new bruise was blooming on her upper arm, livid blurple finger marks she’d tried to conceal with makeup. I rarely considered myself lucky, but at least I didn’t get beat up at home like Luce, whose mom stripped for a living and spent her earnings on meth and vodka and cigarettes. The remaining balance was far too small to afford a conscience, even if they could be bought. Even if she’d wanted one.

Luce stopped fiddling with the worm and gazed at me with a sober expression on her face. Her eyes were big and sad and haunting, like an owl’s, and shimmering gray like windblown ash. They were the most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen.

“Give me your hand,” she said.

I did, reaching it across the table to her.

She took my hand in hers, turning it so my palm was facing up. Then, ever so delicately, she placed the gummy worm in my hand.

“Let this worm protect you,” Luce said with a solemn nod and a straight face. It seemed like a joke—sometimes her sense of humor was hard to figure out. Then a snaggletoothed smile spread across her face, reflecting the artificial light like an ice slick beneath a streetlamp.

I cradled the worm in my hand, reveling in the residual warmth left over from Luce’s fingers, until the bell rang. A shiver rattled down my spine. I let out a deep sigh and stood, putting the worm in my front jeans pocket. I figured I could eat it later if I ever regained my appetite. Lunch of champions.

I parted ways with Luce and left the cafeteria, dreading whatever hell Cole Flickermann had in store for me that day.

###

I tried to blend with the crowd as I walked down the hallway to fourth-period remedial math, my gaze cast down to avoid eye contact, books stacked high in my arms like a makeshift wall. But it’s hard to be very inconspicuous when you wear black lace-up combat boots and your grandfather’s Vietnam dog tags and an oversized anime T-shirt printed with Japanese calligraphy. In that way, I suppose I made myself an easy target.

“Hey, retard,” was all the warning I got as Cole Flickermann rushed me from behind, slapping the books out of my arms and slamming me against a locker. He wore a wolf’s grin, pressing his meaty forearm across my windpipe and pinning me against the cold metal. I gasped for air and my head began to swim. White dots danced at the edge of my vision.

He was hurling some other insult at me—words that were blotted and blurred by a rush of dizziness—when I felt a warm, spreading sensation around my midsection.

At first I thought I’d pissed myself. It wouldn’t be the first time, I’m ashamed to say. But the feeling wasn’t quite right. It was a rush of warmth, like basking on sunbaked rocks after swimming in a cold lake, or feeling the heat of a bonfire on a winter night. The sensation was radiating from my jeans pocket, where I’d stuck the worm just minutes before.

I closed my eyes and let Luce’s words flow over me like a prayer. Let this worm protect you. Let this worm protect you. Please God, let this worm protect me.

And then, as if directed by some external force, my leg jumped up through the gap between Cole Flickermann’s legs. I felt my knee make contact with his testicles. I heard something squish.

He crumpled into a ball in the hallway, swearing and crying and writhing on the floor. I looked around in bewilderment at the students who had gathered to see the spectacle. They looked just as stunned as I felt.

As I wheezed and crouched to pick up my books, I wondered how long it would take for the story to get around, the story of how beanpole Teddy Beaman, the loser, the outcast, had fended off the star linebacker with a shot to the crotch. It would be a tale that defied belief. I wouldn’t believe it myself if I hadn’t seen it happen with my own eyes. Even still, I caught myself wondering: Did I do it? Did I really do it?

###

It was almost midnight when I eased out of my bedroom window at 44 Evergreen Lane, the stars glittering in a cloudless sky as I clambered down the steep slope of the roof. I moved as quickly and quietly as possible, wincing each time my toe found a fallen pine cone or a loose shingle and sent it skittering down to the ground below. I’d been sneaking out several nights a week for the past year, and so far, my parents were none the wiser. I wanted to keep it that way. God knows what they’d do to me if they found out—especially if they knew I was going to see Luce.

Long ago, my dad had forbidden me from seeing my best friend, on account of her mom being a drunk and a druggie and a tramp. His words. He also said the apple never falls far from the tree, but the fact that I wasn’t a raging asshole was evidence to the contrary. I once made the mistake of telling Luce what he’d said about her and her mom—it was the first time I made her cry.

Some things you can’t take back. Some things are better left unsaid.

I reached the edge of the roof and dropped down to the back lawn, feeling the shock in my ankles as I landed. I crossed the yard and jumped the privacy fence surrounding it and started to make my way through the woods behind the house, heading northeast.

I was bound for Longleaf Acres, a trailer park with 30 or so double-wides scattered across a weedy, diamond-shaped lot that was clearcut by loggers a century ago. To get there from my house, you had to tromp through a thin belt of new-growth forest and follow the path of a small, curving stream until you emerged at Wingding Road, a rutted two-lane blacktop populated by an auto mechanic shop and a fleabag motel and an old-timey gas station that was open only when the owner was sober enough to man the cash register. Usually, it was closed. The pumps stayed on, however; customers were directed to pay on the honor system, slipping the proper amount under the door when they finished filling up.

It’s about one mile, as the crow flies, from my house to Luce’s. You can make the trip in 15 minutes if you really hoof it. That night, as I approached her trailer, I felt that warm, spreading sensation in my pocket again. The worm. I’d brought it with me—I couldn’t wait to tell Luce that it had worked, that it had actually worked.

Her mother’s aging sedan was parked on a bed of gravel in front of the double-wide. It was bracketed by a hail-kissed satellite antennae and a patch of weeds where a plastic gas can lay on its side, camouflaged in the overgrown foliage.

The trailer itself was light gray with a thin, dark gray stripe at the top. Those probably weren’t the real colors, but I’d never seen it in the daylight. It had two crooked steps leading to a crooked porch and a squeaky screen door clapping open and closed with the wind. There was no kitschy welcome mat telling you to wipe your feet before coming inside, no walnut credenza or cutesy coat rack in sight once you crossed the threshold with muddy shoes. Luce’s mom’s idea of interior decorating was limited to overflowing ash trays and empty liquor bottles.

I walked around to the back of the trailer, and seeing no lights on inside, tapped lightly on the window to Luce’s bedroom. The faint impression of a head materialized, and then the suggestion of a skinny arm, and then the window was sliding open with a faint squeal.

I slipped inside.

###

“Heard you went for the balls, like I said.” Luce was whispering, meaning her mom was still awake, not yet drunk enough to pass out for the night.

“Word gets around fast.”

“Yeah, and no one even talks to me. No one but you.”

The room was dark. A wan light filtered in through the window, hinting at a jumble of laundry occupying one corner of the cramped space, along with a twin bed and box spring and the tiny TV where we sometimes watched reruns of Inuyasha and Dragon Ball Z with the sound off, mouthing the lines we knew by heart and pantomiming the fight sequences.

“And get this,” I started, taking the gummy worm out of my pocket and dangling it in front of her face. “It’s all thanks to this dumb worm. I was just gonna take the beating, let Cole Flickermann choke me to death, and somehow it gave me…courage? Some kind of bravery I didn’t have before. To fight back.”

“Bullshit,” Luce said. She pushed the worm out of her face. We were sitting on her bed now, so close that her hair was falling on my shoulders and tickling my neck.

“I’m serious. I was about to pass out, and this thing started, like, glowing in my pocket. And I thought about what you said to me, those words, let this worm protect you. Next thing I know, he’s on the ground crying.”

“It’s just a piece of candy, Teddy. It’s not magi—” her sentence was cut short by the sound of footsteps crashing down the hall, the plodding footfalls of a giant shaking the trailer and rattling the bed underneath us. Mommy Dearest was on the move.

Luce’s body coiled against mine. She was panting in my ear, her quick sharp breaths approaching hyperventilation. I felt sure that the bedroom door would fly open at any moment, that I’d be discovered in Luce’s bed. And if that happened, we might both be in for the beating of a lifetime; her mom was even bigger and meaner than Cole Flickermann, and a knee to the crotch wouldn’t be so effective.

But the sound subsided and a door slammed. A toilet flushed. Bedsprings squeaked. Eventually, snoring.

I felt Luce’s muscles relaxing, her breath slowing. “I can’t wait to get out of here,” she said, her voice caught somewhere between relief and embarrassment. “To finish school and leave this place and never look back.” Luce had told me once about her uncle, her mother’s brother, who was some kind of artist in Baton Rouge. He was estranged from the rest of the family and apparently hated Luce’s mom as much as she did. I figured that if she ever got out, that’s where she’d go, to watch the gators sunning on creek banks and to stroll the campus at LSU, blending with the students who had enough money to actually enroll.

On nights like tonight, as Luce shivered against me in the bed, I resisted the urge to calm her with empty platitudes. Like, I know how you feel, or, everything will be OK. After all, I didn’t really know. I lacked the frame of reference to understand the nightmare she endured every day.

I remember telling her, during one of our late-night hangouts, about the time I’d gone fishing with my dad. I was nine. We were sitting on a dock, casting lines baited with nightcrawlers into the water. I couldn’t get a bite. When I reeled in my line, I saw the worm dangling at the end of it, limp and dead and drowned. I started bawling because I’d killed it for no reason. Murdered the poor worm without even one fish to show for it. The way my father looked at me then—the shame and disdain in his eyes—felt like being slapped across the face. He never took me fishing again.

Then Luce told me about the worst beating she’d ever taken from her mother. She’d been in junior high then, and had been left alone at home while her mom went on a weeklong bender with a biker boyfriend. Luce found a baggie of dope in her mother’s nightstand and flushed it down the toilet. She poured her vodka down the sink drain and set fire to cartons of cigarettes in the sandy dirt behind the trailer. When her mom finally returned home and saw what she’d done, she beat Luce with a belt, with her fists. She did things to her with a lit cigarette.

Luce missed a week of school because she couldn’t walk and her eyes were swollen shut.

That put things into perspective for me: Feeling like you’ve been slapped across the face is bad. Actually getting slapped is much worse. In a game of comparative misery, Luce would win every time.

That night, as we sat on the bed, listening to her mother snore, I could still feel Luce’s body quaking with adrenaline. I gently ran a finger across the bruise on her arm—the blooming wound I couldn’t see but knew was there. She gasped as I touched it, but didn’t pull away.

I badly wanted to kiss her then. But I didn’t. Like I said, I’m a chickenshit. I was worried about doing the wrong thing, about losing my best and only friend.

Instead, I said, “Give me your hand.”

She did.

I put the worm in her palm, said the magic words, and headed back home.

###

In the cafeteria the next day, I felt the eyes of my classmates on me as they buzzed through the lunchroom. I was no longer invisible. The story about Cole Flickermann and the high kick heard round the world must have spread through school like a bad case of the flu.

Luce sat across from me, beaming a snaggletoothed smile as she painted her nails an inkblack color. It might be the happiest I’d ever seen her, before or since.

“It worked. It actually worked,” she said, blowing on her nails to dry them. “The worm protected me, just like you said.”

“Your mom?” I said. “She didn’t…”

“Oh, she tried. The bitch barged into my room this morning while I was getting ready for school. She reared back to sock me for no reason at all, like always, but this time I caught her wrist right before she could. And then I punched her square in the nose. It started bleeding. I wish you could’ve seen it.”

Luce unzipped her backpack, pulled out the red-and-blue worm and handed it to me.

“From now on, we share custody. You take it for the rest of the day. Do some more nut-kicking if you have to. Just bring it back to me tonight, OK?”

Then I was beaming, too, and when the bell finally rang, I went out into the sea of students with no fear at all.

###

We traded the worm back and forth for the next two weeks. Miraculously, neither of us were tormented by our respective bullies during that time. The worm had real power, or at least we believed it did.

Luce began insisting that I come over every school night, no exceptions. I left the worm with her on weekends and took it back on Mondays, as if it were a child of divorce. She said she felt safer when I was there with her, though I wasn’t sure whether it was me or the worm that really made her feel secure. At one point, I suggested that she sneak over to my place for a change—I was tired of making the walk every night, and worried about pushing my luck with my parents. I even had a key to the front door made for her. But the idea was a nonstarter.

“If you get caught sneaking out, you’ll just get grounded or something,” she said. “If I get caught, my mom might literally kill me.” I didn’t think she was exaggerating.

So we kept doing it her way. And what can I say? I was falling in love, addicted to our late-night sessions of sharing secrets and lying in the bed nearly touching noses, whispering to each other in the dark. It could have been the sleep deprivation, or the blindness that accompanies young love, but I was too late in noticing how Luce was changing, how our interactions had subtly shifted into darker territory.

The first clue was the way she started to talk about her mom. Before, Luce had always mentioned her in terms of someone to escape, to run away from as soon as possible. But then, one night, she said that she wished the woman would just disappear. How she would be eternally grateful if someone killed the old bag.

Adding to that, Luce had been doing research on the internet about curses and omens and other weird, witchy stuff. She started quoting long passages to me about it. “A talisman is an item that’s been imbued with magical properties,” she said one night, her words rushing out in a breathless, frantic whisper. “It protects the person who carries it, gives them special powers. Don’t you see, Teddy? The worm is our talisman. Nothing bad can happen to us while we have it.”

I was growing increasingly troubled about the nature of our conversations. Luce was obsessed; it was all getting to be too much. Which might explain why I made a crucial mistake one night in mid-December, the night of our last clandestine meeting at Longleaf Acres. The night of the fire.

The night I forgot the worm.

And now I wonder, if I’d only remembered it, would my family still be alive today?

###

I slipped through her window around midnight, like normal. Luce held out her hand for the worm, part of our now well-established ritual. I felt around in my pocket, didn’t find it. Checked the others. It wasn’t there.

I told Luce that I must’ve left it at home. That I wasn’t thinking straight and that I forgot it and that I was sorry.

I heard a sob hitch in her throat. Saw a tear rolling down her cheek in the faint light from the window.

She grabbed my arm with surprising force, her fingernails digging into the skin. “Then you go back and get it,” she said, venom in her voice. “I need it. You know that I need it.”

I was taken aback—I’d never seen this side of her.

I pried her hand off my arm and cupped her face in my hands. It was wet with tears. “You don’t need it, Luce. You don’t. The magic’s in here.” I put one hand over her heart. “That’s where your courage comes from. Not from a piece of candy, for god’s sake.”

Luce collapsed into me. She grabbed fistfuls of my shirt and sobbed into it.

“I’ll protect you,” I said, feeling salty tears welling in my own eyes. “I’ll stay here with you all night, all morning, however long you want. You’ll be safe.”

“But your parents. My mom. If they find out…” she started.

“To hell with them. They can die for all I care.” I channeled her own words, though they rang false in my ears. “All that matters is you.”

She looked up at me, her big sad eyes shining in the diffused light. I could have told her I loved her right then, but I think she already knew. Luce took me by the hand and led me to her bed. It was hours before we slept.

###

I awoke in the dark, alone, to the sound of someone choking. Terrible guttural noises punctuated by gasping, single-word sentences: “Stop…Don’t…No…Why…Why…” The racket was coming from the next room, over Luce’s mom’s bedroom.

My immediate thought was that Luce was being strangled to death by her mother. You were right all along, Luce—the worm really is magic. And I forgot it and now you’re going to die because of me.

I untangled myself from the bedsheets and raced to the door, flinging it open. By this time, the awful choking noises had already died down. I sprinted through the hallway and into the bedroom.

Luce’s mom was starfished across the bed, her nightgown hiked up to her hips. Her face was as purple as a grape and her tongue lolled out of her mouth like an engorged leech. There was a belt cinched around her throat, leashed so tightly that rolls of neck fat overlapped the leather.

Luce was standing beside the bed, wearing a blank expression as she looked down on her dead mother. In one hand she held a red gas can. She began splashing its contents onto her mother’s body, onto the bed, the furniture and carpet.

Bile rose in my throat. Something spoiled in my stomach.

“Jesus, Luce!” I managed to blurt out. “What did you do?”

She turned, looked surprised to see me standing there. “I made her disappear,” she said matter-of-factly, as if I’d asked her for the sum of two plus two. “I made all of them disappear.”

“All of them?” I repeated. I was getting woozy, like when Cole Flickermann had me pinned against the lockers by my throat.

Luce grabbed a set of car keys off her mother’s bedside table and flung them at me. They hit me in the chest and fell to the ground. “Head outside. I’ll meet you there,” she said. She took a cigarette from an open pack on the table and stuck it between her lips.

I was too stunned to move. To do or say anything.

“Teddy,” she said, leveling her gaze at me. “Go outside now. Start the car. We don’t have much time.” There was something dark in her owlish eyes, a night storm of swirling, smoldering ash. They were the most terrifying eyes I’d ever seen.

Numbly, I picked up the keys and ran out of the trailer, barreling through the screen door and across the crooked porch and down the crooked steps to her mother’s car. Luce was close behind, dribbling a thin stream of gas behind her as she came through the door and down the steps.

I unlocked the car and got inside, watching through the windshield as Luce emptied the can and tossed it aside. She produced a lighter from her jeans pocket and lit the cigarette, taking one deep drag from it before flicking it onto the porch.

The gas ignited with a whoosh. A flickering tongue of flame morphed into a wall of hellfire and quickly engulfed the trailer. Even from inside the car, it felt like sitting at the mouth of a furnace.

Luce jumped into the passenger seat, and I slammed the gears into reverse. The car’s tires spit gravel. Then we were speeding down Wingding Road, past the auto mechanic shop and fleabag motel and shuttered gas station, into the night. The fire monster of Luce’s creation loomed large in the rearview mirror. Wisps of windblown smoke crept in our wake, like ghostly fingers that would find us in one heartbeat or the next.

###

By daybreak, we’d made it across the state line into Louisiana and were headed southeast on sun-dappled backroads, the ditches on either side flush with water from recent rains. Luce had her window rolled down, her feet up on the dash, like a carefree tourist on a road trip.

We were still four hours from Baton Rouge when the news broke. A radio DJ with a raspy voice interrupted a stupefying grunge rock playlist to say that firefighters in Polk County, Texas, were battling two blazes that had started overnight—both suspected to be the result of arson. Four people were dead. Authorities were seeking a Teddy Beaman in connection with the blazes. They were still searching for the remains of his classmate Lucinda Dillinger. Anyone with information on Beaman’s whereabouts should contact police at the following phone number…

Luce smiled vaguely at the broadcast, as if it were a weather report promising blue skies and clear roads ahead.

Folks back home in Texas were surely wondering: Was I the one who started the fires? Was I the one who killed them all? I suppose, in a way, I’d played a role in what happened. I was somehow responsible, even though I didn’t pour the gas, didn’t spin the lighter’s wheel. My hands were clean and they weren’t.

They’d find me sooner or later—I was sure of it. It didn’t matter where we went. Louisiana is a small place, and the world is even smaller.

“Don’t worry,” Luce said from the passenger seat, as if she were reading my mind. “Just give me your hand.”

I reached it out to her, palm up and trembling. Ever so delicately, she placed the worm in my hand. I felt the unnatural weight of it resting there, that dead thing that was never alive, sticky with the leftover heat from Luce’s fingers.

She didn’t say the words. But in my head, I conjured up that old preposterous prayer. I said it over and over again as we plunged deeper into the heart of the swamp, the early morning fog coiling around us like fingers of smoke.

Let this worm protect me, I said. God, please let this worm protect me.