Center Stage

The order is in him now. He could close his eyes and recite it, the ones who could fight, the ones who led, the ones who knew the ground, and him last. It will not leave him alone. He has been replaying it, sorting it, taking it apart.

It points somewhere. He sits at Whitfield’s desk, in the low lamp, and he sees where it points.

The room has gone still on him. The lamp puts a circle on the blotter and leaves the rest of the quarters in shadow. The wall in front of him is covered in the same schedules he has already read — the shift times, the head-count, the stations — all of it written by a dead man. The phone hangs on the wall, dead. The radio hisses from the shelf.

He sees it now, how the week went, each one a step closer to him.

He has been telling himself he is the one left standing, the one who got through the week.

The killer wanted him.

He hates it. He hates that some part of him is flattered by it. He has been scored his whole life — in a room, on a field, at a table, by a man reading numbers off a wall — and he built the boy on the score. He knows it is wrong, and it is there anyway. He gets up out of the chair. He does it because sitting is the worst place to be found, and he is close to thinking the thing he does not want to think. He stands by the basin. He grips the edge of the basin and holds it.

He hears Dana say it.

It is the clearest thing in the room, clearer than the lamp. She called him kiddo and meant it, and she saw through him. She caught him doing it — the way he worked a room until he was the one being looked at, the one the attention came back to. She watched him do it and she said, plain, “You can’t stand not being the center of attention.”

He opened his mouth to argue.

It sits in him now, in that tired flat voice. He has called it an insult. It is the truest thing anyone has said about him. The killer saw the same thing in him. It chose the boy who would be flattered to be chosen. He hates that it was right.

The recoil runs through him and he wants away, away from the wall, out of the room, off the porch and down any road. Because if he is right, he was chosen for being the one who glows under the light, the one who loves it. He won a beauty pageant. He does not want to be what the week chose.

He is, though. He can feel it.

His eyes go to the window. The dark out there has not changed. The treeline holds a weight, and it is waiting.

He catches himself in the black square over the basin. He is still that, the boy with the face, and the killer picked him for it.