DEAD AT SIXTEEN (THE KNOWERS Book 1) Read online

  DEAD AT SIXTEEN

  D.A.E. Jackson

  Copyright © 2021 D.A.E. Jackson

  All rights reserved

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN-13: 9798599741800

  Cover art by: Steven Shipman

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018675309

  Printed in the United States of America

  “No thief, however skillful, can rob one of knowledge, and that is why knowledge is the best and safest treasure to acquire.”

  ― L. Frank Baum, The Lost Princess of Oz

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  DEAD AT SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  dead at seventeen

  chapter one

  chapter two

  The Knowers

  About The Author

  Acknowledgement

  DEAD AT SIXTEEN

  Book One of

  THE KNOWERS

  CHAPTER ONE

  I don’t know you, so I’m going to tell you everything as truthfully as I know how. Once, I had friends and a family. Growing up in the nineteen-seventies, I lived what seemed like a normal life to me, but that all turned out to be a lie. Finding out that my life was a big lie really messed me up for a while. It got pretty ugly before I learned how to deal with it. Oh, and then I died.

  CHAPTER TWO

  At fifteen, I was consumed by the same thing most fifteen-year-old American boys who are active in sports are consumed by: food. I ate when I got out of bed, whenever I passed the kitchen, whenever I opened my locker at school, as soon as I got home from school, and usually before I brushed my teeth at night. Sometimes I ate before I got out of bed if I happened to leave an uneaten snack from the night before nearby. Hey, I was growing, burned a lot of calories, and I had to eat a lot just to keep from losing more weight. I was a skinny kid, and a little short compared to those who stood over me in the lunch lines. My total lack of beefcake status and my mousy brown hair, which was only ever under control when it was cut short, plus the random zit factory that was my face, kept me from ever being called out for special attention by anyone—except maybe my mother.

  The track team and eating were pretty much my whole life back then. I didn’t have a lot of friends as I was sort of in between groups at the time. I’d pretty much dropped the friends I’d had in grade school and middle school because, well, I’m not exactly sure, but we just didn’t seem to want to hang out together anymore. Well, actually I think it was me. The others were still finding plenty of time to meet up. I was the only one not joining in. Wait! Didn’t we still call it junior high then? Definitely. It was still junior high.

  At the time, I remember thinking that my friends had all been such losers. I wanted to have more worthy friends. You know? Friends who didn’t constantly disappoint? I didn’t know exactly what I wanted out of my friends, but I was pretty sure that my old friends didn’t have it. They just never seemed to live up to my expectations. I know this sounds harsh, but at the time, that’s honestly what I was feeling. I think that what I was doing was trying to figure out my life on my own. I figured I didn’t need a bunch of loser friends to drag me down, and I certainly didn’t need my parents, who seemed to act as much like a couple of TV sit-com parents as they possibly could. So, that left me on my own to figure out this thing called “life.”

  I remember around that time running into one of my best friends from 7th and 8th grade. Her name was Heidi. We must have had lunch together every day for two years. Back then, our favorite show was “Laverne and Shirley.” We’d talk about it for hours. I was standing in line at school and Heidi came up and stood behind me.

  “Hi, Heidi,” I said over my shoulder, ‘cause I didn’t really want to turn around, but I didn’t want to be rude either. She didn’t take the hint.

  “Oh, Philip. I’m so glad to finally see you. How are you? Did you hear what happened to me? Well, it was so amazing because I really didn’t expect anything, but then, what a surprise…” I honestly don’t remember what it was she was talking about. I think I blocked it. I do remember thinking, I don’t care. Really. I just don’t care. Shouldn’t I care about this? It seems important to her. No. I just don’t. We had once been close friends, but it was clear to me, even if it wasn’t to her, that I had moved on.

  Clearly, I was changing—a lot. Not only was I growing like a weed and eating like a starved animal, I also found I was actually starting to enjoy trying new things. The track team had been new the year before and I loved it. I took an art class and hated it, but I was glad to know that I had given it a try. After joining the props crew for the school play in the fall of 1979 and loving that, I’d auditioned for the spring 1980 play and was actually cast in a small part. That’s where things started to get weird, but don’t worry! I don’t die yet. That’s still a ways off.

  ◆◆◆

  The student director of the play was a guy named Mike. He was a senior, about five inches taller than me and forty pounds heavier. He had that football quarterback vibe. You know: confidence, muscles, good hair and teeth, and even perfectly-placed pimples.

  The play we were performing was “The Crucible,” which is about the Salem Witch Trials, but we were told it was also about McCarthyism from the 1950s. Now, I didn’t know anything about McCarthyism back then, except maybe the name, so I did some research about it to try to understand what the older students were talking about and this other, hidden meaning of the play. To my surprise, I found it oddly fascinating. I ended up reading a couple of books on the subject, which was the first time I’d ever been interested in anything even slightly historical. This may have been due to my father always telling me, “Live in the here and now.” “It’s what you make of today that matters.” “The past is dead and gone: let it stay dead.” You get the picture. Not a big one for introspection, my dad. Once I started reading about Joe McCarthy and his whole anti-communist crusade, it was like it got a hold of my brain, and I couldn’t move past it.

  I saw Mike in the school library before classes started one day. The library's red brick walls and dropped ceiling framed the wooden bookshelves, which were broken up in places for little islands of tables and chairs. He was sitting among the bookshelves at a table, huddled with three of his friends. One was a girl named Jamie. I’d met her before at rehearsal when she was helping build the set. She wore chunky black glasses, and I had the feeling she knew she bore a striking resemblance to Velma from Scooby-doo and based her look on that. There was also Milton, as tall as Mike, but just as skinny as me. I knew he was Mike’s best friend because they were always together. I hadn’t noticed the other guy with them before. That could have been because he never drew attention to himself. I thought he l
ooked Latino. His small stature, black hair, and dark eyes were usually matched by his colorless clothing, which made him more of a shadow in the corner than a part of the group. Later, I found out his name was Roger.

  When he saw I’d stopped and was staring at him, Mike lifted his perfect eyebrows and nose at me as a greeting, so I screwed up my courage a bit and walked right up to the table where he was sitting with his friends.

  “Hi, Mike,” I said.

  “Hey, Phil, wha’s up?” he sort of whispered back in the conventional library quiet way.

  “I was wondering if you could talk with me about the play sometime and help me figure out what it means?” I asked in my own sort-of whisper.

  “Sure. Why don’t you sit with us at lunch today, and we’ll talk about it? I’ve been studying “The Crucible” for five months now, since I found out last October I would be directing it.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll come find you, I guess.” Why were my hands sweaty when I walked away from the table? And, why were there little nail marks in my palms? I realized my heart was thumping loudly in my chest. Maybe that’s why Mike’s friends had all been looking at me with those amused looks. Mike had been looking right at me. I mean, right at my eyes, never breaking contact. I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I was very excited, so I went outside our very 1950s high school building and did one of our running exercises across the school lawn.

  The plain brick walls were broken up by large expanses of floor-to-ceiling windows. I felt like I was putting on a bit of a show for the kids standing in the windows watching me. The high knee-lift run? It looks so stupid, but it tires you out really fast because you use so much energy. After about five minutes of that, I bowed to the kids in the windows and was ready to go back inside. I wasn’t any clearer about what had happened with Mike and his friends, but class was about to begin and my free show was over anyway.

  Not surprisingly, lunch did come that day—like it seems to every day—except for a short period of time after I died when I didn’t have lunch anymore. Okay! Okay! No more references to being dead until, well, until I am actually dead. On that particular day, I just wasn’t sure if I was looking forward to lunch—or dreading it. A new cafeteria had recently been built behind the old high school. As I entered, I already knew where Mike and his friends sat because apparently I’d been stalking him without really knowing it. Maybe? Grabbing a tray I entered the service area, which was all wood tones, chrome, and light. I stacked up my food on the tray and let them punch my lunch card. The long tables, placed end-to-end, had been filling me with a slight sense of dread since grade school. Today, the dread sat back in my throat, where I could taste it.

  Walking right up to their table with my tray, I cleared my throat and said, “Hey, Mike, can I sit down?” Oh, wow! Too loud! People at other tables actually turned to see who was being so annoyingly loud. I wasn’t even sitting yet, and I felt like an idiot already. Mike just laughed and tossed his bangs out of his eyes.

  “Sure, sit here,” he pointed to the spot directly across from him at the table. “How’s your day goin’?” he asked.

  “Oh, I guess okay.” Not my best conversation skills, I admit, but at least I was still talking and hadn’t fallen into the hole I thought was going to swallow me.

  “So, Phil, what do you want to know about “The Crucible”, ” his dark eyes fixing onto mine.

  “Well, I really don’t understand how everyone says it’s about the Salem Witch Trials, but also about the 1950s McCarthy era.”

  “Let me put it this way,” he said. “It is and it isn’t.”

  “Yeah, doesn’t really help.” The other kids at the table had stopped talking and were all listening. I felt like they were all looking at me.

  “The play is about power. Who has it and who can get it. Miller, the playwright, could have set the play anywhere. Well, anywhere a few people seem to have all the power and others want their share. Take this school, for example. Which students do you think have the most and the least power?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, rather lamely, “Probably the senior athletes have the most power and the freshmen brainiac nerds have the least.”

  “Okay, so let's go with that. Now imagine some freshmen nerds started loudly accusing some senior athletes of forcing the nerds to write all the papers for the athletes. As a result, the senior athletes were expelled and kicked off their teams. Now, who has the power?”

  “So if the play were set in an American high school today instead of in Old Salem, the newly powerful brainiacs would start to take revenge on all those who had bullied them. Then, they go crazy and start to ruin anyone they don’t like, anyone higher on the social ladder than they were. They become crazy little tyrants, right?”

  “That’s exactly it," Mike said, giving me that soul-deep look again. “You’ve got it. So it doesn’t have to be witch trials. It could be the communist trials of the fifties or an American high school.” It felt like a switch had flipped in my head. The play suddenly made so much more sense to me. “But, you really should read up on McCarthy,” he said. “He was one twisted guy. I think you’d find it interesting.”

  “Funny thing is, I already have,” I replied, feeling more confident. “It’s like I can’t get enough of this stuff.” Realizing that I actually felt like eating. I began to shovel the lunch home, happy with myself.

  “Yay for history!” said Milton, waving a little paper napkin from down the table as he and Mike shot each other a look. Mike smiled. Milton seemed like a normally very serious guy and this lighthearted moment made the others at the table laugh. Of course, this made me laugh with a mouthful of food. My lack of control even made Milton laugh, which seemed to be quite the achievement.

  ◆◆◆

  The next day at lunch I sat down at the long table across from Mike like I’d been doing it all my life. I’d found out from Jamie, who was inexplicably dressed in a short plaid Catholic school type skirt, that I was the only freshman in the group.

  “I’ve never seen you before this year. You must be a freshman, right?” she asked as she was chewing, talking with her hand in front of her mouth, before I had even sat down to eat.

  “Yeah, I am. Is that a big deal?” I answered back while opening one of my containers of milk.

  “Only for me,” she said before finally swallowing and pushing her chunky glasses up on her head, using them as a sort of head-band to hold her hair out of her eyes. “It means I’m not the baby of the group anymore. Thank you, God. Being a sophomore finally means something around here. It would have been better for me if you were a girl, but the odds were against me on that one, so I guess I’ll take what I can get.” My face must have screwed up in confusion.

  “You know I don’t know what that means, right?”

  “Oh, it’s just statistics,” she said. “I figured in the number of times you’ve been a boy and the probability clearly showed—”

  “Jamie just loves math,” Mike jumped in. “I don’t always know what she’s talking about. Do you guys?” he asked of Milton and Roger. They both had their mouths full, and shook their heads, “No.” Milton seemed amused by whatever was happening here, but Roger seemed to be opting out of the conversation entirely.

  “Yeah, Jamie sometimes likes to talk about things other people just don’t understand yet,” Mike said. “Someday, maybe we’ll all know these things, but for now, I guess you’ll just have to accept we’re still a little in the dark here. How ‘bout you, Philip, how’re your math skills?”

  I was a little lost in the conversation, but I went along with Mike. “Actually, I’m taking algebra this year, and I’m really having problems. I thought I could handle it on my own and I started out the year great, but I’ve fallen behind, and now I’m just lost.”

  “Oh,” Jamie jumped back in. “I could help you. I love algebra. It’s like my favorite thing, next to statistics, which I just discovered this year. But, algebra, yes. I’ll help you and you will be the algebra kin
g. If that’s what you want, but you should say yes.”

  “Well, yes then,” I stammered. How could I say no to her very eager face? It felt weird to admit to this group that I needed help, but at least they didn’t make me feel bad about it.

  ◆◆◆

  “...And that’s all you need to know about the Teapot Dome scandal,” Milton was saying, as he sat at the long cafeteria lunch table a few weeks later. “The whole thing was sorta silly in my opinion, but no one listens to me.” At times Milton appeared to be all elbows and pointy chin, especially when he was exclaiming his truth.

  “I know what you mean,” Jamie said, stretching the neck of today’s turtleneck sweater with both hands. “The same thing happened to me with the flu, back at Fort Riley. I was the only one who—”

  Mike cut her off with, “Guys. Hey, um ...” He was looking at Jamie and Milton and glancing uneasily at me.

  “Oh, don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’m just as lost as ever around here. You know, Jamie, half the time I don’t know what you’re talking about? Which I guess is okay, ‘cause I’ve got some more algebra homework. Thank you so much for your help these last few weeks. I know once you get through doing your magic, I’ll actually understand it.”

  “What can I say. I’ve got a knack for the math,” she replied.

  “I’d say it’s more than that. It’s like you’re a born mathematician,” I said, between bites of whatever it was the cafeteria workers were calling food that day.

  “Math is like my home,” she said, quieter now. “It’s got a beauty and harmony to it. Sometimes, it seems that a math problem sort of sings to me. If I can learn the tune and sing back, the answer just reveals itself to me. It can be quite lovely.”