Preston was taking me home after school because he could drive and I couldn’t. We got behind this loud, black Silverado. “God, Judd Davis’ truck is so nice,” Preston said. I looked and everything on it was black: black headlight covers, black running boards, black wheels, black bedliner. Black. It had a black and white sticker that took up the entire glass. The pointer, the middle, and the pinkie finger were sticking out.
“What’s that sticker mean?” I asked.
“The shocker. Two in the pink and one in the stink,” Preston said.
“Yeah?” I laughed.
“It means he fucks,” Preston said.
◆
I never knew Judd Davis but everyone in school would talk about how tough he was. “Built like a brick shithouse,” I heard the boys on the football team say. When I would pass him in the hallway, he wore a cutoff gym shirt with 2,000 lb club printed on the front and only the strongest boys in the school wore that. He worked all summer mowing yards and doing stone masonry to buy that truck off of Bobby Thompson. He posted pictures of himself on the internet shirtless and lifting heavy stones. Even some moms we knew commented on it.
◆
Judd Davis got bad grades and showed up to school late. He was older than me but in my American History class because he had failed the state test the first time. He had a goatee and wore sunglasses on top of his head. He dated girls older than him and there was a rumor that he slept with one of his girlfriend’s moms, a real estate agent, because she just couldn’t help herself.
Judd Davis never spoke to me. I played video games and was afraid of swimming in the ocean. I was too scared to talk to the girls I would message on MySpace.
But, in March, I grew two inches and went to the movies with Tori Summer Johnson. She was a hippie girl from Todd whose family all slept in a nest together or something, at least that’s what Preston told me. She kissed me during King Kong, and I bought her milk duds. Things my dad and Preston had told me: If you want something, you gotta get it. I asked her to prom during intermission. And even though I was sweaty and wouldn’t look her in the eyes, she told me yes. She said she felt like I was sensitive but I just laughed and gulped my Code Red.
◆
The next day Preston told me Judd Davis shot himself in his basement after school – before his mom got home from work. It was hard to imagine Judd Davis crying or giving up on anything. In history class, I looked at his empty desk and imagined his body falling backwards in cinematic slow-mo, eventually resting beside his favorite set of dumbbells, his sunglasses sliding over his eyes one more time. Preston said that he bet we would get out of school early.
◆
The yearbook class printed his obituary and a picture of him from last year’s prom and posted it around the school—on the soda machines, on his locker, on Coach Trent’s weight room downstairs. Big letters: RIP to a Son and Brother and Lover. Judd Davis was wearing a black suit with a silver tie and black sunglasses standing in front of his black truck.
Nobody spoke the next day at school. Not even at lunch. Tori Summer Johnson waved at me from across the parking lot but didn’t speak.
It rained that winter and never snowed. It just rained. When Preston drove me home, we just looked at the chocolate milk-colored river before he finally put the radio on.
◆
The football team printed memorial shirts with Judd Davis’ name on the back.
The masonry club made decals for people’s cars and sold them during break from the concession stand.
The days went by and still nobody talked.
It rained some more.
◆
The funeral was on a Thursday and the school bus took all the students that wanted to go. Me and Preston went to the Bantam Chef and ate breakfast instead.
“I didn’t know him,” I told Preston.
“He was just an asshole,” Preston told me.
◆
It wasn’t until after the funeral that people started talking again. I can’t remember who told me first but I heard that the reason he did it was because of his girlfriend, Tina. They had been dating since last year, and she was going to break up with him before prom and he said if she did, he would do it and he did it. That’s what I heard. Tina hadn’t been to school since it happened either. Other girls talked at school and said it was her fault. Judd Davis was just heartbroken.
◆
After the funeral, the buses pulled in and everyone came into the gym for an assembly. It seemed like the entire school wore black suits or black dresses and it was just me and Preston and the poor Matkins boys from Pennington Holler that didn’t know how to read wearing something different.
Principal Trowel introduced the guest speakers from California. They were two women with blonde hair and wearing black jeans and black t-shirts. He said that they had heard about our little community and the hurt that we were going through and decided to visit us and talk to you about this tragedy and, most of all, help you honor Young Judd. Whenever anyone older than us talked about him they called him “Young Judd.”
Everyone sat still and the women from California stood at center court and read from a slideshow about how to take care of your mental health. They said things like here’s what you do when you feel hopeless and take a walk outside or scream into a pillow or find some way to deal with your emotions without hurting someone... or YOURSELF. Stevie Matkins raised his hand and said he punches walls when he gets mad and wanted to know if that was bad. The lady from California said it wasn’t bad but sounded expensive. Stevie Matkins said that he could fix drywall so it really wasn’t. The lady from California nodded and said, “Let’s hear some other voices.”
They handed out cards with the suicide hotline number on them and said that we have tell to an adult if we think someone is going to hurt themselves.
“That is your duty in this community,” she said through the microphone and it echoed.
“-unity. -unity. -unity.”
◆
After the assembly, they let school out early. It was so foggy you could barely see the Walmart sign from the school steps even though they were right beside each other. Preston said a bunch of people were going to hang out and play Xbox but he didn’t feel like it. He said he would take me over there if I wanted. I said no. We just went to Walmart and sat in the parking lot.
“Why was he an asshole?” I asked him.
“It’s just what my brother said,” he spit his dip in a Mountain Dew bottle and picked at the calluses on his hands.
◆
Tina came back to school exactly a week before prom. She didn’t say much or do much. She just wore Judd Davis’ gray football hoodie with his name and number on the back and carried her books in her hand. The only time I ever saw her was in between classes and she was always looking down and moving fast. Her blond hair was always hanging in front of her face. She wore rain boots with her sweatpants tucked into them. The teachers said she was going to finish out her exams and then go back to Broughton Mental Hospital to finish her treatment.
The sun came out so Mr. Carlson told us to go outside and do our algebra worksheets. Me and Preston sat on the retaining wall and looked at Bobby Thompson’s car dealership.
“Is that his truck?” I said.
“Yeah, I believe it is.”
I looked for the shocker sticker on the back glass but it was gone.
◆
Tori Summer Johnson drove me to prom in her dad’s green Subaru. We took the mountain curves slowly but the tires still screeched on the new road the state had just laid. She grabbed my hand and put it on her hairless thigh. Her dress was short and pink. I rubbed her thigh in small circles with my thumb. I didn’t know how I knew to do this. I thought about what color panties Tori Summer Johnson was wearing. I thought about how they must have been black.
When we got to prom there was a slideshow with Judd Davis and his truck, Judd Davis in his football jersey, Judd Davis fishing, Judd Davis on his dirt bike, and everyone was talking about how they wished he was there. Preston hated dancing and that’s why he stayed at home.
We ate pizza and Tori Summer Johnson asked if I was sad over what happened since she said I looked sad. I said that he shot himself because his girlfriend broke up with him and that wasn’t any skin off my back. She told me that was an awful thing to say. I told her that’s just what Preston had told me. She said that I needed to be more sensitive than Preston Garrick and then danced with the punk girl with fishnet gloves while I just sat there alone at the table.
◆
I heard that Kent Prince and a couple other boys went back to the football field around midnight after prom. They sat on the 50-yard line and Kent pulled out a ouija board he’d found in his dad’s basement. He said he’d had a dream about Judd Davis. He saw him running down the sideline, barreling over Surry Central’s last defender, crossing into the endzone, winning the game.
All those boys put their hands together on that little piece of wood on the ouija board and it started moving.
To this day, Coffee, the heavy offensive lineman who was homeschooled until his junior year, said he felt like he was going to throw up.
They asked Judd Davis about heaven, fishing, mowing yards, and girls.
They asked him if he remembered them and he did.
When Coach Trent found out, he made the football team run up and down the bleachers before class for the rest of the year. He said they’d done something evil, something wicked.
◆
Before long, Judd Davis’ truck left Bobby Thompson’s car lot. They said somebody from off the mountain saw it online and bought it.
◆
Today I took my truck to Rip Rollins store to see about the brakes. While I waited, I saw he had a number twelve sticker still up in his shop window. It had a cross in the middle. I think Judd Davis’ number was twelve. It was twelve. I’m certain.
◆
When you die, www.mydeathspace.com takes over your MySpace page, and you can go there to look up Judd Davis’ death and all these deaths from the county: Cody Fletcher, Pete Beldsoe, Shelby Vannoy, Thomas Yates. Every one of them.
Sometimes in the evening, I search www.mydeathspace.com to remember all these people.
I want to see their MySpace pictures. I want to see them holding a fishing pole on the banks of the same trout stream I fish.
I want to see them walking these mountains with their dogs.
But the links to the pictures are always broken. I keep checking them. I know they won’t ever get fixed.