Jude Banks, Superhero

Prologue
 
If you asked me how I, a boy at the age of twelve, ended up in a police station waiting to get handcuffed and booked for murder, I would tell you about City of Angels, I would tell you about peanut butter and heart arrhythmias. I would tell you about Katie.
 
Everybody feels guilty when someone they love dies. That’s a fact, Gloria says. She says everyone thinks they should have been nicer or paid more attention. Or called a doctor sooner or stayed home longer. But the person who really is responsible, can you imagine how he feels? How he relives every minute leading up to it, over and over like a movie stuck on PLAY, as if he could stop time and change the path of things, make it better, different, less tragic.
 
On the afternoon in question, I stood in front of the big brick police station, considering all of this—­guilt and how you can’t change things and how maybe this would finally stop that movie from playing. I had my toothbrush, some toothpaste, clean socks and underwear, and a shirt in my backpack, because I’d tried to run away from home. But I couldn’t even get that right. I couldn’t get anything right anymore. I disappointed people I cared about, people I cared about died, and the guilt and grief had become part of me, Jude Banks. I’d slipped out of the house unnoticed and walked down the street without a real plan except to escape.
 
I had a vague idea of going to the ocean, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to get there. It was south of home, even I knew that, so I headed south, or what I thought was south by the position of the sun in the clear blue sky. But in no time I was hot and sweaty and still very far from the ocean. I stopped and reconsidered. What would I even do once I got there? In movies, people stare at the ocean and come to great realizations. But I wasn’t sure that happened in real life. Plus, it took thirty minutes by car to get to the beach. By foot, it would take ten times that long.
 
Should I continue south, anyway? Change direction? I paused, backpack hanging off one shoulder, and reviewed the mess that was my life. No one expects a twelve year old to be in such a mess, but there I was. I wondered if my mother had noticed I was gone, and a stab of guilt almost took my breath away. In the almost a year since Katie had died, Mom had become a stranger—­wild-­eyed one day, quiet the next, sobbing all of the next. Dad told me about a famous psychiatrist who figured out the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. What about guilt? I wondered. Shouldn’t that be a stage of grief? Or maybe it never went away, so it wasn’t a stage but a permanent state of being. Not part of the five stages at all.
 
To me, they sounded like a logical progression. Denial for a few weeks, then on to anger, all the way to acceptance, checking off little boxes as each stage got completed, like the first day of school list for school supplies. The memory of all those afternoons at Staples with Mom and Katie loading up a cart with notebooks and pencils and markers pushed its way into my mind. Katie always liked things that sparkled; I liked purple. Last year, Mom found a sparkly mini stapler and held it up to Katie like she’d found treasure. I could see them there in the aisle, Mom calling out to Katie and holding up that shiny stapler and Katie jumping for joy, literally. Three big kangaroo jumps toward Mom, her head thrown back and her hair sticking up and her joy so real it was almost like something you could touch. I closed my eyes and didn’t open them again until I’d pushed that memory way to the back of my mind. Since Katie died, I’d gotten pretty good at doing that.
 
That famous psychiatrist was wrong, I decided. Mom was angry one minute, then depressed, and then back to angry. Once in a blue moon, she was almost normal. But when that happened, it was a pleasant surprise. When that happened, I moved gently around her. The thing was, I never knew which mother I would find when I came home from school.
 
“Have you heard of the psychiatrist who discovered the five stages of grief?” I asked Mom one afternoon when she seemed as close to normal as she got those days, which meant a lot of staring into space but also that her hair was brushed and she was dressed in clothes that matched.
 
“Kübler-­Ross?” she said.
 
Before I could answer, Mom said, “She got it all wrong, didn’t she, Jude?”
 
I sighed. “Yeah,” I admitted. “She did.”
 
With a mother like that, how could I know what she would do when she realized I wasn’t home? A teeny-­tiny part of me wondered if she might actually feel relief. Without me to care about, she could stay in her pajamas for the rest of her life, drink wine for breakfast, not have to pretend things were getting okay.
 
I stared up at the police station. I’d only managed to walk two towns away from home. My feet hurt in their Converses, and I was tired. So tired that I wasn’t sure I could make it up the big stone steps to the front door, though of course I did. Inside didn’t look anything like police stations I’d seen on television. It looked more like an office, with regular people in regular clothes instead of uniforms and badges, everyone sitting at computers and typing.
 
A woman with lots of dark hair piled high on her head sat at the desk that faced the door. She was staring at her computer screen, too, typing fast. A black-­and-­white nameplate said HILARY HITCHCOCK.
 
I walked over to Hilary Hitchcock, my legs heavy, like they got when I’d been swimming too long.
 
“Excuse me,” I said. My voice came out like a squeak.
 
“Uh-­huh,” Hilary Hitchcock said without looking at me, still typing like crazy.
 
I cleared my throat. I had to find my voice somehow.
 
“I need to talk to a policeman,” I said, still all squeaky and small. “A sergeant, maybe.”
 
She stopped typing and looked at me. Her eyebrows had been plucked off, and she’d drawn in new ones with a dark pencil. When she frowned, they looked like caterpillars moving.
 
“A sergeant,” she repeated.
 
I cleared my throat again. Somewhere inside me was the voice of a superhero. Katie thought so. Now I had to find it.
 
“Someone in charge,” I said. A little stronger? Maybe?
 
“You want to try me?” she asked, and she took out a clipboard and a pen like she was ready to write down whatever I told her.
 
“I can only tell a policeman.” So he can arrest me and get it over with already, I thought, but obviously didn’t say.
 
Hilary Hitchcock put down the clipboard, picked up a telephone receiver, and pressed a couple of buttons that lit up when she touched them, eyeballing me the whole time.
 
“Jeffers, can you come out here, please?” she said. “There’s a kid needs to talk to you.”
 
“He should bring handcuffs, I think,” I told her.
 
She frowned deeper. “Yup,” she said into the phone. “Yup.” Then she hung up.
 
Hilary Hitchcock and I stared at each other until a door opened and out came a policeman—­Jeffers, I guessed. I was glad Jeffers looked like a real policeman, with a hat and a badge and stripes on his shirt.
 
His very long legs marched right over to me.
 
“Officer Jeffers,” he boomed, holding out his hand for me to shake.
 
I shook it.
 
“You needed to see me?” he said.
 
I studied Jeffers, his neat uniform and shiny badge, no handcuffs in sight. Still, I held out my hands, wrists close together like a criminal on TV.
 
“Book me,” I said, and to my surprise, hot tears fell down my face.
 
“Book you?” Jeffers said.
 
I nodded. “For murder,” I said. “Please,” I said. “Arrest me.”