Bench scooted his chair over, deliberately giving himself extra elbow room, putting him closer to me. Rose didn’t seem to notice.
“Wolf was just telling me about the time all four of you nearly blew your own lips off,” she said. Bench raised his eyebrows. Deedee chuckled at the memory, though it really wasn’t all that funny, not even in a looking-back-on-it-now kind of way.
“We didn’t almost blow our lips off,” I said. Though I guess we could have. We got a little singed, at least. Last summer—after the soccer-ball-to-the-head incident—the four of us tried to make our own dynamite. Not because we had anything in particular to blow up, save for a couple of Wolf’s old models that he didn’t like anymore. More because we were bored and couldn’t think of anything dumber to do. It bothered me a little, Wolf telling Rose these kinds of things already. Not that our summer shenanigans were top secret or anything—though homemade bombs weren’t exactly the kind of thing you wanted to brag about in school—just that Wolf didn’t make a habit of going around telling stories. He liked to keep things to himself. It was another thing I thought we had in common.
“A shoe box of leftover fireworks and your mom’s stolen lighter are a dangerous recipe,” Wolf said.
“We needed a longer fuse,” Deedee remarked. I studied Deedee’s face. He didn’t seem that put out that there were five of us again, but it’s not like he would have told Rose to get up and leave. He popped open his lunch box and fished out his food like it was any other nonbreadstick day.
“We needed some brains,” Wolf corrected. “I mean, whose idea was it to split open three hundred Black Cats and empty the contents into a toilet paper roll and set it on fire anyways?”
The idea had been mine, actually, though I didn’t care to admit it. It hadn’t turned out as spectacular as I’d hoped. I was imagining proton torpedo blowing up the Death Star. It was mostly just loud and smoky. Our lips remained firmly attached to our faces, but the black smudge could still be seen on my driveway. Nothing quite gets out stupidity, not even bleach.
“Small town,” I explained. “Long summers. And the public pool’s always too crowded.”
“You four need more hobbies,” Rose said. Bench grunted and dug into his spaghetti. He seemed to be intent on finishing his food in record time. He hadn’t said a word since we’d stepped out of line.
“Speaking of hobbies,” Wolf said, “did you know Rose is a professional orgamist?”
“Origamist,” Rose said. “And Wolf is exaggerating. I’ve only recently gone semipro. Here.” She dropped the celery stalk she had been nibbling at and took the napkin off my tray without even asking. I watched her fold it in half. “Pick an animal. Any animal at all.”
“Me?” I asked, wondering why I’d been singled out. I was supposed to be part of the chorus. I looked at Bench, who refused to look up from his food. I tried to think of something creative, something challenging. Something impossible. “Komodo dragon,” I said.
Wolf snorted. “Really, Frost?”
“She said any animal.”
“It’s all right,” Rose said. “I’ve got this. One Komodo dragon, coming right up.”
The four of us sat and watched. Even Bench stopped scarfing his bowl of spaghetti, looking at Rose Holland over the top of his fork. She worked quickly, her hands moving almost as fast as Wolf’s when they danced up and down his piano keys, impossible to follow. Fold and crease and fold. Press and crease again. I watched something taking shape, though I couldn’t make it out at first.
“Voilà,” Rose said after twenty seconds or so, handing my reshaped napkin back to me.
I held it between us for a moment. I’m sure I looked confused.
“It’s a fish,” I said.
“Nope. Komodo dragon,” she said.
I held it up. “Really? Because it seriously looks like a fish.” It was definitely a fish. It may not have had a sword for a nose, but it was certainly no Komodo dragon.
Rose leaned across the table, her face suddenly close to mine. “Honestly, Frost. Where’s your imagination?” Her breath smelled like celery and cinnamon gum.
“It’s a very nice fish,” Deedee said, snatching my napkin-fish out of my hands and arcing it up and down through imaginary currents. He swam it up to Bench and pretended to tickle his cheek.
Bench wrapped a fist around it, crumpling it and then dropping it to his tray.
“Fish murderer,” Deedee scoffed. Bench shrugged.
“Do one for me,” Wolf said, snatching the napkin off of Bench’s tray this time and handing it over before he could snag it back. “An elephant.”
“No problemo,” Rose said. Fifteen seconds later she handed Wolf another fish.
“You forgot the trunk,” he said. Then he took a stray strand of spaghetti from my plate and smooshed it against the fish’s nose, where it dangled.
“Perfect,” Rose said. She turned to Deedee. “How about it? What’ll it be? A kangaroo? An armadillo? A three-toed sloth? Just name it and the Fabulous Folding Rose will make it for you.”
But before he could answer, Josh Penn, a kid with a buzz cut and a habit of scratching his armpits in class, stuck his head between Bench and me and whispered, “Evan Smalls is running the Gauntlet.”
“When?” Bench asked, finally finding a conversation he wanted to be a part of. “Today?”
Josh nodded. Scratched. “Four o’clock.”
“Why?” I asked, but Josh ignored me. It was a stupid question, anyway. The why was superfluous. Probably somebody had dared him to and he didn’t want to wuss out. Maybe it was an argument. Maybe just a challenge. Maybe it was a bet. It didn’t matter, not to the people watching. What mattered was that Evan was going to run. I glanced around the lunchroom, but I didn’t see him anywhere. Josh Penn moved on to share the news with the next table, spreading it the old-fashioned way in light of everyone’s phones being kept prisoner in the Big Ham’s office.
“Evan Smalls,” I repeated. I knew him. We weren’t friends, obviously, but I had nothing against him. Nothing that would make me want to see him break his neck.
“He’s going to kill himself,” Deedee said, echoing my thoughts. His voice was matter-of-fact. Like it was a forgone conclusion.
“Excuse me, but what the heck is a gauntlet?”
Deedee looked at Rose as if she had an alien crawling out of her throat. “You’re joking, right? You mean you’ve never heard of the Gauntlet?”
Rose put up her hands in protest. “All right. First off, you don’t have to say it like that. You’re not Han Solo talking about the Millennium freaking Falcon. Secondly, I just moved here three weeks ago, and I didn’t get a chance to finish Frommer’s Guide to Exploring Podunkville, Michigan, before I came. Is this some kind of stupid dare thing?”
“Pretty much,” Wolf said. “With an emphasis on the stupid.” Wolf had never been a fan of the Gauntlet. I believe he once used the phrase “immature, idiotic, macho load of bull-hockey” when describing it. He was in the minority, though. The rest of us knew better.
“It’s the place where legends are born,” I explained. “It’s basically this gigantic hill, completely covered with trees, and you walk your bike to the top and then try to ride back down as fast as you can, no brakes, without flipping or kissing bark. Deedee’s right. It’s completely suicidal.”
“So you just ride down the hill?” she asked.
“Yeah. But it’s called ‘Running the Gauntlet.’”
“And this is what you guys do around here for fun?”
“Not us. We make bombs,” Wolf said proudly.
“And play Dungeons and Dragons,” Deedee added. I think maybe he surprised himself by admitting that, because he started sucking on his juice box to keep from elaborating.
“And that boy came around and told you, why? So you can go and watch?”
I nodded. Wolf shook his head.
“I only watched once,” Deedee said. “Remember Kyle Ralston?”
I remembered. Kyle’s nos
e was still crooked, and the scar on his leg where the bike’s gears bit into him earned him lots of second glances in gym class. Kyle had made it two-thirds of the way down. The farther you make it, the bigger the impact. Momentum is a killer.
“I’ll be honest . . . it sounds kinda dumb,” Rose said.
“It is,” Wolf echoed. The two of them shook their heads at each other.
Bench dropped his fork onto his plate. “Well, I’m going,” he declared. He turned to me. “You’ll be there, won’t you?”
Suddenly I was on the spot. I squirmed in my seat, sensing Bench boring holes into me on one side, and Wolf’s sharp green eyes on me from the other. A simple enough question, except it wasn’t simple it all. Bench was challenging me, and somehow I couldn’t back down, not in front of everyone. Not in front of Rose.
“What? Pass up a chance to watch someone plow into a tree at forty miles an hour and possibly crack their skull open? Who wouldn’t want to see that?” I said halfheartedly.
I didn’t return Wolf’s stare, or bother to look at Deedee, either. I did glance over at Rose, just to see if I could tell what she was thinking, but there was no reading her expression.
I did know one thing, though. When Bench punched me playfully on the shoulder after I agreed to go with him to watch Evan Smalls try to kill himself, it hurt a little.
Bench picked up his tray and said that he was finished and that he needed to go get something from his locker before next period. “We’ll meet up after school, all right?” He was speaking to me. Only to me.
I gave the most imperceptible of nods.
As he walked away, Wolf waved to him, but Bench’s hands were so full he didn’t wave back.
THE GAUNTLET
MIDDLE SCHOOL IS A MINEFIELD. DECIDING WHO TO LIKE AND NOT like and who to follow and who to ignore completely. Worrying that you’re going to trip while walking down the hall and sprawl all over the floor like a beached starfish. Wondering if you should raise your hand when the teacher asks a hard question and risk exposing your nerdiness for the sake of a few bonus points. Taking every sideways glance as a message, trying to crack the code. Every day you’re bound to do something that gets you noticed by the wrong people. Every day you’re bound to step somewhere you shouldn’t.
I know all about minefields—actual, honest-to-god-explosives-buried-in-the-dirt minefields—from my crazy uncle Mike, the one who gave me the whale shirt for my birthday. He served in the army straight out of high school and did two tours on the bomb squad. His official title, I guess, was explosive ordnance disposal specialist, but his buddies gave him the nickname Pinky. He spent most of his time over in Iraq for Round Two, as he called it, helping to detonate and disarm land mines and IEDs—improvised explosive devices. Like a toilet paper tube full of gunpowder only more complex and a lot more dangerous. It was an IED that gave my uncle his nickname. It actually blew off three of his fingers, but the surgeons managed to reattach two of them. Sometimes things stick, and sometimes they don’t. Uncle Mike told me all about it. In incredibly gory detail.
I could sit and listen to my uncle’s war stories for hours, partly because they expanded my vocabulary—he only censored the language when Mom was around—but also because they kind of put things in perspective. My uncle has seen bombs capable of leveling buildings, taking out a whole city block, though he says that’s nothing compared to the one time he had to babysit me as an infant and I blew out my diaper. (He called me a biological WMD—weapon of mass destruction—and told me that one diaper was the reason he never got married and had a kid of his own, though I suspect there were others.) He’d seen things I’d never seen and hoped I’d never have to see, and he said he didn’t have a whole lot of patience for people who didn’t know a good thing when they had it.
Sometimes I wondered if he didn’t mean my parents.
Uncle Mike used to come visit a couple times a year before my dad moved away, and when he did he’d tell me about all the things he’d seen blow up.
The last time I saw him was four years ago. Mom and Dad hadn’t spoken to each other in a while, and I swear it was so cold in the house you could see icicles hanging from the windows in June. On the second day of the long weekend Uncle Mike came outside to finish his beer, and found me bouncing a tennis ball off the garage.
“I know what you’re doing,” he said with a sly grin, stepping off the porch and coming toward me. He wore long sleeves, even in the summer. Said he’d gotten accustomed to having every square inch covered.
“I’m playing catch,” I told him. I was only nine at the time. I hadn’t met Bench yet. I had sort-of friends, but no tribe, and I was used to spending time by myself. I lobbed the tennis ball against the garage door again, but my uncle was faster than me and snatched it before I could. He held the ratty old thing up between us in his four-fingered hand.
“You are staying out of the way,” he said.
I didn’t know what to say, so instead I took the ball from him and started chucking it again. In some ways Uncle Mike was the exact opposite of my father. He didn’t care for books. He liked big crowds and loud gatherings. He was a people person, which he said was unusual for someone who spent most of his working hours by himself, trying not to get blown up. He actually tried to get along with my mother—made a pretty constant effort—which was another big difference between him and Dad. But there was one thing he and Dad had in common: neither of them was afraid to lecture me about life, whether I wanted them to or not. I took it better coming from Uncle Mike. It didn’t sound like a lecture. It just sounded like two guys talking. Besides, he was immensly cool in a yeah-I-got-my-finger-blown-off-in-combat kind of way.
“It’s all right. I get it,” he said, standing beside me, taking a sip from his can. “It’s the safest thing. You walk down a road and you see a wire poking out of the dirt, you stop walking, you back the hell up, and you call EOD.” Uncle Mike liked to use acronyms. He was full of them. I suspected he was full of a lot of things. Nobody could have that many stories. “You take cover, clinch hard, and cross your fingers, but you stay out of the way. Sometimes there are no RSPs.”
“RSPs?” I stopped bouncing my ball.
“Render safe procedures. Whatever you gotta do to make sure a bomb doesn’t hurt somebody. You know—don’t cut the black wire or whatever crapola they teach you in the movies. But sometimes there’s really not much you can do. Nothing but trigger the thing and stay out of the way and try not to get hurt. You know what I’m saying?”
I wasn’t sure. “Coming from a guy with nine fingers,” I said, tossing the ball again. Thunk. Bounce. Catch. Thunk. Bounce. Catch.
“I said try,” he said, intercepting my ball again. “You don’t always get out in one piece.” He bounced it as hard as he could against the pavement with his pinkiless hand, a fly ball for me to catch. Unfortunately the sun temporarily blinded me and I lost track of it and it bounced down the driveway and into the street. My uncle and I both watched it, sort of daring the other one to go after it.
In the end we just left it there, resting by the curb, and sat together on the porch instead, him nursing his beer and me chugging a Coke, both of us listening to the nothing coming from inside the house, me wondering what kind of man decides he wants to disarm bombs for a living and my uncle probably wondering the same thing.
But some things, I guess, you can’t shy away from. Some things you just have tackle head on, whether it’s safe or not. Even if it means losing a part of you.
Evan Smalls was running the Gauntlet at four, which meant I needed to get home and grab my bike if I wanted to make it out to Hirohito Hill in time to meet Bench.
That’s what everyone called the Gauntlet when nobody was careening down it: Hirohito Hill. At least that’s what kids long before us called it, and it stuck. I’m not sure it even has a real name. I don’t even know who owns the land—the town, I guess. Or maybe it’s just been in somebody’s family for generations and they’ve forgotten about it. There are no s
igns saying KEEP OUT, though there probably should be.
Not that it would stop us. There’s not much that would stop thirteen-year-old boys from trying to kill themselves in an attempt to prove how cool they are. Maybe barbed wire. Maybe high voltage. But probably not. The rules would just be different. Legend says that the hill was named after the emperor of Japan during World War II. The same emperor who encouraged his pilots to nose-dive into battleships and aircraft carriers. They could have called it Kamikaze Hill, I guess, but then you wouldn’t have the alliteration. I’m sort of a sucker for alliteration too.
You’d think it would be the kind of thing you’d grow out of. An idea you packed up after elementary school, along with your glue sticks and your Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. But not in Branton. In Branton, the Gauntlet is an institution. As integral to our way of life as Mr. Twisty’s, Stockbridge’s statue, Fredo’s greasy pizza parlor, or Mustache Mick, the homeless guy who begs for loose change outside Andy’s Bar on Tenth Street and has a big, black broom curtaining his mouth. Every kid in Branton had given Mick at least a dollar and shelled out two fifty for a jumbo slice at Fredo’s. And everybody had seen at least one kid try to tackle the Gauntlet. It was our proving grounds. Our Octagon. Our Hunger Games. A giant, tree-studded hill, overgrown and wild with brush and ivy. There was no easy path down. The slope, Deedee once calculated, was at least fifty degrees (I know better than to question his math). It took you three minutes to walk your bike up it. You could make it back down in twenty seconds, provided nothing stopped you, but something always stopped you. There was no single straight-line path. To navigate, you had to turn, and turning on that kind of slope going that kind of speed was tricky to do once, let alone the dozen times you would need to in order to dodge the trees and reach the bottom intact.
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