by Carl Deuker
I took a step forward.
“Get out of here, Brock!”
“They’ll kill you.”
“I don’t care.”
Hunter lifted his face from the floor. “Please, please, please. I’m sorry. Don’t.” Richie pointed the gun at his head. Hunter covered his head with his hands and sobbed.
The police were just outside the bathroom door. I could hear them breathing.
I took a step toward Richie, reached out, and put my hand on the wrist of his gun hand. Richie turned so that the gun was pointing right at me, his arm rigid. “Let go, Richie,” I whispered.
His eyes stared into mine; his grip stayed firm. I heard a policeman slide a garbage can aside. Time had run out. I put my other hand on the gun itself and twisted. He held tight for one long second, and then his hand relaxed.
I had the gun.
“Go!” I screamed to Hunter and Colton and the two other guys. “Get out of here!” And they were up and out, running to the safety of the police.
From the hallway, there was noise and shouting, and then everything went quiet. That’s when I realized I was holding the gun. I knelt down, placed the gun gently on the floor, and then slid it to the very back corner of the bathroom. “We’re coming out!” I hollered. “Nobody has a gun.”
“Walk slowly,” a voice answered. “And keep your hands where we can see them.”
When it came to it, I almost had to carry Richie out. His feet had nearly stopped working; his head hung on his chest; his body sagged. I felt drained and weak, but together we took those ten steps. We stepped into the hallway—our hands raised—and instantly my face was against a locker, and a second later I was down on the floor and Richie was down on the floor and we were both being handcuffed. My shoulders felt like they were going to come out of their sockets, and I’d hit the floor so hard, I felt dizzy, but I was alive and Richie was alive and Hunter Gates was alive and everyone was alive, so no matter how much it hurt, it didn’t hurt at all.
It was over, but it wasn’t. For the rest of the morning, I answered questions at the police station, with my mom and dad sitting behind me. When the police were done, my parents took me home, and they made me go over everything again. At one point, my dad interrupted to say I’d done a brave thing, and my mom turned on him. “He could have been killed,” she said, her eyes filled with angry tears. A few minutes later, my mom told me she was proud of me, and it was my dad who told me I should have waited for help.
At both the police station and home, I tried to find out about Richie. How was he? Where was he? When could I talk to him? Nobody—not the police, not my parents—had answers. When I finally got upstairs to my own room, the first thing I did was open my laptop and email him: Write me.
I hit send, and a second later a mailer-daemon message popped up on my screen telling me that my message had been addressed to an invalid email address.
His account had been shut down.
Crown Hill High was closed the next day and would reopen on Wednesday with an all-school assembly. My parents wanted to stay home with me, but when I told them I needed some time to myself, they didn’t argue. I ate breakfast and then headed to Richie’s house. I was sure he wasn’t there, but I hoped to talk to his father. I knocked on the front door, waited, knocked again, and then gave up.
I walked down the porch steps and around back to the shed. I tried the doorknob—expecting it to be locked—but it turned, so I stepped inside.
The plywood base for Richie’s model was back up on the table. Richie’s father must have done that. He’d also taken some of the pieces that weren’t smashed and placed them on the board: a section of the new wing, a few trees, three benches, the back parking lot. Other pieces were lying on their sides. I picked up a couple and tried to remember where they belonged. After a few attempts, I stopped.
Chemotherapy couldn’t keep Richie’s mom from dying. A stationary bicycle won’t keep my dad’s muscles from wasting away. Some things go wrong and stay wrong, and nothing anyone can do will ever make them right. I left the shed, pulling the door closed behind me, and went home.
My parents told me I didn’t have to go back to school until I felt ready, but I had to return sometime—Wednesday was as good as any other day.
The morning assembly lasted half an hour. Mr. Spady spoke first, then Coach Lever. Ms. Levine, the special ed teacher, was last. She challenged us to transform Crown Hill High into a place of love. A few guys in the back snickered, saying they were all for it, but most kids stared ahead, their elbows on their knees, their chins resting in their hands.
As I walked the hall that week, a few kids called out, “Hey, good to see you,” and “Brock, my man.” Most kids stayed clear of me. I was a hero, the guy who’d taken the gun away from a school shooter. But I was also the shooter’s best friend. So who was I, really?
Thursday night, my dad told me Richie was being held at the Juvenile Detention Center near Capitol Hill. I wanted to go see him, or at least call him and talk to him, but my dad shook his head. I wasn’t a member of his family. That meant I couldn’t phone him—ever—and I could visit him only on Saturday afternoons, and then only for thirty minutes.
I went online after dinner and found a photo of a room at the JDC. Concrete floor. A thin mattress on top of a long board that was wedged into the wall. A single shelf above the mattress. A tiny window above the shelf. It seemed impossible that Richie was there, but he was.
On Saturday afternoon, as my mom wound her way across town, I thought of how much I wanted to see Richie, but now that it was about to happen, what would I say to him? What would he say to me?
My mom walked with me as far as the reception area, but she stayed there. To get all the way inside, I had to empty my pockets, take off my shoes, go through a metal detector, and then be patted down.
Once I reached the visitors’ area, I waited at a small table. When Richie entered, I didn’t recognize him. He was wearing an orange jumpsuit and his hair had been cut short, making his ears seem to stick out more than usual. But it was his eyes that tricked me. They were dull and dead, where before they’d always been bright.
The chairs, the tables, the lights, and the carpets—everything about the visiting room was normal, yet I felt as if I were on another planet in another universe, and I could tell Richie felt the same. We couldn’t get any conversation going. After a while, he pointed to a table in the corner that had board games on it. “When my dad visits, we play chess,” he said. So that’s what we ended up doing.
Finally, the half hour was up. A guard came over to the table and nodded to Richie. “See you next week,” I said.
Richie stood and headed to the door leading back to his tiny room. After he’d taken a few steps, he turned back. Something almost like a smile crossed his face. “Nobody’s going to call you a wuss ever again.”
The weeks before Christmas break are hard to describe. In some ways, Crown Hill High returned to normal. I went to the same classes taught by the same teachers to the same students. The McDermotts and my other Whitman friends started talking to me again, though they never mentioned Richie or the shooting. With Anya, it was the opposite. All she wanted to talk about was Richie, but there was nothing new to say.
Hunter and Colton and the rest of those guys—they kept to themselves and they kept quiet. Suicide Alley became just a slightly narrow hallway. And if Hunter saw me anywhere on campus, he dropped his head and stared at his shoes. Mr. Spady avoided me too, and so did Ms. Fontelle, the dance teacher who told me it would all blow over.
One day, Coach Lever called me to his classroom during his planning period. “I heard you got in to see Richie. How’s he doing?”
“Okay, I guess.”
He frowned. “They won’t let me talk to him on the phone. I went to visit him, but he wouldn’t come out to see me.”
“He doesn’t say much to me when I’m there.”
“At least he’s talking to somebody.” Coach Lever stopped, looked do
wn, and shook his head. “Two things eat at me, Brock. First, that I didn’t know my own team. That my players would turn on Richie—I thought we were better than that.” He paused. “And the other thing is that Richie shouldn’t even have been on the field. You should have been back there. You’ve got the great hands, and you know the rules. You’d have caught the snap, waited for the double zeros, and then taken a knee. Game over. We win.” He paused. “We should be getting ready for a playoff game. Instead—” He stopped and shook his head sadly.
I turned to leave, but his voice stopped me. “You’d tell me, wouldn’t you? If you even remotely suspected something like this again. You’d tell me or somebody, right?”
I visited Richie every Saturday. I was nervous each time, but not like I’d been during the first visit. We played chess, and as we played he’d talk about JDC and I’d talk about Crown Hill High. I tried to tell him what Coach Lever had said, but he wasn’t interested.
I couldn’t visit Richie on the Saturday before Christmas. My family flew down to San Francisco. A year earlier, I hadn’t wanted any of our relatives to see my father. Now, to me, my father didn’t even seem sick. His arm braces and his slow movements and his muscle weakness—they were part of who he was.
The visit went okay. We flew back to Seattle on a Friday. Saturday afternoon, I went to see Richie. “Didn’t you read the newspaper?” the woman at the first desk said. “He isn’t a U.S. citizen, so he’s been turned over to the Chinese government. He’s in China now, or on his way. ”
My mother was standing just behind me. She sensed my confusion and stepped forward. “Do you have a phone number for him?”
“No.”
“Is there an address?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Then how can my son get in touch with Richie?”
The woman shrugged. “I don’t think he can.”
A numbness came over me then. I was numb walking the halls at Crown Hill, numb in class, and numb doing my homework. When I talked to my mom and dad, I was numb. I said things without knowing what I was saying. I heard things without knowing what I was hearing.
It turns out that you can get along okay when you’re numb. If kids told jokes, I laughed; if they were serious, I was serious. I studied enough to get decent grades, and I answered enough questions in class to stay under the radar.
Coach Lever told me he wanted me to play summer-league football in a seven-on-seven league that he was organizing, and then play varsity football for him in the fall. “You need to play again, Brock,” he said. “You can’t let things end this way.”
“I’ll think about it,” I told him.
He knew I was blowing him off, because after that he was always pulling me aside in the hallways. He asked me to commit to his league so many times that it became a running joke between us, the only joke I had going those days. “Ready to sign up?” he’d say. “The pen is right here.”
“Maybe tomorrow,” I’d answer.
In February, Hunter signed a letter of intent to attend college at Humboldt State in California. It didn’t bother me, but when Anya heard she was furious. “Richie’s probably rotting in some horrible jail in China, and that jerk gets a full scholarship because he can play a stupidly violent game. It’s not right.”
March meant soccer season. I was going to skip it, but my father insisted I turn out. “You need to do things,” he said. “You can’t just walk through life.”
I didn’t want to argue with him, or with anybody. That’s part of being numb. And playing goalie for Coach Jacklin was actually better than doing nothing after school. Practices and games made the days go by faster.
Sometimes, though, when the ball was down at the other end of the field and I knew it wasn’t coming back for a while, my mind would go back to Richie. Where was he? What was happening to him?
I’d gone online to read about the punishments in China. Wikipedia said minors who committed crimes just had to check in with a neighborhood committee for moral instruction, which didn’t sound too bad. But other sites—the ones that Anya must have read—described kids serving years in prison for crimes that seemed really minor.
Richie had come out of nowhere, an Asian kid with big ears who was great at everything. He’d jolted me out of my old life and into a new one. His mom, my dad—we shared things that nobody else could understand. And then he was gone.
Just gone.
How do you accept that?
And then today happened.
We had a soccer game against Lakeside at their field. Their record was 6–0, while we were 2–4. We had no chance to win, and we knew it. On the ride to Lakeside, I looked out the window and saw nothing. Guys around me talked, but I heard nothing. It was just another day to get through.
But once our bus pulled into the Lakeside parking lot and I saw those ivy-covered brick buildings and those perfect green lawns, something ignited inside me. I remembered the last time I’d been there, when Richie had gotten himself kicked out of the game. I’d sucked as a goalkeeper; we’d all sucked; and they’d destroyed us.
I sat up in the seat, fire running through my veins for the first time in a long time. Lakeside wasn’t going to destroy us again, not if I could help it. I was going to play the kind of game I should have played a year earlier, the kind of game Richie taught me to play.
Lakeside was better, a lot better, so they dominated the opening minutes, getting chance after chance. But I was unbeatable in goal, stopping every shot that came my way, playing the angles perfectly. Nothing got by me.
My unexpected success gave my teammates a tiny bit of hope. We started winning more fifty-fifty balls; we started getting a few chances of our own. And then we got a kiss from Lady Luck. Just before half, Lakeside’s goalie stumbled to one knee on what should have been an easy save. The ball dribbled by him, and before he could recover, Tim McDermott poked it into the net. Lakeside had controlled the game, but we were ahead 1–0.
Still, one goal is nothing against a machine like Lakeside. They’d been scoring four and five goals every game, so there was no panic on their side. But in the second half, I stayed in the zone, making save after save. The time kept ticking away. The Lakeside guys upped the pressure, while their parents and girlfriends screamed for the tying goal. They were the best team in the state. We were nothing. This couldn’t be happening. But it was happening. They weren’t knocking on the door—they were pounding on it—but I wouldn’t let them in. Victory was so close, I could taste it.
And then, in a flash, everything went wrong. Peter Lee tried to make a long crossing pass, but he caught his foot in the ground, and the ball never got in the air. Instead, it rolled out to the center of the field, where a Lakeside forward took control. He dribbled upfield with uncovered forwards on both sides. Rory challenged, forcing a pass to the right side.
Lakeside’s top scorer was coming at me. I took a few steps out to cut his angle. Rory was moving toward him too but was still ten yards off. The Lakeside guy settled the ball, eyed the goal and me, and then drilled a line shot headed toward the lower left corner of the goal. I took two steps and then laid out for the ball, stretching every inch of my body. I felt it hit my fingertips. As I landed on the grass, I looked back toward the net.
The ball bounced once, hit the post, and bounded back onto the field, right in front of the goal. I had no chance to get to it, but Rory hadn’t quit on the play. He beat two Lakeside guys to the ball and kicked it over the end line.
Lakeside botched the corner kick. Peter Lee booted the ball the length of the field, and seconds later the referee blew his whistle. We’d done it. We’d beaten Lakeside 1–0 on their field. We shook their hands and said good game, wearing our game faces, but back on the bus we hollered like maniacs.
When I got home, I went upstairs and opened my laptop. Fireworks were going off in my brain. It felt great to feel alive again. I had to tell someone. I had to keep the numbness away.
But who? Who?
When t
he answer came, my excitement vanished in the same way that fireworks disappear into the night sky.
It was Richie I wanted to tell. No one else.
I sat back in my chair and stared at my computer. I didn’t even have enough energy to close it down—I just sat and watched the cursor blink at me.
I don’t know how long I’d been staring at the screen when a message popped up in the right-hand corner of the screen. I didn’t read it, but it half registered before disappearing. The cursor blinked a few more times, and then I sat straight up.
Had I seen what I thought I’d seen?
I went to my bookmarks and opened Red Hot Pawn. In bold letters, a message flashed across the screen: Vampire17 has challenged you to a game. Do you accept?
My hands were shaking as I clicked Yes , and a chessboard filled the screen. Richie had made his first move: Pawn to King Four. In the message box, he’d written, Doing okay. How about you?
I leaned back in my chair, took a couple of deep breaths, and made my move. King’s Knight to Bishop Three. Then I clicked on the message box. I had five hundred characters. I typed a question, then deleted it. I typed another and deleted that. I had so much I wanted to know—where should I start? I looked up the ceiling, and suddenly I realized what I wrote didn’t matter. There’d be time.
There’d be plenty of time.
I quickly typed, Beat Lakeside today. You should have seen their faces.
We played for the next twenty minutes, exchanging short messages with each move, easing our way back.
Rematch tomorrow? I typed when checkmate was a move away.
Day after he replied with his winning move. School placement test tomorrow. My Chinese still sucks, but it’s getting better. Back at it.
My parents came home a few minutes after I’d logged off. I told them about Richie, and then about beating Lakeside. I must have talked a lot, and fast, because my mom said she was excited to see me excited. “You need to get back into things.”