Rash

by Hautman, Pete

  That took me by surprise. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Maddy told me,” he said, smirking in that phony friendly way.

  Maddy? Why had he been talking to Maddy? More to the point, why had Maddy told him anything about me?

  “I’m just gonna do my best,” I said, shrugging it off. On the outside I was cucumber cool, but inside I was starting to boil. I knew he was trying to get under my skin. Maddy Wilson was my girlfriend. Just having her and Karlohs in the same thought set my teeth on edge.

  “She said you pretend a bear is chasing you when you run,” Karlohs said, his smile growing larger.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, returning his smile. But inside I was screaming. Maddy! What were you thinking? How could you tell Karlohs Mink the things I say for your ears alone? Sure, I’d told Maddy about my grizzly-bear technique. And I’d bragged to her that I might set a new school record. But why did she have to share it with Karlohs?

  Matt and Ron were listening.

  “What bear?” Matt asked.

  Karlohs said, “He pretends a bear is chasing him.”

  “No, I don’t,” I said.

  “Does it help?” Ron asked.

  “There is no bear.”

  Hackenshor blew his whistle and we all took our positions on the blocks. I was sick with suppressed anger. My knees felt shaky and my running gear weighed a thousand pounds. Karlohs had his smirky grin turned on me. Hackenshor was shouting, and suddenly, before I was ready, came the loud crack of the starter pistol. Karlohs was out of the blocks before the signal got to my legs—then I was running, Adzorbium sucking at my soles, and all I could think of was that I was behind, Karlohs Mink’s bright-blue-on-yellow number 19 singlet a body length in front of me. My arms were pumping, elbow pads, kneepads, and ankle braces clattering. My legs were made of lead. Too late I remembered the grizzly bear on my ass, but it had lost its power. Karlohs had killed the bear. Instead of catching up and blowing past the competition, I watched as the gap between us widened.

  I finished dead last, my time an embarrassing 14.39 seconds.

  After the race, Karlohs came over and offered me his hand.

  “Good race,” he said.

  “Listen, Mink,” I said, unfastening my helmet, “I want you to stay away from Maddy.” I pulled off my helmet.

  His eyes opened wide in mock astonishment. “Excuse me? I don’t believe I need your permission to talk to anyone.”

  “Just stay away from her.”

  Karlohs removed his own helmet so I could see his entire smirky face, and he laughed. That was what did it.

  I threw my helmet on the ground.

  “She doesn’t want anything to do with a pretentious droog like you,” I said, getting right in his face. “So leave her alone, okay? I don’t want your disgusting dog-anus mouth anywhere near her, understand?”

  Karlohs staggered back as if he had been struck. I felt a moment of satisfaction followed immediately by a sick feeling. I knew I’d gone too far, even though it was true—his mouth really did look like the south end of a beagle. But verbally attacking someone’s physical appearance is a class-three misdemeanor.

  Then I watched as Karlohs’s eyes went glittery and his anus lips spread across his face in a smile. I picked up my helmet, turned, and walked away with a lead weight in my belly and a prickling on the back of my neck. I already had two violations on my record.

  Three strikes and you’re out.

  I hoped that my little tiff with Karlohs would be overlooked. I’m sure it was recorded by one of the security sensors on the athletic field, but Security, Safety, and Health couldn’t monitor every moment of every day.

  Still, I was plenty worried.

  Last winter I had gotten in trouble for throwing a pencil during Ms. Hildebrand’s art class. We were drawing a bowl of fruit. People have been drawing fruit for hundreds of years. I don’t know why they don’t just use an imager.

  Anyway, I happened to look at Matt Gelman two rows over, and I noticed he’d broken the tip off his pencil. I had an extra one, so I caught his eye and tossed it over to him. It was not a good throw. The pencil flew over Matt and embedded itself point-first in Ty Green’s forehead. Ty let out a howl, Ms. Hildebrand went ballistic, and I ended up in a world of trouble. Nobody believed it was an accident. I was charged with a class-two misdemeanor, put on probation for a month, and graphite pencils were banned from the school.

  Strike one.

  A few months later I was late for track practice. I ran down the hall toward the locker room. Running in school is against safety regs, of course, but the hall was almost empty and I was in a hurry. Then this stupid droog of a senior grabbed me and said to slow down. I don’t know what got into me, but I told him to mind his own damn business. Oh, and I shoved him against the wall. He got a little bump on the back of his head, and I got suspended for a week.

  Strike two.

  I blame it all on my father. Other kids could just breeze through school with never a problem. They weren’t cursed with those Marsten genes. My father should have known that his children would be doomed to end up in prison. He knew he had a temper. Some people shouldn’t breed, my father being a prime example.

  Maybe when he decided to have kids, he didn’t know he’d end up in prison, but that doesn’t make it any less his fault. I wished he wasn’t so much a part of me.

  I showered and went to Ms. Martinez’s USSA history class, where we were studying the 2030s—as boring a decade as can be imagined. I tried to make myself believe that nothing would happen. If Karlohs didn’t rat me out, I thought I might be okay.

  It’s not quite true that the 2030s were the most boring decade of all time. The 2070s were even more tedious. We haven’t had a war or a major natural disaster since 2059, the year before I was born. That was when the Christian Fundamentalist Crusade flew a remote control bomb-copter into the Lincoln Memorial, leveling it with a single blast. The Bible, the CFC terrorists claimed, forbade the worship of graven images. That was the last interesting thing that happened in the USSA, as far as I’m concerned.

  Ms. Martinez started out by telling us about the gun riots of 2039, which sound a lot more interesting than they were. It wasn’t as if people were out on the streets shooting at each other—the gun riots took place in c-space. An extremist gun collectors’ group called the NRA launched a spam attack on the web that jammed servers on every continent. But instead of getting their message across, the extremists only managed to outrage the entire human race. Local police departments were deluged with calls from angry citizens ratting out their gun-hoarding neighbors, which soon led to the nationwide confiscation of all firearms. If the police ever found out that Gramps had a shotgun hidden under his bed, he’d spend the rest of his life on a high security workfarm.

  I drifted off, imagining what it was like back in the days when people owned guns and shot one another all the time. How angry would you have to be to shoot somebody?

  Even Karlohs Mink didn’t deserve that.

  “Bo,” said Ms. Martinez.

  I blinked and sat up straight.

  “Pop quiz, Bo.”

  Everybody was bent over their WindOs. I opened mine and read the first question:

  1. The expression “One hundred healthy years for every man, woman, and child” led Congress to pass what act on September 13, 2033?

  That was an easy one. I typed in the answer:

  The Child Safety Act.

  The next question was harder.

  2. Which of the following crimes were legal prior to 2023?

  a. alcohol consumption

  b. private ownership of large dogs

  c. hunting

  d. public defecation

  e. driving without a safety web

  f. boxing

  g. chain saw possession

  I had no idea. Every one of the crimes listed struck me as outrageous. It had to be a trick question. I answered:

  None of the above.


  Next question:

  3. In what year did President Denton Wilke sign into law a bill outlawing body piercing, tattooing, branding, and other forms of self-mutilation?

  I didn’t know that one either, but since we were studying the 2030s, I had a one-in-ten chance of getting it right. I was about to guess 2035 when my WindO went dark, then lit up with the words:

  PLEASE REPORT IMMEDIATELY TO

  MR. LIPKIN AT SECURITY,

  SAFETY, AND HEALTH.

  Mr. Lipkin was strapped in his survival chair and plugged into a multiset. I sat down on the low padded bench that ran across the back wall of his office and waited for him to notice me. Sometimes it took a while. The multiset connected him to sensors in every room, hallway, closet, and office in the school. I think it was hard for him to disengage. I made myself comfortable and began working on my defense.

  At Washington Campus, verbal attacks are taken very seriously. It wouldn’t help my case to claim that I had been unduly provoked. No matter what Karlohs had done or said to me, my attack on him was a class-three misdemeanor. My only hope was to convince Lipkin that I had been making an ironic joke when I called Karlohs a “pretentious droog.” I would still be punished for hurting Karlohs’s feelings, but as long as I could prove it wasn’t malicious, it might not qualify as a misdemeanor. As for the dog-anus comment, maybe I could say I thought dog asses were beautiful. I didn’t expect him to buy it, but it was worth a try. Maybe I’d get off with a warning.

  After making me wait a few minutes, Lipkin unplugged the multiset from the socket in his temple and placed it in a compartment on the side of his chair. The chair was a Roland Survivor, top of the line. Only a few of the school faculty—those who were born rich or who had won a large lawsuit—could afford survival chairs. Originally designed for people with serious heart conditions, the chairs had become a fad recently among those who could heft the V$5,000,000-plus price tag. I guess if you have the money it makes sense, in a way. According to the manufacturer, a Roland Survivor will extend the life of its owner by an average of seventeen months. That’s assuming that you keep your butt planted in the chair twenty-four hours a day.

  Lipkin touched a pad on the arm. The chair rotated a few degrees to face me, then rose up on its wheels, raising Lipkin’s head to standing height so that I had to tip my head back to look at his wobbly chins.

  “Bo Marsten,” he said in his reedy voice. “You have once again failed to control your antisocial impulses.”

  “I am sorry,” I said.

  “We have recorded five violations. Would you like me to read them to you?”

  “That isn’t necessary,” I said. “I know I was out of line, sir.”

  “Out of line? I think your actions were somewhat more serious than that, Bo.”

  He waited a few seconds to give me a chance to respond, but I kept my mouth shut for once.

  “First,” Lipkin said, reading from the WindO attached to the left arm of his survival chair, “you called Karlohs Mink a ‘pretentious droog.’ Do you know what a droog is, Bo?”

  “Not really.”

  “It was originally derived from a Russian word meaning ‘friend,’ but in modern slang usage it means something like ‘worthless fool.’ It is a word favored by the lower classes—criminals, incompetents, morons, and reactionaries. It is not an expression we are accustomed to hearing uttered here on Washington Campus. Do you not agree?”

  “I guess.”

  “How would you feel if someone called you a pretentious, worthless fool?”

  “I guess I wouldn’t like it much.”

  “In fact, your calling Mr. Mink a pretentious droog was a verbal assault with intent to inflict emotional trauma, was it not?”

  “I was just kidding around. I didn’t mean to bonk him.”

  “Second violation: You unfavorably and maliciously compared Mr. Mink’s mouth to an unsavory part of a dog’s anatomy.”

  “Technically, that’s true,” I said. “You see, I noticed that when he wrinkled his mouth up the way he does, it looked sort of like a dog’s . . . um . . . rear end. I didn’t mean anything bad by it; I just happened to notice the resemblance.”

  “Verbal assault, count two,” said Lipkin, touching the screen of his WindO. “Which brings me to your third violation. Have you been taking your Levulor, Bo?”

  “Um, yes. . . .”

  “Do I need to order a saliva test?”

  “I might’ve forgot this morning.”

  “Skipping your Levulor dose is a violation of school policy, Bo.”

  “I know.” There is no defense for violating a medication order, but usually skipping a day or two isn’t taken seriously. Kids forget sometimes.

  “Take your Levulor, Bo.”

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  “Yes, sir.” I unclipped my medipack from my belt, slid a blue tab from the dispenser, and placed it under my tongue. It dissolved instantly.

  Lipkin nodded, then said, “Number four. You were not wearing proper protection during this afternoon’s track-and-field practice.”

  “Oh.” I didn’t think they would notice the missing knee-pad liners. Those surveillance cameras must be better than I thought. “I got dressed in a hurry.”

  “That is no excuse.”

  “I know,” I said.

  Lipkin stared glumly at his WindO, shaking his head slowly. “Finally, we have attempted destruction of school property.”

  “We do?” That surprised me.

  “You threw your helmet on the ground.”

  “Wait a second. Those helmets are supposed to be unbreakable. I wasn’t trying to destroy it, I just dropped it!”

  “You threw it.”

  “There was no malicious intent,” I said.

  “Perhaps not.” Lipkin cleared his throat and frowned at his WindO. “Nevertheless, I’m obliged to file a report with the Federal Department of Homeland Health, Safety, and Security.” He looked at me with an openmouthed smile that reminded me of a dog farting, but this time I kept my mouth shut.

  I should have gone straight home after school, but I was all knotted up inside over the thing with Karlohs. I might have been looking at six months on a work farm, and all because of Maddy’s big mouth. I had to say something to her. I had to find out what was going on between her and Karlohs, so I stopped by her house on the way home.

  She was in the flower garden behind her house wearing a net over her head and a pair of heavy rubber gloves.

  “Hey, Mad,” I said, taking off my helmet.

  “Bo! You startled me.”

  “Sorry. What are you doing?”

  “Picking flowers. You shouldn’t be out here without a net.”

  “Why?”

  “My mother saw a bee in the garden this morning.”

  I looked around, stepping back from the flowers. “I don’t see any bees.”

  “You don’t want to take any chances. There’s another headnet in the house. I’ll go get it.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” I said.

  “You could get stung.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t care.”

  “Oh, Bo, you’re dangerous, you know that?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “I heard you attacked Karlohs!”

  “He had it coming. He . . . You . . .” I stopped talking and took a breath—that was the Levulor kicking in.

  “‘You what?” she asked, lifting the net away from her face.

  Maddy Wilson looks like a doll: long shiny black hair, big blinking dark eyes, and a pair of lips so delicate and pink that when I looked at them my heart would stop and my throat would knot up and I would turn into a complete idiot. I don’t know how I got so lucky. But I had to know about her and Karlohs.

  “Why did you tell Karlohs about my running strategy?”

  “Your what?” She blinked a few more times. The left corner of her mouth twitched up into a half smile.

  “You told Karlohs about the bear.�
��

  “Oh—your bear story.” Her eyes shifted up and away.

  “Well, we were talking and I—”

  “Why were you talking to Karlohs?”

  “What do you mean? I can’t talk to who I want to talk to?”

  I shook my head, then felt a moment of disconnection. The Levulor again, slowing me down. I focused on the flower bed. A small orange insect was hovering over a patch of yellow blossoms.

  I said, “I wish you wouldn’t repeat everything I say. Especially to a droog like Karlohs Mink.”

  “Bo! How can you call him that?”

  “I called him that to his face. It’s true. He’s a droog.”

  “No, he’s not! He’s really nice.”

  “He’s a droog, and I don’t like it when you talk to him.”

  She moved closer to me, peering up at my red face. “Bo?” A little smile on her lips. “Are you jealous?”

  “No!” But it was true. I was so jealous I wanted to rip out my heart and grind it into the dirt. No amount of Levulor could contain it. I fixed my eyes on the insect. Was it a bee?

  “Bo, what’s going to happen to you?”

  “Lipkin’s going to file a report. I could get sent up, but I’m hoping I just get a warning letter from the FDHHSS. In the meantime I’m on probation again,” I said.

  “Oh, Bo.” She touched my chest with a rubber-gloved hand. “I worry about you.”

  “Then stay away from Karlohs.”

  She jerked her hand away. “You can’t tell me what to do.”

  “I just did,” I said.

  Her face hardened. “I think you should leave now, Bo.”

  I opened my mouth to shout something at her—something hurtful—but the Levulor distracted me for that one critical instant, and I looked away, back at the flowers. Before I had a chance to think about it, I snatched the hovering insect out of the air. For a fraction of a second I felt its wings buzzing, then a searing stab of pain erupted in my palm. I let go with a howl.