by Lex Thomas
Sam laughed. The noise of it expanded in David’s ears like high-pitched thunder. He felt his eardrums tear open. He screamed, “GET AWAY FROM ME!” but he couldn’t hear it over the wretched sound drilling into the back of his eyes. He cried. He screamed. The noise stopped dead, but the pain still thudded in his head.
He opened his eye. Sam stared at him, perplexed.
“What are you, nuts?”
He thought about not telling Sam the truth, but what did it matter now?
“I’m dying.”
Sam plopped back down in his chair. He stared at David.
“I mean… how long do you have left?”
“Not long.”
Sam’s posture, his tone of voice, confused David. He almost seemed concerned. David wondered if somewhere deep down in his crooked mind there was a nugget of compassion, a speck of humanity remaining that David could appeal to.
“Sam. I know a way out. Let me go, and I’ll show you. We could escape together. This could all be over.” Sam studied David’s face, considering the offer.
“I don’t think I want to escape,” Sam said. “I like it here.” Shoes clapped hard against the gym floor. Hilary stumbled over to Sam. Her eyes were lazy slits. She carried a squeeze bottle full of juice, and there was a wet stain all down the front of her dress. Sam turned to face her, and his lip curled in disgust.
“You’re drunk,” Sam said.
“Yup,” Hilary slurred.
“What are you doing up here? Go back to the pool.”
“Hi, David,” Hilary said. “I miss you real bad.” She lost her balance, and Sam had to catch her to keep her from falling.
“Get off of me,” she said, her words falling clumsily out of her mouth. “I don’t want to be with you, I want to be with David.”
“What did you say to me?” Sam said, so loud that it echoed through the gym.
Hilary hung off Sam but peered into David’s eye.
“I’m sorry, David,” she said slowly, trying not to slur. “Sam was a mistake. I never should have broken up with you.” Sam threw Hilary to the ground. She landed face-first.
When she rolled over, one of her teeth, her right cuspid, was gone. Hilary fumbled her hand to her bloody mouth.
“You broke my tooth,” she said.
“Why the fuck would you want to be with him?” Sam screamed. “Look at him. He’s dying, he’s got nothing. I’ve got it all!”
“You don’t have shit,” she said. “Everyone hates you. Your own gang wants you dead. You haven’t got one friend in the whole school.”
“Shut up!”
“When do you think one of your guys is gonna take you out?
Tomorrow? Today?” Hilary said.
Sam paced back and forth, yanking on his own hair. He whipped back around and thrust his finger at her.
“Is this a suicide attempt? Is that what this is?” Sam asked.
“You want me to kill you?”
She smiled at him. Blood and saliva wet her lips. “I don’t want to date a loser anymore, that’s what I want.” Sam picked up the metal folding chair. He stomped over to Hilary and swung the chair up over his head.
The school’s PA system squawked to life.
“This is Will Thorpe. Are you listening, McKinley?” Sam halted his swing; the chair stayed frozen in the air.
“This is a message for that big pussy, Sam Howard, who’s so scared to leave the gym, he has to send his girlfriend to attack people while they’re asleep. That’s the guy I want to see in the quad in fifteen minutes. If you want to see a real fight, everybody should come on down. But don’t blame me if the big pussy doesn’t show.”
Sam threw the chair into the bleachers and howled.
David laughed. He couldn’t stop. It was so perfectly Will.
38
Will stood in the center of the quad. The rest of the school watched from around the edges, waiting for the show. Will felt the singe of every stare. People were hungry and volatile. The sun had set, but the exterior flood lamps were on. The generator was on its last legs and chugging. The harsh spotlights surged bright, casting sharp shadows, and then faded nearly all the way out again, like a drunken strobe.
“You’re gonna die,” Nelson said from behind him.
“Not helping,” Will said.
“I said, you’re gonna die!” Nelson shouted at the top of his lungs.
“I heard you! Everybody did.”
“Oh… sorry.”
It didn’t matter that the crowd heard him. They were already thinking it anyway. They all came to watch him lose, badly.
Every gang was there. If Sam didn’t kill him, there was a good chance that the Freaks might.
“I just hope David’s still alive,” Nelson shouted.
Will had to push that out of his mind. If he thought about all the holes in his plan, he’d be sunk. He just prayed that Sam would come soon. He was already late.
Will had no backup. Nelson was against the whole idea, and the rest of the Loners stood in the far corner of the quad. He would have liked them behind him, at least as a show of support, but they had lost faith in him after the debacle at the library.
Will understood. They had already joined in on one of his crazy plans, and it got them ambushed, injured, and demoral-ized. None of them even believed the exit was real anymore.
This was on his shoulders, and he would have only one chance to get it right.
A Freak in the crowd wore black sunglasses. She grinned at him and slowly drew a finger across her neck. Will swallowed hard. He was thirsty. His chest felt tight. He looked back to Nelson, whose teeth were gritted like he was watching a car accident in slow motion. No matter what bullshit he’d told her, Will wished Lucy was there. He secretly hoped that she would be, so she could see him at his bravest.
The crowd came alive. All heads turned as one. Varsity had arrived.
The Freaks moved aside so that Varsity could enter the circle of gangs. Varsity wore full pads and uniforms like it was a Friday night game. They jogged onto the quad and took a regimented formation across from Will. There were a lot of them, and the other gangs looked like packs of starved dogs in comparison. Varsity was well fed and at full strength. Sam stepped through the front line.
He knew he had a fight coming his way. That was the whole point, but somehow he didn’t ever have this bad a picture in his head. If he did, he probably would have never gone this far. Sam was fuming. He seemed repulsed by the sight of Will.
He pulled off his jersey. Sam’s upper body bulged and flexed.
He was huge. Will felt like the idiot everybody thought he was.
Will clenched his fists and raised them. His fists were trembling, and there was nothing he could do to hide it. Snickers rippled from all around him.
He wanted to run, but he didn’t think he could. He didn’t feel in control of his body anymore. He was all nerves. His mind was plagued with visions of all the ways he was going to screw this up.
Two burly Varsity guys broke through the front line. They were holding David up between them. David’s toes dragged on the ground behind him. His head hung down. His clothes were stained brown with dried blood. The crowd gasped at the sight of him.
“All we did was slap your brother around a little, and look what happened. You sure you wanna go through with this, little boy?” Sam said.
If Sam wanted to get inside Will’s head, it was working.
He saw David’s foot move. His right toe fumbled forward until he laid his foot flat on the ground. Then the other one.
His legs locked straight, taking on the weight of his body.
David raised his bloody and swollen head. It looked like a white eye patch was tied tight around a purple water balloon.
David’s one eye wandered up until it found Will. David smiled. Will couldn’t believe it. It was a broad, genuine smile.
His inflated face looked even uglier with the smile, but it was irrepressible. Even after such a terrible beating, David was
still defiant. It filled Will with pride, and he smiled back. A calm came over him.
“Well?” Sam shouted for the crowd’s benefit. “What’s the matter? Did you swallow your tongue?”
Laughs echoed across the quad.
Will flipped Sam off.
Sam charged him. He was upon Will in seconds, and he buried his fist in Will’s stomach. Will crumpled forward. It felt like Sam punched a hole through him. With Will bent over, Sam tried to knee him in his face. It connected with his chest instead. Will fell backward, and his feet scurried to stay underneath his weight. He barely stayed upright before Sam kicked him in the bladder. Will fell to the ground and landed on his ass bone.
No tussle at a drop, no scuffle in the halls had ever hurt like this. Will couldn’t tell which pain belonged to what. He was losing control. Will struggled to breathe. Things were happening too fast. Sam came at him. Will winged a wild punch at him first. It dinged off Sam’s shoulder like a pebble off a car window. Sam grabbed him by the shirt with one hand. His other hand was a fist. He drew it back, winding up to deliver the final strike.
Then, Will seized.
His body stiffened. His eyes rolled back in his head. His feet kicked out from under him. Sam held him up by the shirt as he hung there, rigid and convulsing. Sam let him go. Will dropped like a sandbag and knocked his head against the ground.
There were laughs in the crowd. There were just as many gasps.
Through fluttering eyelids and jerking vision, Will saw Sam towering above him, colossal. Drool fell out of Will’s mouth.
His body shook. All pretty convincing. Will had gotten plenty of practice from all the times he faked seizures to mess with David.
He rammed his foot up into Sam’s crotch, and Sam crashed to the ground. Will pulled himself up. The crowd’s laughter stopped. Silence. Will wound his leg back and soccer-kicked Sam in the balls again. Sam bellowed in pain. Everyone stared in disbelief, including Varsity.
“Listen up, hungry people!” Will shouted. “All of Varsity’s fighters are here. No one is guarding the food!” The gaunt faces in the crowd turned in the direction of the gym.
“The food belongs to all of us!”
The crowd barked and whistled and hollered in agreement.
Will could feel the tension bristling all around him.
“GO GET IT!”
It was a stampede. The Freaks, the Nerds, the Sluts, the Skaters, and the Geeks, all dashed toward the gym at once, like they were trying to catch the last train out of hell. Varsity tried to block them, but the momentum was too great.
Varsity’s formation was smashed apart. The two Varsity guys holding David cast him aside to go protect the gym.
Sam got to his feet, holding his crotch. For a second he looked at Will like he was about to kill him. But he stumbled backward, suddenly scared. Will was peripherally aware of someone behind him. He turned to see the Loners standing in a semicircle, staring Sam down. Sam yelled out of frustration and ran after the riotous mob.
The generator finally gave out, and all the lights died. The quad was overtaken by darkness.
David was a lump on the ground twenty feet away. He was faced away from Will and wasn’t moving. Will limped over to David as fast as he could. He dropped to his knees and turned David over tenderly. He cradled David’s head in his hands.
His face looked like a misshapen tomato.
“Dave? Are you okay?”
David smiled.
“I think I’m hallucinating…,” David said. “I thought I just saw you kick Sam Howard’s ass.”
Will laughed so hard it made him cry.
39
Lucy and Violent walked toward the ruins by the light of Violent’s torch. Violent had retrieved it from one of the many lockers full of weapons that she maintained throughout the school. A vicious stench hit Lucy’s nose.
“Teachers,” Violent said. She handed Lucy the torch. She unhooked a shiv from her necklace of hanging silverware.
Using Lucy’s shoulder for leverage, Violent reached down and grabbed the hem of Lucy’s dress. She stabbed it with the shiv.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
“We need something to cover our noses. That smell’s only gonna get worse.”
With a solid yank, Violent ripped off the bottom six inches of Lucy’s dress.
“You could’ve used your shirt or something,” Lucy said.
“Yeah, we coulda.”
Violent tore the resulting strip of fabric in two, handing one piece to Lucy and tying the other around her nose and mouth. Lucy did the same. Violent put her arm around Lucy.
Violent limped. and Lucy carried half her weight.
“How do you think the fight turned out?” Violent said.
Lucy thought back to the announcement they’d heard over the loudspeaker. She didn’t understand it, but she had to trust Will had a plan. It was blind faith, but it was the only thing keeping her going. David had to be alive, and there had to be a way out of the school, there simply had to be.
“I think Will beat Sam, and we’ll see them soon,” Lucy said.
“Want to make it interesting?”
“Ew, like a bet? No, you’re talking about my friends’ lives.”
“Just trying to make conversation.”
“Well, try harder.”
“You make a good crutch,” Violent said.
“Thanks.” Lucy laughed.
“No, seriously. You’re not in my gang. You didn’t have to help me like this.”
Lucy nodded with a secret smile. Finally, she’d done something right in Violent’s eyes.
With every step into the depths of the ruins, Lucy felt more unsettled. The flickering torchlight cast mad shadows down the hall. The ruins were like a memorial to the day everything
changed. She could almost hear the rumble of the explosion and the bloodcurdling shrieks that followed, echoing down the halls.
“Have you ever been here before?” Lucy asked.
Violent was quiet for a moment and then, “Yeah. A long time ago. Only bad shit happens here.”
They came to the remains of a staircase. One whole side of it was gone. All that remained were broken stairs no more than a foot wide, jutting out from the wall. At the top landing, where the stairs should have been, was a mess of bent rebar.
“1206 is on the second floor,” Violent said. “We gotta go up.”
“You think you can—”
“Ssh,” Violent said suddenly, dropping to a whisper. “Did you hear that?”
All Lucy heard was the crackle of the torch in her hand. She shook her head. “What did you hear?”
“Nothing, let’s hurry up.”
Lucy and Violent hurried to the stairs. Lucy climbed the broken lengths of stair carefully, one hand on the wall and one holding the torch. Violent was always one step behind her, using the wall for support. Each step felt treacherous. It took her a minute to get half of the way up. The last two stairs were missing.
“Gonna have to jump it,” Violent said, peering past Lucy at the gap.
Lucy looked over the edge to the sharp rubble fifteen feet below. She noticed something etched on the wall below in charcoal letters: R.I.P. SMUDGE. A narrow mound of rubble stood out above the rest. She had the feeling Will had been where she stood. She mustered the strength to go for the jump.
She tossed the torch onto the second floor ahead, then took a deep breath and jumped. She landed on the second floor and tumbled forward. She whipped around with a big smile.
“I made it!”
“Uh, yeah, that’s great,” Violent said dryly. “Can you move?”
“Oh. Yeah, sorry.”
Lucy heard footsteps coming from the hallway behind her.
She spun around. From out of the darkness came a ghoulish boy. He wore a Pretty One dress tucked into black jeans. His face reminded her of a lizard’s, dry and pointed, his eyes black and his skin bluish white, like he’d been drained of blood. His hair was long, fragile, and wh
ite like an old crazy woman.
The boy stuttered to a stop. He looked nearly as shocked as Lucy was. He lunged forward and snatched her necklace off her neck. He dashed back into the dark hallway.
“Hey! Give me that!” Lucy yelled.
She sprinted into the hall, after the boy. The torch in her hand purred and dimmed as its flame dragged behind. She heard movement in the classroom ahead. Lucy poked her head through the doorway and extended the torch to get a sense of the room. It was a chemistry lab. Large, six-station islands with soapstone counters hunched in the darkness like sleeping beasts. Broken equipment and dirty papers littered the floor.
A hand clamped down on her arm and flung her to the ground. She lost the torch. The boy sat on her. He pinned her arms and thrust his face into hers.
“Stay away!” the boy said, the stink of his breath invaded her nostrils.
The torch had set fire to a cluster of papers, and in the fire-light Lucy could see the boy was scared.
“I want that necklace back!” Lucy dared to scream.
“It don’t belong to you,” the boy said. His accent was strange.
It was thick, southern. “Just leave me alone.” Light flared behind the boy. Violent was behind him, holding the torch. She jabbed it into his back.
“Gahh!” he screamed.
Violent stuck him with it again, and he scurried into the corner and crumpled up into a ball near the growing fire.
“You want to hurt girls? Huh?” Violent said, pushing the torch near his face. “Is that your thing, junkie?”
“I want the necklace,” Lucy said.
“It’s mine!” the boy said. “It belongs to me!”
“Hand it over, creep!” Violent said.
“It belonged to my momma! It’s all I got left of her. Please, don’t make me. Please don’t.”
Violent pulled the torch away from him. He pressed his back to the wall like a frightened animal. Lucy ran to the paper fire and stomped it out.
“What are you talking about?” Lucy said, spinning back around to face him.
“He’s high. He’s been huffing,” Violent said, kicking at rags by a dirty, half-empty jug. “Look at this crap.”