I make it known that they’re not allowed back in, because they’re causing too much drama. The football guys make sure they spread the word that they’ll cart anyone out who makes lunch unpleasant for everyone else. I think I’ve pretty well got it solved.
A month into my term, a cluster of the losers come in, wearing posterboard signs and chanting that lunch is theirs, too, like anyone cares what they think. We try to get them out of the cafeteria before things get out of hand, but then one of the nerds actually takes a swing. Of course, the football player dragging her out by her collar doesn’t take very well to it. He doesn’t realize, though, that she has some kind of belt in one of those weird fus, and she mops the floor with him. It makes the other nerds brave.
Before I can even yell for everyone to calm down, the cafeteria erupts into a free-for-all. There’s not supposed to be fighting on the field in baseball, and there sure as hell isn’t supposed to be fighting on school grounds. I wade in to try and break it up, but I just get a couple punches to the face for my trouble. I know it’s bad when Mr. Peretti and Principal Munroe have to pull a couple dorks off me.
We spend the next few hours getting grilled by teachers trying to figure out what just happened to their school. I am informed that I will be punished for my role.
“I didn’t do anything,” I protest. “I was trying to get people to stop!”
“Mr. Corey, you are the reason this became an issue in the first place. It seems that you’ve been barring other students from entering the cafeteria, which is against our code of conduct. All students have a right to be in public areas of this institution during appropriate hours. They should be in the lunch room at lunch time.”
“Really? You’re taking their word for it, Mr. Peretti?”
“Yes. I am. You know why? Because I’ve had you in my classes, Mr. Corey. I know what you’re like. You got a little bit of power and you thought you could do whatever you wanted. Doesn’t work that way. I’ve been trying to get those students to tell me why they were skipping lunch, and now I know. Stories are all consistent, Mr. Corey. Your student council career just ended.”
I don’t believe him. There’s no way they’d do that to me, not after everything I’ve done for them, not after everything I sacrificed to give them their championship baseball team. Peretti doesn’t have that much clout, not in this school.
Until he does. As of four-thirty, I’m informed, I no longer serve as student council president. To add insult to injury, I am also being suspended. I will not be allowed to make up any of the work that I miss on the three days I will be required to be absent. My stomach drops as I hear all of my dreams crumbling around me. It’s over. For the first time in my life, I’m facing true defeat. School policy states that if you’ve been suspended, you are ineligible to play any school sports for the remainder of that year. I have been exiled from the baseball team.
My parents are called. Dad has to come and get me, because Mom’s still at work. He chews on me all the way home. He’s never told me I’m a disappointment before. I get grounded. I’m not even allowed to go over and talk to Roger.
Three days is a long time to sit at home and think. I still can’t believe that everyone thinks this is all my fault. They’re all treating me like I’m not good enough to be around them. Beth even texts me to tell me she’s breaking up with me. She can’t be seen with a loser.
Since I can’t turn in the work anyway, I don’t bother with the stuff that I could do for classes. Whatever I miss is what I miss. I can maybe manage to get my grades up enough next quarter to even them out, so it doesn’t look so bad. Just a little hiccup, you know, no big deal. Kids have these things happen to them all the time right? It’s normal.
Except I’m not normal. I was born for greatness. Everyone around here knew that for a while, but you sure can’t tell it now.
When I go back to school, nobody will even talk to me. You’d think I was some smelly slob who never showers, the way they avoid me. Nobody will sit close to me, not even Roger. Roger used to be like my little sidekick, always trotting at my heels, trying to catch up to my shadow. Even he’s too good for me now.
It makes me realize that, at least on some level, I really did think of Roger as my friend.
Other people would probably just curl up in a ball in a corner of their bedroom and whine about how much their life sucks. Me, though, I get angry. Every day, I just feel angrier. They still want to claim the team, still want to tell everyone we’re state champs and we’re headed for a record next year. The difference is, not one of them bothers to say my name in conjunction with any of it. I was their hero. Now, I’m just their scapegoat.
I get to the point where I don’t even care about the record any more. They don’t deserve it—not after the way they treated me. There’s a way for me to control this. There’s something I can do about this. I can show them. They’re going to wish they’d never messed with me or made me lose my status in this school.
It’s easier than I thought it would be. The Taggert Tigers have been runners-up to my team the last three years. Their pitcher and team captain is Tully Adus. He’s a decent enough player, consistent where it matters. His main flaw is that he’s had the misfortune to go up against me.
It isn’t tough to find him. He and his team go over to Gino’s Pizza to hang out most days. Gino tolerates it because he played for the Tigers. They pretty much have free reign to go sit in there, do their homework, whatever.
I go over on a Thursday night. I’m wearing a hoodie and jeans. It’s dark outside, pouring rain, and the last thing on most of the Tigers’ minds is baseball. But I think I’ve got a pretty good gauge on Tully. He’s enough like me that I can tell even when he’s not thinking about the game, he’s thinking about the game. He wants to win as bad as I do, and he’s trying to figure out what he can do about it.
He gets up to go over to the soda machine. I go stand beside him, acting like I’m waiting my turn. I don’t waste any time. If I’m going to do this, I have to seize the opportunity. I’m not sure I’ll have another one.
“You want your championship, Tully?”
He looks at me so fast I hear his neck pop. That’s not a good sign. His body’s already starting to give in small ways. He pushes himself too hard, he’ll be a has-been before he ever even makes it to being an am.
“Corey?”
“Yeah. Look, don’t make a big deal out of it, okay. Nobody can know I’m here.”
“What are you doing?” Tully hisses.
“They screwed me over.” My voice rises, even though I don’t mean for it to. “They think they’re so great. I got kicked outta school. That means I can’t play for my team any more. They deserve to go down for that, and I can give you everything you need to make that happen.”
I can see Tully thinking. He’s not sure whether I’m making him a genuine offer, or if this is some new strategy to mess with his head.
“Just a second,” he says.
He turns away from me and pulls out his phone. He pounds out a couple of texts and sends them. While I’m filling my Mountain Dew, his phone beeps. He checks the screen then looks at me again.
“All right. But we’re not talking about it here. The rest of my team doesn’t need to know about this, and I can’t be seen talking to you. “
I agree with him. I want the loss of the Bombardiers’ precious championship to come as a shock. If they suspect that I’m talking to Tully, then there’s a chance they might try to get something together that could counteract this. That’s the last thing that I want to happen.
I deliberately leave a napkin sitting on the counter. It’s got my phone number on it. As I go back to my table, I glance back. Tully’s shoving the napkin in his jeans pocket.
It still takes him a couple of months before he finally breaks down and calls me. We meet up in one of the city parks in Bradenberg. It has a baseball diamond at one end, and there are little kids playing catch over in the outfield. They’re yelling at each o
ther and giving each other pointers. I was like that once. At least, I think I was. Now, though, all that matters is revenge.
I start spilling secrets. All of the weaknesses that I’d strategized over the seasons to hide are coming to the surface. Throwing our best hitter a fastball will get him every time. Our third baseman broke two of his fingers last year and after he catches three or four balls, his hand goes numb. He’s never told Coach, but he told me.
It should make me feel bad. I’m betraying them, and part of me knows it, but I can’t find any part of me that wants to offer them a chance to recover. My dreams are dead. They died the moment Peretti and all his little cronies got me thrown out of school. That school doesn’t deserve to win anymore. Not after they turned on me.
There’s a playbook, where I’ve kept all of our signals. This is the part that will damn me forever. It’s the ultimate moment of disloyalty. Coach is too lazy or too unimaginative to change the signals from year to year. Maybe it’s just that he recognizes that the majority of the kids he sees out on the field don’t see the battlefield. They’re just playing baseball for something to do. They don’t study it, or live it, or eat it, or breathe it. It’s a game.
It’s not my game anymore. I know this, as I hand the playbook over to Tully with all of my notes. He’s got enough in there to conquer every team he faces—especially mine. It’s the keys to the kingdom. His eyes get wide as he flips through the battered notebook. He knows what I’ve given him.
“There’s no coming back from this,” Tully says. His voice wavers, like he’s feeling a little afraid.
“There was no coming back the moment they told me I was suspended,” I answer.
My life feels empty without baseball. It revolved around the game for so long. Nobody talks to me, and no one will take the chance getting caught being decent to me at school. I’ve got nothing better to do than study. My grades are better than they’ve ever been. I retake the SAT and get a better score.
I can’t stay completely away from the ballfield, though. It haunts me. I watch local news and read the paper to keep up with scores. The Tigers are having an undefeated season. They’ve become the team to beat. The Bombardiers are floundering. Without me doing all that work and driving them forward, they’re lost. They get a couple lucky breaks, but they can’t seem to get it back together enough to put together a run for the championships.
They don’t even make it to the playoff tournament. They aren’t champions this year. There’s no record. I go watch Tully play his last game of his senior year. He throws a no-hitter. He’s a hero. It should have been me.
Wally tells me that if I play a little community college ball, he’ll come check out a game or two, but I can see the lie on his face. It’s in the way he won’t look at me when he says it.
Maybe I can find a minor league team that will let me walk on, someplace with a community college that thinks my grades are okay. I started out with the world at my feet. I was a monument of greatness. Now, I’m just choking on my own mediocrity, hanged by my own stupid pride.
Angel & Demon
❦
HEATHER DIXON
“Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purged.”
- ROMEO, ROMEO AND JULIET
DENVER, UNITED STATES WEST. DATE: 2075 AD
The demon was bright, which was not at all how a demon should look. So fiercely, brightly handsome that he was almost brittle. He had bright golden hair with a forelock that curled charmingly over his forehead, and bright blue eyes that were so bright they were ice. When he smiled, his teeth shone perfectly straight and bright. He looked young, around eighteen or so, and was brightly intelligent for his presumed age. Everything about him was bright.
Which is why he fit in so well with the League of Government Youth, an establishment that took the brightest and sharpest from across United States West to the capital city, where they were taught debate, rhetoric, and other government workings.
The demon had been on this assignment for the last year. Playing the part with ease. Smiling for the cameras with various senators, shaking hands, kissing babies, and of course, breaking into internet coding and deleting the occasional anti-commune website that somehow managed to eke through the tightly-regulated electronic ether.
And then, of course, punishing the offender when they were found.
That part was certainly a diversion from classwork, to say the least. The last hunt had ended with the Government Youth chasing the offender through abandoned sewer pipes and, once cornered, kindly informing him he would have a government trial before “accidentally” shooting him instead. The pathetic tripe had gone down reciting the antiquated Constitution.
It was quite delightful—to the Government Youth, anyway. Rubix had remained behind the group, watching them prey like beasts. When he was a younger demon, several millennia ago, he would have taken pleasure in it. Now, it was common and boring and—he dared think it—pointless.
But he had his orders. There was a certain GY (a member of the Government Youth, that is) who would do very good things for The Cause, if he could be persuaded to murder someone. And once he’d killed, there would be no turning back. He’d be theirs.
The demon had made friends with the boy, a fifteen-year-old from Arizona with large, dark eyes and a somber face. He’d been inducted into the Government Youth three years ago, but was being slow to come around to the United States West’s (and Purgatory’s) ideas. Still, the demon had slowly become friends with the boy. Friends enough, in fact, that the boy had revealed to him his sacred Navajo name: Cloud Hawk. Considering that all GYs were known only by their regulation numbers, it was a sign of ultimate trust.
The assignment, the demon felt, would have been a piece of cake—were it not for a certain other GY. She’d arrived in Denver shortly after the demon. And she had also made friends of Cloud Hawk.
Not that it had been difficult for her to catch the boy’s attention. She was beautiful—or, rather, pieces of beautiful. She had features that would be stunningly attractive in different places or different times: a nose that would impress Roman emperors, dark eyes with long lashes that Persian princesses would poison for. Her lips were full and dark, the image of a starlet’s mouth from the 1940s. Thick, dark, shiny waves of hair reached the middle of her back in cascades. She looked young—perhaps sixteen—and had the delicate figure to match. All this combined made for a rather odd confection of a person that would shine through any period of time. And the demon had seen a lot of periods of time.
She was different in other ways, though. Her eyes had a light in them that the rest of the Government Youth did not. She was smart, but purposely did poorly in her assignments and took absolutely no pleasure in the debate sessions, choosing to bow out instead of argue. Because of this, the other GYs had dismissed her as “weak.” They knew it wouldn’t be long before she was weeded out and expelled north. (Or shot. You never knew, with the Government Youth.)
She was an angel. The demon could tell. And if he’d had any doubts about it, she’d come right out and confirmed it last week, during US-W New Economics 406.
“Student three-oh-seven-five,” said the professor at the front of the auditorium classroom, and the angel, down the row from the demon, stood up, shaking so much she nearly dropped her tablet. The professor continued without a pause, holding up the electronic screen that displayed her written words. “You certainly took a unique approach to our assignment on eugenic abortions.”
The angel stubbornly lifted her chin and said nothing.
“It’s very well-written, however illogical,” said the professor, eyeing her warily. “Perhaps you were being a devil’s advocate?”
“No,” the angel said firmly, her trembling hand clutching the chair back in front of her. “Heaven’s advocate.”
The demon had nearly choked to keep from laughing. She’d come right out and said it. The professor looked as though he didn’t know what to think of her.
Still, having an angel around t
hrew a clog in the gears. The demon was used to angels trying to meddle in his assignments, but he usually got rid of them fairly quickly. He was good at what he did. It annoyed him, though, how persistent this angel was. She was... sticky.
But it wouldn’t be long until he was rid of her, too. The apex of his assignment was drawing near. After this, it would be back to Purgatory, where he’d report to his supervisor, hobnob, as it were, with his other demon friends, and wait for another assignment.
The night the moment came was hot and dry, but storm clouds fizzed in the distance, the kind that were taller than they were wide.
“Monsoon season,” Cloud Hawk said solemnly, looking at the sky from their dorm room window.
“Monsoons are only in Arizona and India, genius,” said the demon. “Not on this forsaken rock called Denver.”
Cloud Hawk smirked.
His smile faded, though, when a GY burst into their dorm room, positively hopping. The demon recognized her as a rather stupid—yet feral and eager—second-year, number 8321.
“We saw a resistance member!” she crowed, waving the pistol in her hand about. “Posting—not lying—papers! On the main thoroughfare buildings! Papers!”
“How delightfully old-school,” said the demon, rising from his cot in the corner. “Next thing you know, they’ll be dropping pamphlets from the sky, RAF-style.”
Both Cloud Hawk and GY-8321 stared at him blankly. The demon sighed. One of the downsides of making jokes among the Government Youth was that they’d never been taught history. Not the real version, anyway.
“Right,” he said. “We going to chase him down, or what?”
The hot wind whipped the group as they prowled the street. Thunder boomed in the distance. They’d barricaded the trains and traffic in the name of US-W, and their raw excitement grew even wilder when they found a stack of papers that had been dropped by the rebel: “You are Being Lied To!” He couldn’t be far.
It was decided they would split up and head the rebel off around City Center East. Tonight was the night, the demon knew.
Perchance to Dream Page 14