Donovan Meanwhile: Kings of Sparta

by Bierley, B. L.

He dips left and we split right between a couple of parked cars, but before I can get my head on straight again he dips back right, more sharply this time, and launches over a small median into the grass.

  I start to look back to see if the other bikers fell for the little juke maneuver, and my head snaps back as he guns the throttle and the motorcycle shoots out onto pavement, Lynn Street, and we head south.

  Far behind us, the tires of the SUV squeal as it tries to find a way out of the parking lot after us. But the three bikes are still following behind us.

  It takes a few seconds for my brain to catch on to the fact that we’re going the wrong way. I try to shout this to F-Matt but my voice is pushed back down my throat by the wind as soon as I open my mouth.

  I have to just trust that he knows what he’s doing.

  One of the motorcycles manages to catch up with us before the others do, and F-Matt swerves back and forth to avoid gunfire.

  He reaches back and slaps my thigh. “Gimme your helmet!” he shouts.

  “What?”

  He doesn’t repeat himself, and I know what he said. I pull off my helmet and hand it to him, and his pulls it across the front of his body and whips it behind us, where it scrapes and bounces of the ground and right into the front wheel of the bike directly behind us.

  The rider falters and the bike lays down, sliding across the pavement in one direction while it’s rider goes off in another.

  No sooner have we lost that tail than two other bikes catch up as well.

  F-Matt glances in his mirrors and then I feel my weight thrown into his back as he squeezes the back brakes and the bike goes from ninety miles per hour to maybe like thirty. The other two bikes split and are suddenly on either side of us.

  I hold onto his waist even tighter as he slices our bike left and then right, knocking into both of the bikes one after another.

  The first one topples, but the second one he hit recovers easily and comes up alongside us again.

  I hear the rider shout something at him and it sounds harsh and consonant heavy, like Russian. As he levels his gun at us, F-Matt grabs a knife out of his boot and slices it across the Russian guy’s leg, and the rider serves away.

  But he recovers fast and now draws up his weapon again.

  F-Matt slows down again but only for a second, and then banks to the right, cutting through a yard between a couple of townhouses.

  I hear the gunshots rattatat behind us, but the sound is far away and blocked by the buildings. When I’m able to look back again, I see the Russian toss his empty gun into the road and lean over his bike, willing it to catch up to us.

  “Do you know where we’re going?” I shout out, but F-Matt’s too focused to speak.

  Zipping through another yard, suddenly everything opens up and we’re falling off a ledge down onto Interstate 395, barely missing landing on top of a semi truck trailer moving 75mph. The tires of the bike screech as they bounce back off the asphalt before catching their grip again.

  I look back and the Russian is perched at the ledge we just dropped from. He turns back and speeds off.

  “I think we lost them!”

  “Only for now.”

  We exit off the highway into the neighborhood of Northridge, which is not very near my house. He slows down and stops next to a nice house with blue trim and a large front porch.

  “What are we doing?” I ask him.

  “Can’t take you home right now. Too dangerous.”

  “Who’s house is this?”

  “I don’t know, but when you find out you should ask him to call your parents to come get you.”

  “I’m not waking up some stranger in the middle of the night—“

  He flips that switch on his bike, but instead of the engine sound it sounds like an air raid siren. He shuts it off after a couple of seconds.

  The porch light on the little house with blue trim pops on.

  “Now you don’t have to.” He gives me a smile over his shoulder, then tells me to get off the bike already.

  I do, but I’m not happy about it. “Let’s just hang out here, together, until the heat has died down.”

  “Brother,” he says to me, “you watch too many cop shows.”

  Up ahead, a pair of headlights round the corner and stop. The red SUV is waiting.

  “The heat never dies down.” F-Matt twists the throttle, does a quick U-turn in the middle of the street, and then looks at me.

  “Give them everything you have to give, little brother. Don’t let them down.”

  I don’t know if he’s talking about my parents or the strangers coming out of the front door of the house.

  He gives a quick nod, then takes off down the street.

  I watch him shrink towards the next cross street where he veers left but then quickly banks back to the right and disappears around the corner. At the same time the three Russian bikers come from the other way and speed off after him.

  The SUV slows down a bit as it drives past the house where I’m standing out front like a doofus.

  I get a look at the driver. Wavy, dark hair and a long nose. Thin lips pulled into a sneer. I can tell he’d like nothing better than to stop right there and deal with me while his comrades chase down and kill the Fake Matt—but he doesn’t stop. He keeps going, and then I hear a shout from behind me, from the porch-lit front door of the little blue split-level.

  “What the hell is going on out here?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  My father didn’t come get me, the police did. So when I show up at home and step out of the back of a squad car, to say my parents are pissed would be like saying that the Chicago Fire was a heat wave. My mom was the one waiting outside for me, and I could only assume that my dad was inside cleaning the gun that he went out and bought specifically to shoot me with right now.

  My mom has tears in her eyes and she’s frowning, and it’s that look that’s a cross between fury and despair. Her lovely little boy, so nice and quiet before this, has suddenly become a delinquent.

  The cop is nice enough, asks if I’m ok on the drive over. I try to explain to him that I was just lost and I had nothing to do with all the ruckus that the guy was complaining about, the “street racers,” he called them. Officer Nice Enough seems to believe me for the most part, so when I get home and he turns me over to my mom, I am at least relieved Tez some exchanged sympathy between them instead of the cops basically saying I’m a bad kid.

  My mom nods, listens, says a few words to the cop while I wait by the front door, then she wraps an arm around me and looks me in the eye. She wants to say something before we go inside.

  But she doesn’t. She shakes the thought out of her head and walks me through the door.

  “Go to your room,” she says. It’s not like an order, but more like advice.

  Go to your room, avoid contact with your father right now. Climb under your bed and cover yourself with your hands.

  I do as she says. She gives me another sad look as she retreats into their room, and I wonder what the fallout of this is all going to be.

  I’ve been a good kid most of my life. I never broke the rules, really. I never ran away, never stayed out past curfew, hardly ever even swore in front of them. I can only imagine how confused and upset they must be that all in one day I come home with a bashed up face and I sneak out at night to get brought home by the cops.

  I figure there’s two possible ways they’ll respond to this:

  1) They’ll assume it’s just a fluke, since I’ve never been like this before. They’ll shake their heads, wonder what on earth possessed me, and assume it’ll never happen again. In a few months, it’ll be old news.

  2) They’ll completely freak out and do something rash.

  Knowing them, I wouldn’t bet any money on the former.

  While I lay in bed and try not to think about what they’re scheming about turning my life into right now, I’m also thinking about everything that happened. My adrenaline is still pumping at full force
, and it takes me a full five minutes before I even retrace my steps back to that refugee camp in the middle of the basketball courts.

  “Real reality,” Fake Matt had called it. I don’t know how much I should trust the word of someone I call Fake Matt when it comes to reality, I suppose.

  Perralto Nikto.

  That’s what the weird guy in the tent had written on his hand. It seemed like another language, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. Maybe Norwegian? I don’t know what Norwegian looks like.

  Russian? That would make a little sense, at least, considering the guys on the bikes.

  Of course, I’m also just assuming they’re Russian, based on the one thing the one guy said.

  I’m tired of making assumptions, so I get up out of bed and flick on my laptop.

  Can’t sleep anyway.

  Probably’ll never sleep again, if I’m honest. That was an intense night. I wasn’t sure if I never wanted to see another motorcycle in my life, or wanted to buy one tomorrow and ride it forever.

  Since when did Matt own a motorcycle?

  Just another reason he’s Fake Matt, I think bitterly.

  The browser comes up on my computer and I do a Google search for the phrase P”erralto Nikto.” I figure it’s going to ask me if I want a translation or something, but it doesn’t.

  Nike comes up as part of a phrase from an old movie I’ve heard of but never seen, “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”

  But putting it in quotes next to Perralto returns zero results.

  I try Perralto on it’s own and I get a bunch of hits, mostly LinkedIn profiles and blog posts by different people with that name.

  If it’s a name, then I’m still not sure what that has to do with me. I don’t know anybody named Perralto.

  Do I?

  I open up my Facebook and do a search for the name. A few hits come up, and then some other names that are spelled differently or live or work in places with some version of that name.

  None of the people actually named that have any friends in common with me.

  I sit back in my chair and bite my thumbnail. I’m probably just going down a rabbit hole. I’ll have to ask Fake Matt, if I see him again, if he knows anything about the name.

  I wonder if I will see him again.

  Maybe the Russian’s got to him after he dropped me off, or maybe he just did what he had to do and now he’s gone. If it’s some kind of prank, then maybe it was just designed to make me do exactly what I’m doing right now, which is obsessing over what it means.

  Ha.

  What an idiot.

  I’m such an easy mark.

  I lean forward to turn off the laptop and get back to bed but I see something that makes me pause, but it even takes me a few seconds to figure out what my brain just saw.

  One of the profile pictures, for a guy named Yuni Perralto.

  It’s that big hulking robot from “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” Even someone like me who’s never seen it knows the image on sight.

  Now that’s a strange coincidence, right?

  I open up his profile, but it’s private so all I can see is a few past profile pictures and how long ago he or she joined (not even clear what gender Yuni is).

  Eight years ago, in case you’re wondering.

  Without even thinking about it I find myself clicking the “Friend” button.

  And then I laugh at myself again. Sending a friend request to a stranger who happens to have a name and an interest in something I saw in an augmented reality display in the middle of the night after running away from home with a guy who is pretending to be my brother.

  Maybe my parents were right to be worried.

  You know how in movies and books, sometimes the main character is crazy except they don’t know it, and they think they’re going through all this amazing stuff or whatever, but the other characters are all just kind of frowning and looking at them like, tsk tsk? And you find out at the end that none of it was real and they’re in a mental ward?

  First of all, I hate those kinds of movies. What a cop out.

  But that’s really how I feel like things are going for me suddenly. I try to imagine myself from the outside and put together the pattern of my actions today, and the best that I can come up with is maybe Finch or Bola hit me so hard it literally knocked the sense out of me.

  Ding.

  Suddenly Yuni and I are Facebook friends, and a message box pops up. It’s like this guy has been just sitting at his computer, waiting and watching.

  Sounds kind of crazy, I know, except then a message box pops up and Yuni says

  I’ve been waiting for you.

  You may have done something differently in that moment, but what I did was immediately shut my laptop, unplug it, put it under my bed, and lay down.

  Sleep is hard to get when you’re obsessing over your life, and your life is easy to obsess over when it suddenly becomes as strange as mine has.

  It’s like you wake up in the morning and you expect the whole thing to have been a dream—breaking up with your boyfriend, getting beating up by his homophobic posse, finding out that you have another brother who looks like your real brother but is way cooler and probably is just some creep in disguise, finding a pair of glasses that let you see some crazy stuff, and then almost getting shot by some Russians on motorcycles.

  No more red meat before bed for you.

  But it’s not a dream, and you know it isn’t because for one thing your lip still hurts from getting the crap kicked out of you.

  But more importantly, you check your Facebook and see that Yuni Perralto has sent you more messages overnight.

  Each of them is just the same thing, over and over.

  It’s an address in Baltimore.

  There’s no explanation, but the implication isn’t hard to fathom. He wants you to meet him there.

  A couple of days go by and you keep getting more messages. Every now and then he’ll send one that just says

  Please

  or This is important

  or We don’t have much time.

  The days at school are uneventful, insofar as you don’t get the crap kicked out of you anymore. The problem is that you’re protected by an adult member of the faculty at all times.

  You feel more like a prisoner than ever before.

  The first day I’m back, it’s Mr. Lintz, the Science Teacher, who gets first watch. He hangs out with me all day, basically. Doesn’t say much to me, and I get the impression he’s not really thrilled with his babysitting gig.

  In as few words as possible, he tells me that he’s been asked to keep an eye on me throughout the day to make sure nobody else messes with me.

  The spirit of the task is commendable, but the effect of it is horrible. I’m like a freak, being paraded down every hall, and whispered about during every class. Mr Lintz—and then Mr. Moody, then Mr. Ulm (always men, never women) stand at the door to the class and just kind of watch everyone. I feel at times like they’re my personal guard dog, keeping everyone in line, and at other times—most of the time—I feel like they’re my warden, keeping me from being myself.

  I spend all day thinking about Yuni Perralto, and obsessing over that address. By day three I have it burned into my brain.

  The burning begins to hurt so much that by Day Four I finally decide to do something about it.

  That morning, I wake up and call the school. I tell them I’m my father. By that, I mean I pretend to be him.

  It’s easy, I just imagine I have no empathy for anyone and I am only interested in myself.

  Bam.

  I call the school pretending to be him, and tell them that Donovan is being taken to see a therapist and won’t be in school. Given the recent events, it seems like the most believable excuse I could give. Tell them I’m going to the doctor and they’ll ask questions. Say a family member died and that just opens up a whole new can of worms.

  But say I’m going to see a shrink and they’ll just nod their head and thi
nk, it’s about damn time.

  After I’m off the hook as far as that goes, I head out the door with my backpack just like any other day.

  (I bring along the shades just in case they come in handy.)

  The Metrorail is great. Gets me everywhere I need to go on a daily basis.

  Even to Baltimore in under fifty minutes.

  Before I catch the train, though, I stop at a gas station with an old pay phone outside. Dial up the house.

  My dad answers and I hang up.

  This is not a great idea.

  But I have a couple of bucks in my wallet and I give them to a homeless guy around back, and convince him to help me out. I call up the house, and when my dad answers I put the guy on the phone.

  He tells my dad that he’s from the school, and that Donovan has volunteered to stay late today to do a little extra work, to try to make up for his lackluster performance the last few days.

  I specifically tell the guy to say “lackluster,” because that’s a word that a faculty member would definitely use and something my dad would appreciate. Sounds very belittling. I have to explain to the guy what it means, but he seems to lose interest.

  After that, I’m free for the day. The school thinks I’m with my parents, my parents think I’m at school, and in reality, I’m boarding an early morning train to Baltimore and unwittingly stepping into the biggest mistake of my entire life.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The address is a thrift store, which is unexpected to say the least.

  Not a big thrift store like Goodwill or anything. One of those small ones that’s kind of shady. They have dusty old blankets, swollen, discolored paperback novels, scuffed and faded doll parts of various sizes and proportions. Everything is laid out on long, cheap folding tables.

  And everything smells vaguely of mildew and other people’s kids.

  I walk in and I think I hear rustling in the back, but it stops. The store looks deserted. No customers, no employees. I casually make my way down one aisle after another until someone finally steps out of the back room.

  A short, middle-aged man with a pear-shaped face. He smiles, and shows me all of his pearly-white teeth.