Roughhouse

by Dan Cummings

  ROUGHHOUSE

  Dan Cummings

  I would like to thank my brother Gary and my dad Gerard for showing endless support.

  To Julia Gibbs for her excellent and expedient proofreading to pick up on my many, many errors. juliaproofreader@gmail.com

  Thanks again to Nik at BookBeaver.co.uk for another awesome cover. If nothing else, at least my books are pretty.

  And of course, THANK YOU, for giving me a shot.

  Follow me on Twitter at @dancummings85 and Facebook or email me any praise, abuse or questions at dancummings1985@gmail.com

  If you enjoy this novel, please check out my other works:

  Sparks: Welcome to the Madhouse

  Heartbreaker

  Chapter 1

  Neil’s lungs burned, billowing like ship sails being whipped by dry acidic fumes. Legs aching and ready to collapse out from under him, he willed their continued painful rhythm but felt the gradual loss of tempo. With a final sigh, he came to a straggling stop, his limbs dangling like wet noodles in the cool autumn breeze. Doubled over and sucking in huge gulps of fresh air, he was keenly aware of the sounds all around him, crossing the crashing oceans of his quickened pulse: the continued pelting of running shoes catching up to him on the track, Coach Ennis’s shrill whistle, laughter and cheering from the other seniors playing field hockey.

  Matt ambled to a stop beside him, booting him in the ass with a kick that required more effort than it was worth. ‘Asshole.’ He hocked up a tasteful smoker’s loogie and deposited it on the track, ‘I’ll get you next time.’ Matt fell to the running track, staring at the overcast sky and struggling to breathe.

  ‘You’re just too slow.’ Neil swallowed what felt like a hot lump of sand. ‘Told you to quit smoking.’

  ‘But it makes me cool—’ with a distressed damsel’s forearm across his forehead, Matt looked up at Neil for approval ‘—right?’ Matt rolled onto his stomach like a dying fish, then pushed himself to a standing position, swiping his long sweaty curls of black hair from his eyes. Between the pair of them Matt was the one with true athletic potential, always had been, but he was cursed with a tendency to thumb his nose at such gifts, his whippet speed squandered.

  The other runners reached the finish line with equal discomfort and dizzying satisfaction. Matt taunted the third finisher, Patrick. ‘Second place, motherfucker, and I smoke menthols.’ Patrick walked the boast off, his skin too thick for such a sneer to penetrate. Neil cast a smirk at Matt like he knew a dark secret of his, and Matt knew full well what that smugness represented and just shook his head, a small drizzle of annoyance creeping in. ‘Yeah, I know, okay? You win. Now everyone gets to see my cans on Halloween.’

  Neil shrugged, all heart. ‘You made the bet.’

  ‘You know you only beat me because of those stilt legs of yours.’

  Neil made a cut-the-shit hand gesture. ‘Don’t give me that.’

  ‘Give you what, facts?’

  Neil headed over to his bottle of water lying on the grass, talking over his shoulder. ‘Whatever. You’re wearing a dress at the party and you only have your ego to blame.’ Matt rumbled his lips with a disparaging farting noise, and Neil gulped down half the bottle, watching with quiet disinterest as the other gym class slammed into each other like troglodytes with their sticks, chasing after a yellow ball.

  Matt followed Neil’s gaze towards the social Darwinism pitting genetic brutes with ninety-pound asthmatic twigs. ‘Are you dying?’

  Neil almost sputtered his water at the stony sincerity of the question. ‘Err, what now?’

  Matt maintained his wide-eyed curiosity. ‘I’m serious. You had a health scare or something? What’s with this sudden interest in running, lately?’ He dropped his voice conspiratorially. ‘You know you’re making the rest of the burnouts feel bad.’

  Neil shook his head, said, ‘Fuck off,’ and took another drink.

  Matt let it slide. ‘Well, I’ll never understand what you enjoy about running endlessly—’ he pointed the index finger of his bottle hand, ‘—but I understand wailing on each other with sticks even less.’

  Neil lowered his head, swilled his mouth with water and spat it on the grass. They both stood and made their way to the bleachers, their drained legs dropping them onto the front bench. Coach Ennis’s whistle screeched the distant game to a halt as a tapeworm senior almost died beneath a squash of musclebound mass. The pile of overzealous bodies picked themselves up and stepped away, revealing the starfish-splayed student lying motionless on the field.

  ‘Shit, is that kid dead?’ Matt asked, pulling his concealed smokes from his shorts. The skinny runt rolled onto his side and used his stick like a crutch. The whistle blew again and the zoo went wild, the former victim being battered aside once more for the pursuit of the little plastic ball. Matt lit his cigarette and Neil shot him a surprised look. Matt glanced at him with the burning butt hanging from his lip. ‘I ran, didn’t I? This is me resting.’

  Neil waved the smoke away from his face, ‘This is me getting an emphysema.’

  ‘So,’ he exhaled, ‘you are dying.’ Neil leaned away slightly from the pollution. ‘Stop being prissy, you smoked more than me,’ Matt reminded him.

  ‘Exactly my point, I’m trying to avoid black lung over here.’ They both watched the game for a peaceful moment, the rest of the track runners all slowly heading off towards the showers. ‘You do that work for Sanders?’ Neil asked.

  Matt took a drag and shook his head. ‘No, I’ve been busy.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Not wasting my time doing that work for Sanders,’ he smiled. ‘Fuck math. I can count.’

  A deep authoritative bellow, almost lost on the building breeze, swept out from further down the track to their right. ‘Groves! Stub that out, now!’ Floyd, the track coach, snarled his contempt for Matt’s bad habit.

  ‘What a dick,’ Matt muttered, hands surrendering as he leaned forward to grind it out beneath the sole of his shoe. ‘You see the gut on that guy? How the fuck can his soap box support his weight?’

  Neil placed the bottle cap on his water and stood up from the bench with a groan. ‘You’re smoking in full view of everyone. At least go behind the bleachers.’

  ‘Final year, man. It’s our last chance to annoy the piss out of these guys before college.’

  Neil looked surprised. ‘I don’t think you need to go to college to pump gas.’

  Matt punched him in the centre of his back.

  Neil gasped, arcing his back with a pained smile on his face, strolling towards the field’s gate. Up ahead, several of the core burnout crowd shuffled out from beneath the bleachers in a fog of pot smoke and staggered through the chain link fence before any of the coaches got close enough to hassle them. Bringing up the rear of the outsiders was a palpable sense of hostility and attitude wrapped up in faded jeans, black t-shirt and gilet combo and maroon beanie hat. Russel ‘Shit Storm’ Staubach, the school’s reigning king of narcotics. He stepped in front of Neil and Matt, cutting off their path and sneering at them from behind his ratty black facial hair. Neil and Matt felt frozen to the spot. Staubach had supplied a small fortune of weed to the both of them since they were freshmen at Hawthorne High, which is why Neil found himself wondering why they had the rotten luck of bumping into this waste of academia and diplomacy without any business to conduct.

  ‘Hey, Staubach, what’s up, man?’ Neil asked.

  Staubach ignored the question, playing with his rodent-like whiskers, his cruel bloodshot eyes darting between the both of them, finally settling on Matt. There seemed to be some form of subtle conflict simmering between the pair of them which Neil didn’t understand. ‘Where’s Sam?’

  Matt struggled to start his sentence, ‘I-I don’t think he came in
today.’

  Those red, puffy eyes seemed to be reading Matt like a lie detector. He continued to work on them with his crafty glare, having to cast his eyes up at the taller Neil. After a few seconds of enjoyable intimidation, he accepted Matt’s answer. ‘He hasn’t been answering his phone. Tell him I’m looking for him.’ Turning his back on them, he wheezed, ‘Nice shorts, queers,’ with a chuckle and pushed through the gate, leaving the atmosphere a much more pleasant and hospitable place.

  Neil exhaled with relief. ‘What does he want with Sam?’

  Matt cocked an eyebrow, ‘He’s been buying from this new dealer, Sticky. I guess Staubach and the others aren’t pleased with that.’

  ‘Who knew a guy named Shit Storm would be so irrational?’

  They let a minute pass to make sure they wouldn’t bump into him again on the way to the gym.

  Chapter 2

  Neil stared at the prison-issue gruel which the lunch lady slathered onto his tray, accepting his stomach’s bleak future and crossed the noisy cafeteria on legs which still seemed to be mad at him for earlier. His gangly height allowed him to spy over most of the heads around him and he spotted an island of stoned calm amongst the jibber-jabber and laughing student body of Hawthorne High. Matt and Sam, his best friend — by a couple of marginal degrees over Matt — and person of interest for the school’s biggest low life and drug dealer. With the dinner tray held away from his Scott Pilgrim t-shirt like it was some type of biological weapon, he made a beeline for the isle of Matt and Sam who quietly sat at their table curiously spooning their food on their trays like they were dissecting frogs in biology.

  Sliding onto the bench seat beside Matt, Neil kept his eye on the husky Sam in front of him, testing the consistency of what he hoped was gravy, his dull eyes watching the gloop dangle from his spoon. ‘Where were you this morning?’ Neil asked.

  Sam remained in his gravy-trance for several more seconds before the thick curdled slop slid off the spoon and landed atop of the skin of the brown mystery. He ran a hand through his light-coloured white-boy afro. ‘Late night. Check it, I was on Grand Theft Auto, held off the po-po on a five star rating for twenty-seven minutes. It was intense.’ He was clearly baked already, standard operating procedure for Sam. ‘And I did it after toking that sweet, sweet dust from the grinder. It was amazing I could even move my fingers.’

  Matt whistled admirably at this accomplishment but Neil was too busy looking at Matt to gauge whether he had explained the rather unenviable predicament Sam was currently in. Matt’s face was partially hidden beneath the rim of his Detroit Tigers baseball cap, his tangles of black hair obscuring his eyes, a typical defence mechanism of Matt’s when he had hit the marijuana too hard. He must have blazed a joint — one of Sticky’s — with Sam before they arrived here, and from Sam’s aplomb it seemed that Shit Storm Staubach’s message hadn’t been relayed. ‘Did you know Staubach is looking for you?’

  Sam looked rattled for a hot second before shooing away any possible problems which might disturb his fogged slump. ‘Matt mentioned it. It’s cool—’ he tried to look convincing, ‘—he’s just pissed that I bought off someone else. But I’ve only done it a few times. Some dude I bumped into at the Snake Pit—’ the local rock club for live bands, ‘—chill stuff too.’ Sam looked smitten with the recollection of this stellar marijuana. ‘The old you would have loved it.’ There was a splinter of criticism in Sam’s tone, almost like some old-school flower child admonishing a narc. Sam was well aware of Staubach’s reputation — as was everybody in school, they had all risen through the tiers of secondary education with the psychopath — but he seemed pretty content that an explanation/apology would keep him sweet and return the status quo of customer and dealer. ‘Stop looking like you’re about to hose off in your pants, it’s all gravy.’ Sam dropped a pun, spooning up more of the bargain basement food, his lip curling up. ‘I can’t take another year of this cuisine though.’

  Neil inspected his own tray. ‘If I wasn’t so hungry I’d be just as disgusted as you.’ He started in on the edible meat — beef maybe? — and mashed potatoes like he hadn’t eaten in a week.

  Matt shot him a bitter look. ‘I need to watch my figure, want to look good in that dress.’

  Sam’s scientific curiosity towards Neil’s culinary willingness was spoiled by a smidge of distaste. ‘I’m the one with the munchies and even I want no part of that stuff. Forget it, let’s just bail, go to the drive-through.’

  Matt perked up, peering out through the curtains of hair. ‘You buying?’

  Sam looked like he had just been slapped. ‘I’m driving. You cough up the change.’

  Neil appraised Matt, wishing he shared his smaller friend’s prowess. He might have come in second but he not only looked refreshed since the sprinting but had tackled a joint in the meantime and seemed remarkably copacetic. At least I won the bet, he consoled himself before rolling his eyes at his friends’ haste to abscond. Sam was already patting down the pockets of his fleece-lined, acid-washed denim jacket for his van keys. Sam had always felt anachronistic, believing he was somehow born out of time, a refugee made for the 80s but born in an unfitting future. It went a long way to explain his tastes in music and fashion which were deeply anchored in the dawn of 70s classic rock and the hair metal dusk of the 80’s. When a particular fashion trend regurgitated itself from the “cool” taste-makers onto the sheep of his generation, it generally ruffled his feathers no end and caused him to look down upon the fellow ilk of his generation and anybody else who went with the unthinking flow.

  ‘I just sat down, can I finish this first?’ Neil was strangely prepared to stand his ground for this awful meal.

  ‘What…?’ Sam was pushing himself up from the table.

  With a mouthful of food, Neil protested, ‘C’mon, man. I just went Barry Allen out on the track. Let me recharge my jets.’

  Hassled to the hilt, Sam got in a strop. ‘I got jets too, y’know. Jets that need to land on a cheeseburger.’

  A reedy pothead giggle creaked out of Matt, which quickly cut off when he remembered he didn’t have any cash on him. He looked at his school dinner like a broken man. ‘Is there any chance you could pay for me? You know I’m good for it.’

  Sam looked incredulous. ‘You still owe for that keg last weekend. Tell ’em,’ he dragged Neil into corroborating.

  Neil nodded, almost choking on a bolus the size of his fist and parroted, ‘You still owe for the keg last weekend.’

  Matt tugged on the sleeves of his old custom-made white and black baseball jersey —— GROVES 1 — from when he was a star player throughout his freshman and sophomore years before getting high and drunk became his reigning achievements. ‘It was my fake ID and balls which got us the beer in the first place.’

  Sam put his hands up. ‘Whatever you did with your balls is between you and the cashier. But you still owe us dollar.’

  Neil pushed the tray away, trying not to taste the chewy food in his mouth and looking mildly ill. Maybe a burger wasn’t such a bad idea. ‘Okay, let’s go to the drive-through.’ Zipping up his battered black leather jacket, Neil turned from the table and bumped shoulders with a petite brown-haired girl, almost spilling her lunch everywhere. ‘Shit, I’m sorry,’ he apologised, feeling dumbstruck as he made eye contact with her, tingling with the realisation that it was Lindsey McGuire. She was shorter than him — par for the course really — the top of her head levelling off around his sternum. She was a damn sight prettier too. Neil would even go so far as to say sexy, but he oftentimes found it difficult to differentiate between sexy and cute, with the former usually being applied to those whose dominant trait was purely physical, tits and ass; the cuteness, however, stemmed from the fact that she was a first-class brains trust student who played violin in the school band, who also happened to shun hipster trends in favour of an old green bomber jacket and retro bell bottom jeans which made her hard to pin down in the scope of school cliques. Her attire would help her fit right into
his own circle of post-modern brats too lost to give a shit about anything but their insular network and a belief that everything was pointless.

  Her friendly smile briefly paralysed him in both speech and motion. ‘No, it was my fault, I wasn’t looking,’ she offered.

  He became suddenly self-conscious of his flagrant attraction towards her, feeling his cheeks burn with the scorching heat of the summer sun and fumbled for something to say. ‘Err, I might have been doing you a favour. You really don’t want to be eating that.’ He pointed at the gravy-soaked animal on the tray. ‘I think that’s a new species.’

  Her pleasant, unburdened laugh sent tingles through him, natural and musical. Neil drip-fed his own laugh in small modest bursts, trying to give an impression of cool restraint whilst his body — now savvy to the surprise assault of his embarrassment — slowly started to stew him with nervous sweat.

  ‘It’s not an animal, I think I saw Doris taking a fishing net into the toilets earlier,’ she replied, her chocolate brown eyes awkwardly locking then breaking from his blues like misshapen puzzle pieces. They both automatically looked across the herds of students shovelling the toilet bowl treats into their mouths as the plump, planetary form of Doris ladled more of the slop onto the proffered beige trays.

  Neil grimaced in amusement. ‘Gross, but accurate. Lindsey, right?’

  She smiled coyly and yet it was still capable of cooking the perspiration on Neil’s pores. ‘Yeah, Neil,’ she nodded. ‘You occasionally sat next to me in geography…when Mrs Garcia wasn’t throwing you out for being stoned.’

  She remembered my name. He winced. ‘Well, I’m trying to turn over a new leaf.’

  Lindsey was about to speak when Matt decided to shit all over the moment. ‘Jesus, Neil, control your boner. Isn’t one restraining order enough?’ Matt sniggered behind his closed fist, unruly hair and the façade of his lowdown cap. His call had blurted across the cafeteria, eliciting a few curious heckles and utterly destroying the mood.