Spinning Out

by David Stahler Jr.

  Throwing his cane down, Stewart launched himself at Quentin with a howl. In an instant, the two were on the ground, going at it. A cry rose up from the cast and crew. I couldn’t tell if the other kids were excited or horrified at the prospect of a real fight, but I wasn’t going to find out. As soon as Stewart rolled on top, I grabbed him with both hands and lifted him up so fast he practically landed on his feet.

  “Did you see that?” Quentin yelled, jumping up and hopping around as he pointed at Stewart. “Did you see how he attacked me?”

  He was greeted with silence and uneasy looks, but no one seemed too sympathetic.

  “That’s it, Ms. Vale,” Quentin continued. “He’s got to go. Now!”

  “Oh, knock it off, Quentin,” Ms. Vale muttered. She turned to me. “Get him out of here,” she said, gesturing to Stewart. She seemed generally disgusted with all of us.

  Stewart grabbed his cane, and I half dragged him off the stage and up the aisle toward the exit.

  “Okay, everybody,” Ms. Vale hollered as we left the auditorium, “back to work!”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said as we turned into the lobby. “What the hell is up with you today?”

  “He’s one of them,” Stewart said. “His father works for the power company. He helped raise those monsters.”

  “I don’t think so, Stewart. In fact, I’m pretty sure his father owns that gas station north of town.”

  We headed out into the parking lot. All we had to do was get to the car and go home. And that’s exactly what would’ve happened if it hadn’t been for the beat-up Honda filled with Pokers waiting three spaces away from Stewart’s Volvo.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  There were six of them, all squeezed into Pimples’s shitbox like a bunch of clowns at the circus. One by one they popped out as we approached Stewart’s car. I couldn’t remember there being that many at lunch, but since Pokers all tend to look the same, it’s easy to confuse their numbers.

  “There’s the faggots!” Scott crowed as they gathered into a pack.

  So much for evolution.

  The Pokers were out for blood. I could tell by their quivering half ’staches. They’d spent an hour in detention, and the days of mere intimidation were over. I wanted to run for it, hide someplace where they would never find us—I figured the library was a safe bet—but we were too far away from the main building.

  I glanced around the parking lot, looking for a teacher, any adult who might be able to save us, but the place was empty. It was Friday, and just about everyone had bugged out early. A few girls were gathered on the other side of the parking lot, but that was it. They watched us, babbling into their cell phones at the same time. Probably summoning their friends to watch the slaughter.

  Then I saw her—Kaela was in the window of the lobby entrance. She had her cell phone to her ear and was watching too. Even from here I could see the worry on her face.

  Great, I thought, now I get to have my ass kicked and be humiliated.

  “What’s up, dudes?” I said, turning back to the Pokers, trying to sound as sketched out as possible in the hope that it might convince them we were all joined together in the brotherhood of misfits and losers.

  “Thanks to your whack-job friend here, we’re stuck in detention for a whole week—that’s what’s up, drama queen,” Pimples snarled.

  “Come on, guys,” I said. “Don’t blame us for that. What can I say? Ruggles is an asshole.”

  I hated to throw Ruggles under the bus, but if it meant getting out of this in one piece, I could live with it.

  Stewart, meanwhile, hadn’t said a word. In fact, he hadn’t even moved. He just stood there with his head down, mumbling under his breath.

  “Guys, we got to get out of here,” I said. “Stewart just got in a fight with Quentin Bernard, and we got kicked out of practice. Shitty afternoon.”

  I tried to make us sound all tough, but the Pokers weren’t buying it.

  “Doesn’t look like he’s been in a fight,” Scott said, walking up to us. The others followed. “Then again, Quentin’s almost as big a pussy as you two are, so it’s not surprising. We’ll have to finish the job for him.”

  Before I could reply, Scott reached out and shoved Stewart. I started to my right to catch him, but to my surprise, Stewart didn’t fall. He stumbled back a few steps, then recovered.

  Scott stepped up to shove him again, but this time Stewart was ready. He grabbed both of Scott’s outstretched arms and flipped him right over onto the pavement. It was like something out of a kung fu movie. While Scott rolled moaning on the ground, Stewart and I both looked at each other in shock.

  “Good one, Your Grace.”

  Stewart grinned. Then all hell broke loose.

  I don’t remember a lot of what happened next. I remember seeing Stewart take down a Poker with some kind of karate kick, then trip another with his cane. I remember kicking Pimples in the nads, dropping him on the spot. Not too sporting, I know, but with three-to-one odds, I didn’t give a shit. At one point, I even saw that Kaela had joined the fray, jumping on a Poker’s back and pummeling him with a flurry of punches worthy of a pro hockey player. Then I got creamed in the nose and there was blood running down my face and Kaela was running over screaming something and somebody tackled me and another started punching me and wouldn’t stop…

  And then I heard the ring of steel and everything stopped. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. I knew that sound.

  I sat up to see Stewart and Scott, face to face. Only now it was Scott who was shaking, stepping back as Stewart pressed forward, the tip of his sword against Scott’s chest.

  The Pokers looked one another in shock. We all looked at one another in shock. Everyone but Scott. He just gasped and turned green, like he was about to puke. He backed farther and farther away, finally bumping against the front of Stewart’s car, then leaning back until he was lying completely on the hood. Stewart raised his sword tip until it was right under Scott’s chin.

  I got up and stumbled over.

  “Come on, Stewart. Put it away.”

  “’Tis a scabrous villain,” Stewart whispered. He must have taken a blow—his face was red and swollen along one side.

  “You’re fucking crazy!” Scott shouted.

  I came up close to Stewart until I was right in his ear.

  “It’s not worth it. Think about the play. You can never finish if you do this. You can never be Don again.”

  At that point, I’m not sure it would’ve mattered. He had the look of real murder in his eye. Four years of frustration all focused into the razor-sharp tip of a blade. Just one little push, and it would all come pouring out.

  The rapid blips of a siren made us all stop and turn, even Stewart. Chief Sullivan—head of the town’s three-man police department—pulled up, his tires grinding over the thin layer of parking lot gravel as he slammed on the brakes. A pair of state police cruisers pulled up behind him.

  “Drop the weapon!” Sullivan yelled, jumping out with his sidearm pointed right at Stewart. Stewart looked over at me in panic.

  “Christ, just do it!” I hissed.

  He dropped the sword. I couldn’t help but wince hearing it clatter against the concrete.

  The rest was like a scene from one of those cop shows. They made us all lie flat on the ground. One by one, we were handcuffed and hauled to our feet and stuck in cruisers. A few of the staties smirked when they saw me—they knew who I was, of course, because of Mom. One of them even winked at me as he put me in Sullivan’s cruiser, which helped because I stopped being so scared. I figured he wouldn’t have done that if we were truly fucked.

  Stewart wasn’t so comforted. He was shaking, breathing hard, and trying not to cry as we sat together in the backseat, watching the rest of the Pokers get rounded up while a pair of troopers rummaged through Scott’s car. One of them got out, holding up a big bag of weed. I wondered what else they’d find in there.

  Kaela stood off to the side, pale and shiverin
g against the cold, talking to Chief Sullivan. She kept looking over at me, and whenever she did, I just smiled and nodded.

  It was Kaela who had saved us, phoning the police as soon as she saw the Pokers get out of the car. That and shit luck, since Sullivan and the troopers happened to be just down the street getting coffee when the call came in.

  “Want me to call your mom?” Kaela asked, coming up to us while Sullivan crossed the parking lot to talk to the other girls.

  “Don’t bother. If she doesn’t already know, she will soon enough.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Nah.” Actually, my head throbbed like a sonofabitch and my chin was all scraped up, but what was I going to say? I already had her sympathy. Might as well make her think I was at least somewhat tough. Actually, sitting there in the backseat of a cop car—bruised, handcuffed, defiant—I’d probably never looked more attractive to a girl in my life. She reached in and touched my shoulder.

  “You were pretty hot stuff back there,” she quipped.

  “You weren’t so bad yourself. Never seen a girl who could hit like that.”

  She smiled, then left with a worried look of good-bye.

  Ten minutes later, we were off, Stewart and me in the back of the chief’s car, the Pokers stuffed into two state cruisers. I thought we’d go right to the station, but a minute later we passed it and headed out of town.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “St. Johnsbury. Thought it’d be better to handle this at the state police barracks.”

  “Oh shit,” I said. Stewart started moaning.

  “Just take it easy, Frenchy,” Sullivan said. “We’ll sort it all out.”

  The next three hours were almost as bad as getting beat on by the Pokers. At least that was over quick.

  First we all got separated and questioned. I had to tell the story, like, three different times before they finally brought Stewart and me back together. Next came the parents—the Bolgers, swooping in to embrace Stewart and fuss over his bruise, followed by my mother, who just looked pissed. Not that I expected any love—I’d embarrassed her in front of her colleagues. In fact, she looked like she wanted to hit me even more than the Pokers had. I wished she would’ve. I would’ve felt better about the whole thing.

  After they left, Principal Masure came in, her eyes full of quiet rage. She launched into a ten-minute lecture: How could we do such a thing? Circumstances didn’t matter—we had a responsibility not to stoop to violence. She had half a mind to cancel the whole production. A weapon had been involved. On school property! Lawyers would be calling. Her hands could very well be tied. Were we out of our minds?

  That’s when Stewart started laughing, which—as I’m sure you can imagine—really helped our case.

  Masure’s face grew red, her cheeks began to quiver, and her eyes literally bulged. I imagined steam shooting out of her ears like in those old cartoons.

  “He always does this when he’s upset,” I jumped in, praying she hadn’t yet heard about Stewart’s tussle with Quentin. “Stress does funny things to people. We’re both really sorry. Please don’t let everyone else’s hard work go down the drain because of one incident.”

  My pleading seemed to work. Both Masure and Stewart composed themselves, and the lecture continued: We’d see who was sorry. A decision would be forthcoming. In the meantime, we (and here she turned to Stewart) could be assured that suspensions would be handed out. Several days of them, in fact.

  In the end, it could have been a lot worse. Our story matched that of the witnesses, so no charges were pressed—the whole thing was deemed self-defense. Stewart’s cane sword got confiscated, though. A look of pain crossed his face at the news, but he didn’t say a word. He was smart enough to know he was getting off easy. The Pokers weren’t going to be charged with assault, either. But they had bigger problems—Scott, Pimples, and a couple others had gotten cited for possession and were headed for the state’s diversion program, not to mention the threat of future arrest if they bothered either of us again.

  I thought we were out of the woods, but before we were allowed to rejoin our parents in the lobby, Jason Barr, one of the detectives, came in carrying a big yellow envelope with something clunky inside.

  “I need to ask you about this,” he said.

  He opened the envelope and scattered its contents onto the table. It was the hilt of Stewart’s antique sword, along with several scraps of blade.

  “You know who this belongs to?” He turned toward Stewart.

  Stewart nodded.

  “And you know where we found it?”

  Stewart closed his eyes and nodded again.

  “We were just fooling around, Detective,” I said. “We’d heard there was a party up there, but when we got to the top, nobody was around. The gate was already open.”

  I don’t know if Barr believed me—he didn’t even seem to be listening—but I got the impression it didn’t really matter.

  “Just stay away from there. The power company’s lawyers have threatened to take action the next time anyone trespasses. They’re a pretty skittish bunch. The last thing they want is some idiot doing something stupid up there, getting hurt, and suing them. So stay away.”

  “We will,” I assured him. Stewart just looked down at the hilt in silence.

  “Don’t even go up that road.”

  “We won’t.”

  “Good, because next time there’s a problem, you can guess who I’ll be visiting first.”

  He gathered the pieces back into the envelope and left.

  “I wonder if they’re going to install a surveillance system up there,” Stewart said as we left the barracks. It was dark now, past dinnertime. We paused to look at the wind tower lights, a small row in the distance. Even from this far away, they rose above the horizon, lighting up a good portion of the northern sky.

  “Who gives a shit. We’re not going up there anyway. Right?”

  “Barr’s with them. He’s working for them.”

  “Jesus Christ, Stewart, he’s a detective. He works for the state.”

  “It’s all the same.”

  Fucking Stewart. “You just don’t know when to quit.”

  My mother still had to finish her shift, so I followed Stewart out to the Bolgers’ car. They were going to take us both to a nice restaurant to celebrate our narrow escape from the law. They were all feeling pretty good about themselves, as if we’d somehow managed to stick it to the Man.

  Then I noticed Kaela across the lot by her car. She’d been waiting for us to be released.

  “Thanks for the invite, Mr. and Mrs. Bolger, but I think I’m going to go.”

  “Come, Sancho,” Stewart said. “We must rejoice together in our triumph.”

  “Our triumph, huh? No thanks, Stewart. I’m good.”

  Stewart followed my gaze over to where Kaela waited. His eyes narrowed.

  “Fine,” he said at last. “Rest up. Tomorrow’s an important day.”

  I turned and walked away. As I crossed the lot, it hit me all at once—the sound of Stewart’s drawn sword ringing in my ear, the sight of its point against Scott’s throat, the image of what could have been with one little push. By the time I got to Kaela’s car I was shaking. In fact, I shook the whole way home as the images kept flashing over and over again in my mind, an endless loop.

  “Hey, listen,” Kaela said as we pulled into the driveway. “It’s early. Why don’t I come in and we can watch some TV or something?”

  I reached down, grabbed onto the edge of my seat, and squeezed, hoping it might steady my grip.

  “I don’t know. Mom’s going to be home soon.”

  “So what? I can meet her.”

  “I don’t know,” I repeated. I felt like I was down in some deep hole, like Kaela was talking to me from way up on the surface, her voice thin and distant.

  “It’s just TV.”

  When I didn’t answer, she shook her head. “I feel like we’re in a play, Frenchy. You and m
e. And we keep rehearsing the same scene over and over.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  She turned and stared out the windshield. “See you tomorrow.”

  I let go of the seat and dragged myself out of the car and to the door, still shaking. For a second I looked at my hand under the porch light, hovering over the handle, trembling. Listening to her back out and drive away, I realized just how right she was. I was caught in a goddam cycle. And I had to do something to break out.

  So I went inside, looked up the number in the book, picked up the phone, and dialed.

  “Hi, Ms. Vale, it’s me, Frenchy,” I said after she answered. Then I took a deep breath and said the hardest thing I’ve ever had to say. “I’m really sorry, Ms. Vale, but I have to quit the play.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line. I tried to imagine the expression on her face. Disappointment? Anger? Disgust?

  “May I ask why?” she said. Her voice was oddly calm.

  I closed my eyes. There it was again—that naked blade, quivering in the air. I tried to speak, but my voice stuck in my throat.

  “Look, Frenchy,” she said at last, “I know what happened after practice. Trust me, I spent the last hour on the phone with Mrs. Masure. It was a lively conversation, as I’m sure you can imagine.”

  “Did she want to cancel the show?”

  She snorted. “Well, let’s just say we came to an eventual understanding. Stewart will be suspended, but I managed to persuade her to postpone it until after the show. I told her how hard we’d all worked. What an amazing job everyone was doing. You and Stewart especially.”

  “And now I’m going to screw it all up.”

  She paused again. “It will be very hard to proceed at this point if you drop out.”

  “I just don’t think I can do it, Ms. Vale. And Stewart…” I hesitated, trying to think of how to tell her, how to let her know without breaking my promise. “Stewart hasn’t been himself lately. Maybe it’s better for everyone.”

  I could hear her sigh. I was suddenly glad I’d decided to call instead of doing it in person. I knew it was a chickenshit thing to do, but there was no way I could face her.