Janis yanked the lock free and hooked it over her finger. When she opened the metal door on her neat line of books and folders, something fluttered to the ground, a folded slip of paper. She knelt, her books pressed to her chest, and retrieved it. She looked up and down the empty hallway, then shook the note open. A cold sense of déjà vu seized her.
I was wrong. You’re not a lesbian.
You’re a freak.
This note had no signature, either. Janis let it fall from her fingers.
* * *
Creed, in his John Lennon shades, spotted him first and jerked from the driver’s side window. Then his younger brother turned. A cigarette dangled from the corner of Tyler’s mouth, and he squinted out at Scott through the smoke. Creed nudged him toward the sidewalk so the way was blocked.
But Scott’s limping stride didn’t falter, even as he glimpsed the narrow blades extending from the thumb and first finger of Creed’s glove. Scott got as close as he dared, about two parked cars from the Chevelle, and stopped. Traffic hummed along Titan Terrace. Students streamed around him. He’d be safe as long as he didn’t go any closer. He shifted his gaze to the enormous elbow sitting on the car’s windowsill.
“Did you come to piss yourself again?” Creed asked.
“I came to talk to Jesse,” Scott called back.
“Come and talk, then.”
Scott shook his head. “Just Jesse.”
Creed glared at Scott another moment and then palmed his bowler hat as he leaned toward the window. He said something, waited, said something else, then stood from the window.
“Jesse says the time for talking is over, shit face.”
“I have something for him.”
“What?” Suspicion narrowed Creed’s voice.
“Something he’s going to want.”
Creed kept staring at Scott, then leaned toward the window again. Tyler watched from the sidewalk, not saying anything. He took a drag on his cigarette and blew an indifferent stream of smoke.
“Bring it over,” Creed said when he stood.
“Not until you and your brother leave.”
“Who do you think you’re talking to?” Creed spiked his smoking butt into the gutter and began stalking toward Scott.
At that moment, the elbow over the windowsill lurched to life, and a hand appeared. With two sausage-sized fingers, it waved Creed off. Creed looked from the hand to Scott and snarled. Then he backed away, jerking his head for his brother to follow.
Scott waited until they were up in the faculty parking lot before approaching. He watched the Chevelle’s open window, his feet tracing a narrow path along the far edge of the sidewalk. Very soon, the elbow in Scott’s view joined a giant shoulder and the shoulder a squat head that bulged from the collar of a black leather jacket. Scott looked into a pair of impassive gray eyes.
“I wanted to give you this.” Scott pulled the envelope from his pocket.
“What is it?”
“There’s more than three hundred dollars inside. I figured it would cover those charges on your phone bill from last year. Yours and Creed’s. I didn’t mean for your father to… to do what he did.”
Jesse’s eyes didn’t move from Scott’s.
“What about last month?” Jesse asked.
“Last month?”
“We lost our phone service. Stayed out all night. Creed’s, too. Happened on a Sunday.”
“Look, I haven’t done anything to your phones this year. I’m just trying to make this right. I want to get past this.” He held out the envelope with the bills. It was the lunch money he’d been able to save over the last three months, plus some. His father had exchanged it all for tens and twenties.
Scott gave the envelope a shake. “Here.”
Jesse’s eyes remained on his, and Scott could see them assessing whether or not he was telling the truth. The gray eyes shifted to the envelope. And just as Scott was remembering how fast Jesse could move, Jesse’s fist swallowed his wrist. He pinched the envelope away with his other hand.
“This doesn’t square us,” Jesse said.
Scott felt his bones mashing together. He twisted around and stifled a cry.
“You’re still gonna get your arm broke,” Jesse said flatly. “That was the deal. But here’s what I’m gonna do.” He held up the envelope of money. “Because of this, we’re back to one arm. And ’cause I’m feeling especially generous, I’m gonna let you pick the time and place.”
“Look, can’t we just—”
Jesse’s grip tightened.
“All right! All right!” Scott yelled. He tried to think, but the pain felt like the stab and twist of a dull knife. “Where it happened the first time — do you remember? We were in the Grove, I tried to run, and Creed caught me down in the woods, in that clearing. Remember?”
“All right. When?”
“After the holidays.”
Jesse cinched his grip. “Be more specific.”
“Ow! New Year’s Eve! Midnight!” It was the first thing that flew into his mind. He knew his parents would be out that night. They went to Larry Habscomb’s party every year. It was one of the few things they still did together.
Jesse’s hand popped open, and Scott stumbled backward, clutching his wrist to his chest.
“You don’t show up,” Jesse warned, “and it’s gonna be both arms when we catch you. And a leg. Now get the hell outta here.”
Scott started to raise a finger. Something Jesse had said was just registering—
“Get outta here, I said.”
When Scott glimpsed Creed and Tyler sauntering back, he nodded, deciding it wiser to heed Jesse’s words. Still cradling his wrist, he retreated the way he had come, opening and closing his fingers. The pain faded to a throb. He glanced around at the Chevelle. Creed and Tyler were back beside Jesse’s elbow, a thin shelf of smoke growing around them again. It wasn’t the deal Scott had wanted, no, but he had just bought himself an arm and another month.
For the time, that was going to have to be good enough.
* * *
Janis passed the teacher’s desk, feeling no relief at its emptiness, and took her seat. Star was stooped over a crinkled sheet of newspaper. “More of the godamned same,” she grumbled, looking over. “Cut taxes for the rich, slash funding for the poor — that’s food stamps, low-income housing, Medicaid…”
It was a familiar rant: the evils of “Reaganomics.” Janis wasn’t in the mood.
“That’s not ‘trickle-down,’” Star went on. “That’s pissing down or, more accurately, pissing on. And don’t get me started on the military budget. Do you know what he and his cronies are pushing for? Another trillion dollars over the next four years. A trillion dollars. That’s a one with twelve zeros. Do you know how many people that would feed and educate?”
“Maybe there’s a reason for that,” Janis muttered, remembering what her father had said.
“Oh, and what would that be?”
Janis shook her head.
Star laughed. “Let me guess. The United States is vulnerable suddenly?” The derision in her voice rankled like hot needles.
“How would you know one way or the other?” Janis asked.
“Because anyone willing to exercise an ounce of their brain understands how these things work. There’s only so much money in the budget, right? And everyone’s fighting for their slice of the pie. So you have Defense running to the President and Congress like a gaggle of Chicken Littles, screaming, ‘The Russians are getting ahead! The Russians are getting ahead!’”
Janis pulled out her typing primer and set it on the metal stand beside the typewriter, away from Star.
“Meanwhile, the newspapers are printing ‘leaked’ intelligence saying the same thing, getting the public’s paranoia whipped into a panic. And who’s doing the leaking, you ask? Well, ask yourself another question: Who has the most to gain? It just so happens that when your business is defense, your greatest asset is…” She made her voice deep. “…fear.”
/>
Janis remembered the look on her father’s face in the parking lot. She stopped flipping through the primer and turned toward Star. “So you’re saying the Russians haven’t pulled ahead?”
Am I looking to Star for hope? Janis thought in disbelief. She studied her neighbor’s spiked hair, ghoulish makeup job, and crumpled flannel shirt she’d worn more days than Janis could count. Star?
“I wouldn’t bet on it.” Star shrugged a shoulder.
Maybe it was the defiance in the gesture or how Star’s black lips scowled around the words, but Janis felt a sudden urge to hug her, especially after the ominous news that week of Soviet troop movements in eastern Europe and renewed threats to blockade West Berlin. If what Star said was true, then the United States and the Soviet Union were still on par militarily, their “peace” in place. Neither one could risk an attack on the other. MAD still ruled. Which meant the nuclear explosions in her dreams were just that — nuclear explosions in her dreams.
But instead of throwing her arms around Star, Janis leaned nearer and lowered her voice. “Hey, um, you mentioned something the first day of school about having a sister. Whatever happened to her?”
Star’s scowl slid into an expression as flat as stone.
“Do you really want to know?” Her tone mirrored her face.
“Yes.”
Wordlessly, Star began unbuttoning her green-checked flannel shirt. Janis looked around, alarmed, but Star stopped three quarters of the way down. She drew the two flaps of flannel apart, like theater curtains, to reveal a black T-shirt. Faded silk screening called for NUCLEAR FREEZE NOW! in yellow letters with a crossed-out missile underneath. The shirt had been stitched back together, Janis noticed, a long, wending scar. Star inserted a black fingernail into a small hole in the fabric, between her pointed breasts.
“That happened to her,” Star said, “a bullet during an anti–nuclear weapons rally. There’s a bigger hole in the back of the shirt, where the bullet exited.” Star removed her finger and began buttoning her flannel shirt back up. “Blew her chest cavity to soup. She died in the emergency room that night.”
“Oh my god.” Janis’s hand went to her mouth. “Who did it?”
“Someone who didn’t like what she was shouting into her bullhorn, apparently.”
“Were they caught?”
Star shook her head.
Janis didn’t look over when the door banged shut and the roar of voices quieted to murmurs. Her gaze remained locked on Star, who looked down, a fresh scowl struggling to keep the film of moisture over her eyes from spilling.
“I apologize for being late,” droned a voice from far away. “Your teacher, Mrs. Diaz, had to check out at lunch… stomach virus… I’ll be filling in for the rest of the day… open your primers to page 210 and…”
“I’m so sorry,” Janis whispered. “If you ever want to talk about it, you can… you know, talk to me.”
As typewriters banged to life around them, Star moved her head in what might have been a nod. Then, having won her battle with her tears, she set her face in stone once more and opened her primer to a random page.
When Janis glanced toward the front of the classroom, the muscles around her eyes stiffened to ice. At the teacher’s desk sat Mr. Leonard. His own eyes, which had been watching her, jerked away. He cleared his throat into his fist. Then he opened a newspaper and raised it in front of his yellow-tinted glasses until only the top of his pale brow showed, shiny with sweat.
He stayed like that the rest of the period as typewriters went off like gunfire around them.
* * *
Instead of going to her next class — sixth period Spanish — Janis slipped into the downstairs bathroom on C-wing, sealed herself in one of the damp stalls, drew the latch, and perched atop the toilet tank. If she’d had a cigarette, she might have lit it and taken a drag, like Pony Boy from The Outsiders. That would have been another first for her, after skipping class.
The final bell rang outside.
Janis propped her head in her hands, her hair falling around her view of the toilet bowl like a tomato-colored curtain. “What’s happening to me?” she whispered. The curtain shook back and forth with her head. Just the night before, it had felt as though her life was beginning to make sense again, to find grounding in a new normal. Thanks to Scott. But in the space of, what, twelve, fourteen hours, the stakes were all popping out. Her mind sped back through her argument with Blake at lunch, the revelation that she’d injured Amy, the note in her locker, the ghastly appearance of Mr. Leonard.
The shock of the last continued to tremor through her like the aftereffects of a Pacific quake. For a moment, she had been back in the roach-infested shed, his face staring down at her…
Janis stopped and inhaled the sharp odor of bleach.
And what about Star’s story? There’s a bigger hole in the back of the shirt. Janis’s heart ached… for Star, for Star’s sister. She wished she had the power to go back, to warn them. But her powers seemed to come and go at their own choosing. And besides, she didn’t possess the ability to influence past events, only to observe them.
What about future events?
Her thoughts zoomed in on her own sister. And then Mr. Leonard.
He’d followed Margaret to the beach that day. He watched their house at night. He safeguarded a hidden room beneath his shed, a room that would throw the dark curtain back on who he was. Janis knew these things, even if mostly in her gut. But hadn’t Mrs. Fern called the out-of-body realm a source of intuition — a tremendous source of intuition? Yet what had she done with that intuition? Given Margaret a single meek warning three months ago?
Blew her chest cavity to soup.
Janis’s hair shook above the toilet bowl. It wasn’t enough.
She hopped down, opened the stall door, and heaped cold water on her face. Then she paced the ten feet of bathroom for the next forty minutes — forty interminable minutes — until the next bell sprang her.
The three-headed hydra stood at the back of the English classroom, Amy balancing on a pair of chrome crutches, her right ankle cocooned in Ace bandaging. When her eyes met Janis’s in the doorway, they swelled with fear and fresh hatred. She clanked backward, nearly losing her balance. Alicia and Autumn moved in front of her like a pair of bodyguards, their faces twisting and wringing until Janis thought their pores would start leaking makeup.
So much for trying to apologize.
She put her books beneath her seat and raised her eyes to Scott’s desk. Her heart suffered a twinge to find it empty. Probably stayed home. And who can blame him after last night? She pushed out a sigh. She’d wanted to talk to him so badly.
But just as the final bell sounded and Mrs. Fern stood to lecture, Scott scrambled through the door. He sat, legs splayed so his knees wouldn’t knock the underside of his desk, and ran a hand through his hair. When he glanced over, his face startled before quirking into a crooked smile. For the first time that day, a smile touched Janis’s lips as well.
I don’t think it’s crazy, she heard him saying. Really. I believe you.
After class, Scott walked up, hesitantly it seemed, and placed something on her desk.
Janis looked from the folded piece of paper to his face. “What’s this?” she asked.
“Only… only if you want to.”
He stood a moment, appearing to mull the note over, then he tapped his fingers against her desk and walked from the classroom. Janis almost called after him but looked down and picked up the note instead. Nervous excitement fluttered through her as she opened it.
She read it a second time, nodded to herself, and tucked the note inside one of her folders.
28
That evening
7:32 p.m.
Scott stood in front of his closet mirror, freshly showered, in a towel-skirt. Pushing out his chest, he angled himself to one side, then the other. Not Scott Summers proportions yet, no. But lines and taut muscles appeared where there hadn’t been any only a few mont
hs before. He wasn’t imagining it anymore.
Satisfied, Scott pulled open the folding door on his closet. What to wear?
Jeans for sure. He slipped a pair off their hanger and tossed them toward his bed. A belt sailed after them. Blue-striped Oxford or green Polo? Eenie, meenie, miney, mo… Polo it was. Knit vest? He shook his head. Too much. A jacket would suffice. He drew forth his latest acquisition, a black Members Only jacket, and draped it over the back of his desk chair.
Scott glanced at his bedside clock, his heart beating way too hard. It wasn’t a date, no, not technically. But it would be the closest thing he’d ever had to one. His fingers shook as they worked buttons through holes.
A date that wasn’t a date with Janis Graystone.
If she agrees, buddy — and that’s a big if.
In the mirror, his shoulders sagged at the prospect of spending the evening clean, fragrant, well dressed, and alone. He stepped into his loafers and, after performing a few final tucks and teases in the mirror, pulled out an X-Men comic and retired onto his bed. It was issue #127, where the X-Men pursue the evil mutant Proteus. Scott flipped to the panels where Cyclops goads Wolverine — and soon the rest of the team — into a fight, to make sure they haven’t lost their edge. A true leader’s move. Even Wolverine says so afterwards.
Scott closed his eyes. A true leader…
He dreamed he was standing in the front yard, watching Mr. Shine rake leaves into small piles. The sun shone down from a brisk blue sky, and Scott realized it was the first time he’d seen their yard man since the day in the tennis courts, when Mr. Shine saved him from Jesse and the others.
Scott stepped closer. “Hey, um, do you think you could show me that trick with the quarter one more time?”
A chuckle crackled from Mr. Shine’s chest as he turned from the half-formed pile he was working on. He pushed his flat-topped straw hat farther back on his head and squinted toward Scott, propping the rake against his shoulder. But the metal rake had become a garbage pick, and the cuffed trousers and suspenders he had been wearing, a blue pullover like the one he wore at school.
XGeneration, Books 1-3: You Don't Know Me, The Watchers, and Silent Generation Page 24