Leverage
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1 - DANNY
Chapter 2 - KURT
Chapter 3 - DANNY
Chapter 4 - KURT
Chapter 5 - DANNY
Chapter 6 - KURT
Chapter 7 - DANNY
Chapter 8 - KURT
Chapter 9 - DANNY
Chapter 10 - KURT
Chapter 11 - DANNY
Chapter 12 - KURT
Chapter 13 - DANNY
Chapter 14 - KURT
Chapter 15 - DANNY
Chapter 16 - KURT
Chapter 17 - DANNY
Chapter 18 - KURT
Chapter 19 - DANNY
Chapter 20 - KURT
Chapter 21 - DANNY
Chapter 22 - KURT
Chapter 23 - DANNY
Chapter 24 - KURT
Chapter 25 - DANNY
Chapter 26 - KURT
Chapter 27 - DANNY
Chapter 28 - KURT
Chapter 29 - DANNY
Chapter 30 - KURT
Chapter 31 - DANNY
Chapter 32 - KURT
Chapter 33 - DANNY
Chapter 34 - KURT
Chapter 35 - DANNY
Chapter 36 - KURT
Chapter 37 - DANNY
Chapter 38 - KURT
Chapter 39 - DANNY
Chapter 40 - KURT
Chapter 41 - DANNY
Chapter 42 - KURT
Chapter 43 - DANNY
Chapter 44 - KURT
Chapter 45 - DANNY
Chapter 46 - KURT
Chapter 47 - DANNY
Chapter 48 - KURT
Chapter 49 - DANNY
Chapter 50 - KURT
Chapter 51 - DANNY
Chapter 52 - KURT
Chapter 53 - DANNY
Chapter 54 - KURT
Chapter 55 - DANNY
Chapter 56 - KURT
Chapter 57 - DANNY
Chapter 58 - KURT
Chapter 59 - DANNY
Chapter 60 - KURT
Chapter 61 - DANNY
Acknowledgements
DUTTON BOOKS
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PUBLISHED BY THE PENGUIN GROUP
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Joshua C. Cohen
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
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Published in the United States by Dutton Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014 www.penguin.com/youngreaders
eISBN : 978-1-101-47577-5
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For Charles and Jane with all my gratitude.
To Karen with all my heart.
1
DANNY
The high bar’s chalky bite threatens to rip the yellowed calluses right off my palms at the bottom of the swing, where the pull is heaviest. Thirty thousand fans in the Olympic arena muffle themselves as I approach escape velocity. On the upswing, all my pain, sweat, and years of practice drop away like spent booster rockets, pushing me even higher in my one shot at glory and Olympic gold. The crusty steel pipe, my companion and punisher, slingshots me past gravity’s reach and I am a superhero in front of the adoring, breathless fans waiting to see if I live or die. I can fly, like a god, rising higher, twisting and corkscrewing through space, spotting my landing mat, tumbling weightless—
CRACK!
Huh?
Eyelids flutter open as brain reboots from a math-induced coma. My nose twitches at the scent of Old Spice aftershave. Mr. Klech stands beside my desk, ruler in hand.
“Having a nice nap, Mr. Meehan?” he asks, cracking the ruler on my desk a second time. I flinch. The classroom snickers. Mr. Klech always addresses us formally, using our last names like it’s his own personal joke, like he knows how far any of us are from being actual adults.
“Yes. No,” I offer, pretty sure one of those has to be the correct answer. Mr. Klech doesn’t even wait. He’s already waddling back to the chalkboard to complete the same equation I nodded off to first go-round: (x2 - y2) + (z2 + m2) = something you—Danny Meehan!—will never figure out.
The only good thing about Mr. Klech’s class is Glory Svenson, who sits in front of me. My eyes drift off the board full of math scribble and focus on Glory reaching up behind her to undo the black clip securing all that golden hair into a pile on top of her head. Set free, her hair tumbles down in perfect, sun-streaked ringlets that hit my desk and fan out over my algebra textbook. I inhale deeply and am rewarded with the citrus-mango aroma of her shampoo.
Summer still lingers in the air this first week of my sophomore year and, even with the windows wide open, the classroom bakes at a snoozable eighty-four degrees according to the doughnut-shaped thermometer by the light switch. Outside, you can hear the machine hum of John Deere tractor lawn mowers grooming the football fields. The sweet smells of cut grass and gasoline waft into the class, mixing happily with Glory’s shampoo. Sure beats getting stuck behind Wally Peters’s pimply peg-head in science or DuWayne Runyon’s speed-bump Mohawk in study hall.
With eighteen minutes and forty-seven ... forty-six ... forty-five seconds remaining until the bell releases us, I begin tracing around Glory’s spilled goldilocks to stay awake. I’ve got a pretty decent pencil outline going on pages 31 and 32 of my Algebra for Life textbook when the classroom door opens. A guy who looks like he’s been through puberty three times—while I’m still waiting for my first shot—walks through the door with muscles stacked on him like blocks. The guy actually has side-burns and chin whiskers. Chin whiskers! Though he tries to hide it with an overgrown mop falling over his face, I can see a scar traveling from the outside corner of his eye down to his heavy jaw and a patch of skin on that same cheek mottled pink and white, with the rough texture of cauliflower.
The guy looks tough, setting off my internal alert. Everyone knows a guiding principle of underclassman survival is identifying dangerous upperclassmen. The fact that I don’t recognize the new guy troubles me. He keeps his eyes down, like he’s already been busted for something. Around the patch of weird ski
n and the long scar, his face—what isn’t hidden behind his hair—starts to redden. He holds a green hall pass folded over a white note. Mr. Klech stops filling the chalkboard with coded al-Qaeda sleeper cell instructions and impatiently glances at, then pulls a double take of, the big intruder.
“Yes?” Mr. Klech asks with that tone teachers use to make even a simple question sound like a put-down.
The big guy won’t speak. He walks toward Mr. Klech, offering up the green hall pass and the white note. His other hand reaches up to rub the scarred cheek, shielding it from our gawking. His clothes look old but not retro, more like Salvation Army. Or asylum. He wears the long sleeves of his satin shirt rolled to the elbow, revealing forearms corded with muscle and—no joke—about the size of my calves. His longish hair rides over a shirt collar with lapels big enough to flap. His dark dress pants stop at his ankles, revealing white tube socks and vinyl Kmart sneakers. His clothes don’t matter, though, because the guy moves with size and power and remains scary quiet. No way, no how, is anyone in that class going to laugh at him, not even Fred Calahan or Erik Berry, two varsity football starters. The closer he gets to Mr. Klech, the more he looms over our teacher.
Mr. Klech snatches the papers from the guy’s hand and starts reading. The man-beast continues forward, putting himself between Mr. Klech and the class, eclipsing our teacher while a serpentine sound slithers out of him.
Glory Svenson’s hair rises off my desk as she and the rest of us sit forward to listen.
“Sure, Mr. . . . your name, again?” Mr. Klech asks from somewhere behind the giant. With his back still turned to us, I hear the guy make a kuh-kuh-kuh and then a buh-buh-buh noise like he’s attempting really bad suburban beatbox.
“Well, Mr. Brodsky—Kurt—welcome,” Mr. Klech says, and steps back into my sight line. “Just have a seat over ... hmmm, it looks like we’re full up at the moment.” Mr. Klech looks around the classroom. “You can take my seat up here for the next few minutes until we finish. I’ll see about getting an extra desk for tomorrow.”
The guy takes a moment to study the teacher’s chair at the front of class and then shakes his head no.
“There’s really no other alternative,” Mr. Klech says. The new guy, Kurt Brodsky, isn’t listening. He heads toward the back of the classroom, down my aisle, like a bull hauling logs. As he passes me I notice his right hand bunched into a thick fist, knuckles white, looking capable of splitting the thin wood of my desk with one solid punch. He reaches the back wall and then turns around, leaning up against it, watching us watch him.
“Mr. Brodsky, I prefer my students not stand during class,” Mr. Klech says, clearly miffed. “I’d like you to take my seat.”
“I’m sssssssssssssss,” the new guy, Kurt, starts cobra hissing. Then his eyes roll up into half-scrunched lids, leaving only zombie-slits of white. “Ssssssssssssssss . . .” His face grows rosy as the class twists in unison for a better view of him wrestling some demon word out of his mouth. You can tell he’s getting angrier the longer it drags on. “Ssssssssssssssss . . .”
Without warning he brings up his fist and swings it down into the back wall.
Boom!
“Ssssssssstaying puh-puh-puh-put!” he finishes with a heavy stomp of his big, vinyl, Kmart sneaker. His eyes unroll from his head and glare out at us.
Holy shit!
No one says anything. No one dares. We all turn back around in our seats. Mr. Klech ignores the outburst and returns to the chalkboard. I forget all about Glory Svenson’s hair. I pretend to understand the final problem Mr. Klech puts up on the board. I slouch down in my desk and hope that when Kurt Brodsky gets expelled for slaughtering a couple of underclassmen, it isn’t my corpse they’ll find hanging in his locker.
2
KURT
Sometimes, sir, there’s just a meanness in this world. That song lyric says more about most people than anything else I’ve ever come across. It keeps playing in my head as I stand in the doorway of my new algebra class with no choice but to let every student look at me, look at my dumb-ass shirt. Look at my face. My cheeks grow hot and the scars start to itch, uglifying me even more. Without the cover of a football helmet, the stares fire on me nonstop. And just wait until they hear me speak. A bead of sweat caterpillars along my brow as I hand the note and hall pass over to the teacher, Mr. Klech, putting my back between him and a whole class taking aim from behind their desks.
If Lamar were here he would turn it around: act like being the new guy was all a big joke, point at one of the students in front, or pick the best-looking one, and flip’em the bird. He’s as small as they come but I bet he’d step right up to the biggest cat in the room—besides me—and try to pick a fight, establish himself right away. Of course, Lamar’d get himself suspended within the hour, but he’d be dancing all the way out the school door. Without Lamar, I got no voice, no one who understands my eye-rolls. I got no one to show my sketches for that bike shop we’d own together. Without Lamar, I got no one to help me track down Crud Bucket after they release him so we can kidnap him and tie him to a chair in some dark basement and make him explain every single mark he left on us. As always, thinking of Lamar helps at first. Then it hurts.
I tried explaining to Oregrove’s school secretary I’ve already taken algebra, but with each attempt my idiot tongue thickened even more. Her pasted-on smile told me she wasn’t really hearing anything the big retard said anyway. She’s leafed through my records, read my transcript, heard me speak, and now she’s got me all figured out. The wadded-up disco shirt Patti pulled out of a plastic bag and forced me to wear ain’t exactly helping my case, either. Being a coach’s recruit is supposed to make me special. But someone coming from my situation, sounding like my tongue’s juggling ice cubes, makes me a kind of “special” that caused the secretary to address me too slowly and too loudly. Those grades I got at Lincoln High don’t mean nothing to her because Lincoln’s more a holding cell than a school in her mind. Funny how Lincoln and Oregrove both share the idea of keeping me back a year, two even. All the better to keep me humping that football up and down the field to win them a title.
“That coach of yours said he’d arrange us extra funding to help beef you up,” Patti explains that first day she welcomes me into her home as my latest foster guardian. “You’ll get a real good education at Oregrove. Your coach said they’ll be able to highlight your skills, most likely get you signed for a full scholarship at a university. I don’t have to tell you just how big a gift that is.” Patti’s no worse than the last four foster guardians since Crud Bucket, but her face keeps lighting up whenever she mentions—three times that first day—the extra funds Oregrove High School’s coach promised her.
Walking into the sticky-hot classroom, I got nothing against my new algebra teacher, Mr. Klech, but no way am I sitting up front at his desk while all those eyes zero in on me. So I ignore him. I put my head down, remind myself none of it really matters, that it’s all just a game created by adults: filling out forms, standing in line, finding your place, doing as you’re told, and—most important—making sure if someone’s cracking fists, it’s you doing the swinging. Me and Lamar discovered that last one together. All those eyes watching me walk to the back of Mr. Klech’s classroom can’t touch me. Not like Crud Bucket. Not even close.
3
DANNY
Not sure what’s worse, yet: freshmen assuming I’m one of them or upperclassmen mistaking me for an accelerated supergenius fifth grader—minus the supergenius part. Dad’s attempts to reassure me I’ll eventually hit puberty always start with a deep sigh or yawn as he’s leafing through a medical journal, then end with a distracted promise that I’ll soon be a “pimply, awkward, screechyvoiced troll” just like my classmates.
Thanks, Dad.
I guess he’s impatient on the subject because he’s a doctor. No such thing as someone never hitting puberty, he says. But I’m not so sure. I’ve seen all his medical books and American Medical Association journal
s documenting super-rare disorders and diseases (like the diagram of this dude with a scrotum that must weigh about fifty pounds and the baby born with a brain outside its skull). I’m willing to bet that somewhere out there is a super-rare disorder where a kid never hits puberty. And someone has to be the victim of that disorder, so why not me?
Someone my size has to be rabbity to survive the school hallways; darting around even the smallest spaces, avoiding hip checks, shoulder jams, and clumsy attempts at wall smearing. The most dangerous time comes immediately after the last bell when dismissal feels a little like a prison riot.
Nikes laced tight for the Dodge & Sprint, I drop off some books at my locker, avoid a not-so-accidental kick as I pass the Hacky Sack circle, and then hurry downstairs to the team locker rooms to get ready for gymnastics practice.
Entering the boys’ locker room is sort of like entering a dog kennel with extra butt-crack thrown in for good measure. A toxic fog of sweat-mildew-pee-fart-bleach turns all of us into mouth breathers. Prehistoric sweat accumulates on the floor and walls like old coats of varnish accompanied by the more recent animal stink of too many guys trapped in a windowless gas chamber. Add to this the guys who peel wet gym clothes off still-dripping bodies and stuff them directly into a dark, barely ventilated locker to ferment for a few days before unleashing them on the rest of us. Once weaponized, these T-shirts, jockstraps, socks, and shorts may cause bleeding from the ears, nose, and eyes. They get batted around like dead plague rats until they’re either tossed in the garbage, rammed into a clogged toilet, or tied around the face of a small underclassman.
Vital facts: Of the three boys’ sports programs in the fall season, football controlls most of the real estate. The varsity football team has its very own smelly locker room but the players enjoy slumming in the general locker room so they can terrorize the rest of us. The general team locker room is reserved for the junior varsity and JJV football teams. There are also two small, one-bench locker rooms off to the sides. The first is reserved for gymnastics. The second is reserved for cross-country runners. Those poor cross-country runners. Being a gymnast in a lair full of football players is rough, but not nearly as bad as what the cross-country runners suffer. Nervous as deer, they change hurriedly before scampering off in hopes of avoiding the alligator eye of a lurking JV football player angry he didn’t make the varsity squad. The cross-country runners don’t stick together in a pack like the gymnasts do—this is their biggest mistake.