The first bell rings, the one that means there’s ten minutes until homeroom. I snap back to reality, and there’s my locker, right in front of me.
The black-haired girl squints at me suspiciously. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I reply, and she seems to believe me, until I follow it up by bowing a little and saying, “Glory to Za’aal, until the Old Ones rise.”
— — —
My locker smells like a pool because my swim trunks are hanging on a hook in the back. I know I should take them home at the end of the day, but I always forget to bring a plastic bag to put them in. I have swim class twice a week. It replaces gym on Wednesdays and Fridays, so I’ll have it today. Even though at first it seemed like a weird class, I enjoy it now. Luckily, it’s my last period of the day, so I don’t have to sit in school all day with wet hair. Otherwise I would definitely not enjoy it.
I hang my backpack on a hook inside the door and grab the books I need for the first three periods today—German, art, and English—before checking my phone. Neither PJ nor Jake has written back yet, although Jake gets like this sometimes. He just doesn’t check his phone. I think he’s the last person left on Earth who doesn’t check his phone every two minutes.
PJ is probably already in homeroom. All the teachers are strict about not letting you use your phone once the second bell rings, but our teacher, Mrs. Zimmerman, is especially zealous. There are a couple of different homeroom classes, but PJ and I are in the same one, and he sits right in front of me. I won’t see Jake until art class, though.
People are closing their lockers, heading to class. Everyone is still buzzing about Trey and his raccoon. I overhear a passing kid say, “I heard it was a poodle, not a raccoon.”
Pretty soon kids will be saying it was a bear.
The second bell goes off, which means five minutes until homeroom, and as though the bell is a starter pistol, the cheese stick PJ gave me on the bus hits my lactose-intolerant system like a kick in the stomach, and my guts clench with an audible gurgle.
I have sixty seconds to reach a toilet.
I run through the Thunderdome’s turbulent eye toward the nearest bathroom, knocking students aside and dodging a pack of cheerleaders who are stapling paper foliage to a bulletin board outside the boys’ room.
There’s only one guy in the bathroom, standing at a urinal, and he gives me a startled look as I rush into the nearest stall and slam the door shut. I sit on the toilet just in time. The Old Ones are rising today, glory to Za’aal.
I can hear the guy washing his hands. Then the bathroom door slams open so hard it hits the wall, and someone says, “Get the fuck out of here.” The voice sounds familiar, so I peer through the crack between the door and the stall.
It’s Mark Kruger.
But he’s not alone. Tommy Richter and Rob Klein, two goons who are friends with Mark, enter behind him, and—oh God, no—Tommy is dragging PJ behind him. Tommy is the biggest kid in school—heck, he’s the biggest person in school aside from Mr. Hartman—and he lifts PJ off his feet as he drags him into the bathroom. Opposing football teams call him the Richter Scale in hushed tones. As he passes, I see a flash of the orange-and-black Iron Pigs jersey he always wears, and then Rob brings up the rear, an evil dwarf, holding PJ’s mascot head, which is almost as big as he is.
My pants are still down around my ankles. Nowhere to run, I quickly pick my books up off the floor and lift my feet so they won’t see I’m sitting in the stall. Legs up, arms full of books, I balance on the toilet seat in the most uncomfortable yoga position ever.
I peer through the door crack, trying to see them, but the group moves farther into the bathroom, out of my line of sight. I can still hear them clearly, though, a few stalls down, next to the sinks, their voices echoing off the tiles.
A scuffle and the squeak of sneakers as someone is pushed. PJ yells, “Hey, c’mon!” but is cut off by a sound like someone punching a pillow. PJ goes “Oof!” as someone slams him against the wall.
Mark’s voice is tight with fury. “You and your friends think you’re pretty funny, don’t you? You think you can fuck with my old man just because our farm is so shitty already, huh? ‘Oh, it’s the Kruger Farm. Nobody cares if we mess that place up,’ huh? ‘It’s already a piece of shit,’ huh?”
When PJ responds to Mark, I almost don’t recognize his voice. First because it’s a frightened wheeze, but second because he’s doing something I’ve never heard him do before: He’s lying—and he’s not doing a very good job of it.
“Hey, look, no!” PJ says. “We didn’t mean to . . . I mean, I didn’t . . . uh . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“We found your book bag in the pasture, dipshit,” Mark says. “It had your name written inside it. At first I didn’t realize it was you because it said ‘Pablo Jaramillo.’ ” Mark mangles the pronunciation. “But then I checked Facebook and saw your stupid face. The same stupid face I see before you put that pig head on at games. Fucking dumbass.”
“How could you betray our team like this?” Tommy asks, genuinely wounded. “How could you do this to a fellow Iron Pig?”
“Tommy, shut up,” Rob squeaks. Rob is half Tommy’s size, but he makes up for it by being twice as mean. He has a high voice that he tries to make sound tougher by speaking with a very thick, very unconvincing New York accent.
A sound like someone punching a pillow again, another ooof! from PJ that makes me flinch and almost spill the books off my lap. My legs are shaking, still sore from all the running last night. I don’t know how long I can hold them off the floor with all these books on my lap.
I know I should help PJ. I should yell or something, but my pants are around my ankles. I haven’t even wiped yet!
Also, I’ll be honest, I’m not in the mood to get beat up.
“There were three of you last night,” Mark says, voice low and angry. “I saw you running away. One of you fuckers clocked me. Was it you?”
“It was not me,” PJ says.
“What’s your friend’s name? The kid you were sitting with on the bus? Was it him?”
“Who’s that?” Tommy asks.
“I don’t know,” Mark says. “Big glasses, kinda skinny. New kid.”
“His name is Kirby,” Rob says. “He’s in my English class. Fuckin’ nerd.”
A sharp slap, and PJ yelps again. Then another punch.
“Who was with you?” Mark demands.
“Uh . . .” PJ wheezes. “What?”
Rob laughs, a high giggle like an evil chipmunk. “Maybe we have to ask him in Spanish,” he says. “Maybe BJ don’t speak English.”
He speaks it better than you, I think.
“It’s PJ, not BJ, and I absolutely speak English,” PJ says. “And look,” he adds hastily, “we’re sorry. Honestly. I swear we weren’t trying to hurt your dad’s farm. We were just . . . messing around.”
Mark sighs, frustrated. “I’m sorry. Honestly. I swear I am not messing around, and I want to know: Who the fuck was with you last night?” He switches tactics, talks to PJ like they’re buddies. “Help me out here,” he says reasonably. “I got three beatings to hand out, and I need to know who gets them. Otherwise I’ll just give all three to you, Pedro.”
“Pablo,” PJ corrects him, right before getting hit again.
“One of ’em could’ve been that burnout psycho, what’s his face . . . Jake,” Rob says. “He’s always hanging around with them.”
“I guess.” Mark sighs. “Probably.”
An uncomfortable silence descends while all three contemplate the unappealing prospect of tangling with Jake. The lull is broken by the bathroom door creaking open. Rob barks, “Bathroom is closed!” and whoever it is leaves.
Another punch. My legs are shaking so bad I’m afraid Rob will actually be able to hear my knees knocking together. I can hold them up for maybe another minute.
“Hey,” Rob chirps. “I have an idea. Check this out. I grabbed it
on our way in here.”
“Oh, dude!” Mark says. “Dude, you are fucked up.”
PJ inhales sharply and then speaks in a rush. “Okay, yes, it was Kirby and Jake with me.”
Mark, Rob, and Tommy all burst out laughing.
“Holy shit!” Mark laughs. “Oh my God, you folded so quickly.”
“Dude’s shitting himself!”
“Good thing he’s already in the bathroom, huh?”
They have a good long laugh about this. Then Mark says, still laughing and out of breath, “Fuck it. Let’s do it anyway. I wanna see what happens. Tom, take off his jacket and roll up his sleeve.”
They laugh even louder, and there’s a quick scuffle that sounds like PJ trying to get away. Rob squeals, “Hold him!” and Tommy grunts with exertion. Then the bathroom is silent except for PJ’s panicked panting.
“Now,” Mark calmly explains, “don’t yell, or I’ll put one in your forehead.”
There’s a quiet but crisp chunk! and PJ screams in pain.
“I told you,” Mark says, annoyed. “Shhhhhhhh.”
There’s another chunk! and PJ whimpers quietly this time.
Chunk!
Chunk!
Chunk!
The sound is familiar, and after maybe the fifth time I realize why.
It’s the sound of a stapler.
They’re punching staples into PJ’s arm.
Finally PJ can’t hold it in any longer and cries out in pain, “Look, I said we’re sorry! Honestly, please stop!”
“All right, fine. We’re done,” Mark says. “Go to the nurse and tell her you had an accident or something. You’re so goofy they’ll probably believe it. If you rat on us, I’ll tell on you for fucking up my dad’s farm. That’s probably a crime, right?”
“Vandalizing,” Rob says. “Trespassing.”
“Cow hurtin’,” Tommy suggests.
“Tom, shut up,” Mark says reflexively. “Also . . .” There’s another chunk! and PJ yelps quietly, like a broken dog. “Also, if you tell on me, I’ll hunt you down like a varmint with my thirty-aught-six. Bitch got a hundred-yard scope.”
I watch Mark, Rob, and Tommy stride past the stall crack’s narrow strip of vision and out of the bathroom.
“Where’d you get that stapler?” Tommy asks out in the hall.
“Dude, shut up,” Rob says, barely audible as the door swings shut behind them.
PJ sobs quietly and mutters to himself, “Ah, shoot, my flower . . .”
Somehow my legs are still up, and I try not to make any noise at all, but I’m so focused on keeping my legs up that I don’t think about my stomach and it gurgles—loudly —amplified by the bathroom’s perfect acoustics.
A rustle as PJ turns around. “Hello?” he says uncertainly. He pauses. “Is someone in here?”
I hold my breath.
I feel like such a creeper, but I can’t let PJ know I’m in here. I don’t want him to know I just sat here with my pants down while he was being tortured. I can apologize later, but not now, like this.
PJ turns the sink on, and I breathe a quiet, very quiet, sigh of relief. I guess he starts pulling the staples out, because I hear him mutter, “Ow! Shoot . . . Ow! Drat . . . Ow!” This goes on for a minute or two. Then he turns the sink off and pulls a couple of paper towels from the dispenser. He sighs and walks out.
When the door finally creaks shut behind PJ, I drop my feet and books with a groan of relief, pins and needles racing up my thighs.
Behind the relief follows a wave of shame. The kind of wave you see in disaster movies, skyscraper tall, poised to wipe out an entire coastal city.
I wonder if I could flush myself down the toilet.
I know I couldn’t have stopped PJ from getting stapled—I’m no John McClane; hell, I’m not even Ellis—but I could have at least stopped hiding in the stall after Mark left. I could’ve helped pull the staples out.
PJ did rat on me, but I would’ve done the same thing in his place. Heck, I would’ve given up Jake and PJ way before the stapler came into play.
I wipe, flush, and leave the stall, but I don’t leave the bathroom because I’m afraid I might bump into PJ in the hall. A pile of orange geraniums are scattered across the tile floor, one sad, soggy blossom floating in a urinal.
Crap, I realize. PJ ’s in my homeroom too. I’m going to see him again in, like, two minutes anyhow. How am I going to lie to his face and act surprised when he tells me what happened?
And what am I going to do about Mark and those guys?
I briefly consider calling Mom and telling her I’m sick. I could fake a stomachache, go to the nurse’s office, then head straight home from there. But going home is the only thing I can think of that’s worse than getting mauled by the Office Depot Suicide Squad.
CHAPTER 10
* * *
I SNEAK INTO HOMEROOM LATE, but nobody notices. This early in the morning, everyone has their heads on their desks or buried in a book—even Mrs. Zimmerman, who’s at her desk over by the windows, reading. PJ is slumped at his desk in front of mine, head in his hands. His tuxedo is rumpled and missing the geranium from its lapel, but I’m relieved to see that he doesn’t have a Frankenstein-like row of staples circling his forehead.
As I walk past his desk, PJ looks up at me and my stomach flips. I feel like there must be a neon sign over my head flashing GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY, but I try to smile at PJ as naturally as I can while I slip into the seat behind him.
Mrs. Zimmerman finally notices me and purses her lips like she just licked a lemon. “You’re late, Mr. Burns.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
Mrs. Zimmerman dramatically pulls out her roll-call notebook. “I’ll change your mark from absent to present. This time.”
I bow like the queen has just saved me from the executioner’s ax. “Thank you, Mrs. Zimmerman.”
I pull my art history book out of my bag, open it to a random page, and pretend to read.
PJ and I are on the far side of the classroom, away from Mrs. Zimmerman, but we still can’t really talk. Homeroom is a quiet period, like a short study hall.
PJ half turns around in his seat, pretending to check his bag under the desk, and whispers to me, “Mark and some guys jumped me in the bathroom and beat me up.”
My tongue feels like a dead slug in my mouth as I say, “What? Oh fuck.”
“Yeah.” PJ shoots me a stricken look. “They stapled me!”
“Stabled you?” Despite feeling like a creep, I think ‘stabled’ is a pretty slick ad-lib on my part.
“Stapled,” PJ whispers. He shrugs off one arm of his suit jacket. Underneath, a row of double red dots are bleeding through the white sleeve of his dress shirt.
Seeing them makes me feel so awful I don’t have to act at all when I moan, “Fuuuuck.”
Mrs. Zimmerman looks up from her desk. “Did you say something, Mr. Burns?”
“No, ma’am.”
“I’ll tell you more after homeroom,” PJ whispers. “But Kirby, we’re in big trouble.” He buttons his jacket back up and faces the front of the classroom.
I stare at my open art history book. A Hieronymus Bosch painting leers back up at me, a nightmarish landscape of tiny naked people being tortured. Some are getting tossed into a fire that’s broken through a fissure in the Earth. One dude is upside down, getting flayed by a man with the head of a pig that is almost as scary as PJ’s mascot costume. Some people are dancing, oblivious to the destruction around them, or perhaps—even worse—fully aware. In the corner, a naked man is being eaten alive by dogs. It’s a pretty accurate depiction of my day so far.
I flip through the book until I find Van Gogh’s Sunflowers.
Much better.
— — —
I feel bad for PJ, but at least he’s in the clear now. He already got his beating—er, stapling. What office supplies will Mark use to mutilate my virgin flesh? Will he pour Wite-Out in my eyes? Post-it Note my asshole shut?
M
ark’s in vo-tech most of the day, so I guess I don’t have to worry about bumping into him until lunch or gym or something like that. But Rob and Tommy are both sophomores like me, so I could bump into them at any time.
I’ve never been beat up before, so I don’t know what it’ll be like. The only injury I’ve ever had was years ago, when I was eight, back when we lived in Bethlehem. I was skateboarding down a friend’s driveway and fell. I landed weird on my right leg, it bent back at a painful angle, and I went down hard on my ass in the street. I tried to stand up, but the leg wouldn’t take any weight. A white-hot ball of pain grew in my thigh, blotting all rational thought from my mind. Someone was screaming. It was me.
My friend ran over, terrified. “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”
All I could manage to say was “My leg! My leg!” I was afraid to look at it, and when I finally did, my worst fears were confirmed. The leg was bent back at an impossible angle, my knee bulging strangely, a knob of bone pushing the skin near my knee, trying to poke out.
Dimly, I was aware of my friend running inside to get help, and while I was lying in the street alone, a redheaded kid I had never seen before ran out of a house across the street.
He hopped around me. “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”
“My leg is broken!”
“No, no, no,” he said, very concerned. “Don’t say it’s broken. If you think it’s broken, then it will be broken.”
The pain was so distracting, I could barely think about what he was saying. “What?! Are you crazy? Look at it!”
A few more neighbors ran out of their houses. A small crowd formed around me, everyone asking, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”
I cried, “My leg’s broken!! My leg’s broken!!”
“No, it’s not!” the redhead told everyone. “It’s not broken. Don’t say it’s broken,” he told me again, “or it will be!”
“CAN SOMEONE GET THIS ASSHOLE OUT OF HERE?”
Dad was at work, but a couple neighborhood dads carried me to the back of our station wagon, and Mom drove me to the hospital faster than I have ever seen her drive before, swerving and running stop signs while, stretched out in the back seat, I wailed like an ambulance.
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