by Lex Thomas
“Go for it,” Will said. “I think there’s a bathroom up there to the right.”
Gates paused.
“Actually, you want to come?”
Will stared in disbelief. Gates wasn’t kidding. It never ended.
“No, I’m good,” Will said.
Gates frowned. “Are you sure?”
“I’m good. I already went.”
“I don’t remember you going.”
“Well… I did,” Will said.
Gates narrowed his eyes at him.
“What,” Will said. “You don’t believe me?”
Gates pursed his lips, and stared at Will until the awkwardness was painful. Will prayed for him to leave.
“Yeah, okay,” he said. “Maybe I just didn’t notice or—yeah, you know what? I’ll go later. Let’s keep looking for it.”
Will sighed, and the two of them continued their search, poking their heads into classrooms that they had no business looking into. Will carried a six-pack of canned beer in one hand and an extension cord lasso in the other. Gates held a spear made from a whittled wooden flagpole.
“This is where that Freak girl said she saw it?” Gates asked.
Will nodded. “Yep. Second floor. Near room 213.”
“Soo-ey,” Gates yelled. “Soo-ey! Here, piggy piggy.”
Will stood in silence, watching Gates as he snorted like a pig. He didn’t know if he wanted to laugh or cry. Gates could be super fun, but Will just couldn’t keep up anymore. Nobody could.
Will tossed his empty and cracked another beer. He’d already thrown up once that night, but he’d kept drinking. Gates was easier to take when Will was drunk, and so was the crushing pain of missing Lucy.
“When’s the last time you saw the hog anyway?” Will said.
“I don’t know,” Gates said. “The party?”
“Which one?” Will said, but he didn’t really care.
“The first one, buddy. The best one, our pizza party. Come on!”
“Oh, yeah,” Will said. There was no hiding the boredom in his voice.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?”
Will shrugged.
“Please tell me you’re not still obsessing about Lucy, man. She’s ruining your life. I told you to keep away from her, didn’t I? How many times are you gonna let her treat you like dirt?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Will said.
“Well, I do. This is my life too. And she’s ruining it ’cause if you’re in a bad place, then that brings me down.”
“I’m fine.”
“I’m fine,” Gates mimicked Will with a slack jaw and a dead voice.
“What are we gonna do when we find this thing?” Will said, trying to shift gears back to the hog.
“I just want it back,” Gates said with a twinge of annoyance. “It belongs to me. It’s my pet. Why should somebody else get it?”
“Because you let it go in the first place.”
“Hey,” Gates said and bashed his spear into the nearest locker for effect. “If you were gonna be like this, then why’d you come along?”
Will had the urge to tell Gates off, but Gates was acting so odd that he felt a twinge of fear as to what would happen if he did.
“Did you hear that?” Gates said, his annoyance morphing into excitement.
“Nope.”
“Listen.”
Will tuned into the silence, and then he did hear something. It was faint like the distant sound of someone scraping ice off a driveway, but deeper, darker, wetter.
Gates eyes went wide, and for a moment, Will felt a tickle of a thrill.
“Let’s go,” Gates said, hushed, and snuck forward.
They crept up on a darkened classroom. Will and Gates planted themselves on either side of the doorway and peered inside. Just from the stink, Will had a feeling this was a Freak dumping ground. One room to pile up all the nastiness and trash from two floors of turf until the Skaters got around to hauling it all to the dump. They’d gotten lax on their garbage business lately.
A loud snort blasted out of the darkness.
“Light it up,” Gates whispered.
Will softly set down his beers and pulled his Maglite from the back pocket of his jeans. He clicked it on and pointed it into the room. The beam slipped across piles of filth, some as high as four or five feet. A miniature landscape of deflated garbage bags, wet clothes, and rotting food.
“There!” Gates said, still whispering. “Go back.”
Will traced the beam back between two mounds of black garbage bags and he saw it. “Oh god,” Will said, holding the beam in place over the massive hind region of the hog. It was on its side and its head lay flat on the floor.
Thick, coarse hair. Black. Stiff. It covered the hog’s entire body. Long white whiskers angled off its rumpled, bucket-ended snout, which glistened in the beam of Will’s flashlight.
“What’s wrong with it?” Will said.
“It’s sleeping, I guess.”
“Why is it sweating? Do hogs sweat?”
“I don’t know,” Gates said.
“It looks sick, man.”
The hog snorted again, and it sounded like a belch of air from a clogged sink. Both Will and Gates jumped at the sound, then Gates started cracking up. He covered his mouth. The hog’s breath was fast. Will felt like they should help it, but he didn’t know how to even start. He and Gates just stared at it like it was the engine of a broken-down car.
Will trailed his light across its muscled bulk. It had to be three hundred pounds. Its long thin tail waggled violently. He shined his spotlight on the tail. It was still, then flailed around with more spastic jerks. Its ass bulged.
“Oh, motherf—” Will said.
Around a dark hole in its rear end, a donut of flesh pushed out.
“The thing’s gonna have the shits all over the place!” Gates said.
The hog farted, and the slimy head of a piglet popped out. It stayed there a moment, wearing its mother’s body as a turtleneck. Then the rest of the piglet’s slick sausagelike body slid out. It landed on the concrete floor. Its flesh was pinkish where it wasn’t black, and the pink skin looked see-through, like raw chicken breast. Its snout was short and stubby, and it writhed on its side.
Gates had reached out and grabbed Will’s arm for impact. Both of them stared with their mouths wide open and their jaws jutted out.
The piglet’s little slimy eyes opened. The mama hog roared. It was a horrible sound somewhere between a lion’s roar and a volcano with bronchitis. Will flinched. His flashlight beam seesawed. When he tilted the beam back onto the hog, he nearly fell over.
She was looking right at him.
Her long, heavy-boned head was craned just far enough over that she could stare at Will out of the corner of her right eye. She had eyelashes. Soft brown ones. And the white of her eye was prominent from this angle, a crescent of brilliant white. It made her eye look entirely human. A woman’s eye in the head of a pig.
The sight of it made Will’s stomach lurch, and he took off running. He got all the way around the corner to the next hall before Gates caught up with him. He was dying laughing.
“Ho-lee shit…,” Gates said, “have you ever seen anything like that before?!”
Will shook his head. He was trying to forget about it. It all seemed so wrong. That thing didn’t belong in here. Those little things didn’t deserve to be born in this place. But they were here because of Gates and Will.
“We gotta go back,” Gates said.
“What, why?”
“Those are my little piggies!” Gates laughed, and Will recoiled. “I betcha there’s like eight of ’em coming. Dude, we could train ’em, like attack dogs. Attack hogs! How badass would that be? You mess with me, you mess with my hogs!”
“Just leave ’em be. You shouldn’t mess with its babies. Everything’s not here for your amusement, okay?” Will said.
Gates’s face drooped like he’d been the birthday boy a
nd Will had just popped all his balloons. Will didn’t care though, he’d had enough Gates for today. All this partying and thrill-seeking, it wasn’t working anymore. He felt like he needed to sleep for a week just to think straight again.
“Fine,” Gates said. “Be a little bitch about it.”
“Whatever dude, I’m heading back.”
Will turned and strolled down the hall. He didn’t hear anything from Gates behind him. Let him stay here and stare at his piglets, Will thought. And that sounded like what he was going to do, but then Gates piped up again, and Will died a little inside.
“Wait up, we’ll go together.”
31
LUCY WAS GOING TO SLEEP WITH BART.
Lucy and Violent walked up the stairs to the library. The only noise was the jangle of Violent’s necklace made of sharpened cafeteria cutlery. They’d done this walk before, under crazier circumstances, on their way to the ruins, when David was dying by the minute. It had all gone wrong in the library.
Lucy didn’t anticipate Bart to be some rape-crazy maniac, but Violent’s intention had always been that Lucy feel over-prepared for the moment. And Lucy was definitely that. She had five condoms so Bart couldn’t pull any lame excuses. She’d been practicing her scary voice every morning with Sophia, so things didn’t have to get physical if he tried anything she didn’t like. And if he did, Lips taught her eight different ways to hit a guy in the nuts. Raunch gave her a pouch of salt in her pocket to throw in Bart’s eyes if things got out of hand. And if worse came to worse, she had her blade to cut him from neck to nuts, to use one of Violent’s more quotable phrases.
“I feel like you’re my mom dropping me off at the mall for the first time,” Lucy said. “You really didn’t have to walk me.”
“I didn’t have to, I wanted to.”
It made Lucy smile a little.
“Really?”
Violent nodded.
“Thanks,” Lucy said, and they walked the last flight up in silence.
“I heard some shit went down with Will in the lounge,” Violent said when they reached the third floor.
Lucy blushed. “That’ll never happen again—”
“That’s not what I’m saying. I heard he said he loved you?”
“Yeah, he said that. So?” Lucy said. She could feel her stomach cramp with anxiety. She got tense every time she thought about that day. Will had a bad habit of hitting her with huge emotional bombshells that put her on the defensive. She resented how vulnerable he could make her feel.
“Do you love him?” Violent said.
Lucy couldn’t believe she was hearing these words out of Violent.
“Is this another test?” Lucy said. “I can never tell when you’re messing with me.”
“Not a test. I’m just saying from experience, love is scary shit. I ran from it, and I don’t feel any better for it. I wouldn’t want you to make the same mistake.”
“I don’t love him,” Lucy said. She straightened as she did, and she faced the door ahead. “Now, are you done being a pain in my ass, or should we go find a couch somewhere and talk about our feelings all night?”
Lucy held on to her warrior face until Violent smiled.
“All right, pincushion…,” she said as she headed back down the hall. “Go get yourself stuck.”
The fire door opened. Belinda stood in the doorway. She wore a gray sweater and khakis, her curly hair was black now and shoulder length. She’d put a little weight back on, but it suited her.
“Ahhhhhh!” Belinda squealed at the top of her lungs, with her arms spread out like she was trying to catch a beach ball. Lucy squealed too, by automatic girl reflex.
They hugged and Belinda pulled her inside. “I can’t believe you’re here,” she said.
“Me neither. It’s so good to see you, Bel!”
“Look at your red hair! You are such a badass now.”
Lucy laughed. “No, I’m not. Come on.”
“No, but, you are. Have you looked in a mirror? I’m not the only one that thinks so either. I ran into Mort and Ritchie at the market, and, like, we were, like, all talking about how none of us ever saw this coming. You better watch out, I think Ritchie might ask you out.”
“What? No way. Ritchie?”
“Uh huh, he, like… couldn’t stop talking about how you look,” Belinda said, nodding.
“Weird.”
“Totally.”
They struggled through an awkward pause. Lucy had done so much living in the past few months that Belinda knew nothing about, and Lucy was sure the same was true of Belinda.
“I think about the Stairs sometimes,” Belinda said, her voice tinged with emotion. “But there’s nobody here that can relate, so I just keep it to myself.”
“Me too.” Lucy nodded. She understood. But she didn’t want to think about what they couldn’t get back. “So, where’s your guy?”
“I’ll introduce you.”
Belinda led Lucy down a long book-lined aisle where books were replaced by bedding on each double-wide shelf. She wondered what kind of Nerds slept in which section.
“He’s right there.” Belinda pointed to a boy standing in a circle of other Nerds. “Isn’t he so adorable?”
Lucy looked the boy over. He was a little chubby around the face. No hint of an ability to grow facial hair. While the other boys talked, he stared up and to the side, like he was lost in thought. His mouth kept flirting with a grin. His shirt was on inside out and his sneakers were so worn out, they looked like mummy feet. He stood with his hips forward and his stomach out, and let his arms hang straight down at his sides. His fingers fluttered like he was playing piano.
“Definitely adorable,” Lucy said, for Belinda’s benefit.
“Freddy-bear!” Belinda said.
Freddy came trotting over and planted a big clumsy kiss on Belinda’s cheek.
“Hi! I’m Freddy Golden,” he said with a friendly smile. He shoved his hand out, fingers splayed. Lucy shook his hand.
“Hi Freddy,” Lucy said. “I’m Lucy.”
“Cupcakes here talks about you all the time,” Freddy said.
Freddy went behind Belinda, put his arms around her, and slid his hands into her front pockets. He rested his chin on her shoulder. Lucy liked him immediately.
“Aw. Well, I miss her a lot too,” Lucy said to Belinda. “Cupcakes, huh?”
Belinda blushed. “He calls me that.”
Freddy blew gently on Belinda’s neck. He whispered something in her ear, and Belinda blushed and giggled.
“Do you want to do puzzles with us?” Freddy said to Lucy.
“No, she’s got other plans, Freddy,” Belinda said.
“Oh, right,” Freddy said, then flared his nostrils with an immense smile. “Bart’s waiting for you at the information desk.”
“I’ll walk you over there,” Belinda said.
“Don’t be gone too long, Cupcakes,” Freddy said.
Even as Belinda tried to walk away, they still held hands, like lovers at a train station. He pulled her close again, gave her a final squeeze and nuzzled her neck, before letting Belinda and Lucy walk away. It was beyond sweet.
“I think he’s great,” Lucy said as she hooked her arm through Belinda’s.
“I think we’re soul mates,” Belinda said.
Lucy placed her palm to her chest. She was genuinely touched by Belinda’s happiness. She’d never seen her friend look more uninhibited or comfortable in her own skin. And soul mate. No one in the Sluts even said words like soul mate. “You’re a lucky girl, Bel.”
“What about you?” Belinda said.
“Hmm?”
“Bart! He is sooo cute,” Belinda said.
“He is. I don’t know if he’s my soul mate though,” Lucy said. She was surprised by how gruff her own tone sounded, but Belinda was kind and smiled anyway.
They stepped into the expanse of the library’s main room. It was well-lit and quiet, like Lucy remembered it before everything went crazy
last time. She couldn’t help but carry the tension of the old ambush with her in every step she took. Thankfully, she felt like she could handle herself more with every Nerd she passed. In her red, scoop-neck shirt, with slashes in it that showed peeks of her black bra, and her skin-tight black jeans, she was dressed more confidently and provocatively than anyone around her. Every Nerd watched her closely, some with curiosity, some with fear. It made her grin.
“Lucy?” Belinda said.
“Yeah?”
“I just wanted to say, maybe he’s not your soul mate, but I’m really glad you found someone that you care about with Bart. I know how hard it was for you to lose David. You more than anybody,” Belinda said, then paused. “Except Will, I guess.”
“Thanks,” Lucy said, but she felt that same queasy feeling in her stomach again at the sound of Will’s name. Why did people have to keep bringing up Will? She didn’t want to think about him right now. And hearing it out loud, she was even uncomfortable with the idea that she had “found someone” in Bart. Her thing with Bart was casual, just for fun, and that’s why she liked him. He was relaxed, and lightweight. She still thought of that moment where they stood by the bonfire that first night together. She had her girls around her, she was having fun, the heat of the fire was warming her body, and Bart was smiling at her. It was a moment where anything seemed possible, and everything seemed simple. Then Will tore across the quad in a motorcycle and complicated things. She’d been trying to get back to that bonfire moment with Bart ever since, but Will kept getting in the way.
Lucy saw Bart. He was sitting on top of the librarian’s circular information desk, sketching on graph paper. She felt more relaxed at the sight of him.
“Ding-dong,” Lucy said.
He looked up and smiled. “Check it out,” he said and held up his drawing. It was a scribbly ballpoint pen drawing of Bart driving a speedboat, with a bikini girl water-skiing behind it.
“Fun. Is that me?” Lucy said, pointing to the bikini girl.
“Let’s say yes,” he said.
“Jerk,” she said with a smile.
Belinda said good-bye, and Bart showed her more of his drawings. They were all of Bart, and he was always doing something impressive in them, like punching a hole through a wall, or turning into a werewolf. Her favorite was a drawing of a 747 jet with his smiling face where the cockpit should have been. He’d pulled some books for her as well, and he showed her some of his favorite jets of all time. He gave her a tour of the library, and it helped Lucy to see it as his home rather than a battleground. They joked around, flirted, and talked for a long time, until most of the Nerds were heading off to sleep.