Wicked Cruel

by Rich Wallace

  Also by Rich Wallace

  Kickers series

  Losing Is Not an Option

  One Good Punch

  Perpetual Check

  Shots on Goal

  Sports Camp

  Wrestling Sturbridge

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2013 by Rich Wallace

  Jacket art copyright © 2013 by Shutterstock

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/kids

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wallace, Rich.

  Wicked cruel / Rich Wallace.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Three separate short stories, all set in the same New Hampshire town, explore the truth behind local urban legends as, for example, sixth-grader Jordan begins seeing a boy from his school who died of injuries after being bullied.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89800-6

  [1. Folklore—New Hampshire—Fiction. 2. Supernatural—Fiction. 3. Schools—Fiction. 4. Halloween—Fiction. 5. New Hampshire—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.W15877Wic 2013

  [Fic]—dc23

  2012042504

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  For my sons, Jonathan and Jeremy

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Wicked Cruel

  A boy gets bullied for years before moving away. Rumors drift back to town that he died from a brain injury, caused by so many years of abuse. An urban legend? Maybe not.

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  The Horses of Brickyard Pond

  Tragedy. A century ago, a team of horses drowned in a flooded brickyard, snuffed out at the height of their power. But sometimes, on dark, rainy nights, they summon all their vigor and run free.

  Rites of Passage

  The five children of a farming couple all died young—by accident or by murder. Over the years, the farmer built five barns on his property, burying a child beneath the floor of each and sealing the doors off with bricks. According to the legend, at least one of those children has not yet found eternal rest.

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  WICKED CRUEL

  A boy gets bullied for years before moving away. Rumors drift back to town that he died from a brain injury, caused by so many years of abuse. An urban legend? Maybe not.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Jordan!” my father calls. “You gotta see this.”

  Dad’s online again, rediscovering his exciting past. Probably found a lost episode of Seinfeld. Ever since he stumbled on the Freewheeler website, he’s been finding all these “classics” and inflicting them on me.

  So I clear my laptop, then walk down the attic steps to his office.

  “Check this out,” he says, clicking the arrow to start a video.

  I hear a piano solo, and I can tell immediately what song it is. “Another one?” I groan. “How many versions of that can you possibly watch?”

  “This one’s hilarious,” he says, rubbing the three days’ stubble on his chin.

  Last night he subjected me to six different versions of the “Way Back into Love” duet from the movie Music and Lyrics. These were Asian recordings—from Korea, Japan, China, and who knows where else. Dad said he was investigating why the song never became a big hit in the U.S. “It’s a great tune, so I’m looking to see if anybody ever recorded it here except for the sound track of the movie,” he said. “Maybe we can do something with it.”

  These videos are pretty much all the same: Some beautiful young woman is standing onstage in a concert hall, talking to the audience in Japanese or Mandarin or whatever. She starts the song and does the first stanza, and then you hear a guy’s voice singing from the shadows, and the crowd goes nuts with astonishment because he’s the pop-music king of Singapore or something.

  They’re always singing in English, and it’s obvious that the women are fluent and know what they’re singing, but the men have just memorized the syllables.

  The one we’re watching is from a concert in Tokyo. The guy who came onstage is dressed like a hard-core American grunge rocker.

  “Wow, what street cred,” Dad says sarcastically. “You can tell he’s the real thing, huh?”

  I roll my eyes. The camera scans the audience—hundreds of people mouthing the English lyrics. Then I see a face that couldn’t possibly be there.

  Lorne Bainer.

  “Stop!” I say as the camera returns to the singers. “Go back.” So Dad re-hits the arrow and the video starts over.

  Lorne Bainer was this incredibly annoying kid who moved away from here a couple of years ago. What would he be doing at a concert in Japan? But who else could look like that? Pale, scrawny, a long head, and that expression on his face: part “screw you,” part “go ahead and hit me,” and part “I’ll tell the teacher if you lay a hand on me again.”

  The video reaches the audience scan, but there’s no sign of Lorne or any other white people this time. I go, “Where is he?” and my father’s like, “Where’s who?” We play it again and there’s still no trace. I swear he was there. We must have linked to a different version of the song or something.

  Lorne was right there. Glaring at me.

  “What were you looking for?” Dad asks.

  “Nothing, I guess. Just thought I saw somebody I knew.”

  “In Japan?”

  I stare at the computer screen. “In the video.”

  It seemed like all the guys at Franklin Pierce Elementary School beat up on Lorne. He’d get singled out in gym class whenever we played dodgeball—four, five balls flying at him from every direction. Or he’d get shoved into the wall when somebody passed him in the hallway, or smacked in the back of the head when the teacher wasn’t looking. He lost way more than his share of fights after school, too.

  The guys all figured he brought it on himself because of his constant whining and butting in on things. He was always defiant and stirring up trouble. I tried to leave him alone, but he was a pain to me sometimes, too.

  His family moved away the summer after fifth grade. Nobody knew why, but I figured it was so he could start over with a clean slate. It wasn’t likely that anybody around here would have given him a chance.

  And that was the end of it. Some guys at school still get picked on and pushed around, but it’s spread out more over several different kids. I’ve taken a bit of it myself. When Lorne was here, most of the abuse was focused on him.

  I remember hoping that he would be able to start fresh somewhere else. Maybe he’d never have many friends, but at least he wouldn’t be carrying this history with him. There wouldn’t be daily crap from guys like Eddie Scapes or Jimmy Callas from the minute he left his house till the minute he got hom
e after school.

  I hadn’t thought of him in a while, so seeing his face was jarring. He still looked the same.

  He looked twisted and disturbed.

  Dad shuts off the sound and some old Neil Young concert footage plays in silence. “So, you’re definitely cool with this, Jordan?” he asks me for the tenth time.

  “Yeah, no problem.”

  “This” is my parents’ sudden business trip to Europe. They fly out of Logan tomorrow morning for a week. Mom’s brother, David, is coming here to house-sit and keep an eye on me, since the trip was too short-notice for them to line up anyone better.

  Dad is an unsuccessful “entrepreneur,” and Mom is an administrator at the hospital. He usually tries something related to music or film, but this time he has an idea for marketing environmentally safe cleaning products, and he managed to score some meetings in France and Austria. Mom’s going along for the ride.

  The plan is that we drive to Boston tomorrow and pick up Uncle David. We’ll drop my parents at the airport, and he and I will drive back to New Hampshire.

  David is a “freelance” musician, which, according to Mom, means that he makes no money and isn’t big on responsibility. Sort of like Dad, but even less credible.

  Could be a fun week.

  I get to skip school tomorrow for the ride into Boston, but we have to get up wicked early, so I head back upstairs to bed.

  I sleep in the attic. This house is small, square, and old, and there are only two real bedrooms. Dad decided last month that he needed an office in the house, so he took over my second-floor bedroom and “renovated” the attic space for me. That amounted to sweeping the dust off the bare attic floorboards and replacing the broken pane of glass in the slit of a window that overlooks the street. He managed to squeeze a rickety bed frame and a mattress up the narrow stairs for me, and drilled a hole in the floor so he could run an extension cord from a power strip downstairs. I can pick up the Internet from here, so I’m set. Mom insists that I keep about a hundred blankets on my bed, but this space is actually pretty warm.

  I stare at the bare beams that reach a triangular peak about three feet above my bed, then get up and look out the window for a few minutes. There’s a thin layer of snow on the grass, but the streets and the sidewalk are bare. The snow’s left over from Halloween, two weeks ago. It’s not even winter yet.

  I can’t sleep, so I go over to my desk and check for messages. There’s an IM on the screen from my friend Gary, just asking wazzup jordan? I click on it to reply, but he’s already offline.

  I find the Freewheeler site, type in Dad’s password, and look for that video again. There are dozens of versions of the song, mostly Asian. But I can’t find the one we looked at earlier. You click on one and get a list of “related videos,” which either narrows the search or takes you further away. I spend an hour looking, but by then I can’t keep my eyes open and I flop back into bed.

  Sometime after midnight I wake up. There’s a glow coming from somewhere, and I shake my head and glance at the computer screen. It’s back on Freewheeler. The sound is off, but I recognize the video. It’s reached the part where they scan the audience.

  And there he is. Lorne Bainer. Squinting, looking smug and sour. And for a fraction of a second it seems like he’s staring right at me, as if he can see me.

  I turn off the power, but the screen doesn’t go blank right away. It fades very slowly. Then everything goes dark.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It’s a lot more relaxed in the house with my parents on their way to Europe. Uncle David has Mozart playing and he’s chopping onions on a cutting board.

  My friend Gary leans back in a kitchen chair and raises his eyebrows. “He died, you know.”

  “Bainer?”

  “Yeah.” Gary nods. He starts fidgeting with his Red Sox cap, pulling on the brim. “About a year after he moved away. He had a brain hemorrhage. From all those beatings.”

  “He died?”

  “Yeah. One too many punches to the head.”

  “Get out.”

  Gary is even smaller than I am, but I can remember him taking a few shots at Lorne back in fifth grade. Just a shove here and there, maybe some knuckles to the jaw. The thing about Lorne is that he never fought back much, so even smaller guys knew they could pick on him. Lorne’s tactic was stealthy—jab you in the arm with a pen or something, then run. He’d get caught, though, either right away or a day or two later. He always paid for his obnoxiousness.

  Uncle David pulls out a chair and sits down. “Who you talking about?” he asks.

  “This kid everybody used to pick on,” Gary says. “He moved away and then he died.”

  David laughs. “Yeah,” he says, “you can find a rumor like that in every town.”

  “It’s no rumor,” Gary says. “I heard it from … well, I don’t remember where I heard it. But from somebody reliable.”

  David picks up his coffee mug. He made himself right at home when we got back from Boston this afternoon. We stopped at the supermarket for expensive cheese and shrimp and olives. Dad gave him a debit card for groceries.

  “That’s what’s known as an urban legend,” David says, running a hand through his long, unruly hair and tying it back in a ponytail. It’s streaked with a few gray strands. “In my class it was a kid named Gerald Dibble. They said he had hairline cracks in his skull from getting beat up in junior high school. Then he moved away, and word came back that his skull had imploded and killed him.”

  “That sounds like what happened to Bainer,” Gary says.

  David gives out a snorty laugh. “I did an online search for Gerald a while back. He’s an insurance salesman in Concord. Alive and well.”

  “Then what was Lorne doing staring me down from the computer screen last night?” I ask. “That was creepy.”

  David shrugs. “There’s this thing deep in our psyches that thrives on guilt,” he says. “People drum up these myths about somebody they picked on. Somehow, sharing the regret—‘we all killed him, one whack at a time’—makes it easier to tolerate the shame. That’s what the psychologists would tell you anyway.”

  “So you’re saying I imagined that?”

  “It happens, Jordan.”

  I reach across the table and give Gary a shove on the shoulder. “Who told you he was dead?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. Ask anybody. It was like six months after he moved.”

  Uncle David laughs again. “Urban legend.”

  Gary shakes his head. “This town isn’t exactly urban.”

  “Okay—suburban legend, rural legend, same thing. Even in a dinky little town in New Hampshire. These stories crop up everywhere—the kid who drowned in some pond half a century ago that you can still hear thrashing in the water on dark, quiet nights, or the family who found a fried rat in their bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. It’s always pinned on some supposedly credible source, like ‘This really happened to my friend’s aunt’s accountant’s brother’s nephew’—some ‘real’ person, but never anybody you can check up on. Some of these legends have a basis in reality, but then they get twisted and exaggerated in the constant retellings. You try to investigate the origin of the story, and it disappears into a myth.”

  “You’re forgetting one thing,” I say. “I didn’t know anything about Lorne being dead—or not being dead—before last night. That wasn’t even an issue when I saw him glaring at me from the Freewheeler video.”

  “True,” says Gary.

  “So that had nothing to do with this ‘shared guilt’ theory of yours,” I say to David. “That was no myth that woke me up last night.”

  I suddenly realize that me and Gary are late for basketball practice, so I put my sneakers on in a hurry and we run the whole way there. Today’s the first day. It’s just a rec league at the YMCA; one practice session to get organized, then games on Saturday afternoons.

  Turns out all eight guys on our team are short. We’d better run a lot because we won’t be getting many r
ebounds.

  “This should be interesting,” says our coach, a guy named Steve who’s a student at Cheshire Notch State College, across the street. “We’ll go with a five-guard offense.” He laughs, but I don’t see what’s so funny. This is the first basketball team I’ve ever been on, and I’m taking it seriously.

  As we’re leaving the court after practice, the next team is coming on. You can’t play in this league if you made the school team, but there are some good athletes who didn’t bother going out for that squad. Callas and Scapes are here. How’d they get on the same team?

  “They’ll tell you,” Gary says.

  “Tell me what?”

  “About Bainer.”

  Callas is okay—just large and dumb—but his buddy Scapes is one of the biggest jerks in the school, taking advantage of his size to push people around. He gave Gary a bloody lip behind the bleachers at a high school football game a couple of weeks ago just because Gary made fun of his orange-and-black-checked shirt.

  Gary said he’d get revenge, but that’ll never happen unless he gains about forty pounds of muscle.

  Gary walks over to Callas and I follow. Callas is standing on the side of the court with a basketball under his arm. He’s about a foot taller than we are. He’s also starting to get facial hair.

  “You know about Lorne Bainer?” Gary asks.

  Callas winces. “What about him?”

  “He died, right?”

  “I never heard that,” says Callas. “How could he be dead? He’s only our age.”

  “Kids die,” Gary says.

  “You’re telling me he did?” Callas’s eyes start flitting around the gym, like he’s afraid Scapes will see him talking to us. “How?”

  “From getting beat up,” Gary says. “You never heard that?”

  “I haven’t heard nothing since he moved away.”

  “He died from a brain thing.”

  Callas shrugs, but he’s looking uncomfortable. He beat up Lorne a few times, mostly with Scapes. “After he moved?”

  “Yeah,” Gary says, “but the damage was done here. We all contributed.”