She paused and looked at me. “Clark, I’m sorry. Edna Beacon had been trying to persuade me to help her do something about him for years. Her dismissal terrified me. Terrified. But when I heard you standing up to him in there, I realized what a coward I had been. George Denton is not going to hurt any of us ever again.” She stood and gathered a stack of files from her desk.
“We’re going to prove that by sending a message—and getting rid of this school’s Number One Problem, Ty Hunter. Do you know how many children like you have suffered, Clark? Just for getting in Ty’s way? And even before Ty arrived, how many teachers and students Denton made examples of just to intimidate the rest of us? Too many, too many.” She was a blur of filing and form-filling.
When Ty was summoned from class, they made him sit in the nurse’s office. He tried to glare at me from across the hall, but I could tell he was afraid. While I stared at him, my dad put a hand on my shoulder.
“I’m sorry, again, that I was so late to see everything you were up against, Clark,” he said.
“It’s OK,” I said. Pete Manaia and the stuff about the Pentagon had come out of nowhere, but Dad had really helped save the day. “I didn’t even know we had an attorney.”
Dad cleared his throat and looked around furtively, then mumbled, “I never said we had an attorney.”
Huh?
“Pete is the cops reporter at the paper. I tried to tell you about him. He really was a Marine. Sorry, is a Marine. Once a Marine, always a Marine, they say.”
“So I’ve read.”
“Anyhow, after you mentioned that medal, he and I started making some calls.”
“Dad!” I cried. “I asked you not to get involved!”
He raised his eyebrows. “Clark,” he said, “I’m your dad. You didn’t really think I was going to make you fight this alone, did you?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Although I’ll give you credit—you were making all the right friends. Ms. Beacon told me—”
“You talked to Beacon?”
“After you mentioned that she had some kind of information about Denton, yes, I tracked her down. She’s a pretty sharp woman.”
“I know.”
“She had a hunch. But she didn’t have access to the right records. Pete had a friend at the Pentagon who did.”
“So the stuff about Denton’s record—my hunch was right?”
“Your hunch was excellent. Denton was a Marine—for three weeks. He wasn’t lying when he said he enlisted. But he dropped out of boot camp. He just couldn’t keep up physically, and that was it. He’s been lying about his service for years, and nobody bothered to challenge him before now.”
I tried to absorb this. “So basically, he flunked PE with the Marines?”
“I—I guess so,” Dad said, blinking a few times. “I guess so.”
That was so beautiful I actually felt tingly inside. “I wonder how he got that medal?”
“Well, he certainly didn’t win it for his combat exploits. I looked it up—you have to do something heroic not during battle, for the Army, to win one. He probably liked the way it looked and picked it up at surplus store or something.”
“Was he lying about being a business executive too?”
“I haven’t figured that part out—except that he listed only one company on his résumé, and the owner of record was his mother. My guess is he was no better at being a business executive than he was at being a Marine.”
Flunked by the Marines and fired by his mom. And he called me a zero.
“But here’s a question for you, Clark: When did you become an expert on Marine traditions?”
I was going to tell him about Always Faithful, Always Ready, but just shrugged. “I can read.”
Dad nodded approvingly. “Better than Denton, at least. Your books served you well.”
It was at that moment that Ty’s father—a large, paunchy man in a green polo shirt with a logo from the cable TV company—stormed up to the reception desk. “Where the hell is he?” he demanded.
I jumped; I thought he was coming for me. Instead, he stomped into the nurse’s office, and I saw him grab Ty by the shoulders before he kicked the door shut.
Words like idiot and a few that were new to me could be heard. I heard a strange gasping sound, and I realized that it was the sound of Ty sobbing. Sobbing! He was being treated even worse than he had treated me. And he finally, finally was getting what he deserved. And then some.
It felt . . . not as good as you would think.
As the shouting increased, Counselor Blethins stood up from her desk, smoothed her dress and prepared to walk in.
“Clark, it’s all set. All you have to do is sign a piece of paper that says what Ty did, and I can get him sent away. The problem will be over.”
That sounded so good. So, so good.
And yet, I found myself thinking about what I had read about Ty in his permanent file. The part about his mom. He probably could have used her now, as his dad amped up his screaming.
Then I recalled Ty in the Sanctuary, amid the smoke. The way he had looked like a frightened, confused kid. That kid probably was hurting a lot right now.
I related to that kid.
I thought, if he gets kicked out of school, yeah, the problem would be over . . . for me.
But against all that was rational, I found myself asking, What about him?
“Counselor Blethins?” I said. “Can I ask you something?”
She anxiously looked toward the nurse’s office, where the shouting and sobbing were concurrent. “Yes, Clark?”
“What does Ty need right now? I mean, what would fix him?”
“Fix him?” She gave me a puzzled look, then said, “That’s a complicated question, Clark. He and his family have a long road ahead. I’m going to have to alert some authorities. Ty himself probably needs a lot of help.”
“Will he get any at the alternative school?”
She stared off down the hall. “That’s not really what they specialize in there, I’m afraid. It’s more of a place to keep students from hurting one another until they graduate or drop out.”
“But if he stayed here, would you be able to, you know, help?”
She gave me a sad smile. “It’s what I would prefer to do, instead of adjusting class schedules and signing paperwork.”
“So you could, like, counsel him, right?”
Across the hall Ty’s dad was pounding a counter, and I thought of Les. Even though I’d been the one to wreck Ty’s life, things would not be good for Les after this. Not good at all.
“Clark,” my dad said, “what are you thinking?”
“I don’t know, Dad.” I pressed my fingers into my forehead. “I don’t want him to get away with anything. But I don’t want him . . . hurt.”
I thought of what I had been through—being pushed around by someone I was powerless to stop. How it was the kind of thing that made people say, “I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.”
I heard Ty whimper a reply to his raging dad, and I thought, It’s true. I would not.
“Dad?” I looked at him pleadingly. What I was thinking was not logical. But it felt right.
He looked at me, and then at Blethins. “Counselor, do we have options?”
Her nose twitched, and then she looked over at Denton’s office. We could hear him begging with one of his superiors for something. “Well, actually, I wasn’t lying when I told Denton I’m in charge of the Disciplinary Tribunal now. Or I will be, as soon as he’s gone. So I could, I suppose, approve an in-school suspension. It’s kind of like probation. We could attach terms to it—a ‘one false move and you’re out’ type of thing. But that’s only if you’re willing, Clark.”
I looked across the hall. I listened to the shouting. “Could we put his dad on probation too?” Dad looked over at Blethins again.
She thought for a moment, shaking her head. “There’s only so much a counselor can do, Clark. Like I said, I’ll be contactin
g some authorities, but I can’t force his dad to do much. A judge could, but in my experience, a lot of steps have to happen before we get there.” Then her face lit up. “But you know, for starters, we could be creative. I could offer to let Ty remain here at Festus, and in baseball, if they agreed to seek some kind of family counseling. In writing, of course. Yes. I think I could make that work.”
I looked at my dad.
“You have a hunch?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Your call,” he said. “You’ve earned it.”
I turned to Counselor Blethins. “Tell them I’d be willing to make that deal.”
She looked at my dad, who nodded. Then she smiled. “You’ve got a good heart, Clark. Someone has taught you well.” She turned and, with a grimly determined look I had never seen her wear before today, went to confront Mr. Hunter.
I had a feeling I was leaving something out.
“Wait!” I called.
She turned back.
“Can you also make them promise that Les never has to attend another baseball game for as long as he lives?”
She looked over at my dad again. “I can try.”
“Clark,” he asked, “this is really what you want?”
I thought, Is this something Captain Maxim would do?
And I remembered: In Episode 64, he is captured by a race of beings from a quantum dimension who cage him, torture him and force him to fight a pitched battle with the commander of a Vexon battlecruiser, with the lives of both crews at stake. After nearly a full episode of brutal combat, Maxim gets his enemy by the throat and is ready to snuff the life out of him. You can tell from the look in his eye that he wants to. He doesn’t. Why?
“I’m a man!” he yells at the quantum beings. “You can make me fight like an animal, but you will never turn me into one!”
I looked up at Counselor Blethins. “Ty needs help,” I told her. “My crew and I will be OK.”
EXPEDITION LOG
ENTRY 14.01.01
Blethins gave me an excused absence for the rest of the day, and I was happy to accept.
Dad let his friend go write the newspaper story and stayed home with me, Mom and my sister. We had to recap everything for Mom, and at the end of it all she gave me a big hug. Little Gwen sort of applauded, although she might have just been hungry and demanding a cracker or something.
I spent the afternoon catching up on my non-Marine reading and wondering about Les.
That night we drove across town to a hamburger chain that I thought existed only back on the old planet. Sadly, they no longer carried Star Survivors commemorative cups, as they had once when I was in first grade. But they did have bobbleheads from the new Star Wars cartoon. My dad even let me have his. For the first time, this planet was actually starting to feel like home.
But all good times must end. And the next day I had to return to Festus.
I thought I would slip back into my usual anonymity when I entered the building, but I was wrong. It was the first of many surprises.
As I walked the halls to my locker, people stopped and turned and stared. I felt my face. Had a giant zit formed? I looked behind me. Had someone pinned a kick me note to my back?
Then people started coming up to me. “You’re Clark, right?” they would ask. And then they would say, “That was awesome!” Or, “I can’t believe you stood up to him like that!” Or, “Coolest. Speech. Ever.”
One kid whispered, “I wish I’d been that smart when they got on me last year.”
And a teacher standing in a doorway smiled and said, “Ding-dong, the witch is dead. Thanks, Dorothy.”
I just kept walking.
At my locker, Les was waiting. Beaming. (The smiling kind, not the transporter kind.)
And I was finally able to ask, “How, Les. How did you do it?”
While I loaded books back into my locker, he explained. “It was Ricki. She saw Denton leading you down the hallway, pulled out one of her fake hall passes, then got me pulled out of class.
“At first I didn’t know what to do. I thought about setting off some kind of diversion, like in your original plan, so you could run for the hills. But Ricki talked me out of it. Then I remembered something that happened when I was building this Heathkit project that I found in my dad’s stuff. I read the schematic wrong, and I wired some speakers incorrectly. It turned them into giant microphones—too lo-fi for any serious recording, of course, but they worked. And I realized that the intercom could work the same way.
“I ran down to the basement. It was just a matter of identifying the wires from Denton’s office, tracing them to the junction box, then patching them directly into the receiver, reversed. I was trying to figure out how to tell you that you were on the air, but you rendered that step sort of unnecessary.”
I shook my head. “You’ve earned your pay for the week, Les,” I said, and started toward class.
He stopped me. “No, you did. You know that we’re all going to see a shrink together? Me, my stepdad, my mom, Ty?”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling a bit worried. “How’s Ty taking that?”
He smiled. “I don’t care. I’ve already emptied the baseball gear out of my closet. I’m done forever, no matter what anyone says. And now, I’ll finally have a place to keep my soldering iron and some spare parts I salvaged from the Sanctuary. Maybe in a few months I’ll build a real radio station for you.”
“No doubt.”
I looked for Ricki, but she didn’t make an appearance. So I sauntered to the gym. Jerry and Bubba actually cowered when they saw me. Blethins, I later learned, had called their parents in, at which point each boy had stood tough as cotton candy, blamed Ty for everything and pleaded tearfully not to be expelled. The frightened looks on their faces told me all I needed to know, though. They would not bother me again.
When Chambers saw me, he quietly pulled me into his office.
“Uh, look,” he said, nervously. “No hard feelings, right?”
I was silent. He fidgeted.
“Look, um, given where we are, I was thinking, you might need, ah, a rest period. So, ah, if you want to spend the day in the bleachers, doing, ah, homework, or with a book or whatever you read, that’s fine with me. In fact, ah, you wouldn’t even need to suit up. This year. Again. Sound good?”
It did.
I did not find Ricki until lunchtime. She sat with me and Les at our usual table, which had a few extra people at it.
“I guess you’re a celebrity now,” she said.
“Oh, not really. But I’ll bump you right to the front of the autograph line anytime you ask.”
She smiled, but weakly, and didn’t say much the rest of the meal. Actually, I didn’t either; Les was busy retelling some of our new tablemates about how he didn’t know exactly how the intercom had been hacked, but that it wouldn’t be too difficult if you knew what you were doing. Then he proceeded to explain how to do it.
Afterward, Ricki and I walked to the ARC together. “Can you meet me at the rocket ship park today?” she asked. “Alone?”
This was intriguing, but her voice was flat, and even I could tell something was bothering her.
“Ricki, is there—”
“Just—let’s talk at the park, OK?” She quickly changed tones and topics. “Did you hear they have almost the whole original crew signed up to do a Star Survivors movie? They could start filming in July and have it ready by the time school is out next year.”
We walked the halls, talking of stars and survival and summer and the future. Life on Earth, I am telling you, was pretty good.
14.01.02
Ricki and I met at the front doors and walked in the sunshine together.
“Considering how recently we were doomed, this has been a good day,” I said.
She nodded but kept her eyes on the trail and said nothing.
After we had gone another half block, she finally asked, “Do you believe in life on other planets?”
It wasn’t a question
I’d been expecting, but it’s one I’d thought a lot about. You ponder such matters when you’re alone in a room and think you’re the only one of your kind.
“Well, you know, I read that if there’s a hundred billion planets out there, and if just one percent of those are capable of supporting life, and if just one percent of those actually had evolved life, that works out to . . .”
She wasn’t listening.
“Why?” I asked. “Do you?”
We were getting close to the park now. I could see the rocket ship.
“I just think the universe can be an awfully lonely place sometimes,” she said.
“Yeah, but we’ve got that taken care of now. I mean, you and me and Les, we’ve sort of carved out our own space, you know? I mean . . .” What did I mean? I wanted to say thank you, but I owed her more than that. Which was hard to express.
We were at the base of the rocket now. She stopped walking, turned and looked at me directly. Her eyes were bright and sparkling.
“We’re moving,” she said.
My first thought was, “No we’re not, we’re standing still.” Then I saw the pained look on her face, the way her lips were thin and tight.
I thought about movies . . . the wingman getting picked off right as Luke closes in on the Death Star’s exhaust port. I thought of films of hydrogen bomb tests, the houses splintered in a rush of nuclear wind. The Planet of the Apes guy collapsing before the Statue of Liberty, realizing that everything, everything was forever ruined.
I dropped my backpack and staggered back against the rocket, then slid down, until my tailbone crashed onto the rocky earth.
“No,” I coughed.
She nodded.
“Ricki, I . . .” Two kids whizzed past on their bikes, laughing. If I’d had a blaster, I would have shot them on the spot for daring to be happy in this horrible, rotten world.
Revenge of the Star Survivors Page 22