Gentlemen (10 page)

I made it into the library for study hall, but there was a big fat nothing in my inbox. I really thought Jenny #2 might've written back by now. It'd been like three days. But when I saw that she hadn't, I was like, Well, maybe she's just not going to. Actually, it was more like I sort of knew she wasn't going to, and seeing that empty inbox just made it a little harder to pretend I didn't know that, if any of that makes sense.

It was just like I knew the message was pretty bad when I wrote it—I wrote it out in pen beforehand and just typed it in the library—but then I was sitting there, trying to convince myself to hit Send and it was like, Yeah, that's a pretty good message, you know, if you read it the right way. I'll just let you see it, and you can decide for yourself:

Hi, Jenny!

This probably seems like a weird message, but I think it's only weird by real-world standards. Online it's totally normal. OK, no, it's weird here, too. This is Mike, you know, from the lake this summer. (If it helps your memory, I am the one who wore the old Sox cap. It's like my trademark. Also, I am from Soudley and go to Tattawa.)

Anyway, I was out riding my bike and went past the lake the other day, and I sort of remembered how much fun we had that one day (August 2). So anyway, I thought I'd check out your profile. So, you know, hi! I am going to send you a friend request now. I hope you are having a good year!

(I think this is the right Jenny, because of your name and town and stuff. And also because of the kind of music you say you like. If this isn't you, I'm sorry.)

Mike

So that's what I sent on Monday. I know it's not perfect, but it was the best I could do. I read that and I think: friendly, you know, nice. But I could see where a girl could read that and think: stalker. I checked her profile and she hadn't logged on again since Tuesday. I thought about it. Maybe she just hadn't had time.

I went straight home after school. Between Throckmorton, Jenny #2 not writing, and me picturing Haberman out in the woods somewhere with a shovel, it had been a truly crappy day. I was pissed off, stressed out, and tired. I didn't like long phone calls, but I figured I'd have some to make later. I watched some TV and just chilled for a while. Then I headed out to the house in the woods to clear my head and fill my lungs. I'd scored half a pack of Camels for four bucks from Max. He'd pulled up a seat at lunch when we'd been huddling together going over what Throckmorton asked, and what we said, and just sort of sifting through the information. Bones and Max both said they didn't say squat.

Max was like, “I didn't give him anything,” like he was being real hard. And I couldn't let that one go, so I was like, “Max, dude, you don't know anything about it in the first place.” And having Max there was a pain anyway, because I didn't want to ask about Haberman with him there. If he heard that, it would be all over the school in like a day, not Haberman killed Tommy but Mike thinks Haberman killed Tommy, even though I wasn't exactly convinced of that, but just me raising the possibility would be enough.

But again, Bones said he didn't say anything, said he was in there for like two minutes, and I believe that. I'd seen Bones wall himself up before, just rolling his eyes, shrugging his shoulders, and maybe giving a yes or a no if really pushed. Mixer said he didn't say much, but he answered the family question and mentioned Manchester, too. As near as we could
tell, we'd told Throckmorton the same stuff about both, which made sense, since we pretty much knew the same stuff about both. I was like, “Anything else?” And Mixer was like, “Not really.”

After that, when Max was talking to Bones about something, I gave Mixer a look like, Really, dude, anything else? And he looked back at me and shook his head no, and he knew what I meant. Like I said, we've known each other for a long time. We started riding bikes together in the cemetery when we were like eight. (The cemetery's a good place to ride bikes, because there's no traffic and the residents are real quiet.)

So it turned out what Max'd been talking to Bones about was half a pack of Camels that he'd scrounged up somewhere. He wanted four bucks for them and Bones didn't have it. Normally, I'd give him a chance to haggle him down, but I was like, Screw it, I really want some smokes, and I bought them on the spot.

It might sound lame, but cigarettes are hard for me to come by on a day-to-day basis. You've got to be nineteen to buy them in this godforsaken state. Soudley's a small town, and not only did everyone behind a counter know me, they like had always known me, remembered me from when I was saving up my allowance to buy candy bars. They knew my mom, knew my aunts and uncles. I didn't have a license or a car, didn't have an older brother.

Mixer and me had tried to make some inroads with this group of seniors who were always smoking out behind the school, but that'd been a disaster. They charged crazy prices, and I think that after our little attempts to get on their good side they were actually charging us more than the others. We couldn't do that, point of pride, you know? Mixer was good at swiping things, but the powers that be were even better at keeping the smokes behind the counter. And Mixer definitely preferred doing his thing in the wide-open spaces out front.

Joey, who used to be cool, wouldn't buy them for Mixer. It's sort of funny, because he'd buy him beer but not smokes. He said they'd kill us slowly. That seemed fair enough to me. Everything else is slow when you're fifteen and living in this armpit of a town, so why shouldn't death be slow and come with a little buzz and a good taste?

Pot and pills were even more expensive. There'd been some pretty big busts just in the year and a half since I'd been at the Tits, and prices had gone way up. The Staties had a dog, which hardly seemed fair. It was a beagle named Snoopy, which was pretty much the perfect name for him, if you think about it. I'm not even sure if he was named after the cartoon or his approach to the job.

They brought that little fleabag into our class in eighth grade at Soudley for like a sort of show-and-tell/public-service-announcement type thing. It was pretty funny, because while everyone else was crowding around to pet him, and his tail
was going like a thousand miles an hour, there was that little group of Stantz and those guys hanging way back in the classroom, afraid Snoopy'd get a whiff of their denim jackets.

Anyway, like I said, prices were up. You'd need a job or a big-time allowance. No one wanted to trade with Mixer. I'd heard you could score that stuff at parties once you were a junior or senior and had your license, but I wasn't and I didn't, so that kind of quality high was pretty rare in my life. And huffing, man, that was nasty. I remember coughing into my hand once, and when I looked down, my hand was covered with tiny orange dots from the spray paint. I was coughing paint! That was the last time I did that.

Basically, whether it was the cost, the dog, not wanting to exhale in color, or the fact that there were already kids who were much more into drugs than we'd ever be, that stuff really wasn't our scene. Most of the time, chasing smokes and whatever alcohol we could get our hands on was enough. So when half a pack of Humpies—that's what we called Camels—is three feet and four bucks away from me, it's the kind of opportunity I'll go ahead and take.

Bones came sniffing around my locker later, and I gave him two, so we were cool. And I gave Mixer two for the beers on Tuesday, which didn't leave me much for my four bucks, but what are you gonna do? That was how our economy worked. It was like we were in prison, which is kind of ironic, if you think about it.

I cleared 44 and made it to the trail. I was kicking through the high weeds and figured that was as good a time as any to fire up the first one. And the damn thing was stale as hell. The pack'd probably been open a month. Lord knows where Max found it, probably under a chair somewhere. I'd just assumed he'd gotten the pack new somewhere and smoked the first half. Right then I realized that he'd found the things and must've known they were stale. Now that I was paying attention, I could feel how brittle the paper was, not that fresh almost moist feel of the first cigarette out of a new pack.

So he'd found this old pack and decided that instead of smoking crap cigarettes, he'd turn a quick profit. And even then, it's like, OK, so sell them to some dumb freshman. You're gonna sell them to me? To Bones? Man, that was a good way to get beat the hell down. But by the time I was in sight of the house and lit the second one off the stub of the first, I was willing to let him off the hook, because stale cigarettes were still cigarettes.

Anyway, I was heading up to the house, getting ready to boost myself in the window. I put the cigarette in the corner of my mouth and pushed up the sleeves of my hoodie, and I heard something. It was a low grunting sound, like voices without words, and there was movement, weight being shifted around on the old floorboards. There were people in there and, to show you what a moron I can be, I thought maybe they were fighting.

I took the cigarette out of my mouth and sort of crept up to the side of the window. I slid my head over to take a quick look in, and all I saw was hair, the back of a shirt, and a flash of pale skin. There were two of them, a guy all over a girl, and it wasn't until I ducked my head back out of the window that my brain processed their profiles and told me who they were. I could not frickin' believe it. I took a quick drag and went back in for another look, just to confirm it.

She was kind of leaning up against the far wall, or maybe he was holding her there. There was an empty bottle of Boone's Wine Product on its side next to them, some fruit flavor, which was gay as hell, except for the fact that Bones was on top of Natalie in the house in the woods.

Her shirt and bra were on the floor, and her breasts were just right there, bam. I mean, I got my hands on Jenny #1's once, but she was wearing a bathing suit under a T-shirt, so that even when I got my hand under the shirt, it was still on top of the suit. I'd never just flat-out seen them like that. The only thing in my way was Bones's shirt, which was flannel and hanging open, so that when he leaned in, it sort of draped over her side. That pissed me off for some reason. I guess it seemed selfish. Like, step aside, dude, I can't see.

His left hand was moving over her chest, and his right hand was pushing down at her jeans. She was trying to hold it there, but he was a strong dude, considering how skinny he was, and all of a sudden I wasn't sure I should be seeing this. I kind of got a bad feeling, you know? He was looking down
at her, but her head was turned a little toward the far wall. He was doing all the grunting. I ducked my head out again before either of them looked my way.

It was shocking as hell. Like the most shocking thing I'd seen up to that point in my life. I mean, where to start? First of all, I thought Bones was all talk. I didn't think he was actually getting any. Second, I mean, it was Natalie. She was a completely hot property, 100 percent in demand. Tommy had called dibs like the first day we met him, and it was like, sure, whatever, because it didn't seem like any of us had a shot with her anyway.

And Bones was probably the one with the longest odds against him; at least that's what we thought. Bones is a cool enough guy, but he's just a dirtbag. When I call him that, I sort of mean it as a good thing, but that's not how most of the girls in our school would take it.

And that was especially true of Natalie. She was tall and pretty and just sort of seemed better than the rest of us. She looked like she should be somewhere other than our little dump of a high school, and she'd definitely had a lot of practice shooting guys down. Like a lot of the hottest girls, she was just this side of being kind of weird-looking. Like how you see models on those shows and they are all stretched out in one way or another.
Exaggerated
is the word. Like one will be six four and another will have a head that's too big for her body. With Natalie, it was her legs.

She was almost as tall as me, and even so, she was still
mostly legs. I guess it was possible she'd grow into them, but that would make her like seven feet tall. Her eyes were a really pale, washed-out blue, almost gray, like vampire eyes. It seemed like if you turned out the lights, they might actually glow. She had dark hair and kept it short, which not many of the girls were doing, so it seemed sort of unusual and cool. Not that any of us spent much time looking at her hair. If she was walking toward you, all you saw were those long legs and laser-beam eyes. I'd seen guys walk into lockers looking at her.

And, I mean, there were some other truly hot girls in the school but, you know, not many. She was another one who the teachers were always badgering for not “living up to her potential.” But I think a lot of them just wanted to help her out after school, if you read me.

All that said, and here she was basically getting mauled by Gerard freakin' “Bones” Bonouil. I mean, Bones was my friend, but he was also pimply, skinny, not especially funny, and not all that nice. And Bones was Tommy's friend, but he was kind of screwing him over. I sort of had to wonder, and not for the first time this year, what was up with him. I mean, yeah, he was an angry dude. We've covered that territory, but he'd always been a decent friend, and he'd always had some kind of reason for the things he did. These days, it was getting harder to figure out where he was coming from. I sort of figured it was because he was older—sixteen to our fifteen—but it was hard to say exactly. I mean, we'd all changed a lot.

It's not like he couldn't get with Natalie. If he had a shot and Tommy didn't, Tommy would have to step aside, but he should've cleared it with him beforehand. He was crossing a line. It was like in October, when he beat the living hell out of that kid, that Adam what's-his-name. And I mean, Adam was a freshman and a weird one. Everyone picked on him some, but we came across him alone by the pizza place, and Bones just went to work. If Adam did anything to provoke him, I didn't see it, and he definitely didn't do anything to deserve what he got. He was a mess afterward. He had a bloody nose that left a thick red snail trail clear down the front of his shirt.