You (6 page)

“Mercutio is talking about Romeo and says, ‘'twould anger him to raise a spirit in his mistress' circle, of some strange nature, letting it there stand till she had laid it and conjur'd it down.'” He looks up at Ms. Casey. “You want me to read jokes about virgins, erections, and hand jobs without laughing? It cannot be done.”

You're in the last seat of the row and even from there you can see her eyes narrowing, her nostrils flaring out. If you can see it, so can he.

“And then there's line thirty-eight. I mean I'd expect it in, say,
The Naughty Stewardess
. But a class assignment? You
sure
you should be letting us read this porn, Ms. C.?”

So, like everybody else in the class, you look at the line—the open-arsed part is obvious, but what's a pop'rin pear? And even though they're laughing, you know your classmates don't have a clue. This is Midlands High, not Odyssey. Students here don't get Shakespeare. Ms. Casey has all but said it since passing out the book a very long week ago.

But apparently somebody does get Shakespeare. Or he knows how to pretend he does.

Either way, it makes no difference.

Without taking her eyes off Zack, Ms. Casey reaches for the pad of preprinted forms they use when they send someone down to the vice principal's office. You know the form well and you wonder if she'll check the Disruptive Behavior or the Insubordination box.

Either way, it makes no difference.

At the door, checked form in hand, Zack turns back to face the class. “‘Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow.'” But
before he closes the door, he looks at you and gives a nod. You nod back.

Two minutes later, the class is back to normal, the students pretending to read silently to themselves and Ms. Casey pretending to care.

 

T
he weather holds and there's a fire drill during fifth period.

 

T
hursday morning. Homeroom. A summary of the things Ashley says during your eight-minute conversation:

• She got the job at the ear-piercing place
  
• Cici also got a job there
  
• This is a good thing because Cici is her best friend
  
• Next week she'll be spending Thanksgiving at her grandparents' house
  
• She wants a new phone
  
• She saw the funniest video online
  
• No, she has never seen a porno online and thinks it's gross
  
• She texts too much
  
• She thinks she needs glasses
  
• She would rather have contacts
  
• She asks if you know the new kid in school named Zack
  
• Just because someone wears a sport coat doesn't make him gay
  
• He got kicked out of class for swearing at Ms. Casey
  
• This is what everyone is saying
  
• She didn't know that he was in your English class
  
• She thinks what he really said was funny
  
• She thinks he sounds cool
  
• No, she is not kidding
  
• She has a test in social studies first period
  
• She really should have studied
  

With forty-five seconds left in homeroom, she asks you to explain the elastic clause of the U.S. Constitution.

 

“
Y
ou didn't think I'd forget about it, did you?”

It's Thursday afternoon. You're in the boys' locker room. You're wearing a pair of black gym shorts and socks—your T-shirt is balled up on the floor and you don't know what they did with your sneakers.

They had come in fast—you didn't see a thing and you are sure no one else did either. So it'll be your word against theirs. Guess who'll win that one?

Three members of the school's varsity lacrosse team are gathered around the back corner where
your gym locker is located, watching as the team's co-captain leans his thick forearm into your neck, pinning you up against a row of cold, metal doors, the dial of a Master lock digging into the back of your head.

And of course it's Jake the Jock doing the talking, the “it” being the ass-kicking he promised you last week.

Thanks to the school's rotating schedule, your last class was gym. The gym teacher held everybody till right before the bell, so no matter how fast you changed you would not have made the bus.

So you didn't rush.

You were going to stay after school anyway, maybe see Ashley. Bump into her all casual—oh, you're here, too?—talk about nothing until her mother picked her up. That may not be such a good idea now, since in a few seconds you'll have a broken nose and a swollen-shut eye. Not a look you think Ashley will find attractive.

The jocks are all wearing jeans and polo shirts, the type of shirts these kinds of jocks always wear, neat and tailored looking, with the short sleeves that cling to their biceps and the colors that show off their late-fall tans.

If you yelled, shouted for help, there's a good chance the gym teacher might hear you and bust this up, but you wouldn't do that, wouldn't call for help. Better to get the piss beat out of you than call for help. It'd only take a few weeks to recover from a beating. Yelling for help would scar you for life.

Besides, you can hardly breathe as it is with his arm crushing your windpipe.

This is where Jake is supposed to say something like, “I'll teach you to try to steal my wallet,” or, “How'd you like a knuckle sandwich?” or some other stupid movie-line crap, but he doesn't, and you watch—everything slow motion now—as he rolls his lower lip between his teeth, clenches his fist tighter, draws in a sharp breath, and cocks his
arm back an extra inch.

Then a voice.

“And…
cut
.”

A voice you know.

“Thank you, gentlemen,” Zack says, leaning over the top of the row of lockers behind Jake, a cell phone in his hands. “That's a wrap.”

Everything hangs in place—the slack jaws of Jake's pals, Jake's fist a dozen inches from your face, the sweat rolling down your nose—as Zack jumps down the back of the lockers and strolls around to join the group. He's looking at his cell phone, his thumb texting away, the green plaid of his sport coat a few shades off from the color of the painted concrete walls.

And still nobody moves.

“Excellent. Outstanding. Each of you. Truly well done.” Phone held in his fingertips, Zack claps softly. “Jake's brutish anger, the stoic defiance in young Chase's eyes. And you,” he says, aiming his claps at
the other jocks, “supporting roles are so difficult, yet you brought them to life. Bravos all around.”

“What the hell you think—”

Zack points to his phone. “Have you seen these? They're amazing. Not the phone part, the video part. The resolution is
unbelievable
, even in low light like this.” He glances up at the fluorescent lights then turns his attention back to his phone. “The zoom feature is very cool. You can get in
real
close. And the audio. That's probably the most impressive feature.”

Jake jerks his forearm and your head bangs against the locker, and he turns to look at Zack. You can feel something warm running down the back of your neck, but you can breathe again.

“Hey!” Jake shouts. It's a voice that's used to being obeyed. “I'm talking to you, freak.”

“Be with you in a second,” Zack says, holding up a finger of his free hand, his thumb dancing across the keypad. “Just sending this off.”

“It's that queer kid,” one of the jocks says, finally
placing the face or the sport coat. The others agree and add in their own descriptors.

“Gentlemen. Such language. Besides,
I'm
not the one who spent the last twenty minutes lurking around the locker room waiting for some boy to get undressed.”

Jake grunts and steps over the bench. “That's it. You're dead.”

Zack is smiling that smirky smile and you think, yup, he's dead. Jake gets right up on him, bumping Zack with his chest and glaring at him, staring him down to the tile floor. Zack meets his eyes, the smile still on his face. “Jake, Jake, Jake. Aren't you even the slightest bit curious what I was doing?”

You see the edges of Jake's mouth twitch, but he keeps leaning in so that Zack has to bend back to keep their eyes locked.

“I filmed the whole thing, Jake. All of it. Starting out in the hallway when I heard you and your
compadres
talking about how you were going to beat up young Chase here, the sneaking around the locker room, the way you came around the corner, ambushing him as he's pulling his shirt over his head. The way you slammed him up against the locker was
quite
impressive. Oh, and gentlemen?” Zack allows himself a quick glance at the other jocks. “You're all in it, too. Unquestionably, undeniably you.”

Jake inches back on his heels. “So? You show it to anybody and you're a dead man.” Jake chuckles and his friends chuckle, too. But there's no mistaking the nervous edge.

“Won't you ever learn, Jake?” You watch as Zack taps the keys on his phone, holding it out as Jake's voice, tinny but clear in the phone's small speaker, repeats the threat. “Now I've already emailed the video to myself. Whether I email it to Principal Lyttle and Coach Comeau is completely up to you.”

You're certain that Jake is not as dumb as he looks,
but he proves otherwise. “What do you mean?”

Now Zack leans forward and Jake steps back, playing it off by resting an elbow on the top of an open locker door. “If anything unfortunate should happen to either Mr. Chase or myself—for the rest of the year—I'll be sure to include you when I send out the video.”

“Oh, like I'm supposed to be scared of—”

“Yes,” Zack snaps, and for once the humor is missing from his voice. “And you are. Now go away before I decide to punch young Chase in the nose just to blame it on you.”

Jake scowls for a moment, stands a little taller, but it's over and you all can feel it. He laughs like it's not the big deal it is and pushes past Zack, bumping him out of the way, his crew in tow. He rounds the corner and you hear a fist dent in a locker—you can relate to that—then a moment later the crash bar to the exit being kicked open.

You don't know what to say, so you rattle off a
dozen swearwords, then snatch up your T-shirt and throw it in your backpack. Zack is standing off to the side, pushing buttons on his phone. You should say something, so you start to mumble “thanks,” but he cuts you off.

“I'd love to stay and chat, but I'm already a tad bit late for my appearance at the detention room. I'm sure you can take it from here.” He smiles, does that wave thing, and is gone.

 

HOW YOU GOT THAT SCAR ON THE BACK OF YOUR HAND PART
2
: WHAT YOU TOLD THE SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGIST

 

I don't know why everybody keeps saying that I'm angry all the time.

Okay, not
every
body.

My father, for one.

And I bet the bus driver, now.

But I'm not angry
all
the time.

Sometimes, sure.

Everybody is.

So why does everybody keep saying it's just me?

All right, not
every
body.

Jesus.

It's just an expression.

No, I'm not angry now.

But I could be if you want me to be.

I'm glad, too.

What really happened?

You read the report.

I slipped and fell into the seat and my hand went through the window.

I don't care if you don't believe it.

Why couldn't it have happened that way?

Well, maybe I fell in farther than I thought.

Maybe my arm was higher, I don't know.

Why should I tell you something different?

And get suspended?

Why do you care?

Right.

Okay, we'll play what-if.

What if I told you that I wanted to punch that kid in the face?

The kid that was sitting there.

I don't know, just some kid.

He pissed me off.

Something he said.

I don't remember.

All right, something about me being stupid.

Why would I care what he thought?

Because he pissed me off, okay?

Damn.

I said I don't remember.

I'm not getting mad.

He said something, so I went to hit him.

Professional help?
Yeah, right.

Because I didn't hit anybody.

I could have, but I didn't.

I don't know, I just didn't.

Probably would have knocked him out. But I didn't. Damn.

I hit the window instead.

No, that's not what happened.

We were playing what-if, remember? I told you, I slipped.

There's nothing else to talk about.

Can I go now?

 

I
t's Friday night and you're hanging around outside the 7-Eleven, freezing your ass off. They only let you in the store one at a time and Max is in there buying a Slurpee. It's thirty degrees outside and he's buying a drink made with crushed ice. And he's taking forever about it, too, filling the cup's domed lid one minute squirt at a time.

Derrick was a no-show, but you figured that. He and Shannon had been fighting all day at school,
something he said or didn't say or something else altogether, you didn't want to know. He was home, on the phone no doubt. Damage control. It would be different for you and Ashley. You'd never argue with her. You'd just agree with everything she said. You're sure she'd like that because that's pretty much what you do now.

Ryan is outside with you, leaning up against the spot where there used to be a pay phone. You don't remember there ever being a phone, but there had to have been one once because they still have that metal hood that says phone on the side. He's got Kristi pulled up tight against him, her legs snaked around his, both of them holding their cigarettes off to the side as they stick their tongues down each other's throats. There's a vinyl banner across the front of the building—
OPEN
24/7.
BECAUSE THIRST NEVER SLEEPS
—and the way it's hanging it blocks the store's spotlight, putting the two of them in a shadow. But it's still light enough to see her grinding
up against his leg like she does every time she gets near him. She's in the eleventh grade, and she and Ryan have been banging away every chance they get for the past year.