by Carl Deuker
A couple of times I saw Ms. Kater, the school nurse, pull Suzanne aside to talk to her. After that, she’d wear a bra for a while and she wouldn’t shake for guys, but eventually it would start again.
At first, Hunter didn’t pay much attention to her. Then, one day, he pretended to be her boyfriend. I wasn’t there, but I heard how he wrapped his arm around her and told her that she was his girl. After that, whenever he saw her he’d say, “You know what I like, Suzanne.” She’d smile and shake. He’d tell her she was his girl and kiss her while all his buddies smirked.
Richie was with me once when Hunter pulled this. It was right after lunch and I just wanted to get away to my next class, but Richie stayed rooted.
Suzanne was moving this way and that, belly-dancing in a way, but she was so uncoordinated that it really wasn’t a dance. Some kids were snickering, but most kids were pushing by, trying to get away. “This is not right,” Richie said. “Somebody should stop him.”
The warning bell rang. “You’re my sweetheart forever,” Hunter said, and then kissed her dramatically on the lips like you see in old-time movies—Suzanne folded back into a reverse C and Hunter pressed against her while his friends punched each other and swallowed their laughter. I pulled a third time on Richie’s arm, and he finally followed me away.
A few days later, a rumor started going around that Hunter was taking Suzanne behind the gym at lunch and having her lift up her shirt so he could see and feel her breasts. Some kids said he did way more.
I didn’t know how much was true, but the thought of it made me sick. I’m not saying I didn’t want to feel a girl’s breasts, but not a girl like Suzanne Friend. Not a girl who didn’t know what was going on.
One day—it was the day after we’d played to a tie with Cleveland that left us in second place—the school was in an uproar. I saw Tim McDermott in the hallway, and he told me that someone had reported Hunter Gates to Mr. Spady. “They know about him and Suzanne Friend.”
“Who told?” I asked.
“Nobody knows.”
I pulled Richie aside at soccer practice. “Did you do it?” I whispered.
“Do what?”
“Turn in Hunter Gates?”
His face screwed up in confusion. “What are you talking about?”
I explained. “It wasn’t me,” he said when I finished. “I’m glad somebody did, but it wasn’t me.”
Both Hunter and Suzanne were absent from school the next day. Word was that the special ed teacher, Ms. Levine, had them in Mr. Spady’s office all morning. In the afternoon, Ms. Levine came around to classrooms. “If you see something that’s wrong, have the courage to speak up,” she said, her eyes on fire.
She never used Suzanne’s name or Hunter’s name. Some kids were clueless, but most kids knew what she was talking about. As Ms. Levine spoke, I thought about the times I’d watched Suzanne shake, and I stared at my desktop.
The next morning, Suzanne was back at school. She was wearing a bra, had on a loose-fitting shirt, and kept her head down as she moved through the hall. I thought Hunter might have gotten suspended, but around lunchtime I saw him. He was walking the way he normally walked, a little smile on his face.
“He didn’t force her to do anything,” I heard J. J. say. “She wanted to do it. Ms. Levine can get all bent out of shape, but she can’t do anything to Hunter. He didn’t break any laws.”
The Puget Sound Chess Association held a tournament just before spring break. Anya was the second-to-last person chosen, and I was the last, so for all the games I was sitting next to her. I did okay, winning two and losing two.
The individual championship was the final match of the day. Richie and some guy from the Lakeside School sat on stage, and their game was projected onto a huge screen so everyone could watch. I was certain Richie would win—who could ever beat him at anything?—so I was blown away when the Lakeside kid demolished him in ten minutes. As far as I knew, Richie had never lost at anything.
Mr. Gupta had driven the six of us to the tournament in a school district van. On the ride back, Richie was quiet for the first few minutes. I could tell he was replaying the championship game in his mind. Then Richie nodded his head up and down a few times. “He was really, really good.”
On Monday, Richie was announced as the second-place finisher in the chess contest, and his trophy was displayed in the trophy case outside the gym. At lunch, the photographer for the school newspaper took his picture. Richie, grinning broadly, held the trophy with his right hand and flashed the victory sign with his left. “I’m number two!” he shouted.
A couple of nights later, I got a phone call from Rory. “Hey, Brock, I thought you should know,” he said. “It was your new friend, that Fang kid, who told Spady about Suzanne Friend and Hunter.”
“Who says that?”
“Fang says it. Hunter was nosing around, trying to find out who’d ratted him out, and Fang just went up to him and said that he’d done it, and that he was glad he had. The guy’s got balls. He’s stupid, but he’s got balls.”
“But he didn’t do it. I’m sure he didn’t.”
Rory snorted. “Well, if he didn’t, why would he say he did?”
Before school the next morning I found Richie in a corner of the cafeteria reading a book on math puzzles. I pulled my chair up next to him. “I heard what you did, but you don’t have to be a hero. Let the person who turned Hunter in take the flak. It’s their problem, not yours.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It is that simple.”
“What if I told you it was Anya?”
As soon as he said her name, I knew it was true. Anya had no fear of anyone, and she’d stand up for Suzanne.
The clock ticked off ten seconds, then ten seconds more. Something was wrong, but what? Then another thought came to me. “It won’t work, Richie. Anya won’t go along. She’ll say she did it.”
He shrugged. “And I’ll say she’s lying to protect me. Hunter will believe it was me. Everyone will believe it.”
I knew immediately he was right.
The bell rang. I stood, my head pounding. “You’re going to have to be really careful.”
He smiled a totally fake smile. “Don’t worry about me, Brock. I possess the strength of five Bruce Lees. Fear the Fang!”
I don’t know all that went down after that. Nobody but Richie knows. I do know that most of what happened was small stuff, that it was sometimes done by Hunter, sometimes by his friends.
First somebody stole Richie’s shoes during gym class and threw them onto the roof of the greenhouse. Then dog crap was smeared on the outside of his locker. Guys knocked into him in the hallways, especially in Suicide Alley, or slapped books and papers out of his hands as they walked by. Richie would go to sit down in class or in the commons, and somebody would pull his chair out from under him.
Stupid junk like that, but over and over.
Richie ignored Hunter, ignored all guys who were harassing him. He was still smiling at practice, still saying crazy things. “Once there was a guy on my team who had an extra finger on each hand. After he scored a goal, we all shouted, ‘Gimme six!’” But if you knew him—and I did—you could see in his eyes that the jokes were covers.
Somehow, he kept playing great. No Crown Hill soccer team had made it to the state tournament in decades, but as the victories mounted we started thinking that—if Richie kept being Richie—we could break through. The cheer team took down the old posters about the soccer team and replaced them with a bunch of newly painted ones that read FEAR THE FANG! in red letters. They hung posters above the doors of the school. They put more in the library windows, and a couple outside the gym. Everywhere you went, you saw FEAR THE FANG!
When Richie first saw one of the posters, he stared at it for a while and then nudged me and pointed. “I wish they’d drawn fangs growing out of the G. That would have been cool.”
“Tell them. Maybe they’ll do it.”
He waved me o
ff. “No. If they take them down, they might not get them up again.”
I was afraid that Richie would carry some of the garbage going on at school onto the soccer field, but his game stayed strong. After we beat Franklin 2–0 on a cold, windy Friday night, we needed just one more victory—over Lakeside, on their field—to make it into the state tournament. It would be our toughest game of the year, but we had magic going. Everything seemed possible.
I heard about it before I saw it. A guy from my history class, Nick Spadoni, called out to me as I was walking up the steps to school on Monday morning. “Did you see what they did?”
I felt my pulse slow and the blood drain from my head, making me weak and dizzy. I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I knew who “they” were.
“You won’t like it,” Spadoni went on, an odd expression on his face, as if he knew he shouldn’t smile but was struggling to keep from smiling. “Follow me. I’ll show you.”
He led me inside the main entrance of the school and told me to look back at it. All I saw were the main doors with kids coming through them. “What?” I said, turning back to him.
He pointed. “Up there.”
I followed his finger until my eyes rested on the big FEAR THE FANG poster. Only now it didn’t read FEAR THE FANG! A big X had been drawn over the N. To the right was a poster-size Photoshopped picture of Richie. Whoever did it gave him chipmunk cheeks, superslanty eyes, a Chinese afro, and an idiotic toothy grin.
I turned on Spadoni. The blood that had drained from my head was surging back, and now it was boiling. “Don’t get mad at me, Brock,” he said, holding up his hands in a sign of surrender. “I didn’t do it.”
Kids around me were looking up. “That’s mean,” somebody said, but other kids were laughing.
My eyes returned to Spadoni. “Has anybody reported this?”
He shrugged. “How should I know?”
I pushed past him and hurried to the main office. Ms. O’Neill was behind her desk, typing. “Do you know about—”
“Yes,” she said, not looking up. “We’ve got a call in to get them taken down.”
“Them? Did they do it to all of them?”
“I don’t know about all of them, but most of them.”
“How come they’re not down already?”
Now she did look up. “There’s a substitute custodian today, and he can’t find a ladder.”
“They’ve got to come down right now. You can’t let them stay up.”
She tilted her head and glared. “Do you know where the ladder is?”
“No.” I shot back.
“We’re moving as fast as we can. But nothing can happen until we find the ladder.”
Richie wasn’t at English class. During chess club, Anya told me that when he’d come in the main entryway that morning, everyone there had gone completely quiet. When he looked up, he stared at the sign for a while and then walked out the door, down the steps, and off campus. “I’ve texted him a couple of times, but he hasn’t answered,” Anya said. “I hope he’s okay.”
“He’s tough,” I told her. “Tougher than anyone I’ve ever met. These guys can’t break him.”
“It’s racist, you know,” she said, after a long moment. “All of it. If he were black, or Hispanic, or white like you, they wouldn’t do it. But Asians? Anybody can make fun of Asians. So they make that poster and stick it up all over the school. They call him a fag and that’s funny too. You think we’re machines, robots, that we study too hard and get too many As. You think we’ll take it because we’re too polite to fight back, because Asians don’t make trouble.”
“I don’t think that way!” I said.
“Don’t you?” she snapped. She glared at me for a moment and then abruptly stood. “I don’t feel like playing chess today,” she said, and then she walked out, leaving me staring at sixty-four black and white squares.
Richie wasn’t at practice that day. Coach Jacklin had warned us that anyone with an unexcused absence from school or practice would be suspended for a game.
Without Richie on the field, practice was lifeless. It was as if we were responsible for what had happened. We were so bad that Coach Jacklin cut practice short. I went home, ate dinner, and then called Richie. He didn’t answer, so I sent him a text message. He didn’t reply.
Mr. Spady had to know Hunter was behind the posters. Would he have the guts to do anything about it?
Before school the next day, I looked for Richie, but I couldn’t find him. All through first period, crazy thoughts swirled in my head, like that he’d transfer to a different school and I’d never see him again. But when I stepped into Ms. Ringleman’s room, Richie was in his usual spot.
He acted as if everything was normal, so I pretended nothing had happened too. I slumped into the empty desk next to him and asked if some strippers had tried to take my spot. He shook his head. “No strippers.”
Class started. We’d been reading a short story about a kid in Palestine who started out one morning with a new bicycle and made a series of idiotic trades and came home at the end of the day with a pencil sharpener. The kid in the story was crazy/funny in a way that reminded me of Richie. The normal Richie would have had a lot to say about the story, but he didn’t raise his hand once.
When class ended, he was out the door before I even had my backpack zipped. I didn’t see him at lunch or at chess club. I worried that he’d quit the soccer team, but when I stepped on the field I saw him huddled with Coach Jacklin. Jacklin had both hands on Richie’s shoulders, which is what my dad used to do when he really wanted my attention. I always looked right in my dad’s eyes when he did that—I just had to—but Richie’s head was turning this way and that, his eyes looking everywhere but at Coach Jacklin. When their talk ended, Richie wandered over to where the rest of us were warming up.
“What was that about?” I asked.
“I can play.”
“That’s great.”
“Yeah,” he said, his voice cold. “Great.” Then he moved off to warm up with other guys.
All through practice, he was like a downed electric wire—alive and dangerous. His intensity kept everybody on the team focused. Ball movement, dribbling, and defense—it was all top-notch, but nobody took any joy in it. Our practices had been fun because Richie had always been shouting out some crazy joke or making some off-the-wall comment. Now he was stone-faced, so the rest of us were stone-faced too.
There was a difference in how he played, too. He’d always been physical, but now he crossed the line. Forearms to the back, slide tackles that were borderline trips, elbows to the ribs on long runs. “Watch it, Richie,” Jasper Hastings, a senior fullback, said after one rough play that Coach Jacklin hadn’t seen.
“Watch it yourself,” Richie snapped back.
Hastings took a step toward Richie, and Richie stepped right up in his face. Jacklin spotted the two of them and started blowing his whistle like a crazy man. “Save it for Lakeside,” Jacklin shouted, rushing over.
The next day, during sixth period, Mr. Spady called me to his office and had me sit in a plastic chair across from his huge desk. He folded his hands in front of him. “You’re good friends with Richie Fang, right?”
I nodded.
“How’s he doing?”
I shrugged. “He’s not saying much, but he’s got to be boiling inside.”
Mr. Spady sighed. “I don’t blame him. Big joke. Ha ha.”
The room fell quiet. “Hunter Gates did it,” I said, breaking the silence. “You know that, don’t you?”
Mr. Spady shook his head. “Hunter was skiing at Steven’s Pass all weekend. Colton was with him. They didn’t get back until Sunday night.”
“Who says?” I asked, not hiding my disbelief.
Spady’s voice sharpened. “Hunter’s father. He was with them the whole time.”
I thought for a moment. “Then Hunter did it Sunday night after he came back. It wouldn’t take long.”
Spady shook h
is head. “Impossible. The custodians locked the school at eight Saturday night, and it stayed locked until Monday morning. There’s an alarm system. Nobody got in this building on Sunday.”
Again the room fell silent. Finally, Mr. Spady leaned toward me, his voice kinder. “Look, Brock, I know you want whoever did this punished. So do I. But right now, Richie’s mental state is the most important thing. The school district has a professional counselor available for situations like this. She could help Richie.”
I shook my head. “He won’t see a counselor. No way.”
“That’s what he told me when I had him in here. But I still think it would be good for him, and I think that if you backed me up, he might change his mind.”
“So that’s why I’m here. You want me to talk to Richie about seeing a counselor.”
“Yes, I do.”
I shook my head. “Hunter Gates did this. Suspend him or expel him. Just do something. That would help Richie.”
Spady sat up straight. His voice was all business. “Brock, I told you. Hunter wasn’t involved. So get rid of that idea. It’s a dead end.”
We had no practice that day. Coach Jacklin wanted us to rest so we’d have fresh legs for the game. After school, I stopped by Richie’s house. He was in the shed working on his model. We talked about the upcoming soccer game, acting as if everything were normal. Finally, I told him about Spady calling me in.
“And Spady believes the ski story?” he asked.
“What can he do? He’s not going to call Mr. Gates a liar, and he’s not going to hire some private eye to investigate.”
“How about you?” Richie said. “Do you believe it?”
“No,” I said, then paused. “But I suppose there’s a chance it wasn’t Hunter.”
Richie shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.”
He turned his attention back to his model, putting up lampposts and straightening trees. We worked together in silence for about ten minutes. Then, completely out of nowhere, he asked me if I had a gun. “I don’t mean you. I mean your dad. Does he have one?”
