Lots of boys reached for their shirts, tugging them on as they lined up. Owen had a swelling bruise on his forehead, and his bottom lip was split, but he seemed otherwise okay. The proctor released me and pushed me toward the others.
“Why are these boys still here?” Tanner asked. “Leave the shirts. March.” And we double-timed it back to the dormitory. The places where Davis had cut me burned, but I was aware of another feeling, too. I’d never been outside without a shirt, not once that I remembered, and now there was the soft, cooling sensation of air lifting the sweat off me. It seemed strange that I should experience this for the first time at the age of seventeen—the hot sun overhead, the relief of evaporation as my body was allowed to function as intended, with no uniform to trap the heat. I must have laughed, or made some sound, because the boy just ahead of me in line turned around with an anxious expression on his face. I reached to feel my chest, the space where the embroidered Goodhouse logo always thickened the front of my shirt. Instead of the chafe of fabric, I felt only the gentle press of my own skin.
FOURTEEN
The dormitory was quiet when we returned. A nurse came to our room. He brought his med kit and used a tube of skin adhesive to seal the wounds on my arm and my back. He cleaned Owen up, gave him an inhaler to combat the swelling in his throat. The nurse worked silently as a proctor stood in our doorway. The disinfectant they smeared on my arm stained the skin orange, a color that looked even more inhuman beside the bright white bandage. I pulled on a fresh shirt, but I didn’t button it. The air conditioner strained and wheezed.
The nurse left, pulling off his gloves, asking the proctor if there was anyone else. They exited through the common room, and the proctor shouted down the hallway that he was locking the main door.
I stared at Owen. “Are you okay?” I said, and then: “What the fuck were you thinking?”
“Doesn’t matter,” he mumbled. “We’re dead, you know.”
I did know. You didn’t halfway beat your class leaders. And while I was grateful that Owen was breathing, and that I didn’t have to endure some immediate consequence, I knew it was just a deferral.
“They’ll do it at night,” Owen said. “They’ll wait until after the celebration and then we’ll get a work detail. And that will be it.”
“Davis won’t wait that long,” I said.
Owen stood and dumped the contents of the trash can onto the floor. He knelt and dragged his trunk out from under his bed, then lifted the lid and withdrew a package of crackers, a bar of chocolate, and a can of paint thinner.
“You couldn’t beat him,” I said. “What did you think would happen?”
He shrugged. He grabbed the piece of paper with the question mark drawn on it. He tore it into strips and folded it into a cone. “Did you know,” he said, “that the College of Art has separate rooms for everything, like a room for painting and a room for sculpting, and you can order all your supplies and they just deliver them. You don’t have to leave the workshop, not ever.”
I lay on my bed and then rolled on my side so I wasn’t putting pressure on the wound in my back. “Sounds like campus,” I said.
“They’ll even bring your meals,” he said, “right to the room.”
“Why would you want that?” I asked.
“So you don’t have to stop working,” he said. “So you’re never interrupted.”
I heard shuffling noises in the hallway. Boys were leaving their rooms, quietly congregating just outside our door. Owen uncorked the accelerant and squirted a few drops onto the paper. “Go ahead and report me,” he said. He glanced at the crowd in the doorway and lit the match. Fire erupted from the open mouth of the can, leaping upward, appearing as if by magic. I heard the boys suck in their breath, a collective astonishment. Nobody was going to report us. There was a new feeling moving through the dormitory.
“You want double chocolate?” Owen asked me.
“Triple,” I said.
A soft knock sounded on the wall, and I looked up to see Blake standing at the threshold, having forced his way through the crowd. He was holding a fire extinguisher.
“Authorize me,” he said. I looked at Owen. Neither of us made a move to punch in the code that would allow him access to our room. “I’ve got something for you,” Blake said. “We haven’t been able to drink it since you arrived. We thought you were snitches.”
“We are,” Owen said, but this statement was somewhat undermined by his illegal toasting of a chocolate cracker over a blazing trash can.
“Put the can under the air return,” Blake said. “You’ll get less smoke.” To my surprise, he pulled the top off the fire extinguisher. He lifted out a mesh sack and handed it to the boy beside him. Then Blake poured an amber liquid into the sawed-off bottom of a plastic water bottle. He swirled it, picked something out with his finger, and then drank the whole thing. The boys in the doorway cheered.
“Twenty credits a shot,” Blake said. “I got both of you.”
I glanced at Owen, but he was studiously ignoring everybody.
Blake poured another glass. “Apple mash,” he said. “The fucking best.”
I got up and typed in the general authorization code on the wallscreen. I let them all in. There was a feeling that life was somehow suspended. What they were doing was much more illegal than what we were doing, and suddenly it all made sense—how clannish the dorm had seemed, how hostile. The light over the door turned green, and a small whoop went up, a restrained sort of cheer, as they jostled inside, sitting on the floor, the desk chair, any available surface.
I walked back to my bed, and boys leaned out of the way to let me pass.
“The cup,” they chanted. “Give him the cup.” People were bargaining with Blake, promising credits. Somebody passed me the crinkly bottom half of a water bottle. I had to be careful not to squeeze the flimsy plastic too hard and spill the contents. It was half full of a liquid that smelled acidic and slightly putrid.
“Just toss it back,” the boy on the floor beside me said. “Don’t taste it.”
It was nothing like the cognac I’d had earlier. It felt like I’d taken a fiery sip from the trash can itself. I tried not to gag.
“Pass it,” the boys chanted. “Pass it.” And someone snatched the cup away, refilled it, and pushed it on toward Owen. He took a sip, gagged, and choked out much of the liquor.
“Another one,” the boys said. “Give him another one.” But Owen couldn’t do it. His throat was raw. He passed me the cup. The second sip was smoother. I could even taste the sweet tang of apple underneath the alcohol.
Owen handed out the remaining graham crackers, toasting one for whoever wanted it. I sat on my bed, watching the boys celebrate, buying shots for each other. They were talking over one another and laughing. I was seeing them as if for the first time.
But then the rush of merriment was like a spent fuel. They were missing two of their own. Ortiz was dead, and we assumed that Carter was, too. We didn’t know whom the other bodies belonged to, not yet. We drank a toast to the missing. One boy was particularly distraught. He had dense curly hair that made him look like he was wearing a hat. I didn’t recognize him or know his name. “To Ortiz,” he said.
And the boys echoed: “To Ortiz.” Several were silent, staring at a fixed point in the air as if trying to concentrate.
“He was amazing,” Blake said. “He jacked that truck. Oh my God, and when they hit the hound house. Boom. Dogs everywhere.”
“That’s style,” someone said.
When the evening video played, the whole dorm was still packed into our little room. In preparation for Founders’ Day, our wallscreens were showing interviews with various class leaders.
“Give us some news,” someone called.
“Where’s fucking Tanner?” another boy said. “They can’t lock us down and not tell us anything.”
“That just means it’s bad,” Blake said. “Really fucking bad.”
Creighton and Davis appeared together o
n the screen, sitting side by side, both wearing their uniforms but looking somehow very clean, and a little younger, too.
“I think the most important thing,” Creighton said, “was learning how to learn. How to solve problems and become self-sufficient.” Davis said something about giving back to the community, and then I couldn’t hear, because the boys in the room were yelling so loudly.
It was a strange interview. Creighton and Davis seemed robotic and foreign. Not themselves. It was who they wanted to be. And that was nobody we knew. Someone threw the plastic cup at the screen and said, “Suck my dick.” Several others elaborated on this idea. Every few minutes there was a toast to Ortiz or Carter.
“The fucking best,” they said.
“To Tacoma,” someone said, and we toasted them, too, all the brothers we’d never met.
When the lights went out, Owen lit another fire. Blake covered our window so the flicker wouldn’t draw attention, and then he told us about the ghost of a boy who’d been killed in Vargas in the first days of Goodhouse, when the main building was still being renovated. The boy was allegedly found stabbed to death in the delousing pool, and now that the pool had been covered over, you could hear him scratching from the other side of the floor, trying to dig his way out.
“The dead just want to let you know they’re there,” Blake said.
“No,” said Owen. “They want what you have. No matter what it is.”
After everybody left, I lay in bed savoring the dizzy rush of too much apple mash and the contentment that came from feeling momentarily safe. There seemed to be less of a barrier between myself and the world. This was how I’d felt pressing against Bethany, and it was a relief to feel it again, to know that I could. Somewhere down the hallway, a sob was quickly muffled. Last night the Tacoma boys hadn’t known that they’d had their last meal, their last shower. I wondered if Carter’s ghost would return to the dormitory tonight. I wondered if even now it was in the common room, in the hallway—because of course I believed in ghosts. I’d seen them. But more than that, it was impossible to think that there could really be an ending, a full stop.
Blake had predictably sworn us to secrecy about the apple mash, but it had been a gesture only. We were not going to be around long, and it was entirely possible that as boys who’d challenged and failed, we’d drop another status level. I thought of the doctor’s words, his assertion that he could help me if I stayed out of trouble. But I was beyond that now, beyond help.
I began to hum the song that I’d heard the night we’d worked late in the soybean field—the melody with a bright, catchy chorus that slipped, unexpectedly, into a minor key. I let the sound calm me, infect me with its beauty, with its swaying refrain, but even this was complicated. My voice was not my own—my affinity for music was a gift from the school, a useless gift, now a redundancy to be phased out. I’d been taught to love something that had no future.
I didn’t realize Owen was awake until I went silent and he told me to keep going. “I like that song,” he said.
So I kept humming. I started to make up words—nonsense phrases that grew increasingly incoherent as I drifted closer to sleep. Owen sucked on his inhaler, and then, just as I was fading, I felt a sudden pressure on the mattress as he lay down beside me, facing away, back-to-back. I was suddenly awake.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“I got a letter from the College of Art,” he whispered.
“And?” I said.
He was quiet for a long time, but I felt the tension in his muscles and heard the uncomfortable rasp of his breath. “That man who interviewed me,” he said, “on our Community Day—I don’t know that he was real.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “Of course he was real.”
“I had to do things,” Owen said. “At his house.” From the thin, reticent tenor of his voice I knew that he was trying not to give life to a memory.
“What things?” I said.
“Not related to art,” Owen said. I began to roll over and sit up. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t move.” I lay back down. “I don’t want you to say anything.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Not even that,” he said.
There was barely enough room for the two of us on the mattress, but I made myself lie still. After a while I felt him relax into sleep, only to startle awake when he couldn’t draw an easy breath. I wondered if it would be like Owen said—we’d get work detail one night and then we’d be outnumbered.
“Still awake?” I whispered.
I heard him suck on the inhaler. Eventually, he got up and returned to his own bed.
“Thank you,” he said. “For today. Whatever happens, I won’t forget.”
* * *
The next morning, we stuffed a bunch of drawing paper into the trash can to hide the scorch marks. Owen and I checked and rechecked our personal pages, but there were no penalties posted yet—just silence—and this was even more worrisome.
Blake came by our room to collect some of the trash from the night before. Someone had left two reeking sacks of apple mash, and there were bits of charred paper stuck to the linoleum. Blake looked hungover. His eyes were watering, and every time he bent over to collect something, he stood up with a groan.
“They’ll do room searches today,” he said, “so make sure to flush everything. Wipe the floors, too.” They looked dirtier than they should’ve been.
We had an escort to breakfast, and for the rest of the day they didn’t let us travel independently. We moved in small groups of about twenty, accompanied by six proctors. Owen was taken to work on the mural and I ate alone. I felt other students watching me, palming at my approach. By now everyone had heard about the breakout and the fight. I didn’t have any visible bruises or lacerations, something that would be unremarkable at La Pine but was considered extraordinary given what had happened on the field yesterday. I tried to move as if I couldn’t feel the wound adhesive puckering the skin of my back.
I had a history class later that morning. It was to be my last one, though I didn’t know it at the time. The teacher never arrived, so we watched a video documentary of the United States Revolutionary War. It was called Johnny Tremain. It looked old—a copy of a copy—and the beginning had corrupted data, so I never did figure out if it was real or just a story. Afterward, there was still a half hour to fill and we sat quietly at our desks. The classroom had a protected podium where a teacher usually stood to lecture or run the media. It had half-walls made of Plexiglas and a desk with a light strip that usually threw ominous shadows across the teacher’s face. But today it just lit the emptiness—and so we all sat in the dim room, staring at a glowing tower.
Outside, I watched a group of proctors leading students across campus. They made a loose perimeter around the boys, each man clutching a handheld. The men were looking at the sky. The proctors who’d taken us to breakfast had been like that, too. And then I knew, whatever had happened yesterday, whatever they weren’t telling us, the attack had come from above. I stared up at the thin white ribbons of cloud, at the ring of deeper blue at the edge of the horizon. It was vast and ungoverned. With the fence in the distance and the guardhouses, too, the sky suddenly made me feel like I was in a box—a box without a lid.
At noon I was escorted to the factory with the other 3s and 4s. Gravel was still mounded in the fields. A bulldozer—a yellow, square-bodied thing with a long, clawed trunk—tore at the remnants of the hound house. Another truck with a wide loader was on hand to lift the debris and place it in a Dumpster. I kept looking over my shoulder for Davis, for anyone in a class leader uniform. They were conspicuously absent.
When I got to the factory, I was told to report to my supervisor’s office. The rest of the group descended the stairs to the suiting-up room, but I trudged to the third floor. I could see Tim’s office at the end of the hallway, but to get there I had to pass the large windows that overlooked the distribution center where the Mule Creek inmates worked. I saw them in thei
r jumpsuits, stacking boxes and loading pallets. I ducked below the edge of the window and shuffled forward, hunched over, too tall to really pull it off, but still trying to stay as low as I could.
“What are you doing?” Tim said. He stood in the doorway to his office.
“Nothing,” I said. I had my back to the window. “I dropped something.”
He glanced at the floor. “Well, pick it up.”
“I thought I lost a button.” I ran my hand over my shirt. “Guess not.”
Tim just watched me, his gaze narrowing as if trying to discern my true purpose. “You got a medical classification,” he said. “You’re out of the mixing rooms today. Go suit up and relieve Quality Control.”
I shook my head. “That’s a mistake,” I said. “I feel fine. I can lift the bags.”
“I’m not asking a favor,” Tim said. He walked over to me, standing so close that I could smell the sour, musty odor of his unwashed uniform. When he spoke again, his voice was low but commanding. “Or do you want to test me?”
“No, sir.”
“Then you will,” he said, “report immediately to your work assignment.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
Tim held a bottle in his damaged hand, some civilian drink with a colorful label. He lifted it to take a sip. I was waiting for him to step back, but he stayed where he was, enjoying my discomfort.
“I might not be able to read your file,” he said, “but I don’t need to. You’re all the same.” He nodded. “Consistently disobedient.”
“Sorry, sir,” I said.
“Tell me,” he said, “what do you want to do when you graduate?” But his mocking tone let me know that the question was rhetorical. I lowered my gaze, stared at my shoes. “Do you want to work here?” he asked. “Maybe you want my job? Would you like that?” He lifted the bottle and made a show of inspecting the label. “Or do you think it’s not important enough,” he said, “that I’m not important?”
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