Teen, Inc.

by Stefan Petrucha

  When he was done, he ripped off his Herbert’s vest, threw that on the ground, and stomped on it, too. While he was doing all this, he shouted a word over and over, a word which I don’t think I should repeat. I’m not going to say “freak,” “frick,” or “frag” or something lame like that, but you can guess what it was.

  All grumbly, he lit up another cigarette, picked up the now-dirty vest, and put it back on.

  So, yeah, I was staring.

  And, yeah, maybe I had an expression on my face that showed how crazy I thought he was. So, of course he noticed me, and of course he didn’t like the fact that this little geek with a bike was staring at him.

  He jutted his acne-covered face forward and kept it out there, pointed at me like a gun.

  “What?” he said, real nasty. I don’t know if his voice was low and gravelly like that, or if he was just lowering it to add to the effect.

  I shrugged, trying to keep cool, but honestly, I was getting scared. He was bigger and older than me, had a bunch of friends, and there was nowhere I could run.

  I tried looking confused as if I didn’t know why he was talking to me at all, even though I knew exactly why he was. I think it’s some sort of animal instinct: when faced with a threat, you pretend you don’t know what’s going on.

  “Leave him alone,” the girl said. “It’s not his fault you got sacked.”

  Really pissed now, he looked at the sky like he had a personal relationship with it, and said, “Great. Does the whole world have to know?”

  Well, that’s not exactly what he said. He stuck that magic word (that rhymes with stuck!) in there three or four times. Then he started stomping around again, punching the air, spitting, cursing, like he was going to turn into the Hulk.

  The heavy one nodded toward my wheels as if none of this was going on. He had on these square glasses and wore denim pants. His head was really round and squat, like a pumpkin. You know how glasses make some people look smart? Not this guy.

  “Bike broken?” he said. He talked fast, so at first I thought he was speaking in a foreign language—Bayuk böken? Luckily, before a huge amount of time passed, my brain managed to play it back slowly enough for me to figure out what he was saying.

  “No,” I said. “I’m just tired of riding.”

  He nodded. I think maybe he was trying to be friendly, to make up for the other guy’s lousy attitude.

  No one said anything else, so I turned and started walking. After a few paces, I felt stupid for being scared. The guy had just gotten fired, and compared to some execs I’ve seen get the axe, was handling it pretty well. I mean I’ve seen those guys dragged off kicking and screaming by two or three security guards.

  So I said, “Sorry you got sacked.”

  Bad move. I guess an older guy getting pity from some stupid kid with a bike was embarrassing.

  “What do you know about it?” he shouted. He looked so pissed, I backed up like he was going to bite me. He stepped toward me, maybe figuring I’d be as easy to stomp on as the vest, and he wouldn’t have to wear me afterwards.

  I’d like to say he was going to get his butt kicked. After all, he was thin as a scarecrow and I’d taken all these self-defense courses, but I’d never been in a fight, and all of a sudden I forgot everything. So, really, I was the one with the ass about to be kicked.

  That is, until the girl with the hip-huggers shouted “Ranker!” like she was yelling at a bad dog. He responded like a dog, too, furrowing his brow, lowering his shoulders, and panting.

  She, meanwhile, looked at me, mortified. “I’m sorry. He’s my brother. There’s something wrong with him. He’s not good with people.”

  I started to say, “It’s okay,” but Ranker shook his head.

  “Nothing wrong with me,” he said. “People, people suck. Stupid people. People.”

  He kept saying “people” like someone invisible was using his voice to scratch-jam, so it was easy to see what his sister meant. There really was something wrong with him. And his expression wasn’t as angry as his voice. It was dull, what they call robotic, and his eyes, like his sister’s, were partly closed. Only on him, it didn’t look sexy.

  It was pretty creepy.

  “Ranker,” she commanded, “say you’re sorry.”

  Ranker stopped moving and looked at his feet.

  “Sue!” he said, but Sue glared at him like she was going to smack him with a rolled up newspaper.

  He said “sorry” to his sneakers, like he was apologizing to them for letting them get so ratty, but then he looked at me, said “sorry” again, and looked away real quick.

  Then the heavy guy with the glasses started talking.

  “He worked six months, fifty hours a week for seven bucks an hour, and they fire him. No notice. May, the new girl they hired last week? She makes assistant manager.”

  I had no idea what it meant to earn seven dollars an hour. I had no idea what it was like to earn anything. Team Jaiden has me on an allowance, so I save for DVDs or games sometimes, but that’s about it. Still, I figured from the way the heavy guy said it that it wasn’t very much.

  Thinking back, this was another opportunity for me to just nod and go back to my whole running-away thing, but at the time that seemed rude, so instead I said, “Really? That sucks. Why?”

  Ranker glanced up at me, then looked away again. “Because May smiles. She looks people right in the eye and says, ‘Can I help you?’ like she really believes she’s helping, like it makes her a good person to serve ‘hamburgers’ and ‘fries’ and ‘salads’ with ‘ranch dressing.’”

  He said it without making the quotes with his fingers the way some people do, but you could hear them, like every word in quotes was something he hated with all his guts.

  “She even knew the names of the regulars and remembered what they ordered. I didn’t even know there were regulars.”

  Ranker reminded me of Georgia, this woman who used to work the front desk at NECorp. She scowled constantly, so they canned her. Now there’s Bernadette, who smiles so much you want to puke. I preferred Georgia. With her, you knew where you stood, and if she ever did smile, you could believe it. Bernadette, who knows what she’s thinking? Could be a psycho killer.

  Still, I was thinking I could give poor Ranker a few pointers.

  “Remembering people is just a trick,” I said. “You pick something weird that reminds you of them, like if you think Mr. Smith has a nose like a cucumber, picture his face with a cucumber on it. And for the smile, well, can’t you just force yourself to smile? That’s supposed to work.”

  It was true. During “Smiling” Al’s brief tenure, I had to sit in on a couple of Customer Relations lectures where they explained the smiling thing. Apparently, if you smile a lot, you actually feel better. It’s like your hormones and stuff that cause your moods decide that if you’re going to look happy, you may as well feel happy.

  But Ranker shook his shaggy head. “Can’t do it. I tried, but I always look down. I can’t even to talk to someone long enough to find out what their name is.”

  “What happens when you try to smile?” I asked.

  “I can’t. I just can’t. Get it?”

  “Why should he? Why should he have to smile?” the third guy, the bruiser said.

  So they don’t fire you, I was about to say. But I felt funny, like I was missing the point, and they were all bigger than I was.

  “I told you,” Sue cut in. “There’s something wrong with him. He can’t read people’s feelings. It makes him short-circuit.”

  “That’s for sure.” the heavy guy said.

  It dawned on me that Ranker’s pals were kind of like Team Jaiden, with sister Sue taking Nancy’s part. The heavy guy was Jack Minger, trying to make people feel better, and Muscle Man was Bob, just repeating what everyone else said in different words as if it made some kind of difference. Which I think meant that Ranker was me.

  “Gotta be myself. Gotta be myself,” he said to himself. “But I need the mon
ey. Need the money…”

  Sue walked up to him and tried to calm him down, but he kept pulling away.

  “Gotta be myself, but I need the money…”

  It was kind of like one of those really short poems. A haiku? Only, I’m sure it didn’t have the right number of syllables.

  Now that everyone was getting so familiar in a really bad sort of way, I decided I really should get going. I’d taken a few steps away and was just starting to pick up steam when Sue screamed “Ranker!”

  I looked back in time to see Ranker running full tilt on those long, lanky legs of his, toward Herbert’s Burgers. Sue and the other two were running after him. He was fast though, and rounded the corner to the front of Herbert’s before they could catch him. They followed right along and disappeared inside.

  I stood there, staring, thinking, well, this can’t be good. What was Ranker going to do? Punch out the manager who fired him and get arrested? Punch out May and get arrested? Would May still be smiling when they hauled her into the ambulance?

  Clearly I should have kept going, but it was kind of like watching a car wreck. From where I stood, the only thing I could make out was half a brick wall, so I took a few steps closer, trying to get a view of what was going on inside.

  By the time I could see through the window, Ranker, Sue, and their two friends were already running out, even faster than they ran in. And speaking of smiling? All four had goofy grins on their faces. Ranker held something big in his hands, but I couldn’t make out what it was. It couldn’t have been too heavy, because it wasn’t slowing him down much.

  Sue was screaming, “Run! Run! Run!” as she laughed.

  When Ranker saw me, he headed my way. Around then I noticed what was in his hands.

  It was Herbert.

  Actually, it was one of the plastic statues that sits on the counters of all Herbert’s Burgers. Ugliest damn thing. The franchise founder, who may or may not have been named Herbert, apparently hadn’t heard about branding, because he kept the same stupid design he started with back when he couldn’t afford to pay for one. It looked like a five-year-old made it. It was this guy, with no neck and a spatula, wearing what I guess was supposed to be a chef’s outfit, only his white hat was shaped more like a fire chief’s hat.

  Ranker ran at me, carrying this two-foot statue. And me, like a total idiot, stood there long enough for him to shove it into my arms. There I was, staring into these two grotesque, off-size eyes as Ranker, Sue, and their pals zipped past me.

  Then someone else ran out of the restaurant. At first I thought he was a manager, then I realized Herbert’s Burgers managers don’t generally pack sidearms. It was a policeman. Running. At me. And this wasn’t one of those donut-eating, overweight types. He was young, fit, and fast.

  The smart thing would have been to say, “Hey, officer, I had nothing to do with this. Here, take Herbert, return him home. I hope he doesn’t suffer any trauma.” But of course that’s not what I did.

  Can you guess what I did do?

  That’s right. I freaked and ran.

  6

  RUNNING UP THE FLAGPOLE

  “Hold it!” the police officer shouted. He didn’t sound unfriendly, just demanding.

  But I didn’t listen, I just kept running, cradling Herbert. You might think this is a pretty radical move for a kid raised by a corporation who has never been in trouble with the law, but really, it had nothing to do with that. The thing is, when someone’s running after you, running is a very natural thing, almost like not smiling when you have to stand behind a cash register all day. I think it’s part of what they call the flight or fight instinct.

  Team Ranker dove into their crappy car. They were still laughing, but the cheery sound was fading, like it was dawning on them, as a group, that maybe it wasn’t so funny. They fired the engine up, tires squealing against cracked asphalt, the car fishtailing as they headed for the road.

  You’d think any police officer worth his salt would give up on me, get into his car, and go after the real crooks, but not this guy. As they peeled out, he did one of those quick stops, where your feet hop side to side to slow you down. But then he picked up speed again and kept chasing me. Why? Probably because I was holding the statue, his first priority being to retrieve the kidnap victim.

  This didn’t dawn on me for about twenty yards. I was too busy running and being a little pleased that all the time I’d spent in the gym was paying off. I won’t kid you. I wasn’t losing him, but he wasn’t gaining either. I heard him talking into his cell phone, or radio, calling in about the speeding car, and that probably slowed him down a bit.

  About this time, I started realizing it was the statue he wanted, not me. Which meant, if I dropped it, he’d leave me alone, right? The only problem—how to drop it? I couldn’t slow down, exactly, or he’d have me, so I sort of lowered it and let it tumble out of my arms, down to the asphalt.

  Bad move.

  CRACK!

  I don’t think you could make a cheaper statue if you tried. It shattered like an egg full of plaster. Herbert-chunks and Herbert-dust flew everywhere.

  With Herbert now a big white splotch on the asphalt, the cop kept chasing me.

  Like I said, this was a big wide space without anyplace to hide. I wasn’t worried he was going to shoot at me, not much, anyway, but if he had decided, hey, I’m going to put a cap in this kid’s ass, he would’ve have had a nice clear shot.

  A row of stores was coming up. Most were open, but I could just picture what would happen if I dove into one. Everyone inside would turn to look at the crazy guy bursting through the doors. Even if I did find a place to hide, they’d probably just all point at it when the cop came in.

  A chain-link fence ran along the edge of the parking lot and disappeared behind the stores, so I headed for that. Beyond it were the woods, the place I was planning to run and hide anyway. If I could make it into the woods, I might be able to lose the cop.

  Lose the cop—now I was thinking like an outlaw. That’s a long way from ordering my breakfast with the home fries just how I like them. Part of me figured, well, that’s the deal if you want to be your own man in these mean streets. Mean parking lot, anyway. The other part of me, the cold and scared part, remembered exactly how good those home fries tasted.

  On the lighter side, I wasn’t thinking about Jenny very much. Except maybe about how if I got caught and she saw my picture on the front page of the paper, I would die. Because, you know, that’s where it’d be. Teen Inc., Juvenile Delinq or something like that. So, okay, yeah, maybe that thought made me run a little faster.

  The backs of the stores had floodlights that shone on the fence, but past the fence, where the woods started, it was like a dark wall had been put up. Now I had to get over the fence.

  The actual climbing wouldn’t be a problem, but the top was covered with coiled barbed wire, which made me wonder what it was keeping out. Raccoons, maybe, that might get at the trash, but what raccoons needed barbed wire to stop them?

  Fortunately, I’d seen enough escape scenes to know what to do. As I ran, I yanked off my hoodie. With it in one hand, I climbed the fence. At the top, I used it to cover the barbed wire. Cool, huh? Some may call us film geeks, but there’s actually useful information to be had in medialand.

  Climbing over the sweatshirt was slow, and I was only about halfway over when the cop appeared. I was on the edge, about to drop into that darkness when he saw me. He did another of those tap-dancing stops and shouted, “Get down from there, now!”

  I froze. This was kind of it. I could still let him catch me, call it a day, and go back and face the music. After all, I hadn’t done anything wrong. Except for the running. But would that matter? Wouldn’t I still get in the papers?

  A light shone on my hand. He’d pulled out a flashlight from his belt (those guys are equipped like Batman).

  “Give it up. Guy last week climbed over one of those things and sliced his leg so badly they had to amputate,” he said. “Don�
��t be stupid.”

  I didn’t believe him. They can sew whole legs back on. How could a cut make you lose your leg? He was playing me for an idiot. Which made sense, since who else but an idiot kid would be running around with a stolen statue of Herbert? Still, I felt insulted.

  I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I like to think I was really going to run for it, but I slipped and tumbled, down into the dark, on the wetland side. I felt my arm catch one of the razor wires. There was a pinch, followed by an almost painless slicing feeling, then another pinch. A second later, I was more worried about the ankle I’d landed on, which felt twisted, and the leaves and twigs I was eating.

  The cop came running up. My back was to him as he shone the light through the fence links. “You all right in there?”

  He sounded concerned, so I answered. “I hurt my ankle and I think I cut my arm.”

  Actually, I knew I’d cut my arm. It was hurting more and more. When I touched it, I felt wet blood through the torn sleeve.

  The cop eyed the fence. You could tell from his face there was no way he was going to try to climb it.

  “Wait right there. I’ll find a way over,” he said.

  The second he was gone, I stood up, slipping a little on the wet leaves. When I put pressure on my ankle, it started beating like it had its own heart. Worse, I felt a stream of blood running down my arm, across the back of my hand, and along one of my fingers.

  I may have been in shock. My whole body went into robot mode, like it could only remember the last command from my brain, which was, run. So I stumbled on.

  After a few yards, I heard what at first I thought was leaves rustling in the wind, but it wasn’t windy. Then I realized leaves didn’t gurgle. There was running water out in the dark somewhere. As I took a few more wincing steps, my eyes began to adjust. A half moon rose in a clear sky, giving off enough of that freaky blue light for me to make out the edges of trees, the ground, and water.