by Jaime Clarke
Eventually Warren changed tack and went after Hands, whom he spotted ducking inside Roger and Assburn’s house. Warren kicked in the front door, calling out Hands’s name in anger. Roger and Assburn and Hands jumped in surprise, Roger pushing Mr. Baker—whose hands had been amateurishly tied with rope, his mouth sealed with duct tape—quickly up the stairs, Assburn following. Warren exited just as quickly, convincing himself he hadn’t seen what he’d seen so when asked, he would say he knew nothing about it.
Roger threw Mr. Baker facedown on a bed in an empty room, instructing Assburn to close the blinds. Mr. Baker’s initial protest had been reduced to grunts and moans. Assburn watched while Roger wound the tape around Mr. Baker’s ankles.
Roger had enlisted his help during breakfast. He warned Assburn not to tell Hands, who promised he wouldn’t. Everyone in the dining hall looked out the window in disbelief as Mr. Baker’s truck cruised down Regis Street. A beat passed before Hands stood, knowing he had to do something, not wanting Figs to reach Mr. Baker first. Roger followed, pointing at Assburn on his way out the door.
The selection emboldened Assburn, lifting his wilted spirits. He had all but resigned himself to being a pariah at Randolph. His attempts to remake his reputation had failed, and he knew that once senior year started, there would be little room for maneuvering. But then Roger anointed him. He followed Roger to 1959 Regis Street, escorted into the upper echelons, or so he imagined. Even Quinn would have to accept him now, he supposed, which was a relief, since Assburn had destroyed Senator Quinn’s pen out near the Grove, demolishing the emblem of his shame with a large, flat rock.
Assburn was so enamored of his elevation that he could not impartially judge whether holding Mr. Baker down while Roger tied Mr. Baker’s hands behind his back was a building block to respectability or not. The point was he’d been called into action and he’d served. Not even Mr. Baker’s screams and calls for help could diminish the merit Assburn was earning.
Hands knocked on the bedroom door and entered, surveying the landscape as Mr. Baker wriggled on the bed. “What’s the plan?” he asked.
“You tell me,” Roger said.
A moment passed and no one said anything, the three standing around the bed, staring at its occupant. “I have to think,” Hands said.
The clouds rolled in as Warren straggled out past the Grove. He expected to find Axia hiding out, on the run from Hands and Roger and the others, remembering what she’d said the night before about “wandering some more.” He’d been delighted when Axia reappeared downstairs, wanting to go for a walk, the poker game having dissolved into boastful card tricks. The night was muggy and rife with desert insects, but Warren refrained from complaining, influenced by Axia’s cool. They talked about nothing in particular, mostly about how stressed out everyone seemed. They looped around Garden Lakes Parkway, cutting east to tramp through the undeveloped land. Warren asked if Axia was interested in moving to Phoenix, offering up the spare room at his house (he was convinced his parents would not mind). She laughed and told him it was the second such offer she’d received. Warren’s ears burned when she told him of the guest house next door to Figs.
“It’s sweet,” she said, “but I don’t think I’ll be moving to Phoenix.”
“Why not?”
Axia answered with a shrug and a smile, and Warren knew right then that she would not come to Phoenix; or if she did, she would not stay for long. He appreciated her not saying “It’s just better . . .” or “I could never . . .” His admiration for her tripled. She’d decided to live life a certain way, and with fidelity to that way of life. He was jealous of the clarity he imagined such a decision brought. You would do this, but not that. He imagined there were ups and downs—as with anything—but that there wasn’t as much uncertainty because you weren’t always entertaining all the possibilities, struggling to come out on top. He thought about how unambitious he was before enrolling at Randolph Prep, and he shuddered at how he’d been infected.
Warren’s anxiety dwindled as they walked well into the early-morning hours. Cool air rushed through the quiet development as they retired to their houses, and as Warren said good night, he pledged a transformation similar to Axia’s. He would ask for her help and guidance, and wherever Axia ended up in the world, they would share this bond.
Now, as he searched for Axia, lightning crackled overhead, thunder booming around Warren as he continued south, fighting the moist air that tried to blow him backward. He didn’t know for sure that he was traveling in a straight line, but he intuited that he was moving in the right direction. He’d seek out the family of olive farmers if need be. Maybe she had returned to them. If not, maybe they knew something about where she might’ve gone. Warren took refuge behind an outcropping. Sheets of hot rain blew across the desert, the ground wet with puddles, deepening until they ran together. He closed his eyes, letting the rain soak through his clothes, imagining a misty curtain parting to reveal Axia.
He opened his eyes, disappointed.
Hands crouched on the end of the bed in the room adjoining the one where Mr. Baker was imprisoned, listening to the monsoon as it rapped against the side of the house. The sky outside his window was dark gray, matching his mood. Roger’s jumping Mr. Baker still seemed unreal. He took no comfort in telling himself that he probably couldn’t have stopped it. But he hadn’t tried, and he knew it would be his undoing. He replayed the morning in his mind, dreaming of a different outcome.
“What happened here?” Mr. Baker had asked.
Hands could hear his voice, whiny and small, telling Mr. Baker it was an accident.
“Doesn’t look like an accident,” Mr. Baker had maintained. He’d inspected the precision with which the panels had been ripped out.
“We were hoping to get a little more drywall.”
Mr. Baker didn’t hear the request, though, instead demanding to know where Mr. Malagon was. Hands wished for Figs’s presence right then, which doubled his regret. On the field or on the court, Hands relied on his instincts, which never failed him. If a defender twice his size bore down on him, or if he sensed he could intercept an errant pass, his mind and body moved at will. But to his chagrin, the gift was only physical. Mr. Baker’s questions begged for some mental and verbal dexterity he didn’t possess. He worshipped this quality in Figs, but confessing this to Figs would not imbue Hands with the gift, so what was the point? Figs had enough people wrapped around his finger; Hands refused to become another. The day before, when Figs was on the ropes, Hands had stayed in the shadows during the chanting, hiding behind Roger and Assburn and the others, but the release had been as euphoric as if he’d been leading the barrage. Finally, finally, Figs’s reputation had proved permeable. He didn’t really care about Figs’s lie, but he knew the ramifications of such a lie, and no matter what happened thereafter, Figs’s days at Randolph would be humbler.
“Seriously. Where is Mr. Malagon?” Mr. Baker had asked.
Roger had come out of nowhere, lunging. He and Mr. Baker fell to the ground, Roger overpowering his prey with stupefying quickness. Then Assburn appeared and the two strong-armed a dazed Mr. Baker into their house. Hands would have to convince the others that the abduction was Roger’s idea. He could count on Assburn to back up the assertion. Roger had lassoed Assburn as a henchman on his own; it would not be hard for Hands to sell his innocence to Assburn. He would offer Assburn the inclusion that everyone was determined to withhold from him. Assburn had walled himself off by wearing his desires so openly, Hands thought, so that the others made a game of denying Assburn acceptance. Regardless, Hands would make the first offer; he would promise Figs’s friendship too, though Hands knew that some rehabilitation of his own friendship with Figs would be required. The idea repulsed him—he’d never truly be friends with Figs again, and he questioned their friendship going all the way back to Julie Roseman. He’d granted Figs absolution, but had he meant it? His boarding the bus to Disneyland so long ago, before he learned about Figs’s betrayal, r
esonated as the last sunny moment of their friendship. And now rather than make a principled stand against Figs, Hands knew he’d have to fall back in line, too weak to withstand what he knew would be Figs’s manipulation of everything that happened at Garden Lakes.
The storm raged as Hands balanced two columns in his mind: those who would be on his side and those who wouldn’t. Thunder echoed above. The cascade of air-conditioning falling on Hands’s shoulders trickled to nothing, the electricity flowing through its veins cut off by the storm. The lights flickered and then went dark. He slipped downstairs, braced himself for the deluge, and then dashed from the house.
Reedy burst in, a wild look in his eyes, startling Roger from his lookout on the stairs. He had heard Hands leave and expected his quick return, wondering where he was going. Rain pooled under Reedy’s feet as he stood in the doorway.
“Shut the damn door,” Roger said gruffly, still freaked out by the sight of Reedy, his bald head slick with rain.
“Laird’s got a snake,” Reedy blurted out.
Roger eyed Reedy. “What do you mean he’s got a snake?”
Reedy poured it all out about how Laird had been lying down and about how a snake had crawled up in his bed, coiling on his chest. “They do it to get warm,” Reedy added. “Laird wanted me to get you. He wants your help to get it off him.”
“What does he want me to do about it?” Roger asked, though there was no way he wasn’t going to go, flattered that they’d thought of him in their moment of panic.
“I don’t know,” Reedy said. “He just said to get you. He said to hurry.”
Roger glanced up the stairs and thought to make an excuse, but because he didn’t yet know what would be done about Mr. Baker, he followed Reedy into the rain, splashing through the loch that had formed along Regis Street.
Assburn watched out the bedroom window as Roger followed Reedy to a house on Loyola Street. He’d heard muffled voices in the living room and wondered what was going on. He suspected he was being set up to take the fall for Mr. Baker, who was struggling facedown on the bed, his hands wound behind his back with duct tape. His suspicion had been bred when he saw Hands run out the front door toward the dining hall. It was near lunchtime, Assburn thought, but why hadn’t Hands asked if he wanted anything, or offered to relieve him of his command? Assburn sneaked downstairs. He flicked a light switch on and off. Nothing. He slid open the window above the kitchen sink to admit fresh air into the fetid house, but the steamy air did little to comfort him.
He momentarily mistook a loud bang for thunder, realizing his mistake when Mr. Baker bound down the stairs, his keys in hand, a small piece of duct tape still stuck to his cheek.
Roger tapped on Laird’s door. He could feel Reedy’s breath on his neck, but the sick feeling in his stomach trumped his annoyance. The door was opened cautiously by a soph wearing a look of panic. Roger was surprised to find the room packed with sophomores, a bald circle arranged around Laird, who lay stiffly in bed with his eyes closed. A coiled bulge under the covers rose and fell with Laird’s shallow breathing.
“You have to whisper,” Kerr said.
Roger trod carefully toward Laird, who opened his eyes. Reedy fell back, blending into the gallery.
“What is it?” Roger whispered. The air in the room was stagnant, fired by the mass of sweaty bodies.
Laird whispered something Roger couldn’t hear.
“What?” Roger asked, his voice threatening to rise out of a whisper.
A chorus of “Shh!” went around the room.
Laird rolled his eyes and whispered again.
“I can’t hear you,” Roger whispered.
“Maybe you should lean in,” Kerr whispered.
Roger kept his eye on the coil, listening for the telltale rattle that signaled the snake’s agitation. His breathing became measured, his heartbeat slowing. Roger bent down to Laird’s ear but shot upright when Kerr tapped him on the shoulder. “Be careful not to bump him,” Kerr whispered. Roger scowled, but Kerr didn’t notice. He bent down again, putting his ear next to Laird’s lips, the coil eye level now.
“If you rip the covers off, I’ll roll the opposite way,” Laird whispered in a halting voice.
Roger frowned. “It won’t work,” he mouthed.
Laird rolled his eyes again and took a deep breath, the snake rising under the sheets. Roger backed away, a look of terror on his face.
“What did he say?” Kerr asked in Roger’s ear.
Roger repeated the plan to Kerr in a hushed tone.
“I’ll help,” Kerr whispered. He went around to the other side of the bed and pantomimed that Roger should take a corner of the sheets.
Roger shook his head. “It won’t work!” he whispered loudly.
The room filled with shushes.
“On three,” Kerr whispered, grabbing the sheet in one hand. Roger gripped the other side. “One . . . two . . .”
Roger clenched the sheet tightly. A rivulet of sweat leaped off his forehead.
“Three!” Kerr yelled, whipping back the sheet. Roger tried to lift his arm, but the room spun away from him as he passed out from fear and stress and the heat, the coil of garden hose on Laird’s chest falling to the floor as the room erupted in laughter.
Lindy couldn’t believe his luck. He realized he’d have more time to operate than he’d ever dreamed as he witnessed first Hands and then Roger bolting out of the house, followed by Mr. Baker running for his truck, Assburn in step behind until Mr. Baker reached his truck and peeled out. Something was up, but he’d have to find out about it later. He knocked for good measure—it was possible someone was loafing in the house, staying out of the rain—but there was no answer. He slipped inside, leaving wet footsteps on the stairs.
The house was in some disarray. All the doors had been blown open, as if a tornado had roamed the halls. Panicked that either Hands or Assburn or Mr. Baker would return, Lindy pillaged Roger’s room with the efficiency of a burglar. It didn’t take him long to locate what he’d come for: The job journal was at sea in a drawer of unrolled socks. He plucked the booklet out and cleared a place on top of the dresser to write. He used the plunger end of his pen to trace over Roger’s handwriting. He practiced Roger’s disconnected capital printing, lines flaring on the Es and Fs, Ts that crossed with a dot, Rs that looked like Ps. He traced over a half page about corner beads and then clicked his pen, ready. He found a space in the margin and wrote, “Mr. Morgan is a fag,” the slur matching Roger’s handwriting perfectly. The famous episode about Roger transferring out of Mr. Morgan’s Advanced English class, complaining to Principal Breen that Mr. Morgan’s grading was too harsh, would complement the slur nicely.
Lindy tucked the job journal away in the top of Roger’s closet so he could easily find it again during the Open House. He started at what he thought was the sound of someone downstairs, but what he’d really heard was the deafening quiet: The rain had ceased pelting Garden Lakes, the gray clouds that had concealed sunlight rolling away, the winds blowing their last breath as the monsoon passed.
Some of us would remember inspecting the water damage to one of the sophomore houses on Loyola Street when we first heard the sirens that afternoon, others would remember eating lunch in the dining hall when the first traces of blue and red painted the air. Still others would conveniently forget the answer to the question. Our collective confusion would be a source of consternation for the administration as they spent the fall semester trying to sort out the details.
Your faithful columnist would prove to have the clearest memory of events, becoming invaluable as the police waded through the alibis and plots. Figs fingered Hands as the mastermind of Mr. Baker’s kidnapping, having heard about Hands’s involvement from Warren, but Hands had a rock-solid alibi. I’ll tell it to you as I told it to the cops: Hands was on the roof of the community center with yours truly, watching the storm gather through binoculars, when Roger attacked Mr. Baker. Hands’s alibi forced Mr. Baker to retract his positive ID
, landing the blame solely with Roger and Assburn, neither finding an ally among us.
The truth, of course, is that I had no account of Hands’s whereabouts at any time that day; and while I was averse to providing him with an alibi, Figs’s eagerness to sacrifice him to the police changed my mind. I admit to succumbing to the urge for revenge. The opportunity to do to Figs what he had done to me in denying me the friendships that I so desperately coveted, as he had Assburn, was not likely to present itself again, I knew. It had taken the help of my neighbor, Mr. Chandler, an alum, to gain me admittance to Randolph, and I recognized it as my last chance at any sort of equal footing, or at least at putting some distance between my peripatetic past and my future. All the shuttling between distant relatives after the gas leak exploded my childhood home in California and stole my parents away before I could know them, a life of transfer before I even understood what it meant. I was just the kid who lived on the wrong side of town, who hadn’t gone to any of the middle schools or junior highs the others did, who didn’t appear to have parents. But it wasn’t going to happen at Randolph, I knew by then. If he were being honest, Assburn had known it long before Garden Lakes too. All through life, people like Figs just decide. The American dream about upward mobility is a myth, save for the incremental movements of some under the watchful eyes of the few.
To my credit, I wavered. The police had separated us into groups—fellows pointing at one another as they spoke, sophomores shrugging or crying as the policemen accused everyone of everything—and it was by chance that Hands and I were cordoned off under the palm tree in the lake bed. Mr. Baker accompanied the police officers as they made the rounds, and when Mr. Baker laid eyes on Hands, he gesticulated wildly, saying, “There’s one!”
