Leverage

by Joshua C. Cohen

  Gross, I think, knowing Cindy’s thinking the same thing about my face.

  “Hey, man, we’re having a party at Studblatz’s place this weekend,” Scott says. “We’re hazing the JV players before the girls come over, so you gotta be there.”

  “We should be hazing him,” Studblatz grunts, pointing the corner of his chocolate milk carton toward me. I take a bite of my mush and replay drilling him into the turf.

  “We don’t haze starters.” Scott shakes his head and then claps his hand on my shoulder. “Especially star starters.”

  “He’s new to the team,” Studblatz counters. A bit of gristle tips off his lower lip and back onto his plate. Red boils, big as snails, fester from his hairline down into the collar of his jersey shirt. “He should be initiated.” Studblatz stabs at his plate of food with his spork to make the point.

  “He’s only new because they stuck him in that zoo at Lincoln before Coach Brigs rescued him. It’s not like he’s new to football. He isn’t getting hazed and he doesn’t have to get initiated if he doesn’t want,” Scott says. “But he does have to come to the party. No excuses.”

  Tom Jankowski and Mike Studblatz don’t look too convinced. But they go back to shoveling food.

  “Hey, Tommy, you find that thing I wanted you to get?” Scott asks, changing subjects. “The critter?”

  Tom Jankowski stops eating and stares dully until his brain kicks in behind his eyes. “Yeah, I got it,” he answers. “Caught it yesterday. Kept it out in the sun so it’s starting to get nice and ripe.”

  “Good boy,” Scott says.

  “What are you talking about?” Cindy asks.

  “Nothing you need to worry your pretty little head over, darling.” Scott winks at her. Wish I even thought to wink at her—not that I would because she’d probably slap me—but just to even attempt it puts Scott way beyond the rest of us.

  “That means they’re up to no good,” Cindy tells me. “Boys, boys, boys,” she tsks.

  Scott stands up, retrieving his long legs out from under the table. Studblatz, Jankowski, Cindy, and the other girl I never met all follow him.

  “You coming?” Scott asks, waiting for me to get up.

  I shake my head no, pointing to my plate still full of food. Scott shrugs. “Okay, see you at practice.”

  They move as a group, and Scott taps fists with a couple of JV and low-rung varsity grunts at different tables before leading his entourage out of the lunchroom. Watching them exit takes my eyes past the goth group again, all studying me like I just crawled out of a hole, which for them might actually be a bonus in my favor. Mohawk girl’s mouth moves, talking to one of the others, but her eyes stay on me. Safety-pin-in-her-cheek girl nods back while observing me like she really wishes she had binoculars because the beast is eating his kill and that’s a rare sight during safari. The two guys with them, dressed in long black coats even though it’s about eighty-five degrees in the lunchroom, twist around to watch me, see I’m looking at them, and turn away. I dig into my food, wrapping an arm protectively around my tray, letting hair fall over my face, trying my best to create a curtain.

  About a minute later, one of the goth girls sits down across from me holding a bag of chips and an armful of books. Her skin is baby-powder white like her friends’, and her cheeks are flawless and I wonder if she understands the gift she’s been handed. Heavy mascara and black eyeliner circle pale blue eyes. She dyes her hair jet-black but the blond roots are showing. For a second, I think she looks familiar, but I get distracted by her ears, each of which has about fifty-seven piercings. As she speaks, a glint of metal piercing her tongue causes a slight lisp. Makes me wonder how she eats. Or kisses.

  “Kurt?” she asks, using my name like she knows me. Those blue eyes lock on mine, never drifting to my scars, not even for a moment. I nod at the question and duck my head. “Kurt.” She repeats my name. “You don’t remember me.” She reaches up and pulls her hair back as if that somehow will explain everything.

  “It’s Christina,” she says. “Tina. I was at Meadow’s House when you were there. Well, only for a few months, thank God, before they transferred me. On the girls’ side. Well ... duh, of course on the girls’ side. I mean, why would I’ve been . . .”

  Meadow’s House.

  The name reaches out and clutches my throat and I can’t breathe. It trips off her tongue—metal piercing clacking against her teeth as she pronounces it—and makes me ill. I push my plate away. Kids came and went from Meadow’s House. The lucky ones were adopted. Others, like me and Lamar, just got stuck. Crud Bucket ran the boys’ wing. He owned it and he owned every boy that passed through it. When the men in coats and ties asked me to tell them exactly what happened, I started from the beginning and didn’t leave out a single thing Crud Bucket did to me and Lamar. I couldn’t forget if I tried.

  But no one at Oregrove is supposed to know about Meadow’s House. No one. They told me that. No one will know about my past. They promised!

  “I duh-duh-don’t know you.” I push the words out.

  “I was there,” she says, her mouth rising at the corners. “I remember you, Kurtis. I remember your friend,” she says. “I couldn’t believe what they said happened on the boys’ side—”

  “Nuh-nuh-nuh-nothing happened,” I say, unable to meet her eyes. “Go buh-buh-buh-back to your friends,” I tell her. “We duh-duh-don’t know each other. I duh-duh-duh-don’t know yuh-yuh-you.” I press down on the table to get my legs out from under the bench. I rise up, getting bigger, towering over the little goth girl pouting up at me with confusion on her milky face. She’s scrawny. Almost as scrawny as me and Lamar back then. Bad thoughts surface like swamp gas and I need to escape, to hustle to the weight room and start stacking plates and heave some pig iron until my memory fails—or my body does. Staring down at this girl, I want to grow even bigger, reassure myself that no one will ever hurt me like that again.

  9

  DANNY

  First thing hits all of us is the smell.

  A sickly sweet odor creeps up our nostrils; the type you whiff when driving past a crushed dog or pulpy raccoon on the side of the road, flies buzzing all over the bloated fur and gore. The larger locker-room area usually smells bad but not this bad. We have it all to ourselves since our team works longer and harder than any of the other sports and by the time we finish, everyone else has gone home. Coach Nelson made the right call, leaving through the front of the gym and sparing himself the whiff of death. As we head toward our team locker room, built off from the main room locker room, the stench only gets stronger.

  “Damn, Paul.” Fisher coughs. “You wanna start using deodorant or showering or something? You’re killing me here.”

  “Whatever it is, Fish,” Paul answers, “it must’ve crawled out your ass.”

  “It’s worse than that practice when Fisher ate only CornNuts for breakfast and lunch,” Gradley says, waving his hand in front of his face. “Fisher, you been eating CornNuts again?”

  Ronnie Gunderson, unlucky enough to reach our team locker room first, flicks the light switch and squeals—yeah, squeals—as he reels backward out of the room.

  “Yuck!”

  Ronnie—not to overstate things—is a tad sensitive, being a youth-camp Christian and all. One more reason I’m not jazzed about being mistaken for him, which happens a lot. I mean, besides being even smaller than me, Ronnie is, like, fragile—almost dainty. He never swears, either, which I don’t trust. None of it would bug me that much if people didn’t accidentally call me by his name and vice versa. Then, again, he bugs Fisher way more than he does me and no one confuses them.

  “What’s your problem, fairy?” Vance Fisher snaps as Ronnie backs into him. Fisher’s face, like the rest of ours, is scrunched up against the smell. Vance pushes Ronnie out of the way and then stops in the middle of the team-room doorway like he’s hit a glass wall. Curiosity drives the rest of us to push in past Fisher.

  A dead squirrel, its belly split open and
its guts hanging out, is nailed into the center of Bruce’s locker. A scrawled note, smudged with crimson streaks and pasted below the body, reads WAIT ROOM IS OURS!!!

  The squirrel’s head is cut off and wedged into the middle air vent of Bruce’s locker. Someone’s also taken the trouble to smear squirrel guts across all of our lockers, making sure to wipe the goo over our locker dials so we’ll have to touch it while spinning our combinations.

  “Gross.” Paul sighs, then spits into the wastebasket.

  “Is there a waiting room in the school I didn’t know about?” Vance snickers. “Dumb fucks can’t even spell.”

  “Gee, I wonder who did this?” Bruce grumbles. He looks grim, as if he’s just been told his shiny, new senior year is going to suck.

  “Just a little varmint, fellas,” Fisher says. He walks over to the squirrel and with his bare hands yanks the thing off the nail. It sounds like a shirt tearing. Then he pinches the decapitated head with his fingers and pries it out of the locker vent. He goes over to the wastebasket and tosses in the remains, surprising me with how he handles the situation. “That the best those goons can do?” he asks. “Shoot, this ain’t nothin’ compared to deer season. You field-dress a twelve-point buck sometime and that makes this look like someone sneezed on your sleeve.” Fisher gives us his goofiest grin. “Ronnie,” he says, “go make your frosh ass useful and get a heap of paper towels, wet them, and pump the hand soap on them. We’ll have these lockers cleaned up in two minutes.”

  Ronnie does as he’s told while the rest of us just stand there scratching ourselves, stuck until the locker dials get cleaned up. Bruce starts pacing a small circle in front of the bench, softly bumping his fisted knuckles against each other. “We ain’t letting ’em get away with this,” Bruce says. Something’s churning inside him. The muscles of his neck, arms, and back clench into a hard shell. “No way I’m letting these wads think they can get away with this.”

  “Damn straight,” Gradley agrees.

  “We got to tell someone,” Pete Delray, the other freshman, says. Bruce turns to him with a look of disgust.

  “You go ahead and tell someone, Pete, and get back to me when they decide to do something,” Bruce grouses. “School ain’t gonna do shit to those guys.”

  “But—”

  “No, we take care of this by ourselves,” Bruce speaks over Pete’s protest. “They think they’re untouchable—especially Miller, Jankowski, and Studblatz. Well, we ain’t a bunch of pansy cross-country runners. They’re going to find that out.”

  “I’m liking what I hear,” Fisher says, the only one of us who seems to be enjoying himself at the moment.

  Ronnie Gunderson looks like he wants to disagree but Bruce holds a finger up to him, signaling not now.

  “Okay, guys,” Bruce says. “It’s payback time.” He reaches into his gym bag and pulls out his almost empty water bottle, upends it into his mouth, glugs down its remnants, and then slams it down onto the bench. “Who’s got to piss?” he asks, his eyes burning with a fevered look I’ve never seen on him. He rattles the empty bottle. “Well, fill’er up.”

  Because we’ve been sweating our asses off for the last three hours, no one’s got a lot to contribute to Bruce’s bottle until it’s Fisher’s turn. Vance Fisher takes Bruce’s bottle into the toilet stall and tops it off. Then he calls for another.

  “Come on, guys. I’m flowing here,” Fisher yells from the stall. “Hook me up!”

  “Where’s he put it?” Larry Menderson asks.

  “It’s all that soda he drinks,” Bruce says. “You’re gonna rot your teeth, Fisher.”

  “This isn’t right,” Ronnie protests.

  “Relax, frosh,” Fisher says over the sounds of his stream. “Baby Jesus ain’t gonna cry just because we’re pissing in a water bottle. Check your Bible. It’s not like we’re breaking a commandment. You ain’t gonna burn in hell.”

  “Pete, give Fisher your water bottle,” Bruce says.

  “Hurry, guys,” Vance calls again.

  “Why mine?” Pete whines.

  “ ’ Cause you’re a freshman.”

  “So is Ronnie,” Pete answers.

  “Ronnie’s too busy saying prayers for all our lost souls,” Bruce says, then slaps Pete’s shoulder. “Come on, man. Do it for the team.”

  Pete finally sacrifices his water bottle for the good of the counterstrike. By the time we clean up our lockers, dress, pee, and walk down the long basement hall toward the varsity football locker room, it’s real late and nobody should be around except maybe a janitor.

  Since they’re freshmen, we let Ronnie and Pete stay outside in the hallway as lookouts. Bruce tells them to whistle real loud if they see anyone approaching and then hightail it out of there. Bruce leads the way in to the enemy lockers, shaking the pee bottle like it’s a protein drink needing mixing.

  “Okay, dickheads,” he whispers to the empty locker room. “Time for a little justice.”

  We move in a clump, afraid and excited. If anyone catches us in here, we’re dead. Bruce makes a V with his index and middle finger, and brings it up to his eyeballs, then points the V out to the surrounding locker room. Fisher, the deer hunter in our group, nods his understanding.

  “Fan out, guys,” Fisher translates. “Keep your eyes open for the captains’ lockers.” The skinny junior, lanky as a scarecrow, with a gap-toothed grin and crooked nose, devours the whole experience like candy. Usually I think of Fisher as a screw-off, with no plans after graduation other than opening a bait-and-tackle shop or maybe joining the marines like his older brother, on the condition they let him get high and sleep late. But right now, hunting down lockers with bottles of piss, Fisher impresses me.

  Unlike Fisher, Bruce doesn’t look excited or pleased, just angry. He’s been fuming ever since we found the squirrel. No one’s talking to him other than Fisher, his mission cocommander.

  The lockers in the varsity room are triple size and each has a glossy label with a player’s name and jersey number stenciled across it. This makes our mission easier. Me and Paul, too scared to wander off alone, stay together and find Jankowski’s locker at the same time.

  “Over here,” I stage-whisper. Paul punches me in the shoulder.

  “Shhhhhh,” he says, and puts a finger to his lips. Bruce rounds the corner, shaking his bottle like mad, practically walking over me to reach the target. He hops up on the long bench running between the rows of lockers. He pulls open the spout on his squeeze bottle. Without a second’s hesitation, he aims the spout up into the top vent of the locker and crunches hard on the plastic with both hands.

  Phhhhthththththththththt . . . The bottle sprays up into the locker vent, its contents disappearing on the other side, unseen.

  “See how you like it now, bastard,” Bruce hisses. He seems to be getting angrier and angrier as he does it. The bottle gurgles and he tips it at a steeper angle, squeezing again.

  Phhhhthththththththththt . . .

  “Studblatz’s is over here,” Gradley calls softly from the next row. Bruce hops down off the bench and moves like a minitank, pushing past us to get to the next locker. He steps up on the bench and presses the spout up into Studblatz’s vent.

  Phhhththththththththt . . . shake, shake, shake ... Phhhththththththththth.

  “Refill,” Bruce calls out. Fisher is there, handing over Pete’s water bottle like it’s an ammunition clip for a depleted machine gun.

  Phhhthththththhtthth . . .

  “Found Miller’s,” Menderson calls out.

  Bruce finishes the rest of the second bottle, upending it, through the vent slit in Scott Miller’s locker. It feels good watching piss spray into the quarterback’s locker. I bet that cross-country runner he’d been harassing would love to be here watching. I think we’re done but Bruce pulls out a baggie from his pocket.

  “The gift that keeps on giving.” Bruce smirks as he pulls the mushy squirrel guts and pelt out of the baggie and squeezes it as best he can through the vent. It smells b
ad and I lift my forearm to press against my nose.

  “Shit, dude,” Gradley hisses. “Now they’ll know for sure it’s us.”

  “What are they gonna do?” Bruce asks him, and I see he’s challenging all of us. “They gonna cry that we didn’t play fair? That we used their own squirrel guts against them? They gonna cry to their coach? Screw ’em.”

  “You just shafted us,” Paul says, and shakes his head.

  “Relax,” Bruce says, stubborn. No way he’s admitting he went too far.

  We hear a high piercing whistle. It’s either Pete or Ronnie.

  “Go, go, go . . .”

  We scramble around the benches, banging shins on the planks of pine and slamming shoulders on the thin metal corners of the lockers.

  “Come on, come on.... Go, go, go.”

  Paul leads the way, shoving the door open, and we pile out into the basement hallway, expecting ... the whole football team? A group of teachers? Cops?

  Pete and Ronnie stand in the deserted hallway, eyes big as a baby Pokémon’s.

  “What?!” Gradley asks.

  “Janitor down at the end of the hall, but he went into the boiler room,” Pete whispers. That’s enough for us. We sprint down the hall in the opposite direction, our sneakers squeaking against the smooth cement floors and the thighs of our jeans vvvrrrping with each stride.

  Upstairs, Bruce stops us.

  “Okay, guys. Wait!” he says. “We can’t all leave in a big group. Too suspicious. Go to your lockers or hang out for a sec.”

  “Yeah, smart,” Fisher declares.

  “And not a word of this to anyone. I mean, anyone,” Bruce cautions. “No matter what, just play stupid.”

  “Paul’s got that covered,” Fisher says. Paul shoves him.

  “The squirrel’s fair game,” Bruce continues, still pleading his case, “but the piss will send them over, so don’t say anything.”