by Lex Thomas
“Home? I thought your whole gang bailed on you.”
Will didn’t like hearing his situation put so bluntly, but he couldn’t deny that it was pretty much true.
“I’ve got a smaller place now.”
“The elevator?” Gates said. “You’re not going back there. That’s depressing.”
“How do you know where I…”
“You mentioned it last night.”
Will groaned softly. He didn’t remember doing that. What had he been thinking?
“Look,” Gates said. “I know we haven’t known each other long, but, I’m not really one for waiting, in general. We need someone like you, someone who knows this school.”
“You want me to be a Saint?”
“I guess we’re stuck with that name, huh?” Gates said. “Anyway, yeah, that’s what I’m saying. I think you should run with us in the food drop today.”
Just the thought of being on the quad again, in front of everyone, made Will’s hangover double in intensity.
“You don’t want me in your gang.”
“I do actually, that’s why I’m fuckin’ asking,” Gates said sharply. “We’re the new kids, there’s no hiding it. I can’t lead my people if I don’t know how things work, or if I don’t know who I can trust and who’s trying to hustle us in the market… I don’t know all that stuff. But you do.”
The picture was clear in Will’s head. He was seizing in the middle of the quad, everyone was laughing, and the Saints were walking away from him. It would happen all over again.
“I don’t get it,” Gates said when Will didn’t answer. “You don’t want forty pairs of eyes watching your back from now on? You don’t want to get your respect back? Walk out there with us and you could show all of them that they can’t keep you down.”
“I don’t run in drops anymore,” Will said, breaking eye contact.
Gates threw his Nalgene bottle onto the ground, spiking it like a football. Water sprayed up on the door of a neighboring cell. The bottle clattered on the hard floor. Will looked at Gates, confused.
“Dude, what’s your problem?” Will said, throwing up his hands.
“You’re epileptic and it sucks. I get it. I got an earful of it last night. But, you want to hide? That’s what you want to do about it? I know I’m hungover, and my head is fucking killing me, and maybe I’m out of line in saying this, but grow the fuck up. You get seizures. That’s your deal. You have to accept it.” He massaged his temples, clearly in pain. “I’m sorry I’m yelling, but… don’t you want someone there to help you up next time?”
Will stared at Gates. He couldn’t believe what he’d just said, but what surprised Will more was that it didn’t hurt so bad to hear. Everybody usually skirted around the issue of his epilepsy, or tried to make it out to be not that bad. That always bugged him. Nobody had talked to him so plainly about his problem since David.
“All right,” Will said.
“Yeah?” Gates said, his eyebrows rising high. “Fantastic!”
They shook hands, and Gates’s grip was strong.
“You’ll love it. We have a lot of fun,” Gates said.
“I get one of those rooms, right?”
Will remembered a time when he wished everybody in McKinley knew his name. Things change. Will’s head tingled. His sweat was cold. His stomach felt ready to erupt.
He stepped onto the quad with his new gang.
The quad quieted as more people became aware of Will walking with the Saints. Whispered conversations sprung up all around. There was Will, not a Loner, not a Scrap, but a Saint. He locked eyes with former Loners—Ritchie in the Skaters, Mort with the Freaks, they looked stunned. He scanned the Geeks for Lucy, but came up empty. It was almost a relief. He was more afraid to know what she thought than anyone else.
The Saints took their place against the wall where the Loners used to stand. Will was suddenly outside of himself, seeing what everyone on the quad was seeing. A desperate person throwing in with the new kids, who didn’t know any better.
Will glanced at Gates, looking for that same confidence and belief that got him to step foot out here, but Gates’s focus was on the quad, not Will. All of the sudden, Will’s logic was melting away. He wondered if he’d just been talked into something totally idiotic by a dude who didn’t really care if Will lived or died. Maybe Gates rattled off this kind of hype at everybody he came across.
Across the quad, he saw Bobby in front of the Freaks. Bobby mimed having a seizure. He went stiff as a board, then dropped to the ground, and flopped around. The blue-hairs around him laughed and pointed at Will. Colin and Mort were the only ones who didn’t. They covered their faces and turned away instead.
“Try breathing. It makes you look less like a corpse,” Gates said with a smile.
“Ha, right.”
Will breathed out in a long, anxious exhale. It made him feel a tiny bit better. He was with the Saints now, and he had to play it out and hope for the best. There was no backing out without looking like a bigger fool. Will looked up to the empty sky.
“When’s this damn thing gonna start already?” Will said.
A hubbub over by Varsity drew the attention of the quad away from Will. It was strange that they stood at the neighboring wall, rather than their usual post, across from the old Loners’ spot. Sam was strangling Terry on the ground. Varsity guys converged on Sam and pulled him off. They restrained him, and he thrashed in their grip, as Terry got back to his feet.
“That’s the last straw, Sam!” Terry shouted. “You’re done!”
“You can’t kick me out of Varsity!” Sam said. “I made Varsity!”
Terry ignored Sam and turned to face the entire school. “I want everybody to know, Varsity is heading in a new direction, and it’s away from Sam Howard.”
“You’re losers!” Sam said. “You all just made the worst decision of your life.”
Sam’s words lost their power in the wide open quad, with a wall of Varsity staring back at him, unmoved. Sam frantically rubbed his hands through his hair; he snapped his gaze up to the roofline.
It felt monumental to Will. Sam was officially alone. Gangless. Powerless. And Will had the Saints. In an instant, the tables had turned. His hangover nausea started to fade as Will’s heart pumped with excitement. He zeroed in on Sam’s face, which was defined by a new frantic quality. As soon as the food dropped, Will would rush Sam. He didn’t have a plan other than that he had a gang behind him now, and Sam couldn’t do what he did to Will last time. He felt an overwhelming craving to hear Sam cry in pain.
Will watched Sam’s eyes flit across the quad, looking for an angle, some way to right his situation. He heard the squelch of the guitar amp.
“We have an announcement.”
All heads looked up to see the man in the motorcycle helmet standing behind the razor wire fence.
“We’ve had a setback,” he said. “We were counting on a shipment, but the truck never arrived. We just got word that the driver was arrested and his load was confiscated. It’s… it’s not great news. Because of this setback, there will be no food today.”
Everyone flipped out. People started screaming at the man in the motorcycle helmet.
“Are they serious?!” Will said to Gates, but Gates didn’t look his way.
While everyone else shouted up at the roofline, Gates started walking across the quad.
“Where’s he going?” Will said to no one in particular.
“Settle down!” the man in the motorcycle helmet said, splaying his hands out. “We’re working on an alternate plan.…”
Will kept his eyes on Gates, fascinated. Something slid out from the sleeve of Gates’s jacket and he caught it by its black rubber handle. It was a hammer. Gates walked across the quad at a hurried pace. Will realized he was headed straight toward Sam, whose back was to Gates.
Gates raised his hammer up over his head and he struck Sam in the shoulder. Sam made a noise like a dog being kicked.
�
��Whoa,” Will said softly.
Sam struggled to get away, but Gates was faster. He swung his hammer into Sam’s kidney as he ran. Sam’s body crimped sideways, and he belly flopped onto the ground. Gates grabbed him by the hair and lifted him to his feet. Sam was moaning. He swayed and stumbled, and probably would have fallen if Gates wasn’t holding him up like a marionette. Varsity didn’t budge to help him; they stood firm on their earlier declaration. Sam was on his own.
“YOU!” the man in the motorcycle helmet said. He was pointing at Gates. “STOP THAT! STOP IT!”
People in the quad watched Gates jerk Sam around like a mutt with a steak. The angry shouting from above began to settle, until the only thing that could be heard were Sam’s desperate yelps for help.
Fowler slapped Will on the back. “New guy,” he said. “You want a piece of this action, right?” Fowler clutched a roll of brown packing tape in his hand, and started a hurried walk toward Gates and Sam.
Will ran to catch up with Fowler. He didn’t know what the hell this was about, but if it meant making Sam hurt, he was first in line. As Will got closer to Sam, he became acutely aware that he was putting himself in the spotlight again. All eyes would be on him. If there was a time to turn back, it was now. Will’s gaze traveled to the Geeks again. He knew whose face he was searching for, but he couldn’t find her. A few seconds later, Will and Fowler reached Gates’s side. Gates was wired. Sam flailed in his grip.
“Take his arms,” Gates said to Fowler and Will.
Fowler grabbed one of Sam’s arms. Sam twisted his head to look at Will. He seemed rattled, but still he looked at Will like Will was an ant. “Touch my arm, Thorpe, and I’ll beat you till you shit yourself again. I’ll kill you this time, I swear.”
Will grabbed Sam’s other arm and wrenched it. Sam grunted. Gates raised his eyebrows at Will, as if to say, “Fun, huh?”
Better than fun, it felt incredible. Sam was at his mercy. He twisted his arm more, and Sam’s cry of pain was melodic. He hoped Sam was scared. He wanted this to be a level of helplessness unlike anything Sam had ever known.
Fowler passed the packing tape roll to Gates, who let go of Sam’s yellow hair to peel off three feet of brown tape. Will looked up toward the roof where a group of five parents, all wearing scuba tanks and bandanas over their faces, had gathered with the motorcycle man. They shouted at Gates to stop.
“What, uh… What are we doing?” Will whispered to Gates.
“You said motorcycle man up there is Sam’s dad, right?” Gates said.
Oh, God. He didn’t remember telling him that. Will’s blood went cold. He felt Sam go rigid at Gates’s words.
“Yeah,” Will said. He’d never actually seen who Sam was talking to up there, but now didn’t seem like the time to split hairs. Sam looked up to the sky, and for the first time, Will saw the fear in his face that he’d been hunting for. Eyes opened so wide, they were nearly lidless. A tremor in his lip.
Sam got ahold of himself, put his angry face back on, and shouted at the crowd that stood on the sidelines. “You think any of you can stop me? You know what I’m capable of! Well, last year was nothing! I’ll make every one of you regret ever letting this happen if you don’t—”
Brown plastic tape muffled the rest of his words. Gates pulled it tight around Sam’s head until it was a plastic gag. He kept looping it around, holding Sam’s jaw shut, and layering tape around his mouth. That was enough to keep Sam quiet, but it wasn’t enough for Gates. He taped over Sam’s eyes, over his hair, he emptied the roll and turned Sam into a crinkled and shiny brown cellophane mummy, with patches of skin, and tufts of yellow hair poking through. His nostrils were left uncovered so he could still breathe. Sam’s attempts to keep talking through his tape gag were unintelligible blasts of diluted noise, like underwater shouts.
The quad was captivated. Will was dying to know what was going to happen just as much as they were. Gates looked up to the sky.
“Hey,” he said. “I’ve got your little boy.”
“We don’t know what you are talking about,” the motorcycle man’s muffled voice boomed. “Just let the kid go. This is uncalled for. We understand you’re upset, but this is only a temporary interruption, we have no intention of letting you go hungry.”
“Oh, thanks so much, really,” Gates said. “But you’re gonna have to do better than that, if you want to keep us locked up here like zoo animals. We’re done jumping when you say jump. You’re going to give me everything that I ask you for. Because I know that Sam here is your son.”
That idea hit the quad like a bomb. All eyes zeroed in on the man in the motorcycle helmet. The black face shield of his helmet revealed nothing. He didn’t move.
“Someone has been lying to you,” the man in the motorcycle helmet said.
“Really?” Gates said, swinging the hammer lazily.
“Yes,” the man said.
“Then you won’t mind if I give Sam’s face a little character.”
Gates flipped the hammer over in his hand, and struck Sam in the forehead with its claw teeth.
Will felt Sam’s whole body jolt and then sink against his grip. Sam made terrible grunts and yelps. Blood drizzled down from the twin triangular gouges above his left brow. It streamed over the folds and down the twists of tape that swaddled his face. He looked like a mail order jock that had been damaged in shipping.
The woman in the lilac motorcycle helmet yanked out the man’s microphone cord and plugged herself into the amp.
“Stop, please! Yes, he’s our son, Sam is our son. I’m beggi—” the woman said, before the man unplugged her and plugged himself back in.
There was an excruciating pause.
“What do you want?” the man said.
The crowd’s eyes switched to Gates now. So did Will’s. He had them in the palm of his hand, and he could ask for anything. The moment stretched.
“Pizza,” Gates replied.
The quad erupted with cheers and applause. Will marveled at Gates.
“And microwaves. You hear me? I want Kraft macaroni and cheese. Pop-Tarts. I don’t want canned beans, you’ll give us Frosted Flakes. The real kind. Waffles and whipped cream. Fresh meat we can grill. And grills!”
With every item Gates named the crowd’s cheers grew louder and more fervent. Just saying the names of those foods placed a sucking black hole in the belly of every kid on the quad.
“And porn. And video games,” he said.
Boys in the crowd hollered low.
“And raid every clothing store in this deserted town. Every closet. We want new clothes.”
Female cheers soared high. Gates looked around at the girls in the crowd and smiled. He might have winked at them too, but Will couldn’t see.
“What do you say, ladies, makeup? Bath products?”
The girls went a little crazy, like they were twelve again and at their first boy band concert. Gates beamed, soaking up every second of female adoration.
“And forty cases of liquor. Tequila. Bourbon. We’re gonna have a party!”
The quad went nuts. Will could see the whole range of reactions. Some thought the whole spectacle was hilarious, others lusted after Gates’s demands and relished the opportunity to stick it to the parents. But what seemed to get everyone in the spirit of things was that it was all at Sam Howard’s expense. Sam, who had hoarded everything for himself. Sam, who had terrorized everyone. Sam, who hated all of them.
“You hear that?” Will shouted into Sam’s taped-over ear. He wanted to make sure Sam knew it was him. “That’s how much they want you to pay. Nobody’s saving you.”
Sam’s head turned toward Will’s voice. Will couldn’t see his eyes, but he could feel his arm shaking. Will felt strong, in control.
“You’re going to give me what I want!” Gates shouted at the man on the roof. “You’re going to give my friend Will here what he wants. You’re going to give all of us what we want.”
There were shouts of joy. Will gave Gates a
surprised look.
“Will, tell Sam’s daddy what you want!” Gates shouted over the crowd. The shouts subsided.
The sudden wide broadcast of Will’s name, the full focus on him, was more than he thought he was signing on for. He was undeniably a part of this now, people wouldn’t think of this event without thinking of him, and what his answer was.
The crowd listened. Gates listened. The parents on the roof listened.
Will knew what he wanted. It was only one thing. But the idea of asking for it mortified him. He didn’t want to say. Not here, not where his face had been dragged through the dirt, not where they’d all seen him fail and would never forget it. Not while he held Sam’s arm. This was the worst time, worst place to say it. But, he needed them.
“Carbatrol. Extended release. Chewable if possible. Or Klonopin. And if not that than Lyrica. They’re—They’re epilepsy medications.”
Will received no cheers. He’d killed their fun. He’d called the cops on the party. He could feel Gates’s eyes on him more intensely than any others. It made the skin on his cheekbone prickle. He glanced over.
Gates nodded at him slowly. His expression had gone grim, his eyes sorrowful, but he thought there was respect there as well. Gates craned his head back up to the roof parents. He rose his hammer over Sam’s head again and froze it there.
“You heard us,” he said.
“You don’t understand,” the man shouted. His voice was an angry, distorted blast. “Our resources are limited until we get this truck situation resolved. What you’re asking is only going to make it harder. You have to be reasonable.”
Birds chirped in the distance.
“Have it all by next week, or I’ll cut off your son’s head.”
17
KIDS FROM ALL GANGS LINED THE HALLS ON both sides. It was like they’d come for a parade, but there was no confetti in the air here, no music, no street food. These kids had come for the chance to see Sam’s walk of shame as the Saints brought him back to the processing facility. Gates was just ahead of Will, and giving Sam shoves when he wasn’t walking fast enough. A few Saints walked ten feet in front of Sam so that he’d have nowhere to go if he tried to run. Not that he could see where he was going with tape over his eyes.
