Gentlemen

by Michael Northrop

  “Come on, boys,” Throckmorton said, extending his hand. Then he sort of cut ahead of the other guy so that he wouldn’t have to walk down the stairs with his back directly to us. That was what deputies were for, I figured.

  We kept quiet in the back of the police car. There was a layer of that special glass or plastic or whatever it was between the front and back seats. I wasn’t sure if they’d be able to hear us if we kept it low, but they might’ve had some kind of device or something, maybe a recorder, and I didn’t feel much like talking anyway.

  I just watched the town go by. How many times had I been driven down this same road, and why did it look different now? It was still early, but I’m sure a few people saw me back there when we blew through downtown. If even one person had, it’d be all over town by noon. My mom must’ve known already. They were probably already in my room, collecting my boots and stuff.

  The flashers weren’t on anymore, but we were doing seventy, easy. They’d turned the lights off as soon as we were in the backseat. It seemed a little backward to me, but I guess they were in more of a hurry to grab us than to get us anywhere. We pulled out and passed the bus, which was still parked on the side of the road, with the tires on one side cutting tracks into someone’s lawn. Dozens of eyes looked down as we went by, with exactly half as many mouths flapping. They’d be talking about this at the Tits for years.

  We rocketed by the sheriff’s office, so I knew we were headed for the State Police barracks over in Canterbridge. I sort of wondered how that worked, jurisdiction-wise. Bones was already there when they brought us down to the holding cells. There were four cells total, and we were the only guests. They allowed us each one phone call, just like on TV. I figured my mom already knew, so I asked if there was any way I could check my e-mail instead. There wasn’t, so I called my mom anyway. Four words for you: Not a good call. They put us each in our own cell, and the tall trooper I’d seen at the school stood straight across from us, arms folded. We could talk if we wanted, and he could listen.

  “Do you guys know what this is about?” said Bones. He was talking to us, but it was for the trooper’s benefit.

  “Give it a rest,” I said. What was the guy going to do, run out and tell them we were innocent? And Bones was a bad actor anyway.

  I think he was doing something else there, too, trying to get us all together on something, even if it was just bad acting. He wanted us all together, because I think he knew this little group was about to come apart.

  And he was right. The door at the far end opened and another trooper walked in. He stopped just a few steps in, just close enough to be heard.

  “All right, Benton,” he said, guessing wrong and looking at Mixer. “You’re up first.”

  25

  They tried Bones as an adult. It seemed like they’d been doing that to a lot of teens lately, but I guess that’s because the only cases you hear about are the real bad ones. But Bones was sixteen, almost seventeen, and he’d done the damage, so they tried him as an adult for attempted murder. Some people said it should’ve been assault instead, but I can’t say I disagreed with the charge.

  In fact, I’ll never be able to say I disagreed, because I testified against him. I’m on the record. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one of those nature shows on crocodiles, but they do this thing called a death roll. They grab hold of an animal with their teeth and just start spinning. They tear it all to hell. That’s pretty much how I rolled on Bones. It sort of seemed like piling on at the end, but I guess that’s the way people get put away.

  Mixer and me had the same lawyer. Mixer’s folks paid for most of him, but my mom chipped in. The guy was real slick. He wanted Mixer to talk, too, but Mixer wouldn’t testify against anyone. He refused to answer almost everything on the grounds that almost everything was “liable to incriminate” him. It’s called taking the fifth, or pleading the fifth maybe, I forget. Either way, Mixer spent most of a morning doing it.

  I could’ve done that, too. I mean, I’d never seen myself as the kind of guy who’d squeal. Yeah, Bones was out of control, but it was still Bones. I’d grown up with him. And there wasn’t really anything in it for me. I was a juvenile. I hadn’t swung the club, and no one was saying I had. There was a maximum they were going to be able to do to me, and that was already running up against the minimum people around here were going to accept.

  But I went ahead and testified anyway. I put it all down on paper for Throckmorton, and when he asked me if I wanted someone to read it off for me, I said, “Nah, I’ll do it.” And I took the stand and read it all out, while the lady sat there and typed it all on to skinny paper with that little machine.

  If you’ve never been in a courtroom, then it’s not what you’re thinking. Or it’s half what you’re thinking, but the other half is like Bingo night at the VFW. It’s a little cut-rate. The chairs for the audience aren’t folding chairs, but they’re just one step up from that. They’re made out of the same hollow metal and have vinyl pads for your back and butt. The floors are just floors, like at school. The jury box and the judge’s desk are made out of wood, but it’s just regular wood, like from a kitchen set.

  I wasn’t expecting marble thrones or anything, but it all looks heftier and nicer on TV. And the judge is pretty much always some really distinguished-looking guy on TV, but he was just this normal little dude. I would’ve pegged him for a dentist if it wasn’t for the robe, but even that looked at least half polyester.

  Anyway, the dentist was sitting above me and to the right when they swore me in. He seemed kind of bored, to be honest. Bones was sitting at a table out in front. He was staring daggers at me, because you can’t stare clubs. Mixer was looking down at the floor. Tommy was in the back, and he looked like he couldn’t believe any of this. My mom had her chin up, and she almost looked proud. I was thinking, Don’t be, Mom. It’s not like I’m up here collecting an award.

  The jury was just this random group of adults off to my left. It was like they’d gone into a Dunkin’ Donuts at three P.M. and rounded up everyone there. It was sort of a stacked deck, too, because it’s supposed to be “a jury of your peers,” right, but the youngest one there was at least twice our age. They were looking at me like I was an exhibit at the zoo, like the North American ring-tailed delinquent or something. They were getting a good look at my eye, because they were on that side.

  Everyone else in the room was looking at me, too. I cleared my throat and got to it. My voice was shaking a little at first, and I sort of hated myself for that. I really didn’t want to be up there.

  You know why I was, why I testified? I’ll tell you. It was the way Haberman used to call us gentlemen. “Right this way, gentlemen.” It was the way he called me Mr. Benton. I used to think he was making fun of me—I mean, I wasn’t exactly walking around school in a tuxedo—but then, I used to think that pretty much everyone was making fun of me, looking at me, whatever. I was pretty quick on the draw when it came to taking offense. All that stuff seems kind of small now, after seeing a man beaten like that in his own living room.

  I guess I just realized that Haberman actually meant it. He was showing me some respect, and I just wasn’t used to seeing any. He wasn’t picking on me in class, he was giving me a chance. I think maybe I knew it as soon as he opened the door for me. And how did I repay him for that? I sat there and watched him bleed on his own floor.

  So now I was repaying him this way, because I realized one other thing, too, at just about the same time: Bones was a damn psycho. Haberman’s house, the house in the woods…dude should pretty much be kept on a leash outside. Because friendships ended. Damn right they did, and for a lot less than all this. I appreciated him sticking up for me in like sixth grade, but at some point you’ve got to move on. It just stops being cool to lash out, to hurt people who haven’t hurt you. And it stops being OK to just let that happen.

  So yeah, I testified. Bones was like, You’ll be sorry, man. And I was like, Yeah, maybe I will, but not for seven
to ten years, bitch.

  26

  Mixer and me got juvie. I finally realized what Mixer was saying that night when I got out of the truck: “We are fifteen.” They sent us to different places, but I can’t imagine his sucks any more than mine does. Juvenile detention is like a school you can’t leave. And it’s even worse than that, if you can believe it, because everyone in there has some kind of major damage, and they all think they’ve got to be cold-blooded 24/7. I don’t have it too bad that way. They think I killed a teacher, and I’m not going to tell them I didn’t.

  Anyway, that’s my deal. I’ll be here for the next few years, and I figure I’ll have to move away from Soudley once I get out, in order to find any kind of a job and start saving up to buy that truck, the one with the plow on the front.

  In the meantime, I’ve got a lot of time to kill. I finished that book, for one. That dude, Raskolnikov, he didn’t get away with it, either. That didn’t surprise me one bit. The dumbass gave himself up, confessed. They shipped him off to Siberia, which turns out to be a real place. I always thought it was just a figure of speech, sent to Siberia, like Podunk or Palookaville.

  There was this one really cool line: “his dream seemed strangely to persist.” Sort of trippy, right? And thinking about what had happened, about Bones swinging away and me just standing there frozen and the red of the blood and all that…It really did seem like a dream now. As for persisting, that was a freaking understatement.

  Anyway, once I finished the book, I wrote Haberman about it. I guess that was my way of saying sorry. I’m not going to write out the whole letter here, because it was between me and him. I mostly talked about his class. “I think I get what you were saying with the barrel and the words on the board and all that,” I wrote. “Like at the end of the book”—I threw that in so he’d know I finished—“the dude confessed, but even at the trial, he sort of had to convince them that he’d done it. And, I mean, they sent him away, but is it really ‘punishment’ if that’s what he wanted?”

  Stuff like that. I know he got it, because you know what he did? That old dude sent me a carton of Camels, a full frickin’ carton. Do you know what a big deal that is in here?

  That many Humpies in one place is like the damn promised land, but Haberman wasn’t going to use them. One thing about spending all that time in a coma is that it cleared all the nicotine right out of his system. He went cold turkey out cold, kicked it clean.

  I opened that package and it was like Christmas morning. I read his little note:

  I’m glad you liked the book. You are more gifted than you know, and this is still the first chapter for you. I wish you the best. As for the cigarettes, I won’t be needing them.

  I folded up the note and put it in my lockbox with the smokes. Won’t be needing them? His loss, I figured.

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2009 by Michael Northrop

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, SCHOLASTIC PRESS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Northrop, Michael.

  Gentlemen / Michael Northrop.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When three teenaged boys suspect that their English teacher is responsible for their friend’s disappearance, they must navigate a maze of assorted clues, fraying friendships, violence, and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment before learning the truth.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-545-09749-9

  ISBN-10: 0-545-09749-5

  [1. Guilt—Fiction. 2. Missing persons—Fiction. 3. Teachers—Fiction.

  4. Crime—Fiction. 5. Friendship—Fiction. 6. High schools—Fiction.

  7. Schools—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.N8185Ge 2009

  [Fic]—dc22 2008038971

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 09 10 11 12 13

  First edition, April 2009

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.

  E-ISBN: 978-0-545-23123-7

  The quotations from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment are from the 2003 Bantam Classic reissue, translated by Constance Garnett, published by Bantam Dell, a division of Random House, Inc.

  JACKET ART & DESIGN BY PHIL FALCO

  PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARC TAUSS