Austin's banner vandalism was just more evidence that the anger in our school was breeding like bacteria. I might not have been responsible for everyone's anger, but I had certainly been a carrier. I could only hope it wasn't about to become an epidemic.
By now the entire school was anxiously anticipating what would happen to Alec next. I knew that I was, and I was not looking forward to getting the blame, or the credit, as some kids at school would put it.
It happened after gym class—another class that Alec and I had together. We'd been doing tumbles and unimpressive moves on the parallel bars. I never minded gym, but I could tell Alec hated it. As he liked to enter any activity at the very top, he despised being forced to engage in sports in which he wasn't already the best—and though he claimed to be a whiz at any sport that involved a ball, he was an absolute klutz when it came to gymnastics. So when class was over and we hit the locker rooms, he wasn't in the best of moods. My gym locker was just a few feet away from his, Usually we faced in opposite directions when we dressed so we wouldn't have to deal with each other, but today he felt like striking up a conversation.
"You really must like that shirt," he said to me with asmirk on his face. "You wear it an awful lot."
It was the same shirt he had commented about once before. It was just a plain, old blue-buttoned shirt.
"So," I said. "It's comfortable."
"You should wash it once in a while," he suggested. "You might find it smells better."
"At least it doesn't smell like skunk," I said under my breath but loud enough for him to hear.
"You've got Cheryl fooled, but you haven't fooled me," he said. "And you'll get what you deserve sooner than you think."
I closed my locker. "Was that a threat?"
"Nope," he said, "because I won't sink down to your level."
He pulled out a hairbrush and a bottle of styling gel, then pumped some of the clear gel into his hand.
"You believe what you want," I told him, "but when the truth comes out, I'll be expecting a major apology from you."
He laughed at that, rubbing the gel between his hands, then brushing his hands through his perfect hair. Right about then I began to smell a chemical odor, like paint or varnish. Schools were filled with weird smells, so I didn't think about it at first, until I noticed the look on Alec's face. His hands were still moving through his hair, spreading the gel, but his hands weren't moving as freely as they should have been.
By now some other kids had begun to take notice.
"What the . . . what is this?"
His hands were still firmly pressed against the sides of his head. He tried to pull them away, but they weren't coming.
"This isn't my hair gel!"
As the smell around me grew stronger, I recognized it. My father and I had smelled it out in the garage when trying to glue back together some broken lawn furniture. It was the smell of Lunar Glue—a super-epoxy "so strong it could hold the moon in orbit," went the slogan—and right now it was spread across Alec Smartz's entire head. Lunar Glue was a prank as old as time, and although it was always funny in TV and in movies, the reality wasn't so funny. It was like watching a hummingbird caught on flypaper.
I found myself backing away, as if putting distance between me and the sabotaged bottle of gel would cast the guilt off of my shoulders.
"Don't look at me," I said, but that's exactly where Alec was looking.
"What did you do to me!" he shouted, beginning to go red in the face. He tried to pull his hands away from his hair, but his head just tilted with the motion of his hands, bonded there, like a pot. Shirtless and barefoot he stumbled out of the locker room with me and a dozen other kids behind him. The bell had rung and the hall was filled with kids. Someone bumped his elbow. "Ahh," he screamed, and he spun like a turnstile.
"You're going down for this, Mercer," he said. "You're going down in a major way."
Through the crowd I saw Cheryl, wondering what on earth was going on.
"Alec?"
By now the group of kids around us had expanded, and more people took notice of Alec's strange shirtless position. Now Alec was the center of attention—the place he always wanted to be, but not quite the way that he wanted it.
"Alec, what's wrong?" asked Cheryl, looking to him, to me, then back to him again.
"I've been Lunar Glued," he said with a whine in his voice.
And that's when someone laughed. I don't know who it was, but that laugh started it. It was just a snicker at first, and then another, and then another.
"Shut up!" said Alec. "It's not funny!"
And he was right. It wasn't, and yet I found a grin coming to my face as well. It had to do with the way that he was just standing there, his hands in a permanent pose on the sides of his head, like a fashion model. A hummingbird on flypaper, horrible and helpless—but the mob's laughter was contagious. I found myself beginning to giggle, just one among the rising chorus of laughter, as Cheryl reached up and tried to pull his hands away from his head.
"Oh, Alec," she said, and she, too, started laughing.
It became uncontrollable. As awful and as terrible as it was—as cruel as it was—a part of all of us just had to laugh and laugh and laugh, until tears came to our eyes. But it wasn't everyone's laughter that Alec heard. It was mine and Cheryl's.
I Am Not Now
Nor have I Ever Been
a Waste of Life
SOMETIMES I HAVE to close my eyes and put myself back in the burning lighthouse. It's kind of like scratching at a scab; it itches, and you know that's because it's healing, but you can't stop scratching it. Pretty soon it begins to bleed, and you've got to start healing all over again. They put these cones around dogs' heads to keep them from scratching wounds. I wish someone could put some kind of cone around me, because on the day Alec's hand got glued to his head, I couldn't help but scratch. I went down to the beach where Tyson and I had washed ashore, that day back in October. There were still plenty of reminders—like the burned timbers half buried in the sand. The smell of charred wood had mingled with the salty aroma of decaying kelp. The sound of the sea was a constant reminder, too—the rumble of the breakers and the hiss of the spray—such a comfort to some people, so threatening to me.
I walked the beach all that afternoon, looking at theburned driftwood, listening to the uneasy echoes of the world around me in seashells, picking the scab.
I was so lost in my own thoughts, I didn't notice that I wasn't alone on the beach, until I practically walked into two kids heading the other way.
"Oh, sorry," I said. It took me a moment to register who they were. It was none other than Brett Whatley and our resident large dude, Moose SanGiorgio. After my fight with Brett the other week, he was the last person I wanted to see. As for Moose, well, he was kind of like human flavor enhancer; he wasn't much by himself, but somehow his linebacker presence doubled the intensity of whomever he was with. In this case it turned Brett Whatley from a general nuisance into a four-star general nuisance.
"We got a message for you from Alec Smartz," Brett said, then he tried to deliver a punch to my gut. He must have seen too many action movies, however, because he sort of did it in slow motion. I caught his fist in my open palm and squeezed, cracking all of his knuckles. It sounded like a bag of microwave popcorn. "Arrggg!"
He pulled back his hand, grimacing, and almost fell to his knees.
"That's gotta hurt," said Moose.
Moose was actually a pretty intelligent guy when he was around intelligent people, but today he was taking his lead from a guy with the mental capacity of a canned ham. Still, I tried to address Moose's more sensible side.
"So, Moose, what's the deal here? Did Alec really send you guys to beat me up?"
"He hired us as bodyguards," Moose said happily. "The beating-you-up part was Brett's idea."
Brett grunted, still shaking his aching hand.
"What's Alec paying you?" I asked Moose.
"He says he'll give us positions
in his cabinet when he gets elected class president."
"Get cash," I told him.
"I'll consider it."
Brett, having recovered, glared at me. "We're here to tell you that you'd better lay off Alec, or we may have to take steps."
"Ooh—that's a tough one," I said, and did a quick search through my long-term movie memory. "Ah! I've got it! Michael Beihn said that in The Abyss. Am I right?"
"Shut up."
By now my moron-meter was in the red, and I couldn't stand much more. "Listen if you guys want to be Alec's personal Secret Service, that's fine with me—but until you catch me red-handed trying to mess with him, stay out of my airspace!"
"Fair enough," said Moose, and stepped aside.
I shouldered Brett out of my way, and although he threw a clump of wet sand at my back, I refused to let him provoke me.
"It'll only be a matter of time, Mercer," he shouted after me. "The truth is out there!"
My father cornered me in the kitchen the next morning before I left for school. "I want to talk about the message I got from your vice principal yesterday."
"I thought we talked last night." Actually I got out of having to discuss it by asking him to help me with math. I did need the help, and he was so pleased that I had asked him for anything that he forgot about the phone message from Mr. Greene (which luckily didn't give a clue as to why he had called). We had a good time, believe it or not, doing algebra together. Then, when the work was done, I guess he didn't have the heart to talk to me about Greene. I did hear him and Mom worry-talking, though, later at night when they thought I was asleep.
Dad poured himself a bowl of cereal. "I plan to call him back as soon as I get into work."
"Good. He likes it when people are prompt." I burned my fingers as I pulled my waffle from the toaster, and grimaced, shaking the pain out of my hand. My mom had already left for work, so they couldn't double-team me, but Dad was doing fine on his own.
"Are you in some sort of trouble, Jared? What's going on in school? Have you done something we should know about?"
In social studies, we'd been learning about McCarthy- ism—you know—how back in the fifties some senators whose shorts got too tight decided that everyone who picked their nose the wrong way was a Communist. They formed acommittee and began to ask people all kinds of questions like, "Are you now, or have you ever been a Communist?" Sort of like the questions my dad was asking now. Some people got really good at not answering.
"Have you done something wrong, Jared?"
"Not that I recall."
"Is there a reason why Mr. Greene would be calling us?"
"Not that I know of."
"What about your friends? Have they been getting into any trouble?"
"You want me to name names?"
He stared at me, like he so often did, in that state of parental confusion. It was Tyson who saved me.
"Mr. Greene was probably calling about me," Tyson said as he came into the kitchen. "He said he would call to see how I was doing with my new foster family." Tyson took my waffle. "So how am I doing?"
Dad relaxed. He was much more at ease with Tyson lately than he was with me. "Aside from eating us out of house and home, you're doing fine." Then he said his standard good-bye, and left.
"I really don't like lying to my parents," I told Tyson after my father was gone.
"Hey, what use am I if I don't teach you some bad habits?" he said.
"Anyway," I reminded him, "it won't hold up very long. He'll call Greene back, and I'll get my butt kicked halfway to China."
"Naah," Tyson said. "Your dad's not a butt-kicker, and anyway, he's not going to punish you for something you didn't do."
I wasn't so sure about that. I knew I had broken my parents' trust before. Would they believe me now, or would the weight of everyone else's suspicion sway them? When the Shadow Club was brought to justice the first time, they had taken away all my privileges—TV, video games, time with friends, time anywhere unsupervised. Gradually they had begun to give those things back, but they still withheld the most important thing of all: their trust. I had always taken it for granted that a parent's trust was a right, not a privilege.
As I pondered my own parents' faith in me, there was a knock at the door. I opened the door to see a kid standing there. A kid with a crew cut. It took me a few seconds to realize that it was Alec. Then it occurred to me that his little run-in with the Lunar Glue would leave him like that. I took a step back, almost expecting him to sock me or something, but that's not what he had in mind. He had a new look on his face. Yes, I could see anger there, but now there was something else, too, on top of the anger and resentment. It was fear.
"I want to know what I have to do to get you to stop," he said.
Tyson came in from the kitchen, took a few moments to gauge the situation, and slipped out the back door, realizing this was between just me and Alec.
"Why don't you come in," I said to him.
"Why? Is there an anvil hanging over the door?"
I backed up and opened the door wide to show him there was nothing about to fall on his head. Then he stepped in. Ihurried to the kitchen.
"Want a waffle?" I asked him, fumbling with the package of frozen waffles.
"Not hungry."
"The haircut kinda suits you," I said, and then grimaced, realizing how dumb it was to say it.
"No, it doesn't," he said. "My cheeks are too big. I look like a chipmunk with a crew cut. What is it going to take to make you stop?" he said again.
This was a white flag of surrender, and as much as his arrogant nature irked me, I was even more bothered to see him defeated.
"You've got it wrong, Alec," I told him. "I'm not the enemy."
"Then what are you?" he said. "Because you're definitely not a friend."
I put my hands in my pockets. He was right, I wasn't a friend, but that really wasn't my fault.
"You don't have friends, Alec," I told him. "You have subjects, and servants."
"You wish you had a tenth of the respect that I had, but you don't, and that's why you hate me, isn't it? That and Cheryl."
"Leave Cheryl out of this." Then I leaned against the counter and took a deep breath. He was trying to draw me in, to make me angry, but I wasn't falling for that.
"Listen," I said, "maybe this was the last prank. Maybe, Just maybe, the person who did it has realized it's gone too far, and they feel sorry they did it."
Alec stared at me, his eyes cold, unbelieving.
"And maybe they don't."
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't help but face his angry distrust with matching defiance. "I guess we'll just have to wait and see, won't we."
A
Bitter Pill
I WAS CALLED INTO Mr. Greene's office right after lunch.
There were several chairs in Mr. Greene's office: a plush comfortable one for setting kids' minds at ease, a beanbag for less formal counseling sessions . . . and then there was the old wooden chair; a worn-out, high-backed, dark monster with wide armrests. Kids called it the "Electric Chair." This was the chair he had positioned in front of his desk when I was escorted into his office that morning.
"Come in, Jared. Have a seat," he said.
I sat down in the uncomfortable chair, figuring I would hear the same old stuff about how he thought I was the center of all local evil, but all he said was: "I like your shirt."
I looked down to notice that this was the same shirt I had worn on the days when Alec had commented on my shirt as well.
"I like your tie," I said to him. "Have you spoken to my parents yet?"
"We've been missing each other's calls." And then he sat there and just stared at me.
"Listen, is this important, because I'm missing English class."
"I will ask you this once," he said, "and I expect an honest answer."
"Sure."
"Did you put a skunk in Alec Smartz's minivan?"
"No, I did not," I said as directly as I could.<
br />
He leaned back in his chair, with a slight look of satisfaction on his face. "You might want to think about your answer." And then he reached into his drawer, pulled out a tiny plastic bag, and tossed it on his desk. At first I thought the hag was empty, but then I saw something in it—something small—something round and blue. It was a shirt button that looked very familiar. I looked down at the shirt I was wearing—the button was identical to my shirt buttons, and when I reached up to my collar, I found that the top button was missing. Suddenly I felt the hardness of the Electric Chair, and I knew what Mr. Greene's look of satisfaction was all about. It was the look of an executioner preparing to throw the switch.
"Do you know where this button was found?" he asked.
I shook my head.
"It was found on Alec Smartz's driveway—right near the spot where his van was parked that night." He reached out and took the button away from me. "Maybe you'd like to re- consider your answer."
I could only stammer, because I knew that no matter what I said, it would sound like a lie.
"Don't you have anything to say for yourself?"
"It's not my button," I said weakly, but we both knew that it had to be mine. The question was, how had it gotten there? I had never been on Alec Smartz's driveway.
"I'm going to give you one final chance, Jared," he said with the patience of someone completely sure of himself "I'd like to put an end to this situation by tomorrow. Otherwise, it might get ugly."
But I wasn't listening to him anymore. I was thinking about that button. There were only two possibilities: either Alec was lying about where he found the button . . . or someone had intentionally put it there for Alec to find.
But who? I thought. Who could have gotten that button? Then it dawned on me, in growing disbelief, that there was only one person in this school who had access to my shirts.
When I got home that afternoon, Tyson was already there, sitting in the living room with his headphones on, blasting his ears with one of my CDs. I pulled his headphones off, and his eyes snapped open.
"Hey, what gives?" he asked.
I wanted to grab him and shake him. I wanted to accuse him right there and pass judgment on him the way Greenehad passed judgment on me, but I had done that once before to Tyson, hadn't I? I had beaten him silly, convinced that he was the one pulling the deadly pranks last fall, but I had been dead wrong. Maybe Greene was ready to throw the switch on me, but I wasn't going to do that to Tyson. No matter what I suspected, he deserved the benefit of my doubt.