Twisted Read online

  “I’m warming up,” I said, shuffling my feet on the mat and crouching low in the batter’s cage. My center of balance had shifted when I walked out of Dad’s room. It was throwing everything off.

  Thunk. Whiff.

  “Is that what it’s called?” he asked.

  We were in the white inflated dome of Action Sports, the place down the street from the mall where you could shag baseballs, shoot hoops, play pool or arcade games, and drink overpriced soda from ten in the morning to ten at night. Five bucks rented me the cage and batting helmet, and I could get ten pitches for two dollars by sticking tokens into the machine to the left of home plate.

  Yoda studied the guys in the other cages. “Why don’t you try swinging like them?” he suggested.

  “I have my own swing, thank you very much.”

  Thunk. Whiff.

  “Yeah. I can see how that’s working for you. Why can’t you just play a video-game version? That way you could be comfortably sitting on a couch.”

  “It’s not the same,” I said, missing another ball. My shoulders were sore and my ribs were talking to me. I was batting barehanded, with a gun waiting in the car and more than four hundred dollars in my pocket. I was starting to sweat. Plus, my gut ached from puking and my head was spinning. The blisters were rising quickly.

  Thunk. Whiff.

  “What are you trying to hit?” Yoda asked.

  “The small white ball flying towards my head at seventy-five miles an hour.”

  “No, see, that’s your problem,” he said. “You’re dealing in reality, not metaphor. Hannah’s coach makes the team visualize attacking someone before a game begins. Who do you want to beat up?”

  “Chip Milbury,” I spat out. Thunk. The ball rocketed towards the plate. My arms twitched and the bat swung, catching the ball on the tip and swatting it away with a hollow ping.

  “See? It’s already working,” he said. “It’s a Force thing.”

  “Don’t start.” The ball flew out of the tube and past my bat, crashing into the net behind me.

  “Concentrate, you should. Visualize.”

  Thunk.

  Chip, again, his head like a watermelon on a picnic table, my bat swinging through it, pink juice and black seeds exploding.

  Thwack.

  “Good hit,” Yoda said.

  Thunk.

  Bethany, I couldn’t hit her, not with a bat, but I could tell her off, walk up to her at tennis practice or her locker and say, “Sorry, there, Beth, but you lost big-time. I would have been the boyfriend you always wanted, the good guy. And you blew it.”

  Thwack.

  “Wow,” Yoda said. “That was far.”

  Mr. Milbury and his wrinkled Barbie-doll wife and their breakable champagne glasses and their tacky fountain and their—

  “You missed,” Yoda pointed out.

  “Do you mind?” I wiped my forehead on my sleeve. “I’m trying to concentrate here.”

  He folded his arms over his chest. “Sorry.”

  “Thank you.” I plunked in two more tokens and dialed up the pitching speed.

  “Shouldn’t you be slowing it down to increase your chances of hitting the ball?”

  “The faster it comes in, the faster it goes out,” I said.

  The first ball blew by before I was in my stance, but I was ready for the second, thwack, the third, thwack, and then I found my balance and fell into an easy rhythm, thwack, wait, thwack, wait.

  I became an armed beast roaming the streets of a helpless suburb, crushing cars and buses, destroying buildings with a single swing, thwack. I wiped out the football stadium, thwack. I annihilated Josh Rawson’s party, thwack. I destroyed every jerk who had ever looked at me sideways, and thwack, the courthouse, thwack, the judge and my P.O., and thwack, my father, thwack, thwack, thwack, every bone in his body snapping like kindling wood.

  The balls stopped coming. Yoda looked up at me. “Done yet?”

  71.

  Yoda talked the whole way to the river, but I couldn’t hear him. It felt like an oversized batting helmet was on my head, like the ear holes weren’t lined up, and the brim dipped over my eyes.

  “Turn here,” I finally said.

  Yoda turned into the park entrance and slowed down for the speed bump.

  “Go all the way to the end,” I said. “Then take the left.”

  When we turned into the parking lot that fronted on the river, I pointed to the farthest row of the spaces, where the gravel bled into the grass, ten feet from the edge of the riverbank. He parked and we got out. The wind had picked up, blowing the empty swings on the playground back and forth, and making small whitecaps. We were the only people there.

  “That is some nasty water,” Yoda said.

  “Chemical plant upstream.”

  “Does this have anything to do with you running away?” he asked.

  “She told you?”

  “I just hung up with her when you rang the bell.”

  A Big Gulp cup floated by. I grabbed the backpack. “This won’t take long.”

  He followed me to the water’s edge. “What are you doing?”

  I unzipped the pack, took out a box of ammunition, and poured a handful of bullets. I brought my arm back and threw them as hard as I could. They sailed in an arc, then dropped fast and hit the water with heavy plop-plop-plops.

  Yoda’s eyes bugged. “Jesus God, Tyler! You are throwing bullets into the river.”

  I threw another handful. “Observant, you are,” I said.

  “Where did you get them?”

  “My father.” Another handful.

  “Wait. Stop. The metal is bad for the fish.”

  “They’re not going to blow up.” I paused and looked at the oily foam collected in the weeds. “Do you really think there are fish in there?”

  “Maybe not now, but bullets won’t exactly welcome them.”

  “I can’t throw them in the garbage can. What if a kid finds them, or they blow up the dump truck when they get compacted?”

  “We can Google it at my house. There has to be an approved method for bullet disposal.”

  “Can I throw the gun in?”

  Yoda grabbed at his knit cap with both hands. “The gun? You have a gun? What in the hell is going on?”

  I pulled the Beretta out of the backpack. “This won’t hurt the fish,” I said. “And if I take it apart”—I ejected the clip and removed the barrel—“it can’t hurt anybody.”

  I threw the clip and the barrel north, and pitched the grip south. When I threw the grip, I could feel it in my sore ribs and my shoulder. Yoda watched with me as the metal pieces slammed into the water and were swallowed.

  My eyes started leaking and my nose, too. I let my hair fall in front of my face and looked down at my hands.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  I nodded my head and wiped my eyes. “Guns are dangerous.”

  “Yeah. That’s what they say.”

  I turned my hands over. The blisters from the batting cage burned on my fingers and palms. My calluses from the summer were a memory. I bit the biggest blister and water poured out.

  Yoda looked in the backpack. “Do you have any grenades in there?”

  “Nope. That’s it.”

  He picked up the pack and slung it over his shoulder. “It took forty-seven strikes before you hit a ball today.”

  “Forty-seven?”

  “I counted.”

  “Ah.”

  We walked to the car. I put the backpack between my legs and buckled my seat belt. He started the engine.

  “Forty-seven?” I asked. “You sure?”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s a lot.”

  “I wasn’t going to say anything.” He checked the mirror and backed out, then put it in drive.

  There were four virgin blisters on my left hand and five on my right, plus the popped one. A blister is a defense mechanism, Mr. Pirelli explained on my first day of work. He told me to keep them clean and bandaged and
remember to use gloves the next time.

  I bit at the blisters, popping all of them open, and rubbed them on my jeans. It felt like my hands were on fire.

  “What are you doing?” Yoda asked. “Won’t those get infected?”

  I flexed my fingers. “Calluses build up faster this way.”

  72.

  I went to bed at ten o’clock and slept for thirteen hours.

  Spent all of Sunday catching up on homework. I read Faustus again and the passages of Paradise Lost that Salvatore hinted would be on the next test. Wrote an essay about the aftermath of the Three-Fifths Compromise. Conjugated future conditional irregular verbs in French. Did Calc until numbers oozed out of my ears. I even did an Art History assignment—studied pictures from the early Renaissance and wrote a reaction piece. I had to define “renaissance.” At first I wrote “gathering of military intelligence, like for a raid.” Then I looked it up in the dictionary. Renaissance meant “rebirth” and was “a revival of culture and learning.” The other word I was thinking of was “reconnaissance.” An understandable mistake.

  While I studied, Mom and Hannah glided around the house like shadows I could barely see or hear. Dad wouldn’t be home until Monday night. After dinner.

  The temperature dropped twenty degrees by sunset and the wind howled from the north. Shingles flapped on the roof.

  73.

  I woke up in a sweat, tasting metal in my mouth. I panicked, grabbed the edge of my mattress, and tried to remember what I had done with the gun. The fog lifted in my brain: No, I don’t have it. No, I didn’t do it. My lip had split open again in the night. There was a little blood on my pillow. I felt better after I brushed my teeth.

  I drove Yoda’s car to school so he and Hannah could snuggle in the backseat. Riding shotgun were my backpack and a large plastic garbage bag, tied at the top. I would not tell them what was in the bag. Yoda squeezed it and was relieved that it was soft.

  I turned the key in the ignition. The engine sputtered, then caught, and I pressed the accelerator. The engine roared, instant boner. My hands sweated as I gripped the steering wheel. Time to drive, my license in my wallet glowing like plutonium. Tyler Miller, Lord of the Universe. I revved it one more time, redlining the tachometer.

  “Hey,” Yoda called from the back. “Stop it. You trying to blow a gasket?”

  I put it in gear and drove off, keeping to all posted speed limits.

  I did not go to my cell for homeroom. I went right to Hughes’s office. His secretary said he’d be in meetings until third period and suggested I wait for him in my personal Siberia.

  “Sorry, I can’t,” I said. “I have a couple appointments. I’ll be back.”

  The guidance counselor wasn’t expecting me, either. I looked through some college catalogs while I waited and ripped out a few pages that looked promising. When she let me in, I shook her hand and explained what I wanted. She looked at me over the tops of her glasses and said one word. “Impossible.”

  “Please check my date of birth on your computer.”

  Her fingers clicked on the keys. “Oh. Happy birthday.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But you still need parental signatures to do this. District rules.”

  “No problem,” I nodded. “You get the papers together and I’ll make sure they get signed. And can you give me a hall pass?”

  I gave all the homework I’d done on Sunday to the secretary so she could put it in my teachers’ boxes just as Hughes came in, his face red. He rifled through his phone messages and told me to follow him into his office.

  “Two hours wasted just so they could tell us we’re getting even less federal funding next year.” He took off his coat and put it on a hanger. “I didn’t think it was possible to get less federal funding, but there you go.” As he put his coat in the closet, he muttered something about “jackass mandates” that I couldn’t quite hear.

  He sat at his desk, glanced at his monitor, and finally looked at me. “Have a seat.”

  “No, thanks. I’ll stand.”

  “Suit yourself. What’s the problem?”

  Deep breath, deep breath, just like you planned it.

  “It’s not really a problem. I thought I’d give you a heads-up. I’m changing my schedule for next semester.” I put my hands behind my back so he couldn’t see them shaking. “I’ll get my parents to sign off on it tonight.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. And starting tomorrow, I’ll be attending all of my classes.”

  “But we agreed—”

  Deep breath.

  “That was a dumb thing for me to do. I wasn’t thinking straight. Now I am. I’m going to all of my classes tomorrow. You should tell your spies and the security people. If I get hurt, if I get punched or knocked down, or harassed more than the average student, I will contact the school board and the newspaper. I’m not the problem here, Mr. Hughes. I’m tired of feeling like I am.”

  I stopped at the custodian’s office on my way to the cafeteria and handed Joe my keys. While he jiggled them in his hands, I apologized for stealing them.

  “Apology accepted,” he finally said.

  “If the judge gives me more community service, can I do it with you?” I asked.

  He nodded. “No problem.” He locked the keys in his desk drawer. “But if you ever take anything from me again, I’ll kick your ass.”

  “Understood.”

  The cafeteria was at full volume when I walked in. Feeding time at the monkey house.

  A few people watched as I passed the table where Yoda and Hannah sat. More noticed when I stopped in front of the table occupied by Chip and his minions, along with Bethany and a few of her underfed friends.

  “Get out of here,” Chip said.

  “Not yet.” I tossed the big plastic bag at him. He grabbed it before it landed on his tray.

  “What’s this?”

  “I thought your mother might want it back,” I said.

  A low “Ooooooohhhhhhh” started at neighboring tables. Chip stood up as Bethany untied the bag and pulled out the pink blanket with the satin edge.

  “That’s what you threw over my head the night you beat me up,” I said. “Parker”—I pointed at him—“you were there, but I still can’t figure out who the third guy was. Austin? Jordie?”

  All eyes focused on Chip. “Get out before I flatten you.”

  I turned to the kids behind me. “Did you hear what he said?” A couple heads nodded.

  “Anytime, anyplace, Chippie,” I said.

  He came around the end of the table and stood six inches away from me.

  “Right here, right now, loser,” he said.

  Please hit me, please hit me, please hit me, go on, take a swing.

  “Bravo, very good,” I said. “Ask me to fight in the room that has the most security.” I pointed to the cafeteria monitors staring at us.

  “You think you can take me?” He shoved his chest forward like he was trying to show me his cleavage.

  Just throw the first punch, Chippie, I’m begging.

  “You know I can. I let you win at your party. You were too scared to take me on in the locker room. When you finally got around to it last week, you needed two henchmen and a blankie. How pathetic is that?”

  Out of the corner of my eye I could see a security guard walking towards us, and Bethany in a furious conversation with Parker, who looked like he wanted to hide in the mashed potatoes.

  “A real man faces his conflicts, Chippie. On his own.”

  I started to walk away, then stopped and backed up.

  “Just in case you decide to go crying to Daddy because I had the balls to talk to you?” I flicked the card from Hewson, Heiligman, and Keehn so that it landed in the middle of the table. “Tell him to call my lawyer.”

  The security guard walked me to the guidance counselor’s office so I could pick up my paperwork, then to the attendance office so I could sign out, then to the front door. That was nice of him.

 
As I approached the wall of doors that faced the flagpole, I saw Bethany’s reflection in the glass. She was running towards us, carrying the pink blanket.

  “Tyler!” she called.

  I hesitated, my shoulder against the door.

  “I want to talk to you,” she said, pouting, hands on her hips. “I mean, I think we should talk.”

  I smiled at her reflection, pushed open the door, and left.

  One more loose end.

  Since I didn’t have an appointment, the secretary at the courthouse said I’d have to wait an hour before Mr. Benson could see me. While I was waiting, I called Pirelli Landscaping and left a message saying I could work weekends again, if Mr. Pirelli was interested.

  My stomach gurgled. I hadn’t eaten anything at lunch and I was feeling sick from all that homework the night before. The taste of the Beretta was still in my mouth and nose, lurking in the background. I put three sticks of gum in my mouth and pulled a Highlights magazine from the stack on the table. I used to love going to the dentist so I could read it.

  I kept one hand curled around the edge of the chair to keep me steady. I wasn’t on thin ice anymore, but everything still felt slippery. There was a chance I was going to fall flat on my face. But I had to keep moving.

  Mr. Benson did not flash his possum teeth when I was finally ushered into his office. I explained I was trying to take control of a few things, and I wanted to know what was going to happen to my probation because of the party violations.

  “Assuming you’re not arrested?” he asked, leaning back in his chair.

  “Yes, assuming that.”

  He put his hands behind his head and asked me questions about school and life and attitude and girlfriends and just about everything except for the kind of underwear I wore. I didn’t think it would be so complicated, but I answered everything and tried not to sweat.

  He finally set the front legs of the chair back on the floor. “If they let you off the hook for the camera thing, no charges at all, I’ll recommend six more months’ probation and community service. The judge will probably accept my recommendations. What do you think?”