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  I stormed towards them. They all stepped backwards, and their circle broke. In the center of the locker bay was the bench, the bench you put your sneakers on when you’re tying them.

  Yoda was lying across the bench on his stomach, his wrists tied together with duct tape. His jeans and boxers had been yanked down. His butt cheeks had been taped together, too. He kept his head down.

  Breathe. Just keep breathing. And kill the first thing you can get your hands on.

  “All right, party’s over,” I said, with more control than I was feeling.

  Parker got in my face. “We’re just getting started. And I don’t remember inviting you.”

  “You have two seconds to disappear.”

  “Get lost, Nerd Boy,” spit Parker.

  The henchmen stepped back into the circle. One of them smacked Yoda with a wet towel. Yoda grunted in pain, trying to hold the sound in. The jerk with the towel laughed, a high-pitched squeal, like a jackal.

  I snapped.

  I grabbed the front of Parker’s shoulder pads, lifted him off the ground, and slammed him against the lockers. His eyes went wide. The henchmen froze, confused. I pulled him towards me and shoved him into the metal doors again. Parker fumbled, trying to get some leverage so he could hit me. I slammed him harder. I was going to do this over and over and over until I drove a Parker-sized hole through the locker, then the locker beyond that, all the way until I broke through to the outside of the building.

  “Hey!” someone yelled, the voice far away. “Put him down.”

  The air split with light as the door from the playing fields opened and Chip Milbury walked in, helmet in hand.

  “What’s going on?” he yelled.

  I took a deep breath and let go of Parker, who stumbled forward.

  “Ask him,” I said.

  Parker quickly explained that Yoda was bothering them because he “thinks he can be our manager.”

  I kept my back to the lockers and slid a few steps closer to Yoda. I knelt next to him and quickly unwrapped the tape that tied his wrists. As Yoda pushed himself off the bench, I reached out for his arm. He brushed me off and pulled his jeans up over his butt without removing the tape. He zipped his fly and buckled his belt. His eyes never left the floor.

  “And you think this is cool?” Chip asked Parker. “You think it’s funny?”

  “Yeah,” Parker said. “Don’t you?”

  Chip licked his lips and glanced around quickly. “Yeah.” He play-punched Parker’s arm. “Stupid, but funny.” Then he turned to me. “You got a problem with this?”

  “Yeah, I do,” I said. “He was offering to help, and these little shits jumped him.” My voice was getting louder. “Five on one,” I yelled. “Five on one! You’re all freaks, know that?”

  Chip stepped up to my face. “That’s a good one, you calling somebody else a freak.”

  It occurred to me that the odds were now six on one. And since Yoda was useless in a fight, the one was me.

  “Got anything else to say?” Chip asked.

  The only sound in the locker room was Yoda breathing hard, trying not to sniff. Out in the hall, a couple of girls giggled, their flip-flops smacking the ground. In the distance, coaches’ whistles were blowing. Chip Milbury and his friends were about to give me the beating of my life. I had nothing to lose.

  “Chicken,” I said.

  “What?” He was confused.

  “You’re a chicken,” I said. “A coward.”

  Chip forced a laugh. “And you’re a lot dumber than I thought you were.”

  More silence. This was where they were supposed to jump me, to hold me down and take turns kicking me. But Chip just chewed the inside of his cheek, and Parker had worked his way to the back of the crowd, rubbing his head where it had made solid contact with the locker.

  “Aren’t you going to flatten him?” one of the guys finally asked Chip.

  Chip hesitated. “This is the wrong place,” he said.

  I had him. Chip was afraid to take me on because there was a chance that he’d lose in front of all his boys. He hadn’t forgotten who actually won the arm-wrestling match.

  “Braaaaawck,” I said.

  “Hit him,” Parker said.

  Chip’s eyes darted around the room. He wanted to piss his pants. I could smell it. I had won. I had leveled up. I was a freaking giant killer, and they all knew it.

  “He’s not going to hit me.” I was growing taller and stronger by the second. “I’ll hit back harder, won’t I, Parker?”

  Two of the JVs drifted to the door and looked outside.

  Chip kept one eye on them and the other on me. “I’m not going to hit you because we’re in school and I’m not stupid enough to do anything here,” he said.

  “Not even if I ask nicely? Not even if I say pretty please?”

  Yeah, that was taunting, but I was desperate for Chip to take a swing at me so I could unleash a decade of rage on his ass.

  Chip turned to his dwarves. “Get back on the field.” As they trooped outside, he pointed at me with his helmet. “Watch yourself, Miller.”

  “Any time you want, Chipper,” I said. “Any place.”

  27.

  As we drove home, I kept flashing back to the locker room and replaying the scene obsessively. Me opening the door. Me taking control. Me flattening Parker. Me challenging Chip.

  What was I thinking?

  They could have killed me. They could have killed us both. Temporary insanity was the only explanation.

  Yoda didn’t want to talk about it. He kept his eyes nailed to the road in front of the car the whole ride. When we got to the driveway, I did not help him out of his seat. He would have tried to punch me if I did, then he would have missed, then he would have felt like an even bigger loser. But I carried his backpack and I followed him into his house, just in case he needed something.

  “How are you going to get it off?” I asked. (Yoda was a hairy guy, if you get my drift.)

  His bangs fell in his face. “Just leave me alone, okay? Go home.”

  I was halfway to the front door when he called, “Wait!”

  I stopped. “What?”

  “Don’t tell Hannah.”

  “‘Course not.”

  “Thanks. You want a soda?”

  I walked back down the hall to his kitchen. We armed ourselves with food and retreated to the basement to do something mind-numbing. Yoda wanted to watch Star Wars: Episode III again. I wanted to watch Spider-Man. We compromised and watched the hot blonde on the Weather Channel talk about highs and lows and tropical storms ready to create havoc. We drank black-cherry soda and ate Doritos.

  We didn’t talk about football or duct tape or sisters or fathers or crime or punishment. We didn’t talk about the time in seventh grade I had my face pushed into a toilet or when he used to get chased home from school or when we both used to hand over our lunch money so we wouldn’t get beat up or the plans we used to make to get back at the bullies or how weird all of this was because I had picked that Parker kid up off the ground and slammed him into a locker. We didn’t talk about what it felt like when they held him down or how hard he fought against crying or how close I came to killing Chip Milbury or if he needed help getting the tape off because we both knew if he asked, I’d do it, and we’d never talk about it again.

  We didn’t talk about any of it.

  Instead we talked about the odds that the weather babe’s boobs were real.

  When his mother asked if I was staying for dinner, I said no, I had to go home. Yoda said he’d take care of the Paradise Lost essay for me. He had read it for fun and loved it.

  Before I left I told him it was cool for him to go out with Hannah.

  28.

  I was in the shower that night when I remembered what I wanted to tell Mom. I jumped out, wrapped a towel around my waist, and hustled down the hall.

  She was sitting on top of the quilt that covered her bed, laptop in front of her, a pen tucked behind her ear, readin
g glasses at the end of her nose. The family calendar was next to her, and CNN was on the TV, muted, the tragedies of the day crawling across the bottom of the screen.

  She looked up. “Run out of soap?”

  “What? No. You know that shirt you got me? The red one? That I wore today?”

  She pushed her glasses up into her hair. “You’re dripping on the carpet.”

  “I need more of those shirts. Like, twenty of them.”

  “You want me to buy you new clothes?”

  “Just get me the shirts. Promise. I really need them.”

  “Urn, fine. I’ll get the shirts. Want some pants to go with them?”

  “Yeah. But only if they’re hot. Not Mom hot. Ask some girl at the store. Make sure she’s good-looking. Or take Hannah with you.”

  “Hot.”

  “Exactly.” I turned to go.

  “Hang on,” she said.

  “I’m dripping on the carpet,” I pointed out.

  “Does this have anything to do with Bethany?”

  “Bethany who?”

  “Nice try. Your sister told me.”

  I tightened the towel around my waist. “Bethany who?”

  She nodded. “Okay, we’ll pretend you don’t like her. One more thing.” She picked up the calendar. “Don’t forget your meeting with Mr. Benson after school tomorrow. And we’re scheduled for the Christmas card photo on Friday.”

  “No way. We’re too old for that.”

  “I got the last slot, five o’clock, with Davis Gunnarson, and he is a genius—an expensive genius—so we will not be late. We’ll leave here at quarter after four. Do you know where your sweatshirt is?”

  I shivered. She had the air-conditioning cranked again. “The one with the retarded reindeers? It won’t fit.”

  “The plural of ‘reindeer’ is ‘reindeer.’ No s. You swam in that shirt last year. It’ll be fine.”

  “But…”

  “You wanted me to go shopping for new clothes? Something that Bethany would like? What was the word you used…‘hot’?”

  The question hung there. CNN reported on the rise in the stock market, green arrows everywhere.

  “Okay.” I held on to my towel, leaned forward and kissed her cheek. “Quarter after four, Friday. Reindeer. Thanks, Mom.”

  29.

  When Yoda picked us up on Wednesday, he was sitting on a large pillow covered in a Jimmy Neutron pillowcase. I didn’t say anything. My sister was too distracted to ask any questions.

  Yoda stared at Hannah’s field-hockey uniform. “You look amazing.”

  Hannah looked into a little mirror as she drew a line of thick, black grease under each eye. “We have a game this afternoon.”

  Yoda shifted into drive. “I know. I’ll be there.”

  She capped the tube and tugged at her skirt. “Did you know that this violates the dress code? It’s four inches too short.”

  “You should protest. Hold a rally.”

  “Tell me about it,” she said. “It’s hypocritical fascism.”

  “You don’t know what fascism means,” I said.

  “Fascism is a totalitarian world view that supports the state—or the school—controlling all aspects of personal life,” Hannah said. “I learned that yesterday.”

  “It’s just a dress code,” I said.

  Hannah picked a piece of lint off her skirt. “Principal Hughes should read about how well fascism worked for Mussolini.”

  Yoda smiled at her in the rearview mirror. “You have them cornered.”

  “You’ve lost your mind,” I said.

  30.

  When I walked into homeroom, Chip Milbury acted like I didn’t exist. That was a good thing. Bethany did, too. That was bad. But she was busy handing tissues to Stacey Peters, who had just been dumped, so I forgave her.

  When the bell rang, I dropped my notebook so the papers would scatter all over. This made me late to class, but it guaranteed that Chip would be in front of me. One-on-one I could handle Chip Milbury no problem. But Chip had an army on his side. I was still the slightly weird kid who only had one friend.

  As my Calculus teacher yelled at me for being late, I realized that I needed to work out again. My hard-earned landscaping muscles were beginning to melt. I’d start doing push-ups. I’d run. Maybe Bethany would let me pick her up and practice lifting her.

  I’d have to phrase that in just the right way so she didn’t slap me.

  I was called down to the principal’s office at the beginning of second period.

  Mr. Hughes looked terrible. All of the buttons on his phone were blinking red. His walkie-talkie lay on the desk, crackling. When the secretary showed me in, she reminded him that he had a meeting with the superintendent in five minutes.

  “We’re keeping this short,” he told me after she had closed the door. “My spies tell me there was an altercation in the boys’ locker room after school yesterday.”

  Chip had an army. Mr. Hughes had a spy network. I needed to beef up my recruitment efforts.

  “Were you a part of that altercation?” he continued.

  “No,” I said, happy to tell the truth. The altercation was the attack on Yoda. I was part of the aftermath. A technicality, perhaps, but an important one.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Did someone see me there? Did someone file a complaint?”

  He stared at me for a full minute. The seconds dragged on the clock behind him like the hands were stuck in tar. “No,” he finally admitted. He tapped a piece of paper on his desk. “I am required to report any trouble you get into to your probation officer.”

  I nodded. “I’m seeing him this afternoon, sir. Should I ask him to call you?”

  Another half minute of silence, then, “No. But your grades are not what one would hope for.”

  How was I supposed to answer that? I kept my eyes on him and focused on blinking regularly, but not too fast, so I wouldn’t look like a liar or a cheat.

  “You’re walking a fine line here, Tyler. You don’t have any room for error.”

  Blink. “Yes, sir. I know that, sir.”

  “I don’t want to hear any more rumors about you. You keep your nose clean.”

  “I’ll try my best, sir.” I sniffed and wiped my nose on my sleeve. He didn’t notice.

  Bethany sat with us at lunch again. She did not put her foot in my lap, but she had the choice between sitting next to Hannah or me, and she sat next to me.

  Her arm bumped mine four times.

  After lunch I sniffed my sleeve. It smelled like her. I wanted to strip and rub it all over me, but the lunch ladies were already giving me funny looks.

  31.

  After school, I took the C bus into town to the county courthouse to meet with Mr. Benson, my probation officer. He was a big guy, ex-Marine plus sixty pounds, gray in his buzz cut, thick glasses, and a smile that reminded me of a hungry possum.

  The waiting room was the size and temperature of a meat locker and was lit by blinding fluorescent lights. There was a bored secretary at one end and a coffeepot that looked like it had last been used in the late 1980s. Old copies of Highlights magazine and Good Housekeeping were piled on a metal table in the corner.

  I sat.

  How did I end up with hardcore stuff like a judge, trial, and probation officer? Look up the laws about property damage.

  It’s a good thing they never found out what I really wanted to do. Spray-painting the school was Plan B.

  The Foul Deed: Plan A involved a bomb, an entertaining smoke bomb that would have forced them to close school on a beautiful spring day. It seemed like a surefire way to become a hero.

  Then I found myself dreaming about a real bomb. About blowing up the building. But don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t going to hurt anybody. I planned on using a timer so that at three o’clock in the morning the entire building would explode into small, standardized pieces.

  I just wanted to make a statement.

  After a week of planning, I started
having nightmares about explosions and timers that went bad. All that broken glass was bound to hurt someone. The fire might spread from treetop to treetop until it hit the neighborhoods around the school, then the stores on Grant Boulevard, and then the Buckeye Mall would go up in flames and the police would corner me and there’d be a tense standoff with their weapons drawn, and as I raised my hands over my head, one of them would think I was reaching for a weapon, and they’d blast away.

  I’d be the next dead boy on CNN for sure.

  By deciding to spray-paint a few harmless slogans, I actually saved hundreds of lives and countless millions in damages. But when they arrested me, I realized that people might not understand if I explained that part. I never told anyone. I thought about it from time to time, but I never told.

  The secretary looked up from her nails when Mr. Benson’s door opened. A woman my mom’s age hurried out.

  I followed Mr. Benson inside and took my chair. He shuffled papers on his desk and smiled his hundreds of big teeth at me. He told me that he’d had a great report from Mr. Pirelli and another nice one from Joe, the head custodian at school.

  I nodded.

  “How are your classes going?”

  “Great,” I said.

  “How’s your dad?”

  “Why, did he call you?”

  “No. It’s just that people like your father want to send their kids to summer camp, not to a probation officer. I wanted to make sure things were okay.”

  “He’s fine,” I said. “He works a lot.”

  “Well, give him my best.” He scribbled something on a piece of paper. “That’s that. Work hard at school, keep your nose clean, and come back in a month.”

  Again with the clean-nose thing. Authority figures had a pathological fear of boogers, that’s how I saw it.

  32.

  The explosion hit us as soon as I opened the door at four thirty on Friday afternoon. Good thing I was in front. Hannah didn’t have the body mass to absorb that much punishment.