Six   

By the end of the week, things at school were back to normal. Kids were carrying on, outwardly at least, as if Mark Everley had never existed, and Dooley was back to remembering why he had never liked school. Reason number one was standing right up there at the front of the class—Dooley’s math teacher, droning out the rudiments of calculus, sounding like he one hundred percent didn’t gave a crap if anyone was listening or understood what he was saying. Reason number two: having to cram your head full of shit you knew for a fact you were never going to use, like, say, calculus. But the blue-ribbon winner, reason number three, was all the assholes. In Dooley’s experience, your average high school had a higher asshole-to-solid-citizen ratio than your average youth detention center. The only difference was, most of the high school assholes weren’t violent.

But some of them sure were.

Look, for example, at what was going in the yard on the school’s blind side, the side that faced a brick wall with no windows, the place where all the shit went down because no one in authority could see it unless they ventured out of their offices. It reminded Dooley of the Roman Coliseum he’d seen in some cheesy movie that for some reason had stuck in his memory. In the middle, two gladiators. Around the edges, the bored and bloodthirsty citizens. And somewhere, Dooley was willing to bet on it, there was an emperor ready to give thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Dooley told himself it was none of his business. What he should do was just walk on by. But what he actually did: he turned his head to take in the scene. He didn’t know what it was all about, but one thing was for sure, one of the guys in the middle was going to be fucked pretty soon. Two gladiators? Make that one stringy little Christian about to be eaten alive by one nasty looking old lion in the shape of a man. Well, a man-sized teenaged boy. The Christian was being played by a scrawny kid who obviously didn’t know a thing about fighting. He had his hands up, but they weren’t even curled into fists. Also, he looked scared, which was a big mistake because it only added to the confidence of the big guy with hands like mallets who was standing opposite him, staring him down, his mouth working, probably telling the guy how he was going to pound him into the ground like a tent peg.

The big guy was Mark Everley’s friend, a guy named Landers. He was taunting the scrawny kid. One of the spectators, standing close to Landers, but not in the middle of the semi-circle with him, was the only person in the whole school whom Dooley actually knew: Eddy Gillette. The first day Dooley had started school, he had been surprised to see Gillette there. He’d figured that first day was also going to be the last day he saw Gillette because Gillette wasn’t much of a regular school attender. But Dooley kept seeing him around, not every day but often enough to get the idea that Gillette was showing up more than he was skipping.

Dooley slowed his pace when he saw Gillette, but then he picked it up again. He had an appointment. Right after that he had to get to work. But before he did, he had to go home and grab his stupid video store T-shirt and his stupid video store name badge.

Gillette was saying something to Landers when he spotted Dooley. His expression changed and he turned away from the action in the semicircle to look directly at Dooley. After that it got weird. As soon as Gillette turned to look at Dooley, Landers turned to look at what Gillette was looking at. Then one of the people in the semi-circle turned to look. The person next to him turned to look at what he was looking at—and so on and so on and so on, until all of a sudden Dooley was the main attraction. Dooley glanced at the scrawny kid with his hands in the air. If the kid were smart, he’d cut out of there while everyone was looking at Dooley. But, it figured, the kid wasn’t that smart. He just stood there, waiting almost patiently for Landers to turn back to him, as if he knew, like the Borg, that resistance was futile. While Dooley was looking at the scrawny kid, Gillette turned and looked at him too. It took a moment, but Dooley finally understood. Gillette was wondering if the scrawny kid was a friend of Dooley’s. If he was, maybe Gillette would tell his pal Landers to leave the kid alone, at least while Dooley was standing there. Maybe he’d even get Landers to back off altogether.

Dooley glanced around at all the faces looking at him. Some of them he sort of recognized from some of his classes. A couple he was pretty sure he had seen at the funeral. But most were just faces, people he didn’t know, people he was pretty sure he didn’t want to know, people who had obviously all heard something about him. They were watching him and exchanging nervous glances, like they were wondering what he was going to do, probably wondering if he was going to produce a baseball bat out of thin air and let ’er rip.

Dooley kept moving.

Someone came around the side of the school. Principal? Vice principal? Teacher? Someone who could break things up?

No.

It was Beth. She was carrying a handful of paper and a tape gun, and she frowned as she took in what was happening. She started toward the semicircle, a determined look on her face. Dooley wished now that he’d been a hero, but it was too late. Someone else had stepped into that role—Rhodes. Dooley wondered where he had come from. He hadn’t noticed him and didn’t think he’d been standing there the whole time. Rhodes waded through the crowd until he was standing between Landers and the scrawny kid. He looked a little nervous, or maybe it was the way the sun caught the lenses of his glasses that accounted for the way he dropped his head a little and seemed to be looking up at Landers, even though he was as tall as Landers.

“Why don’t you leave him alone?” Rhodes said, his voice quiet, quavering just a little. He must have been sweating, too, because he reached up and pushed his glasses up his nose. Everyone strained forward, even Dooley, to see what Landers was going to do.

Landers was breathing hard. He glowered at Rhodes, clearly unhappy that his fun was being interrupted.

Rhodes turned to the scrawny kid and said, “Go on, get out of here.”

A buzz went through the crowd. Beth was staring at Rhodes. Dooley could just imagine what she was thinking—who knew they actually made guys like that outside of the movies?

Landers glanced at the guy he’d been ready to pulverize. He pivoted to look at Rhodes. He took in all the kids who were crowded around in a semicircle, his audience and his screen. Rhodes leaned in close to Landers and said something. A warning maybe? A threat?

Landers threw up his hands in a gesture of frustration and disgust. He did a slow one-eighty, checking all those faces. Then he curled his hands into fists and thumped Rhodes hard on the chest with them. Rhodes recoiled with the impact, like one of those bottom-weighted punching toys—you can whack them so that they look like they’re going to fall over, and then they do what Rhodes did: they rebounded. Rhodes didn’t back off or down. He stood with his own hands clenched, determined in his clean, pressed jeans, his light leather jacket, his kick-ass boots, and watched as Landers turned and elbowed his way through the spectators.

Rhodes reached out and touched the scrawny kid who seemed to be having trouble understanding what had just happened. He looked like Dooley had always imagined that dead guy Lazarus in the Bible must have looked like when Jesus brought him back to life. Think about it. You died—Dooley believed, he feared, there was a moment when you knew it was going to happen, what he called the aw-shit moment, the same as when you knew the cops had you good, only about a million times worse. That guy Lazarus, he must have known it was permanent lights out. Then the next thing he knows, he’s up and walking around again. Dooley had never figured out if that was a good thing or a bad thing. And anyway, why Lazarus? A better question: why only Lazarus? If you were that good, if you could raise the dead, why stop at just one?

“Go on,” Rhodes said. He nudged the scrawny kid to get him started. The kid blinked and stumbled toward the semicircle of spectators. Two girls reluctantly moved aside to let him through. Then the kid took off, and there it was, the sound Dooley hated, the sound of forty, maybe fifty, kids laughing at the kid, look at him go, sprinting for the side of the building like he believed his life depended on it.

Rhodes turned. His eyes widened in surprise when he saw Beth. He smiled at her and started toward her. Dooley walked away.

He spotted the first notice on a utility pole outside the school. Then he saw that notices just like it had been taped on every third or fourth pole for at least a block in all directions. He was sure Beth had put them there. He took a detour on the way home and saw them taped to the utility poles near the ravine, too. Lost: Red backpack with black trim. Net pockets on both sides. REWARD OFFERED. If found, please call… He ripped one off a pole mostly because it had her phone number on it, but he couldn’t imagine himself calling her. The thing about his life so far: it hadn’t allowed for many girls.