25

At the emergency room, we tried to get in to see Dylan, but the nurse at the front desk said he was with his family and the police and pointed to the waiting room.

Frank arrived a few minutes later, out of breath and drenched in sweat. He’d gotten a text message from Meg and had run two miles to the hospital. I believe that my big friend had pushed himself as hard as any member of Fremont’s track team could have done. “How is he?” Frank demanded, red-faced and gasping. “Did they catch the guys?”

“What guys?” I asked. “What happened? No one here will tell us anything.”

“Somebody beat the crap out of him,” Frank told us.

I remembered Rob Powers’s warning to me that the football team wasn’t amused by all the publicity we were getting. “Could it have been some of the football players?” I asked.

They looked at me.

“I hate our school,” Becca said.

“I hope Dylan tells the cops everything,” Frank said. “I hope he names names.”

“Why wouldn’t he?” Becca asked.

“Because he has to walk through the doors of Muscles High again soon,” I told her.

“Things are going to change,” she vowed. “Enough is enough.”

I glanced down the corridor and saw two cops walk down the hallway to the exit. In a minute, Meg appeared. She didn’t say anything but just waved for us to follow her.

In the ER ward, Dylan was the only patient. The curtains around his bed were wide open. Dylan’s mom was usually a very calm woman, and I had watched her coast through three years of school board emergencies without ever once losing her cool. Now she looked worried and enraged at the same time. “Thanks for coming,” she said in an unsteady voice as we entered.

Dylan’s father—a tall and gentle guy who ran a small travel agency in town—was standing by the right side of the bed, and Meg moved to a spot on the left. Dylan was lying on his back with his neck in a protective brace and what looked like the biggest Band-Aid ever on his nose. There were cuts on his face, his left eye socket was badly bruised, and his right wrist had been immobilized in a splint. My friend wouldn’t be hitting any killer Ping-Pong backhand slices in the near future.

“Hey, buddy,” Frank rumbled, concern and anger clear in his deep voice. “You look awesome.”

Dylan looked back at us, and I think they’d probably given him some pain meds because he smiled. “I feel pretty awesome,” he said.

“What the hell happened?” Frank asked. “Who did this to you?”

“Dunno,” Dylan told us. “After school, I was cutting through the Stevens.” The Stevens is the nickname of a little patch of forest near the back of our school. A stream twists through it, and according to local legend a young solider named Stevens was drowned in it during the Revolutionary War. It still carries his name two hundred and however many years later. “They came from behind me, fast. I heard footsteps but I never saw who it was. The next thing I knew I was on the ground, they’d pulled my jacket over my head, and someone kept pounding on me and laughing.”

Then he stopped talking and began to cry.

None of us knew what to do, as our friend lay there sobbing like a little kid. Tears squeezed out of his eyes and ran down his cheeks, and his nose started to run. His mother squeezed his hand, and his dad said to us, “Sorry, guys. You’d better go now.”

We walked back to the waiting room and Meg came with us.

“Could he tell the cops anything?” Frank asked her.

She wiped away a tear of her own. “Just when and where it happened. The police are going to see if there are any footprints or other clues.”

“He heard them laughing,” Frank said. “Didn’t he recognize their voices?”

“He said it could have been anyone,” Meg told us.

“It was football players,” Becca announced.

Meg looked at her.

“We don’t know that for sure,” I told Becca. “We shouldn’t spread that around until there’s proof.”

“Who else could it have been?” she demanded. Suddenly the anger between us from earlier bubbled back up. “Dylan doesn’t have an enemy in the world. Tell me who else it could have possibly been, Jack. A motorcycle gang? How about a Viking raiding party?”

Her sarcasm made Frank and Meg smile, but I said again, “You can’t accuse people unless you know for sure that they did it.”

“I can accuse anyone I want,” Becca insisted. “You were the first one who mentioned the football team. They knocked out your teeth, too, remember? Why are you defending the people who just beat up one of your best friends?”

“Great, accuse anyone you want,” I told her. “Maybe you want to call a newspaper reporter.”

“Hey, guys, chill,” Frank said. “It’s not gonna help Dylan if you two go at it.” And then he asked Meg, “What happened to his arm?”

“His wrist is broken. The doctor said it’s a common injury when someone is knocked over and tries to break their fall.”

“What about his nose?” I asked.

“They broke that, too,” Meg said.

“Was that also busted in the fall?” Frank wanted to know.

“No, that was a punch,” Meg told us.

We were all quiet for a long moment, and then Shimsky’s voice rang out. He had stepped into the room behind us. “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable,” he said.

We turned to look at him. He was standing there nodding and almost looking pleased, as if he had always known this situation would flare up into violence.

“Who said that?” Becca wanted to know. “Danton?”

“Stalin?” I guessed.

“John F. Kennedy,” he said. “You know what just happened, right? They just upped the ante and we have to hit them back even harder.”

“What good will that do?” I asked him.

“It’s not about doing good,” he said, and I saw Becca nod slightly.

Percy arrived next, and two minutes later Chloe and Pierre showed up. Within half an hour, a dozen of our teammates were milling angrily around the waiting room. We might have been the Losers, but when it came to solidarity and friendship we were making a pretty strong team statement.

*   *   *

They operated on Dylan’s wrist at about nine p.m. He had something called a distal radius fracture, and they had to use two pins to stabilize the bones.

“Remind me not to fly with him,” Pierre joked. “Every time he travels through an airport he’s going to be setting off alarms.”

“I think these days they use titanium,” Becca said. “It doesn’t set off anything.”

Suddenly Percy called out, “Everyone quiet down.”

Dylan’s mother had walked into the waiting room, with a young and athletic-looking male doctor in blue scrubs. “That’s right, titanium’s a nonferrous metal,” the doctor said. “It doesn’t set off any alarms. I just wanted you guys to know that your friend came through the operation okay. His wrist is gonna be fine and his nose will heal up better than ever.”

“They’re going to keep him here overnight,” Dylan’s mom told us, looking and sounding a little better, “because he might have a low-grade concussion. He’s resting now, but he wanted me to thank you all for coming and hanging out. It means a lot to him knowing you’re here. He’ll be out of the hospital tomorrow and back on the soccer field soon.”

We all applauded the good news.

Dylan’s mom paused and gave us a smile. “In the meantime, he’s coming to watch the game on Tuesday, and he said he wants you to lose this one in his honor.”

As if in response, a chant started that I doubt has ever rung out in a hospital waiting room before: “Losers, losers, losers forever!”

The young doctor looked around, a bit mystified.

“Let’s lose this one big for Dylan,” Meg called out.

“Not just big but ugly!” Pierre seconded.

Frank’s deep voice boomed: “It’s time to show the world just how bad we can be!”