Paul’s got something to do and points me toward the kitchen for lunch. Corina and Damon are already at a table when I walk in. They’ve got empty plates in front of them and they’re deep in some conversation, but Corina stops talking when she sees me in the doorway.
“Hey, Alex.” She smiles. I think she looks happy to see me. “Got your patch?”
Damon looks up, too. He looks less happy.
I nod, smile a little bit. “Yeah.”
“C’mere.” She waves me over. I cross from the door so I’m standing next to her. “Let’s see it.”
“See what?”
“Your patch.” She touches my arm just below my sleeve and tugs at the fabric. “Roll it up.”
I do. She leaves her hand on my arm. I sneak a look over at Damon while she and I fiddle with my sleeve. He’s annoyed.
“It’s so strange.” Corina touches my patch. Her voice is so soft it’s almost a whisper. “Feeling things like they’re happening to skin when something touches the patch.”
I pay attention to her touch. She’s right. Even though I can tell that there’s something different about the feel of her finger based on whether it’s touching me or the patch, I can still feel both. I nod.
Damon stands up and leans over the table. “Let me see.”
He reaches over and pinches my patch, hard.
The pain is awful, like getting kicked in the nuts with a boot. I scream and pull away, but the pain is so intense that I can’t even make my legs work. My eyes start to water and he laughs.
“You and your patch—you’re both pussies.” He walks around to the other side of the table and sheds his jacket onto a chair before walking his plate back to the counter. He doesn’t even look in my direction.
Corina’s saying something to him, but I can’t hear her words. I can’t hear anything. I see red. The adrenaline spikes in my fingers and my feet. My sight narrows.
Everything that’s gone wrong in the world in the last week floods my mind at once.
He’s going to pay.
I’m up and over to him in a flash. Corina calls my name, but I’m not stopping. I can’t see anything but him going down. I move to intercept him but he ignores me so I shove him hard from behind. “You messed up, bitch.” He stumbles into the counter.
He’s got me by six inches in height and he’s thicker than me, too, but I don’t care. He turns toward me like he’s going to say something but I don’t give him the chance. He’s right in my range, so I box him at the temple and he goes down in a pile. I kick him once, hard, to drive the point home. His shirtsleeve pulls up when he falls and his patch is showing. I reach for it, ready to make him hurt worse than he made me, but then there’s new hands on me.
Instinct kicks in and I drop down under the grip of whoever’s got me and send an elbow backward. I land it hard in their stomach and I hear the air go out of them like I popped a balloon.
“Oh shit,” Corina shrieks. “What did you do?” I whip around to see what she means.
It’s Paul. He’s wiggling in pain, his face is red, and it looks like his eyes are about to pop out of his head.
I look back at Damon, but he’s still on the floor.
“Damn,” Corina says, staring at me. She crosses over to Paul and kneels down next to him. Richard runs in, sees us, pulls a radio from somewhere and mumbles into it like a security guard.
I’ve just screwed everything up.
I don’t know what else to do, so I make a break for it, pushing past Richard, through the gym and out onto the patio. Richard calls my name, but I don’t slow down until I’m in the Long Hall, headed for the driveway.
I hear the door on the deck side close behind me and lock. The driveway door is locked, too. I look around, but there’s nowhere else to go.
I slide to the floor.
The walls brighten so I look up. There’s a picture of Corina driving, and another of Julio and Zeon squaring off on the day they met for the first time in sixth grade. It was one of the most entertaining fights I’ve ever seen. Zeon took Julio down.
I’ve got nowhere to go. I close my eyes to dive deep for my Voice. Things are different with the patch—the drain’s not there anymore. It’s like the patch stopped it up. Instead, there’s just the path Paul took me down. I can hear the jackhammer pile of guitars behind the wall but that’s it.
HELLO?
Nothing. Just like she said.
When I resurface, Corina’s coming up the hall toward me.
“Alex? You okay?”
“Yeah.” Then: “You saw. He pinched my patch and called me a pussy,” I tell her before she can even ask. I shake my head. “He shouldn’t have done that.”
She’s standing over me now. I look up at her, but her eyes aren’t on me—they’re on the wall with the picture of her in the car. “That’s how I look to you?”
The heat of embarrassment rises in my face, overwhelming what was left of the adrenaline from the fight. I don’t answer her. Instead I think of anything else besides her so the picture will change.
“South Park?” she asks. I look up again and her picture is gone, replaced by a scene with Kenny from South Park. I realize I’ve been holding my breath. I let it out.
“I like South Park.”
“Me too,” she says. She slides down against the wall across from me. She’s wearing a skirt and it’s hard not to look at where her foot has kicked it up to her upper thigh. She follows my eyes and shifts her position, making me feel even more awkward.
“Sorry,” I mutter, not sure whether I’m sorry for looking at her legs or for thinking about her and making the picture happen or for clocking Damon and knocking Paul down.
She shrugs. “It happens,” she says. “Damon plays too much.”
“Paul doesn’t. He didn’t deserve that.”
She shakes her head. “Nope. You shouldn’t have done that.”
“He should’ve minded his own business.” But even while I’m saying it I know it’s stupid. “Never mind. I didn’t . . .”
“He’s alright. You didn’t do any permanent damage.”
“What about Damon?”
She shrugs. “He’ll live and maybe grow up a little bit.”
Before I can stop myself I think about her and Damon at dinner the night before. They looked cozy and like they were really into each other. I hear her laugh. She’s looking over my head and when I look up, I see the two of them at dinner last night in a big picture on the wall. I want to die and I desperately try and think of anything else.
A picture of Benny, my mom’s old Chihuahua.
“Cute dog,” she says. “You think me and Damon . . . ?” She laughs. “There are rules here, though, and one of the big ones is that we aren’t allowed to ‘develop emotional or romantic attachments’ with other witnesses.”
“So? It’s not like everybody follows the rules.” I’m obviously totally jealous. My face gets all hot again and I feel myself sweating. “Not that I care,” I lie.
“Course you don’t.” She smiles and shifts her weight so that she frees a leg and kicks me with it. Not hard or anything, just like you do. “But just so you know, Damon is most definitely not my type.”
I smile and look down, almost too embarrassed to form words. “Don’t matter.” Then: “How much trouble am I in?”
She shakes her head. “You and Damon are going to have to work things out and you’re going to need to make this up to Paul somehow, but I think that’ll probably be the end of it.”
“Richard isn’t pissed at me?”
She shrugs. “I think he was a little surprised at having his suburban compound life suddenly go street, but he’ll get over it.”
“It’s hard not to . . .” I shrug. “What was I supposed to do?”
“I feel you, but here at the compound, we’re supposed to talk it out.” She rolls her eyes. “Even when people deserve a little pain.”