MIDDLE SCHOOL IS A MINEFIELD. DECIDING WHO TO LIKE AND NOT like and who to follow and who to ignore completely. Worrying that you’re going to trip while walking down the hall and sprawl all over the floor like a beached starfish. Wondering if you should raise your hand when the teacher asks a hard question and risk exposing your nerdiness for the sake of a few bonus points. Taking every sideways glance as a message, trying to crack the code. Every day you’re bound to do something that gets you noticed by the wrong people. Every day you’re bound to step somewhere you shouldn’t.
I know all about minefields—actual, honest-to-god-explosives-buried-in-the-dirt minefields—from my crazy uncle Mike, the one who gave me the whale shirt for my birthday. He served in the army straight out of high school and did two tours on the bomb squad. His official title, I guess, was explosive ordnance disposal specialist, but his buddies gave him the nickname Pinky. He spent most of his time over in Iraq for Round Two, as he called it, helping to detonate and disarm land mines and IEDs—improvised explosive devices. Like a toilet paper tube full of gunpowder only more complex and a lot more dangerous. It was an IED that gave my uncle his nickname. It actually blew off three of his fingers, but the surgeons managed to reattach two of them. Sometimes things stick, and sometimes they don’t. Uncle Mike told me all about it. In incredibly gory detail.
I could sit and listen to my uncle’s war stories for hours, partly because they expanded my vocabulary—he only censored the language when Mom was around—but also because they kind of put things in perspective. My uncle has seen bombs capable of leveling buildings, taking out a whole city block, though he says that’s nothing compared to the one time he had to babysit me as an infant and I blew out my diaper. (He called me a biological WMD—weapon of mass destruction—and told me that one diaper was the reason he never got married and had a kid of his own, though I suspect there were others.) He’d seen things I’d never seen and hoped I’d never have to see, and he said he didn’t have a whole lot of patience for people who didn’t know a good thing when they had it.
Sometimes I wondered if he didn’t mean my parents.
Uncle Mike used to come visit a couple times a year before my dad moved away, and when he did he’d tell me about all the things he’d seen blow up.
The last time I saw him was four years ago. Mom and Dad hadn’t spoken to each other in a while, and I swear it was so cold in the house you could see icicles hanging from the windows in June. On the second day of the long weekend Uncle Mike came outside to finish his beer, and found me bouncing a tennis ball off the garage.
“I know what you’re doing,” he said with a sly grin, stepping off the porch and coming toward me. He wore long sleeves, even in the summer. Said he’d gotten accustomed to having every square inch covered.
“I’m playing catch,” I told him. I was only nine at the time. I hadn’t met Bench yet. I had sort-of friends, but no tribe, and I was used to spending time by myself. I lobbed the tennis ball against the garage door again, but my uncle was faster than me and snatched it before I could. He held the ratty old thing up between us in his four-fingered hand.
“You are staying out of the way,” he said.
I didn’t know what to say, so instead I took the ball from him and started chucking it again. In some ways Uncle Mike was the exact opposite of my father. He didn’t care for books. He liked big crowds and loud gatherings. He was a people person, which he said was unusual for someone who spent most of his working hours by himself, trying not to get blown up. He actually tried to get along with my mother—made a pretty constant effort—which was another big difference between him and Dad. But there was one thing he and Dad had in common: neither of them was afraid to lecture me about life, whether I wanted them to or not. I took it better coming from Uncle Mike. It didn’t sound like a lecture. It just sounded like two guys talking. Besides, he was immensly cool in a yeah-I-got-my-finger-blown-off-in-combat kind of way.
“It’s all right. I get it,” he said, standing beside me, taking a sip from his can. “It’s the safest thing. You walk down a road and you see a wire poking out of the dirt, you stop walking, you back the hell up, and you call EOD.” Uncle Mike liked to use acronyms. He was full of them. I suspected he was full of a lot of things. Nobody could have that many stories. “You take cover, clinch hard, and cross your fingers, but you stay out of the way. Sometimes there are no RSPs.”
“RSPs?” I stopped bouncing my ball.
“Render safe procedures. Whatever you gotta do to make sure a bomb doesn’t hurt somebody. You know—don’t cut the black wire or whatever crapola they teach you in the movies. But sometimes there’s really not much you can do. Nothing but trigger the thing and stay out of the way and try not to get hurt. You know what I’m saying?”
I wasn’t sure. “Coming from a guy with nine fingers,” I said, tossing the ball again. Thunk. Bounce. Catch. Thunk. Bounce. Catch.
“I said try,” he said, intercepting my ball again. “You don’t always get out in one piece.” He bounced it as hard as he could against the pavement with his pinkiless hand, a fly ball for me to catch. Unfortunately the sun temporarily blinded me and I lost track of it and it bounced down the driveway and into the street. My uncle and I both watched it, sort of daring the other one to go after it.
In the end we just left it there, resting by the curb, and sat together on the porch instead, him nursing his beer and me chugging a Coke, both of us listening to the nothing coming from inside the house, me wondering what kind of man decides he wants to disarm bombs for a living and my uncle probably wondering the same thing.
But some things, I guess, you can’t shy away from. Some things you just have tackle head on, whether it’s safe or not. Even if it means losing a part of you.
Evan Smalls was running the Gauntlet at four, which meant I needed to get home and grab my bike if I wanted to make it out to Hirohito Hill in time to meet Bench.
That’s what everyone called the Gauntlet when nobody was careening down it: Hirohito Hill. At least that’s what kids long before us called it, and it stuck. I’m not sure it even has a real name. I don’t even know who owns the land—the town, I guess. Or maybe it’s just been in somebody’s family for generations and they’ve forgotten about it. There are no signs saying KEEP OUT, though there probably should be.
Not that it would stop us. There’s not much that would stop thirteen-year-old boys from trying to kill themselves in an attempt to prove how cool they are. Maybe barbed wire. Maybe high voltage. But probably not. The rules would just be different. Legend says that the hill was named after the emperor of Japan during World War II. The same emperor who encouraged his pilots to nose-dive into battleships and aircraft carriers. They could have called it Kamikaze Hill, I guess, but then you wouldn’t have the alliteration. I’m sort of a sucker for alliteration too.
You’d think it would be the kind of thing you’d grow out of. An idea you packed up after elementary school, along with your glue sticks and your Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. But not in Branton. In Branton, the Gauntlet is an institution. As integral to our way of life as Mr. Twisty’s, Stockbridge’s statue, Fredo’s greasy pizza parlor, or Mustache Mick, the homeless guy who begs for loose change outside Andy’s Bar on Tenth Street and has a big, black broom curtaining his mouth. Every kid in Branton had given Mick at least a dollar and shelled out two fifty for a jumbo slice at Fredo’s. And everybody had seen at least one kid try to tackle the Gauntlet. It was our proving grounds. Our Octagon. Our Hunger Games. A giant, tree-studded hill, overgrown and wild with brush and ivy. There was no easy path down. The slope, Deedee once calculated, was at least fifty degrees (I know better than to question his math). It took you three minutes to walk your bike up it. You could make it back down in twenty seconds, provided nothing stopped you, but something always stopped you. There was no single straight-line path. To navigate, you had to turn, and turning on that kind of slope going that kind of speed was tricky to do once, let alone the dozen times you would need to in order to dodge the trees and reach the bottom intact.
I’d never ridden the Gauntlet, but I’d run down it on foot a few times. That was slightly safer; when you feel like you are going too fast you can just whip out an arm and lasso one of the thousand trees that threaten to pulverize you, anchoring yourself to it. But even running down you run the risk of tripping over a root or getting tangled in the underbrush, splitting your head open on a rock or twisting your ankle. On a bike you’re almost better off just closing your eyes and hoping for angels to guide you.
In the whole history of Branton Middle School—more than fifty years—there were probably only a dozen kids who had made it to the bottom of the hill in one piece. All of them had long since graduated, their names recorded in whispers, passed down from kid to kid, generation to generation.
None of them were named Evan Smalls. He was going to crash, no doubt about it. That’s why everybody was here. They wanted to watch.
I met Bench at the base, standing in the field of clover and spent dandelions where everybody just pitched their bikes in a great big pile. I was early—Evan hadn’t even shown up yet—but there was already a crowd. Lots of people I knew, but Bench was the only one I was friends with.
“Beat ya,” he said when he saw me. “I’m guessing they didn’t change their mind?”
Wolf and Deedee, he meant. Maybe Bench thought they would call at the last minute and say they were coming. But Wolf was probably rocking Chopin, and Deedee was probably locked in his room polishing his dice and drawing up maps for our Saturday-night session. I didn’t tell Bench how close I had been to not coming myself. How awkward I felt with both him and Wolf staring at me at our table.
He seemed to know what I was thinking, though. “Man,” he said. “Lunch today.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Weird.”
“So weird,” I repeated, not sure if we were using the word the same way. It had certainly been uncomfortable. But then the origami thing had been kind of funny. “Komodo dragon,” I mumbled.
“Yeah. What was up with that, anyway?”
“If I would have known, I would have just told her to make me a fish.”
Bench grunted. “Something tells me Rose Holland is gonna do whatever she wants to, no matter what you say.” Those words mashed together seemed to form a compliment, but it didn’t really come off that way. “And her and Wolf. He didn’t even ask. I mean, that’s our table.”
I didn’t tell Bench that Wolf did ask. Sort of. He just didn’t ask Bench. Maybe he knew what the answer would be. “It’s just lunch,” I said, sensing the tension in Bench’s voice. Suddenly I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk about it anymore.
“Yeah, I know, but did you see the looks we were getting?” he asked. “And not just today. Yesterday too. Some of the guys I practice with, you could just tell what they were thinking.”
I tried not to think about what they were thinking. I told myself I didn’t care. I didn’t have guys who I practiced with. But I had Bench, and he obviously cared. “It’s kind of hard to blame them,” he continued. “I mean she is kind of—well, you know . . .”
She is what? The unfinished sentence hung between us as we started up the hill, daring me to fill in the blank. Rose was a little odd, I guess. She didn’t dress like most of the other girls at school. Didn’t act the same way. In two days I hadn’t seen her in the hall with anyone besides Wolf or one of the teachers. She was new. An outsider. Someone who’d never even heard of the hill we were currently walking up or seen anyone ride down the other side. She obviously stuck out.
“It’s not just how she looks,” Bench added quickly, seemingly reading my thoughts again. “I heard her mom’s crazy, and nobody has ever even seen her dad.”
“You sure know a lot about her,” I said, maybe more suggestive than I meant to.
Bench stopped and gave me a hard stare. We were nearly at the top of the hill now where everyone else had gathered, clustered in their own tribes. “People say things, Frost. You know that.”
Yeah. I knew that. Sometimes the things they say get back around to you. Sometimes they don’t. But you know they’re out there.
“I’m not suggesting I have anything against her personally. I just don’t know if she should sit with us all the time. Things were just fine before, right?”
I stood in front of him and thought of all the ways I could respond. I could say that it’s only been twice so far, which hardly counts as “all the time.” I could say it wasn’t his decision to make; there were four of us at the table. I could say that it shouldn’t matter who she sat with, or who we did. I could throw his own words back at him and say that Rose Holland was probably going to do whatever Rose Holland wanted to do.
But he wasn’t wrong. We were just fine before.
“Okay,” I said. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was saying okay to. I was just ready to stop talking about it.
“All right,” Bench sighed.
Up on the hill the crowd of onlookers started to buzz and Bench and I craned our necks to see Evan walking his bike up. He was joined by Jimmy Reese, his best friend and wingman. You needed to bring someone with you when you ran the Gauntlet. Someone you could trust to call 911, if it came to that, and to lie to your parents for you or make up some excuse. Someone to help push your mangled bike as you limped back home. Bench and I stopped talking and followed the blob of fifty or so kids to Evan’s chosen launch spot.
Everyone attempting the Gauntlet picked their own takeoff point. There were some that were considered better than others, but there was no single entry point into the dense wooded hillside that gave a person a better shot at making it. “Did you ever find out what this was even about?” I asked, nodding toward the doomed boy and his bike.
“Evan and Mikey V. have been talking trash, apparently trying to impress Alicia Raymond. They have a bet that if Evan makes it down, he’s got to pay Evan fifty bucks.”
Fifty bucks. Hardly seemed worth risking your life. Of course I once watched my parents argue for three days over whose turn it had been to empty the dishwasher, so I’m probably not the best judge of what is and isn’t worth fighting for. People had risked the Gauntlet for less. I looked around for Mikey V. and spotted him at the edge of the crowd, arms crossed. He seemed pretty confident he’d hold on to his money. I wondered if Alicia Raymond was even here.
Evan Smalls sat on his bike and peered down the hill, probably mapping his course, or just trying to find the courage to lift his feet. He wasn’t wearing a helmet. It was tradition. The kids who ran the Gauntlet forty or fifty years ago didn’t wear them, so kids today didn’t wear them. Convoluted logic. Like saying you shouldn’t wear sunscreen because your grandma never bothered.
There were no speeches. No bequeathing of material possessions. Jimmy and Evan bumped fists. “Good luck, man.” It was the only thing anybody ever said. Evan hitched a huge breath and then hunkered down over his handlebars. The crowd hushed, each of us silently counting down in our heads. Three. Two. One.
We have liftoff.
He didn’t need to pedal. The pedals were just a place to keep your feet. Gravity did all the work. Evan Smalls careened down Hirohito Hill on an orange-and-black Huffy, undulating over the rutted terrain. I thought about my uncle and what he would say about this—except there were no render safe procedures for the Gauntlet. There was the top of the hill and the bottom of the hill and a thousand ways to get mangled in between.
I found myself holding my own sweaty hand and saying a little prayer for Evan as he dodged one tree after another. He wasn’t a friend or anything—it’s not like we ever hung out—but he’d never nudged me or called me a dweeb or a loser either. Please let him make it, I whispered. Let him get to the bottom.
But the bloodthirsty gods that watch over Hirohito Hill don’t take requests.
Evan had barely gotten halfway when his pedal clipped a tree, causing him to jerk the opposite direction. He sideswiped an even bigger tree and wiped out, shielding his head with his forearms and using his right shoulder to absorb most of the impact as he flipped, the crowd of students at the top of the hill flinching in unison, fists to their mouths. The bike twisted and slipped out from underneath him, the busted gear assembly sawing through his sock and into his ankle, leaving a jagged gash. He lay there, sprawled out in the dirt, entangled in the metal tubes and springs of his ride, rolling and wincing and holding his right arm as several kids, including Jimmy, made their way to him, none too quickly, afraid they would take a tumble down the hill themselves.
Bench and I stood at the top and watched. Even from where we were you could see Evan’s face squinched in pain.
“Nasty,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Is that blood?”
“I think so.”
There wasn’t a lot else to say.
A small crowd of students had gathered around Evan now and were helping him to his feet. To his credit, he didn’t cry, even as he limped the rest of the way down the hill, Jimmy guiding the bike with its busted tire and slipped chain behind him. It would probably cost fifty bucks just to get the bike back in shape. Not to mention he’d have to explain to his parents where he got the huge yellow bruise that was no doubt going to blossom across his shoulder. It takes a while, sometimes, for things like that to show. A bloody sock you could just toss in somebody’s bushes on the way home. But the bruise would sneak up on him in the middle of the night, and somehow, his parents would find out, and he’d have to make some excuse, because parents weren’t allowed to know about the Gauntlet. Like most things kids do that they probably shouldn’t: if the adults found out, they would put a stop to it.
The show was over. Bench and I headed back down the gentler side of the hill toward our own bikes.
“You think you’ll ever try to ride it?” Bench asked.
“For fifty bucks? No way.” Probably not for a girl either. Even if I thought running the Gauntlet would impress one of them long enough to like me, which was doubtful.
“For anything, then?” Bench asked.
I stopped for a moment and tried to think of something that would be worth it. Hypothetically, I would do it for a thousand dollars. Or maybe five thousand. I’d do it if I could end world hunger. Or if my life depended on it. Or if somehow it might get my parents to just talk to each other again. But for the reasons that kids normally tackled the Gauntlet? I shook my head. “You?”
“I don’t know,” Bench said. “I guess if my rep was on the line, you know? I wouldn’t want people talking smack about me, saying I wasn’t up to it.”
Bench’s reputation. Sometimes I forgot any of us had one, but I guess if one of us did, it would be him. I wondered what people he meant. If there were certain ones he was thinking of.
“I mean, how hard could it be, really?” he said. “Keep your head up. Keep your eyes forward. Don’t let go. Oh. And try not to crash.”
“Well, when you put it that way . . . no. I still wouldn’t do it,” I said.
Try not to crash. It sounded like sage advice.
If only it were always that easy.
That night, after Mom managed an epic fail at eggplant parmesan and had to order takeout, I finished up my homework and checked my email. I was one of the few kids I knew who still bothered with it (e-mail, not homework, though I knew a lot of kids who didn’t bother with that either), mostly because I didn’t own a phone of my own and Mom put the kibosh on social media accounts until I turned fifteen—though I had one that she didn’t know about.
There were the usual messages. Hot twenty-four-year-olds in the Branton area looking for a date. A pill that would help me with the urination problems I didn’t have. Kohl’s was having its fourteenth biggest sale of the season. Delete all. Amid the junk, though, one message caught my eye: from hollandrose42@gmail.
Apparently I wasn’t the only one who preferred email over texting. I opened it.
There wasn’t much in the body of the message, just a subject line that said, “Thought you might like this,” and a link underneath. She signed it simply Rose.
I paused, wondering first how she’d even gotten my address, and second (and more important) why she decided to use it. I wasn’t the one she was laughing with at the start of lunch today. And yet here she was sending me a message.
I remembered what Bench told me back at the hill. People say things. They see things. They jump to conclusions.
I actually looked around idiotically to see if anyone was watching, though the only other person in the house was my mother and I could hear her in the kitchen scraping burned eggplant from the pan. I clicked on the link, my palm sweaty, and found myself directed to a website teaching viewers how to fold origami animals.
Or, more specifically, an origami Komodo dragon.
It was actually a thing.
First take your sheet and fold it lengthwise. Then pull down the top two corners. . . .
I smiled at no one in particular as I watched the video one time through. I went back to the beginning and reached in my jeans pocket for the sticky note, the one from Bench with the joke on it (unbearable), and did my best to follow along, but my square was too small, and what I ended up with looked a lot more like Evan Smalls all crumpled and tangled in his bike than a Komodo dragon.
I threw it in the wastebasket underneath my desk. Then I spotted the other sticky note clinging to the side of my monitor. The one with the snowman on it.
Thanks for lunch.
I couldn’t just ignore her. It didn’t seem right. I hit reply.
Maybe I should just start with a fish. ☺
My cursor hovered over the send button, finger poised over the mouse, reading that one sentence, over and over, making sure I hadn’t said anything I hadn’t meant to, which would have been hard given the fact I’d only used eight words. I even fretted over the emoticon—considered the one with the winking eye, but that would definitely give the wrong impression. And that was the last thing I wanted to do.
I clicked send and stood up to go brush my teeth but paused over the keyboard, refreshing the inbox once, then again, standing there for thirty seconds, a minute, two. Just to see if, by chance, she was online right at that moment and had gotten my reply.
And if she would write me back.