Twelve months earlier: May
Robot spends the whole day feeling angry, resentful, and doomed. He just wants those stupid assholes and their stupid YouTube channel to fuck off and go away. And the whole day, from math to bio to global geography, none of the actual classroom work gets through to him. He cannot listen. He is taking shitty notes, writing things down to keep the teacher from getting on his case. But his head is full of imagined scenes. In one scene, the bell rings at the end of the day, and he ignores the idiots mobbing him in the hallway and goes to the band room, gets followed there by the stupid Prank Fights crowd. Trumpet Boy meets him at the door: “Don’t come here dragging this shit show with you. I knew it was a mistake to ever invite your sorry ass to play with us.”
In another scene, he attacks Lucas Shortt and that fucking knob Suitjon. They are waiting for him outside the front foyer and he wades into the crowd, grabs Suitjon’s camera, plows Suitjon in the face with it, then knocks Lucas Shortt over sideways, plugging him on one ear with the camera and then following through with it until Shortt is on the front step of the school, bleeding all over the concrete from the side of his fool head.
After lunch, his global geography teacher gets in his face about staring off into space. She is a bony old lady with grey roots at her scalp. In his mind, he is in the middle of a scene where he is trying to talk his way out of a fight with Gink. Suddenly he becomes aware of the teacher. Her lined face floating in the centre of his field of vision. There is that terrible bitter coffee smell that you get from old people’s breath. She has obviously said something to him, because she is grinning expectantly, awaiting a reply. The kids around Robot laugh, but the laughter dies away quickly and Robot decides he can just wait this lady out. He has no idea what she said, but telling her that is only going to make things worse.
“Well…” she says.
He looks back up at her, at the mean, self-satisfied look on her face. Half the lights in the classroom are off. There is a screen at the front with an overhead image on it. A PowerPoint slide with a bar graph in three colours. He is completely lost. There are words on the bar graph: production is one. Investment is another. There are some country names. China. The United States. Whatever she said to him, whatever reply she is waiting for, it probably has nothing to do with the lesson, anyway. There is a growing tension around the moment that, the longer it goes on, the more determined Robot becomes not to engage with it. The teacher set out to humiliate him and she’d already succeeded. The whole class is gawking at him with their slack-jawed mouths open. Whatever he says now, whether it fits with what the teacher said to him or not, they will laugh at it.
The classroom has a single narrow window that stretches from thigh level almost all the way to the ceiling. Robot sits on the opposite end of the room, so that when he scans the room everyone is a glare-shot silhouette. All the kids in their rows of desks. Even the teacher, whose features were easy to make out when she was up close to him, has now taken a couple of steps back, to further make a specimen of him. Her face has become a darkened outline with only glimpses of contours as she moves her gaze from the classroom behind her back to Robot.
He raises a hand.
A few students giggle.
When she doesn’t respond immediately, Robot says, “Excuse me.”
More giggles in the room.
“Yes, Robert,” the teacher says.
“May I please use the washroom?”
There is subdued laughter. The teacher makes an ironic face and shakes her head resignedly. “You might as well,” she says.
Outside the geography room door, there is a landing at the top of a staircase. The boys’ room is to the left.
“What happened to you this morning, man?” It is Noh, standing in front of the boys’ washroom as though he’s been waiting there since class started almost an hour before.
“Hey, Noh,” Robot says. “Ah,” he was not expecting this conversation, “I got delayed.”
There is no way to explain to Noh what he’s been going through today.
Noh’s face is broad and square and handsome.
“We’ll be there after school. Right after class. We usually jam for, like, a half hour before stage band rehearsal.”
Robot takes a step back and looks into the geography classroom. The teacher stands in the projector light, her face partially coloured by a purplish stripe of bar graph.
There is literally nothing more important to him at this moment than playing with the Jazz Kids again. From their perspective, he’s already blown them off once. How many times can he count on being re-invited? He is so angry with Lucas Shortt and Suitjon and even with Gink right now. They are all just idiots.
“Listen, Noh.”
“Can I ask where you two are supposed to be right now?” There’s a teacher coming down the hall.
Noh gets a slightly scared look on his face. It is the look of a kid who has never been in any real trouble. He looks at the teacher and opens his mouth as if to speak. Robot can tell by the even pace of the teacher’s walk that he has no intention of following up his question. He is just playing a role.
“Good afternoon, sir,” Robot says, just as the man disappears past the corner of the hallway.
“I had so much fun last night,” Robot says when he turns back to Noh.
Noh smiles. “It was a good jam, right?”
Robot thinks. “It’s…it’s the most fun possible. It’s fun that’s so far beyond fun that you need a whole new word for it.”
“‘Euphoria’?” Noh says. He shrugs. “I don’t know. I looked it up one time.” Everything Noh says seems to be the most honest, genuine thing he can think of saying. But at the same time, he always seems on the edge of laughter. Nobody else Robot knows seems so close to laughter all the time unless it is bitter, ironic, hateful laughter. But Noh is not like that at all. He’s like a little kid on the verge of the giggles.
“Euphoria,” Robot says. “That’s it.”
Noh nods.
They both laugh.
“Anyway. You can tell everyone I’m sorry about this morning. And I have to deal with something today right after school. But starting tomorrow, I’ll be able to jam as much as anyone.”
“That’ll be awesome, man. We’re going to, like. There’s a slot in the talent show we’re already booked for,” Noh says. “And there’s this other gig we might have. Like, a corporate thing over at the Holiday Inn. Just playing in the corner while all these business people get drunk and eat snacks. We played one in the fall. It was a smaller one. This one is bigger, I think. Paid.”
Paid! “Yeah, man. I’m all about that. Just. Today is no good. I got that thing to take care of after school. After that, I’ll be free…”
What is he even talking about? A thing after school? All he knows is that the bullshit with Lucas Shortt needs to end. Now.
After geography class, Robot has a seventy-minute math class in which to prepare himself for what is coming. He opens his math book and his binder, grips the edges of his desk, and stares blankly down at the pages while the class drones on around him. The math teacher is less concerned than the geography teacher with making sure every single person is completely focused on the lesson at all times.
There is an old-fashioned analog clock above the whiteboard at the front of the room. When he looks up and notices that there are only five minutes left until the bell rings at three, he unlocks his hands from where they grip his desk. He feels the stiffness come out of his fingers, and he loosens up his elbows. He looks around the room. The teacher has written an assignment on the whiteboard. It is a page number and an exercise number. He jots that down on a sheet of loose-leaf in his binder. Most of the kids look like they are furiously working through the homework exercise in class, hoping to get it done before the bell rings.
When the bell does ring, he slings his bookbag over one shoulder and picks up his guitar case from the aisle beside his desk.
By the time he finds himself walking toward the front entrance of the school, he has a woozy sense of detachment.
Inside the door at the front entrance, a girl he knows from Lemon Street is speaking loudly and self-consciously to a boy in a One Team school athletics T-shirt. The sun is shining through the newly-leafed-out maple trees on the school’s front lawn. There is a line of cars on the half-circle drive that leads up to the landing in front of the main door. One at a time, the cars pull forward, kids step off the landing, get into passenger seats.
It is not until Robot gets to the sidewalk and starts heading toward the main street of town that he notices the crowd gathering at the edge of the school grounds. They spike across the emptying parking lot and wander partway onto the street.
Suitjon has his camera going. Robot hears Lucas Shortt’s ridiculous voice. His heart is now racing in his chest. He feels pressure in his bladder and thinks how bad it will be if he pees his pants on camera.
He barely knows Gink. He tries to conjure a picture of him in his mind as he scans the crowd. He looks for a broad torso and a shock of spiky red hair. Mostly what he looks for, based on the Prank Fight videos he’s seen, is a scared- or angry-looking person in front of a mob pushing him forward.
But Gink does not appear to be there.
The crowd floods over from the parking lot, across the sidewalk, and out into the street. Horns are going. Traffic leaving the school begins backing up.
Robot hears Lucas Shortt yelling at the crowd: “Get off the street, you assholes. If someone calls the cops…” Robot sticks to the sidewalk and plows straight ahead. The crowd, almost all boys, clears away the space in front of him.
“Fuck,” he hears Lucas Shortt somewhere on his right and behind him now. “Where the fuck is Gink?”
Robot walks farther, careful not to speed up, slow down, or react to the crowd in any way. People get in his face and yell: “Fight! Fight!” But he is careful not to acknowledge anyone.
Traffic from the end of the school day continues to spool past him on the left as he makes his way to Prince Street, the main drag at the centre of town. The pedestrian light turns red, and when he stops, he realizes he has broken from the pack and most of the crowd is almost a full block behind him, coming up the sidewalk in a bunched knot, trampling grass with overflow.
Some in the crowd are just coming even with him again when the light goes green and he continues across the street. He gets two blocks up Young Street, across the tracks, and has turned in the direction of Lemon Street when a ripple of emotion goes through the crowd at his back. He guesses they’ve found Gink, or Gink has found them, and a quick look over his shoulder confirms it. The crowd’s speed has doubled now, and the entire dark mass of bodies is catching up to him up quickly. He stops a moment and turns full around to see what’s coming. A path has opened in the middle of the noisy group and he can see Gink in there, broad-shouldered in a tight red T-shirt and black jeans, his fists pumping away at his sides as he comes.
There is a white house on the corner and he goes down the uneven gravel and dirt driveway and bursts through a little opening in the wild scrub maple at the end of it. He is in a small grassy clearing at the end of a municipal park. There are two or three wooden benches and an ancient, indestructible see-saw away at the far end where the park squeezes between several backyards and driveways and comes out in a footworn track of hard-packed earth in the centre of the grass. Beyond that lies another street whose name he cannot recall at the moment. Still a few blocks from Lemon Street. The entire crush of boys comes squeezing through the opening in the scrub brush at the end of the driveway and into the clearing. There is yelling and jostling now. Guys are shoving each other out of the way to get to the front.
Near the front of the pack comes Lucas Shortt, who Robot can now see is wearing a green T-shirt with the Prank Fights logo in white across the chest. “Keep up! Keep up!” Shortt is yelling at Suitjon, who is running, red-faced and huffing, across the front of the crowd, which is still spilling into the clearing but is pushing outwards along the periphery of the grassy centre of the park, along the edges of trees and backyard fences on both sides, leaving the middle of the clearing open. No one needs to direct this action. It’s just what crowds who want to see a fight do. Robot has seen this happen a dozen times. But this is the biggest crowd he’s ever seen open up this way. And it has always been for someone else, not him.
“Let’s get this done,” someone says. Maybe he said it himself.
“Wait! Wait!” Lucas Shortt wants to hold off until he can better direct the camerawork. Well, fuck him.
Robot shucks his backpack to the ground and leans the Les Paul case against it. He takes several steps away from the guitar, so as to make sure it does not get damaged.
Gink is in the clearing now, stepping in his direction. Robot looks over his shoulder at his guitar. The crowd is nowhere near it.
“Fight! Fight!” the crowd is shouting, trying to get a rhythm together.
Gink steps ahead. Should I say something? Robot thinks. What is there to say? He can see Suitjon out the corner of his eye, circling the centre of the fight ring. “Here they go!” says Lucas Shortt.
For a brief second, an image of the band room at school flashes in Robot’s mind. The Jazz Kids are in there right now, their hearts pounding with euphoria. He steps in Gink’s direction, cocks his fist, and lets go with it. A split second before he makes his move, someone in the crowd yells, “Gink!” Gink’s attention breaks, his gaze turns slightly in the direction of the voice.
Robot’s fist makes a terrible sound against the side of Gink’s face, striking just at the intersection of cheekbone and eye socket.
Robot springs back from the punch. Before Gink even hits the grassy earth beneath him, Robot knows a terrible thing has happened.
“Fuck!” someone says. Somewhere a kid is throwing up. Robot hears the retching.
Lucas Shortt has an ecstatic expression. He stands over Gink’s slouched body. “Yas!” he shouts. Suitjon has lowered his camera, bewildered a moment before recalling his role. He films Gink, limp on the ground, a stream of blood coming out of his left eye.
“Oh, fuck,” Robot says. He backs toward his guitar case and looks at his hand before bending to pick up the guitar. His knuckles are barked and swelling. There’s blood across the front end of his fist.
“Run!” somebody shouts at him. A face darkens his field of vision, but he cannot make out features. “You killed Gink. Run!”
“Gink is dead!” he hears someone else say.
Then comes Lucas Shortt’s voice: “Gink’s not dead! Are you, Gink? Gink! Get up, buddy. Stop fucking with us!”
Robot expects to be followed home. He’s forgotten his backpack in the clearing, but he has his guitar. He runs to the far end of the park and continues in the direction of Lemon Street. But when he gets to the first corner, he looks back over his shoulder. No one has come in behind him. He can hear sirens now. The first to arrive is an ambulance. Then a police car. They drive over the curb and right into the little clearing.
He sits on the grass at the far end and watches the paramedics work on Gink.
He lies back and looks up at the rapidly changing clouds in the sky. For what seems like a long time he lies there, expecting the police to cross the field and take him into custody. When that does not happen, he gets back up, picks up his guitar, and walks the few blocks to Lemon Street.
When he gets home, there is no sign of his mother. He does not think about or care where she might be. He goes straight to his bedroom and sits on the bed. He places the guitar case against the wall and sits looking at his swelling hand. He pulls out his phone and checks the time: 3:18 p.m. The Jazz Kids are jamming on their second or third tune. Stage band rehearsal is at 3:30. People are coming through the band room door with their instruments, grooving to the music, getting ready for rehearsal to start.