In Creative Writing, Mary kept her back to him. He felt as if he were burning a hole in the back of her head with his stare, so he got a grip and focused on the lecture.
Mr. Burklander was talking about Faulkner and point of view. Those in the class were supposed to write a story from the point of view of someone they’d never met and disliked very much. Charlie was going to write about love at first sight from the perspective of Donald Trump—it would end with him realizing it was a mirror—but then Charlie found out half the class was going to do Trump.
The bell rang, and Mary was out the door so fast Charlie couldn’t get close. She never looked back. He tried to catch up in the hallway but stopped short as a hand went palm first into his chest, hard enough to startle him.
“Hi, Charlie,” Tim Fletcher said.
Charlie felt the adrenaline surge. If this was it, this was it. He wasn’t going to back down from a six-foot-two, ’roid-raging jerk. If he got his ass kicked, so be it. At least he’d go down swinging.
“Hey, Tim,” he said, his voice sharp edged.
“How was class? See Mary?”
“I did. The back of her head, from three rows back. It was fascinating.”
“I heard you gave her a ride last night.”
“I did.” Charlie waited. Nothing more to say.
“That was kind of you.”
“You’re welcome?”
“So now you’re a smart-ass?”
“I gave her a ride. What do you want me to say? It wasn’t dinner and a movie.”
Tim smiled. It was a daddy’s-boy smile, rich, privileged, unconcerned. Things would go his way. One way or another. He had a crew. He had a legion of adoring football fans in a state that put high school football just a tick below religion. He could harass and bully with impunity. With homecoming coming up and a perfect team record and a shot at another state championship, Tim was untouchable. And Charlie, former good student, son of an accountant, was nobody.
“Maybe you should take her to dinner and a movie,” Tim said pleasantly. “Maybe you should try that. What do you think?”
“I think Mary can do whatever she wants.”
Something in Tim’s hazel eyes changed. They darkened, the eyebrows raised. “Should I ask Mary what she wants?”
It occurred to Charlie that while he was busy being brave for himself, it might have been Mary that he’d put in danger, not himself. You don’t know him, she’d said. As Charlie looked into Tim’s cold eyes, that suddenly seemed plausible in a way he hadn’t even considered when he’d stepped up to Tim. He started thinking of ways to fix what he might have just broken.
“Are you threatening her?
“No.” Tim smiled. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said in a way that didn’t make it sound ridiculous at all.
“If you lay a hand on her…”
“Charlie, Charlie.” Tim put a hand on Charlie’s shoulder. “Relax. You’re getting all worked up over nothing. How long have Mary and I been together? And what are you to her? Nothing, right? You’re not even friends. So what are you worried about?” Tim stepped aside and held his arm out, an invitation for Charlie to walk away, free and clear, into the flow of students bustling through the halls.
Charlie stepped right toward Tim, which made Tim’s height advantage seem even worse.
“I’m serious. Don’t you dare hurt her.”
“Charlie.” Tim smiled gallantly. The football star. The homecoming king. “I couldn’t hurt a fly.”
CompSci was Charlie’s favorite class, not least of all because he sat between Vanhi and Kenny, and also because he loved to code and was miles ahead of the simple projects they tackled in class. But as good as Charlie was, Vanhi was light-years better. She had a knack for programming. When Charlie had asked her to join the Vindicators, she’d told him, “Why would I want to be slowed down by a bunch of dumb boys playing with robots?” It was a fair point. But she’d shown up the next day, thrown her bag down, and said, “Let’s get this shit started.”
The rest was history.
Charlie settled into his terminal between Kenny and Vanhi, and she slugged him on the shoulder.
“What’s that for?” Charlie asked, rubbing his arm.
“Cheating.”
“On what?”
“On me!”
“Um, as I recall, you rejected me.”
“Maybe. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still worship at my feet. I am, after all, a divine nature goddess.”
“You’re the goddess of something, all right. The High Queen of BS.”
She slugged him even harder.
“Some of us are trying to focus here,” Kenny said, sighing theatrically, trying to force himself to code. Unlike the rest of the group, Kenny was not a math-science nerd, but rather a philosophy junkie and world-culture scholar. His parents were deeply religious, devout Catholics, and made him learn Greek and Hebrew when he was young. He’d been reading theology, mythology, and philosophy at a college level since he was twelve.
“Hey, by the way,” Charlie said, “are you two coming tonight?”
“Oh, you mean Peter’s secret midnight conclave?” Kenny asked. “Sure, why not?”
“You didn’t click that invitation yet, did you?”
“No,” Vanhi said, “I’m not in the habit of responding to spam.”
“Okay, good. Peter’s doing some research on it.”
“Well, that’s reassuring. What do you think it is?”
“Some kind of game. I just want to make sure it’s not shady.”
“If Peter’s involved, it’s almost certainly shady,” Vanhi said.
Charlie ignored that. Vanhi was always out to think the worst of Peter.
Vanhi showed them her code. “Watch this. I made it last night.”
She ran the program, and a picture of a sphere appeared at the top of the screen. The wire-frame, 3-D rendering was generated from scratch in C++. It shot to the bottom of the screen and bounced back up, obeying the laws of gravity. More spheres shot from the top and sides, bouncing off each other and skirting off in different directions.
“I call it Balls.”
“Charming,” Kenny said. Always the string-section snob.
When the class had quieted down and was deep in coding, Charlie leaned over to Vanhi. “Don’t you have your early application due?”
“Next Tuesday, yeah. What are you, my mom?”
Charlie laughed, but not really. “I was just thinking about our last prank.”
“Trump! Trump! Trump!”
“Yeah, it was funny, but…”
“But what?” She sighed, annoyed.
“A felony? I mean, what were we thinking? You really could get into Harvard early. Do you want to throw that away over ‘Trump is a shape-shifting lizard’? Or whatever new thing is tonight?” Charlie knew he had nothing to lose. His future was toast anyway. But as far as he knew, Vanhi still had the world at her feet.
Vanhi felt that her face was flushing. “Why are you patronizing me? Is it because I’m a girl? Did you tell Kenny not to throw his life away?”
Now Charlie flushed. “It’s not that. It’s just, we always said we’d go together. Now I can’t. I don’t want to drag you down, too.”
Vanhi was churning inside. She couldn’t let Charlie know she was as doomed as he was. She couldn’t reveal her secret shame, her AP failure. It was like, pull one thread and the whole Vanhi sweater would unravel. So she double-bluffed. Instead of their both being losers, what if she pretended they could both still win?
“Listen, I’ll make you a deal. You turn in an early application to Harvard, and I will, too. You blow yours off, I blow mine off.”
“That’s stupid. Why would you throw your future away?”
“If you don’t, I won’t either.”
“You’re not serious.”
“Try me.” She patted Charlie’s shoulder. “We’re friends, Charlie. I got your back. So promise you’ll do it, and I won’t have to throw my future away just to prove a point.”
Charlie tried to read her. Was she serious? No way in hell was he applying to Harvard. The only way he could even dream of getting in now was to use his mother’s death as a sob story of how he’d gone from valedictorian to failure. Even then, he’d need a redemption angle, and how could that work when he was still very much down in the mud? No fucking way. But why should Vanhi go down with him? So he lied.
“Okay. Sure. Why not. I’ll apply.”
“Okay,” Vanhi said, trying to sound casual.
They eyed each other warily, unsure who was playing whom.
They coded for a while. The assignment was to make a software back end for a logistics distribution company, like Amazon. It had to ship anywhere in the world and deliver as close to instantaneously as possible. No drones though, at least not in this simulation.
She whispered right in his ear, “You really did cheat on me.”
“I did?”
“Mary Clark, Charlie. Really?”
“I gave her a ride.”
“You kissed her.”
Charlie turned and gave her a perplexed look. “How do you know that?”
“Everyone knows that.”
“She told?”
“I doubt it. That’s not the kind of thing Mary Clark would publicize. Prettiest girl in school kisses marginalized quasi-nerd.”
“Then how?”
“Charlie, you kissed her twenty feet away from a social mob. Did you really think no one would notice?”
“We were in the woods.”
“Don’t you know, Charlie? Someone is always watching.”
Charlie turned away, his cheeks flushing red. So Tim knew? He hadn’t said anything in the hall, but that cold rage in his eyes …
“You need to be careful, Charlie.”
“Tim?”
“Yeah. But he won’t come for you directly. He’ll get Kurt Ellers or Joss Iverson to do it.”
Kurt was a particularly sadistic bastard. Blunt and crass where Tim was slick and cultured. The offensive lineman to Tim’s QB. Joss was dumb muscle—a linebacker, ready to pounce; he just needed to be pointed in the right direction.
“You’ll never please her,” Vanhi said, suddenly sounding like she cared. “All she wants is some rich guy to buy her things. Did you see the bracelet Tim got her? It was rose gold. It probably cost a thousand dollars.”
“Is it so crazy to think she likes me?”
“No. It’s crazy to think she’ll ever choose you.”
They were talking quietly, and Kenny was studiously pretending not to hear them.
“You’re a real pal,” Charlie told her.
“I am.” The bell rang, and she gathered up her things. “You know what a friend is, Charlie? It’s someone who tells you the truth, even when you don’t want to hear it.”
At lunch, the text said:
Meet me by the portables.
It came from Mary’s number, which was crazy, as the last text in the chain was from two years earlier, about an anti-graffiti project for student council to repaint the south walls. Charlie felt his heart light up, but when he got there, he didn’t see Mary anywhere. But across the patchwork of shadows between the portable buildings, he saw a small crowd gathered. Charlie gave Mary another couple minutes, then headed toward the group to see if she was there. He paused when saw Kurt Ellers, the sadist in chief. Suddenly Vanhi’s warning came together in his head—kiss Mary, Tim finds out, Kurt does his dirty work. But the crowd wasn’t focused on Charlie, and something was already going on. Charlie let himself get a little closer, and he felt his heart sink. They were gathered around Alex.
“Do it,” Kurt said cheerfully.
He held a cell phone up, ready to film.
“N-n-no.” Alex was sputtering with fear. A football player was on either side, holding Alex’s arms back.
Kurt gave him a rough shove. Alex kept his head down, hair over his eyes.
“Did you really think we’d let you get away with this? I mean, what the fuck? I thought Asian kids were supposed to be smart.”
“Leave me alone.”
“I’m going to call you Dumb Asian from now on,” Kurt said, his smile ugly and mean.
“Eat shit.”
Kurt slapped him so hard and so quickly across the face that it seemed to startle Alex before the pain set in. But then a bright red mark appeared on his cheek and he closed his eyes, trying not to cry.
The slap woke Charlie up. He’d been watching, frozen. Now he was alert. He had a choice to make. Neither option was pleasant.
And what had Alex done? Did you really think we’d let you get away with this? Get away with what? What crazy thing had Alex done now to put himself at risk? Stop victim-blaming, Charlie told himself. No one deserves this. You’re just a coward, looking for an excuse not to get involved.
“Do it,” Kurt said to the guys holding Alex.
Do what?
Alex looked terrified. He began to struggle furiously.
There were five guys, at least. There was no way Charlie could run for help in time. Even if he called someone, it would be too late by the time they got here.
Earlier, Alex had, in his own way, asked Charlie for reassurance, to let Alex know he wasn’t alone, and Charlie had bungled that miserably. With a second of hesitation, he’d sent Alex further down that hole of isolation.
He felt a surge of anger. At Kurt. At Tim, who wasn’t even here, but he led this crew of sadist kings. At Alex, for being the one Vindicator who threatened to turn them all from lovable, even liked, nerds into something else. At himself, for feeling that way.
On either side of Alex, a jock grabbed Alex’s pants and pulled them down. He screamed, “No!” One of them pulled his underwear down next. Goddamn if he wasn’t a seventeen-year-old kid wearing superhero boxers. Then he was exposed, his dick hanging out for the world to see, neither small nor big, just a normal dick, all the guys laughing and jeering, and Kurt held up his phone to snap a picture.
Charlie ran. He ran faster than he’d ever run in his life, clearing the distance between them in no time and launching at Kurt so quickly that none of those fascist, cruel motherfuckers saw him coming, so focused were they on tormenting the Boy from Mars and his perfectly normal dick. Charlie had never been in a fight before, but there was a first time for everything.
The adrenaline was surging and he launched into Kurt Ellers and took him down to the dirt and got one good punch into his smug face before Joss pulled Charlie off. “Erase that,” he shouted, grabbing for Kurt’s phone as Joss dragged him away. The phone had hit the ground a few feet away. “Leave him alone.”
“The fuck I will.” Kurt got up and wiped dirt off his face with the back of his hand. “Did you tell him to do this?” Kurt’s eyes narrowed maliciously.
“I have no fucking clue what you’re talking about,” Charlie shot back.
Alex was staring at the whole thing, incredulous. He backed away from the guys, who were all watching Charlie, and pulled his pants up.
Just before the first punch landed, Charlie thought, Oh, well, these guys were coming for me sooner or later. At least this was on his terms.
Charlie felt the sting and his head snapped back into Joss’s chin.
He felt the grip loosen, just for a second.
Charlie raked his heel down and back, along Joss’s shin. There was a yelp and Charlie pulled away just in time, before the thug got his bearings back. Kurt’s phone was on the asphalt, and Charlie came down on it hard and fast with all his weight on the back of his heel. The screen smashed and the body cracked. Charlie backed against the portable shed as the group advanced on him. He took one of the bricks from the pile of construction materials and chunked it at them, slowing them down a bit. He took another brick and brought it down on the phone, then again and again, until it was crushed and shattered.
“That was new,” Kurt whined.
“Let him go,” Charlie said, nodding at Alex and holding the brick up, ready to attack. His lip was smarting and he could taste blood. But he felt exhilarated. He felt alive and with purpose for first time in a year.
“You’re dead,” Kurt, not cheerful anymore, said to Charlie.
“We all have to go sometime.” Charlie tried to sound brave and cavalier, although inside, he felt a pit in his stomach.
The backup QB, Chris Everett, rushed him, and Charlie swung with the brick. It hit Chris’s shoulder.
The football player staggered backward, saying, “You’re fucking crazy.”
“Come on,” Charlie told Alex.
Uncertain, Alex looked from tormentor to tormentor, but all eyes were on Charlie. Alex joined Charlie by his side.
They backed away, until they were around a corner, then Charlie dropped the brick and they took off running. Alex had always been surprisingly fast. He got ahead of Charlie, then slowed down so they could escape together. But the football crew did not follow. Whatever they had planned for Charlie, it would come later.
But one thing was certain. It would come.
Once they were safe on the far side of the school, Charlie said, “Are you okay?”
Alex was sullen now, the shame of what had happened settling in.
“I didn’t see anything,” Charlie tried, but it sounded flat. He tried for humor. “I mean, except for your dick, which was awesome.”
Alex shook his head.
“Too soon?” Charlie asked.
“Those fuckers. I hate them.”
“Alex, it’s over. You’re okay. We smashed the phone.”
“They’ll tell everyone.”
“Tell everyone what? That they’re sick fucks? That you look like every over guy at this school in the locker room? There’s nothing to tell.”
Charlie thought of something. “What did you do, anyway?”
“I didn’t deserve that.”
“I know. Of course not. But still, what was that about?”
“Nothing.” Alex’s eyes flicked to his backpack reflexively. He saw that Charlie saw and lowered his head even more.
Charlie took the bag. Alex didn’t even try to stop him.
Inside, hundreds of printed copies of a flyer pictured Tim Fletcher’s head photoshopped on a cartoon body with a tiny prick.
The flyer looked like a concert poster and said ALL HAIL LORD LITTLEDICK.
“You made these?”
Alex shrugged. “It wasn’t hard,” he said sarcastically.
“Yeah, I know. Why did you make this?”
He shrugged again. “That guy’s an asshole.”
“The world is filled with assholes. Tim’s been one for years. Why did you do this?” A sickening thought occurred to Charlie: the kiss, Tim confronting him in the hall. “Did you do this for me?”
“Don’t flatter yourself. The world doesn’t revolve around you.”
“I didn’t say that,” Charlie started, but then he let it go. “Did you put any up?”
Alex shook his head. “One of their minions saw me printing them in the library.”
Reckless and sloppy. Maybe Kenny was right. Maybe Alex was bringing them all down.
Alex said, “You didn’t have to do that.”
“Of course I did,” Charlie said, but deep down, he wasn’t so sure.
Alex started to walk away, but Charlie grabbed his arm to stop him. Alex flinched.
“Are you okay?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Let me see.”
Charlie pulled Alex’s sleeve up. Bruises were up and down his forearm, but they were old bruises.
“What the hell?”
Alex jerked his arm away.
“Have they bothered you before?”
“No.” Alex’s cheeks were flushing.
“Alex—”
“I’ll see you later.”
“Alex. Tonight, right? Midnight?”
Alex shrugged. “Where else do I have to be?”
Charlie let him go. He wanted to say, You’re one of us. But he didn’t know whether it would come out reassuring or patronizing. Or false. Alex said he was coming tonight. That was enough, for now.
Alex walked away, bag of mischief slung over his shoulder.
As he left, Charlie felt his phone buzz in his pocket.
He looked at the text.
You did a good deed and God was watching.
800 Goldz!