Burn (9 page)
“What did he say?”
“Today?”
“Does this happen often?”
“No.” He has another victim, one he prefers more.
“Okay, then. What did he say today?”
Cameron shrugs and realizes he’s going to have to say something if he ever wants to get out of this office.
“It’s the way he says it. Like I don’t have a brain.”
Elwood nods. “Have you seen
The Wizard of Oz
?”
“Yeah.”
“You know the scarecrow didn’t have a brain?”
Cameron is about ninety-nine percent sure that Elwood is missing some or all of his.
“I’m not a scarecrow,” Cameron says.
“Exactly. Remember that whenever you think Hart is talking down to you.”
“That’s it?” Is this guy serious?
“No. Detention or Saturday school — which do you prefer?”
Right. Detention. Maybe that way his mom won’t find out.
“I see those wheels turning,” Elwood says. “I’m afraid I have to call her either way.”
Great. “I’ll take the detention.”
“Three days, an hour after school today, tomorrow, and Friday.”
Fine.
9:55AM
By the time Cameron leaves Elwood’s office, second period is over. The bell rings as he’s walking through the hall. PE next. The thrill is gone. He thought last night about pushing his lap time even more. He knows he can shave a couple of seconds if he doesn’t lose focus, but Patterson is all he can think about.
He stops at a water fountain, stalling. He never enters the locker room early. Before it was so he could avoid Patterson and his stooge. Now he’s trying to psych himself up. He doesn’t want to disappoint the coach. Doesn’t want to look like a loser in front of the whole class after his victory yesterday.
He has to do pull-ups today, enough to pass the PT test, and push-ups, too. He’s not worried about the running, the crunches, or the squats. The pull-ups and push-ups will be harder. His upper body strength sucks. Cameron has the thinnest chest in the whole ninth grade, except for Darcy Swimmer, the only flat-chested girl at Madison. That’s one of the things Cameron notices a lot. His only reason for making it to physical science class, and passing it, is because his lab partner, Helen Gosset, wears shirts that are so small Cameron knows her belly button is pierced. And they’re tight enough that Cameron can see the seams of her bra, the shape of tiny bows on the straps, through the cotton.
Cameron is still drinking when a hand comes down on his head and shoves his face into the stream of water. There’s gum in the fountain and it connects with his chin. Cameron jerks backward, wipes at his face, and watches two Red Coats, Patterson’s buddies, continue down the hall, their heads back, laughing.
“You make it too easy, Grady!” one calls back.
Cameron adds the colors red and gold, their school colors, to his hate list. He promises himself he’ll never wear them again.
He pushes through the double doors, into the boys’ locker room. Wet, dirty socks. The smell is the same every morning. Cameron stops at a urinal, pees and zips up, then finds his locker. He looks over his shoulder; the locker room is clearing out. He hears the coach’s voice through the doors, lining kids up. He’s later than usual and picks up his pace. He pulls his jock off the shelf, lets his underwear drop and is pushing his feet through the straps of his cup when the locker door next to his slams shut.
“I was wrong, Murphy. Grady here isn’t a girl.”
Cameron is pushed onto the bench; he shoves his hands in his lap to cover himself.
“You have nothing to hide, Grady,” Patterson sneers. He bends over and plucks Cameron’s jock from the floor. “What are ya doing with this?” He holds it up. “Look at that, Murphy. It’s man-sized.”
He laughs and taps Cameron on the head with it.
“Get off me.” Cameron struggles against Murphy’s hands, takes a swipe at the cup, but Patterson pulls it back.
“You’re in the wrong locker room, Grady,” Murphy says.
“He’s not a girl, Murph.” Patterson bends over, grabs Cameron’s nipple, and twists. “No boobs.”
“Darcy Swimmer doesn’t have boobs, either,” Murphy says.
“You’re right, Murph. Looks like you have something to prove, Grady.”
“I have nothing to prove to you,” Cameron says. His tongue is dry and it makes the words stick to his teeth.
“You hear that, Murph? He has n-n-nothing to prove t-to us,” Patterson snickers.
“How about to the school, Grady? Big mistake coming to sports night with your mommy. Wearing your hair like a girl’s.” He dips his head so he can snarl in Cameron’s ear, “Big mistake yesterday. You know you run like a girl.” Patterson pulls a cell phone from his pocket and flips it open. “I think you have a lot to prove. Once and for all. Is he or isn’t he — a she?”
They laugh and it feels like scissors slicing through Cameron’s ears.
Patterson nods at Murphy, who steps closer to Cameron, so close Cameron can feel his legs pressing into his back. The boy’s hands tighten on Cameron’s shoulders, the fingers grinding into his bones. There must be a pressure point there somewhere, because a hot, burning, tingling feeling runs down Cameron’s arm right before it goes numb.
“I learned that in tae kwon do,” Murphy says. “There are a hundred and seventeen points of destruction in the human body.”
“Your girlfriend, the Incredible Hulk, went down like a tree,” Patterson says.
Cameron feels a tearing in his chest, like his heart broke loose and is knocking against bone. He roars from the pain of it and tries to thrust to his feet. Patterson shoves him back down and digs his knee into Cameron’s thigh, into the soft muscle, putting enough of his weight into it that Cameron feels the sting.
Murphy’s hands tighten on his shoulders. Cameron tries to take a swing with his right arm, but it hangs useless at his side.
“Hold still, Grady,” Murphy advises. “And say cheese.”
“Get off me.” Cameron twists, hoping to break lose, and Murphy’s arms slither around his neck, holding him in a half nelson. Cameron swings at Patterson with his left arm, and glances off the cell phone in his hand.
“Pull his arm back, Murph.”
“Doing it.”
Cameron’s arm is wrenched behind him, and he is completely exposed. Patterson snaps a picture. Cameron jerks up off the bench, frees his working arm, and tries again to knock the cell phone from his hand.
Patterson shoves Cameron back onto the bench, puts his foot on Cameron’s leg to keep him there, and lowers his phone. Cameron hears a series of clicks. “A close-up. I don’t think it’ll do much for the girls, but it’s worth a try.”
Cameron screams in frustration and Patterson shoves a sock in his mouth. He gags on the cotton, which is too far down his throat, drying out his mouth. He breathes through his nose and switches to survival mode. Disconnect. He’s got to get himself out of here, even if it’s only as far as his mind will allow.
“Full frontal,” Patterson says.
Cameron feels his legs pushed apart. Patterson is standing between them, holding the phone close to Cameron’s body, snapping pictures.
“You want to impress the girls, Grady?” Patterson takes Cameron’s face in his hand, lifts it so that Cameron has to look him in the eye. “You have to pack wood for that.”
“Are you going to do it, Grady?” Murphy asks, pulling on his arm. “Or are we going to do it for you?”
Patterson isn’t waiting. Cameron sees the intent in his eyes, feels his own body shudder with an anger that’s too big, that will split his skin, that will kill him for sure.
Patterson slides his phone into his shirt pocket and pulls out a glove.
“This won’t hurt at all,” he says.
“No! No! No!” Cameron’s voice is muffled by the sock. He surges against Murphy’s hold and then recoils from Patterson’s touch.
If he doesn’t die from this then he’ll kill himself.
That’s the last thing Cameron remembers thinking and then he checks out completely. His eyes hook on the white tiles leading to the showers. He thinks he can hear the steady drip of water from a shower head. A toilet flush. Water rushing from a sink faucet.
Tunnel vision. Patterson and Murphy become blurred; the white tiles sharp. And then a dark head. Small, bobbing over the half wall isolating the showers. It pops up and Cameron sees Pinon, just his head, his eyes wide, like the lids have been rolled back and pinned to his skull. Pinon. His glassy eyes and his teeth biting into his pink lips, like maybe he wears lipstick they’re so pink. His hands come up, curl over the wall, and he swallows. Cameron can see his Adam’s apple jerk, like the kid is choking on it.
He’s real. Cameron isn’t imagining anymore. Pinon is crouching in the showers, watching Cameron’s humiliation. Not running for help. Not crawling into a small space. Hiding. Pinon is crouched in the showers, watching and not even blinking.
Cameron feels his body fall to the cement floor. A foot swings into his side. He cracks his head against the bench and squeezes his eyes shut. His hearing returns like the crashing of symbols.
“You’re ours, Grady,” Patterson warns. “This is just the beginning.”
12:35PM
Cameron makes it through the door of his computer class just as the bell rings. A group of kids are gathered around a computer work station. He starts toward them, when their teacher, Mrs. Marks, stops him.
“Cameron, when that bell rings you need to be at work, not just arriving.”
He knows this, but it took him an entire hour to convince himself to finish the school day. After Patterson and Murphy were done with him, Cameron got back into his jeans and sweatshirt and bolted out of the locker room. He didn’t stop running until he was off campus, until he found shelter under the canopy of some elm trees at the back of a strip mall, where he sat shaking and reliving the incident until he was so angry he was sure the rain sizzled when it hit his skin.
He despises Rich Patterson, his loser friends, all the peckerheads in this school. He especially loathes Charlie Pinon. The next time Cameron sees him, he’s going to let the perv know with his fists how much he doesn’t like him. But even thinking about that isn’t enough to cool him off, isn’t enough to convince him that life is worth living.
His mom. When it comes right down to it, the image of her broken face, the moment she finds out he burned alive, is more than he can keep in his head. That’s what Cameron thought about doing, lighting himself up. He sat under the tree, with the rain falling around him, and lit one match after the other. Letting the flame burn down to his thumb and finger, watching the skin bubble, feeling the pressure ease slowly from his body.
That helped, too.
“Mr. Grady?”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“Next time it’s a tardy.”
He is going to agree with her, but they’re interrupted. Laughter. Deep, husky laughter and some nervous twittering. Then a girl’s scream. That’s how he’ll remember it.
When Cameron turns toward the students crowded around a work station of three computers, he sees a screen flickering through a series of images. He doesn’t need to step closer to know what they are.
He can’t move. His heart is in his throat, thumping, crashing against his Adam’s apple until he feels like he’ll pass out from the pain. His blood is so hot, it’s shrieking, his mouth too dry to spit. He watches the others as their faces, some of them horrified, some of them gleeful, turn somber or smirking. Until everything blurs, like he’s looking through a window during violent rain.
“Mr. Grady?” Mrs. Marks. Is she whispering, or is he too far off to really hear her? “Mr. Grady?” Louder. Angry.
“Turn off those computers,” she orders. “Now. All of you. Mr. Grady, step out into the hall.”
That’s the last thing he hears. Cameron is outside without knowing how he gets there. The sun glows behind a bank of heavy clouds, so that there’s no more rain, but no blue skies, either. He’s running. He feels the air burn in his chest. Feels it burst from his lips. He runs through long, wet grass, pushing through shrubs and between the thick trees that tower above and hide him, pushing, pushing.
1:05PM
Cameron strikes a match against the carbon and watches it flare to life. He breathes deeply through his nose, that first acrid black-smoke taste on his tongue, then flicks the match through the front window of the Chrysler LeBaron. The car is an old wreck. It used to be gold, but most of that paint has peeled off or was eaten by rust. Must have been in the woods for years, Cameron figures. A great nesting place for squirrels, field mice, anything small enough to burrow into the backseat cushions and close its eyes or birth its babies. Today, Cameron doesn’t see any animals. He can barely see anything in front of him. He wishes he could climb inside his head and rip out that last image of his humiliation. It’s not enough to tell himself he won’t think of it anymore, because it sneaks up and is right there, bigger than it was on the computer screen. It’s like a damn accident, the way people just can’t stop looking, no matter how gruesome it is. He’d rather shovel brain off pavement than see himself one more time, naked, stuffed with his own gym sock, with Rich Patterson’s foot on his leg, holding him down.
“Peckerhead. Peckerhead.”
His blood screams with the fury of it.
Rich Patterson is a peckerhead. A loser.
It doesn’t do anything for him, thinking it or saying it aloud to the trees and the whitewashed boulders surrounding him. Once, he spray painted
Rich Patterson sucks dick
onto a road sign. But that was over Christmas, in Syracuse, when Cameron and his mom and brother visited his grandparents. For a few days he actually felt good about it. But no one in Syracuse knows Patterson. No one here knows about the sign.
Cameron lights another match, holds it under his nose. Too close. The smoke makes the small hairs burn and he feels it all the way down his throat, already hot and raw from the run here, from the screaming he did at the top of his lungs, his voice muffled by the thick leaves and columns of the trees:
RICH PATTERSON SUCKS DICK!
He wants to write it somewhere. Somewhere everyone in town will read it. Maybe on the overpass — there’s only one in this part of town. All the way here, Cameron screamed it and the fire still seethes below his skin. He still tastes it, as thick as blood in his mouth.