Leverage (20 page)

“Is that you, Danny?”

“Yeah . . . who is this?”

“. . . Ronnie . . .”

Exactly
the person I don't want to talk to right now. Or ever.

“Yeah?”

“I'm sorry about calling so late . . .”

He waits for me to say it's no problem, but I don't. Instead, I inch up the volume on the “Party Rock” radio station with the remote while reading the Top Ten list on TV.

“Sorry I wasn't at practice today,” Ronnie says. “I . . . I stayed home.” That he's apologizing to me for not going to practice after what happened makes my heart crumple, makes me want to weep into a pillow.

“Me too,” I say. “I'm sick.”

“Yeah . . . me too.”

“I ain't going tomorrow, either,” I tell him.

“Danny? Were you . . . did you see those guys ... do ... that stuff to me?”

I stare at the TV.

“No,” I lie softly into the mouthpiece. “I was in the locker room getting water.”

“Oh . . . okay. I thought . . . maybe ... I saw . . . that you were in there ... but that wouldn't make sense, either. Why would you be in the storage room watching?”

“I wasn't there. I didn't see nothing till Kurt beat them up good.” I think my lie will help make Ronnie feel better, let him think one less person saw him attacked. One less person for him to feel embarrassed in front of at school.

“I called Bruce,” Ronnie says. “He thought you saw what happened, but I guess he—”

“He's wrong,” I cut Ronnie off, which is so, so easy to do. “I wasn't in there. I didn't see nothing.”

“Okay, it's just that ... It's just ... I think ... It's not clear anymore. I feel ... I can't wash it off. Bruce keeps telling me to act like nothing happened.”

“Sounds like good advice to me,” I say, tucking the phone under my ear and going into the kitchen. I pull out a big carving blade from the knife block on the counter-top and repeatedly stab the point into the wooden cutting board. The motion soothes me. I like how protective the weight of the razor-sharp steel feels in my hand. I hear sniffling through the earpiece as I keep stabbing the cutting board, lifting the knife higher and higher before plunging it, trying to get the blade clear through the wood. I wonder if this is what it feels like to stab someone and hit bone.

“I can't get ... it's like when you're . . .” Ronnie flounders. “. . . like a poison ... need to boil it away . . .”

“What?” I ask, not that I want to understand him.

“. . . washing doesn't help,” Ronnie says. “It's
inside
!”

“It's over,” I say.

“I'm not strong like you. I've—”

“Look, Ronnie, take Bruce's advice. Nothing happened.” The image of Ronnie on his knees, gagging, pollutes my head until I think I can smell him right now in the kitchen. I drive the knife blade deep enough into the cutting board that it stands straight up by itself, handle quivering a little.

“But—”

“Stop it. Just stop it. Get over it.”

That's what I tell him.
Get over it
. I despise Ronnie at that moment. I despise how small and weak he is, and I despise that it was only luck and timing that kept the two of us from switching places in those awful moments.

“Ronnie, I gotta go,” I say. “See you at practice.” I hope he gives up and quits the team. Even better, quits school. I don't think I can stand the sight of miserable, pathetic Ronnie ever again.

“Yeah . . . okay ... all right.”

“'Night, Ronnie.”

“Good night, Da—”

I hang up on him before he finishes. I put the knife and cutting board away and go back to the living room. I adjust the settings on the video game so I can't die and I have all the weapons and all the ammo and I start blasting everyone and everything: bad guys, good guys, innocent passersby, street signs, bar windows, cars, sky, planes, pavement.
The Late Show
returns from commercial and I wait for the audience to laugh on cue and trick me into thinking the world is still normal.

K
urt?” Patti calls, while tapping on the bedroom door. The hinges creak, and without opening my eyes, I sense she is sticking her head into the room. “Kurt, hon. I know you're not feeling well, but there's a boy here insisting on seeing you, said he'll only be a minute, wanted to tell you something.”

“Mmmm . . .”

“I asked him if it could wait, but—Now, just a second, young man,”

“Kurt?” asks a new voice. This one is feathery soft, ready to blow away if I bark at it.

“He's sick,” Patti snaps, nicking my earlobes. “Can't you see that?”

“Shhhhhh, it's okay. It's fuh-fuh-fine,” I say, wanting only silence and more rest.

“Hummph,” Patti answers. My sleep-crusted eyelashes pull apart. Sunlight swarms past the curtains and sets on my eyeballs with stingers extended. A boy slips by Patti to stand before me.

“Kurt?” the boy tries again. He's the one right out of that nightmare a few days ago. My throat tightens as I barely tamp down a groan, then wrap both ends of the pillow around my head. The sight of him—so small, so frail—starts the skin under my left eye twitching. A fever chill runs up my neck and escapes through a yawn.

“Wuh-wuh-what?” I ask, hoping he'll just go away. Patti hovers by the dresser. “Patti, wuh-wuh-would you get me suh-suh-some wuh-wuh-water?”

“Sure thing, hon.” She leaves the room and her footsteps fade down the staircase. I force myself to sit up, ignoring the high-pitched ringing in my sore ear. The whole room shifts, and then rights itself, like when I was drunk at the football party.

Ronnie stands there without saying anything. He pulls a knit cap off his head and starts wringing it in his hands. He takes a step toward the bed, hovering too close. It makes me want to curl up toward the wall. But I don't. Not yet.

“Thank you,” he says. “For what you did.”

I can't have this talk now, not ever. Can't allow it to come back up from the dead. “Got in a fuh-fuh-fight. Had nothing tuh-tuh-tuh do with you.”

Ronnie bows his head, already whipped. He's got to toughen up if he's going to survive. Brush it off. That's how me and Lamar handled it.

“Duh-duh-don't thank me. Juh-juh-just move on.”

“That's what Bruce says.” He sighs. “Danny, too. Says he didn't see anything, that I should just forget it. But they didn't see it like you. Hearing them talk, I'm starting to think maybe I'm a little crazy, you know? Like, maybe, I imagined some of that stuff. But why would I?” Ronnie's still wringing his cap, strangling it between his fists.

The front of my head, the part facing Ronnie, starts to boil, like he's radioactive and causing it. “They duh-duhdidn't see anything 'cause nuh-nuh-nothing happened,” I repeat dumbly, hoping he'll leave me alone. Ronnie stops strangling his cap and starts picking at the skin around his thumb. His lips are so chapped they're peeling. His tongue darts out, quick as a lizard's, to wet them.

“The thing is,” he says as he brings a finger up to his mouth to chew on the already bitten-down nail, “I'm not sure anyone would even believe me if I told.” Not only is my head boiling but my stomach starts bubbling. Ronnie is spreading his germs all over my bedroom, sickening me, making me fight off his flu, too. “Maybe if you, like, maybe if you told—”

“Shut up,” I hiss. “Just shuh-shuh-
shut up
. Stop tuh-tuh-talking. You're fuh-fuh-fine, now. I got in a fuh-fuh-fight. But yuh-yuh-you're okay. Go home.”

“Kurt?” Patti calls, her footsteps climbing the staircase. She can't return fast enough, far as I'm concerned. She needs to chase him out of my room, stop him from reminding me what happened. The walls keep shifting and my stomach sours. A pasty acid collects at the back of my throat. He's making me sicker.

Patti comes back into the room offering Ronnie nothing but a stingy squint while handing me a glass of water. I down half of it in one gulp, wishing I could gargle it instead and spit out the foul taste Ronnie's brought with him. “How you feeling?” she asks me.

“Bad,” I answer, telling the truth. I feel worse than bad. Ronnie, standing there, small and broken, makes me think of nothing but rottenness and how the world is sometimes so horrible that just staying under your bedcovers seems like the only right thing to do.

“Come on, you,” Patti tells Ronnie, never bothering to learn his name. He turns to follow Patti out of my room like she's just slapped shackles around his wrists and legs, slowly winching him toward his destiny. We don't speak another word to each other and that's fine by me. I close my eyes and let the world slip away.

 

A hand resting softly on my forehead wakes me. “You don't feel warm,” Patti says.

“Hmmm.”

“Coach Brigs called,” Patti says quietly. She lowers onto my cot, sinking the mattress in that spot so I tilt toward her hips. “Turns out there wasn't no practice on Saturday. I don't much appreciate being lied to, Kurtis. You understand?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“And what did I tell you about calling me ‘ma'am'? Don't call me that. You call me Patti. I swear I am about to call an ambulance for you or take your butt down to the hospital myself if you can't get out of this bed by tomorrow.'Course they'll accuse me of abusing you. I just know it. I don't want that, Kurtis. I really wish you'd get better quick so I don't have to take you to the hospital. You know child services will come knocking soon as I do that. And that'll be it. I won't get another chance to take someone in. I'll starve.”

“I'm good. I am. Just nuh-nuh-need suh-suh-sleep. A little more suh-sleep.”

 

Wednesday afternoon I finally sit up and bring my feet over the side of the cot. My head still throbs but at least I can look around the room without squinting against the light.

“Thank God, Kurt,” Patti says. “I been praying for you.”

“I ain't guh-guh-going in today,” I say. I walk into the kitchen and open the fridge to get some OJ, but the fridge is empty. “I ain't guh-guh-going in this wuh-wuh-week. I ain't puh-puh-playing on Friday. Call Cuh-cuh-Coach for me. Tell him. I got the fuh-fuh-flu. Real bad. I ain't fuh-fuh-fakin'.”

“I know, hon. I know. I'm just glad to see you up and about,” she says, smiling at me through the ribbons of smoke tailing up from her cigarette. Her bloodshot eyes rim with water. “And I'm not the only one. Some girl, Tina, called and asked about you. I said you were sick and best not to come by and catch it herself. When you're better you can tell me all about this girl you been hidin',” she says.

I don't set foot into the school until the following Monday and so, except for the visit from Ronnie, I get away without thinking about the fight for a whole week. But I pay for it. I pay for it good, on Monday. That's when the world, with all its claws extended, pounces.

F
ake sick starts feeling like real sick if you do it long enough. Two days after Ronnie calls, I'm pretty sure I really have a scratchy throat and a temperature. Dad leaves so early in the morning and crashes so heavily in the evening that it's not until Thursday that he realizes I've stayed home all week.

“You're really that sick?” Dad asks me, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. Where the frames usually rest on bridge of his nose, there remain two red dents, like emergency nostrils. Dad readjusts his glasses, then spends a moment studying me. “How do you feel, now?” He draws out the question in slow, weary words, as if stalling for time while trying to remember his son's name.

“Like crap.”

“Well, what hurts?”

“Everything.”

“Everything?” he echoes skeptically, then scratches his bearded cheeks. “Well, let me have a look at you.” He makes me open my mouth and say “ahhhh” while examining my throat with his penlight. He feels the glands around my throat, neck, and armpits. His fingers are gentle. I try recalling the last time he hugged me, but another memory surfaces: the two of us flying kites together the summer before last on a trip down to the Carolina coast. He was tired even then but somehow that day—with the surf and sky and sun flowing over us—woke him up for a few hours. That day he stopped looking like a sleepwalker and more like how I remembered him with Mom. That day on the beach both of us somehow managed to forget for a few hours that Mom was dead and all we really had was each other. That was a great day.

“Well, you don't have any swollen glands and your throat and ears look good. Probably just a virus. Nasty stuff is always going around, you know.”

“I know.”

“So, you've been out all this week?”

“Yeah,” I say innocently. “I thought you knew.” I didn't exactly plan it, but every morning when my alarm went off, the first thing I imagined was running into Scott Miller, Tom Jankowski, or Mike Studblatz. Or worse—facing Ronnie. So I kept hitting the snooze button—Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday morning—until it got so late the choice was made for me. Dad always leaves for his hospital rounds long before I get up for school, so I've been on the honor system for the last six years.

“I mean, Dad,
come on
,” I say. “I've been in my pajamas every night you've gotten home.”

“Hmmm . . .” His lips purse to one side and I know he's nibbling the inside of his cheek just like I do. “Well, do you need me to write a note for those four sick days?” he asks. “To take to the school office tomorrow?”