Make Something Up (31 page)

With a wild grab, Troublemaker caught the balloon and her fellow perverts pulled her back to safety so fast that they all fell in a heap. Mashed among them, the balloon popped.

Pig the Pirate contemplated the busted skin of yellow latex and looked as if he might cry. Tomas scowled and asked, “Now what?”

In frustration Kevin grabbed the torn shred of yellow. “Maybe they put a message inside. Or heroin.” Brainerd tried to grab it away, but Jasper grabbed at it, also. There was nothing inside. They were all tangled in the balloon's pink ribbon before they noticed it was so long. The ribbon still trailed out the window. It didn't merely droop down the side of the building, it looped off into the darkness in the direction of the gates. It seemed to stretch on forever.

Somewhere in the blackness it was attached to something. Or someone. All of their eyes tried to follow it. Troublemaker was the first to speak. “Don't break it,” she said.

Slowly, carefully, they pulled it, taking up the slack. The ribbon gradually went tight.

“Don't let it sag,” warned Brainerd, “or it might touch the fence.” He meant the high-voltage fence. None of them knew if a ribbon could conduct electricity, but no one wanted to find out.

To Kevin, pulling the ribbon felt like pulling the string that held Suede's skin shut. They pulled, carefully reeling in what felt like an impossible amount of ribbon. It collected on the floor in a heap around them. They pulled until a knot appeared. Beyond the knot there was a thin nylon cord, like a clothesline. They pulled at the cord until another knot connected it to a thick nylon rope. The rope was so long and heavy that it took all of them pulling like a team, like those horses pulling beer on television. Troublemaker dragged a length of the rope into the room and said, “We need to tie this up high.” She told Kevin to signal when it was knotted and the Rock Hudsons would pull it taut from their end.

Kevin gaped out the window. To no one in particular he said, “We're supposed to climb down this?”

Jasper shook his head, silently, at the prospect. It was too dangerous. Even if their hands didn't give out the rope might sag and drop them to the attack dogs or the fence.

By then Troublemaker's eyes had already found a thick sewer pipe near the ceiling, on the far side of the room. She was stacking one bed atop another, balancing a chair on them. Climbing the heap, she was hauling the rope up to the pipe. The rope spanned the room, stretching from the ceiling, slanting downward at a slight angle until it disappeared out the window. Looping it and lashing it in knots, she ordered, “Signal them.”

They were still wearing pajamas. Lost in the excitement, none felt the cold.

Troublemaker went to her locker and retrieved a belt. She climbed the stack of furniture and looped the leather around the rope. She buckled it to make a hoop. A harness. She put her head and arms through the harness and lifted her feet to test its strength. It held. With her feet suspended above the floor, she bounced a few times. The rope didn't sag or stretch.

Before anyone could stop her, she stepped off the chair. Like a suicide, she hung there for an instant kicking her feet in midair, her head and one arm caught in the belt. The loop slid along the rope. The others stepped aside as it zipped the length of the room. At the window Troublemaker slipped free and nimbly dropped to the floor while the belt jetted away, following the rope into the free world.

Troublemaker got up from the floor and made a big show of slapping the dust from her pajamas. She went to the door. “I'll be back in less than an hour.” She punched four numbers into the keypad. Four notes sounded, and the door unlocked. “The code was written on her gallbladder.”

Kevin realized that all the codes for all the doors were recorded inside Suede's guts. Her insides served as the collective memory of every boy who'd passed through her. Kevin warned Troublemaker, “You'll never make it out that way. You'll never make it past the front doors.” But Troublemaker was gone.

Troublemaker wasn't back in an hour. Two hours passed. It was almost sunrise.

Whale Jr. grumbled, “We should untie the rope. You guys are going to wreck my parade.”

None of them had so much as gotten out their belts. For a while the Rock Hudsons had signaled from the dark, but even those flashes had tapered off. The sun would be up in half an hour. Brainerd voted that they untie the rope and toss it out. It was Kevin and Tomas in favor of keeping the lifeline. Everyone else, against. They heard a noise in the stairwell.

In another moment four musical notes sounded from the keypad in the hallway. The door creaked open, and there stood Troublemaker. She stooped, something flung over her shoulder. Panting with the effort, she walked into the room. Her burden was wrapped in a dingy plastic sheet. Nobody asked what it was. They could tell from the smell.

Something slipped out of the sheet and flopped onto the floor. It sparkled in the dim light. Everyone studiously ignored it until Troublemaker thrust her chin toward it. “Would one of you pervs pick that up?”

Kevin pulled the sleeve of his pajamas down so that it covered his hand like a mitt. He reached to get whatever had fallen. It was the charm bracelet. His pajamas didn't have any pockets so he knelt and fastened the chain around Troublemaker's ankle.

It wasn't lost on Kevin that something was happening, an event that he'd never need to exaggerate. He'd only have to tell the story and people would be impressed. He only needed to not die and he'd have a life worth more than $20,000.

Troublemaker decided to go last. Since she'd carry Suede she'd weigh double. Nobody wanted to go first so Kevin volunteered. He'd take the laser pointer and flash a code if he arrived safe and the coast was clear. He climbed the beds and chair and looped a belt around the rope. The window being open so long, the room was unbelievably cold, but his pajamas were soaked with nervous sweat. He looped his head and shoulders through, but couldn't bear to step off. He kept half remembering some book where kids thought happy junk and flew out a bedroom window. Some fairy-tale bullshit. In London.

At times like this Kevin felt as if he'd lived only through books or television. His best memories were a mash-up of different stories and movies. He was sixteen years old, and he'd wasted his entire life.

At the rate of one thousand dollars a week, every minute counted.

In the next moment the room was blazing with lights, and the building was shrieking with bells. Whale Jr. was standing next to the fire alarm. His hand wrapped around the handle, he was shouting against the bells, “I warned you guys!”

Kevin must've flinched. The chair under his feet shifted and toppled over. Before Kevin could untangle himself from his belt he was already sliding toward the window. Before he was free, he was outside, dangling in the dark, like live bait over invisible attack dogs. The alarm had woken them, and Kevin could hear their barking, their teeth snapping below him. Mindful of the electric fence, he lifted his feet and pulled his knees to his chest. He was sliding through darkness, soaking wet, suspended halfway between where he wanted to escape and a new future he couldn't begin to imagine. Behind him were the bright lights and the blaring noise, before him were the faceless shapes of silent people waiting to arrest his fall. A long howl escaped his lips, and the Stalag 13 dogs howled along with him.

Of course they got caught. Only Suede escaped, and that was only because Kevin, Tomas, and Jasper had carried her away. Pig the Pirate and Brainerd dug the hole, and they'd all buried her. So far none of them had confessed the exact location. The Commander had brought in search dogs, but they'd only wandered around tracking circles in the snow. Kevin and his fellow pervs had lugged the body in confusion, crashing through acres of cornfields, crossing and backtracking their own footprints for miles in panic. Wherever Suede's grave was, no one would ever find it.

Troublemaker was another story.

She'd come out the window, last, leaving behind only Whale Jr. Just as they suspected, her weight had made the line sag dangerously. She had hardly cleared the dogs. She could've dropped Suede to save herself, but she didn't.

They were all waiting to catch her. Nobody could see anything until a bright flash lit up the night. A supernova of blue sparks like a giant bug zapper. Troublemaker had
almost
cleared the electric fence. The blast of fireworks exploded as the charm bracelet around her ankle brushed the top wire. Kevin smelled smoke, and when they caught Troublemaker her fingers wouldn't let loose of the looped belt. Her pajamas were smoking, her pajamas and her hair, and they had to beat out the little flames with their bare hands. Kevin could see uniformed figures running around behind the windows of the sixth floor.

Suede's wig was scorched from the electric shock. Between her frizzed hair and her stitches she looked like the bride of some mad scientist's homemade monster. Troublemaker wasn't dead, but she wasn't waking up, either. Her eyes were half closed, the pupils weren't the same size. She looked like the monster.

The Rock Hudsons promised to keep the gates blockaded. For the first time they would keep people inside rather than out. This would give the boys a head start. Kevin grabbed Suede around the waist. They all grabbed her. They were freezing cold, but now her skin was warm, warmer than alive. It felt good to hold her. And they took off running barefoot through the rows and rows of dead cornstalks.

Troublemaker never uttered another word. Days, they propped her among themselves. In the television lounge or the cafeteria, she was always the center of their group. And they told the story about how she'd memorized the security codes written on a dead girl's organs. They regaled each other with accounts of how Troublemaker leaned out above six stories of certain death and caught the yellow balloon. Pig the Pirate recounted how Troublemaker had looked, leaping from that window with a damsel flung over her shoulder. In that way, they spoke her into a legend. They took her out to sit on the basketball court, sunny days. They included her in everything.

They didn't include Whale Jr. Nobody spoke another word to Whale Jr. One day after basketball they came back to the sixth floor to find that he'd piled two beds together and balanced a chair atop them. He'd looped a belt around the pipe where Troublemaker had tied the rope. Whale Jr. had put his neck through the belt and stepped off the chair. He hadn't gone anywhere. Leastwise his body hadn't. His body got the homecoming parade he'd always craved, a long, slow, stately drive down Main Street, but nobody cheered and he wasn't riding in a convertible.

Troublemaker was still with them, but she was no longer Troublemaker. She stared into space, trembling, like she'd sat in an electric chair that had only executed her courage. To preserve her secret, Kevin had to take her to the bathroom. Kevin had to feed her. If the staff of the Fag Farm had discovered her secret identity, they didn't let on. Maybe someone was still paying the bills for her. Maybe they were afraid of an investigation.

The sixth-floor inmates made halfhearted plans for another breakout. Jasper carved a bar of soap into a pistol and painted it black with shoe polish. Kidney Bean sat by the window at night, on the lookout for another balloon. In truth, none of them longed to reenter the outside world.

Kevin didn't see the point, not anymore. Who wanted to return to a world that was so corrupt? Who wanted to be celebrated by such despicable people? He might go back as a hero, but who wanted to be king in a world of assholes? None of the boys wanted to serve as living proof that this bogus system worked. If they went back, now, their natural desire for girls would vindicate people they'd grown to despise. The Commander would be a hero. Confined here, they had the comfort of knowing they'd be a drain. Their families and their communities would be crippled by the cost of warehousing them. Theirs would be a generation on strike.

Kevin sensed that, for the rest of his life, he would be rushing and striving. For now he could relax. It was okay to be trapped here. He didn't need to be in a Porsche driving two hundred miles an hour. It felt great just to sit still. These days Troublemaker didn't seem any more alive than Suede had been, and Kevin resolved to protect her.

He dressed Troublemaker and walked her to the classrooms. In trying to teach Troublemaker physics, Kevin learned it himself. Seldom did Kevin look at the calendar, he was so content. He didn't wish time away, nor did he long to be someplace else. His life was no longer a race into the future.

Something told Kevin that this was good practice. This was how it would feel to be a dad. Thus his idea of happily-ever-after evolved, slowly. For the time being, the irony wasn't lost on him. His parents had sent him here to save his soul. As a prisoner he'd found it. His life, such as it was, was good enough. He didn't need to distort himself into a cartoon freak.

Hovering here above the endless cornfields, this prison had come to feel like a cloister. Heavenly, almost.

The same as most afternoons, Kevin sat Troublemaker on the toilet and waited. It was better to be on the safe side after a big lunch. The lavatory was so quiet he could hear the drumming of the basketball on the concrete, outside. Awkward, he stood to one side of the cramped stall, crowded by Troublemaker's hairy knees. Perverse as it sounded the smell of piss had come to fill Kevin's heart with joy. It would mean Troublemaker was doing her business, and the two of them could go.

No one was in earshot as Kevin Clayton made his confession in one-sided dialogues. “The only answer I know is running away.” He patted Troublemaker's hair flat where the high voltage had turned it spiky. A black fly landed on his friend's cheek, and Kevin waved it away. “I escaped from my family,” he continued. “I could've escaped this place and kept going.” He listened for the sound of Troublemaker making water. “Time will rescue us.” Troublemaker farted. That was a promising sign. “Time rescues everybody.”