Rotters (24 page)

“It’s the Congress of Freaks,” Foley said. He pointed to the man I had mentioned. “His head’s on backwards.”

From that day on, we adopted the phrase. No more did we attend Bloughton High. Instead we were but representatives of the Congress of Freaks, and moved among our fellow initiates, troubled and troubling, but no more so than anyone else. I thought of myself as the Backwards Man, always looking at the shit I left in my wake. Foley was the Manly Giant, and Celeste, when I saw her, was Legless Mite, the girl
balanced atop the wheeled cart—beautiful and dark-eyed and powered with a grace frightening to those burdened by regular limbs.

It was the last Friday of the semester, and I entered the school with almost breathless excitement. It had been a tremendous week. After returning from Kansas City, I had nailed every paper and exam the bastards had put before me, and a perfect score on my closing biology test was all I needed to claim victory. The final day of classes before Christmas break was Monday, which meant I had all weekend to prepare for Gottschalk. Most kids groaned; I celebrated.

After lunch, I hurried to the final Fun and Games. I didn’t expect to remain friends with Celeste, if that was what we were, when classes picked up in January, and so felt an urgency to talk to her a final time, no matter how many lies I had to make up about theatrical agents who were this very moment booking tickets for Bloughton. But when I walked through the gymnasium doors, my hopes sank. Stettlemeyer and Gripp lounged next to each other on the bleachers as they had for the first half of the semester, and students gathered in loose assemblies, not a single one of them wearing gray shorts. There were a few basketballs and Frisbees lying around for those so inclined, but clearly the coaches had decided to let the final session function as a social hour.

Stettlemeyer barked a reminder that we all needed to go empty out our lockers at some point. Half the crowd got the task out of the way immediately, including Foley, whose invisibility made him impervious to intimidation. When he returned with his sweats twisted into a rank knot, we situated ourselves on the bleachers and watched our classmates mingle. I was so used to seeing them in dismal gym wear that they
seemed rather like sophisticates at a cocktail party. Stettlemeyer’s superhits completed the deception.

Celeste, Woody, Rhino—I kept tabs on them for ten or fifteen minutes, then let them slide from sight. Dwelling on any of them was not going to help the next few days of intense study. But Foley’s constant bitching—currently about how his grandparents always gave him noncirculating commemorative coins for Christmas, what the fucking fuck was up with
that?
—wasn’t interesting enough to keep my mind off the gymnasium’s missing character, Heidi. I stood up.

“Hey, where you going? I haven’t gotten to the Limited-Edition Barack Obama Inaugural Series yet. Wait’ll you hear what those things are made of. You’ll shit a brick.”

“Clothes,” I said. “Locker room.”

“Oh, right. Well, hurry up.”

Alone in the stairwell, I paused to relax in the cool darkness. Maybe next semester I could get out of gym entirely, I thought. The locker room door squeaked beneath my fingers. I had heard of such arrangements in Chicago, of being permitted to add an extra class in lieu of gym. I passed red benches, black lockers; my nose tickled at the fog of aerosol. Yes, I would ask the school counselor, maybe even today after school—I didn’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before. The first number of my combination was thirteen. I smiled. Maybe my luck would just keep getting better.

Then impact—teeth rattled, cheeks and lip smashed against clammy brick. There was no air; I wheezed; great vises collapsed my lungs. The spice of armpit hit my nose. Far away I heard the skittering of my shoes and then the horrible absence of sound as they were lifted from the floor.

I went horizontal. Blood rushed to my head. There was a
splashing noise and I looked down to see two large Nikes stomp across a thin puddle of water; I was being toted like a suitcase. I wrenched my neck and saw Rhino and then there was a great blow to the top of my skull. All went black—and then I saw starbursts, tasted the blood from my lacerated tongue, and heard a chuckling from above.

“Didn’t mean to hit that wall,” said Rhino. “Honest I didn’t.”

I opened my mouth but my swollen tongue took up too much space.

“It’s your lucky day, Crotch.” I didn’t need to look to confirm the identity of this second voice. “We’re performing a public service. Free showers to anyone who smells so shitty I can smell him all over my girlfriend.”

“Trask, do they still count as girlfriends when they don’t even let you—”

“Rhino, you’re going to want to shut the fuck up.”

I was flipped through the air—my stomach lurched—and then I felt hard cement reverberate up my ankles. I blinked; everything looked green. I shuffled my feet and heard water, and then slipped and felt against my back two twists of metal, hot and cold. I slid until the seat of my pants hit standing water.

“You’ll have to forgive Trask,” Rhino stage-whispered. One of the metal knobs whined. Vibrating through the wall, the digestive squeals of plumbing coming to life. “When it comes to you, he gets a little agitated.”

The water blasted. I gasped—it was freezing and every muscle in my body clenched at once. For a shocking moment I was the corpse and this was rain and I pleaded for my father’s shielding. Then I blinked and watched the puddle turn pink: proof of life. Rhino exclaimed in a mixture of shock
and glee. My eyes saw through water. Soaking pants; fingers, my own, clawing blindly at the air; my shoe heels scraping senselessly at the drain in the floor.

I caught a flash of Woody, leaning against the far wall, perfectly dry. “Soap,” he said.

“Scrub-a-dub-dub,” sang Rhino. “No more stinky-winky.”

A terrible taste hit my bleeding tongue and I became aware of a turquoise liquid, dribbling. Then more of it, appearing in splotches across my stomach and pants. I squinted through the downpour and saw Rhino pumping soap from a dispenser and flinging it at me in handfuls. My eyes stung. Suds slid down my face in foamy tears. The hard walls of the shower made it sound as if the entire school were laughing.

God is good.

“All purty,” Rhino announced. He daintily dipped his hands in the water stream to rinse them. I sensed his retreat and heard the dull thwack of a high-five.

Woody’s breath warmed my ear.

“Stick to your own kind, Crotch. Or we can do this again next semester.”

Footsteps splished through puddles and they were gone. I traced their progress and noticed other faces poking around the corner. There were four or five of them, their jaws agape, and not just boys, but girls, too. I scooped a mountain of bubbles from my lap and spat the synthetic tang of cheap soap. Woody and Rhino had succeeded—I was nothing if not clean.

I tried to stand but slipped in the turquoise lather. There was laughter. More voices now, too many. I reached for the knobs to pull myself up but they too were slick. It was getting darker; more and more heads blocked out the locker room lights. I barely heard the noise of someone pushing through the throng, and even when he was kneeling at my
side and tugging at my arm I barely saw him. It was Foley, trying to help me up, his black pants soaking blacker, and all I felt was jealous rage that, even here, almost no one saw him. “Joey, come on, man.”

I slapped away his hands and lurched. The nearest onlookers shrank back as my shoes fanned water. I tromped through the shower and past the red rows of lockers, meeting no one’s eyes, concentrating upon the squish of my socks. I had the door pushed open before I felt Foley’s dry fingers take handholds of my soggy clothing.

“Joey, man, I told you to stay away from them—”

“Move.”

“Joey—”

“Move.” I wrestled against his embrace. He lodged himself into the doorframe for leverage.

“Joey, what the hell?”

“Move.”
I lowered my head and bulled forward, knocking him aside even as he tried to keep hold. I shouldered the door. It smashed against the far wall and rocketed back. Foley screamed, a high girlish noise that I instantly hated him for, and I looked over my shoulder to see blood patterned across the brick. The door had slammed his finger, and he held the misshapen purple thing in front of his face in disbelief.

Keep moving
, I told myself.
Up the steps, up the steps
.

Three bounds later the stairs were history and I was through the door to the gym. While I trailed shower water across the floor, Stettlemeyer showed Gripp funny snapshots she had stored on her phone.

I made it to the cafeteria right as the bell was ringing. An excess of quarters hung heavy in my sodden jeans and I plunged the coins home, stamping out Boris’s number. It rang and rang, burying the last echo of Foley’s pain.

An automated message picked up. Somehow I waited until the beep.

“Boris, call me now. Right now. This is Joey.” I recited the number. My voice was all over the place, wild.

Students passed on their way to the day’s last classes. I eyed them, shifting my feet in a growing puddle.

Twenty minutes later, I deposited more money and called again to the same result.

“I’m not screwing around, Boris,” I said. “Call me back.
Call me back.
” I gave the number again and hung up.

Fifteen minutes passed.

“Boris, where are you?” Bound by the cord, I paced in a tight circle, my wet clothes clinging uncomfortably. “Don’t tell me you have this thing off. You don’t ever have it off. You’re avoiding me. Stop avoiding me! You have the number.
Call it.
”

Ten more minutes.

“What the fuck is your problem?” I shouted into the phone, my voice breaking. “You’ve got no right to treat me like this! I need you! I need you to call me! Pick up your fucking phone and call me!”

Five minutes later the pay phone rang. I jammed the receiver against my lips.

“Boris!”

“This better be good,” he said.

“I’m coming home. Now. I mean it. Right now. I’m heading to the train station right now.”

He groaned.

“I don’t believe this,” he said. “You need to learn how to keep it together.”

“Can you wire me money? I’m heading there now and I don’t have a dime.”

“Wire you …? What does that even mean?” He was speaking softly as if from a public place. “Of course you don’t have a dime, you’ve spent it all dialing my number three thousand times.”

“Find out the number to the Bloughton station,” I said. “Call them. Arrange it. Put it on Thaddeus and Janelle’s card. I don’t care how you do it!”

He paused. “I’m not putting anything on anyone’s card.”

I could barely keep my voice down. “Why the fuck not? You’ve done it before! Boris, I need this!”

“What you need is help, Joey.”

I heard through the receiver someone saying “Shh,” followed by Boris’s muttered apology.

“Where are you? You’re not in school?” I was surprised at my own accusatory tone.

“What’s it to you?” Boris snapped. “Last day of school here was yesterday, moron. Thaddeus and Janelle took me out to a movie.
Which
I’m missing.”

The image of something so cozily privileged as the graduate-degreed Watsons escorting their well-behaved son to a subtitled movie at an art-house theater that probably sold imported beer and gourmet coffee, and all as a reward for something as mundane as concluding another semester, consumed me with envy and spite.

“Who gives a shit?” I howled. “We’ve been best friends for a million years and the moment I need you all you can do is complain about missing some movie? Are you kidding me? Get
out
of there.”

“Were,” Boris said. “We
were
best friends. I don’t even know you, dude.”

I closed my eyes and let the words sink in. Through the receiver I heard piped-in movie-theater smooth jazz, laughing
strangers, the distant flutter of popping corn. My side of the phone was even louder—boys shouted as they bought vending machine food, girls in the hallway squealed, and their volumes increased as they pressed closer in their eagerness to confirm that Crotch was indeed hunched over the pay phone, drenched and crying.

Crying—yes, I was. The tears felt different, oilier somehow, from the rest of the water beading my face.

“Boris,” I said.

“I don’t think you should call me anymore.”

“Boris, please, listen.”

“Don’t call me anymore.”

“Please listen.”

“Don’t call.”

“Please.”

“Don’t.”

It was the last word he would ever say to me. The dial tone was deafening.

I turned to face the gawkers. Their eyes were too bright, their postures too predatory, the smiles on their faces too ravenous—they were the freaks, not me. I fumbled the receiver at the phone. It fell and dangled, but by then I had plunged into their ranks. They parted to make way, their enraptured whispers like tires through wet pavement.

My last hope: Simmons and Diamond. I didn’t care about the retribution I would suffer once Woody and Rhino had been suspended. All I cared about was that the principal and vice principal acted speedily on my behalf. Really they had no choice. The abuse had been vicious and the witnesses many.

Passing my locker, I snatched my biology text but nothing else, not even my coat. Moments later I closed in on the
familiar wooden letters:
PRI CIP L’S OF ICE
. Laverne was standing just outside the doorway, struggling to direct her second arm into a coat sleeve.

“You’re wet,” she said, blinking at me in surprise. “Joey, you’re all wet. What happened?”

“I need to see Mr. Simmons.”

Laverne opened her mouth, then closed it.

“That’s going to be impossible.” Her normally nasal tone was flattened with an unexpected coolness.

“Ms. Diamond, then, I don’t care.”

Laverne took a moment to adjust her hem before deliberately attacking the buttons, one after another. When she was fully sealed, she raised her chin proudly. I felt a twinge of distress at the smug set of her lips.