The Rule of Won (19 page)

As I was trying to clear my eye, more food filled the air. Some beans. Fries. A wiener. Then people started shoving each other.

“Calm down! Calm down!” Ethan was shouting.

Through blurry vision, I saw a few panicked lunchroom
attendants rush out from the serving area. The hall monitors were coming in through the doors.

I also caught a glimpse of Dylan, headed my way.

Something heavier, maybe a book or a chair, slammed me in the back. I fell forward, slipped on the pie I'd wiped from my face, and the next thing I knew I was eating linoleum. People were going at it, tussling. When the tangled web of limbs parted for a moment, I saw Dylan still trying to get to me, but he couldn't. The crowd was too thick even for him.

But someone else reached me. Two strong hands grabbed the cloth of my overshirt and pulled. I wasn't lifted, but I slid along the floor. Disoriented, I flopped over some feet, then sloshed through a pool of soda and ice, cold bubbles freezing my back.

“Hey!” I shouted, but whoever it was didn't hear me or didn't care. And they were moving fast. The voices of the mob were growing louder, angrier, mixing with the hard clacks of pushed chairs and the wet thuds of hurled food.

It was sounding like a major riot.

I heard doors open and found myself yanked full body onto the relatively clean floor of a dim hallway. As the doors swung shut and the roar inside the cafeteria was muffled, I wound up eyeballing fluorescent ceiling fixtures and a display case showing the sole trophy the Screech Neck Basket Cases had won twenty years ago. Third place. Gaining my bearings, I pivoted awkwardly on my damp shirt and looked up into the face of my rescuer, whose hands were still on me.

Ethan.

“Get off me!” I shouted, twisting away.

He let go and rose, panting slightly. “I saved your ass,” Ethan said. “They were going to kill you.”

He put a hand out to help me to my feet. On my knees now, I swatted it away.

“I said get off!”

“Suit yourself.”

Ethan stepped back as if he were abandoning my lost soul. As soon as I was half standing, I rammed the top of my head into his gut. Together, we sprawled onto the hallway floor. Blood pounded in my ears, mixed with the distant screams of the students and the newer shouts of school officials trying to restore order.

Ethan stood first, legs shoulder-length apart, too perfectly balanced. He waited until I had a chance to stand, then shoved me in the shoulders. When I tried to shove back, he hopped out of the way, leaving me stumbling.

“Will you knock it off? Someone could see us,” Ethan said. “What is it with you, anyway? Is this about Vicky?”

“No,” I said. “You tried to kill Mr. Eldridge.”

He blinked. For half a second, he looked afraid, but then that calm, steely mask that made him look like he was thirty slipped back over his features. “If you insist on thinking in that backward way, then so did you, every time you imanifested everyone passing the algebra test.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “You cut his brake line.”

I pulled back and took a swing at him, but my eye was still tearing from the cinnamon and sugar, so he ducked easily.

“You
really
don't want to fight me, Dunne,” Ethan said.

“Yeah, I do,” I said.

He chuckled like a super-villain. “Okay, fine, but let's try to be a little smarter about it, okay? Not now, not here. That way, no suspensions.”

I panted. “Okay. Name the time and place.”

“Saturday night, midnight. In the new gym.”

I blinked and wiped my eye again. “What?”

He was so calm, so sure of himself. My own, unreliable rage was already fading, the image of the spork, or the pipe clenched in my hand, disintegrating.

“That's right. You and me, once and for all, in the new gym. You know the place, don't you? After all, you helped create it.”

He must have been imanifesting for me to agree, because even though I knew it was the stupidest thing I'd ever done, I said yes.

The next day it was as if an eerie truce had descended between me and the Cravers. I even walked by Dylan a few times, and he didn't so much as snarl. Maybe it was because Wyatt came down so hard on everyone involved in the cafeteria “food fight”—thirty people got detention—or maybe it was because I accepted Ethan's challenge and word was out that I should be left alone until Saturday.

I don't know what I was thinking when I said yes to that fight.

Well, yeah, I do. I was thinking it'd be really sweet to punch him a couple of times, slam him around a bit, and make him hurt. More interesting are all the things I
wasn't
thinking—how if I got caught, with Wyatt still considering me responsible for the building collapse, I'd be totally, permanently expelled. I also wasn't thinking that, as a slacker, if I could even still consider myself one, I didn't believe in violence. Nor had I truly considered that even if I won, other than making me feel better for a little while, what good would it do? Ethan would just give
everyone some variation of his “I really meant for that to happen” speech, and everyone would slap Mr. Psycho on the back.

I went to visit Erica at the hospital again that afternoon, but I sure didn't want to talk to her about school. The overdose had left her with some kind of stomach ulcer that was aggravated by anxiety. She was having enough trouble recuperating without hearing that I was about to battle to the death. So I was all smiles, talking favorite TV shows and movies while she talked novels and poetry. I thought I'd pulled it off quite nicely until she grabbed my hand and said, “What's wrong?”

“What?”

“Something's been bothering you since you got here. What is it? The Crave after you?”

“What? No. I'm fine. I'm, uh . . . just going to go see Moore now. You take care.”

She knew it was an excuse. I knew she knew, but I wasn't going to talk. I already felt like I'd failed her the first time, by not telling someone about her notebook. I didn't want to fail her again. I was surprised by how strongly I felt about her lately, and this time it wasn't the cookies.

To date my visits with Moore hadn't been fun for either of us with his jaw wired shut. Unable to exercise his gift for being verbally annoying, he mostly just lay there watching TV. I figured I'd drop in and bring him some soda from the vending machines. Quick in and out, in case Erica was watching.

But as I neared his room, I heard familiar voices.

“In a couple of days those wires will be gone, and you won't be able to shut up.”

“I TiVo'd this week's
Lost
episode for you. I'll burn you a DVD.”

“And don't worry about Saturday—we've got it fixed so we can all watch the fight together.”

Seconds later, Mason, Drik, and Guy stepped out into the hall. Their clothing was unusually sedate, T-shirts, coats, and jeans all around, as if they were traveling incognito. I was thrilled to see them.

“Hey! What the hell have you all been up to?” I said. “Couldn't you have given me a call or sent an e-mail or . . . something?”

“Sorry, Dunne, this was the first time we even had a chance to visit Moore,” Guy said.

“You've been
suspended
. You've got nothing but time.”

“We can't all run around accepting challenges from Ethan,” Mason said. “Think they'll give you a room next to Alden?”

I furrowed my brow. “I suppose by now I shouldn't be surprised by what you know. Is it up on the Crave message board?”

Guy waved off the thought. “We got blocked out. They changed passwords.”

“We did find out that the police
were
showing Eldridge's security video around all along, only they were doing it quietly, with local residents and a few students. No one was able to identify the attacker,” Mason said.

“Another dead end,” I sighed. “Unless I lie and say I
was
there.”

“Don't bother. You'd never pass the poly. However . . . ,”
Drik said. He looked mysteriously up and around. “We have been doing something a little more proactive . . .”

“Drik . . . ,” Mason warned.

“He should know,” Drik said. “He's practically one of us.”

“Know what?” I asked. “Come on! I went through a whole police interrogation, and I didn't squeal.”

Guy sidled up to me and lowered his voice even more. “Okay. Want to come over to my house tonight for a few hours? Around eight?”

There are no ritzy sections of Screech Neck. During economic boom times, when you couldn't help but make money, there were a few upscale developments planned. Concrete foundations were even poured, but not a single McMansion was ever completed, leaving Screech Neck pretty much all old and drab. There were apartment buildings near the center of town, where I lived, and 1960s single-and two-family houses at the outskirts of town, where Ethan and his family lived, but there was also a kind of dreary sameness to it all.

On the one hand, you never felt like you were in a particularly bad neighborhood, but on the other, you never felt totally safe. That's a roundabout way of saying that Davis Street, where Guy lived, was pretty nondescript, a row of two-family houses lining the street, so close to each other that if you opened a side window, you could reach into your neighbor's kitchen to borrow the mustard.

Once I reached the address, it took me a second of staring at the names beside the door to realize Guy's family lived in
the basement. A little arrow pointed down some cracked stone steps where I found a small white buzzer. After I pressed it, a light came on inside, the door creaked open, and I was greeted by a short woman in a housecoat. Her hair was up in curlers. A lit cigarette dangled from her mouth.

I cleared my throat. “Guy here?”

“
Guy!
” she howled. I was impressed the cigarette didn't fall.

His voice called from inside. “Send him back, Mom!”

The dangler stepped out of my way and I entered. There was only one light on in the living room, a small lamp with maybe a twenty-watt bulb in it. Looking down, I realized I was standing on old newspapers, which seemed to cover most of the floor. The ceiling was low, and even though there wasn't much furniture, it felt crowded.

The creak of the door closing behind me made me whirl.

The dangler was gone.

“Guy?” I called out.

“Here,” he said.

I felt my way through the dimness to a door at the end of a hall. When I pushed it open, a dull green-blue glow met my eyes.

Inside were Guy, Drik, and Mason, all in chairs facing the source of the glow, a monitor. It was an old tube-type, big, maybe twenty-one inches, with speakers on either side, hooked by a few wires to Guy's laptop. Between the chairs, tables of snack food were laid out. No one acknowledged me. They were all busy munching and staring at the screen.

“Think she'll do it?” Guy said to Mason.

Mason shook her head. “Nah. See how fed up she is?”

Last time they'd showed me a monitor, I'd been shocked by what I saw. This time it was just the same. On it was a blocky webcam image, blown up way too big for the screen. The frame rate was low, the movement jerky. If it was in color, I couldn't tell. There were two figures on it, a male standing in the center of the frame, arms out, like he was pleading, and a shorter girl, some papers in her hand, with her arms crossed, like she was saying no. The angle was off, the way you'd see in some hidden-camera TV show. Then I realized why.

It was Ethan and Alyssa.

That familiar dulcet voice came through the tinny speakers, tinged with impatience. “Just one picture, Alyssa. Just one drawing of me beating him. Please.”

“Holy crap!” I shouted. “You put a
webcam
in Ethan's room!? How did you—”

“Shh!” they all said.

“That's breaking and entering! And . . . and . . . wiretapping! Do you know how many laws you're—”

“Shh!” they said again.

Mason pointed to a chair next to her. Amazed, I sat.

On screen, Alyssa was yelling at Ethan, shaking her head.

“Come on, Ethan, this is just because my pictures remind you of Mom! What are you going to ask for next? You think I can bring her back from the dead?”

“Maybe.”

She was genuinely upset. “I can't do it anymore anyway, even if I wanted!”

He stiffened. “What do you mean?”

Guy leaned forward and whispered, “We've been waiting for him to confess about cutting the brake lines, but so far, nothing.”

“Shh!” Mason said again.

“It never worked the way you said to begin with, and now it doesn't work at all. I can't even draw a decent picture.”

“It can't just stop working. It's a natural law of the universe.”

“Then maybe you should get a lawyer,” she said.

Alyssa held up the papers in her hand, crinkling them as she thrust them toward Ethan. “I've been drawing for six days, and not one picture has happened. Not one.”

He took them, looked at the pile, and unfolded one or two carefully, like they were holy relics. He shook his head as Alyssa continued to speak.

“Maybe my battery wore out, okay? Or maybe I broke something or maybe it was like I've been saying all along,
just a bunch of coincidences to begin with!
”

He put the papers down on his desk and shook his head furiously. “No, no, no! It's not! There's no such thing as coincidence! Do you understand? No such thing!”

She snarled back in a voice that again reminded me whose sister she was. “Then maybe you're being punished for being too greedy!”

He slammed his hands down on the desk. “This was your last chance, Alyssa. Your talent was a gift from Mom, but you betrayed it. Your drawings don't work anymore because you've let negativity creep into your mind. I don't have that negativity. Not one ounce.”