The Rule of Won (2 page)

Having jack else to do, I slipped through the chain-link fence surrounding the construction area to check it out. Frozen dirt crunched underfoot as I climbed a small hill for a good view. I was thinking it was pretty cool. The big sheets of plastic covering the tall windows flapped in the cold wind, letting out little wisps of that new gym smell.

But then the wacky Fates decided to mess with me. With an ungodly loud creak, like the rusty hinges on a giant-size door opening, the roof and the whole side wall collapsed, bringing down scaffolding and bricks and cinder blocks and wood and letting loose a major cloud of crap that billowed and rushed toward me. Before I could even think of moving, I was covered in junk and coughing concrete dust.

I was still coughing when I heard the sirens. The crash had tripped some alarm, and the police were on their way. There was yours truly, trespassing, covered in dust. I felt like a kid about to be caught with his hand in the cookie jar, only I didn't even get a cookie.

Knowing Screech Neck's finest wouldn't believe some sixteen-year-old slacker punk even if I swore I hadn't touched a thing, I booked, leaving a lovely trail of concrete dust footprints
on the sidewalk. That much would have been fine since the prints vanished after a block and I could run pretty quickly.

The kicker was that my fellow classmate, super-nerd and wannabe ace reporter All-den Moore, was also out and about that day, doing whatever it is wannabe ace reporters do on snowy afternoons. His name's just plain Alden, but I make the the first syllable long—All-den. Kind of a holdover from elementary school when everyone used to make fun of him. Anyway, after the collapse, he saw me running, covered in dust. Mind like a steel trap, he put two and two together and got five.

Did he tell? Of course.

I was in the shower scraping wet gunk off my skin when the cops came to the door. GP Joey, the world's only honest auto mechanic (part of the reason his business was failing) handed over my dust-caked clothes and explained how it wasn't my fault I was turning out badly, since my deadbeat dad ran off when I was three, and with him and Mom working all the time, there was no one around to give me proper supervision.

Lucky for me, they still couldn't quite press charges. What with there being no actual vandalism, there was no actual evidence of vandalism.

Unlucky for me, Principal Wyatt didn't care about evidence. Unlike the courts, his rule of thumb was—if he feels like it's true, it's true. He felt like I was guilty and suspended me for the rest of the school year. I think the worst part was the look on my mother's face when she found out.

As a final capper to the worst winter I'd had since I found out there was no Santa Claus (
No jolly guy who just brings you
stuff? Say it ain't so, Ma!
), it turned out the construction company didn't have the proper insurance, so SNH not only remained a broken T, but everyone, from the students to the teachers to the custodial staff, blamed me.

I suppose I should've just been grateful Vicky stuck by me when I returned that September. Even if we hadn't been alone once since then. Even if, as she explained that morning, there were . . . conditions.

“Caleb, no one talks to you anymore. You've got to pull yourself out of this,” Vicky said. “The meeting will help. I promise. They'll accept you.”

Silence hung in the air like a smelly old sock on a doorknob. “I haven't even read the book,” I said lamely.

“It's an Open Crave.”

I raised an eyebrow. “A what?”

I could tell she was trying to be patient. “
The Rule of Won
is about fulfilling desires, so they call the meetings ‘Craves.' Open Craves are for people just starting out.”

“Like Open Graves are for people just finishing up?”

I thought that was worth a chuckle. She didn't.

“This isn't middle school anymore. I'm trying to make something of myself. I don't want to have to leave you behind.”

“Vicky, you've been trying to make something of yourself since you were two. And really, you're running for student council, not Congress. It's no big deal.”

Her eyes narrowed with anger. “No. It's what I make of it. Promise you'll go.”

“I don't know, Vick…”

She pulled her trump card. “My parents don't even want me talking to you. They're convinced you're a no-account vandal who needs to be in jail.”

I felt defeated, but I pretended I still had my pride. “They're wrong, but so what? So what if I don't care about college? So what if I don't want to bust my ass getting some corporate lackey job so I can make a lot of money? I mean, what's the big deal?”

“The big deal, Caleb, is that sometimes you have to move forward just to avoid going backward. Wyatt's looking for an excuse to get rid of you. So's most of the school. So are my parents. Maybe… so am I.”

I sighed. “Fine. I'll go.”

She smiled, like her button. I didn't, like me, and we split to enjoy our day, me with a sinking feeling in my gut, hoping this Crave thing wouldn't entail homework.

Truth be told, slacker though I was, there was something I did want for myself: to turn back the clock to last year when I had a decent average without having to study, a girlfriend who didn't mind my lack of ambition—and no arrest record.

But it didn't look like that was going to happen any time soon.

First period was creative writing, but I was in no hurry to get there. I try not to be in a hurry to get anywhere. I ambled nice and slow, but people kept staring at me, since I was apparently guilty until proven innocent. One girl even hissed. After that, I picked up my pace.

I was a little relieved to see Erica Black, the only other
person in the school who spoke to me, sitting on the floor near the classroom door. She was willing to talk to me, I think, because she had transferred in this year and didn't know my sordid past. Frankly, she made me nervous. She's a little dark and intense, which explained why no one bothered to mention to her that I was the maniac who blew up the school.

She was hunched over, scribbling in a spiral-bound notebook. No shock there. She was
always
writing—on the bus, at lunch, in the halls. Writing, writing, writing. Hell, I don't do things I
like
that often.

At least she was company, so I walked over.

“What's up, Erica?”

“Just contemplating the darkness that is my soul,” she said.

That's how she talks.

“Cool,” I shot back, being what they call “ironic.”

I squinted at the page, expecting a poem about how much better darkness is than light, but it was all numbers.

“Not polite to stare, Mr. Dunne,” she said.

Don't get me wrong, Erica Black was cute as hell. At first glance, you might think she's Goth (SNH has three), but she's not. She does have that Goth look. Wan. Glum. She also has this black curly hair, and I mean
black
like a night sky, but it's short, and she keeps most of it covered with this old-style 1920s hat that looks like a lacy baseball cap. Her skin is smooth without a freckle or a drop of acne. It always shines a little, too, like a dinner plate.

I looked at the top of her hat and stated the obvious: “That's not a poem.”

She answered, either annoyed or pretending to be: “No. It's not. Did you want a poem? Fine. Here:

Razors pain you; Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful; Nooses give;
Gas smells awful; You might as well live.

“Dorothy Parker, 1926.”

“Wow. Parker, eh? I thought it was yours for sure.”

“Really? You thought I wrote a poem about suicidal depression? That's the sweetest thing anyone's ever said to me!” She flashed this big fake smile that almost seemed to be making fun of Vicky's button. “But the fact is, if I don't pass my next algebra test, I
will
kill myself.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Get off it. Pigeons and gerbils can pass Blubaugh's tests. They're all multiple choice and she lets you retake them. Believe me, I know. I scored the lowest in the class the first time, but I passed. You'd have to be brain-dead.”

She eyed me. “Then disconnect me from life support, because I failed three. As a reward, my parents had me moved into Mr.
Eldridge's
class.”

I gasped. “Ow. That's like teaching someone to swim by tying lead weights to their feet.”

She nodded. “Yeah. Better teacher, tougher tests. The only math tests in the world with essay questions. It's bringing
down my whole average and ruining any chance I have of getting a scholarship.”

The bell rang. She clapped the book shut and stood. “On the other hand, I hear getting really drunk and freezing to death can actually be pleasant, like falling asleep.”

“You'd never do that,” I told her.

“Why not?”

“Because then you'd miss your own funeral.”

I caught a real smile on her face as she went inside. “Good point.”

Some people might be worried about the way she was talking about suicide, but really, it was her way of blowing off steam. Frankly, I didn't know anyone who had Eldridge that didn't contemplate offing themselves at some point. I had him for trig this year, and even though I was doing fine without much effort, I was having regular night terrors about the quadratic equation slipping into my bedroom and eating my brain.

Vicky had already left me feeling pretty glum, but my mood dropped further when I walked into creative writing and saw an assignment on the board to write three “free-verse” poems, each about a different feeling. Mrs. Ditellano smiled at me. She has a friendly, plump face and wears these square glasses, like Mrs. Santa Claus, only creepy.

“Are we floating today, Caleb?”

I looked at my feet. “Don't seem to be, Mrs. D.”

“Keep working at it, dear. You'll get there.”

Honestly? I only signed up for creative writing because I
wanted to write science fiction, with particle beams and warp engines and alien tentacles that reach through your nose into your respiratory system and lay eggs that burst your lungs. Instead, it turned out to be all this “floating.”

I scribbled some nonsense about air and waves and my soul, then spent the rest of the class worrying about the Crave. As the day wore on I took a break from fretting to consider talking to All-den Moore. I hadn't spoken to him since I'd gotten back, and rumor had it he was afraid I was going to beat the crap out of him. He's a nervous kid to begin with. Since I didn't really blame him for turning me in—he was just being honest, after all—I wanted him to know things were okay, but I didn't see him in the halls or at lunch.

I did see Dr. Wyatt. He's a little guy in a suit, kind of like Quark from
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,
but without the personality. When he saw me, he pointed at me and practically shouted, “I'm watching you, Dunne!”

Maybe, but he wasn't watching the door opening in front of him, and
wham
! He slammed right into it, nose first.

I hightailed it out of there, figuring he'd blame that on me, too.

After all, I was responsible for accidents, right?

Most things are easier said than done, but for a slacker, that's true of
everything
. Picture your normal nervousness going to a club the first time, with people you mostly don't know, who probably hate you, to discuss a book you haven't read that you'd probably hate if you did. Triple it—that's how I felt about that first Crave.

Even before the building collapse I wasn't a public kind of guy. Plus, for someone who prided himself on wanting
nothing
, a meeting about getting what you wanted was a trip into the lion's den. Creative writing, with the floating, was bad enough.

Most of all, though, I dreaded the possibility of a group hug. You get into a circle with a lot of people like that and you never really know who you're hugging, or who's hugging you. Ach.

So, even though I usually leaped giddily from my seat at the end of the day, instead I slogged along like a slug. Eventually exiting from SNH's rear end, I entered a truly ugly asphalt plain. Once a parking lot, it was now home to a series of
rickety trailers euphemistically called “temporary” classrooms. Just to see them brings to mind what GP Joey calls Screech Neck's unofficial town motto: Doing the worst with what little we have.

They were plopped down by some government relief agency after the school wing collapsed. They've been here longer than I have, and will probably still be here after I've gone. So, as far as SNH is concerned, I'm more temporary than they are.

It's in the trailers that most after-school clubs meet, except for the
Weekly Screech
, the school paper that comes out maybe once a year, if at all. They have an actual office with lots of room. I heard All-den was the new editor, lucky guy. As for the rest of us, Dr. Wyatt figures if we trash these old wrecks, no one will notice or care.

I approached trailer B, thudded up the three metal steps, sighed for my forgotten dignity, and went in. Before I even saw anything, I was blasted with the thick smell of mold so ancient it'd probably developed intelligence and was planning to start its own club.

Adding to that smell were ten, maybe fifteen kids. Huge crowd for one of our clubs. When they saw me, everyone inhaled. It was like one of those Westerns where the bad guy walks into the saloon.

I figured that was my cue to bag this scene, but Vicky and her button were sitting in a corner, both smiling in a come-hither way, so I gritted my teeth, pulled up a chair, and sat next to her. Sensing my distress, she gently scratched the back
of my neck with those long painted fingernails of hers, making my brain melt. I closed my eyes, almost forgetting where I was until I opened them again and saw everyone ogling at me.