XGeneration 1: You Don't Know Me (14 page)

Scott’s neck burned. “Yeah, well…”

“And what’s this?” Wayne grabbed the laminated letter around his neck. “The sign of The Secret Order of I’m-The-World’s-Biggest-Ignoramus?” He unleashed more spitting laughter.

“It stands for
Gamma
. It’s a men’s organization, something you wouldn’t know anything about, you—you hacking neophyte.”

Wayne went rigid. “What did you call me?”

In his anger, Scott had gone straight for Wayne’s Doomsday Button. He glanced over at Craig and Chun. They looked back with wide-eyed expressions that said,
Now you’ve done it
.

“Just forget it,” Scott said.

He tried to draw away, but Wayne still had the other end of the letter in his grip. The glint of condescension in his eyes sharpened to blades of anger and naked jealousy.

“Let go,” Scott said.

Wayne mimicked him in falsetto: “
Let go.
”

“Let go, I said. You’re gonna tear it!”

“
You’re gonna tear it!
”

Scott had hoped to resolve their dispute with the same command and maturity as Scott Summers of the X-Men. But here they were, grappling for a laminated letter like a pair of first graders. All that was missing were the glue sticks and round-tipped scissors. Scott glanced back to make sure the other students weren’t watching and found them standing in a semicircle around him, all glasses and unkempt hair. He seized Wayne’s fingers and tried to pry them away.

“I just wanted to warn you about a tap,” he whispered as they struggled. “There’s one on my line… might be one on yours.”

“Crap on your tap.” Wayne jerked his arm, and the string around Scott’s neck snapped. They both looked at the letter in Wayne’s hand, an “Oh, shit” flitting across Wayne’s eyes. Then he scrunched up his face and flung the letter away. It flapped over the heads of the onlookers.

Scott stared at Wayne, klaxons blaring between his temples. He imagined himself seizing his best friend’s neck, pressing his thumbs into his bony Adam’s apple. But then he counted off the consequences in his head:
trip to the dean’s office, suspension, expulsion from Gamma.

He leveled a finger at Wayne’s nose. “Don’t talk to me. Ever again. I mean it.”

“
I mean it,
” Wayne echoed, waggling his head. Several students tittered, including Craig and Chun.

Scott wheeled to hunt for his letter.

* * *

Janis stood on tiptoes outside the peeled-paint metal door, trying without success to peer through its mesh window. She knew about the room from when Margaret had pledged. It contained a couple of small tables, a non-working refrigerator, and a countertop with broken cabinets where mice nested. She knew about the cockroaches in the stained ceiling as well and how the room would break into shrieks and toppling chairs whenever a roach landed in someone’s hair. The room’s official name was the Teacher’s Dining Room, a relic of some sepia-toned decade past. Now it was Where the Alpha Pledges Ate Lunch.

Janis sighed through her nose and seized the door handle.
Let’s get this over with.
Hinges squealed, and the pledging class, crowded around the two pushed-together tables, blinked up at her from the darkness like well-heeled tomb robbers. The room’s lone fluorescent bar didn’t work either, a detail Janis had forgotten.

“Sorry I’m late,” she muttered, letting the door swing closed behind her.

Chair legs scraped, and when Janis’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, a narrow wedge of table had opened up for her. She was glad to see it wasn’t beside the Amy-Alicia-Autumn hydra. It was bad enough having to miss her lunches with her friends, but being confined to a room with her archenemies…

“Just as well for you,” Amy chirped. “It gave us time to spruce up the room a little. You should have
smelled
this place ten minutes ago. Good thing Autumn was toting her Charlie perfume.”

Janis didn’t lend her voice to the flutters of laughter. Instead, she unpacked her lunch bag, glancing up once to find the round whites of Amy’s eyes looking back at her. Apparently the three A’s had been holding court before Janis’s arrival because they resumed chattering about life in front of the cameras to their rapt audience. Janis took a despondent bite from her bologna-and-mayonnaise sandwich and examined the ceiling for roach activity. Never in a million years would she have imagined experiencing the place herself. And yet, thanks to whatever power Margaret wielded over her thoughts, here she was.

Yay for me.

The stuffiness of her outfit—slacks and a flipping
blouse
—made her shift and fidget in the half light. She had drawn the line at hanging the A around her neck. It would be her silent act of defiance, and if it meant demerits, so much the better. Maybe she wouldn’t get in.

“So what do you think, Janis?”

She looked over to find Amy facing her again, sculpted eyebrows raised. To either side of Amy, the other heads of the hydra bore similar expectant expressions, Autumn with her fingers propping her sharp chin, Alicia blinking beneath the tips of her brunette bangs. But Janis could see through the artifice, especially that of Alicia, the supposed actress.

“What do I think about what?”

“About getting together this weekend,” Amy said. “The whole pledge class.”

“No thanks.” Janis took a sip of Capri Sun and pretended to become interested in the writing on the metallic pouch. The other pledges fell silent. Of course to them,
she
was the stuck-up bitch.

“Oh, are you busy this weekend?” Amy asked.

Janis was, actually. She had plans to practice up in The Grove again with Samantha.

“Not really.”

“Well, think about it.” Amy’s voice sounded a half octave higher than natural. “You still have my number, right?” She didn’t wait for Janis to answer before turning to the rest of the pledges and listing the places they might meet up. Naturally, the food court in the mall topped the list.

Janis pushed the last bite of sandwich into her mouth and scooted her chair out. She had fulfilled the requirement. She’d eaten with the other pledges. No one had said anything about sitting there the entire lunch period. Heads turned as she stooped for her books, and then she was stepping out into the light. But before the door could swing closed behind her, she heard Amy telling the others she would be right back.

Great.

Janis sped up, but Amy caught her near the auditorium.

“Hey,” Amy called, out of breath.

Janis swung around but didn’t speak. She began wadding up the paper bag that had held her lunch.

“Look…” Amy watched Janis’s hands. “I just… I was hoping we could put the past behind us. You know, start over.”

Janis shot the balled-up bag past Amy’s head into a metal trashcan.

Amy flinched then looked back at Janis. “Can’t you say something?”

“How about I write it down on a piece of paper and slip it into your locker when no one’s around?”

The space between Amy’s eyebrows wrinkled into a W.

“Oh, come off it,” Janis said. “I know it was you.”

“You know what was me?”

Janis turned to leave.

“All right, wait!” Amy hustled to catch her. “I was eleven years old. It was immature and… and mean.” Amy’s eyes glistened above cheeks still soft with baby fat. “I don’t know why I did it.”

Janis pointed her chin toward the door they had just come from. “I do. They were just sitting next to you.”

Amy lowered her eyes. “I’ve changed,” she said softly. “We all have.”

“Oh, really?” Janis tapped her foot. “On Monday, you and the A-hol—the other two look at me like I’m something you just stepped in. Then Friday rolls around, and suddenly it’s time we all kissed and made up? That could only mean that whatever
change
you’re talking about happened in a matter of four days.”

Amy didn’t say anything.

“Hmm… wonder what
that
could have been.” Janis made a point of staring straight at the red Greek letter against Amy’s chest.

“All right. You’re still angry. I get it.” She started to touch the A, then clasped her hands in front of her. “I deserve it.”

For the first time, Janis sensed her former friend didn’t like what she had done, not entirely. It was in her stance, the inflection of her voice. Amy began to walk away. And now something in her surrender—the totality of it—struck a chord in Janis. She opened her mouth, knowing she would probably regret it.

“I’m not going to say anything to Margaret,” Janis called. “If that’s what you’re worried about.”

The fact was, she’d never planned to say anything to Margaret. If Amy and the others got in, so what? It wasn’t her club. She wanted nothing to do with it, in fact. But at least with the information, Amy could stop making a pretense of being her friend again.

“All right?” Janis called when Amy didn’t answer.

Amy turned partway and nodded. And in that glimpse, Janis saw she was crying.

* * *

Scott threw his hand over his mouth and shrunk back. There was a quality of sour milk to the smell, of a cold metal railing that had been handled too much. But worse than the smell itself were the associations it dredged up in Scott’s mind.

Memories of torment, mostly.

He swallowed hard and stepped all the way into the cafeteria. The metal door slammed shut behind him. Scott faced a dingy industrial-blue room made cavernous by the absence of students. Fifty, maybe, walked and sat in a space designed to hold five hundred. A far cry from the crowded chaos of Creekside Middle. At a table off to his right, two students with rattails faced off in a game of pencil breaks, the splintering
thwack
s echoing the length of the cafeteria.

It didn’t take long for Scott to spot several pledges seated on the far side of the room, Gamma letters dangling over their steaming lunches. The faint clatter of trays called Scott’s attention to a doorway across from him. He fingered the string holding his Gamma letter (knotted in two places now, thanks to Wayne) and joined the short lunch line.

Just as he had last year, he selected his milk carton from a damp bin and his food from a despondent-looking tray lineup. He separated a dollar from the three his mother had left for him and handed it to the sallow grandmother at the register. As he pocketed the fifteen cents change, he realized that one advantage of eating in the cafeteria was that he would profit ten dollars at the end of each week. Money to buy cologne with, maybe… or take Janis out on a date.

He felt his cheeks flush as he turned with his tray.

He surveyed the large room. Now came the hard part, crossing the cafeteria and joining the other pledges. He hadn’t recognized any of them at the meeting and didn’t recognize any of them sitting there now. Scott took a circuitous route, hoping to arrive at the table’s far end unnoticed. When he went to straddle the empty chair, he nearly kicked the pledge to his right. His knee jarred the table instead, making him wince.
Smooth move, Ex-Lax.
He should have just set his tray down and then pulled the chair out, but that was how his lunches used to get dumped on his lap in middle school. Old instincts died hard.

He mumbled an apology that no one heard. They were all engrossed in a discussion. Scott pressed up his glasses (thin metal frames now, courtesy of the one-hour vision store in the mall) and craned his neck like a periscope.

“…and he made me drop right there and give him twenty!”

“That’s nothing,” said another pledge. “I had to run two laps around the practice field and got crud all over my shoes.
And
I was late for first period.”

“Next thing you know, they’ll order us to kneel while they use our ties as toilet paper.”

That got some laughter, and Scott was glad to see that the disgruntled joker was short and pudgy with an Ovaltine-colored bowl cut, not of the same physical stock as the officers he’d observed at Friday’s meeting.

There was hope for him yet.

“What about you, Stretch?” Ovaltine asked. “What’ve they made you do?”

It took Scott a moment to realize the boy was addressing him. The rest of the pledges turned. His ears prickling savagely, Scott lowered his eyes and retracted his neck like a tortoise.

“Oh, um…” The truth was, he hadn’t been made to do anything. Not yet, anyway. “Push-ups.”

The others grunted and nodded, all except for the tall pledge who sat across from Scott and ate quietly. He seemed to be the only one without sweat stains in the armpits of his dress shirt. A minor miracle. And then Scott recognized him. It was the same guy he’d collided with on the first day of school. The pledge set his fork and butter knife down and, smiling, held his palms out.

The table grew quiet.

“All right, guys,” he said once he’d finished chewing. “Like it or not, this is going to be our life for the next thirteen weeks. We can either sit here grumbling over who has it the worst, or we can say, ‘You’re not going to make me fold. You’re not going to break my resolve.’ Because that’s exactly what this is—a test of our resolve, our character. But more, it’s a test of us as a pledging class.”

The solidity of his words struck Scott first, then the words themselves. Why couldn’t he talk like that? Scott watched the speaker’s intent blue eyes, his easy smile, the way his fraternal gestures included the entire table. And even though he wasn’t much bigger than the others around him, the Gamma letter around his neck seemed much smaller, somehow, like it was no burden to him at all.

“I say we make a pact right here. A pact that we’re going to complete our pledge term—the thirteen of us.” He bent toward his backpack and reappeared with a sheet of college-ruled paper. He took a couple of minutes to write something across the top, then slid the paper and pen over to Scott. It read:

The Pact—Gamma Pledge Class ’84

I hereby promise to do everything required of me as a pledging brother. I understand that failure to do so will result in letting down not only myself but also my fellow brothers with whom I am pledging. If I am ever on the verge of giving up, I promise to first seek out a fellow pledging brother for counsel and support. And if I see a fellow pledging brother in crisis, I promise to do everything in my power to help him.