Crazy Dangerous

  I had to stop there. I was gasping for breath. I leaned forward, my hands on my knees, trying to recover. I turned my head and looked up the road. It was two narrow lanes of pavement winding through pine trees and out of sight. I turned and looked the other way. It was the same: two narrow lanes, pines on either side. Not a car to be seen. No one coming from either direction.

  I knew where I was. About three-quarters of a mile from the edge of town, maybe half a mile from where I’d left my bike. If I could jog it, I ought to be able to get home before dark.

  I took a look at my hand. The sight made my heart sink. My palm was red and swollen. There were black marks on it where the splinters from the railroad ties had buried themselves deep. Even worse, there were two or three big old chunks of wood in there, one end protruding out of the flesh, the other visible under the skin. I knew I ought to hurry and get out of there fast, but somehow I just couldn’t bring myself to leave those big splinters in there. I grabbed the end of one of them and drew it out, grunting with the pain. I grabbed hold of another, then another. Lines of blood began streaming down over my hand.

  By now I’d recovered my breath and was ready to start running again. But before I could, I heard an engine.

  There was no mistaking that sound, that aggressive unmuffled roar. That was Jeff’s red Camaro, coming after me.

  There was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. I couldn’t get back up that hill into the woods. So I just took off, away from the direction of the noise, toward town, toward home.

  I ran as fast as I could, but I was flagging now, really low on energy. The engine quickly got louder behind me. I glanced over my shoulder.

  Yeah, there it was. A flash of sunlight on its silver fender. Then another flash, and I saw the fire-engine red of its hood.

  I tried to put on some speed, but I was practically staggering now. What was the use anyway? Even at my fastest, I couldn’t outrun a car. Behind me, the red Camaro gave a guttural roar of acceleration. In another moment, the sound dropped to a guttural hum and the car was right beside me.

  I turned to it. Harry Mac’s face was grinning at me through the passenger window.

  In pure panic I tried to get away, to dash into the woods to escape. It was no good. I got about two steps up the dirt slope and fell—collapsed, really. I slid back down over the bed of fallen pine needles and dropped onto the road’s sandy shoulder. I knelt there, panting, exhausted.

  The Camaro stopped. The doors opened. Harry Mac and Ed P. got out. One of them grabbed me under one arm, the other grabbed me under the other. They hauled me over to the car. They hurled me into the backseat. They got in, one on either side of me. They shut the doors.

  Jeff was at the wheel. He hit the gas. The Camaro roared and took off again. Jeff gave the wheel a hard twist and the car pulled a great big Huey, turning full around. Then it headed back in the direction from which it had come—only with me inside now.

  If you have never been in the backseat of a Camaro, let me tell you: the legroom is nil, zero. I had to bend my legs so much, my knees were practically in my teeth. Also, there are only really two places to sit back there, one on the left and one on the right, and I was sitting in the middle. The lumbering Ed P. was pressed against one shoulder, and the enormous Harry Mac was pressed against the other. There was no room to move, so all I could do was sort of press my arms close to my sides and make myself small. Oh, and by the way? Ed P. and Harry Mac smelled like old socks.

  I was nervous. All right, I was scared. I didn’t know where we were going or what they would do to me once we got there. Whatever it was, I didn’t think it was going to be too good.

  I heard Jeff snicker. He looked up at me in the rearview mirror as he drove along the winding forest road. I could see his weaselly eyes reflected in the narrow strip of glass. “We got you now, don’t we?” he said slowly. “We do got you, sure enough.”

  “You got me, all right,” I said. “So what are you gonna do with me?”

  “Why do you ask?” said Jeff, and this time, all three of them snickered. “You’re not scared, are you?”

  “Oh no,” I said. “Why would I be scared of a nice bunch of guys like you?”

  I could tell by the reflection of Jeff’s eyes that he was smiling. “That’s funny,” he said. “You’re funny even now. I like that. You’re a tough little punk, aren’t you?”

  I shook my head. “Not very tough, no.”

  “Oh yeah, you are. You punch me in the face like that? With three of us standing there? You run across that bridge, right into that train like that? You’re a tough little punk, all right, no mistake.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’m a tough little punk.” I hate to admit it, but I actually felt a little proud that Jeff had said that.

  And he went on too. “Really,” he said—kind of earnestly, as if he were trying to convince me of this very important point. “Running into that train? I don’t think I ever saw anything like that before. That impressed me. It really impressed me.”

  I shrugged, trying to hide the fact that I appreciated the compliment. “I’m happy I could bring a little entertainment into your shabby life,” I told him as sarcastically as I could.

  At that, Jeff let out a real laugh, a big laugh. “See, that’s what I mean,” he said, talking to me through the rearview, glancing back and forth between the rearview and the windshield as he drove. “Saying stuff like that? When we’ve got you like we do? That’s tough. I like that. It impresses me.”

  I shrugged again. I wondered if Jeff being impressed meant he wasn’t going to kill me.

  I fell silent for a while and Jeff fell silent too. He drove the growling Camaro along the winding road until we reached a turnoff hidden in the trees. He turned there, and we started heading over broken gravel back up the hill, back to where we’d been before.

  I looked out the side window, past the hulking—not to mention smelly—shape of Ed P. Outside, I saw that we were in deserted territory again. Empty, rolling hills. A spreading dark oak tree with a flat, dark lake underneath it. The sky.

  Not much to see—and no way to escape. I looked away and tried to forget my fear by picking a few more splinters out of my bleeding hand.

  After a while Jeff started talking again. “I’m gonna tell you something,” he said. “Normally, if a guy does what you did, if a guy hits me like that, I gotta do something about it, I can’t just let something like that go unanswered. You see what I mean?”

  I sighed. “Yeah. I see what you mean.”

  “Normally? A guy does something like that to me, I gotta do something back to him, only a hundred times worse, enough times over to put him in the hospital. You can understand that, right?”

  I didn’t answer. I felt my stomach drop. Getting put in the hospital didn’t sound like a happy end to my day.

  “But I don’t know,” Jeff went on. “What you did. The way you were. The things you say. The way you ran right into that train . . .” He gave a kind of thoughtful sniff as he guided the car around another turn. Now we were bouncing and bounding over a dirt road, past trees, hills, more deserted territory. “I like you, Sam,” Jeff said then.

  I couldn’t keep the surprise off my face. Jeff was the kind of guy people feared. The kind of guy people treated politely. It was odd to have him tell me he liked me.

  “I’m serious,” he said. “You’re just the sort of guy I like to have around me. You’re the sort of guy I want on my team, if you see what I’m saying. Really, I can use a tough guy like you.”

  I didn’t know how to answer. No one had ever said they wanted me on their team in anything.

  The car came to a stop. I tried to look out past Jeff’s head, out through the windshield, but I couldn’t see much. Then the doors opened and everyone got out. Harry Mac grabbed me by the arm and dragged me out too.

  The Camaro was parked in a sandy spot, a sort of driveway. There was an old barn in front of us. Brown, unpainted, the clapboards rotten and splintering. Around us was
. . . well, nothing. A hilltop. Trees in the distance. No other building or person in sight. Not even a sheep.

  Jeff came around and stood in front of me. I looked up at him—up, because he was taller than me by about a head.

  His rat-like face broke into a grin. “I mean it,” he said. “I like you, Sam.”

  Then he punched me in the stomach—hard. Really hard. I gasped and lost my breath and bent over. Then I sank to my knees and gasped some more.

  “That was for hitting me,” Jeff said, standing over me. “I can’t just let that pass. You understand, right?”

  “Sure,” I managed to gasp after a second. “Sure, what’s not to understand?”

  Then Jeff reached down and grabbed me by the shirt collar. He hoisted me roughly to my feet. He slapped me twice in the face. It stung like fire and made me so angry I wanted to strangle him. But I managed to control myself because I didn’t want to die. Through tear-filled eyes I squinted at his blurred, grinning face.

  “Now that we got that out of the way,” Jeff said, “I think you and me are gonna be friends. What do you think about that? You want to be friends with me, Sam?”

  I gasped a few more times before I got my breath back. Then I thought about it. I thought: Well, why not? Friends with Jeff Winger. That could actually be kind of interesting.

  So after a second or two, I said, “Okay. Sure.”

  And that was the stupidest thing I ever did.

  4

  Preacher’s Kid

  Here’s what you have to understand: I’m a PK, a preacher’s kid. My dad, Matthew Hopkins, is the rector of East Valley Church, which is on Washington Street, which is in our town, which is Sawnee, which is a small place of about seven thousand people in upstate New York. And see, when you’re sixteen and your dad is a preacher—and you live in a small town so everybody knows who he is and who you are—there’s a lot of pressure on you. It’s not that anyone expects you to be perfect or anything. You don’t have to be brilliant. You don’t have to be an athlete. You don’t have to get great grades in school. All you have to do is—well, nothing. Or nothing wrong, that is. You can never, ever do anything wrong. Ever. Other kids can get into trouble, get sent to the principal’s office, get a little wild sometimes. But not you, not the PK. See, people like to gossip about the preacher. Since he’s always reminding them to be moral and good, they get kind of a thrill out of it when they find out his life isn’t perfect. And if you—the preacher’s kid—get in trouble, everyone will start whispering to one another: Did you hear about the preacher’s kid? Tsk, tsk, tsk, Reverend Matt’s boy has really gone off the rails . . . It makes your father look bad. It makes your mother upset and angry. And it makes you feel like the worst person on earth. Trust me on this.

  So, on the one hand, there’s all this pressure to be good. But then, on the other hand, you don’t want to be too good. You don’t want to be so good you can’t be . . . well, ordinary. One of the guys. You don’t want the other kids to feel like they have to fall silent whenever you walk by or stop telling the joke they were telling or say “Excuse me” to you after they curse or something as if you were their maiden aunt and had never heard a bad word before.

  It can be a problem. Like, with girls, for instance. I can’t help noticing that a lot of the girls in school are very polite to me. I mean, very polite. Extra polite. Too polite. Like I’m their best friend’s little sister or something. Like I’m their mother’s good china and they want to be careful not to break me. Now and then, for instance, I’ll be looking at a girl . . . Okay, specifically I’ll be looking at Zoe Miller. Because I have what is technically called “a major thing” for Zoe Miller. Because Zoe Miller happens to be insanely cute and nice. She’s got this short black hair and these big green eyes and this pug nose with freckles on it and this smile that makes you feel like she really means it. And the thing is, when she’s with most people, she’s really funny too. Not funny like a circus clown or anything, but just kind of good-natured and teasing and easygoing and comical. People are always laughing when she’s around. She’s fun to be with, that’s what I’m trying to say.

  So anyway, I’ll be looking at Zoe when she’s talking to—let’s say, for instance—Mark Sales. Mark Sales, the star runner on our track team. Mark Sales, who set a new school record in the 3,000-meter steeplechase of eleven minutes and five seconds. Mark Sales, who’s seventeen and nearly six feet tall and whose teeth practically flash and sparkle when he smiles, so that girls wait until he walks by and then clutch their books and look up to heaven with their mouths open as if some sort of miracle has occurred just because he said hello to them. And don’t get me wrong: Mark is a great guy, a really nice guy—but somehow that only makes the whole situation worse . . .

  So, as I was saying, I’ll be looking at Zoe when she’s talking to Mark Sales. And Zoe will be all relaxed and easygoing and joking around like she usually is. And Mark and his track-star pals, Nathan Deutsch and Justin Philips, will all be laughing around her with their sparkly teeth. It’ll just be cute Zoe and the Big Men on Campus standing around the school hallway having a blast. Right?

  Then I walk by.

  And I say, “Hey, guys.”

  And suddenly everyone stops laughing. Everyone kind of clears his or her throat and they all glance at one another. It’s as if I’d caught them doing something really embarrassing.

  And then Mark says, “Hey, Sam.” In this sort of formal way.

  And Nathan and Justin mutter, “Hey.” Because they’re not as good at pretending to be relaxed as Mark is.

  And then finally Zoe smiles at me, but it’s not her supergreat smile that she gives to everyone else. It’s this ever-so-polite smile. And she says, “Oh, hello, Sam. It’s nice to see you,” in such a polite, formal, inoffensive, and not-joking way that I really would prefer it if she just took out a gun and shot me dead on the spot.

  That’s what I’m talking about. Being a preacher’s kid. It can be a problem.

  So you might be wondering: What has this got to do with Jeff Winger? With me saying I would be friends with Jeff Winger?

  Well, okay, since you ask, here’s the answer: whatever else you could say about him, Jeff Winger was not a preacher’s kid. Jeff Winger didn’t have a father at all as far as anyone could tell, and he only lived with his mother when he could find her. As a result, Jeff didn’t have to worry about being a good guy all the time. Good guy? He was a full-blown juvenile delinquent! He had once been arrested for stealing a car. He had once been arrested for driving under the influence—under the influence of what, I’m not entirely sure, but it must’ve been pretty influential because he piled his cousin’s pickup fender-first into a lamppost. What else? Oh yeah, Jeff had been suspended from school twice or maybe three times for various reasons: fighting, smoking, carrying a weapon—a knife, I think it was. And one time he had shown up for first period with his face a mass of purple bruises—the rumor was he had taken part in a knock-down, drag-out brawl at the Shamrock, a nasty bar over in Ondaga, one town over.

  So that was Jeff Winger. And again, the big question: Why would I have any reason to want to be friends with a thug like that?

  Well, for one thing, I couldn’t help noticing that girls didn’t fall silent around Jeff. They didn’t treat Jeff like their best friend’s little sister. Not at all. Girls loved Jeff. Okay, not all girls. Not—just to be completely accurate—any of the girls I was particularly interested in knowing. But still, they were girls, which is no small thing, and they just loved him. No kidding.

  One day I remember I was sitting in algebra class. And unfortunately, at Sawnee High School, algebra is taught by Mr. Gray, who is every inch as exciting as his name suggests. You know the sound a lawn mower makes when someone’s cutting the grass about halfway down the block? Like: uuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhh? That’s how Mr. Gray talks.

  So anyway, Mr. Gray was droning on in that uuuuuu–hhhhh voice about how some imaginary guy named John Smith took a job and received a three percent r
aise in salary every four years—which, by the way, sounded like a pretty crummy job to me. And the numbers and letters Mr. Gray was scrawling on the whiteboard were beginning to blur in front of my eyes into a single hazy shadow. And after a while I sort of turned and glanced out the window, hoping there might be an alien invasion or nuclear war or something distracting out there to keep me awake. And instead, far across the track field, I saw Jeff out by the bleachers with Wendy Inge. And to put it bluntly, Wendy Inge was hanging from his lips like a cigarette.

  Now, again, let me emphasize: Wendy Inge is not a girl I really want to know very well. In fact, she’s not someone I even want to stand very close to. All I’m saying is: she was a girl and she wasn’t being superpolite or formal or saying, “Oh, hello, Jeff,” like he was her maiden aunt. Nobody ever mistook Jeff for anybody’s maiden aunt.

  So sometimes I couldn’t help thinking: Hey, if I could learn to be just a little more like Jeff, then maybe people wouldn’t expect me to be so nice all the time. Maybe people would feel more relaxed around me. Maybe they could clown around with me like they do with everyone else. Maybe Zoe would laugh with me the way she laughs with Mark Sales.

  And that’s why, when Jeff Winger asked me if I wanted to be one of his friends—that’s why I said, “Sure. Okay.” Because I was thinking: Hey, maybe this is my chance. Maybe this is exactly what I need in my life. Maybe I can learn something important from these guys.

  Like I said: stupid. Very.

  5

  A Couple of Cars

  Here is what happened when we went into the barn—me, I mean, and Jeff and Ed P. and Harry Mac.

  Jeff led the way. Ed P. and Harry Mac followed. For another minute or so, I couldn’t do much but stand there by the Camaro, gripping my stomach and trying not to throw up. I was in pretty bad shape at this point. My gut hurt from Jeff punching me, my face hurt from Jeff slapping me, my hand hurt from having splinters in it, my shoulder hurt from falling on it when Harry Mac tripped me, and my lungs ached from running so hard. Plus I had a whole bunch of other assorted cuts and bruises to show for my afternoon’s adventures.