I put my hand on hers, covering part of a Stonehenge monolith. “You’re right, Mom.” McMurphy—the worst McMurphy—would be a part of me forever. But at a certain point, that had to be my problem. Mom’s penance was over. She had done her time.
There was no way I would ever tell her that the watershed trauma in her life had not been King, but his sex-maniac cousin. The poor woman had spent nearly twenty years coming to terms with her brief liaison with a rock star. If she had to scale that back to a sleazy womanizing manager, I couldn’t predict how she’d take it.
Dad’s opinion: “I’m just happy I can walk in my own home without stepping on the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.” But his next comment, five minutes home from the airport, was the forty-thousand-dollar question. “So? Are we going to Harvard?”
“No.”
“He turned you down?”
“I didn’t ask. You were right. It was a lousy thing to do.”
He looked unhappy. “Your dorm assignment came in the mail. I hope it’s not too late to get our deposit back. We can put it in the account I’ve set up for next year.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I said, and meant it. But the truth was, next year may as well have been fifteen centuries in the future. The here and now looked like a hardware store job, weekend trips to see Melinda, and a whole lot of woulda, shoulda, coulda.
East Brickfield Township High School. A couple of months ago, I’d been a student here. Now the place was as alien and remote as a moonscape. Worse than that, because of the circumstances of my graduation, it felt hostile.
The walls began to close in on me as I approached the assistant principal’s office. This was enemy territory. In a campground outside Boston, I knew Melinda and Owen were sending me psychic energy. I wished I could have taken Owen out of that equation. He was a great guy, but he had an unpleasant knack for turning everything he touched into doo-doo. On the other hand, he couldn’t hurt me much now. How much lower can you go than rock bottom? Unless Borman had hired Detective Sergeant Ogrodnick to help at the meeting….
They were cutting the grass outside the office. So every few minutes we had to shut up and wait for a guy on a John Deere riding mower to roar past the picture window. It made an awkward conversation even more so.
“How was your summer, Leo?”
Looking at Borman, I realized that I didn’t want to beg; I wanted to hit him. It was McMurphy, I knew. But this time my hitchhiker wasn’t some stranger. I was McMurphy, and McMurphy was me.
“Not bad,” I replied. “I guess you’ve heard that I won’t be going to Harvard.”
To his credit, he didn’t grin. “I was sorry about that. Still, it was your decision.”
McMurphy wanted to say, No, it was your decision, you sick fascist. But that wasn’t exactly in keeping with the goals of this appointment. I had to suck it up and be polite.
“Mr. Borman, what I came to talk about is this: it’s too late for this year. But I need you to take that black mark off my record. I’m never going to get into a decent school if people think I’m a cheater. And you know I’m not.”
It would have been easy for him. All he would have had to say was okay.
He didn’t. “Part of being an educator, Leo, is to teach students that actions have consequences.”
“What actions?” I countered, my voice rising in volume as the mower approached again. “Refusing to help you crucify a kid because you don’t like his lifestyle? You know I didn’t cheat.”
He waited for the grass cutter to pass. At last, in a quiet, stubborn voice, he said, “You broke the rules.”
“I did. I talked during a test. Isn’t this kind of a steep price to pay for that?”
I looked longingly outside at blue sky and scudding white clouds. It was a beautiful day. What was I doing in here, beating my head against a stone wall, looking for mercy from someone who had none to give? “This has nothing to do with consequences,” I went on resentfully. “You won’t clear my record because that would be admitting you were in the wrong from the start. To you, this is all about saving face.”
He was angry now. “Exactly who do you think you’re talking to—?”
The engine noise swelled again, drowning him out. He stood up to wave the grass cutter away to another part of the lawn, and then cried out in shock. His leap across the office would have won an Olympic medal in several different categories.
All at once, I saw what he saw. For a nanosecond, a dark shadow eclipsed the light from outside. The next thing I knew, the window exploded, and a half-ton of screaming metal machinery was hurtling into Borman’s office in a blizzard of broken glass.
The gleaming Harley-Davidson hit the office floor, skidded in a half-circle, and stalled out. So help me, I thought the rider was dead. But he rose from the wreckage and shook himself like a wet dog, spraying glass everywhere.
The one and only Marion X. McMurphy.
King Maggot turned punk rock’s most storied rage on the assistant principal of East Brickfield Township High.
“You call yourself a teacher! Is it a teacher’s job to keep great kids out of Ivy League schools? I’d puke on you, but that would be a waste of good puke!”
Borman recovered enough to rasp, “You’re in big trouble, mister!”
King seemed impatient. “Just remember that if it happens to me, it goes on page one—right beside the story of the piece-of-crap principal who tried to ruin a student’s life!”
“You’re insane!” Borman hissed.
“Damn right,” King agreed. He took a single threatening step toward the assistant principal.
Borman scrambled to his feet and out the door. We could hear his running footsteps tearing down the hall. I have to say that almost made the whole thing worth it—the sight of my archenemy hightailing it out of his own office in fear for his life.
But there were more urgent issues at hand.
“King, what are you doing here? How did you find me? How did you know I’d be meeting Borman right now?”
“Your friend Owen told me.”
“Owen is in Boston with Concussed!” I persisted. “How could he find you in California?”
“Cam knows my number. He signed on with Pete and the Stem Cells after we dropped off the tour.”
“Cam?” Was I missing something here? What did my ex-roommate and tormentor have to do with Owen Stevenson?
“Didn’t you know? Owen and Cam are together now.”
“Together?” When Owen told us he’d met someone, he was talking about Cam?
I was floored. I thought back to the heaps of abuse Cam had laid on me for holding him back from picking up girls. To hear him talk, you’d have thought he was Bernie in training. And all this time he was gay?
It was crazy—yet the more I thought about it, the more it made perfect sense.
How pleasant could it have been for Cam to hide his true identity in the sexually charged macho world of rock and roll? No wonder the guy was in a bad mood all the time. I should have suspected something when Owen came up with a backstage pass in Cleveland, and it hadn’t come from me.
Owen and Cam together? Good for them!
King glared at me. “Where do you get off not telling me you lost your scholarship because of this jerk?”
“It wasn’t your problem.”
“Don’t you get it?” he snapped at me. “Your problem is my problem. Why do you think I flew three thousand miles to crash this meeting? My samurai sword got confiscated by airport security. And you think you can rent a Harley just anywhere? I was all over Connecticut looking for this thing—which I’ll have to pay to fix!” He flipped up his shades and skewered me with those piercing eyes. “That’s a stiff tab when you add in tuition for Harvard.”
I stared at him—this rock star standing in the wreckage of Borman’s office, glittering with glass splinters, bleeding from a thousand tiny cuts. I realized that my first impression of him had been one-hundred-percent correct. He was a maniac. And yet he had just offered to do t
he finest thing anyone had ever done for me.
“King—I can’t let you pay for me. The truth is, you’re not my father. Bernie is.”
It was painfully hard to say, but once it was out, I knew it was right.
I thought he’d be shocked, but he shrugged it off with an impatient gesture. “Oh, I figured that.”
I gawked at him.
“Listen, Leo, I was no saint during the eighties, but I remember me, and I remember Bernie. I always knew there was a chance it might be him you were looking for.”
“I wish it wasn’t true,” I said fervently.
“It’s a technicality,” he insisted. “We’re still family. I knew the night we kidnapped the wrong mutt that I didn’t give a damn if the DNA test didn’t go our way. I want to be a part of your life.”
“King—” I stumbled forward to embrace him, but he warded me off with a stiff-arm.
“No offense, Leo, but I’m in a lot of pain right now.”
I was worried. “I’ll take you to the hospital.”
“The cops’ll be here soon,” he commented blithely. “They’ll look after me.”
As if on cue, we heard sirens approaching.
He was three thousand miles from home, battered and bleeding, about to be arrested. Yet I’d never seen him so serene. I recalled a comment he’d made about the first Harley incident: If something came along that was really worth caring about, I could get just as worked up as I used to in the eighties.
King Maggot cared that much about me.
I turned to him. “What can I do for you? How can I help?”
“You can get out of here,” he replied. “Go home and start packing. Freshman orientation starts in a week.”
We could see the cops now through what was left of the window—two squad cars turning up the drive.
“But I want to help you!”
“Okay,” he agreed. “You know the drill. Call Bernie—he’s still my personal manager. He’ll get the lawyers, set up bail—the usual. Now, scram!”
And I did, sprinting through the school and exiting via the fire doors in the gym. Leo Caraway, former Young Republican, soon of Harvard, escaping in full flight, just a few steps ahead of the police. I should have been beside myself, terrified, close to hysterics. Instead, I was strangely calm as I scrambled into my mother’s car and gunned the engine.
We McMurphys know how to act in a crisis.
Gordon Korman is the author of more than seventy popular young adult and middle grade novels, including The Juvie Three; Schooled; Born to Rock; Son of the Mob; Son of the Mob: Hollywood Hustle; Jake, Reinvented; No More Dead Dogs; and The 6th Grade Nickname Game.
Gordon lives with his family on Long Island, New York. Visit his Web site at www.gordonkorman.com.
Gordon Korman, Born to Rock
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