Could I run at the acoustics man, shove him out of the way, then shoot the clock from the top of the key?
A guy in a suit as metal-looking as the hair of Boystar’s dad came out of the door of the boys’ locker-room. “Our star the Boystar!” the guy said to Boystar, adjusting his belt.
“I’m not happy about this, Chaz. I’m not happy about this at all,” said Boystar. “I’m really fucking unhappy.”
The guy in the glitzy suit—Chaz—put his arm around Boystar’s shoulder and whispered something in his ear.
Boystar said, “You’re a real sweetheart, too, Chaz Black, but that’s got nothing to do with anything. Emotionalize is about being sexy.”
Explosive as I was getting, I probably could move the acoustics man and hit the clock. Or I could even just race across the gym and hit the clock running—my chemicals were making me simple; my aim would be true—but I would get seen, caught.
Chaz said, “Sexy is as sexy does, my friend.”
Boystar’s dad clutched his own neck and looked at his feet.
As if he knew what I’d been considering, the acoustics man moved to the southeast corner of the gym. He struck a tuning fork and said, “Nice.”
It was too soon to get caught. Would it always be too soon? I didn’t think so, but I knew it was too soon right then. I turned my pennygun upside-down above my palm and shook it til the wingnut fell out.
Boystar’s mom touched the elbow of the acoustics man. “Is that a tuning fork you’re using?” she asked him.
“Sexy people aren’t diseased,” Boystar said. “And you said I’d get a blue faux-hawk and we’d shoot in LA and you’d CGI me doing fly aerial shit in halfpipes. You tricked me and it’s stupid and I’m thinking hard about hiring a lawyer.”
There was an X of masking-tape on the sideline where the shot-framer had stood. He was working his rectangle at halfcourt now.
Chaz was saying to Boystar, “No one tricked you, buddy. Circumstances have changed. And for the better, I might add. Frankly, we got lucky. This video’s gonna nice up your image and it ain’t gonna cost much.”
“I don’t care what it’s gonna cost. I’m gonna be rich. I’m gonna be so rich. The only reason I even agreed to sing with that retard was so Brodsky would let me go on tour. Like that ever even mattered. Tch. If he had any faith in me,” said Boystar, pointing at his father, “he’d know how big I’m gonna be, and he’d just withdraw me from this shithole and hire a tutor. Now the whole world’s gonna see me chumming some Jerry’s kid? Emotionalize is not about dances with retards, Chaz. It’s about being sexy.”
I pulled pennies from my pocket.
Chaz said, “Listen. You treat this Mookus with affection—smile at him, put your arm around his shoulders, make wowie-zowie kindsa faces if he breaks out the fancy footwork like they do in that sensitivity-training video we watched together—and all this advance negbuzz we’re getting about Emotionalize being too explicit for the tween set is gonna disappear forever. Churchmoms around the world are gonna be humming ‘Infantalize Me’ over the pot-roast like it was the Cats! soundtrack or something. And ‘The Way You Mmm’? Forget about it. Platinum.”
“I’m a star,” Boystar said. “I’m a star and I’m sexy and retards do not move units.”
I dropped a penny in the balloon and I aimed.
“I want to get a punky haircut and dress like a skateboarder. I want—”
I shot him in the knee and he dropped to all fours, yelling, “Help me! Something happened! Help me!”
“Stand up and stop acting like an idiot,” his mother said.
“Something happened!” Boystar wailed.
“Get off the filthy floor,” said Boystar’s dad. “You are ruining your slacks.”
“My slacks?!” yelled Boystar. “I’ll ruin my slacks?! How about this, Dad? Emancifuckingpation! I want emancipation! I’m gonna fucking sue you for emancifuckingpation! You can fuck these fucking slacks in the face with a big fucking stupid fucking… cock! For all I care. But I’m gonna be rich, and you won’t get my money! You won’t get fucking shit! Ruin your fucking slacks! How do you like that, you fucking fucker stupid ass?”
I didn’t get to hear what his father’s response was. I’d been heading west slowly since the first “emancipation,” doing the walk of the oblivious innocent, and after “fucker stupid ass” I was too far away.
I cradled a ball of gooze in the curl of my tongue and rang the Cage doorbell. As soon as Botha came to the gate, I fake-sneezed the ball into the middle of my hall-pass, and tried to hand it over.
“Kape it,” Botha said.
Coming through the door, I slapped the pass on the wall over the lightswitch and it stuck.
I heard Vincie whisper, “I told you he was alive,” and I revolved to wave at Eliyahu, who blushed.
“Gurion. Yo!” Mark Dingle said.
“Yo, Gurion,” said Dingle’s friend, Salvador Curtis, who was sitting at the carrel to Dingle’s right.
“Quoydanawnsinz!” snapped Botha. “Face ford!”
Both Dingle and Salvador showed me a power-fist.
Dingle’d been in the Cage since the very beginning, and we rode the same bus but didn’t speak. He was one of those guys who was always reading Fight Club. I’d never heard of him fighting anyone, though. He’d probably never had to. He was the scariest-looking kid at Aptakisic. He might have been the scariest-looking kid in America. It’s true he was taller than most other eighth-graders, and nearly as wide and muscley as the Flunky, but his height and build weren’t what made him scariest. His homemade tattoos—lopsided black aces on three of his knuckles and a stick-figure hangman on the light side of his forearm—weren’t it either. In the fang-shaped shadow of his super-lubed pompadour, behind his masking-taped, shop-teacher glasses, Dingle’s face—every centimeter of it that wasn’t teeth or eyeballs—was gruesomely deformed. The first and only time I’d gazed directly at the face, I bit my cheeks raw and gave away my lunch. You’d guess Dingle’s leprosy’d contracted the mange before infecting him through lesions in his acne vulgaris, but according to Vincie no disease was the cause. All those swollen cross-hatches and discolored volcano-shapes, every gouge and slash and shiny pouch: they’d all been self-inflicted with razor-blades and cigarettes, pushpins and paperclips, at least twice a pencil-lead dipped in hydrochloric. Each of his scars had won a small-stakes bet for him. “If you don’t believe me,” Vincie’d said, “go up to him at lunchtime and tell him you got three dollars says he won’t rip a new hole in its bottom part’s ass-thing.” That’s a chin-cleft, I’d said. “Whatever keeps your nightmares at bay, young man.”
The other guy who’d yo’d and powerfisted at me, Salvador Curtis, was the only kid who ever talked to Dingle, and he was known in the Cage for his uncommon talent: he could suck whole limes with no facial puckering. Every day he brought a baggieful to school. Once, on a bet, inspired by Dingle, he squeezed a lime dry on a freshly bleeding knee-wound he’d gotten at recess and didn’t wince once. Three guys paid him a dollar apiece. The next morning, on the bus, he squeezed limes in Dingle’s eyes. That time it was Dingle who paid him a dollar.
I chinned air at both of them.
Benji said, “Tch.”
The Cage, that day, was at full capacity, a beautiful thing; I’d have kids on both sides of me. The carrel that was open was between Scott Mookus and a sixth-grade guy called Chunkstyle Heany, who was regular-sized but smelled of canned tuna. Chunkstyle’s real first name was Remus. He got sent to the Cage after the third time he gently cupped the cheeks of his Social Studies teacher, Mrs. Mingle.
Cheek-cupping a teacher—especially with gentleness—is surely pervy, but Remus Heany hadn’t meant it that way. Third period on Mondays and alternate Thursdays, Mrs. Mingle was assigned to the Cage, and every single Monday and every other Thursday, at some point near the end of third period, Chunkstyle would push his glasses up his nosebridge and stand to recite a lengthy apology that Anna Boshka—who was put in the Cag
e because she’d only address her teachers in Russian—helped him write in the perfect, formal English of an eager new immigrant. The apology always began the same: “Barbara Mingle, my love for you is a powerful thing that drove me to behave in a manner I do not quite understand and so cannot honestly account for. However—” We never got to hear the rest of it, though. Botha’d always shut him down before he could finish.
I barely knew Remus, but I assumed he was a good person because he never made fun of My Main Man Scott Mookus. Plus, the t-shirts and folders of Anna Boshka all had dolphins on them, and if she loved dolphins even half as much as it seemed, she had to have been very impressed with Remus’s kindness to befriend him despite all the Starkist he ate.
He pitched a note over the wall we shared. It said:
We the undersigned want to join the Side of Damage.
Tell us how. We will do anything. We are:
1. Ben-Wa Wolf 2) Mark Dingle 3. Chris Perrot 4. Cody von Braker 5. Stevie Loop 6) Exar Tea 7. Flunky Bregman 8 Casey Sabado 9. Jackie Friday 10 Summer Weekint And) Winthrop! 12. Miles Minton 13. Clive Spearmint 14 Renee Feldbons (15) Paulina Mulvina 16; Jerry Throop 17: Fulton Market 18 Casper Lunt 19 Ansul Entsry 20. Janie Glencoe 21, Forrest Kennilworth 22. Derrick Winnetka 23) Rick Deerfield 24! Jesse Ritter 25: Glen Murphy 26) Aarron Worley 27) Anna Boshka 28. Christian Yagoda 29 Salvador Curtis 30. Remus Heany
I thought: Me + Benji + Mookus + the Janitor + Ronrico + Vincie + Mangey + Jelly + Leevon + Eliyahu = 10.
And: 10 + 30 = 40.
Vincie’d been right. Every student in the Cage—we were all on the Side of Damage. And that wasn’t the only thing Vincie’d been right about: on the desk of my carrel, near the Remus-side wall, someone had planted a WE DAMAGE WE. It was thin-lined enough that I’d missed it at first. It was bombed with a ballpoint in the hand of a girl, the hand of a Cage girl who must not have had a Darker, a girl who was neither Jelly nor Mangey. I looked around the carrel, found another on the facing wall, and another one yet right under my elbow. Same ink, same size, same feminine hand. I’d forgotten to check the other carrels when I’d entered, but if a girl who didn’t even have a Darker was willing to bomb, then the rest of the kids…
The chair of Scott Mookus groaned the floor.
“Gurion,” he whispered. He was leaning into my carrel and no one was stopping him, so after a two-count, I broke the face-forward rule. The teachers at the cluster were working with students. Botha shuffled papers at the monitor’s desk.
I leaned toward Mookus = Go.
“Plans to lay well-laid plans are best laid to rest,” he whispered, “for their very scripting would tire the fingers that need grip steady so many disguised bodkins we shall launch into the thrumming parts of tomorrow’s bancing, fleshy targets. Lord, get we simple enough to be earnest, and stealth enough to be harrowing in our damage-making. Let our laces outlast the soles of our Chucks and Sambas. We would never order hamburger buns without something between them. It’s not nutritious and it might feel like slavery. We want to find props on our feet that help us pretend to be superheros but we can’t have new kicks til we need them. We can’t just put some butter on salt-crackers and call that dinner, either. We can’t stuff up on bread, skip the meat, and expect dessert. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat? We’re not gonna take it. The words of the prophet were written on the studious crowd noise. All the world’s indeed a page and we must loudly tear it. May our disarrangement be a joyous and brutal project. May The End come once and pretty, Gurion, and once and for all. Your sons’ mother’s love shines blinding off your skin like the light of God off Adam’s at Creation’s apex, and I pray you do not lock us up but give us tomorrow our daily guns, and today bind us safe inside your danger. Never forget to protect me.”
I squeezed his shoulder.
“I believe you,” he said, and ducked back into his carrel.
It felt good and strong having people on both sides of me. It had been over two months.
I turned over the petition and wrote:
Remus,
To be on the Side of Damage is to be a defiance. So be a defiance. Spread the word by mouth during the passing-period. Return this note to me for safekeeping as soon as you’re done reading it—we are stealth here.
—Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee
I tossed it over the wall and then broke the face-forward rule again.
On the side of the Cage perpendicular to mine, Ronrico tossed a note to Eliyahu who passed it on to Vincie while Jelly tossed a second note to Mangey, who got it to Nakamook. Botha was still shuffling papers, but the teachers at the cluster—Mr. Powell and Ms. O’Connor—weren’t occupied, and Mr. Powell was looking right at my friends, and Ms. O’Connor was looking right at me, and neither of them were doing anything about the rules that were getting broken. Peculiar, I thought.
But then I thought: Is it?
I tried to remember the last time someone in the Cage got a step from one of the teachers at the cluster. Mine always came from Botha.
The note came back to me:
You can call me Chunkstyle if you want, Gurion. I mean it. It is good to have a nickname when your parents named you Remus. Before the Cage, I was Rabbit because of Uncle Remus, but that was always too obvious and I hadn’t discovered tuna yet. I hear you are in love with Eliza June Watermark. I know how it feels because it’s the same with me and Barbara Mingle, only she won’t even talk to me because I didn’t act like a gentleman. I don’t know what to do.
I wrote:
Your love for Barbara Mingle is only a smellyweak version. Anna Boshka is where it’s at. Open your eyes. She’s ten times prettier than Mingle and already fluent in two languages, plus not married. If you fall in love with her, she’ll let you cup her cheeks, I bet, and probably she’ll cup yours, too, if you want that. Find a ceramic dolphin that opens up to reveal another ceramic dolphin which opens up to reveal a third that contains a fourth and so on. Then buy the dolphin, give it to Boshka, and tell her you’ll quit eating tuna before she has to ask you, and make sure you do it before you kiss her. And get this note back to me.
I tossed it over the wall. I tried again to remember a time when a teacher at the cluster had handed out a step, and I couldn’t. Even if there was such a time, though—even if there were two or three or even ten such times—they were obviously exceptions; if they weren’t exceptions, I’d have had a much easier time remembering them.
But so why didn’t the teachers ever—or hardly ever—give us steps, then? According to the Cage Handbook, they were allowed to.
I got half a rush, thinking the teachers were on the Side of Damage, too, and they just didn’t know it.
But then I saw it couldn’t be true.
To be on the Side of Damage meant nothing if not to be against the Arrangement. You could not be against the Arrangement without being against the STEP System, and in classrooms outside of the Cage, where the teachers at the cluster spent most of their time, they all handed out steps left and right. I’d never been in a normal classroom at Aptakisic, but everyone else in the Cage had been, and for the most part it was the teachers at the cluster who’d sent them here.
But then why would the teachers act different inside the Cage?
I thought of a few possible reasons. It could have been they were scared of us—that they knew we were more dangerous than the students in their regular classrooms, and so thought it was too risky to make us angry; that maybe the reason they got so many of us sent to the Cage in the first place was so they wouldn’t have to be scared of us in their regular classrooms.
It could have been they thought we were hopeless—that even though they were pro–STEP System, they didn’t think Cage kids were good enough to benefit from the STEP System, and so we weren’t worth the time it would take to discipline us and fill out the paperwork.
Or maybe the paperwork part was right, but it had nothing to do with hopelessness; maybe they were just lazy and uncaring and knew that Botha would
do their dirty work.
A benefit-of-the-doubt way to think of them was that they didn’t like the STEP System at all, that they only gave steps when in their classrooms because the Arrangement demanded that they do so, while inside the Cage the Arrangement allowed them to give steps but didn’t demand that they give steps and so they didn’t give steps. Maybe in their hearts, they were on our side. Maybe they weren’t so much fingers and robots of the Arrangement; maybe they were the Arrangement’s fiefs and draftees.
But then maybe they had nothing in their hearts. Or maybe their hearts were confused. I couldn’t see into their hearts with any more clarity than I could Slokum’s face.
Chunkstyle sent the note back over the wall.
Anna Boshka is ten times prettier, maybe even twelve times prettier, and I will try to fall in love with her eventually, but before I can move on I need Barbara Mingle to forgive me for my uncomely and inexplicable behavior that was untoward at her. I can’t wait to tell everyone to be a defiance. Thank you for the privilege. Down with the Arrangement!
I decided it didn’t matter what was in the teachers’ hearts. At least not yet. Whatever was in their hearts, they never once protected us from Botha. And they could have. Or at least they could have tried to. Even if they were fiefs and draftees, their toil and their soldiering was good for the Arrangement. That was what mattered.
Soon the end-of-class tone complained and Miss Pinge’s voice came through the speaker to introduce the announcement-maker. To be an announcement-maker, you had to have stayed below step 4 and gotten nothing lower than a C for the entire quarter prior to the one during which you’d do the announcement. Also, you had to write your own introduction.