Chapter 2

Sweat as bright as blood stood out on Rick’s upper lip. His arms flailed around Stacy’s head, trying to knock him back, but Stacy was too close and digging in further with each hit. One fist struck Stacy in the neck, the next glanced off his cheek, then fingers plunged into his hair, tugging his head back. A low growl escaped him as he gnashed his teeth at Rick’s arm, trying to get free—

Suddenly uncompromising hands hauled him up. He struggled against them, bucking as his arms were pinned behind his back. The coach had him, Stacy knew it because the old man was the only one who could hold him—anyone his own age he tore through easily enough. Still, he strained at the hands cuffing his, even when the coach yelled out, “Break it up, Evans.”

“He started it—” Stacy began.

The coach jerked his arms to silence him. “Major,” he hollered down at Rick, still lying on the floor, “get up, son. What the hell’s going on here?”

Stacy glared at his cap still crammed down on Rick’s head as his teammate stood and ran a shaky hand across his mouth. He frowned at the sweat glistening in his palm, as if annoyed he wasn’t bleeding. “Major?” the coach asked, his voice impossibly loud in Stacy’s ear. When he moved towards Rick, he pulled Stacy’s arms a little bit further up his back, and pain shot through his elbows where they bent. “Someone tell me what this is all about.”

Stacy tried again. “I said he started it—”

The coach gave another hard tug on his arms. “Let me be the judge of that,” he muttered, which meant he’d believe any line Rick fed him and Stacy would get suspended. Again.

* * * *

A week that time, right at exams. He spent long days in the detention room, a tiny cell tucked away down a forgotten corridor off the auditorium. The only students who came down that far were either troublemakers like Stacy himself or members of the drama club. Through the sky blue walls Stacy could hear the annoying plink plink plunkof the piano on stage as the club rehearsed an upcoming show. He stared at the walls as he leaned back in his chair and tapped his pencil on the desk in front of him. His Scantron answer sheet was unused, his exam paper unopened, as he listened to the piano. Every so often it’d stop, the notes faltering, as whoever sang screwed up the scene, but then the music would start again, from the beginning, the same tune all over.

This is what hell would be like, Stacy was quite sure—a nondescript room in the bowels of the earth surrounded by the mindless scritch of other students’ pencils, the faint turning of the teacher’s magazine page, and the eternal accompaniment of a distant song that never made it past the first verse. He wasn’t doing his exam, he decided. He was sick of playing this shit, he wanted out.

The Thursday coming up he turned sixteen, and for the life of him, he couldn’t imagine spending his birthday holed up in that hellish room. Before the final bell rang on Wednesday afternoon, he’d decided that he simply wouldn’t go to school the next day.

Cal Jones, Stacy’s step-dad, left for work in the morning at 6:30, a whole half hour before Stacy had to be at the bus stop. Cal was an ass and if he even suspected that Stacy might want to play hooky, he’d hang around the house just to make sure the bus picked him up. So on his birthday he kept in his room, out of sight, and waited until he heard the front door slam shut. Outside the car started, the engine revved, oily backfire belching into the early morn.

When the wheels spun over gravel, Stacy began to get dressed—by the time they squealed out of range, he was already creeping through the house, careful not to wake up his mom. She worked double shifts, retail all afternoon and waiting tables at night, and she was a light sleeper. Most days she heard him rummaging around in the kitchen for something to eat, no matter how quiet he tried to be, and she’d pad barefoot into the doorway, hair disheveled, eyes puffy with sleep. “Stace?” she’d murmur, rubbing at her face. “What time is it?”

“Go back to sleep, Momma,” he would say. He didn’t look at her at these times, when she looked too much like the young girl she must have been before he came along and not his mother at all. Instead he’d concentrate on making his lunch—a sandwich, some chips, a soda if there were any in the fridge—and sooner or later she’d leave him to find her way back to her room.