December Park(135)

“Hey,” Sallis squawked at Keener. It seemed like he couldn’t make up his mind whether to help his friend or take off running through the underpass. “Nate, you okay?”

Keener held out one hand in Sallis’s direction. He didn’t lift his head to look at him.

My attention returned to Falconette. When he caught my stare, he manufactured an overlarge and humorless smile. He possessed the blank and soulless eyes of a department store mannequin.

Keener spat on the ground—a globule of reddish mucus—then climbed unsteadily to his feet.

“Nate?” Sallis queried again.

Keener faced me. A bright red banner of blood had spilled from his nose and was smeared across one half of his face. When he winced, I saw blood on his teeth. “Okay.” The word sputtered out in a shaky exhalation. It was barely a whisper. “Okay.” And he nodded at me. “Okay.”

When I opened my mouth and tried to speak, all that came out was a thin whistling sound.

Keener stumbled toward the mouth of the underpass. Sallis, whose eyes were as large as flashbulbs, followed him.

Falconette remained leaning against the tunnel, hands in his pockets. The cut on his left cheek was leaking toward his chin now. After a moment, he slid one hand from his pocket—very slowly—and pointed at me. He jerked his finger like he was pulling the trigger of a gun and said, “Ka-pow.” Then he faded into the darkness of the underpass, whistling.

As all the adrenaline was pumped from my bloodstream, pain began to blossom across my face and body. I patted my tenderized face and discovered that much of the blood on my hands and shirt had come from my own nose and mouth. “I think I’m gonna pass out,” I muttered, slowly lowering myself to the ground.

I looked up and tried to focus on the Park Closes at Dusk sign to anchor myself, but it pixelated and scattered as a sickening numbness enveloped me. I closed my eyes and felt the earth tilt to one side. An instant later, I was overcome by the very real sensation that the world had opened up beneath me and I was falling, falling, falling, just as my friends and I had done in my nightmares, right down into narrow little holes in the earth . . .

Then, little by little, I felt the warm night air against my face, the trickles of sweat and blood across my skin, the numbing throb in my right hand. The world came back to me in fragments.

Scott’s face appeared in front of me. “You okay?”

I couldn’t speak. My throat was so dry I could have lit a match by striking it across my teeth.

“That really just happened,” Peter said on a gust of pent-up breath and collapsed on the ground beside me.

Michael dropped down on the other side of me and slung an arm around my shoulders. “Your face looks like hamburger meat. It’s a surprising improvement, to be honest.”

“Don’t make me laugh,” I croaked. “Hurts.”

“Should you go to a doctor?” Adrian said.

“I’m okay,” I said. “Just a little banged up.”

“I think you broke Keener’s nose,” said Scott.

“Good,” I said. “What happened to Falconette’s face?”

“Shit,” Michael said. “Scott cut him.”

“What?”

“Yeah,” Scott said, a bit out of breath. He looked around nervously as if fearful he would be overheard. “He tried to jump in on the fight so I . . . well . . .”

“He just lashed out and cut him,” Michael finished.

“Holy shit,” I said.

Scott turned his palms up and stared at his hands. They shook.

The sky growled. Either a dump truck was bounding down the road or a storm was fast approaching. Fat drops of water pattered on my head, and I turned my hot face up to them.





Adrian let me clean up at his house before I went home. Thankfully his mother had gone to bed early, so that was one less thing I had to contend with.

In the downstairs bathroom, I scrubbed the dried blood from my face and hands while Adrian disappeared upstairs to fetch me one of his shirts. My face was a little red, and there were some nicks on my cheeks and chin and a decent horizontal gash across my forehead. But considering Keener’s busted nose, I thought I had gotten off pretty easily. The worst was my right hand—it ached, and I found it next to impossible to make a proper fist.

Adrian appeared in the bathroom doorway with a Captain America T-shirt that looked about two sizes too small. “It’s a little big for me, so it might fit you pretty good.”

That was when I lost it. Tears sprung from my eyes, and I felt my legs threaten to collapse beneath me. My entire body burned. I sobbed—a pathetic foghorn sound.

In the mirror, Adrian’s blurry reflection watched me. “Does it hurt?”

I swiped at my eyes and turned the water on. After I washed my face again, I muttered, “No. I’m not hurt.”

“Then how come you’re crying?”

“I’m not,” I whined, feeling the anger and frustration and fear rise up in me all over again. “I’m n-n-not—”

Tears spilled down my face again. Ashamed, I hung my head and let them fall down the drain. I was thankful for the running water covering up my sobs. “Don’t tell the guys,” I managed, my breath hitching.

“Never,” Adrian said. Then he shut the door and left me to it.