Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(14)
He looks over his shoulder twice when crossing the lot, in part to make sure the Jeep hasn’t rolled away or lost a tire or burst into flames, but his gaze is full of longing too as he considers climbing behind the wheel, revving the engine, driving over the mountains, then south along the coast without glancing a single time into the rearview.
Two thousand students and he knows not a single one. He brings his fingers to the bridge of his nose and pinches. Ever since he moved here he has had a vague headachy pain behind his eyes. His mother blames it on tension and altitude. He blames his bed. His mother bought it from a neighbor, a woman whose son had a job and a fiancée in Portland, so she was changing his bedroom into the guest room and upgrading from the twin to a queen-size. Every time Patrick rolls into bed, he finds it unsettling, with the impression of someone else still in the mattress, a dent where another body had been, just one more reminder that this place is not his own.
He doesn’t mind the landscape. The deep-rutted glaciers glowing from the Cascades. The thickly forested foothills with their hiking trails and bear-grass meadows and white-water rivers. And then, to the east, the sprawl of the sage flats interrupted by the occasional striped canyon, the bulge of a cinder cone. Hanging above all of this a sky, that high-altitude sky, as glassy and blue as the stripe inside a marble.
But his mother is a stranger and his bed reminds him of a coffin and he wakes up in the night to pee and crashes into the wall or the bookcase because the room isn’t his own. Twelve months, he thinks to himself, pushing through the glass-doored entrance, shouldering through the crowds of students. Twelve months and his father will be home, which means he will be home, and it will be as though he never climbed aboard Flight 373.
The morning passes in a blur. He forgets his locker combo. He tries to navigate the many crowded hallways and won’t ask for directions and ends up slipping late into each of his classes and facing the students’ hooded eyes. Teachers wearing glasses and ill-fitting slacks lick their fingers when walking up and down the desk rows, laying down syllabi, reading aloud course expectations in voices that seem already half-stunned with boredom.
He has a difficult time paying attention. He feels hopped-up, jittery. He can’t seem to get enough oxygen. The lights are too bright. The chairs are too cold and rigid. He chews a hole in his cheek and drinks his blood. The clock clicks its way toward noon, and its sound reminds him of a detonator.
He remembers, in grade school, the Magic Eye books that were so popular at the time. You would stare at a patterned page until your eyes went out of focus—and then an image would rise from the page and startle you. He remembers one page in particular, a page carrying the shape of the moon—and out of its cratered grayness rose a skull. He had slammed shut the book and for some time avoided looking at the moon too closely, always closing his blinds at night for fear that it would roll past his window and grin down on him.
In this manner his day progresses, the ordinary sharpening into the dangerous. A slammed locker is a bomb. A snapped pencil is a broken bone. A girl with her hair dyed black and her face powdered white is a corpse.
He jerks his head, hearing his name muttered everywhere, but never directly to him. “Patrick,” they say under their breath. “Patrick.” At the drinking fountain, after a splash of water, he turns to find a girl with long bangs staring at him through her hair. When he says, “What?” she half gasps, half giggles, before jogging away.
He wonders if he is hearing things, imagining things, or if anyone actually recognizes him. He hopes they don’t. His photograph, he knows, was splashed across newspapers, magazines, television reports, including the Oregonian and the Old Mountain Tribune. “Miracle Boy,” they called him. But a month has passed. And he has always thought of himself as rather nondescript—brown hair, medium height, ropily muscled, ball cap pulled low, his only distinguishing feature the red birthmark shaped like a half-moon next to his right eye.
But their eyes are on him—he is certain of it now—every face in the hallway turning to regard him, every teacher lingering on his name at roll, blinking hard when he raises his hand. He tries to shrug off the attention. Most of these students, after all, have taken classes, played sports together since they were in grade school. People notice the new guy. That’s all he is to them: the new guy. They’re sizing him up, trying to figure out who he is, where he’ll fit.
But a group of skinheads—he thinks that’s what they are, their eyes hard and their hair razored down to a bristling shadow—has him worried. He has spotted a dozen of them. Or maybe the same three or five people keep wandering past him, staring. They wear white shirts tucked into khakis, combat boots. He spots on the backs of their hands a tattoo he can’t quite make sense of, some symbol that looks like a bullet.
But that isn’t who knocks his hat off in the hallway. A hand cuffs the back of his head and he watches his hat flip forward, the brim of it clattering to the tile, spinning to a rest. Slowly Patrick blows out a sigh and turns around.
“Hey there, Miracle Boy.” He wears cowboy boots and tight jeans with a rodeo buckle shining from the belt. He’s big, nearly a head taller than Patrick, squarely built and jowly like a bulldog. “We haven’t met.”
Patrick shrugs off his backpack and it thuds to the floor next to his hat.
“All day long, I’m hearing about you. People talking about Miracle Boy this, Miracle Boy that.” He smiles without humor. “You’re famous. I never met anybody who’s famous before. You going to sign me an autograph?”