Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(15)

In the crowd eddying past them, people are beginning to slow and stare and whisper. Something is about to happen, they know, and whatever happens, Patrick knows, might determine how he fits into this place. “Fuck yourself,” he says, his voice more like a shrug than a threat.

“That’s no way to treat a fan.” He mocks sadness, pooching out his lower lip. Then, in a flash, his body surges forward, his huge hand slapping the side of Patrick’s head, knocking him off-balance, mussing his hair. “Miracle Boy, I’m wanting to ask you a question.” He goes to slap Patrick again, this time with the opposite arm, but Patrick dances back from the swing and feels only the breeze it displaces. “Shouldn’t you be dead? Why didn’t you die along with everybody else?” His eyebrows rise into the shapes of crowbars. He circles Patrick and Patrick pivots to follow him. “Not a scratch on you, Miracle Boy. Hardly seems fair.”

His arm shoots out again, cuffs Patrick on the side of the head, an openhanded hammerblow that makes his ear momentarily deaf, so what the boy says sounds a long way off. “Does that make you lucky or a hero or a ghost?”

People gather around them like a lasso. Some of the faces are smiling. Patrick looks to them for help, and when it doesn’t come, they blur away. His mind hums like a wasp’s wings. He breathes in a gulping way, as if he is choking. He has thought endlessly about what he could have done on the plane, how he might have pulled off his belt and used it to strangle the lycan, ripped the fire extinguisher from the rear cabin and bashed in its skull. Now, with his body trembling all over, it’s as if all those thoughts finally find an outlet. He feels a darkness rising through him, drowning him, a wonderful, horrible feeling.

Patrick doesn’t aim. He doesn’t arrange his legs in a boxer’s stance. He simply whips his fist into the boy’s face and sends him reeling back, blood geysering from his nose and mouth. The pain catches up a moment later, a sharp volt that sizzles from his knuckles to his wrist. He shakes it off and then stares at his hand, the skin torn and raw, like a tool he doesn’t recognize.

The boy hunches over and twitches, an apron of blood running down his face and chest. He keeps touching his nose and seems baffled by the red smeared across the tips of his fingers. Somebody laughs, a haw-haw-haw that sounds a little like a crow’s cackle. At that the boy gathers himself upright and rushes Patrick with his arms out.

At the last moment Patrick leaps aside with his leg angled out to trip. He has never moved like this in his life. The boy falls heavily, his body impacting the tile with a thud, his face with a thwap. He rolls over, screaming a scream that is muffled by the hands he tents over his mouth. His eyes well with tears and stare up at Patrick with a furious sadness, like he can’t figure out how this has been done to him but he will find a way to rectify it.



Principal Wetmore has a stiff broom of a mustache. He wears a baggy tan suit and a Bugs Bunny tie. His office is eerily dark, lit only by a tall lamp with a heavy shade that tints the room mustard. His bald head flashes with the light and so do his squarish glasses when he leans forward and lays his elbows on his desk. “One day in and we’re already talking, huh?”

“Afraid so,” Patrick says. He opens and closes his right hand, the knuckles chewed up and throbbing with what feels like an electrical current.

The walls are busy with bookcases and diplomas and a family photo taken in a JCPenney studio where the principal smiles proudly over the shoulder of his permed wife and their twin boys. On his desk sits a half-eaten bowl of peanuts with a halo of salt around it. Next to it is a nameplate that reads THE BIG CHEESE in inlaid gold lettering. The door is closed. But windows surround them, one of them looking out into the hallway, the glass-paneled trophy case. Students drift past and goggle their eyes at Patrick. He tries to imagine he is looking through a portal at the bottom of the sea and the students are strange fish with needly teeth and translucent skin.

“He started it, right?” Wetmore says. “Seth?”

At first Patrick isn’t sure whether he is being sarcastic or not, so he doesn’t respond except with a searching look.

“Obviously he started it. And I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry that’s how you’ll remember your first day here.”

“Thanks.”

“To be honest, to be perfectly frank, I’m glad you did what you did. Don’t repeat that! But it’s better that you laid him out rather than the other way around. But that’s between you and me, mano a mano. You got me, amigo?”

Patrick nods and looks to the door, wishing himself on the other side of it.

“Now hopefully people will leave you alone. But I can’t have fighting!” He raises his finger in the air and wags it. “I just can’t.”

Patrick bounces his knee, chews at the dry skin of his lower lip.

“Next time, do me a favor? Walk away?”

Patrick glances out the window. Through the crowd of students milling by, he spots two of the skinheads. They lean against the trophy case, as still as the golden runners behind them, with their arms crossed and their eyes on him. He nods at them. They give him nothing in return.

“Patrick?”

“Yes, sir. I’ll try.”

“Look.” Wetmore steeples his hands. “You’ve been through a lot. Publicly. I thought about inviting you in here—did you know that? were your ears warm?—I actually thought about inviting you into my office a few weeks ago when I heard you’d enrolled. Just to say hello. I honestly wanted to tell you that I honestly didn’t know how the students were going to treat you. Whether they would resent you for what you’ve been through or love you for it. Maybe a little of both. I just didn’t know. I do know that it’s always hard coming to a new place. Maybe not for you, but maybe so, probably so. And if so, we want you to let us know what we can do. Okay? Okay.”