Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(29)
He wears small glasses on a head too big for his body. His hair is the wispy blond of cornsilk. His arms and legs are stumpy, his torso round. All of this giving him the appearance of an enormous baby.
The same can’t be said of Chase, who feels so much younger than his body. A few years ago his bones began to ache and he developed a vicious hunger, gobbling up six eggs for breakfast, a whole pizza for dinner, sucking down five gallons of milk every week. He studied himself often in the mirror, as his limbs stretched to match his oversize feet, his hands, what his mother called puppy paws. He started rubbing himself off in fifth grade, shaving in sixth grade with his father’s razor and Barbasol. He is taller than most of his teachers and plays forward on the varsity basketball team.
He’s not a good guy—he knows that has nothing to do with what happens next. He hates the Methodist church his parents drag him to every Sunday and smokes cigarettes under the football bleachers and sneaks cheat sheets into exams and every chance he gets tries to slide his hand up a girl’s skirt. But most of his trespasses have to do with pleasure, seeking it out, the buzz of a beer, the way a blow job makes his whole body feel like a tingly nerve ending.
He’s not a bad guy either—he has a certain sense of righteousness motivated now by these three punks, with their braces and pimply backs, getting off on ganging up on somebody weaker than them.
From what Chase gathers, as he moves toward them, the kid has been camping out in the toilet stall after gym, skipping his shower, changing where no one can observe him. A pile of clothes remains in the stall as he is dragged across the wet tile floor, half-dressed in a button-up short-sleeve and white briefs that match the paleness of his skin. He struggles but does not cry out when the boys reach for his underwear and try to yank it off him.
Chase comes up behind them. Without pause he kicks one of the boys square in the ass and sends him keeling into the wall—striking it with a wet thud, crumpling into a mewling ball. Chase cracks together the skulls of the other two boys and then shoves them headfirst into the nearby urinals. He holds them there for a good five seconds, mashing their mouths into the deodorant pucks. Then he slams the flush bars and leaves them sputtering.
The kid has gathered up his clothes. His face is impassive, and his glasses have fogged over, hiding his eyes. Neither of them says anything. Not until the next day, after algebra, when the kid introduces himself as Augustus and asks what he can do for Chase.
“You don’t owe me nothing.”
The rest of the class is filing out of the room, glancing at the strange pair, Augustus standing with his arms crossed and Chase sitting with his legs sprawled out, their height about equal. “I disagree,” the kid says. “And maybe you will as well when you hear my proposal.” The precision of the kid’s words, the confident purse of his mouth—the white short-sleeve shirt, like something an accountant would wear in the summer. Chase might as well be having a conversation with an alien. He has no idea how to respond and finds he doesn’t have to, because the kid is filling the silence, explaining how, if protected, Augustus will do any homework assignments Chase finds tiresome.
“I’m not stupid. And I’m not looking for help.” Chase is less angered than amused. “My grades are fine.”
“You have obligations I do not: sports and socializing. Homework gets in the way of these, yes? If you feel like completing your assignments on your own, great. But if on occasion you have an away game or a hot, sexy date—then you will hand the work off to me and I will happily oblige.”
“And for this I kick anybody’s ass who messes with you?”
A curt nod. “Tit for tat.”
Chase stands. He towers over the kid, could smash him into his backpack if he wanted. “We don’t have to hang out or anything, do we?”
“Not unless you want to.”
“I don’t.”
A contract they have more or less honored for the past thirty years.
Chase has never called Augustus by his name. It was a mouthful, and obnoxious, the name of some old poet who liked to write about the pansies growing in his garden. The kid. That’s what Chase called him—until they enrolled at the University of Oregon, when the kid took Chase aside during orientation and said he would rather not be called that anymore.
“Why not?”
“It implies a lack of strength.”
“Then what the hell am I supposed to call you?”
“My name.”
“Out of the question.”
He settled on Buffalo. For the enormous head, too big for any hat, that seems to grow directly out of his sloped shoulders. Chase nicknames everyone he meets. His administrative assistant, Moneypenny. His legal counsel, No Fun. The head of his security detail, Shrek, for his bald head, his jutting forehead, his barrel of a torso balanced on tiny legs. Even the people he doesn’t know, he finds a way to name them—a bartender is honey or sugar, a valet or groundskeeper is buddy or friend. It’s his way of making people come a little closer, look him in the eye and smile.
Sweetheart is what he calls the woman working the front desk at the Kazumi Day Spa. He recognizes her from the teahouse. The wrinkled face and square body and silvery hair pulled back into a bun stabbed through with chopsticks. A potted bamboo sits in the corner. A scroll bearing a string of Japanese characters hangs behind her. She doesn’t smile at him but lifts her arm, gesturing to a dark hallway, and says, with a heavy accent, “Last door on the left.”