The Storm King(15)

She must have been hoping to ask him this. Maybe this question had been on her tongue since April. He could conclude only that it was rhetorical.

He wasn’t given time to answer.

A hand gripped Nate’s collarbone and spun him around. He was shoved over the rim of the driveway’s masonry, and he tumbled onto the black slick of its surface. Three seniors loomed over him, but Adam Decker was the only one who mattered. He was a blond giant and a standout on the varsity football and lacrosse teams. A schoolyard legend for the worst reasons.

“Why’re you down there, man?” Adam asked him. “You’ll get all wet.”

Nate tried to get to his feet, but the stockiest of the bunch pushed him back.

“The Boy Who Fell keeps on falling,” Adam said.

A group of snakes was a pit, and a gang of rats was a plague, but what was the collective noun for bullies? A clod? A rash? Perhaps a remedial? Nate liked it, but the Latin root was problematic. Remedialis, as in “remedy.”



“Doesn’t the miracle boy speak? Or did he lose his voice in the crash, too?” the stocky one asked.

They were a disease, not a cure.

“You must like Halloween, huh, McHale?” Adam said. “Ghosts and zombies all over town?” The massive teen’s eyes were gray-blue, like the lake on a winter day. “Maybe tonight you think your mommy, daddy, and baby brother will come back from the dead.” He smiled, but his lake-water eyes did not waver.

Nate carefully got to his feet. Adam, Stocky, and the third guy, with skin like a plate of baked beans, boxed him against the garage door. Nate couldn’t read the expression on Lucy’s face. He wanted to throw her own question back at her. Wanted an honest answer in return.

“Whaddaya think, Luce?” Adam turned to Lucy. “Guys? You ever see someone fall off a cliff and still look so pretty?”

Nate was tall and lean, not yet entirely filled out, but he was on his feet.

He shifted his eyes to Lucy and grinned.

Her emerald irises widened. At first, Nate thought she was excited for the coming carnage. But then she bit her lower lip. And what did that crease between her eyes mean?

Adam stepped between them.

The blond boy moved like a train, but Nate was ready. He adjusted his stance, clenched his fists, and raised them. Then Adam’s face twitched and blinked and then he dropped to the pavement with all the unraveling grace of a collapsing tree. When the bully fell, he revealed Johnny behind him. Nate’s friend’s teeth were bared and he had the thick limb of a fallen branch raised above his head like a club.

Beans stooped to help Adam while Stocky jolted Nate hard against the garage door. But then Tom surprised Stocky by shoving him, sending the older boy off-balance and stumbling over his feet.

Tom and Johnny. They’d come back for him.



Of course they had. They’d never leave him. Since April, Nate had given them more than enough chances and reasons to. If they were still side by side with him now, they would surely be with him forever.

“Don’t think they’re kidding around, man.” Johnny brandished the tree limb like a bat.

Nate tried to remember what he’d done to earn such friends. On his bad days he wished they’d leave him alone—not for his sake, but for theirs. What better lives Tom, Johnny, and Grams would have now if Nate had never found his way out of that car.

Lucy backed away, but caught his eye one last time. Are you happy? Nate wanted to ask her. He wanted to scream it.

Adam staggered to his knees. He was unsteady and clutching the back of his head. When he pulled his hand away there was blood.

Nate had prepared himself for a fight, and that was what he intended to get. Adam’s strength matched against Nate’s fury. He wanted to find out what would be left when they clashed. He wanted to see what would be wrought.

“Please.” Tom grabbed Nate’s elbow.

The fire inside him flickered. If there was a fight now, Tom and Johnny would bleed along with him. This was why he’d sent them away. If only they’d left him, how much easier everything would be.

“Please.”

Nate turned to Tom, and for a moment he had the urge to tell him about the abyss inside him. That hole at his center that he couldn’t imagine filling with anything but agony. Maybe there were words that could convey this—a sound he could utter that wasn’t a howl—but Nate didn’t know them.

So he let himself be prodded into motion. One foot. The other. Then the three of them were running for the Cohens’ lawn.

“I can’t believe you hit him like that,” Tom told Johnny.

“Me either,” Johnny said. “Do you think he’s pissed?”

The Mustang’s wheels squealed behind them.



The deluge was made visible by the car’s headlights, casting translucent veils over the night. The wet grass gleamed like a field of jewels spliced by the shadows of trees.

Nate glanced back to see the car gaining speed. He watched it tear across the lawn, kicking clumps of turf aloft to join the wind and rain. He wondered if Lucy was inside. He wondered if she was trying to scare them or kill them. Surely one murderer was enough for any family.

They weaved among trees before climbing over a post-and-rail fence at the property boundary. From the sound of car doors opening, Nate knew the chase wouldn’t end there. The headlights projected the long shadows of their pursuers. Nate heard their feet slap against the wet ground.