Made You Up(81)

He headed toward the school. I escaped up to the press box where Evan and Ian worked the baseball scoreboard controls and explained to them where Miles was and how I planned on hiding with them for the entire game.

“Isn’t this your old school?” Evan asked.

I nodded. “Unfortunately.”

“What happened? What got you thrown out?” “I, uh, spray-painted the word Communists on the gym floor. Things got out of hand; I was having a few problems at the time. Everything’s fine now.”

“It’s okay,” Ian laughed. “We really don’t care about your—problem? I guess, is what we’re calling it.”

“Well, that’s good.” Relief washed through me. I looked over at the Hillpark stands, then back at Evan and Ian, and remembered how much it had sucked the first time: how people hadn’t trusted me, how they made fun of the way I spun around every time I entered a room, my incessant picture taking, and how I hadn’t been that lonely since I was seven years old and my only friend had left me for Germany.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone climbing the stairs to the press box. A brown uniform flew up and landed on the scoreboard controls. “Your Nazi boyfriend won’t need that anymore!”

I spun, catching a flash of Ria’s blond hair. I looked down at Miles’s uniform, then over at Evan and Ian, and all three of us understood at the same time.

“Theo!” Evan called to the concession stand below us. “Come up here and run this thing for a second!”

The three of us sprinted to the school, each holding a different piece of Miles’s uniform. We barreled into the hallways behind the gym, through the locker rooms, and into the connected natatorium.

It had finally happened. McCoy had used Cliff and Ria as a distraction and Miles was laying on the tiled floor in a puddle of his own blood.

The natatorium was dark when we arrived. A lone figure sat on the bench next to the pool, soaking wet and clad in nothing but a pair of boxer shorts.

“Go get towels,” I said to Evan and Ian. They vanished into the locker rooms.

I sat down next to Miles. His glasses were missing and his eyes were unfocused. “I hate water,” he mumbled.

“I know.”

He looked like a waterlogged cat. His hair was plastered to his head. Goose bumps covered his skin, layered over fading bruises that dotted his torso and ran down along his ribs. A horrible green-yellow-blue one ran diagonally across his back. They were all old, not inflicted here.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I went into the locker room to change,” he said. “They ambushed me. Took my glasses. Threw me in the pool. They were gone by the time I got out, but it was slippery and I fell back in. Now you’re here. The end.”

He scratched at his legs, his arms, picked at his skin like there was something there. I remembered all the bandages. The smell of pond scum and algae. Animalia Annelida Hirudinea.

Leeches.

“You can’t let them do things like this to you,” I said.

“It won’t be much longer.”

He said it softly, his voice like every part of him I’d ever met—the jerk, the seven-year-old, the genius—and none of them, all at the same time. This was something new, something unknown. Something that scared me. Maybe he meant it wouldn’t be much longer until the end of the school year, that when we were out of high school he’d have more freedom to do what he needed to do.

Are you sure, idiot?

You’re so stupid.

He never talks about college, or anything after this.

Are you really so na?ve?

All he wanted—all he knew to do—was to get his mother out of that hospital. But he had to get rid of Cleveland first. He had a plan. I knew that.

I hadn’t realized how far he was willing to go.

Some deep instinct made me reach out and grab his arm, hold it tightly as if I could keep him right where he was, alive and sound.

I could not lose him again.

No—I could not let him get lost.

I was suddenly more afraid than I had ever been my entire life, more afraid than when Bloody Miles had shown up at Celia’s bonfire, more afraid than when my mother said she would send me away. This was worse than the idea of McCoy trying to hurt Miles. I could stop McCoy. I could yell and scream and even if they didn’t believe me, they would stop and look.

I had no sway over Miles himself. Not when it came to this.

Evan and Ian returned laden with towels and Miles’s school clothes, and Miles dried himself off. Neither of them said anything about the bruises as Miles pulled his pants and shirt on.