Unspeakable Things(27)
When he didn’t answer, I studied him. He was trying to make an angry face by clenching his jaw, but his lower lip was quivering. I shifted uncomfortably. The kid was a mess.
“It’s hard being new,” Evie said. I wasn’t sure if she was telling him or me.
“Yeah,” I said, as if I had any idea. Really what I was thinking was that he’d moved to town about the same time as Clam—and maybe another Hollow boy—had been abducted. Probably it was terrifying for him. “You shouldn’t be so defensive, though. There’s better ways to make friends.”
He rolled his eyes and ignored me. Fine by me. I wolfed down my lunch while Evie picked at hers. Eventually, a deep sigh and long stare signaled someone special had crossed her line of vision. I glanced over my shoulder and saw Gabriel striding into the cafeteria. My pulse tripped over itself. That wasn’t who Evie was looking at, though. Mr. Connelly stood on the perimeter of the cafeteria crowd, joking with some students. Evie was flashing Mr. C. the lovey eyes.
Well, she was one of many.
I grabbed my nearly empty tray with one hand and my yearbook with the other. “I gotta skedaddle. I need Mr. Connelly to sign this bad boy.”
I hadn’t planned on having the band teacher sign it, but now that he was in the lunchroom, it gave me an excuse to get away from Frank and Evie and then make my way back to Gabriel.
Evie couldn’t have cared less. She’d gone back to tapping and toying with her food. Frank didn’t even look up. As I walked away from them and the loser table, a cloud ditched the sun. The brilliance lit up the bank of windows opposite the gym, refracted a thousand times by the raindrops still falling.
I wove through the jostling crowd to dump my two milk cartons and that second cinnamon roll. I’d eaten everything else, including the soupy green beans and applesauce. I dropped my fork into the soaking bucket, slid my tray into the stack for the wide-hipped kitchen ladies to clean, and speed-walked toward the closed doors of the gym into which Gabriel and then Mr. Connelly had disappeared.
“Where’s the fire?” Wayne Johnson said, dropping a hand onto my shoulder when I tried to squeeze between him and Ricky Tink. Wayne wasn’t a great-looking kid, and he came from the Hollow, same as Clam, but three years ago he’d said this funny thing that had instantaneously launched him to the top of Popularity Mountain.
The fourth-and fifth-grade class had been outside for recess, playing Troll Under the Bridge. We had a German foreign exchange student that year, a quiet kid with eyes like lakes. He also smelled like sausage. The kid’s name was Deter. Deter, Wayne, and all the rest of us were waiting our turn to dash over the troll-bridge jungle gym when the ice cream truck drove by, dingle-inging its bell in the hopes of tempting the day-care kids.
Without a second of self-consciousness, sausage-scented Deter shouted, “Ice cream!”—only his r was long and his ea was short, and it sounded like “ice crrrim!”
“No,” Wayne yelled louder, proudly. “That bell means they’re out of ice cream.”
We’d gone silent, all of us within earshot, wondering for a split second if we’d been lied to our entire lives. Then someone laughed, and just like that, Wayne was promoted from troubled kid to Official Class Clown.
The thing was, it’d been an accident. I could tell no questions asked that Wayne had believed what he’d said, that ice cream trucks only made noise when they were out of ice cream. He’d been gloating that he knew something Deter hadn’t, not telling a joke. He’d wiped that confusion off his face lickety-split, though, and jumped into the laughter because while Wayne was not the sharpest knife in the drawer, he was smart enough to recognize when he’d hit a bull’s-eye.
That’s the thing about small-town boys. All they had to do was come up with that one shtick, a crack at just the right time, or a Hail Mary touchdown, or nail the part of Romeo in the class play, and they were set. They never had to try again. Here’s the thing about small-town girls: we let them get away with it. But not now. I didn’t have time for it.
“It’s a gas fire, and it’s in your smelly pants,” I responded, twisting free of Wayne’s grip. Ricky sniggered. He was a year younger than me, two years younger than Wayne, best known for the Band-Aids covering his finger warts. He was the only one of the Hollow boys who was in band. He played one of the school-issued trombones, and no one else would touch it because of the warts. I thought he was a nice kid. He never bothered me on the bus, anyhow.
Wayne didn’t follow up, so I slipped into the gymnasium, breathing in the quiet, the raucous noise of the lunchroom mellowed into a background hum. Two high windows let in squares of murky, stormy sunlight, dust motes floating lazily inside them. The bleachers were rolled back and pinned to the wall, revealing a glossy sea of golden oak flooring. Overhead, the basketball hoops were tucked in tight, ready for the long summer slumber.
Gabriel and Connelly were nowhere in sight. I was alone in the gym for the first time in my life, and all that space was whispering at me to run across that big floor. Students weren’t supposed to be in here unsupervised, but it was the last day of school, and I wasn’t the only one bucking the rules. I glanced at all the doors. I really was alone in here. I charged off toward the opposite side, toward the locker room doors, my China flats as quiet as butterfly wings.
I was racing, flying, free, speeding with such power that my hands made an echoing slap when they hit the cool cinder block of the far wall.