100 Days (9 page)

Agnes smacks Moira's arm. “Thanks a lot.”

Wow,
I think.
Harsh.
I use a corner of the rake to perfect the edges of one pile so it will be easier to bag.

“I'm just saying.” Moira's laughing now. It's a surprisingly pleasant sound. “So what did you say?”

“I asked if maybe we could just go see a Disney movie instead.”

“Talk about birth control,” Moira says.

A short laugh escapes my mouth before I can stop it. To cover it up, I pretend to cough. I can feel Moira's eyes boring into the back of my skull.

“What a piece of work,” she mutters.

At first I'm not sure if she's talking about me or this Jamey person, but Agnes clears it up. “He'll have to go to your house next, I'm pretty sure.”

“No, he won't.”

“Why not?”

“Because he won't, that's why.”

“If you're talking about
paid
work, I need the money so bad, I'd actually consider going to your house,” I say under my breath. “But there's no way in hell I'm doing it for free. I don't care what the school says.”

Moira looks like she's turned to stone. Apparently, the comment wasn't as under my breath as I thought, and it's pretty clear she can't believe the servant boy is daring to speak. It's beyond satisfying to leave her speechless for once. It's intoxicating, really.

“Maybe I'll show up at your front door with my rake and my leaf bags just to piss you off,” I continue in a louder voice this time. “Man, I'd love to see the look on your—”

The comment is cut short by a red-hot pain shooting through my left butt cheek. I'm so surprised that I instinctively drop the rake and grab my own ass, hard, with both hands.

The girls howl like a couple of coyotes circling in for the kill.

Doing my best to act casual, I release my grip on myself and look around, trying to figure out where the pain came from. Did somebody shoot me with a .22, a neighbor boy, maybe? Finally, my eyes rest on Agnes, who's doing a poor job of hiding what looks like a wrist rocket–type slingshot inside her jacket. When I was little, my father tried to show me how to shoot birds out of trees with a weapon that looked just like it (of course, I kept missing the birds by “accident”). Agnes gets up quickly from the step, not taking her eyes off me.

As I stand there shaking my head and glaring at them, the girls exchange grins before turning around and disappearing into the house. “Show up at my place and a slingshot will be the
least
of your worries,” Moira yells right before she slams the door.

 

20

MOIRA

DAY 81: APRIL 5

I'm standing in front of the bathroom mirror, practicing my death scowl. I'm convinced it's the thing that makes other people nervous enough to leave me alone. I don't care what they say behind my back. I assume the worst, and that's fine. It is what it is.

But this scowl? It's my armor. More than that, it's my middle finger to the world, specifically to the world of high school and all the lame-ass cretins therein.

 

21

AGNES

DAY 80: APRIL 6

“You need to stay home today.” Moira's voice is hoarse at the other end of the phone line.

“I'm not sick,” I tell her.

“But I am. I don't want you going to school without me. People are assholes. Sorry—jerks.”

“I'll be fine.”

“I'm serious, Agnes.”

“I'm serious, too. I have a geometry test.”

“You didn't mention anything about a test yesterday.”

“So now I have to tell you every detail of my academic life?”

The line goes silent.

“Sorry,” I say. “I just—”

“No worries.” Now Moira's voice is suddenly breezy.

“Em—”

“Nope. It's fine. You'll be fine.”

“I will be fine,” I tell her. “But—”

“Have a good day.”

*   *   *

When our homeroom teacher, Mr. Jeffers, realizes Moira's absent, he asks me if I want him to call the front office so they can assign another escort to walk with me between classes.

“No,” I tell him. “That's okay.”

There's a late morning awards assembly for the fall sports teams. Everyone's jazzed up when it's over, shoving one another toward the exits and creating a bottleneck of students at one end of the gym. I stay put in my seat until the crowd thins, but things aren't much better when I get to the main hallway. I want to be able to tell Moira how brave I was when we talk on the phone later, but the truth is I'm scared. I feel like a toddler trying to navigate her way through a crowd of drunken lumberjacks. I hug my books close to my chest as I walk toward my government class, trying to protect myself the way you protect a newly healed broken bone that's just had the cast taken off.

A swarm of burly football players approaches. It may even be the entire team. Without the coach there to keep them in line with his shouts and his whistle, they laugh and jostle one another. Even from a distance, I can tell they're still amped from the rally. I assume—hope?—the rowdy group will part down the middle so I can safely pass through their midst. But they're so wrapped up in whatever it is they're joking about that they don't even seem to
see
me. Not one of them looks down, and why would they? Moira's the one people always see when she and I are walking together. Moira's like one of those bright orange safety flags on the back of a bicycle, the importance of which you underestimate until the one day it's not there waving above your head and you're mowed down by a truck.

I scoot to the side of the hallway and flatten myself against the wall. The players are taking up the entire corridor now. They're shoving one another more aggressively, cackling and hooting and yelling obscenities. A bunch of other students stop and press themselves against the walls, too, but still nobody sees me.

My eyes dart from one side of the corridor to the other as I step away from the wall, searching for a classroom doorway.
This must be what it's like to die in a buffalo stampede,
I think, panicking now, as their shadows approach and then envelop me. A guy I recognize as the star quarterback looms large. It occurs to me (too late) to throw a hand up to catch his attention like I do with the school secretary anytime I'm in the office. I open my mouth to scream, but nothing comes out. There's a sharp squeezing sensation in my chest, like something with talons has gotten hold of my heart. I scrunch my eyes shut and wait for the inevitable.

It doesn't come. After a while, I open my eyes, but it still takes me a few seconds to get the courage to look up. When I do, I see that a familiar sort of bridge has formed over my head. It's a pair of arms, just like that day in the cafeteria when Moira shoved Boone Craddock's back to keep her balance.

This time, though, they aren't Moira's arms.

Boone's hands are embedded in the quarterback's chest the way Moira's hands were embedded between Boone's shoulder blades. As far as I'm concerned, they are the Hands of Life.

“What the hell—” the quarterback starts to say.

Boone cuts him off and motions down toward me with his head. “Just watch where you're going, okay? Try to have some awareness.” His teeth are clenched when he says it.

“Oh, I'll have some awareness, all right,” the quarterback says.

He's about to say something else when I scurry out from under the bridge of Boone's arms and over to the other side of the hallway as fast as I can, my heart cathunking all loud and uneven in my chest. Other kids stay frozen in place, expecting a fight. I don't hear all the words they exchange after that, but I do hear the quarterback call Boone a dipshit before the team continues down the hallway. A few of them look back, like Boone's a pile of something disgusting they accidentally stepped in.

When he looks over at me, his face is red and his jaw is still tight. “You okay?” he asks.

“Were you following me?”

“Doesn't matter.”

He
was
following me. I'm sure of it. As the athletes round a corner at the end of the hall, Boone relaxes a little.

“Did Moira put you up to this?” I ask him.

“She didn't put me up to anything.”

Then we just stand there for a few seconds, neither of us saying anything.

“Boone?”

“What.”

“Thank you.”

“Yeah, okay. Whatever.”

For the rest of the day, he meets me outside each of my classes and walks me to the next one in silence. Not another word is spoken about what happened in the hallway, but I do manage to snap a picture of him before the end of the day. He's standing by my locker with his arms crossed over his chest, waiting for me to get my English stuff before last period. “You just need a pair of sunglasses and one of those earpieces to complete your Secret Service look,” I tell him, reaching for my camera. At the exact second a grin breaks out across his face, I point and shoot.

 

22

BOONE

DAY 79: APRIL 7

I'm Standing in a puddle of gray slush behind the gym, and it takes everything I have to use my words instead of my fists. At least the quarterback showed up without his teammates like he promised yesterday after school when we arranged to meet out here. “I'm not about to get kicked off the team because of you,” he said. “And we don't need any witnesses, even though I'd love to have an audience watching when I take you down.” He punched his fist into his other palm for emphasis when he said it, and I worked hard to keep from laughing. Somebody needs to tell this guy to lay off the steroids. He probably only made the promise to show up alone because he knew he'd look like a pussy if he came with a posse. I smile a little at the poetry. I could do this all day, people.

In response to my smile, the guy whips off his letterman jacket and holds his fists in front of him, old-school street-fight style. What a meathead.

“C'mon,”
he snarls, no doubt imitating some action hero he saw on late-night TV. “What's the holdup, tard?”

Damn, I want to pummel this guy. But, no. I'll at least try to talk first, try to reason. I'll force myself to rise above my baser instincts and—

The quarterback throws the first punch. He's stupidly obvious about it, and I duck. As I stand back up to full height, he's on me, throwing punches that mostly don't connect very well.

I never could abide the methods of subduing horses my father used during that year after the roofing accident. After he got laid off and went back to horseshoeing, he had to occasionally deal with animals who seemed to see it as their mission in life to kick the ever-loving crap out of him. In that sort of situation, my dad would grab one of the horse's ears and twist it down. That, or he'd tighten a chain twitch around its sensitive upper lip. It made me sick to see a frightened creature rendered immobile by sudden localized pain. I much preferred a simple hobble, which forced the horse to use its feet for balance rather than for violence against its handler. At the time, I understood full well that my queasiness about using brute force made me repulsively soft and sentimental in my father's eyes. Due to the new situation with his coordination, though, he forced me to learn the harsher techniques anyway. Doing so meant I could help him shoe the rankest stallions and most pissed-off mares on his roster. The two of us damn near got killed perfecting our team restraint procedure more times than I care to think about. But perfect it we did.

Now, sighing deeply, I respond to the barrage of sloppy punches by throwing the quarterback onto his stomach in the slush, planting my knee in the small of his back, and hoisting one of his legs and his opposite arm up behind him. Bound in this sort of modified scotch hobble, my opponent screams in hyperextended agony.

And it is at that moment, in the strangest, calmest way and for the first time ever, that I find myself grateful for my father's lessons in cruelty.

 

23

MOIRA

DAY 78: APRIL 8

His swollen face is the first thing I notice when I finally feel decent enough to return to school on Friday. The first time I see him is in English. The fat crescent beneath his eye is hard to miss, even with his bangs hanging down. It's greenish with dark purple splotches mixed in.

When the bell rings, I gather my stuff, take a breath, and walk over to his desk. “Agnes told me what happened.”

No response.

“She didn't say anything about a fight, though.”

Boone smiles. “Let's just say a friend and I got together for a … chat after school yesterday.”

Standing this close, I catch a glimpse of a crusted-over gash on the side of his face as well. “Damn.”

Boone shrugs and looks away.

I don't say anything for a minute. That gets awkward quick, though, so finally I just go ahead and blurt out what I came over to say. “I need to thank you for what you did the other day. For Agnes.”

“Don't worry about it.”

“No, I'm serious.”

“So am I.”

I decide to ignore him. “My parents might have some stuff for you to do around our place. I remember what you said about needing work.”

“Oh, you mean the thing I said right before Agnes shot me in the ass?”

I look down. “Yeah.”

“Are you for real?” He's smirking, but it's not an entirely unfriendly smirk.

This time, I roll my eyes at him. “Do you actually think I'm not for real? Like I'm playing a trick on you or something?” It comes out pretty harsh, but I'm annoyed. I may be many things, but I'm definitely not one to ignore a good deed done on Agnes's behalf. “Yes, I'm serious,” I say, taking another breath and turning the sarcasm down several notches. “Our yard looks like something from the ninth circle of hell.”