Dull Boy (6 page)

I can’t bear the thought of losing this. My flight is the one thing I have that’s totally my own—no one’s ever witnessed it; it’s never hurt anyone and it never will. Without it, I don’t know if I’d be fully myself. I’d be dead, lifeless, dull. When I’m flying, I’m more than normal, more than most people will ever know—but it’s undeniably who I am. And there’s peace in that—in being here, now,
myself
.

Tonight, when I launch myself into the damp, cool air, up past the treetops, into that massive, starlit sky . . . everything’s left below me. Any anxiety, any confusion, remains on the ground where it belongs.

I’ll get through this—I have to.

Because somewhere—maybe worked up by the same feelings, facing the same dangers—there are other kids like me.

And I’m going to find them.

 

UN-FREAKING-BELIEVABLE.
Sitting across from me, in the guidance office of my new high school for troubled losers, is the worst excuse for a jaded misanthrope badass I have ever seen.

And the worst part is I think I sort of know her.

“So what are you in for?”

The anarchy buttons, the black eyeliner, the coffin T-shirt, and the weird striped tights are gone. She’s completely transformed since I last saw her.

“What am I ‘in for’?” I blink at her, trying to mask my confusion but probably failing. “Nothing. My parents enrolled me. Why are
you
here?”

She’s still wearing glasses, but now they’re paired with glittery eye shadow and big gold hoop earrings. Her jeans are like ten sizes too big and belted around her hips so that her boxers puff out like a deflated hot-air balloon.

“My probation officer recommended it,” she says, propping her pink Timberlands on a table that’s covered with the school’s glossy brochures. “No one wanted to mess with me in juvie ’cause I was psycho.”

I’m sure.

Darla unzips her giant parka and blows a bubble-gum bubble, then pops it. Underneath her jacket she’s wearing one of those R.I.P. T-shirts, the kind that are supposed to commemorate the glorious life of your dead homie. Only it looks like she made it herself, with the help of Photo-shop and some iron-on transfers, since I doubt there are a lot of gangsters mourning Marie Curie.

This girl is so damaged.

“You know you’re totally giving yourself away, right?”

“Are you hollering at me, dog?” She slouches even lower in her chair, like that’ll be the magic trick that negates her posing.

I don’t even know how to respond to that. “Um . . . okay. You know dead scientists aren’t really ‘gangsta,’ right?”

She flushes. “You know Marie Curie?”

“Not by sight, but her name’s right there on your shirt, and I’m not a moron. I don’t belong in this school. And I’m not staying here . . . if I can help it.”

“Oh. You’re not? Huh.” Now when she sinks in her seat she looks like she’s hiding, face ducked behind the huge collar of her parka. “Crap,” she mumbles.

“Something wrong?” Man, this girl is weird. I still can’t figure out what she could have done to get sent here, unless she shoplifted those huge pants and then wrote the judge one of her crappy poems.

I haven’t forgotten that whole coffee-spewing incident either, and the fact that she’s starting at this school on the very same day
I’m
starting . . . well, it’s suspicious. But I mean, it’s possible this is a coincidence—she might just be deranged.

“Kind of. I, um . . . at the risk of sounding completely insane—”

The secretary interrupts before Darla can finish, hands us our schedules, and tells us to hurry on to class, assuring us that we
don’t
want to get detention here. I check my schedule: “Remedial English—sounds promising. You going there, too?”

“No, I have . . .” Darla scans her printout. “Intro to Rehab.” Her eyes grow wide, like a person on a sinking ship who just saw the last lifeboat leave without her. “All right, well—we need to talk later! Okay? At lunch?”

“Sure,” I say. I need someone to sit with anyway, assuming no one will have stabbed me by then. “See you later. Hope your first class is, uh, helpful.”

“Um, yeah. Thanks!” She sways back and forth, and her eyes start to roll back in her head.

“Whoa!” I catch her before she clonks her head on the table. “Are you all right?”

“F-fine,” she says. “I just need a little . . . reassurance.”

Darla’s breathing really hard, almost hyperventilating. She starts digging around in her huge parka, and I steady her until she finds her purple inhaler.

“Asthma?” I say. “That must be rough.”

“I’m fine now. You can go.
Really.
” She waves me away and I leave her to take care of her medical business in private. But I’m not a hundred percent convinced that she’s okay, so I stop at the doorway, peek back to make sure she’s breathing properly.

She doesn’t have her inhaler anywhere near her mouth. She’s holding it away from her body, about as far away as you would hold a leash if you were walking your dog.

Darla presses a button on the inhaler, and blue electricity crackles between two outstretched metal nodes. Then she sighs and starts to calm down, like she can breathe again.

I haul A to my first class.

B
y third period I have exactly one friend (Darla Carmine), 280 potential enemies, and a boot print on my pants from getting kicked in the ass on my way down the hall. (And no, I didn’t retaliate—I just gritted my teeth and kept walking.) Thank you, anonymous donor.

It turns out that Darla and I have science together third period, and when we arrive the teacher is all smiles. “Aren’t you lucky—we’re doing a dissection lab today!” She assigns us seats at different tables, then reminds us that “the scalpels are not to be used as weapons.”

Great. As if cutting up a cow eyeball isn’t bad enough—it also means arming the resident psychopaths. That’ll do wonders for my concentration.

Darla and I exchange looks. Her telltale geek pallor goes a shade or two lighter.

“Scalpels?”

I shrug and try to look reassuring. “Maybe everyone’ll be too grossed out to get violent.”

The classroom fills up with every variety of thug and delinquent imaginable. It’s not as big of a shock as it was at first, when I walked into Remedial English and saw two thugs stabbing each other’s hands with pencils until they bled, while a huge guy with a ten-o’clock shadow squished a smaller kid’s head into his armpit, and the teacher calmly diagrammed sentences with her back to the class—but I wouldn’t say I’m used to it.

Overall you’ve got: the Thugs 4 Life, busy giving each other ink-pen tattoos (Gothic letters and knives stabbing into skulls), who’ve been in and out of juvenile detention centers since they were eight; the low-maintenance Burnouts, who break into the janitor’s closet at least once a day and huff cleaning fluid and bug spray; the
high
-maintenance Burnouts, who chug Robitussin and snort Ritalin on their way to a full-out coke habit; the Bonecrushers, who beat people up and send them to the hospital, but whose parents have enough money to keep them out of juvie; and the Mary Janes, who dress like they’re in preschool but threaten to “cut you” if you look at them the wrong way.

And then Darla, the gangsta-impaired electroshocker, who seems to be even more out of place here than I am.

While the teacher’s explaining the lesson, Darla whips out the most complicated cell phone I’ve ever seen (it’s purple, and looks like the illegitimate techno child of a satellite and a Swiss Army knife) and starts texting up a fury. I start doing this subtle-yet-crazed put-it-away gesture that gets increasingly frantic as every crook in the room turns to watch her. Like moths to a flame.

The thing is, half these kids could afford to buy the hottest cell on the market. But beating someone down and stealing their property must be more satisfying—judging by the gleam in every fiendish eye.

This could get ugly.

Just as I’m making a mental note to cut my next few classes so I can tail this girl all over school and make sure nothing bad happens to her, there’s a knock at the door. Darla finally notices me waving at her. She stashes her cell phone and we all turn our attention to the door.

“Just a moment,” the teacher says, setting a tray of rancid worm corpses on her desk. A uniformed police officer escorts a slouching, black-clad girl into the room.

I almost choke on my next breath. It’s Catherine—the floor-sweeping girl from Roast.

Is this like a twisted reunion or something? What’s going on?

She looks really irritated, halfway to snarling, and she’s clutching a package of Wonder Bread by the plastic tuft at one end. There’s something pathetic about the clash of the bright red, yellow, and blue packaging against her black clothes. Her hair hangs in flat, soggy tendrils, like she just took a shower or got caught in the rain. She scowls and shakes it out of her face.

“Found another truant,” the officer says, patting his belt.

I know he thinks he’s doing something good, but that smug expression rubs me the wrong way. I’ve had enough authority figures look at me like that to know there’s
always
more to the story. I mean, it’s not like he brought her in carrying a crack pipe—she’s holding a loaf of white bread. Get off your frigging high horse.

“Catherine,” the teacher says. “So glad you could
finally
join us. What’s your story this week? The flu? An exotic vacation?”

“I’m not truant—I had to stop at the store,” Catherine snaps.

“Take your seat.” The teacher gets all no-nonsense and points to the back of the room—to the table where
I’m
sitting. Catherine swings her Wonder Bread and grumbles all the way back. She raises her eyebrows when she sees me.

“What are
you
doing here?” she says under her breath. “Did Pikachu tell you to kill someone?”

The teacher slams a tray with a dead worm pinned to it onto our table.

Harsh. She treats everyone else’s worms with more respect, setting the trays down like they’re harboring a formaldehyde-infused scientific treasure.

“Shut up or I’ll make you a sandwich out of that,” I murmur back.

I think I see the corner of Catherine’s mouth turn up in a smirk. “Yeah, right.”

Darla’s voice carries over to our side of the room, high-pitched and quavering: “I work best alone, actually.” I glance to see who her partner is.

It’s one of the Burnouts. Not too dangerous, but skeezy enough to have Darla freaked out. He’s leaning close to her, leering, his greasy hair hanging in his face.

Uh, did he just stroke her shoulder? That’s a mistake.

“This is a team effort,” the teacher says. “Working together is part of functioning properly in society.”

“Five bucks says he eats it to get high off the formaldehyde,” Catherine says quietly.

“That’s so sick. No way he does that. You’re on.”

“Remember to use the tools,” the teacher says. “There will be no pinching, biting, or squeezing the worms. You are to find and identify every item on the work sheet . . .”

Ugh. This is so disgusting. I try to remind myself that, technically, this is more educational than the rest of the crap I’ve done today—but I can’t bring myself to cut into the worm. I don’t even want to
look
at it, let alone identify its anus and genital pores.

There’s another knock at the door and the teacher excuses herself. “Keep working!” she says. As soon as the door slams shut, this massive dude sitting diagonally in front of us swivels around in his seat. He’s wearing a blue football jersey that says
Big Dawg
across the back, and his legs are packed into cargo shorts like two pasty sausages. He looks like he’s been mainlining bovine growth hormone since he was born.

“Hey, Catherine.” He grins. “What happened? Your drunk dad forget to drive you to school again?”

“Shut up, dumb-ass.”

It takes a second before I realize that’s
my
voice.

Every head turns to look at me—this is way more exciting than worm theater. The Burnouts’ eyes are wide and wobbly. Even the Thugs think I’m insane.

“Kill him, Big Dawg!”

“Rip his head off!”

Big Dawg’s nostrils flare. He stands up slowly, like a stout Godzilla savoring the moment before he crushes Tokyo.

I start to shove my chair back, but Catherine puts her hand on my arm to stop me.

Big Dawg cracks his knuckles.
Krrrk. Crunch.
“What’s your name, new kid?”

So I tell him.

“Pirzwick, you’re the dumbest new kid I’ve ever met. I’m gonna break your bones in so many places, you’ll be begging to be put on house arrest so I don’t paralyze you.”

Nice. I have to bite my tongue (literally) to keep from telling him where he can stick
that
threat. Followed by:
My bones don’t break that easily. I could hurl your ass to the next county if I wanted to.