Extra Life (5 page)

Asshat toed Tennis Skirt in the back of her knee to get her attention. She swore and swatted him, but he just laughed and said, “I let you get half a lap ahead of me and here you are flirting with some other guy?”

He nodded at Paige to show who he meant.

They found themselves hilarious. Paige stood her ground, silent, taking it.

“I heard y’all hang out with homeless chicks downtown,” Tennis Skirt said to Paige.

“I volunteer at a women’s shelter if that’s what you mean,” Paige said.

Asshat grinned, tongue jabbing his inner cheek. He said, “That’s pretty kinky, dude.”

Paige didn’t respond, which freaked me out. Never had I ever hurled an insult at Paige that she didn’t fling straight back at me. So to see her helpless, it was disorienting. I could suddenly feel the rotation of the earth.

I stepped onto the bottom bench of the aluminum bleachers. My shoes made a dramatic laser-gun echo. Asshat took notice of me and announced, “Look at that, it’s the gay and lesbian alliance.”

“Hate speech?” I asked him. “Seriously?”

Asshat’s biceps pulsed left/right, left/right.

Coach Belk was nowhere around, I noticed. She was notorious for random smoke breaks, and this was conveniently one of those times. We’d have to fend for ourselves.

“Got a problem, Vale?” Asshat asked me.

“Your whole shtick is tired. A good insult’s got to be clever.”

“Russ,” Paige growled, somehow behind me now. Without even really realizing, I’d jumped down off the bleachers and nearly chested up to the Asshat.

“So y’all admit you and her are gay together?” he said.

Strike one, Chief. Even Tennis Skirt rolled her eyes at that lame crack. I could see it, how the realization of his own lameness cranked through Asshat’s head like a penny through a boardwalk coin-press machine.

Noting that my forehead didn’t quite clear the height of his chin, I said, “I’m not going to dignify your prejudices, son. You shouldn’t judge and you can’t change a person, so what’s your motivation?”

Asshat took hard breaths through his nostrils. Half the class was through with the mile run and was now converging around our late-breaking event. A few had their phones out, ready to snap mementos for instant upload.

Glancing back, I found myself alone against the enemy. Paige was storming off toward the school, already halfway gone. So much for her support.

When I turned back to Asshat, I saw instead a beautifully composed close-up shot of knuckles. It was Asshat’s fist, barreling at my face. Flash bulbs burst all at once, and the fresh-mowed grass tasted just like sprout-and-hummus wraps.

O
NE PUNCH
from Asshat, and I’m snoozing for a good thirty seconds. A while after the “fight,” I found myself alone in a Port City Academy administrative conference room full of fake potted plants. I leaned back with an ice pack patched over my throbbing left eye socket, waiting for the verdict.

The clock made its ascent toward two p.m.

My cell phone jolted with a text. Four characters from Paige Davis:
WTF?

I thumbed out a response:
did I win ur favor?

ur an idiot

still need your mad camera skillz!
I sent.

Radio silence from Paige after that.

The conference room door eased open with a light-knuckle tap. I was expecting the vice principal, but it was Dad instead. Kasper Vale, escaped from his attic habitat, in sweat pants and a flannel, nursing a travel mug from an Azalea Festival ten years ago. His eyes were a little blinky from the unexpected run-in with natural sunlight. Mom was usually the contact parent for my fiascoes, but she had a drug company to manage. With no job, it appeared Dad would be pinch-hitting today.

“How you holding up?” he asked me.

“I didn’t know they were going to call you in.”

“You’re supposed to say, ‘You should see the other guy.’”

“The other guy is subhuman, and I didn’t hit him,” I said. Had to make my innocence known right away, since my track record liked to testify against me. In my defense, I’d been red flag free for over a year. My last and only misstep at Port City Academy was that terrible prank on Connie before we were friends.

Vice Principal Skaggs came in and slapped a file folder onto the table top:
Vale, Horace
written on the tab.

My rap sheet, thick enough to include my riotous days in public school, i.e. my freshman-year misdemeanor arrest for breaking into the high school’s sports equipment shed, stealing the alligator mascot costume and hanging it by its legs, bungee-style, from the nearby pedestrian bridge that arched over Market Street. This was sadly a step down from my original plan to get dressed in the costume and dangle
myself
from the bridge. In the moment of truth, I couldn’t bet my life on my knot-tying skills after only a two-week stint in Boy Scouts.

I had two accomplices, dipshits I didn’t associate with anymore. One of them brought the video recording to the police and set loose the process that landed me in private school. I’m sure all the sordid details were available in Skaggs’ file, indicting me before I could even get a fair hearing.

After the necessary handshake, Skaggs gave Dad his best Crest-whitened smile and said, “I believe Mrs. Vale will be joining us in a moment?”

“She will?” Dad and I said, tensing up, in unison.

As Skaggs predicted, Mom blustered in. She shouted, “gotta go,” into her cell phone and thumbed away the call. Whipped her attention straight at me. Her busy hands tried to decide whether they’d throttle my neck or pet my head. “Let me see it,” she demanded.

When I showed her my eye, she hissed and shook her head. Finally Mom noticed her husband slouching in the corner. She said, “Kasper,” like he really was a friendly ghost.

He raised his plastic mug to salute her. “I didn’t think you’d be able to get away from work.”

Because Mom was top brass for a leading manufacturer of FDA-approved chemical mood-enhancers, dysfunction-solvers and ache/pain-reducers. A six-figure shyster, a
drug dealer
, but I learned to treat her career with a little cognitive dissonance. After all, her salary bought the most innovative, hands-on, private education a short attention span like mine could appreciate.

The wall clock read 2:05 p.m. It would take at least fifteen minutes to get down to the Silver Bullet diner and keep my hard-won videotaping appointment with Savannah Lark. Ten minutes to wrap up this parent conference.

“My son was obviously not the aggressor here,” Mom was saying.

“We’ve found it incredibly difficult to get to the truth in situations like this,” Skaggs explained. “So we’ve adopted a Zero Tolerance policy on bullying and violence.”

Mom’s phone rang, but she shoved her hand into her purse and silenced it. “So let me get this straight,” she said. “A kid can walk up to another kid in this school and sucker punch him—
which is what happened
—and the
victim
gets punished? What sense does that make?”

“Madeline, we don’t need to get angry here,” Dad cautioned.

The glare she gave Dad was about as cold as my ice pack.

“I’m just saying,” Dad suggested. “Maybe if we brought the boys together and had them apologize to each other?” It was the same solution Dad offered the first time I got in trouble with Skaggs—shake hands and make up. But that time the truce was with Connie, who turned out to be my perfect counterweight. That was different. Guaranteed no
way
I’d have a change of heart and find myself buddying-up with Asshat.

“I’m unconvinced that you could charge tuition and enforce a suspension simultaneously. I’d hate to involve legal counsel to work it out,” Mom told Skaggs.

So much for a ten-minute resolution. To distract myself from the countdown, I zoned on a view through the office window—the steel Cape Fear Memorial Bridge stretching over the river with its two vertical lift towers. There weren’t many high places in my town, but this was one. My legs shuddered with the urge to climb one of those towers. My palms got moist. If only there was a zip-line from one to the other—a stunt to trip all the breakers in my nervous system. It wasn’t a suicidal urge, and it wasn’t fearlessness. It was the opposite of both, a siren call upward from the mundane ground, rising to where I could feel terrifyingly alive.

Two-thirty was when they finally wrapped it up, having decided jack squat except that I was partially at fault for antagonizing the zoo animals. Once again, I was facing expulsion or at least suspension: big skull-and-crossbones marks on any college app. It was like I hadn’t cleaned up my act at all. I wanted to yell
objection!
I wanted Connie or Paige there to speak as character witnesses on my behalf.

As soon as the VP said, “Welp, that’s it for now,” I scrammed, left the liquefied ice pack at the main desk.

My shoes squealed on the hallway floor. I was in the clear, but just as I rushed past the drinking fountain, someone lurched out of the men’s room, straight into my path. I saw the fishing vest first, then my broadcasting teacher George Yesterly’s panicked eyes.

We collided, and each of us took a seat on the floor. His fall was less graceful than mine. Poor Yesterly, with his chalky skin and body heat, looked worse than Paige’s gym class after their mile run on the track. I suddenly wanted a shower to wash away whatever might be catching.

“Oh, man, I’m sorry, Mr. Yes,” I said.

“No, Russ, no—it’s fine. I wasn’t looking where…” His voice trailed off. Something over my shoulder had grabbed his attention.

Mom’s shoe heels clapped up behind me, and Yesterly watched her approach with a dumbstruck slow blink. I felt bad for him—this chance run-in with The One That Got Away, just as he was dying from the plague.

“Horace, really,” Mom scolded me. With both hands, she hoisted Yesterly up by the elbow, even though he outweighed her by a hundred pounds, easy. She had no idea who he was.

“Madeline…” Yesterly said.

Mom cocked her head, took a step back from the frumpy dude she just rescued. Then it registered for her. “George?” she said. She almost put her hand over her mouth.

Yesterly leaned against the wall to stop himself from falling again. When Dad and VP Skaggs arrived on the scene, Skaggs squeezed in to assess damages. “Are you all right, Mr. Yesterly? Any injuries?” he asked, apparently eager for something else to pin on me—assaulting a faculty member.

Yesterly shook his head. “No—no—that was completely my fault. I’m, uh, I’ve go this blood sugar issue. Damn thing has gotten the best of me today. I’ll be fine if I just get something, something sweet…”

“Oh, dear. Let’s get you some Pepsi and send you home,” Skaggs said, leading Yesterly away. As they departed, Skaggs said to my parents, “We’ll be in touch very soon, get this whole business worked out.”

Mom gave a tight little noncommittal nod. For the first time in forever she seemed at a loss for actual words. Then I realized why. Misty watercolor memories of George Yesterly, the creepy kid who used to follow her home from school.

A sudden plan blurted from my mouth. “Mr. Yes—what about the Young Auteurs project? The deadline?”

Yesterly looked back at me, haggard. Then he looked at my mother and there was the passing glimmer, the sad smile.

“I was going to bring you my finished entry by four-thirty,” I explained. “Still got some last minute edits. But if you’re going home early…”

“M-monday morning,” Yesterly said. “First thing.”

Score.
Use whatever advantages you’ve got
.