Joyland (33 page)

“What happened with the girl?” Kenny demanded, shifting from foot to foot.

“Hell if I know. Anytime I see him since then, we’ve always got some words. I wasn’t exactly a runt myself, but shhh-i-i-i-i-t, I couldn’t see out of this eye for a week.” Adam raised a hand at it. “I can tell you one thing, he and Genny weren’t science partners again.”

Kenny checked his digital watch. Chris could feel his sweat turn cold.

“I’ll tell you another thing,” Adam said, clearing his throat and pointing his finger at the imaginary chest of an imaginary person in front of him, “I see that guy, it’s war.”

The plan was far simpler than any of them wanted to admit. When they’d originally come up with it, Chris and Kenny had done away with all unknowns — reduced it to something foolproof and easy: lay in wait for Marc, knock him off his bike, and take a swing at him. It wasn’t noble, but the element of surprise had excited them.

Mounting their bikes, they whirled over gravel again, around the corner, loop-the-loop past the park. Only this time, the sidewalk cracks that vibrated up through Chris’s wheels made his stomach uneasy. The cul-de-sac where the Bretons lived was a pale loose mouth; Running Creek Road straight as a ruler, just there, around the bend, on the other side. Dean and Reuben took up posts on the corner, where they could see all the way down St. Lawrence Street. The other boys fanned out quickly. David and Kenny hid behind the hedges on the left. Adam took shelter to the right. A rusty, chancrous van was parked conveniently just beyond the lip of the crescent.

Chris threw his bike on the lawn. His only job was to tell J.P. he was heading over to the school for registration. He shouldn’t do it — he knew he shouldn’t — it would only cause more trouble later. It was too late. The door opened.

“Hey man.”

Chris swallowed. “Ready to go?”

“Good a time as any.”

“Your brother coming with us?” Chris had got it out. His first line.
It sounded good
, he thought.
It did, didn’t it?
He congratulated himself — an inaudible flurry of self-doubt and backslaps.

“Yeah, right.” J.P. scoffed.

“I thought he could drive us. . . .” Chris fumbled from the porch. The words hummed on his lips, burned into an invisible swelling, as if a fist had tried to force them back in.

“He doesn’t get his car ’til tomorrow. Besides, you got your bike right there.” J.P. took off his ball cap and swatted it against his leg. “Hold on.”

J.P. disappeared down the hallway to Marc’s room.

Too late, Chris realized that on any other day he would have followed him in. He stood just inside the doorframe under the flat-line smiles of Mr. and Mrs. Breton. Suspended at eye level, the 16x20 print shone with Windex: against the dark wood panel of the foyer a dark wooden frame. In it, younger versions of J.P. and Marc stared at Chris with adolescent penny-candy grins. Marc’s hair was as unruly as J.P.’s, his scalp not yet sheered mean. It had only been six months since he shaved it, and now Chris couldn’t picture him any other way. Even J.P. seemed alien here. The excitement of having a family photo taken had snuck into J.P.’s face, his sweatshirt hood crimped along the seam where it had been pulled tight by a nervous hand. His neck burst from it, taut and beaming. Down the hall, Chris could hear them, their voices through the wall.

It was taking too long. He glanced back over his shoulder, Adam’s bike tires obvious beneath the van. He wondered if Marc had the same angle, could see them from the bedroom window.

Chris heard J.P.’s voice lift through the wall, his pitch heightened. “Yeah, but —” The words stopped short. The bedroom door opened.

“Get out of my way, limpdick.” Marc brushed past Chris, left a trace of elbow under his ribs. Marc made his way out of the house, the loose screen door swinging back, banging the frame.

J.P. stuck his hand out, stopped it before it could hit again, pushed it open. Without saying anything, J.P. gestured for Chris to pass him, his Adam’s apple bobbing like an egg.

Chris’s footsteps jolted through his legs as he bounced down the porch steps. The world felt unnaturally flat. Chris moved out into the yard. From where Chris stood, already Marc looked smaller.

Marc threw a hairy thigh over the crossbar of his bike in a smooth, easy motion. Coasting down the driveway, every gesture entrenched with strange arrogance, Marc’s shoulders broke out of the long black muscle shirt. He leaned back. Chris grabbed his own bike and launched onto it. Marc’s hand fumbled assward, perhaps to grip the back of the seat as he rode. Shirt hem flapped above relaxed-fits. He instantly tucked it back in place over a hard lump of hairbrush. He neared the mouth of the crescent. The bike tire tick-tick-ticked over the cement.

Chris rose up on the bike, his butt hovering above the seat as he careened forward. He couldn’t say whether J.P. followed or not, whether David or Kenny were appropriately stationed, whether Dean and Reuben had abandoned the mission entirely or were currently parked on some distant piece of curb, watching. When Chris looked back he imagined the moment would rubber wheel its way home without incident, would press the handbrakes before follow-up. But it didn’t. Chris’s throat and head infused with heat. Marc groped at his back pocket again and this time Chris could see something there, oblong and silver.

Chris opened his mouth to yell — to stop it. Marc’s hand wrapped around the thing in his back pocket, which Chris saw very clearly now. It was not a brush because, in spite of the Bretons’ foyer photograph, Marc had a quarter-inch buzz cut. Before Chris could make a sound beyond an inhalation, Marc’s front wheel shot past the snout of the van.

Adam was standing there, his own bike already resting on the pavement. He reached out. There was a swerving of bodies and bike as Adam descended. On the other side of the circle — what seemed a long way away — David and Kenny rolled out to watch. Silence battered Chris’s ears. He braked instinctually.

Swiping an arm around Marc’s neck, Adam pulled to topple him from the ten-speed, managed a good jab. His fist cracked against Marc’s face in a splinter of knuckle and skin. Marc’s bike seemed to float. Marc reached backward again — even as he began to waver, even as his head snapped. His fingers ratcheted the thing from his back pocket.

It was a handle. Even before it came completely into sight, Chris knew that it was longer than a girl’s hand and as heavy as cast iron. Marc’s back pocket slowly unsheathed the thing — the intricate
Star Wars
light sabre replica, suddenly a basic piece of lead pipe. Chris opened his mouth again to warn them. He opened his mouth. There was no sound.

Chris realized he hadn’t moved, wasn’t moving, was in fact the only one who had stopped dead. A thick fire reached a thick hand through Chris’s throat. With one leg raised on the pedal, the other flat on the ground, Chris watched it all bloom, the colour of blood on concrete.

Marc’s bike clattered to the ground and he pitched with it straight into Adam, his hand thrusting forward suddenly. The glinting nub of metal smashed into Adam’s open mouth. A loud crack shook the air — the shock of teeth and bone exhumed from skin and gum. Before the red bleared downward, Marc had brought his fist back for a second blow.

The hilt of the sabre landed with a dull thud against Adam’s temple. Adam toppled into a swatch of red. His forehead palpitated with fleshy matter, burst like an overstuffed cushion. There was a warm, soft gush — a rush of things Chris would later claim he had not seen.

Chris yelled, but he didn’t know it. He heard the sound, but it had no words and he didn’t recognize it as his own. He reached out and caught Marc’s arm. He did it without even knowing he was close enough to do so; one minute he was standing, straddling his BMX, watching, and the next he had edged forward and intervened. Marc jerked back hard, the metal flying out of his grip. It rang across the concrete. Then he flailed out. His knuckles grazed hard off Chris’s jaw. Chris reeled backward, his bike toppling.

“What are you
doing
?” Marc spat on the road, glared at Chris, as if he was responsible for the punch he had just been dealt. Marc’s face was like a hammer, one small, bright freckle of blood clinging to his cheek. Marc picked up his ten-speed, swerved the front tire around one of Adam’s bent legs. Shakily, he swung himself over the crossbar and rode away without taking his hands off the handlebars.

Chris stepped over his bicycle tire, stood over the body. Blood rang in his ears and he tasted it along his gums.

“Are you okay?” he shouted more than once, although he knew no one could answer.

His knees gave out and he touched Adam’s shoulder to steady himself. Chris crouched over the boy that lay in the road.

[Continues from “Berzerk,” Player 1, page 229]

Chris had never known that being stuck in a room could be so excruciating. He had always been sent to his bedroom as punishment, but in his room he had all his stuff. This was something else entirely. The boys sat on a bench, partitioned off from the main room by brick and thick glass. None of them spoke. In the end, Marc broke the silence, far away, down the hall.

They could see him as he was brought in. J.P. stood up and went to the window that looked out on the hall. The rest of them remained seated.

David jabbed Kenny in the ribs. Kenny didn’t respond. He gaped at Chris, as if unaware he was being prodded. From his left side, Dean glared at David, pushed over on the bench away from him, into the space J.P. had just vacated. On the other side of Chris, Reuben stared straight ahead, bouncing his knees anxiously so that the whole bench jiggled.

Kenny had been the only one to keep his cool after the blow. The rest of them had stood staring down at Adam. Wretched David, ever cool, even tried to help him up, saying, “He’s fine. It’s nothing.” Although after David reached out to touch Adam’s hand, he turned and walked away, swearing, shaking his fingers as if trying to get something off himself.

Kenny had run straight into the Bretons’ house for the phone, hadn’t thought twice about throwing open their front door and dashing through their hall. Now, the shock reversed its effects: David scoffed behind J.P.’s back; Kenny zoned out; and Chris — all Chris could think was
How had he known?

Chris shuddered. It didn’t seem to matter that he hadn’t particularly liked Adam, or that he had only known him for the span of one summer. Chris rubbed his jaw, tentatively. Where Marc had socked him, a small thistle of pain beneath the bone. With the bench jiggling from Reuben’s bouncing, the wall behind Chris’s head statically clutched at hairs.

Escorted by two officers, Marc walked past them. He yielded like a wax figure. Where Adam had struck him, a white fist-shaped mark had begun to puff into four distinct spots, the knuckles imprinted in a clean manifestation of their now-deceased owner. It took Chris a minute to process the sound that came out of Marc. He was choking on it, an octave too high, as if he had sucked helium from a valve. The dreadful squalling seized the station. Teeth that refused to open, refused to let the poor noise go, stopped it short.

J.P. put a hand up to the glass, as if to knock on it when Marc went by, but as he came closer, J.P. stiffened. He stopped short, his hand a half-inch away from the partition. His brother passed.

Chris put his head down and lay an arm across his torso. Beneath him the bench thrummed. A spike of bile jolted in Chris’s throat. He willed it back down. Already he knew — in his brain, he knew — that they would be sent home soon enough. A few questions. A stern talking-to. They were accessories, J.P. even more than Chris, but J.P. would be fine. Even Marc would be fine. At most, they’d send him to a counsellor. It was a clear-cut case of self-defence. Adam had attacked him; Marc had fought back.

But that didn’t matter.

Unwilled, it came to mind, set to repeat. A terrible theme composed of heat. Hand scrabbling backward. Handle unsheathed. Muscles plunging into red. How did it happen so quickly? His idea, however backward it had gone.
His
.
He heard Adam say to no one in particular, “I see that guy, it’s war.” He heard Marc say specifically to him, “What are you
doing
?”

Sweat fled Chris’s forehead and fell to floorboards between his white runners. A faint pink residue still clung to the brand new rounds of rubber. From shoe to floorboard, imprint of dead boy blood.

A series of breathy hard-kicked hiccups began inside Chris. He struggled to swallow them, one by one, back down.
Don’t make me go to the funeral
, he thought like a litany.
Don’t make me. Go.
He swallowed, gulped again.

Outside the holding room, the hallway clock continued its parade of hesitant steps.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR & ILLUSTRATOR