Unpopular: An Unloved Ones Prequel #3 (The Unloved Ones) (5 page)

And then I hear something that places me squarely in the moment for the first time in weeks. It’s like being dunked in a tub of ice water. I have just caught the ball, and from the backyard, I hear muffled voices in our front yard. Muffled voices, and cruel laughter.

My head turns and I snarl. I don’t know where the anger comes from, but it’s alive and intense in a flash.

“What’s wrong?” my dad asks, and he has enough sense to keep his voice low.

“Someone’s out front,” I say, and start creeping toward the house. He follows me, and inside we find my mom at the living room window, peering out through the curtains of our front window.

She turns to us and holds up a finger to her lips. We have vertical blinds, and the one she has pulled aside with her finger lets in a band of light from the streetlamp. The light cuts down the side of her face, thin as a razor blade, and reflects in her left eye like a star.

My dad and I creep forward and join her. My dad looks through the same crack in the blinds as her. I pull aside a new blind and look out.

There’s a big tree in our front yard, and I see a white streamer fall from a branch. A body is there to catch it, and then he throws the roll of toilet paper back up over another branch. There are other bodies. In the darkness I recognize them as guys from my team. I see Duko. I see Manning. I see our entire outfield including alternates. They have a car parked on the curb across the street. Aaron Johnson is there, keeping the engine running so they can have a quick escape. It’s a nice car. A BMW.

My family watches in silence as they TP our yard. When they pull a can of spray paint out from a sack, I make a move to the door.

“No,” my dad says. It’s a whisper, but there’s nothing soft about his tone. “You stay where you are.”

I hear the spritz of spray paint as they graffiti our garage door. Then the side of our house. And then, last but not least, my truck. There they use neon pink paint to draw a stick figure version of me. I am boiling, and then mortified, as they continue to draw in my father next to me. They draw one of his legs crooked, and then draw in a huge cartoon penis so that he is raping me.

My mom closes the blinds and walks away with her hand over her mouth. My dad at first follows her, but then sees me and stops. He makes me shut the blinds. I hear the guys chuckling outside, and then the sound of their sneakers against the asphalt as they run away. The tires of their car squeals, and the engine roars as they race down the street.

 “Aren’t you going to do anything?” I ask. I am shaking, I’m so angry.

“You’ve done this to yourself,” he answers.

“But they’ve ruined my truck!” I scream.

“Good!” he screams back. “Maybe that will teach you a lesson. Now go to your room.”

I am speechless. He makes a move toward me, and I back down and go to my room. I slam my door and pace.

I hear him talking to my mom in their room. She’s crying. She mumbles something, and he responds, “The only way to fix it is to win the game. That’s the only thing this town understands.”

I sit down on the edge of my bed and put my hands over my ears. I don’t want to hear it anymore. I don’t want to hear people saying what I should do, or who I should be. I just want things to be normal again.

And then I think of what the guys did outside, and the sound of them chuckling. And Aaron Johnson in the front seat of their getaway car. Aaron Johnson, who was supposed to be my best friend. And as soon as I lose a few games, he’s laughing with the guys as they destroy my life.

Why should I win the game for them? Why should I make them my friends again?

They should pay for what they’ve done.

I let my hands fall. Yes, they should pay. If my dad won’t fight back, I’ll do it myself. I wipe the tears from my eyes and turn my head to search the room.

There it is.

Resting against the door is my bat. I get up off the bed and take it in my hand, curling my fingers around the stick. My breathing is still irregular from crying, and my chest is heaving up and down. I pull on my cap, and look to the window over my bed. I’ve already got my shoes on from earlier.

I am about to sneak out, my foot on the windowsill, when I hear a knock on my door.

“Go away!” I shout. I know they didn’t hear my window go up, or else they would have come in without knocking.

I pause a second, hovering on the windowsill, and wait for a second knock.

There isn’t one.

I jump gracefully onto the grass outside my window, and slink along the side of the house. There are fresh tears in my eyes, and the baseball bat is raised, ready to strike. I feel dangerous.

I feel like a creature of the night.

It’s a Wednesday night, but since it’s roughly eleven o’clock, everyone in town is already in bed. I walk away from my house in the center of the street, traveling in the direction of the skid marks from when the guys pulled away in such a hurry.

Once I’m a few houses down, I don’t worry so much about my parents overhearing, and I start to knock the end of the bat along the flowers and fences along the curb.

Mayfield is your average Midwestern town: middle-class, mostly white, conservative and dull. I never minded it so much until tonight. Now the sight of every clean-cut home and minivan only makes me more upset. Who are these people to judge me? What have
they
done with their lives? If they weren’t half so pathetic, they wouldn’t care what happened on the damn high school baseball team. But no. Each little house and each little family seems to think it’s all their
business—

I swing the steel bat and obliterate the mailbox of the Fosters. It was made of wood, and it explodes into a million twirling splinters like fireworks on the Fourth of July. I don’t stop. I’m already breaking down a birdfeeder at the next house by the time anyone turns on a light.

I have the sense to run.

I keep to the shadows on the next block, hiding behind cars at intervals on the tree-lined street and not causing any damage. I need to focus. Where would the guys be? Aaron Johnson was driving, but it wasn’t his car.

At the end of the block, I change direction and head south, toward Bobby Duko’s house.

The night air is cold, and it feels good against the skin of my face as I run. I haven’t gotten to run except in the sun lately, and it feels so much better in the dark. My muscles of my legs warm, and my heartbeat accelerates. It makes everything sharper in my vision. Clearer. It feels good to be completely awake.

Bobby Duko lives on the rich side of town. As I walk down these streets, the houses move farther and farther back from the road as the lawns get bigger. These are the well-to-do of Mayfield: the doctors, the lawyers, the governor. Duko’s parents own some sort of chemical firm that produces an ingredient found in overpriced pharmaceuticals. At least, I’ve gathered that much over the years. I don’t think Duko is smart enough to fully comprehend his father’s job description. But it buys them a nice life.

I stop outside his gate. I look through the bars to his circular driveway that loops in front of his porch. He has one of those plantation-style homes, with a wide porch and thick columns. The tendrils of ancient weeping willow trees sway in the night breeze, and I can smell the pollen from the flowers planted on either side of the gate.

The driveway is empty.

I am about to turn around when I hear a car coming down the street. The gate rumbles and starts to part automatically, and quick as a flash, I dart inside and hide behind a tree. I stand with my back pressed against it, and stay back as the headlights of his car pass over the yard. The car passes, and I peek out from behind the tree trunk.

It’s a nicer car than it looked from across the street. It’s a BMW that probably cost more than my house. Duko is alone. He kills the engine and gets out and slams the door. He doesn’t even bother to lock it. He goes right up the front steps to his house, and shuts the door behind him. A minute later, a light goes on upstairs. I see his shadow pass behind a window with the blind pulled down. Some music starts to play at a low volume, the hollow melody floating into the night, and I take a step out from behind the tree.

I am going to destroy his car. I can already picture myself smashing in his windows, maybe even turning the entire thing over onto its side. Who knows? I’m strong now. I might be able to. I lift the bat over his windshield.

But then I hear something that makes me stop. Upstairs, in his room, Bobby Duko is humming along to the music.

He’s humming.

For some reason, this makes me see red. And then I realize why: he’s humming because he doesn’t care what he’s done. This is just another night for him. He doesn’t care at all.

It’s then that I decide the world would be better off without Bobby Duko. People like Bobby Duko should be killed. This makes perfect sense to me, and I feel my rage bubbling, condensing, and refining into a hyperactive state of mind. There’s an electricity that seems to energize my entire body. My fingertips tingle as they hold the bat, and my mind seems to flat line into a thoughtless concentration. My entire being is focused on this one goal, and it’s more in the zone than I’ve ever felt with sports. It’s like I’ve found my purpose.

I don’t think, but I am entirely aware as I turn toward the house. My senses pick up little things that are so faint that under other, more rational circumstances I might have written them off as my imagination: the scraping of a cricket’s wing twenty feet to my left; the charcoal odor of hot dog that had been dropped on the porch the summer before; the ticking of a grandfather clock; the sound of his mother turning over in her sleep, her cheek pressing against the pillow.

The front door is unlocked. There’s a beep when it opens: the house’s security system. There’s a panel on the wall next to me, and there’s a red dot blinking in a grid of green dots. I close the door, and the red dot turns green.

In the darkness I can make out a spiral staircase. I wait a moment, testing my feet against the wooden floor, and gently lower my body weight from foot to foot so as not to make a sound. Their home is nice: it smells nice. The floor smells like lemon cleaner; I'm sure in the daylight it shines. The staircase is carpeted, and it's easier to stay quiet as I work my way up, one step at a time. I hear the faint rumble of the music from Bobby's room. I am drawn to it in my blindness, like a shark drawn to a single drop of water in a black ocean.

I reach the top of the stairs, and face a long hallway. As I work my way down, I hear breathing behind the doors. I know he has a sister. I can smell her. His parents' room must be the double doors at the end of the hall. I see a door next to it, light coming from the crack under the door, and I creep softly toward it. I am barely breathing, I am so silent, and I reach his room.

Bobby hums inside his room, oblivious to me as I stand outside his door. I wonder what he'd think if he found me. Would he be frightened? I smile, thinking of him frightened, and something in me gets the courage to push the door slightly, so that I can peek inside.

He's sitting on his bed, still in his jeans but his shirt and shoes are off. His iPhone is on the bed, the screen dark. He's leaning against his headboard, reading a magazine.
Sports Illustrated
. It's blocking his face. I wait a moment. His legs are crossed at the ankle, and his feet twitch to the beat of the song. Then he lowers the magazine, and I pull back into the shadows outside his door. He hasn't noticed me, but I can still see him through the sliver of space.

He puts down the magazine on his nightstand, and stretches out his arms. He picks up his phone, scrolls through something, and the music suddenly stops. He reaches over and pulls down on a cord on his bedside lamp, and the room is blanketed with darkness. His phone, the screen illuminated, travels to his nightstand where he sets it down, and then the bed creaks as he settles into it. The light of the phone disappears, and I listen to the sound of his breathing.

He turns on his side, and he breathes with his mouth open. The air wheezes in and out, deeply at first, and then softly, before settling into a monotonous rhythm.

That he can sleep so soundly after what he's done only encourages me more.

Finally, after I am sure he's asleep, I take a step forward, wait for him to react, and when he doesn't, I push open the door. I close it behind me.

There is an excitement in my blood. I am standing in his room, holding a steel bat over his head, and he isn't even aware of it. I could bash in his head right now. He would never even know what hit him. I feel incredibly powerful.

I take a step to the side of his bed, and the floor creaks. Duko's eyes open, and he must see me in the darkness, because he startles back just as I am bringing the bat down on the side of the bed.

He screams out, and falls off the other side of the bed.

"What? No!" he yells. "Stop!"

He puts a hand over his head to shield himself, and I gain some pleasure in the fact that he doesn't know it's me. That I'm able to do this so skillfully. But part of me wants him to know. He should know that I've won.