Delusion Road (7 page)

“It’s pretty clear what you meant, asshole,” said Celia, moving forward to stand on Willa’s other side.

He looked at Willa, his expression flickering into something she couldn’t read. She was embarrassed all over again, but not by what he’d said in English class. By her friends, who’d hijacked the moment and manufactured a whole new drama. She could feel her own face begin to pink. “Let’s not—”

“Willa was humiliated,” Celia interrupted, her voice rising as if everyone in that corridor couldn’t already hear her clearly. The river of seniors leaving the building had slowed to a trickle, but the remaining students were gawking at them, whispering to each other.

“Yeah, humiliated,” echoed Britney. She poked Willa with her elbow. “Tell him, Wills.”

Willa was humiliated, all right—by the spectacle they were making now.

“Yeah, Willa,” urged Celia, “
tell
him.”

Willa glanced at Celia, who was looking not at her but at Britney, her expression similar to the one she’d worn at Subway when Willa thought she’d rolled her eyes. More than similar. It was the same.

Willa turned to Keegan. “Yeah, you humiliated me,” she said, her words barely audible.

He glanced away, seemed to take a breath, then turned to her again. “Look, I should’ve—”

“There’s
lotsa
things you
should
have done,” snapped Britney. “One of them is watching that mouth of yours.”

“First, though,” added Celia, “you’d better learn how things work around here.”

“How things work,” he repeated, his voice now toneless. His expression changed again, but this time Willa could read it. He was pissed. He turned to her. “You’re unbelievable.”

“Me?” she asked. Why?”

“Waiting here with your friends to ambush me. Christ, that’s so middle school. You need to grow up, Jaffrey.”

Willa felt her embarrassment flare into annoyance. After all, weren’t her friends just standing up for her? But before she could say anything, he spoke again. “You’re in for quite a shock,” he said.

“Am I?” She heard her own voice begin to rise.

“One of these days, you’re gonna find out you’re not the centre of the universe.”

She blinked at him, her annoyance churning into something stormier. She could feel Celia and Britney beside her waiting, watching, willing her to respond. So she did. “
You’re
summing
me
up?” she said. “You’ve been here how long? A whole
day
?” Her words ricocheted off the lockers like bullets.

“I had you pegged from the moment we met,” he said. “What you see is what you get, right?”

Willa felt her face work oddly, as if trying to build three expressions at once: anger, indignation, and something more wounded, like the way you’d look after a stinging slap. But before she could reply, he glanced around to see all the eyes in that corridor focused on him.

“Look, let’s drop it,” he said. He turned to leave, heading for the exit.

She felt her indignation grow exponentially, like the algebraic function Shedrand had shown them in one of his frigging slides. Which made her think of the drawing in the new guy’s math notebook. “You need to put out a fire?” she called after him. She hoped he could hear the sarcasm in her voice.

It was like she’d struck him. His stride faltered and, for a second, she thought he would turn. But he didn’t. He pushed through the exit and was gone.

T
hat bitch! Keegan fumed as he burst out the door. The Jaffrey girl had obviously been plotting payback ever since English class, she and her friends waiting for him in the hallway like a firing squad. What had that Celia person said?
You’d better learn how things work around here.
Oh, he’d had that figured out the moment he’d laid eyes on them. And to think he’d been planning to
apologize
to her again!

Reaching the bottom of the steps, Keegan turned and headed for the walkway that would take him around the front of the school. Avoiding the student parking lot meant avoiding another confrontation with Willa Jaffrey, but that wasn’t the reason he was opting for the longer route. He was in no hurry to get home.

Correction: no hurry to get to his
house.
He couldn’t imagine ever thinking of it as home.

Shoving that thought away, he replayed the events of the past few hours in his head, imagining what Forbes might say about his first day at Brookdale High. It wasn’t as if Keegan didn’t understand the importance of the prime directive. Hadn’t Forbes hammered it into his head repeatedly? And hadn’t his father echoed the same thing that very morning as Keegan left for school?

He reached the sidewalk on Gates Avenue and followed the high chain-link fence separating the street from the school’s field, where already dozens of guys stood listening to Coach Cameron. Soccer tryouts were being held this week, something he’d learned fourth period during phys ed. Taught by Cameron, the period had been more of an information session than a class—stuff about safety issues and individual performance goals—and most of the people in his class were guys. Last week, Cameron had sent out an email about the tryouts, but Keegan hadn’t received it, probably because new students weren’t in Cameron’s database yet. Even if he
had
gotten it, though, it wouldn’t have mattered. He couldn’t play.

Three of the guys taking phys ed were Jaffrey’s boyfriend and his two buddies, and all three had given Keegan weird looks when he’d walked in, muttering to one another as he’d passed. Keegan hadn’t heard what they were saying, but after that scene a few minutes ago in the hallway he figured he’d been a hot topic of conversation at lunchtime.

A whistle shattered the air, followed by Cameron’s deep voice shouting commands, and Keegan watched as guys lined up taking turns performing manoeuvres. Balls arced through the air, some of them bouncing across the grass toward the fence.

“Vancouver!”

He turned to see d’Entremont jogging toward him, trapping a ball neatly with his feet and then dribbling it expertly toward the chain-link. “Yeah?”

“You not trying out for the team?”

Keegan shook his head and kept walking.

“Why not?” D’Entremont paced him on his side of the fence,
the ball constantly moving between his feet. “They don’t play soccer out west?”

“They play it,” Keegan replied. “I don’t.”

“Figures.” This from Todd Thomas, who had also retrieved a ball and, like d’Entremont, hadn’t thought it necessary to trot back to Cameron. It was clear to Keegan that neither of them was too worried about not making the team, which didn’t surprise him. Just another example of how things worked around here.

As if proving that point, Jay Underwood loped up, ignoring Cameron’s shout to bring the balls in. “Vancouver not trying out?” he asked the other two, as if Keegan couldn’t answer for himself.

“He doesn’t play,” said d’Entremont.

“Doesn’t or can’t?” Underwood asked.

“There’s a difference?” d’Entremont snorted.

Underwood guffawed, and Keegan wished he’d cut through the student parking lot after all. He’d swallowed entirely too much shit for one day. He lengthened his stride.

“What you see is pretty much what you get,” said d’Entremont, still pacing him.

Keegan forced himself to keep walking. Why hadn’t he listened to Forbes?

“The same go for you?” d’Entremont asked him.

Keegan bit back a reply, kept his feet moving.

“Because if that’s the case, you’re way outta your league here. You know that, right? If I were you, I’d be checking out bus tickets to B.C. One way.”

Keegan’s stride faltered. “If you were me,” he said, turning to face him. He repeated it more slowly—”If
you
were
me
”—and suddenly found himself struggling not to laugh. He failed.

D’Entremont’s face darkened. “What’s so funny, asshole?”

Keegan ignored him and resumed walking, the laughter bubbling up from nowhere and everywhere. Behind him, he could hear d’Entremont fuming—”You’re lucky there’s a fence between us, Vancouver!”—but that only made him laugh harder.

Lucky.

If luck was something he’d ever had, it had run out a long time ago.

By the time Keegan reached his house on Maple Avenue, his laughing jag had ended, replaced now by anger at just about everything—at his father for bringing him to Butt-Suck Brookdale, at Willa Jaffrey and her merry band of dickwads, at his inability to play soccer, at everything. And even greater than all those combined was his anger at himself for doing exactly what Forbes had warned him not to.

Turning into the driveway of the tiny storey-and-a-half that squatted beneath a large maple, he followed the cracked asphalt around to the backyard, along two sides of which the previous tenants had built a high, L-shaped board fence. It connected a corner of the house with the end of what was listed in the rental agreement as a garage but was little more than a shed that leaned to the left, its roofline dipping toward the centre. Tossing his backpack onto the uneven carpet of weeds that had choked out whatever grass once grew there, he opened the door of the shed, went inside, and returned with a soccer ball under one arm, its synthetic leather panels heavily scuffed. Dropping it, he kicked it
directly above his head and, as it fell, he bounced it off his right knee, then his left, back and forth, back and forth, before catching it with the top of his right sneaker, then his left, juggling it from one foot to the other as he moved around the yard.

In the middle of one section of the fence, someone had painted an image of a soccer net, and Keegan turned toward it now, the ball in constant motion. In the distance, he could faintly hear the sounds of the tryouts, the coach’s whistle and barked instructions punctuated by shouts of encouragement, and Keegan let his mind drift, amplifying those sounds, morphing them into the shouts of fans watching players race down a regulation field. He let the ball fall to the ground and dribbled back and forth across the yard, his feet constantly moving as he lunged and spun, the ball seemingly fastened to them by an invisible elastic cord. In his mind’s eye, he pounded toward the net in the game’s final moments, his body a needle stitching through a phalanx of opposing players intent on blocking him. Ahead of him, a powerfully built blond-haired player blocked the net, his face a snarling mask as he waited for Keegan to make his move in the remaining seconds. Keegan could hear the roar of the fans swell in his head as they screamed at him to
TAKE THE SHOT!
and he feinted left before veering suddenly right, connecting squarely with the ball and launching it into the air. His opponent leaped a split-second too late, the black and white sphere now hurtling past his fingertips. The scuffed ball hit the exact centre of the painted image hard, shaking the fence and rebounding with equal force into the face of the child who’d appeared, unseen, beside him.

“
Christ
, Keegan!” he heard his father shout. “Look what you did!”

Keegan turned to see his eight-year-old brother sprawled on the weeds, blood already flowing from his mouth and nose. “Jeez, I’m sorry, Isaac,” he said, kneeling beside the whimpering boy and cradling him in his arms. “You okay, buddy?” he murmured, rocking his brother gently from side to side. He could feel Isaac’s blood leaching into his shirt, but he didn’t give a damn.

“What the hell do you think you were doing?” growled his father, standing over them.

Keegan bit back a
Building a cold fusion reactor, what’s it
look
like
? and continued to rock Isaac, making soft shushing sounds until the boy’s whimpers began to subside.

Evan Fraser knelt on the ground beside his younger son and stroked his hair, but the boy’s attention was already lost to the maple tree towering over them, its leaves fluttering in the September air. Keegan pulled his shirttail out of his jeans and used it to dab at the blood seeping from Isaac’s upper lip, and he was glad to see that the flow from his nose had slowed. “I think you’re gonna live, buddy,” he said softly, pulling the boy to his feet. “Let’s get you cleaned up, okay?” Isaac’s eyes, however, continued to flicker in tandem with the leaves.

Bending down, Keegan put his hand under Isaac’s chin and gently guided it so his brother was facing him. “We’re gonna go get washed up now, Isaac. I’m gonna clean you up, okay?”

The boy’s eyes continued to flicker, but their movement slowed, and he seemed to focus on some point just to the right of Keegan’s face, the closest he ever came to seeing eye-to-eye with another person.

“I’ll do that,” said their father, taking Isaac’s hand and leading him toward the back step.

They’d reached the landing when Keegan spoke again. “It was an accident, all right? I didn’t mean to hurt him.”

His father turned to him. “But you did, Keegan. You have to be more careful.”

Keegan abruptly felt spark inside him the anger that had burned so intensely just a few minutes earlier. “Because of you,” Keegan snarled, “my whole
life
is about being careful!”

His father’s eyes held his for a moment, the look on his face unreadable, then he opened the back door and gently ushered Isaac inside.

Feeling his anger roil uselessly, Keegan retrieved his backpack, then saw the soccer ball a few feet away. More than anything, he wanted to kick that ball as hard as he could, drive it overhead into the maple where, he hoped, the stalk of a branch would pierce it. He liked the thought of hearing the air rush out of it, seeing the synthetic leather collapse around itself, watching it deflate like every dream he’d ever had.

But instead, he picked the ball up and walked toward that piece-of-shit shed, tossed it inside, and closed the door behind him. Turning toward the house, he realized he no longer heard the sounds of the soccer tryouts on the school field.

You could block out anything if you tried hard enough.

I
nteresting, thought Griff as he stared at the Facebook update. The new boyfriend was a surprise, although he probably shouldn’t have been, given how much time had passed since the other guy had been out of the picture. Griff had marvelled at how Talia hadn’t moved on right away, admired her decision to wait, respected her sense of loyalty. He wondered what had changed. Had she learned something new?