Goodhouse (23 page)

My next move was to kick out Creighton's knee. He was kneeling beside Owen and I had a perfect shot. We were both getting to our feet, but he was just a second too slow. I slammed my heel into his kneecap. I heard the crunch of collapsing tendons and cartilage. Or maybe what I heard was the sound of shifting gravel underneath my feet. The chatter of a hundred tiny pebbles. Creighton howled. It took no effort at all to right myself, to reach for Owen, to roll him on his side. One of the boys in the circle came forward to pull the gravel out of his mouth. Owen started to heave and vomit.

Davis made a guttural grunt, something to help him regain his breath. I turned just in time to leap out of his way.

“It's always the roommate,” he said. He exhaled sharply to flex his diaphragm. Sweat stung my eyes. As Davis closed the distance between us, I used a basic kick to stop his forward momentum. Any boy at La Pine would have been able to sidestep it, and I was shocked to feel it connect completely. Davis staggered back, his legs shaking, a flash of fear in his eyes. The boys on the ground were calling out advice now, sensing possibility. I couldn't hear individual words, just a rising hiss as if the gravel itself were speaking.

Davis was more experienced and he was stronger; still, it took a moment for him to realize what was going on, to realize that this wasn't just a haphazard flail. I was speaking a different language. I knew what I was doing, and my calm flustered him, more than anything else.

He stepped forward again and I spun to his side, kicking him in the kidneys, which catapulted him forward and made him scramble to stay upright. I kept on him, but didn't get another shot. His arms were too fast and he swung for me, so that leaping back, I was off-balance.

The boys around us were yelling now. Some were standing up. I didn't know where Creighton was. My world had shrunk into this tiny circle. I don't even know how long we fought. It may have been only a minute, but it seemed longer. I didn't go for obvious targets. I knew he'd protect his groin and his face, and he must have had something in his hand, because when it passed over my shoulder, it left a deep cut that soaked my arm with blood. I barely felt it, or rather, it felt like fire and I pulled at the sensation, using it to fuel me, to add power to everything I did.

His face was lit by rage, and the wilder he became, the more calculating and dispassionate I was. But then the fight changed and I was no longer in control. Davis seemed to be everywhere at once. I struck out with my hands, and he knocked me to the ground, where the bigger, stronger boy always won. I struggled to rise, to roll out of his range. I had a fresh cut across my back. I don't know what would have happened next, but two proctors tackled us. “No,” I shouted. I was gasping for breath. “I called it. I can beat him. It's my right.”

“Shut him up,” someone said. I recognized Tanner's voice. He stepped into the circle, wearing his usual black suit. His hair was unkempt, and two of his personal bodyguards stood very close to him, expecting trouble. A proctor twisted my arm behind my back and then eased when I stopped struggling.

“Get them out of here,” Tanner shouted. “Line up and march. I want every dormitory on lockdown.”

Tanner glanced at the gate. A small crowd had gathered. “Jesus,” he said, “that's all we need.” He turned to the boxer. “And what the hell is this? You want to see this on the news? Get him out of here, too.”

Lots of boys reached for their shirts, tugging them on as they lined up. Owen had a swelling bruise on his forehead, and his bottom lip was split, but he seemed otherwise okay. The proctor released me and pushed me toward the others.

“Why are these boys still here?” Tanner asked. “Leave the shirts. March.” And we double-timed it back to the dormitory. The places where Davis had cut me burned, but I was aware of another feeling, too. I'd never been outside without a shirt, not once that I remembered, and now there was the soft, cooling sensation of air lifting the sweat off me. It seemed strange that I should experience this for the first time at the age of seventeen—the hot sun overhead, the relief of evaporation as my body was allowed to function as intended, with no uniform to trap the heat. I must have laughed, or made some sound, because the boy just ahead of me in line turned around with an anxious expression on his face. I reached to feel my chest, the space where the embroidered Goodhouse logo always thickened the front of my shirt. Instead of the chafe of fabric, I felt only the gentle press of my own skin.

 

FOURTEEN

The dormitory was quiet when we returned. A nurse came to our room. He brought his med kit and used a tube of skin adhesive to seal the wounds on my arm and my back. He cleaned Owen up, gave him an inhaler to combat the swelling in his throat. The nurse worked silently as a proctor stood in our doorway. The disinfectant they smeared on my arm stained the skin orange, a color that looked even more inhuman beside the bright white bandage. I pulled on a fresh shirt, but I didn't button it. The air conditioner strained and wheezed.

The nurse left, pulling off his gloves, asking the proctor if there was anyone else. They exited through the common room, and the proctor shouted down the hallway that he was locking the main door.

I stared at Owen. “Are you okay?” I said, and then: “What the fuck were you thinking?”

“Doesn't matter,” he mumbled. “We're dead, you know.”

I did know. You didn't halfway beat your class leaders. And while I was grateful that Owen was breathing, and that I didn't have to endure some immediate consequence, I knew it was just a deferral.

“They'll do it at night,” Owen said. “They'll wait until after the celebration and then we'll get a work detail. And that will be it.”

“Davis won't wait that long,” I said.

Owen stood and dumped the contents of the trash can onto the floor. He knelt and dragged his trunk out from under his bed, then lifted the lid and withdrew a package of crackers, a bar of chocolate, and a can of paint thinner.

“You couldn't beat him,” I said. “What did you think would happen?”

He shrugged. He grabbed the piece of paper with the question mark drawn on it. He tore it into strips and folded it into a cone. “Did you know,” he said, “that the College of Art has separate rooms for everything, like a room for painting and a room for sculpting, and you can order all your supplies and they just deliver them. You don't have to leave the workshop, not ever.”

I lay on my bed and then rolled on my side so I wasn't putting pressure on the wound in my back. “Sounds like campus,” I said.

“They'll even bring your meals,” he said, “right to the room.”

“Why would you want that?” I asked.

“So you don't have to stop working,” he said. “So you're never interrupted.”

I heard shuffling noises in the hallway. Boys were leaving their rooms, quietly congregating just outside our door. Owen uncorked the accelerant and squirted a few drops onto the paper. “Go ahead and report me,” he said. He glanced at the crowd in the doorway and lit the match. Fire erupted from the open mouth of the can, leaping upward, appearing as if by magic. I heard the boys suck in their breath, a collective astonishment. Nobody was going to report us. There was a new feeling moving through the dormitory.

“You want double chocolate?” Owen asked me.

“Triple,” I said.

A soft knock sounded on the wall, and I looked up to see Blake standing at the threshold, having forced his way through the crowd. He was holding a fire extinguisher.

“Authorize me,” he said. I looked at Owen. Neither of us made a move to punch in the code that would allow him access to our room. “I've got something for you,” Blake said. “We haven't been able to drink it since you arrived. We thought you were snitches.”

“We are,” Owen said, but this statement was somewhat undermined by his illegal toasting of a chocolate cracker over a blazing trash can.

“Put the can under the air return,” Blake said. “You'll get less smoke.” To my surprise, he pulled the top off the fire extinguisher. He lifted out a mesh sack and handed it to the boy beside him. Then Blake poured an amber liquid into the sawed-off bottom of a plastic water bottle. He swirled it, picked something out with his finger, and then drank the whole thing. The boys in the doorway cheered.

“Twenty credits a shot,” Blake said. “I got both of you.”

I glanced at Owen, but he was studiously ignoring everybody.

Blake poured another glass. “Apple mash,” he said. “The fucking best.”

I got up and typed in the general authorization code on the wallscreen. I let them all in. There was a feeling that life was somehow suspended. What they were doing was much more illegal than what we were doing, and suddenly it all made sense—how clannish the dorm had seemed, how hostile. The light over the door turned green, and a small whoop went up, a restrained sort of cheer, as they jostled inside, sitting on the floor, the desk chair, any available surface.

I walked back to my bed, and boys leaned out of the way to let me pass.

“The cup,” they chanted. “Give him the cup.” People were bargaining with Blake, promising credits. Somebody passed me the crinkly bottom half of a water bottle. I had to be careful not to squeeze the flimsy plastic too hard and spill the contents. It was half full of a liquid that smelled acidic and slightly putrid.

“Just toss it back,” the boy on the floor beside me said. “Don't taste it.”

It was nothing like the cognac I'd had earlier. It felt like I'd taken a fiery sip from the trash can itself. I tried not to gag.

“Pass it,” the boys chanted. “Pass it.” And someone snatched the cup away, refilled it, and pushed it on toward Owen. He took a sip, gagged, and choked out much of the liquor.

“Another one,” the boys said. “Give him another one.” But Owen couldn't do it. His throat was raw. He passed me the cup. The second sip was smoother. I could even taste the sweet tang of apple underneath the alcohol.

Owen handed out the remaining graham crackers, toasting one for whoever wanted it. I sat on my bed, watching the boys celebrate, buying shots for each other. They were talking over one another and laughing. I was seeing them as if for the first time.

But then the rush of merriment was like a spent fuel. They were missing two of their own. Ortiz was dead, and we assumed that Carter was, too. We didn't know whom the other bodies belonged to, not yet. We drank a toast to the missing. One boy was particularly distraught. He had dense curly hair that made him look like he was wearing a hat. I didn't recognize him or know his name. “To Ortiz,” he said.

And the boys echoed: “To Ortiz.” Several were silent, staring at a fixed point in the air as if trying to concentrate.

“He was amazing,” Blake said. “He jacked that truck. Oh my God, and when they hit the hound house. Boom. Dogs everywhere.”

“That's style,” someone said.

When the evening video played, the whole dorm was still packed into our little room. In preparation for Founders' Day, our wallscreens were showing interviews with various class leaders.

“Give us some news,” someone called.

“Where's fucking Tanner?” another boy said. “They can't lock us down and not tell us anything.”

“That just means it's bad,” Blake said. “Really fucking bad.”

Creighton and Davis appeared together on the screen, sitting side by side, both wearing their uniforms but looking somehow very clean, and a little younger, too.

“I think the most important thing,” Creighton said, “was learning
how
to learn. How to solve problems and become self-sufficient.” Davis said something about giving back to the community, and then I couldn't hear, because the boys in the room were yelling so loudly.

It was a strange interview. Creighton and Davis seemed robotic and foreign. Not themselves. It was who they wanted to be. And that was nobody we knew. Someone threw the plastic cup at the screen and said, “Suck my dick.” Several others elaborated on this idea. Every few minutes there was a toast to Ortiz or Carter.

“The fucking best,” they said.

“To Tacoma,” someone said, and we toasted them, too, all the brothers we'd never met.

When the lights went out, Owen lit another fire. Blake covered our window so the flicker wouldn't draw attention, and then he told us about the ghost of a boy who'd been killed in Vargas in the first days of Goodhouse, when the main building was still being renovated. The boy was allegedly found stabbed to death in the delousing pool, and now that the pool had been covered over, you could hear him scratching from the other side of the floor, trying to dig his way out.

“The dead just want to let you know they're there,” Blake said.

“No,” said Owen. “They want what you have. No matter what it is.”

After everybody left, I lay in bed savoring the dizzy rush of too much apple mash and the contentment that came from feeling momentarily safe. There seemed to be less of a barrier between myself and the world. This was how I'd felt pressing against Bethany, and it was a relief to feel it again, to know that I could. Somewhere down the hallway, a sob was quickly muffled. Last night the Tacoma boys hadn't known that they'd had their last meal, their last shower. I wondered if Carter's ghost would return to the dormitory tonight. I wondered if even now it was in the common room, in the hallway—because of course I believed in ghosts. I'd seen them. But more than that, it was impossible to think that there could really be an ending, a full stop.

Blake had predictably sworn us to secrecy about the apple mash, but it had been a gesture only. We were not going to be around long, and it was entirely possible that as boys who'd challenged and failed, we'd drop another status level. I thought of the doctor's words, his assertion that he could help me if I stayed out of trouble. But I was beyond that now, beyond help.