Hit Squad (3 page)

“In what way is it a zoo?” Birgit asked Whisper.

“Well,” Whisper said slowly, his grin reappearing, “this year there's more bullying going on; you see it every day. Some of it's racial, but not all of it. Kids are getting mugged for their lunch money. Girls are just as bad. Sometimes they're worse. An eighth-grade girl was bullied into writing another kid's essay. Can you believe it?”

Peter cut in. “The terrorists are in charge. There are kids who've stopped coming to school because they're so scared of the bullies. My brother went to this school. It's changed since he was here. It used to be such a great place, but now they're letting all kinds of lowlife…” He stopped.

There was an uncomfortable silence for several seconds. Mickey knew just what the others were thinking. They were thinking of how there were no longer any school boundaries. They were thinking of how kids from places like Creekside were now allowed into Grandview. They
were remembering that Mickey was from Creekside.

Whisper said to Birgit, “But I don't see how it's our problem. Why should we care? Do your time and then get out. That's what I say.”

Birgit's face flushed pink. “You make it sound like a prison.”

“That's what it is,” said Whisper, cracking his knuckles.

“Grandview never used to be like this,” said Birgit. “Why should we care, you ask? Well I care because the animals are taking over. The low-class bullies are in charge. Why should we let them rule our lives?”

Whisper, without taking his eyes off Birgit, chomped his teeth into an apple.

Birgit looked at Mickey. “What do you think, Michael?”

He felt a squeeze under his heart. With her beautiful eyes on him he couldn't think of anything to say. It was like his brain had been vacuumed. All he could do was shrug his shoulders. But she was right about the
bullies. Last night he had tried to think of a way of getting back at those two fat slobs who bruised his ear, ribs and ego. And who stole his lunch. His ear still wasn't right.

“The school's a war zone, so what?” Whisper chipped in. He took his eyes off Birgit and glanced at his watch. He reached for his cell phone.

“Okay.” Birgit's eyes flashed. “I'll tell you
so what
.” She drew in a breath. Mickey watched her, mesmerized, unable to take his eyes from her face.

Whisper was also captivated by Birgit's fire. He returned the cell phone to his pocket.

“I called this meeting,” said Birgit passionately, “because I want to do something about this zoo. I called this meeting because I want Grandview to be a normal, ordinary, decent school, the way it used to be. I called this meeting because I want to put the animals back in their cages, because I want the good people—like you and me—to win out over the bad people, the brutes and bullies. Good over evil. Brains over brutality. Class over
trash. That's what I want. I called this meeting because I want you to help me. I want us to form a club, a society, a very special secret society that will help put an end to … to … to this terrible, mindless violence.” She stopped, flushed and out of breath.

The three boys stared at her in stunned silence.

“I want you to help me.” Her words rang in his ears.

Mickey felt his heart twist in his chest. Birgit was dazzling. His mind disconnected from the band room. He traveled back in time to see again that pretty, spunky kid facing down a wrecking bar and Hulk's hundred-and-eighty pounds of mindless muscle.

Birgit was talking again, cooler now.

“My plan is to form a cleanup committee, a group to help put this place back together again. Mr. McCann can't do it.” McCann was the school principal. “The teachers can't do it, so it's up to people like us. We could start by dealing with a few of the jerks, like the ones who beat up Joey Washington.”

“I think it's a great idea,” said Peter quietly. “It's about time something was done!” He paused. “And that's not all.” He glanced quickly at Birgit. “I know a girl who was practically raped by three classmates—animals, more like—in the art supplies closet. She felt like she
had
been raped. I'm not kidding. They were girls, and they were suspended for—get this—
one day
! Can you believe it?” He was angry.

“You better believe it,” said Birgit quietly. She looked at Mickey and Whisper. “The girl Peter's talking about is me. They pinned me down and…” She stopped, all choked up, and looked down at her Reeboks.

Silence.

“So, what do you say?” said Peter. “You
guys ready to help put a stop to it?”

“Put a stop to it?” said Whisper. “Are you kidding? You've been watching too many Bruce Willis videos, man. What can the four of us do?”

Birgit's head snapped up. “Punishment,” she said.

“Punishment?” Whisper's smile melted away.

“They must be punished,” said Birgit quietly. “And it will be a warning to others. Word will get around. It will no longer be the law of the jungle. It will be law and order, decency and dignity.”

“You're out of your mind,” said Whisper.

“No, I'm not. I know I'm right.”

Whisper said, “So we're to be, what? A high school SWAT team? A hit squad?”

Birgit's chin lifted. “A hit squad maybe. But more like doctors. Let me tell you about … ”

Mickey listened. He could sit and look and listen to Birgit all his life and never get bored.

“…my Uncle Helmut,” Birgit continued.

“He's a surgeon. When I was little I asked him how he cured people who had cancer. He told me he had to get the cancer early, before it spread through the whole body. All the diseased cells had to be cut out. None could be left. The body had to be purified and cleaned before the healing could start.”

Nobody spoke.

Mickey could feel goose bumps on his arms.

“We need to be surgeons too,” Birgit said. “We need to cut out Grandview's cancer.” Her eyes moved from Peter to Whisper to Mickey and back to Peter. “It's up to smart, decent people like us to make things work properly. We don't need to wait until we're adults. We can start right now, here at Grand-view High.”

A long silence.

Whisper scratched his jaw and stared at Birgit. Mickey slumped farther down into the collapsed sofa and tried to free his eyes from her face but failed.

A pair of chattering kids opened the band
room door, closed it and went away. Mickey could hear the sounds of kids clattering up and down the basement stairs. Whisper cracked his knuckles.

Birgit leaned back on the desk. She scrambled Mickey's brains by turning the full power of her eyes on him. Then she did the same to the others. She was in total command.

Peter said, “You can count me in, Birgit.”

“Sure, why not?” croaked Whisper. “Count me in.” He wasn't grinning now. Birgit's brilliance had dazzled him too, Mickey reckoned. Also, Whisper liked violence and brutality. Mickey had seen him on the field. It was never enough to tackle and bring another player down. He always had to add the extra sly punch. For Whisper, being in a hit squad would be fun. And being brutal for Birgit would be heaven.

Birgit smiled at Mickey. “Michael? Are you in?”

Of course he was in. Why wouldn't he be in? Birgit was a knockout. He would do anything for her. And wouldn't it be great
to hit Birgit's “animals”? And the Agostino brothers? And hadn't he been waiting a long time for an invitation to Grandview society? You bet he was in.

But he didn't want to seem too eager. He had to play it cool.

“Sure.” He shrugged. “I'm in.”

Mickey rolled his old Carlton racer home down the hill in a daze.

Headlines: Mickey Cord Meets Amazingly Beautiful Girl. Astonishingly Rich and Beautiful Girl Falls for Poor but Honest Creekside Kid.

But he was fooling himself. Birgit wasn't for him; she was too much, too unattainable. And she had Purring Peter. And anyway, a girl
with a surgeon-uncle named after a Viking was simply too much for a kid named after a mouse.

And Mickey didn't think he was as tough or as smart as Birgit thought he was. He was smarter than Heck maybe—who used to be called Hulk—but that wasn't saying much.

He came to a stop in the driveway of Hobbit House. He parked his bike in the shed. Hobbit House was a big old three-story building with cedar shakes and an open front porch.

The shed was full of junk. Mickey's bike was saved from being junk because even though it was an old, beat-up racer he took good care of it. He oiled it every weekend and dismantled and greased the bottom bracket and oiled the chain every couple of weeks or so.

Heck was in the living room, sprawled out on the ragged sofa, watching cartoons on TV with Sammy and Jimmy. The kids treated Heck like a slightly younger brother. Mickey tried to sneak up the stairs, but Heck heard
him and leaped to his feet. He was overjoyed to see Mickey, as usual. If he had a tail it would've been wagging.

“Hey, Mickey!”

“Hi, Heck,” Mickey said over his shoulder as Heck followed him up to their room. Mickey didn't call him Hulk anymore. The Hobbits said it wasn't a nice name and he should be called by his proper name, Hector. The other kids in the home argued that Hector was a dumb name, so they called him Heck, a compromise.

Heck was supposed to be out looking for work. He should have left Hobbit House a couple of years ago, when he was eighteen. That was when the government stopped paying his bills. But the Hobbits let him keep his old room—it was Mickey's now too—when he was released from the minimum-security prison. The Hobbits had been keeping him ever since. Which was real nice of them, Mickey thought, because they weren't getting a penny from the government.

Larry and Annie Hobbs, the Hobbits, ran
the group home. They were from England originally. Mickey didn't know who in the distant past started calling it Hobbit House, but the name stuck. The Hobbits were okay. Mickey had lived in some pretty awful places, but he struck it lucky the day he got sent to Hobbit House. That was about four years ago.

Larry Hobbs was a big, serious man, built like a marble monument, with gray hair. An ex-policeman, he now worked days downtown in the courthouse as a security guard. Most of the time he looked like he was angry about something. Usually his big face crumpled into a frown and his bottom lip pushed out and he would start growling at some country for bombing some other country. Or at the government for promising stuff and then going back on its word. Or at the way people in Africa were being allowed to die of AIDS. Larry reading the
Vancouver Sun
was a kettle coming slowly to the boil. But his anger was never at anyone or anything in the house. He never even got mad at Heck, and Heck was an adult who never looked for
work. But Larry never blamed Heck. “You can only play the hand you're dealt,” he always said.

His wife, Annie Hobbs, didn't say much. Annie had long brown hair with a gray streak in it, usually worn in a braid, and her eyes were a pale watery blue. She was a pretty good cook. She was easygoing, never hassled anyone except Larry. She cooked and cleaned and never complained except for telling Larry to cancel his newspaper subscription before he had a heart attack.

The other kids in the house were Sammy, eleven; Jimmy, twelve; and Candy, thirteen. Candy was the only girl. Sammy and Jimmy were nice ordinary kids who shared a room and went to Creekside Elementary. They stayed out of trouble, mainly because Larry and Annie kept a watchful eye on them.

Candy, however, refused to go to school. She was supposed to be in the eighth grade. She had a big fight about it with Larry a year ago, when she first came to Hobbit House. “I can educate myself,” she told him. “I don't
need no school to tell
me
what to do.”

She borrowed books from the library and read them in the tiny room she had all to herself. Larry accepted Candy's decision not to go to school and defended her against the school inspector. “Is this a free country or what?” he argued.

Candy was nice to everyone, but she was especially nice to Heck. “He can't help the way he is,” she said. This echoed Larry's point of view. Candy watched over Heck like she was his mother.

Mickey threw himself onto his bed. Heck sat on the edge of his own bed, asking Mickey questions. He often did that. But all Mickey wanted was to be alone so he could think about the meeting in the band room and about Birgit Neilsen.

“Hey, Mickey, what do you say?” Grinning, specks of saliva at the corner of his mouth, eager like a puppy.

“I've got nothing to say, Heck. I'm bushed. Leave me alone, will you?”

“Look, Mickey! I mended my jeans, see?
It's an iron patch, that's what Annie said it is, an iron patch. She showed me how to do it, see?”

“Didn't you hear me? I said leave me alone!”

His face fell. “Leave you alone?”

“You heard me right.”

The excitement went out of Heck's face. He stared at Mickey dumbly, then turned away and shuffled out of the room. Mickey could hear him clumping down the stairs, back to the kids and the TV.

Mickey felt like a rat.

Supper that night was fish burgers and salad. Larry always sat at the head of the table, opposite Annie. Annie kept jumping up and down as she hustled back and forth between table and kitchen. Heck and Mickey sat on one side, as usual, and Candy and Sammy and Jimmy sat on the other. It was a long table, with room for a couple more people. Mickey had seen a time when all the chairs were full,
but right now there were only the five kids, if you could call Heck a kid, though he sure acted like one.

Larry waved his fork and ranted on about how big corporations paid hardly any taxes. Except for Candy, none of the others were really interested in that kind of stuff. Not even Annie. But Candy always seemed interested in what was going on. When Larry paused to catch his breath, Candy usually jumped in with a whole bunch of questions.