Phoenix Island (9 page)

Ross just shook his head, looking like he’d received a death sentence.

“Hey, look on the bright side,” Campbell said. “From what they’ve said, we’re almost finished with Red Phase.”

“Red Phase, Blue Phase, what’s the difference?” Ross said. “We’re still here, aren’t we?”

Carl nodded. “Sounds like silver stars and gold stars back in elementary school. One more way to control us.”

“Correction, orphan,” Ross said. “One more way to motivate us.”

Carl laughed.

“I don’t know,” Campbell said. “According to Rivera, Blue Phase is way better. More free time, better training. They even teach us survival skills.”

Ross groaned. “Survival skills? More army stuff?”

Campbell shrugged. “I guess.”

“Well, I hope they leave out combat training,” Ross said. “Don’t get me wrong. I love a good game just as much as the next guy, but I’m not entirely comfortable with the notion of some of these guys getting weapons. Davis’s gang? Or Decker? That guy’s a psychopath.”

“Psychopath,” Medicaid mimicked from the gloom. He giggled and clapped, then went back to muttering.

Campbell’s face went serious. Quietly, he said, “Keep an eye on that kid. If anybody’s going to snap, it’s going to be somebody like carrottop over there,” and nodded toward Medicaid.

Ross made a face. “Yeah, every time I see him, I think Rambo.”

“Joke if you want,” Campbell said, “but I’m serious. Even a strong person has his breaking point. Kid like that, he’s weak. He can only take so much. They keep pushing, something has to give.”

“On that note,” Carl said, packing away his polish and rags, “I have to write up tomorrow’s schedule.”

“Put me down for sofa duty,” Ross said. “Then I’ll inspect the female barracks for the rest of the day.”

Carl laughed. “Right.” He secured his things and headed down the hall, where he locked himself in the book man closet. He put the whiteboard and marker on the desk, just in case Parker came knocking, then pulled Octavia’s note from his sock. Where could he hide it? The drill sergeants were always inspecting their bunks and lockers, and they could shake anybody down, anytime, so his only shot was here, in the book room. One quick look around the room told him it wasn’t much of a shot.

Just flush it down the toilet
, Carl told himself. If someone found the note, he’d get in trouble, and so would Octavia. It was stupid, but they would. And they’d be kept apart, too.

He looked at the note and warmed at the sight of his name in Octavia’s handwriting. No way was he going to destroy it. He couldn’t let the drill sergeants take everything from him.

Where to hide it, then? Not in the desk. The drill sergeants probably checked that. The file cabinet was locked. Under it? No. They might move it to wax the floor. He looked around the rest of the room and was just about to call it quits and flush the note when he looked up and saw
the silver ductwork close to the ceiling. If there was space between the duct and the ceiling . . .

He slid his chair under it, climbed on top, and stood on his tiptoes. Between the duct and the ceiling was a small gap—the perfect spot to hide something.

In fact, someone already had.

Atop the duct, blanketed in dust, sat a tube of papers held by a rubber band. He set the note on top of the duct and grabbed the papers. He started rolling the rubber band. Brittle with age, it snapped. He unrolled the pages—there were several—and saw small, neat handwriting cramming the lines. The top of the first page read
Book Man in Hell
. Below this, he read
Dear Diary
.
Weird
, Carl thought.

The doorknob rattled. “Hollywood!” a voice yelled outside.

Carl’s heart leapt in his chest. Parker. Carl heard keys.

He jammed the scroll down his sweatpants, jumped off the chair, and said, “Yes, Drill Sergeant?” just as the door swung open.

“What are you doing in here, Hollywood, taking a nap?”

“No, Drill Sergeant.”

“Drop and give me forty for making me wait. Then come to my office and pick up a stack of crap to file.” As soon as Carl dropped down, Parker crossed the room and stepped on his fingers with heavy combat boots.

Carl kept pushing. “Zero-one-seven. Zero-one-eight.”

He heard Parker unlock the file cabinet. “You’ll file this stuff in the appropriate folders. I want it done tonight. You finish, push this tab. Eyeballs, Hollywood!”

Carl stopped pushing and turned his head.

“You’re dumber than a bucket of mud,” Parker said. He pointed to a knob near the top of the cabinet. “Think you can remember to lock this when you’re done?”

“Yes, Drill Sergeant.”

“You’d better, or I’m smoking the whole platoon in your honor—what are you doing taking a break? I didn’t tell you to stop pushing. Start again.”

“Yes, Drill Sergeant,” Carl said, gritting his teeth. “Zero-zero-one.
Zero-zero-two.” Forty more. Big deal. With all the new muscle he was packing, he could rack out two hundred.

“Oh, and Hollywood, just because I’m being a nice guy, don’t think I forgot you trying to make me look bad in front of First Sergeant Oteka.”

Carl kept pushing. There was no point denying it. Parker already knew it wasn’t true.

Parker said, “You’ll pay. And I’m not talking push-ups and front-back-go. You got . . . oh . . . about a week, I’d say. Then we’ll be even.” He strutted off.

Was Parker going to ship him back to the States? Carl hated Phoenix Island, but he had to stay. If they sent him back, he’d go straight to prison, and a boy in a prison would have to fight every day. He’d spend the rest of his life in solitary confinement, nursing broken knuckles and losing his mind.

Carl finished his forty and followed Parker to the drill sergeants’ office, feeling the scroll start to slip down his leg. What if Parker spotted it?

He managed to get to the other office, where hanging on the door he noticed the platoon photograph. Even at a glance, he recognized faces: Campbell, Octavia, Davis. In the middle of the girls, black ink obscured one face.
That’s the girl who broke her leg
, Carl thought, remembering the word the drill sergeants had used:
recycled
. The poor girl would have to start all over again with the next batch of orphans.

Parker opened the door. Carl heard the light hum of air-conditioning and felt the cool air. The hairs along his forearms rose to attention in the chill. “There,” Parker said, and pointed toward a stack of papers.

“Yes, Drill Sergeant.” Photographs of former platoons covered the wall behind Parker’s desk. Nearly every face was blacked out. Did that mean they’d all been recycled? Carl couldn’t afford to fail. His whole life was riding on making it.

Carl felt the scroll slip the rest of the way to the bottom of his pant leg. It wouldn’t fall out, not with his pants tucked into his boots, but he hoped Parker didn’t notice the bulge in his ankle.

“What are you looking for, Hollywood? This?” Parker reached into his shirt and withdrew Carl’s medal. He’d been wearing it around his
neck. Smiling, he twisted the medal so it winked in the light. “You know what this is?”

“It’s my medal, Drill Sergeant.”

“Wrong,” Parker said. “It’s a symbol. It stands for everything I hate about showboats like you. It’s all shiny and flashy, and you hold it up, and everybody oohs and aahs over it . . . but what’s it worth, really? Huh? What’s it worth in the real world?”

“Can I have it back, Drill Sergeant?”

“I’ll tell you what it’s worth, Hollywood. Two cents, that’s what. Just like you. Oh, you think you’re special, but you’re nothing. Two cents.” He dropped the medal back into his shirt. “Get out of my office.”

“Yes, Drill Sergeant.” Carl picked up the papers and left, trembling with rage and wanting nothing more than to go back in there, show Parker just how special his fists were, and rip the medal off his stupid neck. He carried the stack of papers back to the book room, dropped them on the desk, and closed and locked the door. He climbed onto the chair, pulled the scroll from his pant leg, and stashed it back on top of the duct, his hands still shaking with anger.

He saw Octavia’s note sitting in the dust. Why couldn’t they just leave this place?

He hopped off the chair and threw several fast combinations, picturing Parker’s face cutting and breaking under his punches. Why did the guy have to push? The pencil to the leg, the Hollywood crap, the threats and insults, the medal . . . Carl ripped another combination, liking the feel of his new muscle mass. He’d expected it to slow his punches, but it hadn’t. They felt strong. They made Carl feel a bit better.

The papers he was supposed to file turned out to be medical. Height and weight, eyesight and hearing. Times and dates for their many inoculations. He opened the top drawer and started distributing paperwork into the folders, which were arranged in alphabetical order. Most were pretty thick. The first file read
ALVAREZ, JUANITA
. Stapled inside was a picture of the girl with the birthmark on her face.

His file was fat. No surprise there, considering how many times he’d gotten into trouble.

Stapled to the inside cover was a picture of him back in middle
school. Sixth grade, he thought. A plain black T-shirt, a poor kid’s haircut—the bangs chopped straight across his forehead—and a little bruise under one eye.

Underneath the photo, someone had written
National Boxing Champion
.

He flipped through the pages, creating a choppy slideshow of school records, disciplinary write-ups, and court reports. So much paperwork, from so many places: counselor logs, psych evals, and feedback from teachers, foster parents, and group homes. One from the facility at Lake Nockamixon, where he’d spent a few months during seventh grade, said, “Carl is well behaved. Carl is respectful to staff and other residents. Carl says he would like to be a police officer when he grows up.”

Carl says he would like to be a police officer when he grows up
. Man . . . that had been written a long time ago, back when he still told people stuff like that. He chuckled . . . then, out of nowhere, felt strangely sad.

He flipped ahead.

The newspaper clippings about his dad surprised him but not as much as the articles detailing Carl’s boxing victories. He grinned at an old picture of himself, sweaty and smiling, a big trophy in his wrapped hands, standing next to good old Arthur James. Must have been nationals, he thought, because Arthur was actually smiling . . . a little.

It was cool flipping through these, but strange, too. Boxing articles didn’t seem to fit this kind of folder. Whatever.

He skimmed on. More charges, more court orders, more placements, his life beginning to take on an almost scripted pattern.

He shook his head. So much time gone.

Then he came to a page labeled
SUMMARY SHEET
, which looked like just that: a stack of bullet points listed dates, charges, and institutional placements. Very bare-bones, no real details. Someone had highlighted all the charges in green, and neat but blocky handwriting in the margin—the same writing, he realized after a second, that had noted his national championship under that first picture—read, “A single charge, repeated ad infinitum.”

At the bottom of the page, the same handwriting—this time in red
ink, not black—said, “Relocate to Idaho facility, then route as necessary to penultimate placement in North Carolina.” Beside this, a date, which he read . . . then reread.

The note, which to Carl sounded less like a summary and more like an instruction, dated back to December.

Weird.

He hadn’t gone to Idaho until February, hadn’t even gotten into the trouble that landed him there until January, but whoever wrote this was talking about Idaho and North Carolina way back before Christmas.

That made no sense.

Unless . . .

Odd misgivings warbled through him.

Something weird was going on. Really weird.
Bad
weird.

The date suggested that whoever wrote this was either psychic or had been planning his placements months in advance. . . .

Or
, he thought,
somebody just wrote the wrong date. Duh . . .
Over the years, how many people—cops, court clerks, guidance counselors—had messed up his paperwork? A bunch. One time, cops dropped him at juvie, and the intake officer looked at him funny and said, “Carla? You don’t look like a Carla to me.”

Carl grinned, feeling stupid—a simple clerical error had him imagining psychics and conspiracy theories—and shut the folder. He’d have another look later. It would be fun to reread the boxing articles, but he didn’t have time now. The last thing he needed was Parker coming back, yelling at him for taking too long.

But maybe he did have time for one more indulgence. . . .

Finding “Gregoric, Octavia Grace,” he opened the folder and smiled at the photo inside. She looked just as he’d remembered her from the first day: sad, scared, and stunned . . . yet utterly beautiful. And there was her hair, thick and dark, with that white patch in the front. Flipping through the folder, he saw school records with pictures going back to kindergarten, where she looked cute and happy. In early photos, she smiled wide, and in some of them, she was missing teeth and looking over-the-top happy, dimples and all, but in the sixth-grade photo, she didn’t even smile. This was the year she’d gotten the white
spot in her bangs. Maybe that was why she didn’t look happy. Or maybe something bad had happened then. He’d heard of people’s hair going white like that, from fright or whatever, but he didn’t know if it could really happen.

This was crazy. If Parker came in, he’d feed Carl to the sharks. Besides, it was kind of weird, looking through her stuff like a stalker or something. Ready to move on, Carl froze when his eye caught a newspaper clipping in her file, its front-page headline announcing
GIRL FOUND GUILTY IN ARSON DEATH OF STEPFATHER
.