Rivals (20 page)

“Oh no, you
didn’t,” she said. She couldn’t manage to put as much ironic sneer into her
voice as she would have liked, though.

Maybe they
still had her stuff in a box somewhere, if they hadn’t just thrown it out.
Maybe it was in the principal’s office. The smart thing to do, of course,
would be to just walk away. She’d already taken too long here—any second
now, somebody might—

“We all get
PMS sometimes, Maggot. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

Maggie turned
slowly, a very nasty grin forming on her face. “Hello, Pill,” she said. “It’s
been so long, and I’ve barely missed you at all.”

Jill Hennessey
stepped out of the student lounge just down the hall. “I’ve been keeping up
with your press clippings. You know, the news reports, the articles in the
paper. The wanted posters. I have to admit, I’m becoming a fan. I mean, I
always believed in you. I knew from the start that you had the makings of a
first rate sociopath. But you really sunk to new depths faster than any of us
imagined. In just a few short weeks you went from beating up defenseless old
ladies to robbing banks. Kudos to you!”

Maggie
frowned. This felt wrong. Jill was cruel, yes, and even sadistic. But she
didn’t sound right. She was talking too fast, almost as if she were nervous
about something. As if she was scared.

If that were
the case—at least there was going to be one bright spot in Maggie’s day.
But still, she needed to know what was going on. She ran over to where Jill
stood and grabbed her by the throat. “What do you think you’re doing? Don’t
lie to me.”

“I’m stalling
you, you stupid child. I sent Dana to get your brother and I don’t want you to
run away before he gets here.”

“Big mistake,”
Maggie said.

“I don’t know.
It seems to be working.”

“Lucy!
Please. Just stop a second. Stop and talk to me,” Brent said. He’d been
looking for her all morning. He wanted to discuss what she’d said the night
before, but every time he saw her in the hall she had hobbled away from him.
He was starting to get really frustrated. “What you said—”

“There are
some places even superheroes aren’t allowed to go,” she told him.

“What?”

She glanced to
her left. She was standing next to the door for the girls’ bathroom. “Give it
a rest, Brent,” she told him, with a sigh. “I acted pretty stupid last night.
I said some things I didn’t… mean.” She looked down at the braces on her legs.
“Anyway. I know I can’t compete with Dana. Just—give me some time,
okay? To get over what was really just a childish infatuation anyway.”

“I need to
tell you how good it made me feel when you said… that,” he told her. “How
special it—”

“Oh just shut
up!” Lucy clenched her eyes shut as if to hold back tears. “Shut your stupid
face and leave me—”

“Brent!”
someone called from down the hallway. “Brent! Thank God I found you!”

It was Dana.

“Hey,” Brent
said, his stomach churning. “This isn’t a great time.”

Dana shook her
head and ran over to grab his arm. “It’s your sister. She’s here. Over by
the Home Ec rooms.”

“No way.” He
felt his hands make fists by pure reflex. “No, she wouldn’t…” He shook his
head. “But I guess she did. Lucy, please, just—” he began, but when he
looked at his best friend he only saw the girls’ room door swinging shut behind
her. “Damn it! Okay, okay. We need to be careful here.” He turned back to
Dana. “Go get a teacher, any teacher, and tell them what’s going on. They
need to start evacuating the school. Maybe she’ll just leave quietly, but we
can’t take that chance.”

Dana nodded.
She was still holding his arm.

“You should do
that right now,” he told her, gently.

She nodded
again. Then she ran toward the nearest classroom.

Brent went the
opposite direction—toward the Home Ec rooms. The hallway turned a corner
up ahead. He was running by the time he got there and he couldn’t slow himself
down in time, so he didn’t even try. His momentum carried him into the far
wall, hard enough to crack some of the bricks there. He bounced off and kept
running. By the time he got to the Home Ec rooms he was running so fast that
the classroom doors on either side flickered as they whooshed past him.

“Mags!” he
shouted, when he saw her. “Stop right where you are.”

She was
holding a locker door like a club. She had it lifted over her head, and
somebody was down on the floor in front of her. It looked like she was going
to play golf with their head.
Jesus
,
Brent thought.
That’s Jill.

“Not right
now, baby bro,” Maggie said. She was breathing hard and her eyes were bright.
The prospect of hitting Jill Hennessey was clearly exciting her.

How do you
talk somebody out of killing the most popular girl in school?
Half the kids in Brent’s class would probably cheer.

“Brent,” Jill
said, sounding far calmer than the situation indicated, “will you be an
absolute doll and kick Maggot’s ass for me? I’ll make Dana let you have your
way with her. Whatever you want.”

“You never did
know when to shut up, Pill.” Maggie looked up at Brent. “I don’t suppose
you’d be willing to turn around for a second and not look?”

“Put that
thing down,” Brent told her.

“Do you
remember the last time I let you tell me what to do?” Maggie asked. “No? Me
neither. Because that never, ever happened, and it’s not going to start now.
Hit me if you’re going to hit me—or stand back and watch.”

So he hit her.

Digging his
heels in hard enough to leave small craters in the linoleum floor tile, Brent
launched herself at Maggie with everything he had. He shot toward her with his
arms wide, planning to grab her around the waist and knock her down with his
momentum.

The problem
was—as always—that she knew exactly what he was going to do. He
might be faster than she was, but she already had the locker door up high, held
like a baseball bat. She swung around as he came toward her and hit him right
in the chest with the door’s jagged edge. Brent went spinning away from her,
totally out of control, and as he struggled to get his feet underneath him she
grabbed him by his belt and his collar and body slammed him against a row of
lockers, face first. The lockers caved in, their doors popping open one after
the other. A shin-high avalanche of gym shorts and three ring binders
slithered to the floor.

“Start
fighting back now,” Jill commanded.

“Get out of
here,” Brent shouted. He would have said more but Maggie chose that moment to
grab his hair and haul him backward, out of the ruined lockers, and throw him
against the far wall.

He felt the
bones in his shoulder separate with a drawn-out cracking noise that made him
feel instantly nauseous. He dropped to the floor and thought about how nice it
would be to never get up again.

He could just
turn his head. He could feel his broken bones knitting themselves back
together, felt the muscles in his neck and arm sliding across each other. It
hurt like hell to look down the hall and see Maggie walking away from him.

Without
turning around, she gave him the finger.

That’s it
, he thought, anger filling him up, drowning out the
pain. He pushed against the wall behind him with his good arm. Shoved himself
upward until he was standing. There were no moral quandaries in his head just
then. No worries that he was doing the wrong thing.

He jumped
through the air and came down with both feet on Maggie’s back, right where her
spine met her pelvis. She cried out and bent away from him, dropping to her
knees. He grabbed her under the armpits and hauled her back up to her feet,
intending on spinning her around and knocking her out with one powerful right
hook.

Instead she
brought her head back way too fast. The back of her skull connected with his
nose, smashing it flat. Then she kicked out with her feet and launched both of
them backwards with incredible force, straight toward the wall of the AV
Department.

Maybe she’d
planned on crushing him against the wall. Instead, the two of them went right
through it in a shower of bricks and pulverized mortar.

Brent’s head
spun. He tried to stand up and just fell down to one knee. He rubbed at his
eyes—they were full of brick dust—and tried again. This time he
managed to stand up.

Then Maggie
came at him, swinging an overhead projector like a club. He swerved out of her
way and tried to sweep her legs out from under her on the way down. Instead
she hopped over him and broke through the room’s door with her shoulder.

“No,” he said,
and dashed after her.

Out in the
hallway there must have been a hundred kids standing there, gawking at her.
Their mouths were open. Their eyes were wide. They weren’t moving. The
biology teacher, Mr. Armitage, was trying to lead them away but all they could
do was look.

Maggie just
laughed. “Go Panthers!” she said, and pumped a fist in the air. Then she
turned around to face Brent and brought her hands up like she would grab him
and throw him into the crowd.

“Mags,” Brent
said, picking his way through the ruins of the door, “just hold on a second,
okay? Let them go.”

“Why?” she
asked. “What do I owe them? When I was in trouble, when I was hurting, they
all turned on me. They wrote me off, Brent. They gave up on me.”

“I didn’t.”
He glanced at the crowd and saw that it was, slowly, moving down the hallway,
toward a fire exit. “I tried, again and again, to help you. But you wouldn’t
let me.”

“You couldn’t
do anything. You were too busy doing dirty work for Weathers. And then you
betrayed me.”

“I did not!
He used me!”

“What. Ev.”

The hallway
was almost clear. Only a few stragglers had stayed behind to watch, and
teachers were pulling them away. He just had to stall a couple more seconds.

“I wanted you
to come home. I wanted to fix everything. But you kept hurting people. You
kept making it worse!”

The anger
drained out of her face. Maggie’s shoulders slumped and she suddenly looked
very, very tired. “You get to this point,” she said, “when it’s all broken.
When you’ve gone too far. And after that, everything you can think of just
makes it worse. But you keep doing it because you don’t have any choices
left.”

“That’s
bullshit. You always have choices.”

The hall was
empty, except for the two of them. Okay, Brent thought. Okay, whatever
happens now, it’s alright. Nobody gets hurt but us.

“Stop making
it sound so easy!” Maggie came stomping toward him. “Stop making it sound
like I ever had a chance.” She swung at him, and he ducked under her fist.
Then he kicked out with one leg and caught her in the stomach.

She went
flying, arcing through the air to smash into a trophy case outside the entrance
to the gym. Plate glass smashed and glittered through the air and she screamed
as the shards of broken glass cut through her hoodie and jabbed her in a
hundred places at once. She slid out of the display case and sat down hard on
the floor. Then she reached up and picked a three inch long sliver of glass
out of her hair.

“Give up,” he
said.

Knowing she
wouldn’t.

She reached up
and grabbed a golden statue of a football player from the case, then flung it
at him with all of her strength. He managed to dodge to one side, but the
statue smashed a crater into the wall behind him.

Next came a
championship cup for baseball. It grazed his shoulder and went skittering down
the hallway. He looked down and saw a deep gouge in his arm, welling with
blood.

She grabbed a
smaller trophy next, a piece of granite and chrome that she started to chuck at
him—then stopped. “This is for field hockey,” she said. “I helped earn
this one. How about golf instead?”

Brent threw
himself to the left and then rolled back up to his knees and got to his feet.
She had plenty more trophies to go through, and he knew he couldn’t dodge them
all. He pushed through the doors to the gym and hoped she was mad enough to
follow him. She most definitely was—the doors flew off their hinges as
she burst inside.

He’d had a
second or two to prepare. As she spun around looking for him, he wound up his
arm and then pegged her in the head with a softball.

“Gah!” she
screamed, probably more from surprise than pain. She grabbed her head and for
a second she wasn’t watching him. He charged her and knocked her backwards
into a rack of baseball bats that clattered around her feet. When she tried to
get up again she tripped on the rolling bats and fell in a heap.

Now
, he thought—this was his big chance. He
wrapped an arm around her throat and hauled her upwards, leaning back to get
her feet off the ground. She was stronger than he was, he knew, but if she
couldn’t get any leverage all that strength wouldn’t help her. He could choke
her until she passed out.

“Just stop,”
he shouted in her ear. “Stop! That’s your choice. Stop what you’re doing and
let somebody else help you for once!”

Her face was
turning blue. He eased up, a little, not wanting to choke her to death. Her
eyes rolled toward him and he saw pure hatred there. She wouldn’t ease up if
their roles were reversed.

“I’m so
sorry,” he told her, and tightened his grip. He could feel her trachea start
to collapse.

Then she
reached up with one flailing hand and grabbed his left ear. And pulled.

He felt the
skin tearing, felt the cartilage in his ear crush under the pressure. She was
going to pull his ear right off his head. He felt something give way and blood
poured down the side of his neck. Horrified, he released some of the pressure
on her throat and then—