Screwups (24 page)

“Fuck Dad!” Jake snarled. “And fuck you too!”

Bobby grabbed him by the collar and swung him against the opposite wall, causing his elbow to punch a hole in the thin plasterboard. Behind Robbie, Danny was standing in the door, watching the scene in horror. He shouted, “Leave him alone!”

Shit!

That was the last thing Jake wanted, for Danny to get involved in a fight with the twins. Danny had no idea what they were like. If Robbie and Bobby had consciences, Jake had never seen evidence of it. They never pulled their punches, even if someone was half their size—like Danny.

As if to prove his point, Robbie shoved Danny hard in the chest and sent him flailing back into the room. Jake couldn’t see where he landed, but his initial anger instantly turned to blinding rage. “Don’t you fucking touch him!”

Robbie was out of his reach, but he landed a good, solid punch to Bobby’s gut. It wasn’t the smartest move. Bobby barely seemed to notice the punch, except to be enraged by it. He yanked Jake forward and threw him back against the first wall, bellowing his fury.

Doors were opening as students poked their heads out to see what the hell was going on. Jake could hear Robbie yelling obscenities at Danny, calling him a “faggot” and a “cocksucker,” but there was no way he could get to them. Not without getting past Bobby.

Jake lunged for the door of the room, but Bobby simply grabbed him by the waist and tossed him several feet down the hall toward the stairwell. Pain jolted through his entire body, as Jake landed near the open door and flipped over once before he came to a stop. Bobby screamed, “Who the fuck do you think you are, you little shit?” He grabbed Jake under the armpits and hauled him out across a short stretch of the hall and into the lounge, where there was more room to fight.

“You think you can take me, asshole?” Bobby shouted as he dropped him heavily on the carpet. “Come on! Let’s see you try!”

Jake had never seen his brother so furious. They’d fought a lot when he was young—with Bobby and Robbie always winning—but there had never been this level of anger in it. For the first time, Jake was afraid for himself. But the thought of Danny alone with Robbie quickly drove that concern from his mind. He was terrified of what might be going on in that room.

D
ANNY
HAD
no idea whether it was Bobby or Robbie who’d come charging into the room and shoved him backward over the end of Jake’s bed. He looked like the handsome redhead Jake had introduced him to before Thanksgiving—Bobby—but they were identical twins, so appearance wasn’t a good guide.

The end of the bed had a short metal railing, which caught Danny painfully in the back of his knees before he toppled over it. Fortunately he landed on the mattress.

Jake’s brother didn’t immediately attack him—not after that first shove. He leaned over the bed, frothing at the mouth and jabbing a finger at Danny, while he went on and on in a practically incoherent stream of consciousness. “…fucking faggot who seduced my brother I should shove my dick so hard up your ass you’d taste shit if you ever touch him again I’m gonna bend you in two so you can suck your own dick you piece of shit cocksucker….”

Danny was terrified. But he was more terrified about what was happening to Jake out in the hall. He heard Jake shout something like “Don’t you fucking touch him!” followed by an enormous crash that shook the walls. There was a dull thud, and Jake’s brother shouted, “Who the fuck do you think you are, you little shit?”

Then the fight sounded like it moved down the hall and out into the stairwell.

“What the fuck is that?” Robbie or Bobby or whoever it was had just caught sight of Danny’s nude male calendar. He stormed across the room and ripped it off the wall, then ripped it in half. “You’re a sick fuck, you know that?”

“So you came here to kill us?” Danny asked him.

For a second, there was just a glimmer of humanity in those blue eyes so much like Jake’s. He seemed confused. Then he threw the remains of the calendar at Danny’s desk, knocking a half-full glass of water over onto Danny’s music history notes. “Fuck you!”

Danny couldn’t recall ever hearing the word “fuck” so many times in one conversation.

T
HE
THROBBING
in his arms and shoulders—not to mention his hip, where it had been dragged across the carpet—was starting to filter through Jake’s anger. But he could still hear shouting coming from his and Danny’s room, so he forced himself to ignore the pain. It sounded like Robbie was beating the shit out of Danny.

“Come on, you little fuckwad!” Bobby snarled, raising his fists. “You think you can take me? Huh, faggot?”

Jake gritted his teeth and spat back, “Just get the fuck out of here, Bobby! I don’t want to fight you. I just want to be left alone.”

“Get up!”

“Dad kicked me out and told me never to come back, so why don’t you do the same? Just leave and you never have to look at me again.”

“I said get up!” Bobby reached down to grab him by the collar and yank him to his feet. Then he let go and drove his fist into Jake’s face, knocking him down again.

Jake hit the floor hard, pain once more shooting through his whole body—especially his head and jaw.

From down the hall, he heard Danny’s voice faintly. “So you’re going to kill us?”

Danny!

Jake heaved himself up and launched himself at his brother, barely able to stagger forward. He latched on to Bobby’s waist and tried to topple him over, but he didn’t have the strength. Bobby staggered slightly but didn’t go down. He just leaned over to wrap his arms around Jake’s waist from behind. When he straightened up, growling like a bear, he had Jake hanging upside down with his ass in the air and his legs flailing. Bobby charged toward the couch in front of the plate glass divider.

Perhaps he’d meant to throw Jake onto the couch, but if so, his aim was off. They fell forward together onto the seat, Jake’s head mashing into the cushion. His stomach hit the back of the couch, and one knee smashed through the glass above it. Large pieces of jagged glass rained down upon them both.

T
HE
SOUND
of glass shattering in the lounge was enough to divert Jake’s brother from screaming more obscenities at Danny. He stopped midsentence and ran out the door. Danny rolled off the bed and stumbled after him.

“Jake!” The other twin’s voice was coming from the lounge, and he sounded panicked.

The scene they burst in on was nightmarish. Jake was draped face down over the top of the couch, not moving. One leg was completely through the empty space that had held one of the glass windows, his pants torn and bloody, and the other leg was bent at the knee, pressed up against the wooden frame. His face wasn’t visible, since his head was wedged against the seat cushion at an awkward angle under his shoulder. There were shards of glass all over him and the couch.

Oh God! No!

Jake’s brother was huddled over him, and he was bleeding from multiple cuts on his arms and shoulders. But Jake had gotten the worst of it. He was bleeding from cuts all over his body, and there was a particularly nasty gash on his back, where his shirt had ridden up and exposed bare skin.

“Jake!” his brother cried, tapping his arm. But Jake wasn’t responding. “I didn’t mean it! Jake! Come on, man, you can’t die on me!”

“Don’t touch him!” Danny’s shout surprised even him. But he no longer gave a fuck about these two idiots. He wasn’t afraid of them anymore. He just knew he had to get Jake to a hospital. “Get away from him before you make it worse!”

Both the twins looked at him in shock, but after a brief hesitation, they obeyed him. Jake appeared to be breathing, when Danny leaned over him for a closer look, but he was afraid to move him in case his neck was broken.

“Nobody touch him,” Danny commanded them. “I’m calling 911.”

He ran downstairs to the phone booth, praying he could hold himself together long enough to dial and give someone the address. Jake looked half dead, lying there in the shattered glass, his head wedged against the seat cushion at an odd angle. But he was tough. Now that Danny had seen what Jake had had to deal with growing up in that household, he realized Jake was even tougher than he’d appeared.

There was no way he could die.

“I’
M
SORRY
,”
the EMT told Danny as he prepared to close the ambulance door, “we can’t take you in the ambulance. You’ll have to drive to the hospital.”

Jake was strapped to a stretcher, but he hadn’t moved and he looked deathly pale.

“What hospital?” There were two nearby—one in Dover and one in Portsmouth.

“Wentworth-Douglass.”

Then the door slammed and the ambulance moved away.

Danny turned around in a daze and ran into Paul, who’d apparently been standing behind him. He gasped and tried to push away, but Paul wrapped his arms around him. Confused, Danny thought Paul was trying to restrain him for some reason, until it filtered through his muddled mind that Paul was actually hugging him. It was the first time Danny had ever known him to deliberately touch someone.

“He’ll be okay,” Paul said.

Danny hugged him back. “We need to find Eva.”

When they entered the lower lounge, they could hear the twins upstairs reluctantly giving their information to the police who’d arrived with the ambulance, interrupted frequently by Sonny, who was having a fit about the damage to the walls and the glass partition.

The last thing Danny needed was to get snarled up in that mess. He led Paul back outside and up the hill and across the handicapped ramp to the side door at the end of their wing. Eva’s room was right next to the door. If they were lucky, she’d be there and they could just grab her and sneak out again.

From the far end of the hall, they could hear one of the twins saying, “I need to go the hospital. I’ve got all Jake’s insurance info.”

“Were you involved in the fight?”

“I didn’t hit him. That was Bobby.”

“Thanks for throwing me under the bus, man,” the other twin grumbled, but if Robbie responded, Danny couldn’t hear what he said.

“All right. Give me your contact information and you can go. We have a few more questions for your brother.”

J
AKE
WASN
’
T
dead, or so Danny, Paul, and Eva were told at the ER. But that was about all anyone would tell them since they weren’t relatives.

Even more infuriating, Robbie had arrived before them, and he
was
apparently being kept up to date, despite the fact that he and his brother had put Jake in the ER to begin with. Danny overheard the nurse at the desk tell him at one point, “Your brother is conscious, but they still need to do X-rays and stitches.” That was something. Though he was puzzled that Robbie was still out in the waiting room—Danny had expected him to be allowed inside the ER.

Robbie spent several minutes on the phone in the entryway, arguing with his parents. Danny could overhear fragments of a conversation between him and his father—enough to reaffirm his conviction that Jake’s dad was a complete dick and didn’t care if his son died or not. Robbie, for all his dickishness, did at least seem upset about Jake being hurt. He hung up with his father and dialed another number. From what Danny could hear, he was talking to Jake’s mom now, and she
was
upset, thank God.

“I don’t know, Mom. He’s being a dick. He told them not to let me in.”

Well
, Danny thought,
Jake’s coherent enough to have some sense, anyway
.

After Robbie was done on the phone, he went up to the desk to pester the nurse again, but she kept pointing to the waiting room until Robbie gave in and took a seat, as far away from Danny and his friends as possible. He refused to make eye contact with them, simply glaring at the floor with his arms crossed over his chest.

About forty-five minutes later—the time it took to get from Concord to Dover, if someone didn’t mind speeding a little—Jake’s mother walked into the ER. She’d pulled her thick blonde hair back with a barrette, and with the expression of barely-controlled anger she wore, she reminded Danny of a pissed-off Lauren Bacall.

Robbie got up and went to speak to her. She made eye contact with Danny while Robbie was filling her in, and then she went to the desk to ask the nurse something. The nurse looked at her ID and, though she kept her voice too low for Danny to hear what she was saying, it looked as if she was insisting that Robbie had to stay in the waiting room. She pointed at him several times, and seemed kind of pissed off at him, which by now was probably the case. Mrs. Stewart held up a finger for the woman to wait a moment and then, to Danny’s surprise, walked over to him.

“Danny?” she said, smiling at Eva and Paul but not taking the time to introduce herself. “I’m going in to see Jake now. Would you like to come with me?”

He jumped up from his seat. “Yes! Thanks, Mrs. Stewart.”

“Mom,” Robbie protested, “he’s not gonna do any good back there.”

“You’re the one Jake ordered them to keep out,” she replied coolly. “And I’m pretty sure he wants to see Danny. So you can either wait here or head home.”

Robbie glared at Danny and set his jaw stubbornly. “I’m gonna go pick up Bobby. Then we’ll both come back here.”

“Fine. I’ll ask the nurse to have someone flag me when you get back. Come along, Danny.”

Now that he was with Mrs. Stewart, the nurse at the desk appeared to have no issue with Danny going inside the ER. They were escorted into a large room with a nurses’ station in the center and rooms with curtained entrances along the outer walls. Jake was in one of these in the far corner, propped up in a bed, pretty much naked except for the sheet covering his waist. The cuts had been washed, stitched in a few places, and bandaged, but he still looked awful. The bandages were
everywhere
, and he looked ghostly pale.