The Rule of Won (8 page)

Any luck and maybe he'd hate it so much, he'd leave. Trying to be friendly, I nudged him. “It tastes better if you pour half off and put in lots of sugar. Well, at least then it tastes like sugar.”

We got our lousy drinks, mopped up a table with some napkins, and sat. Vicky nudged me a few times to get me to say something, but really, I didn't have anything I wanted to say. This left her to get the conversation rolling, which I have to admit, she did pretty well.

“I know Caleb and I were . . . pretty happy when we heard about the grant, but what did it feel like when you found out? I mean, you began the Crave.”

Ethan smiled. He wasn't looking at me or Vicky but at some invisible point off in the distance. “What did it feel like? It felt like being the Eagle of Hell.”

“Okay,” I said. “And this means?”

He tightened his face and then relaxed it. “Near the academy I used to attend there was this old amusement park, Happy Planet.”

“I remember that place,” Vicky said. “They shut it down when a little girl died on one of the rides. She unbuckled herself and stood up on the Whirl-A-Gig.”

Ethan nodded. “RideCo, a huge corporation, bought up the property and planned to reopen it. While they were fixing it up, we used to sneak in and hang out at the arcade. There was this old machine that still worked for a dime. It tested your strength by giving you a shock when you held on to this metal
grip. It'd score you depending on how much of a jolt you could take. The bottom level was Old Lady, the top Eagle of Hell.”

“Shock?” I asked. “Like with electricity?”

“Yeah,” Ethan said, getting excited. “I think it was broken, or they didn't have safety regulations when the thing was built. It felt like this wild vibration, starting in my thumb, then my hand, elbow, arm, shoulder, even my chest, until my whole body felt shot through with the juice. But I held on until I reached the eagle. I was the only one who ever did that. That's what it felt like when we got that grant, reaching the eagle.”

He clenched and unclenched his hands a few times. “My palm had these red marks on them for a week,” he said with a laugh.

“Wow,” Vicky said.

I couldn't figure out if she was impressed or just weirded out like I was.

“Geez, Ethan,” I said. “Some people might think it's kind of stupid to hang on to something that's hurting you.”

He twisted his head sideways and toward me, then said, “That depends on what you get if you do, Caleb.”

Trying to look cool, he picked up his coffee and knocked some back, but I guess it was even worse than he expected. He gagged.

“You okay?” Vicky said, reaching over and patting him on the back.

“Fine,” he said between coughs. She stopped patting and started rubbing him, giving him a little massage. I may have just been imagining that, but I was seething with jealousy.

Still coughing, Ethan reached into his backpack and pulled out a handkerchief. As he did, his hand snagged a sheet of paper that fell out and went sliding across the floor. I'm all about picking up other people's papers, Moore's or Ethan's, so while he finished hacking, I snatched it up and happened to give it a look.

It was a drawing of the school. Not the way it looked now, more the way it might look if it got all fixed up. There was even a new garden on the side. It looked professional, but done in an old sketchy style. I was impressed, even if Ethan was stealing my girl.

“You do this?” I asked.

Vicky leaned over. “That's amazing,” she said.

Ethan half smiled. “Yes, it's great. But it's not mine. My sister, Alyssa.”

“But it's a picture of our Crave,” I said.

“Yep. Alyssa . . . wanted to help out.”

“Is she at Screech Neck Middle School?” Vicky asked.

He shook his head. “Dad's homeschooling her.” He pursed his lips as he added, “One reason he's not making as much money as he used to, but that's the way it has to be, I guess. She . . . uh . . . she just doesn't do anything anyone tells her if it doesn't make sense to her, and you never know what's going to make sense to her. Hell, Parker Academy barely knew what to do with her. One week in a public school and they'd diagnose her as ADD, ADHD, OCD, autistic, Asperger's, or schiz. And she's none of those things, she's just . . . Alyssa.”

Ethan reached for the drawing, so I handed it back.

“Nice work,” I said. “Kind of an old style.”

He shrugged as he slipped it into his backpack. “She made it look like a Blake etching, like the proverbs on the back of my door.”

“Why?”

“To have a little fun with me, I think. It's how my mother used to draw sometimes. I got my dad's brains, Alyssa inherited Mom's . . . talent. She's got a weird sense of humor that's all her own, though.”

Vicky leaned forward and took Ethan's hands in hers.

I was like,
Hello, I am still in the room here!

“You sound like you worry about her.”

He shook his head. “She worries more about me than I do about her. Funny kid. I don't think she understands the sheer power she . . . I mean,
everyone
has. How many things it could fix for her.”

“You mean from
The Rule
?” Vicky offered.

He looked at her like he was only half listening, then nodded.

“So. . . Ethan. . . ,” I said, watching Vicky's hands on his. “That girl on the ride at Happy Planet.
The Rule
says if it happened, she must have wanted it to happen, right?”

“Yes.”

“I don't get that. You think she wanted to die?”

“Caleb?” Vicky said.

As far as I was concerned, I wasn't trying to trip him up. It was just an honest question.

He made a face. “She crawled out from the harness, didn't she? Did she understand what would happen? She was eight,
not two. She was in a spinning ride going about fifty miles an hour. How could some part of her not?”

“But why would anyone want to die like that?”

“Who knows? Maybe part of her knew she had something like a brain tumor that hadn't been discovered yet and she wanted a quick death instead of a slow one. Maybe she was being abused and didn't want to live at all. Maybe part of her knew the ride was going to collapse the next week and hurt a lot of people and this was the only way to save them. I mean, would you rather believe she died for something or died for nothing?”

I'd never really thought of it as my choice, but he did sort of make a kind of sense. Didn't he?

After a respectful silence, I said, “Ethan, do you know what ‘Vanuatu' means?”

“No,” he said. “What?”

“Never mind.”

“Erica?”

“Who's calling?”

“Caleb.”

“Mr. Caleb Dunne? The quintessential slacker? Has he actually picked up a phone?”

“Yeah.”

“Unprecedented. What's up?”

“Uh . . . you going to the game Saturday?”

“Maybe. It's a toss-up between that and putting a spike through my head.”

“Then may I suggest that the basketball game would be the slightly better choice?”

“How so?”

“There's popcorn, for instance. And . . . I . . . thought maybe you could come with us.”

“
Us
?”

“Me and Vicky . . . and Ethan.”

“Aha. Now
that
sounds much more fun to watch than some
silly old basketball game. Pay for the popcorn and you can count me in.”

“Good. I think. Pick you up at six?”

“I'll be waiting, my heart aflutter.”

“Uh . . . okay. Bye.”

I hung up, then rapped the phone against my forehead a few times, trying to imagine that spike through my head. Erica saying yes somehow made our new group date more real. I should have seen it coming, but when I asked Vicky to the game, it was just like the coffee shop—why don't we ask Ethan along? Right. Why don't we carry him there? Why don't we build a little hutch for him, so we can feed him and keep him warm? Isn't Ethan great? Why can't you be more like Ethan? Why can't
everyone
be more like Ethan? That way, whenever I looked at someone, I could see Ethan.

I felt stupid for hating the guy. I should be angry with Vicky. Unless Ethan was secretly trying to imanifest her away from me. Why not? I thought about using
The Rule
to win her back. I pictured me and Ethan as Voldemort and Harry Potter, squaring off with our wands. Well, Ethan would have a wand. I'd have a spork. And I'm not totally sure which of us would be Voldemort and which Harry Potter.

After an hour lecture on just how much pressure to put on the brakes, Joey lent me his van, then warned me to keep my nose clean, whatever that meant. I picked up Vicky first, so she'd wind up in the front, next to me, but as soon as we reached Ethan's ranch house, she climbed into the back anyway.

He looked at the old oily interior and wrinkled his nose a bit. I don't think it was a money thing, like he was too good to get in, more like he was afraid of dirt. Somehow he managed, and of course Vicky stayed in back with him. She did look a little annoyed when Erica got in the front, next to me, and that pleased me a bit.

Regis, the town where the game was taking place, was a good forty-minute drive. The muffler on the van was shot and the interior acted like a big drum, so when I hit the highway and took it over forty, it was too loud to talk to anyone except whoever was right next to you. In the rearview mirror I could see Vicky and Ethan chatting merrily away. I turned to Erica, and there she was, of course, writing in her journal.

“That thing stitched to your hand?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said vacantly. “The staples hurt too much.”

I wound up mostly keeping my eyes on the road.

After we parked, which was easy at Regis compared with SNH, Ethan hopped out and looked down at his pants, worried.

“Damn. I've got some kind of stain.”

I didn't see anything myself, but hey, I don't bleach my shoelaces either.

“You know where the bathroom is here?” he asked.

Vicky half climbed out and sort of posed. She was dressed to kill in a tight orange sweater and short skirt. Her fingernails had little basketballs on them. It was kind of retro for her, but she looked terrific. “Why don't you show him, Caleb? Erica and I will get seats and see if anyone else from the Crave is here yet.”

“Fine,” I mumbled, and I led super-cool Ethan to the john.

Regis High School was Ethan to my Screech Neck. It was a newer, bigger structure with porcelain-sided brown brick and visible steel girders that gave it a twenty-first-century gleam. It was more brightly lit and had much nicer vending machines. The huge gym, nearly a separate building, had these neat bleachers that folded straight into nooks in the walls. Ethan nodded with approval as we made our way to the sparkling bathroom, where all the stalls had doors and the tiles gave off a minty fresh odor.

As we went in, two guys in Regis Hurricane uniforms were exiting. They were stooped, slouching so much that I, at five eight, was nearly as tall as they. Their hanging faces looked white and sweaty, as if they'd seen a ghost or been puking their guts out. Turned out to be what Mrs. D would call the latter.

Another Regis kid was behind them, but giving them a wide berth, like they were lepers, so I said to him, “Hey, they looked sick.”

He nodded. “Stomach flu. Half the team and most of the school's got it. Our best players are on the sidelines, and I think we just lost two more. No offense, man, but if they were playing any other school, they'd just cancel the game.”

“None taken,” I said.

He left. Ethan and I looked at each other. The game hadn't even begun and already the odds were stacked in our favor. It felt good for a second, giddy, but then . . . it just didn't. I mean, how good can you feel about people puking?

Ethan didn't have a problem. “
The Rule
works in weird
ways,” he said as he walked over to the sink. He wet a paper towel and rubbed it against that invisible stain on his pants.

“It's . . . kinda freaky, isn't it?” I said. “Makes you wonder—what if someone got really hurt making one of our dreams come true?”

He stopped rubbing, that mad scientist glint flashing. “Don't go there, Caleb. Everyone gets only what they ask for. If these guys have the flu, if they lose, or even if a building falls on them, it's because they wanted it that way.”

The look vanished, and he smiled. “But I understand. It's easy to have doubts.”

“You don't seem to have any.”

“Nope,” he said. He went back to his cleaning. “Except maybe whether this stain will come out or not.”

You have to understand, I hated the guy because Vicky liked him, but, unlike Moore, who just annoyed me whether he was right or wrong, Ethan had this air of calm authority I respected and, well, feared a little. Part of me believed he
did
have all the answers.

“Hey, Ethan, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Rumor is your dad lost his job and the house.”

He raised an eyebrow. “And you're wondering why I just don't imanifest more money for myself and my family, get back what we lost?”

“Well, yeah. Why don't you?”

Hearing it out loud, I felt stupid for asking, like I'd just asked a priest, if God was all-powerful, could he make a rock so
big he himself couldn't lift it? That always struck me as a good question, but it was an insulting one, one a kid would ask.

Ethan buffed the paper towels against his pants like he was shining shoes.

“Well, Caleb, the human mind's a funny thing,” he began, which made me feel even more like an idiot. “We think of all sorts of things. Millions of thoughts a minute. The thoughts we're aware of are just the tip of an iceberg. Can't control
all
of them, right? I'm sure everything in my life happened because part of me wanted it to, but I can't be sure why. I think it happened maybe because it was part of my bigger purpose.”