Trollhunters (5 page)

“Sturges!” Coach Lawrence cried. “Go for the gold!”

I was drunk enough with exertion to think I could do it. Then Tub yipped. I looked and he was wagging his head around as if trying to evade a bee. It was hard to see because both of our ropes
were in motion, but I saw the problem: a thread of hemp from the rope had gotten caught in Tub’s braces. I knew from his cross-eyed panic just what he was envisioning: when he fell, his
entire jaw would come flying out the front of his face.

Tub’s rope began spinning. I lashed out with an arm to try to steady him but only felt his fingers grasp frantically at mine for an instant before his weight dragged him down. Naturally
the thread of hemp snapped immediately and Tub went down on his ass, right in front of everyone.

The arm I’d used to help Tub never made it back to my rope. It pinwheeled, my feet slipped, and then I dangled from one arm. Unlike Tub, I tried to hold on and instead slid all the way
down, the rope scorching my palm until I struck the floor with both knees. It hurt all the way up into my skull.

Coach Lawrence offered both of us a hand. Tub looked miserable, wounded, resigned to his fatness. The chant of his name, which for a while we could have pretended was serious, had broken apart
into hoots and howls. A single basketball continued its steady
SMACK, SMACK
. Eventually Tub made it to his feet, rubbing his sore butt, and that’s when the basketball looped over the
crowd and bounced off the side of his face. You couldn’t deny that it was one hell of a throw.

For the second time that Friday, Tub and I found ourselves cleaning our wounds. There was little either of us could do this time to lighten the mood. Both of us had lingered in
the shower, where our blood ran into the central drain. Now we were the last two guys in the locker room. I was almost dressed, but Tub sat motionless and dripping on the far end of the bench,
facing away from me, still wearing his towel.

It sounded like something a teacher would say, but I couldn’t come up with anything better.

“Don’t let them get to you, Tub.”

“Gee, thanks for that totally sound and utterly useless piece of advice, Mr. Guidance Counselor.”

“They’re not our friends. Who cares what they think?”

“Then who are our friends, Jim? Go ahead and list them. I’m sure I can spare the zero seconds that will take.”

“Don’t be dumb. We have friends.”

“I’m not talking about friends that only exist in chat rooms. Or friends of the feline or canine variety. I’m talking about real, human friends who do human-type stuff, like
talk and hang out and eat with silverware. Wouldn’t that be great, Jim? Some friends who knew how to use silverware? That’d be a real step up for us at this point.”

Tub’s eyes glowered over his bare shoulder.

“Trying to cheer me up just makes it worse,” he said. “We have to accept who we are. And before you ask, I’ll tell you. We’re nobody. We have no life. We have
nothing to look forward to. We’re not special. I just want it to go away. All of it. The stupid being scared. Doesn’t it seem we’ve been scared forever?”

“Look, remember when I was scared of monsters in my closet?” I asked.

“Now
that
was dumb. Everyone knows monsters live under the bed.”

“Yeah, well, I was pretty sure it was the closet. And then I couldn’t take it anymore, being afraid all the time like my dad, and so one night I got out of bed and opened the closet
and got inside and spent the whole night there. Eventually I fell asleep and then it was over. I mean, it’s all got to end sometime, Tub.”

He didn’t respond. I finished tying my shoes, too tight. The whole room felt too tight, squeezed in against my shoulders like the locker I’d been inside a few hours earlier.

“Least we’ve got each other,” I offered.

“So true,” he said. “Where you think we should set up our wedding registry?”

Though constructed with sarcastic words, the sentence had the tone of an apology. I sighed in relief and checked the clock. The bell would be ringing soon. It had been a long day for me and an
even longer one for Tub.

“I bet someone gets us a nice china set,” I said. “And a bread maker.”

“Awesome. When the zombie apocalypse strikes, that bread maker will save our asses.” He took an unsteady inhale and cleared a phlegmy throat. “You need to give me a minute, or
I will never finish dressing. You got no idea how hard it is for me to put socks on.”

Tub hated changing his clothes with someone else in the room. He was going to have to accept his weight at some point, but this was not the time for pushing that agenda. I ambled over to the
next aisle.

The coach’s office was in the far corner. The lights were off. In fact, Coach Lawrence must have hit most of the lights on his way out. Darkness lay over the locker room like a tarp.
Aisles looked too long and were notched with unexpected crannies. I hesitated before going any farther. Locker rooms were places stained with bad memories: snapping towels, underwear tossed in a
toilet, tennis shoes burned through a locker grill with a lighter. It was no wonder that shadows there loomed larger.

I reminded myself of the nonexistent closet monster and kept walking. I got about three steps before I saw the thing.

It was crouched in the farthest corner. I took a deep breath and leaned in, but it did not go away. It was amorphously shaped and taller than me but did not move or make a sound. In the
distance, I heard the sighs of Tub getting dressed and felt a surge of protectiveness. I couldn’t let this thing chase my naked friend into the hallway. That was one humiliation too many.

There was a light switch just five feet away, right between me and the thing, and I edged in that direction, my shoes splishing through some foul locker room liquid. Reaching for it felt like
reaching for the red bandana on the rope. I paused, afraid to see the truth behind the thing’s multifaceted folds of skin and pungent odor.

I slapped at the switch. It winked on, a single, weak bulb.

A mountain of damp gym towels sat piled in the corner. It stunk, but it wasn’t exactly going to leap out and kill me. My face went hot and I almost starting kicking at the pile, except
that, with my luck, that would cause a landslide and I’d be smelling like one hundred underarms for the rest of the day.

There came a clanging noise from the shower room.

I glanced over, expecting another false alarm, but noticed that the grate over the center drain had been moved aside. The streams of water leading into the drain were splattered about as if
disturbed by feet. Pink daubs of Tub’s blood and my own were mixed in there, too. I took a step back to try to get a better look, and my peripheral vision caught a dark shape lumbering across
the opposite end of the locker room.

It was Steve; it had be Steve, out to collect from Tub his overdue five dollars. This time, I wouldn’t let it happen. I lunged into the next row of lockers and just caught the back end of
what might be a foot, though it looked too large for Steve. And there was a sound, a glottal, huffing snort so resounding it had to have come from a colossal chest.

I sprinted, my sneakers cracking through shallow puddles. Away from the light bulb, it was even more difficult to identify what was passing the aisles on the opposite end of the room. I saw what
looked like giant, hunched shoulders dragging thick arms. But hadn’t I thought the towels were a murderous blob? I sped for the next row and arrived there with a bold, terrified
“AHA!”

Tub wrapped his arms around his shirtless torso. He was still working on those damn socks.

“What? Jesus! Come on! Privacy, Jim! Privacy!”

Heavy footsteps crossed somewhere behind me with such force that the tiled floor vibrated. I turned, dashed three steps, and then heard a clanging noise from the shower. I tore around the
corner. The grate was back over the drain hole. Had I been wrong before? Had it been in place all along? I grabbed the mildewy wall for support, tried to catch my breath, and thought I saw the
grate still shuddering, just a bit.

Few Fridays had been longer. What I didn’t suspect was that it was only beginning.

I exited the school alongside Tub. Predictably, several of the pumpkins lining the front entrance had been kicked in, and the two of us had to step around the scattered guts. Tub made some quip,
but the orange gore turned my stomach. I was still stricken by what had happened in the locker room. Naturally I had said nothing to Tub. Either I was going crazy or the athletes of our school had
been taking too many steroids. Neither possibility was going to put my best friend in better spirits.

My foot hadn’t hit the sidewalk before a group of girls accosted the both of us. This being a highly suspicious event, we started searching for the bucket of pig’s blood about to be
dropped on our heads. But instead there were flyers in neon colors being thrust in our faces. Three of the girls were classic drama dorks decked out in the most calculatedly uncoordinated of
outfits. But the fourth wore the colors of army fatigues. It was Claire Fontaine.

“Play tryouts tomorrow.” She bit off the end of a licorice whip and downed it with a swig of cola held in the same hand. “Either of you gentlemen interested?”

Gentlemen—it sounded so musical that I wished I was wearing a tuxedo with a carnation on the lapel. I looked at the hot pink flyer that Claire was holding. No surprise that the play was
Romeo and Juliet
. The drama coach, Mrs. Leach, had learned her lessons when it came to
Shakespeare on the Fifty-Yard Line
. Tradition held that the short, half-hour play was cast
and rehearsed in a single week, so to keep things simple she cycled through the same four abridgments:
Hamlet
,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
,
Macbeth
, and
Romeo and
Juliet
. The last had been performed so many times that it had its own nickname:
RoJu
.

“Free donuts?” Tub investigated the fine print. “It says here free donuts. How can that be true in this economy?”

Claire let out a chuckle. Her cheeks were red and the fall breeze whipped her hair out from under her beret. She hitched up her immaculate pink backpack and took another chomp of licorice. It
was well known that she was a junk-food fiend; it was probably what kept her from the waif physique of the most popular girls. Personally I didn’t care what kind of saturated fats and
granulated sugars were to blame for that excellent figure.

She had a laugh like the pounding of random piano keys.

“See!” Tub pointed at her and gave me a victorious look. “It’s a trap!”

“I’m laughing at the
word
, Mr. Dershowitz,” Claire said. “They call them ‘doughrings’ where I’m from. I don’t understand the
‘nuts.’ There are no nuts involved.”

“Oh,” Tub said. “In that case, let’s reconsider this. I’ve got a dentist appointment tomorrow. They’re putting on new braces. You probably noticed I have
braces. I’m hoping the new set will be a little more dashing. But maybe I can make it afterward. I’m always up for doughrings. Nuts get stuck in my braces anyway. I guess that’s
not need-to-know information. I don’t know why I’m still talking, to be honest. But here I am. Talking. Still.”

Claire offered up the same funny lip twist she gave me in math class, the one that made me feel like we were sharing a secret. She began saying something about how there were never enough
“blokes” at tryouts, and how the drama club needed “new blood,” as her “da” would say. I nodded along but my attention wavered. Not many things could distract me
from a direct encounter with Claire Fontaine. In fact, I could only think of one.

SMACK, SMACK.

I snatched the flyer from Claire’s hand and turned up the wattage on my asinine grin.

“I’ll be there,” I said.

Tub shrugged and took a canary yellow flyer from one of the drama dorks.

“I’ll come for the doughrings,” he sighed. “Assuming I still have teeth.”

“Smashing, then!” Claire popped onto the toes of her hiking boots for a moment. “Noon, right here at Saint B. You chaps practice your sonnets and work on your
brogues!”