The Hollow Men

I wrote this a loooong time ago when I was really, really young. AND IT SHOWS. Still, I have some affection for this piece.

The Hollow Men

The Syndicate

Mind-eaters and soul-stealers, drug-dealers and drop-outs, minor miracles for small-time sinners, endless cycles and mean gray walls: It squatted gray and lifeless against the moon-lit horizon, behind a chain link fence designed to contain giants, to repel behemoths, soaring up beyond reason. It squatted three stories high, speckled in graffiti, grinning lopsidedly with teeth made up of windows which didn’t open. We stared at it long enough, surprised, I guess, by how strange it looked at night. I sucked on a cigarette, waiting for someone to move, feeling the wind stick its fingers into me, testing the surface tension.

The fence was easy. There had been talk, back when I’d been a freshman, of putting wire up on top of the fence. But it had never materialized, and the fence remained toothless. It was easy. Get a good running start, jump, grab hold, get set. pull up, hand over hand. Flip your legs over, brace yourself, and drop down. Less than a minute, and we stood panting in the courtyard.

There were four of us. Me. Gail, in black jeans, boots, and leather jacket. Henry, in front as always, blue eyes and little else. Kevin hulking in the rear. Our breath steamed in front of us nervously. We were surrounded by broken rules, swimming in the thick grease of guilt, and all we could do was smile at each other. It lay shattered at our feet and we grinned at our reflections in the shards and reveled that we had the power to cause it. Then Henry took off and we followed.

The side boiler-room door out back was still propped just so slightly open. Bill the mumbling old man who cleaned the place on good days hadn’t bothered to check it, as usual. Old bill could be counted on for two things: to be asleep by two every day, and to steal dirty magazines from our lockers. With that he was clockwork.

We slipped in and shut it behind us, making our way out of the works and into the lockers, dark and damp, foreign all of a sudden. We didn’t take our time. Working on fear and determination, we cut through the halls by memory and broke into the printing office with Henry’s screwdriver -push, pull, watch for falling wood chips.

I grabbed the paper, three packs of five hundred, from the side closet. Gail prepped the copier and set it up. The whine of its warm-up was ear-shattering. Kevin searched for the copy codes, popping open desk drawers with hard snaps of his own screwdriver, finally digging them up. Henry just watched, smoothing out the original.

Gail stepped back, Kev punched in the pass code, programmed fifteen hundred, and I loaded up the paper trays. We turned to Henry, and he was just grinning, watching us, looking crazy, his flashlight pointed up at his face and all the wrong shadows around his eyes. Then he slapped the page down and pressed start. The room filled with snapshot lightning, and we waited, getting nervous. nothing happened. Minor miracles for small-time sinners.

Done, we split up. We papered the place. We had to wade through papers to get out. Outside the gate, we checked time. Twenty minutes, exactly. henry joked that it took him longer to take a shit. It was his way of complimenting us. Then we each went home and forgot we’d seen each other.

Tuesday morning, before the bell, and already class had settled in for the day. The wake and bakers had left a cloud of sweet smoke behind them in the locker-room restrooms; taking a piss became a hallucinatory experience after seven-thirty. Fall-out for the cliques was lazy and all over the place, the calm before the storm that brewed up around lunch. They all glared at each other and pretended not to see, pretended they were the only people on the face of the earth.

I passed Gail on the way in but I didn’t say anything. She didn’t even glance at me. Her screwdriver was about to wiggle out of her back pocket, and I had to stop myself from pointing it out. I checked my own, instead.

The day had a soundtrack. Everyone mimed and moved silently beyond my headpones, the opening credits of some teen angst movie. There was no slow-motion, no special effects, no credits. But it seemed that way anyway. I stopped at my locker and leaned my board against it. it wasn’t the locker, or the combo lock, that they’d given me at the beginning of the year. I’d switched both off a couple of times, so if they tried to search the lockers, they’d have to figure out where I was and whose lock I had, first. I figured it might slow ’em down a little. Make ’em drown in their own paperwork.

I scanned the room, pulling off my phones, checking out my immediate neighbors, lost souls, minced minds, for all intents and purposes the enemy. On my right Chang the Politician blessed me with a good-morning sunshine smile, gladhanding even before first-light coffee. I eyed him cooly, which he accepted as a reply. To my left, the faceless freshman stuffed books into his full locker, sweating, pushing his glasses up every few seconds.

“Hey, punk, you feeling lucky today?” I said wearily, sticking a Lucky Strike between my lips.

The freshman, my pet freshman, my adopted freshman, looked up and smiled horribly, disfiguring himself. “Hey, Gavin.” he breathed.

I liked making the little fucker think, just for kicks. “If we’re so fucking free, asshole,” I began reasonably, “why do we have to keep all our stuff where they tell us to?”

Chang laughed his inoffensive, superior minded laugh. Chang had it coming.

“Uh,” the freshman grinned again, “to make it easier, I guess.”

I shook my head. “So they always know where to look, stupid. So we have no where to hide. So they can control us through fear, paranoia, and physical force. Didja know your locker is searched twice a year, random?”

He didn’t. He didn’t care. He wanted to get away.

Chang broke in. “You’re crazy, Stillman.”

I dumped my bag of tapes and shut my otherwise empty locker. “Chang, why can’t you suck my dick the way you suck everyone else’s?”

That made him blink. He’d been in his networking, polite argument, cocktail-conversation mode. The unprovoked attack made him jump, and I felt better. I struck a match. Chang stared, and I wanted to pop his eyes out.

“Shit, man, you can’t smoke in here.”

“What the fuck are they going to do? Put me in detention?” I asked, reasonably. “Ooh, big deal.” I stalked off, leaving blue smoke in my wake. I could feel their eyes on my back, heavy.

I didn’t belong anywhere. Not to the pretty-boy jocks done up on steroids and smutty-buddy male bonding. Not with the nerds or the flakes or the geeks or the dusters, burned-out druggies over the hill at fifteen. Not with the school spirit committee or even with the small-town least likely to succeed club. They’d all bought into the bullshit. The only place I belonged I couldn’t admit to. Not yet.

The halls were gray and relentless, prison halls. They taught us here, every day. They taught us not to fight. They taught us how to dress — I’d been in detention six times already for dress code violations. They taught us not to talk unless we raised our hands, not to take a piss or eat or sleep unless given permission. They taught us to do pointless, boring tasks over and over again without complaint. They taught us which words we were allowed to use, which opinions it was okay to have. They taught us to respond to bells, like animals in labs. They trained us.

Some of us were sick of it.

Walking up the stairs, I saw the flyers we’d hung up. People were already talking about them. Most of them were laughing at them, but that was okay. If just one person read it and knew what was going on, it was worth it. It was obvious we were going to get force-marched into an assembly about it. I blew smoke at people and paused at the foot of the next flight to unscrew the no-smoking sign from the wall.

####

Upstairs was a little brighter. The nerds for hire shuffled paper and copied homework for their pals-for-a-day jocks. The barbie-doll grads compared lipstick and blow-job technique, evaluating every cock walking by on a marriage-scale. The punks sat sullen and self-righteous, confusing laziness with revolution. I spat stares at them, but really had no dislike for them. They were good decoys.

Henry sat in the lobby amongst less gifted peers, his blue eyes locked on me. I sat down next to him and pretended not to know him, ashing on the floor. I could feel his tension. I wondered if we’d been nailed about the flyers.

After a moment he stood up and walked off; I knew better than to follow. A piece of folded loose-leaf sat expectantly on his chair, and I picked it up. Unfolded, it revealed a single line:

It’s on tonight.

I got up and found him in the bathroom. We propped the door shut with a trashcan, and I set fire to the note.

“Who?”

He grinned. Henry was crazy. Henry was nuts. He grinned and you heard marbles rolling loose in his head. He bummed a cigarette off me and slowly unscrewed the hinge on the first stall, for fun.

“The shithead’s name is Thompson.” He said, his voice the usual off-center drawl. His eyes were blood-shot and his nose was thin and sharp, a rat’s face. “I don’t know him too well.”

“Why him?”

The stall door fell off with an echoed crash, and Henry shrugged. “Someone, right?”

I nodded and swallowed, suddenly nervous. We had never done something like this before, but as we got older and bolder the stakes became higher. The air shimmered and the pact was made. I unpropped the door, and homeroom bell rang.

####

Principal Davids was a middle-aged woman in high heels who’d once been a pretty girl in tight skin. She had an adult sneer on her face, fear and awe of the kids given way to bland, useless rage. Half of us wanted to fuck her, tie her down and make her bleed. The other half wanted to stuff a rolled up newspaper down her gas tank and light a match. I usually combined the two into one luscious daydream.

She took the steps leading up to the stage almost daintily, stood before the microphone, and took a moment to scowl at us all. I smiled, hoping she could see me. I doubted it. Her hair was pulled back, leaving her face exposed and made up, pale and loose. She was old.

She unfolded a piece of paper and held it aloft. My grin grew triumphant. She stood alone on the stage facing a huge crowd of us, condemning our flyer.

“This is a disgrace — ” she began.

I started applauding, on cue with my fellows. There were only a few of us, but the mince-minds thought it would be fun and joined in. We drowned her out and she waited for us to stop, jaw-clenched. Gleefully, I saw an unhealthy purple cast creep into her face.

I looked down at my black Chucks and waited for her to resume.

“This sort of filth will not — ”

I had barely begun to clap when the whole auditorium kicked in. Davids stepped back and studied us coldly, her eyebrow arcticly cocked, icy and disgusted. But there was nothing she could do. Just as we were dying down again, someone let loose the loudest wolf whistle I’d ever heard and everyone clapped harder, letting out cheers.

We kept it up for a while, making Davids red and three shades of purple in the face. Finally, though, the kids grew bored and started to figure that the fastest way out of the auditorium was to let her have her say. Smart, those kids.

She condemned our flyer. Anything calling for physical harm to teachers and damage to the school was reprehensible, according to her. I leaned back in my chair and crossed my arms, looking at her over the rims of my sunglasses. She wrapped it up by saying that an investigation into the identities of the involved parties was going to be launched, and that criminal charges would be brought. I gave her the finger and slouched out of the auditorium with the rest of the cows. Instead of class, though, I went to the library and read a few pages here and there. Eventually, they found me, and yelled, gave me detention, and sent me on my way. I sulked out grinning, the endless cycle complete again.

####

Lunch was everyday bedlam. The little truces that kept life peaceful were thin-skinned, at lunch. I sat with Henry in the back, eating Jello and smoking. Nobody liked us. No one sat with us. It was our cheerful attitudes, I think.

Some chick was walking around getting people to sign up for a blood drive. She sat down next to Henry and flashed us her flossed, blinding smile. We both smiled back, reptilian, lips and teeth.

“Hi, guys.” she chirped.

“Hi.” Henry said. I grinned a high-volume smile at her. She seemed to think we liked her. I supposed she didn’t meet many who didn’t.

“You guys want to give blood?”

“I got a few pints back home I could give you.” Henry said with a thoughtful look.

“I’d rather give semen.” I leered.

She wrinkled her nose and beat a hasty retreat. We laughed, and returned our attention to the nothing we’d been thinking of.

“There he is.”

I glanced up at Henry, and then followed his gaze to Thompson. I nodded. “Gotcha.”

“I wonder if we’ll have an assembly about this?”

I smiled. I looked at him. “Let’s go get some Ho-Hos.”

For kicks, I followed the blood girl for the afternoon. She had Morrow for algebra and I could smell brain death in the air. She’d spotted me in the halls as I sucked down Ho-Hos and tailed her (pretty obviously, I think) and kept staring at me. Finally, while Morrow was scratching something on the board, I got up and took the empty seat next to her. She looked ready to boil away.

I leaned on one arm and stared at her. My hairspray was getting gummy; I guessed I looked horrendous. I grinned. “Hi.”

She kept her eyes on Morrow. Everybody else pretended I was a desk.

I sighed like Jack Nicholson; aping Nicholson is a bad habit of mine. “I sometimes see the darkened moon, shining in your eyes.” I said, off the top of my head, a little too loud. She turned to me, eyes wide with that oh-my-god-people-are-looking-at-me stare.

“What?” she gasped.

“I sometimes see the darkened moon, shining in your eyes, I’d like to taste the sweet caress hidden between your thighs.” I sighed again. Everyone was looking. “Your sweaty thoughts around me like a pair of silken gloves, thrust and break ignore the pain kneel and taste the blood.”

Mr. Morrow was ordering me from his class. I still had a stanza to go.

“The nights torment me, useless past of mine, our one night together, burned into my mind.”

Morrow pulled me up by the arm and started pushing. I let him. The look of horror on her face was worth it, and I was in a great mood. On the way out, I even smiled.

####

Davids’ office had my initials carved around its perimeter a hundred times. There was a waiting area outside her door, where her secretary sat at her desk and delinquents sat awaiting judgment. All the chairs bore my mark, as did most of the wall and some of the desk. Sometimes carved other people’s initials, too.

The secretary was gone, so I spent a few minutes removing something which looked vital from her typewriter with my trusty Phillips. There was a big stack of confiscated flyers on her desk. I smiled. It didn’t matter if anyone read them -we didn’t expect much from the rest of the mince-minds. We did it just to do it, just to get under Davids’ skin. And if someone got to thinking because of it, and maybe saw the reason behind it, even better. We did it because we weren’t supposed to.

I lit a Lucky, rummaged through the desk and found a pad and pen. I started writing down my new poem. I kind of liked it.

The door opened, and Davids glared at me as if she expected me to get scared. “Who are you?” she snapped.

“I thought you’d know me by now.” I offered, reasonably enough, I think.

She ripped open a file and tore through it. The thing is, I didn’t hate Davids. I disliked her, sure, but I disliked a lot of people. She truly believed she was doing right, so I couldn’t hate her. But I didn’t spare her. Stupidity was no excuse.

“Stillman.” Her eyes flashed up at me. “You’re in quite a lot of trouble, young man.”

“Don’t I know it, old lady.” I replied. “And it’s getting worse every day.”

She smiled, which surprised me. “No,” she said, “every minute.”

The babe had spirit.

####

After a blistering interrogation squeezed into five minutes, I was ushered into my final class with a screretarial escort. My cigarettes had been confiscated, so I just sat in the back and listened to Miss Crowers lecture me about Hamlet. I asked her a few questions, but she refused to answer me unless I raised my hand, so we stalemated. Eventually, I dozed off.

####

I’d missed a lifetime of gossip. Henry had told some milk-white handjob queen to fuck off, and her boyfriend had vowed to make Henry an unpleasant statistic. I slouched down the corner on my board and watched the proceedings. I saw Gail and Kev in the crowd, as well as Geezer and Norm, and caught eyes one at a time. We all smiled at each other.

The guy was big. He wore his JV jacket like it meant something -wrestling, which meant he thought he was tough. We’d prove him wrong. Right after the verbal assaults, while the jerk was pulling off his jacket, we stepped in. I socked him in the face with my board, Gail went for the balls, and while he lay on the ground bleeding and moaning, we quite literally kicked the shit out of him. And none of the sheep said or did anything. Afterwards, we walked off in our own directions, sweaty. I think Mr. JV had been expecting a fair fight, and if so then we had taught him a valuable lesson.

Someone

I escaped the homestead that night by the skin of my teeth, boarding around the dark, listening to the Ramones. The night made it all gray and pale and lifeless. Pointless. I rolled past the stoners in the park, wasting another night, and the kids on dates strolling along the sidewalks, careful, polite lust looking for a quiet place to drool. I breezed past them all, dressed in black, a phantom bent on murder. They didn’t know that, though. I made a few trolling cars hit their brakes hard and burn rubber; I suppose I’ll get hit, eventually.

I was aimless for a while, but when it started to feel like midnight, I made for school, soundtrack off and eyes open.

We met outside the gym, hidden by a clump of trees. Gail wasn’t there. No one mentioned it. Henry smiled at us all, beaming, and then his eyes flicked behind us.

“Hey.”

We all turned. Thompson stood with his hands in his pockets, looking chilly. Henry had invited him out with the friendly way Henry could have, if he wanted it.

“Hey.” Thompson replied, nodding. “What’s up?”

He had a disarming, lop-sided smile.

Henry nodded, and we moved in. Kevin grabbed him and wrapped a meaty hand around his mouth and an entire arm around his neck, squeezing just enough. The rest of us grabbed the rest of him, and we dragged him, kicking and puffing, into the gym. I dragged my switchblade across his neck, Henry pulled a red permanent marker from his hip pocket and wrote on his chest in quick, decisive letters. Then we left him there, went out the front door and ran, splitting up. I had blood on my hands. I think if we’d stayed together, Henry would have said something like it would have taken him longer to shit.

####

By the time the next day rolled around, he’d been found and the cops were looking for a brutal murderer, a phantom with no face or name. The gym was roped off, and seven hundred mince-minds and their shepherds stood outside gawking.

I was sipping coffee in a careful mimic of the plan-clothes cops skulking around. I fell in behind Chang and his girlfriend, the Ice Queen Diane herself.

“Hey, Chang. Gettin’ any?”

She hated me. I wondered why.

He glanced at me. “Stillman.” he said carefully.

“What’s going on?”

“Kid named Thompson’s dead.” he said with a glint in his usually laconic eyes.

“No shit, huh?” I sipped coffee. There was blood under my fingernails. I looked at Chang. “It doesn’t bother you that we’re all here just waiting to see the corpse?”

He glanced nervously at Diane. It was starting to look like we knew each other, for god’s sake. “Christ,” he chuckled, “you’ve got to relax a little. Stillman.”

I nodded. “You’d like that, huh.”

I moved away and stood behind a gaggle of girls. “I hear the word NARC is written on his chest in blood.” I said.

One turned to me. “Yeah, except I heard it was written in shit.”

I raised both eyebrows. “Wow.” I said, thinking that that would have been the perfect touch. I filed it away for future reference. “No shit, huh?”

She nodded heavily.

I walked away grinning secretly, hiding it by drinking coffee and lighting a cigarette. I made my way politely to the front and leaned on one of the police barricades.

Davids stood talking with a suit and tie dick, a tall one who slouched next to her with a pissed off smirk and unshaven face. He didn’t seem to like her, and kept running a hand through his dark hair and accidentally blowing smoke in her face. I tried to hear what they were saying. Instead, I heard the guy next to me.

“I heard they carved the word PIG on his chest.”

I smiled, studying the smoke from my cigarette dreamily. “I heard they shoved a red hot poker up his ass and it’s still glowing.”

I felt stares.

“No shit?”

I tried to look solemn. “No shit.”

Davids had one of our flyers, and handed it to the smirking cop. I grinned. This was victory, as nervous as it made, as much as it made me want to throw up, this was it. The only way to be vindicated by the world was to be on its shit list.

I turned and dived back into the crowd to find Henry, to tell him. he’d love it. It would make his day.

The sheep were mooning about, losing interest. The nature of death prevents any true relationships, and it’s hard to care about a body under a sheet. I couldn’t blame them.

####

We didn’t get a day off, and on line in the lunch-room that was all they cared about. The crappy day off.

I sat in the usual place with Henry and Tara, who he fucked around with but didn’t trust. Over cheese fries and cokes we talked about it all as if we weren’t murderers.

The expanse of power as we sat and acted and kept secrets was great. It was intoxicating, and I started to glance around with the canny look of a spy. Tara said I looked sick.

She was tall and dark-haired, dim-eyed and sour. She had a nice enough body, smooth and taut. She wasn’t too bright, but she was into cool bands and put out, so Henry was as close to in love as he got.

“Hello there, guys.”

We looked up and watched our rat-faced detective as he sat down next to me. He smelled like nicotine and after-shave. He smiled as if he didn’t care that we didn’t like him. We stared back.

“We used to just have pep rallies in the gym, when I was your age.”

I nodded wisely. Henry smiled. “Is that the theory -ritual sacrifice in the name of school spirit?”

Dick seemed taken aback. We’d caught him off guard. “Er, no.” he admitted lamely. Then he smiled and looked up. “But it’s not a bad idea. I’ll look into it. You kids know him?”

“A little.” Tara said, gloomily.

“Hmmn.” Dick breathed. “I hear he went to meet some kids last night.”

“Christ,” I muttered, “you can’t even trust your friends anymore.”

“That’s right!” Henry said brightly.

“You wouldn’t kill me, would you?” I whined.

Dick got the joke and stood up, dropping a card onto the table. “That’s my number, kids. You’re on Ms. Davids’ shit list, so I’ll be poking around you a lot. Keep your noses clean, okay? And if you think of anything, give me a call.”

“Ten-four.” Henry said with a wave.

Dick looked at us with a weird sort of cock to his eyebrow. “In my day, kids joined the boy scouts, not the Hitler Youth.”

I shrugged. “Bullshit.”

He seemed to accept that, and moved on.

“Seig Heil.” Henry said, with quite a professional salute.

“Fuck,” I muttered. “We would’ve been in the French Resistance.”

“The what?” Tara asked. I just shook my head.

####

In gym class, Rat Willer lined us up in our uniforms and gave us a speech. Half the gym was roped off, and the divider was closed. Nothing interfered with gym class, not even death.

We called Mr. Willer “Rat” because he twitched his nose. It wasn’t a personal thing. He was an asshole, but we didn’t call him “Rat” for that. That’s what the word “asshole” had been invented for. We called him Rat because he looked like one.
He was otherwise a stout, thick-chested bitter man of middle age, with a military buzz and a sadistic approach to physical education. He usually wore a bright white T-shirt tucked into stained gray shorts, and I think that even if he hadn’t been our gym teacher, we would’ve hated him.

The speech was about death. He seemed to think we were all traumatized, and his talk of carrying on and bucking up gave Henry ideas. He winked at me and started to back away, an odd light in his eyes. I started to laugh right away, and did my best to hide it.

He waited until he had people’s attention, and put his arms out all crazy. “He’s not dead!” he shouted. “He’s not dead! He can’t be dead! He’s alive! Alive!”

And he turned and ran.

Because I couldn’t keep from laughing for much longer, I ran after him. We left a stunned silence behind, and ran all the way to Tony’s Pizza Haven two blocks away, pulling the fire alarm as we did. An hour later, they were still doing head counts to see how many had escaped. Davids grabbed us right away and gave us each a lifetime of detention, for suspicion of who knew what. We just grinned.

####

In detention, we busied ourselves unscrewing our desks while Mrs. Billings dozed. She was the old lady of the school, blue-haired and matronly, constantly cat-napping and occasionally dotty. Henry and I liked her, more or less, and usually left her alone. When my desk collapsed half way through and startled her awake, I was almost apologetic.

Outside, we walked together and discussed strategy, losing interest again a few minutes later and talking about bullshit to pass the time. An idea came to us. A grand idea. A pristine, perverse stroke of genius. Neither of us could recall who had it. That’s the way it goes sometimes, like an epiphany. Minor miracles for small time sinners.

####

It took a few days to get it going. In the mean time we stayed out of the usual trouble and answered questions; Dick the friendly plain clothes man led his charming gestapo through the school, questioning us all cheerily on the subject of our dead classmate, collecting statements from anyone who knew the late, great Thompson or looked like they might. We smiled at our personal cop and lied a lot, and I think by the end of it he liked us a great deal.

Surreptitiously, Henry and I cornered the rest of us and held meetings, enlisting their support. After that, it was almost standard operating procedure, although Gail wasn’t with us. Gail wasn’t around much at all. We propped open the boiler room door again and hit the copy room again and no one was waiting for us, no one expected us, no one was there to stop us.

The next day the school was wallpapered with eight by eleven warnings: ONE DOWN, THE WHOLE SCHOOL TO GO.
It caused quite a stir. Davids and her fellow teachers scampered around swishing their tails in alarm, ripping down the signs and sometimes losing their cool. henry and I avoided each other, but caught stares, gleeful stares, and knew how we felt.

####

We swam through the next few weeks noiselessly. We started getting into the same old trouble again, but nothing serious, nothing conspired. The teachers were skittish, and we loved it. Several refused to come to work without police protection -so we never quite got rid of the pigs- but it was worth it. Chaos loomed everywhere and we stood ready and willing to fall through the cracks.

Dick came back not too many weeks later, dressed in a better suit and a tan trench coat, with a bunch of faceless grunt cops in tow. Davids met them, they disappeared into a classroom, and in homeroom I got a summons to room 113. I met Henry and Gail in the hall, but we didn’t say anything to each other. Gail wouldn’t even look at us.

Room 113

Dick looked me over. there were three other men in the room, standing facelessly in the back, drinking coffee. In the center of the room was a single plastic chair, bright yellow. He gestured at it.

“Sit.”

I slouched over and sat, smiling.

“Name?”

“Davids files that incomplete?”

Silence.

“Stillman, Gavin B.”

“B for what?”

“B for Betty.”

“Middle name Betty?”

“Middle name B.”

“B?”

“B.”

He glowered at me.

“Have a sensa humor, old man.” I said.

“Did you kill Ken Thompson?”

It made me pause. I shrugged, feeling my heart shudder and stumble. “It was a couple of weeks ago, but I don’t think I can remember a murder.” I managed.

He grunted. Something had changed in him — and I realized an act had been dropped. It made me momentarily nervous.

“Don’t like school?”

“Hate school.”

“Why?”

“It’s a training ground for the next herd.”

He laughed. I smiled, all-vicious.

“Hate teachers?”

“Part of the problem. Don’t hate them, can’t excuse them.”

“Huh. And cops?”

“Oh, I love cops. My Dad owns stock in Donuts.”

“Funny.” He returned my vicious smile. “You killed Ken Thompson.”

I shrugged. “No.”

“Henry Piller just signed a statement claiming you did.” he sighed. “I guess it’s true. I was hoping it wasn’t, but…”

I snorted. “Sure.” I felt sweat on my brow now, and hated myself for it. I wasn’t going to give in to their mind games.

He started to chuckle. “You know,” he gasped, “we’re the same, you and me.” To illustrate, he pointed at me, and then at himself.

“Bullshit.” I snapped.

“The same. This is classic.”

We stared at each other. His face had become shadowed, indistinct, his sick little grin the only thing I could see. He stood before me, hands on hips, his clothes baggy and about to explode. It occurred to me that I was about to be arrested, or at least officially accused. I was tight and I wanted to shout — but I couldn’t, my head was empty. I just licked my lips and he just smiled at me, with gibbering eyes. I had to shut him up, rip his teeth out and make him choke on his own blood.

He opened his mouth, and I shouted.

“Fuck you!”

He slowly closed his mouth, and smiled all through it.

“Fuck you! Okay?”

“You’re a rebel.”

I just sweated. I’d been caught. I was fucked. life suddenly seemed short and tight. He leaned down so his smile filled up the space before me.

“You got a cause, kid?”

I didn’t know what he wanted me to say. An eyebrow went up and he was suddenly leering at me.

“You ready to die for it?”

The fire alarm went off. For a moment, we stared at each other, and then I dived out the door.

####

Into a sea of kids I ran, melting into chattering hostility with the ease of the professional, dodging and ducking for the secret, faster ways out we’d researched. I could only hope the rest of us were doing the same, but we’d all understood that it was every man for themselves, in the end.

The pigs swam upstream, too big, too slow, too used to being in charge. Before they’d even picked me out of the crowd, I was gone. Down the stairs, through the boiler room, out the door, pounding the pavement in a dry sort of panic. I didn’t want to get caught. They could break you, if they wanted to. I’d seen it happen. They could mince your mind and make you sign confession, they could teach you guilt.

Coda

Henry picked me up on the Highway. We both wore sunglasses. He was playing Bad Brains on the deck.

I leaned back and lit a cigarette, put my feet up on the dash and watched the strip malls flash by, the thin-walled houses, the gas stations. Kids. They swarmed at the arcades and the schoolyards we passed, pissing out territories and working part time to pay for shit, flies stuck on paper so soon, so young.

Silently, we drove. The free don’t need to talk. The free just have to keep moving, and in motion the words get lost in the breeze, anyway.