It was sickening.
I needed to vomit it up, and there was only one way I knew how.
I stalked across the floor, my boots thudding a direct, predatory rhythm.
The other kids in the hallway sensed it and scattered, granting me a berth as though I were a chemical spill.
Only Amelia seemed oblivious, or else so utterly accustomed to danger that she couldn’t be bothered to react.
I slammed her locker door shut with a flat palm. The hollow bang echoed off the cinderblock walls.
Amelia jerked back, cradling her hand, eyes sparking with a flash of terror that quickly fell into the bland defeat I had come to expect from her.
“Move,” I said, my voice low and even, not a request.
She did, her lips pressed tight, knuckles white where they gripped the strap of her backpack.
I watched her walk away, hunched and guarded, shrinking herself down to nothing, and I felt nothing. Nothing but a cold, crawling disgust.
I rounded on the locker, wrenched it open and slammed it threemore times, each time harder, bracing for the moment when the metal would refuse me and shatter my wrist.
The pain never came. I was too good at this by now.
Later after school, Dante was waiting by the bike racks, chewing on a strip of beef jerky and watching the sky with the blank patience of someone who expected nothing good to follow the final bell.
I liked that about him. Dante didn’t ask questions, didn’t pry for explanations. He just existed, a constant presence.
When my shadow stretched across the pavement, Dante spat the jerky stub into the grass and nodded, already knowing we’d be walking to the gas station, then to the quarry, then nowhere at all.
We walked in silence, the sound of our boots crunching gravel louder than any words we might have exchanged.
I felt the old familiar thrum of anxiety in my chest, the anticipation of violence, waiting for my father to materialize from behind a parked car.
But the streets were empty. Even the birds had gone mute, as if the entire town had agreed to vanish for the afternoon and leave me alone with my festering thoughts.
We bought two cans of Monster and a donut at the Kwik Stop, then walked the railroad tracks into the woods, where the town gave up and let nature take over.
Dante peeled the donut in strips and tossed each piece into his mouth, chewing with the languid boredom of a cow.
I sipped my Monster, feeling the fizz burn down my gullet, and imagined it was acid, that it would eat me clean from the inside out.
“You coming to mine, or you gotta check in with the warden first?” Dante said, his voice sludgy with indifference. He didn’t look at me, just flicked a lighter over and over, the sparks almost invisible in the broad daylight.
“Not going back there tonight,” I muttered, my knuckles white around the handlebars of my bike. I felt the words as a kind of relief, a counting of hours before the next reckoning. “I’ll crash at your place if your mom’s cool.”
“Your dad a dick again?” Dante asked, eyes on the tracks.
I didn’t answer. I didn’t need to. The bruises on my knuckles spoke louder than words, the way I kept flexing andunflexing my hands as if rehearsing invisible violence. I dragged my boot along the rail and watched the flecks of rust scatter like blood.
“You ever think about doing something else?” Dante continued. “After school, I mean.”
I made a noise that was almost a laugh. “Yeah, like what? Move somewhere else? Or maybe just off myself in the gym weight room and save everyone time.”
Dante shot me a look, only half joking. “You could join the Army. You’d like that. Free meals. Guns. Nobody gives a shit where you came from.”
I considered it, the idea of vanishing into a uniform, letting someone bigger and meaner than my father yell orders at me instead. I pictured my own head shaved, boots shining, a name stitched over my heart like a bandage.
Maybe I’d get so good at killing that the anger would bleed out and leave nothing behind.
