Jay Foley, smiling, shook his head. “I underestimated Bruce. I surely did.”
“One picture is all he had, though?” Amos said.
Foley shrugged. “Yeah, I don't get that, either. There were fourteen total. Believe me, I counted them.” Foley started to veer toward the west wing but turned back. “Hey, you tell Crookshank I'm a big fan.”
“Hey, Amos!”
Amos turned and nodded at someone he'd never before spoken to. A few seconds later, someone passing by grabbed his hand and pressed a note into it. He whirled around to see a retreating girl he didn't know. He unfolded the note in Civics.
Hi, I'm glad you're alive and back in school. I always liked you, but now because you almost died I'm just going ahead and saying so.
Deanna Adkins
Deanna Adkins? Had he even had a class with Deanna Adkins? Amos was thinking how much he might've liked a note just like this one if it had been written by Clara Wilson, when Mr. Duckworth, his Civics teacher, appeared suddenly in the aisle beside Amos and plucked the note from his hands.
The classroom fell quiet. Mr. Duckworth had a deep, resonant voice, and his custom was to read captured notes aloud.
A look of amusement formed on Mr. Duckworth's face as he read the note to himself. Then, after a moment of theatrical deliberation, he smiled down on the class. “Allow me to share,” he said, his rich voice caressing the room. He let his gaze settle on the note. “My dearest dearest Amos dear,” he proclaimed, as if reading from it. “I have always liked you, but now, to be quaintly inarticulate, I like you even more. Yours very hormonally et cetera et cetera et cetera.”
This drew laughter from the class, and embarrassment from Amos, but not entirely. Part of him was pleased, too, that he'd received a note like this and that the rest of the class should know it.
When Amos sat down at an empty lunch table, the chairs around him slowly filled with boys who wanted to see his black eyes (Amos would briefly lower his Carreras) and his stitched scalp (he would for a moment doff his Blue Jays cap). They also wanted to hear what happened, and Amos told them, more or less. “I was too stupid to be afraid,” he said, hoping this would sound modest. He never said the Tripp name, but the other boys did, which made Amos nervous. “Taking on the Tripp brothers solo,” one of the louder boys said. “That's more than slightly awesome.”
When Amos looked at this boy, he happened to glance beyond him. Off at the edges of the lunch area, leaning against a post, Eddie Tripp stood staring at him.
At the beginning of fifth period, Amos asked for permission to go to the bathroom. He didn't like using the west-wing bathroom, but sometimes it was unavoidable, and this was one of those times. To his relief, the bathroom was smoky but unoccupied. Amos was at the urinal when the door swung open and someone walked over to the sink and began running water. When Amos turned around while buttoning up, he saw that it was Eddie Tripp. He was wetting his hair and reworking a curl over his forehead until it was just so. Amos, feeling real fear, headed for the door, but Eddie wheeled neatly and blocked his path.
“Ain't you gonna wash up?” he said, and made his sneering grin.
Eddie was actually smaller than Amos, but Eddie's menace made it seem the other way around. Amos went over, turned on the water, and wet his hands. He pumped the soap dispenser, which he knew was foolishâthere was never soap in the soap dispenser, just as there were never paper towels in the towel dispenser. Amos washed without soap and was wiping his hands on his pants when Eddie Tripp smiled scornfully and said, “So everybody's calling the Milkboy a hero.”
After a moment, Amos said, “I wouldn't know about that.”
Eddie was shaking his head slowly, as if thinking of something sorrowful. “Everybody's so happy to have Charles and Eddie Tripp get caught at something, they'll turn something as pathetic as you into a hero over it.” He smiled unhappily at Amos. “That's how much people despise the Tripp brothers.”
Amos was still wearing his Carrera glasses, but Eddie asked him now to remove them. “It's not polite,” Eddie said, “talking indoors with dark glasses on.”
Amos removed the glasses and held them in his hand.
“Yikes!” Eddie Tripp said in mock surprise when he saw Amos's eyes. “Couple of real serious shiners you got there.”
Amos nodded.
“How'd you get 'em?” Eddie said.
In a low, sullen voice, Amos said, “How do you think I got them?”
“Well, I'm asking in order to find out what you'll answer.” Eddie grinned and fixed his eyes evenly on Amos. Without looking away from Amos, he reached into a pocket of his fatigue jacket and withdrew a metal object that Amos recognized as the kind of utility knife painters use to scrape windows. When Eddie depressed a latch with his thumb and pushed it forward, a razor blade slid out from its metal sheath.
“I didn't tell anybody anything,” Amos said.
Eddie finally broke his gaze from Amos. He looked down at the razor blade. Inscribed in the metal were the words
Use Extreme
Caution
. “Well, somebody told somebody something,” Eddie said with a restraint that made his face seem brittle, as if it might break at any moment and turn into something monstrous.
A studentânobody Amos knewâopened the door to the bathroom, took one look at Eddie Tripp's expression, and turned right around and went out.
Amos said, “Look, Eddie, I'm telling the truth. I didn't tell anyone anything.”
Eddie smiled. He pushed up his jacket sleeve and began slowly combing the edge of the razor blade back and forth along the length of his bare arm, pushing the nap of his black arm hair first one direction, then the other,
shhhh shhhh shhhh
. “The po-lice were smug when they got hold of us,” Eddie said. “Smugger even than normal. They said they had a positive eyewitness ID on Charles and a close approximation on me. That's what the po-lice called it, a close approximation. They had my mom all weeping. So Charles tells them I wasn't there and if everybody'll accept that, he'd have something to say. They went for it, of course, and now he's in juvie spending his time thinking about Amos MacKenzie.”
“But I didn'tâ”
Eddie cut him off. “Oh, I know. You didn't say a word, you didn't name a name.” Eddie's scornful smile widened to a scornful grin. “So what you're trying to tell me is that the po-lice had no positive eyewitness ID, had nada, nothing, and we folded to their bluff.” His eyes flew up so quickly it startled Amos.
“I didn't sayâ”
“You know what?” Eddie said, staring hard at Amos. “What I'm learning here is how little I like the sound of your voice. You know how that is? How sometimes somebody's voice just begins to get on your nerves, and pretty soon you think you're just going to have to do something about it?”
Amos understood this was not a question he was meant to answer.
Then Eddie did a strange thing. He turned the edge of the razor blade and drew it quickly and cleanly across his forearm. It made a thin line on his skin, a line that widened as blood rose. He watched it for a second and then looked up smiling at Amos.
“I'll take those fancy sunglasses now,” he said.
First Amos tightened his grip on the sunglasses, then loosened it again. The sunglasses dropped to the floor.
Something tightened in Eddie's face. “Now you need to pick them up.”
Amos did.
“And wash them off.”
Amos was holding them under the faucet when the bathroom door swung open again. It was two teachers, who immediately broke off their conversation. “What's going on here?” one of them asked.
Amos glanced at Eddie, who'd somehow hidden his utility knife and was now leaning close to the mirror and combing his hair with elaborate casualness. He'd pulled down his jacket sleeve to keep the bloody cut on his arm out of view. “Nothing,” Eddie said, and Amos, sliding behind the teachers and heading for the door, said he was just cleaning his glasses and needed to get back to World History.
“Well, then, git,” one of the teachers said, and the other one, turning toward Eddie, said, “And as for you, Mr. Tripp, where do you rightfully belong at this hour?”
Amos was gone so fast he didn't hear Eddie's reply. Amos almost ran back to class.
By the end of the period, not only was Amos's heart beating normally again, but he was beginning to think he'd cheated Eddie Tripp out of some satisfaction. When, between classes, another boy asked why Amos had looked so freaked out when he came back to fifth period, Amos said, “Eddie Tripp paid me a visit in the west-wing head. He told me he wanted my Carreras.” Amos smiled and tapped his sunglasses meaningfully, as if to say, “And look who's still got 'em.”
But even while he spoke, Amos was keeping an eye out for Eddie.
Amos hadn't seen Clara all day. Hour upon hour, while teachers droned on about circumference and tangents, tobacco and respiratory tract cancer, Muslims in Pakistan and Hindus in India, Amos imagined what Clara Wilson would think if she heard that Amos MacKenzie had been driven to school by high school jocks. And maybe someone would've told her about the note Mr. Duckworth had read and she'd see that he wasn't such a bad catch after all.
When Amos opened his locker after last period and found an envelope with his name written on it in Clara's handwriting, he felt his heart break into a gallop. He glanced around for Eddie, then opened the envelope with an air of extreme casualness, leaving his aviator sunglasses on, which made reading more difficult. The note was written on white stationery. The date and Clara's address were at the top, as though she were writing to a pen pal in a distant country. But the message was shockingly brief.
Thank you for your letter,
it said in rushed pencil.
I believe
you, not that it matters now. Clara Wilson.
Without thinking, Amos took off his sunglasses, and as he read the note again, he began at the same moment to feel both hot and foolish. He felt his face reddening, put on his sunglasses, and, ignoring first one, then another student who called out his name, made for the front door and descended the long set of steps to the street.
A horn was honking.
Buses filled the air with the smell of diesel fuel, kids yelled and skuttered here and there, and the sun's reflection off the snow was sharp, almost blinding.
The horn honked again. “Amos, you little jerk! Don't pretend you don't see me!”
It was his sister, Liz, double-parked in the rusted-out Econoline their father had bought for $200 from the dairy. Beneath a thin application of white paint, it was still possible to read the words Cosgrove DairyâWe Still Deliver! It seemed to Amos that all activity around him had abruptly stopped when Liz had called out to him, that every set of eyes now followed him as he walked down the grade toward the old van. Curbside, he slipped for just an instant on the ice, and though he caught himself, Amos thought he heard someone snicker.
“Just get in,” his sister said. “I don't like driving this thing in public either.”
Amos slouched a little and made a point of looking away from the school grounds. “What's going on?” he said when Melville was safely behind them.
“Oh, Mom's in hyperspace. She called me out of school and told me to pick you up so we can visit Dad in the hospital. Which, considering the fact that he's supposed to come home tonight, seems pretty mongoloid, but there you are.”
They rode along in silence, Amos staring out at the dirty snow and ice through his Carrera sunglasses. He felt in his pocket for Clara's note and fingered its edges. He wanted in the worst way to take it out and try to make some sense of it, but he didn't want his sister to see him do it.
“So I heard they got the guy who hit you with the bat,” Liz said.
Amos nodded and looked away.
“Charles Tripp,” Liz said. “The usual suspect.” She shot Amos a look. “Was he the guy who did it?”
“I guess so,” Amos said in a low voice. “If that's what the police say.”
“What do
you
say?”
“I don't. It was too dark to tell.” Then, “I guess it could've been the Tripps.”
Liz turned sharply. “The
Tripps
. Plural?”
Amos shrugged. “Maybe.”
A block passed before Liz spoke. “Well, if it was Eddie, too, you should tell the police. He might not be quite the convict his brother is, but give him time and he will be.”
Amos stared ahead. A few minutes passed in silence. Then, after the Econoline backfired three times coming to a stop, Liz said, “You'd think Dad would at least get the muffler fixed.”
Amos didn't speak. Whatever it was that had pumped him up and floated him through the school day had leaked out and left him completely flat.
Liz, glancing to her left at a stoplight, looked suddenly stricken. “Oh, God, there's Eric Bradstreet,” she said, and Amos, peering around her, saw the very Jeep he himself had ridden to school in that morning, driven by the same handsome, thick-haired boy who owned it. Before he knew it, Amos ducked back, too, and, like his sister, stared frozenly ahead.
St. Stephen's Hospital was situated on the floor of Jemison Valley, and most of it was already shadowed by the hills behind it. Only the uppermost stories of the main building still caught the late-afternoon light, which gave the white walls a comforting, buttery color.
Inside, however, the lobby was anything but comforting. It made Amos think of an airport in bad weatherâa lot of tired people sitting around waiting for announcements they feared would be bad. It took two different people at the reception desk to even determine their father's room, and another twenty minutes before someone from another floor telephoned to say that their mother would be down in a few minutes.
Amos and his sister gravitated toward a lounge area that had televisions mounted on three walls, each of them showing something different. Almost nobody was watching them. Amos sat down and flipped through a
Jemison Star,
but the sports page was missing. His sister picked up a
People
magazine and, to nobody in particular, said, “Who cares how many hats celebrity moms have to wear?” Nearly an hour passed before a nun approached them and explained that their mother would be detained a few more minutes yet.