Sway
Authors: Kat Spears
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For Jack, Josie, and Ingrid. Love each other well, and always give the impossible a chance.
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CONTENTS
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Sway helps you make money and money helps make you sway. But sway is not money.
â
25TH HOUR,
DIRECTED BY SPIKE LEE
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PROLOGUE
Nothing is good or bad, only thinking makes it so. Shakespeare was the one who said that. It's the only interesting thing I've learned after three years of high school. And now here was my senior year looming ahead of me, just waiting to suck.
High school is a lot like prisonâterrible food, group showers, somebody on a power trip always telling you when to do things. They tell us when to eat, when to use the bathroom, when to talk, when to be quiet. They're also big on telling us everything that we're not supposed to have.
The more you tell people they can't have something, the more they want it. It's one of the laws of the universe. Real power, in prison and in high school, doesn't come from telling people when to do what. Real power is the ability to get the inmates what they wantâthings they aren't supposed to haveâwhich happens to be a particular talent of mine.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
When Ken cornered me I was leaving school, on my way to my car. I hadn't anticipated the attack but, all the same, wasn't surprised by it. I was the only person who knew his secret, knew that his transformation from vicious bully to Christlike saint was all an act.
And maybe I had it coming. Hell, I knew I had it coming, but the threat of getting my ass kicked had done nothing to change my behavior.
Love for a girl like Bridget makes guys do crazy, stupid shit. It's the only explanation I had for the things I had done. I suppose with the way I'd been playing it, the attack from Ken could have come weeks earlier. After all, he was in love with Bridget too, and he was already stupid and half crazy to begin with, so it followed that he would lose it sooner rather than later. I told myself that I loved Bridget better than he did, in a way he never could. I knew her faults and loved her anyway. Ken didn't know her at all.
He appeared suddenly from behind a parked car and drove his shoulder into my flank in a technically perfect football tackle. Coach Andrews would have been proud of him. There was a crunch as my shoulder hit the car window but the crunch was from my collarbone, not the glass. My breath gusted out with a comical
oomph
as I hit the car door and slid toward the gravel.
Ken recovered quickly and landed a punch on my jaw. Since I was already heading for the ground, the blow wasn't as devastating as it otherwise might have been. Still, my head was ringing and blood was dripping from my lower lip as I swayed on my hands and knees. I stubbornly refused to collapse though my body wanted me to.
“You think I'm some kind of idiot?” Ken asked through gritted teeth. His short black hair was still perfectly gelled in place despite his violence. “I know you're after Bridget, trying to get at her through her kid brother.”
“Ow,” I said as I shifted to a sitting position and rested my back against the car tire.
“There's more where that came from,” he said, and kicked savagely at my ribs. Now both sides of my chest hummed with pain. “You stay the hell away from Bridget. And you won't be around Saturday night for Pete's birthday dinner. You got that?”
Ignoring him, I spit a mouthful of bloody saliva onto the gravel and touched my jaw to see if it was swollen. My eyes were shut so I wasn't expecting it when he grabbed me by the front of my shirt and dragged me to a standing position. “Answer me,” he said.
“What was the question?” I asked.
He hesitated stupidly as he searched his memory for the question, then said, “I asked you if you got it.”
“Got what?”
“You want some more?” he asked, giving me a shake.
I grinned but I think it came across as a grimace because he seemed pleased with his handiwork and shoved me back down to the ground.
My grip on the car door handle slipped twice before I pulled myself to a standing position. Now my teeth were chattering, as the cold had seeped through my clothes from the ground and it made my jaw hurt worse. Ken was long gone by the time I crawled into my car and rested my head on the steering wheel while I waited for the heat to kick in.
My tongue probed the inside of my lip, testing the gash cut by my teeth. It wasn't too bad. My ribs and shoulder ached and I thought about going to Digger's, sinking into the couch after a bong hit and losing myself in an episode of
Sons of Anarchy,
his new favorite, now streaming on Netflix. I had to admit, it was a pretty good show.
I knew I would make an appearance for Pete's birthday dinner despite Ken's threats, but I had to question my own motives. The smart thing to do was to back down, forget about Bridget and her dopey kid brother, and get back to business. Joey was right about that, and Joey is almost never right about anything.
“Nothing is good or bad,” I muttered to myself as I backed out the car. “Stop thinking.”
I drove for a while, ended up on the narrow suspension bridge that spanned the riverâwishing for something to numb the pain in my head but not wanting to go home for some ibuprofen. And in some way, the pain in my head was punishment for the way I had treated Bridget. I deserved to suffer.
No one used the bridge much anymore, since the bypass provided a quicker way to reach the downtown and the campus. It was a scenic spot where people came for a view of the town cradled in its lush valley. It was as picturesque as a Hudson River School landscape, but a place where evil preyed on mere mortals.
The bridge spanned a narrow gorge where the river ran swift, the riverbed full of jagged boulders. As loud as the rapids were, they still couldn't drown out all thought, just created a pounding insistency in your brain as the white water boiled beneath your feet and occasionally sent up a spray of mist that tickled your throat and dampened your hair. The drop from the foot of the bridge to the river was only about forty feet, but it was enough. There was very little chance anyone could survive the fall.
I thought about calling Joey. She would get my head straightened outâtell me to stop risking everything because of some Disney princess with impossibly soft skin and doe eyes.
And that was exactly the problem. I had let emotion and personal feelings cloud my judgment. There was a solution to all of itâa happily-ever-after ending wasn't out of the question. Once the pounding in my head stopped I'd be able to think it through, figure out a way to make it all work. Get the girl, kill the bad guy, slay the dragon, find the treasureâI could make it happen.
Then again, it would be an easy thing, one leg up on the rail of the old bridge, one leg over, and I'd be four stories below, my head broken open like a cantaloupe on the jagged rocks. Give the people on the six o'clock news something to talk about. We'd see how sway everyone thought that was.
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ONE
The first time I ever heard Bridget Smalley's name, it was a day like any other. There was no reason for me to think everything was about to change. That's the way life happens, why you have to be able to see all the angles every time you make a choice. What's true today might not be true tomorrow.
When the last bell of the day rang, my butt was already halfway out of my seat and I took the stairs two at a time to the first floor. A group of chattering girls banged through the stairwell door and I stepped back to let them go by me. As they passed, I was enveloped in a cloud of bubble gum and fruity body spray. Nauseating.
The hallway quickly filled to capacity with students leaving their classrooms while I tried to slip through unnoticed. A blond girl in heavy makeup squealed when she saw me and held out an arm as if to put it around my neck in a hug. She looked vaguely familiar. In fact, I might have taken her on a date once, but I ducked her arm and then slid along the wall for a few steps to avoid a herd of freshmen as they spilled out of the gym.
Two varsity basketball players were terrorizing a wimpy kid by playing keep-away with his backpack and blocking the corridor. The kid was obviously not destined to last long in the high school ecosystem, but there was no way I was going to engage in any misguided acts of heroism to help him out.
Instead of trying to get past the basketball players, I cut through the teachers' lounge to emerge in the math and science wing just as David Cohen was passing by, talking with a short kid whose name I didn't know.
“Hey, David,” I said as I fell into step beside him and gestured for the short kid to get lost. “How's it going?” I asked.
“It's going,” he said, eyeing me suspiciously. The short kid moved away and was instantly lost in the throng of students hurrying to leave the building.
David was a full head shorter than I, probably barely five-five, made to look even shorter because his shoulders were permanently slumped under the weight of his overstuffed backpack. His Jewfro was much frizzier than mine, though we had the same coloringâbrown eyes, brown hair.
I glanced casually at my six to make sure no one was paying attention to our conversation before saying, “Listen, I've got another job for you.”
“Another one?” he asked with a grimace.
“I need two term papers for Bartlett's class.”
“Oh, come on, Jesse, I barely have time to get my own work done,” David whined. “You've already got me doing labs for half the football team. How am I supposed to get two term papers done too?”
“I understand it's a lot of work on short notice, David,” I said, my voice automatically shifting to smooth and soothing to divert his tantrum, “which is why I'm going to pay you fifty dollars for each paper.”
“It's not about the money,” David said with a shake of his head. “My dad is the president of the university, Jesse. Believe it or not, he makes more money than you do.”
“Yeah, well, for now he does,” I said, though David was so busy wallowing in self-pity, he wasn't really listening.
“I'm under a lot of pressure to get good grades,” David continued, operating under the incorrect assumption that I gave a shit. “I've got Model UN, student governmentâa lot of responsibility.” He crammed a hand in the pocket of his gray slacks and pushed his glasses up his nose with the index finger of his other hand. “I've got so much going on, I should be paying
you
to get
my
homework done.”