The Shibboleth Read online

  A GIRLFRIEND.

  In the last year, I’ve grown a lot! I bet I’m a foot taller than you now. For a while, at night, I couldn’t sleep either (they say there’s some sort of insomnia problem out there now, but we don’t get much news here—they say it’s because it’s like camp). The nurse said it was because my legs were always aching and finally she gave me my own bottle of ibuprofen. “Here, kid, don’t take ’em all at once or you’ll never wake up.” Said it was growing pains.

  Anyway, I wish you were here too. I train every afternoon using my and that is hard and I don’t seem to be getting any better. Occasionally kids don’t do well here and they “wash out” and disappear from the general pop, stuff gone from their dorm rooms in the middle of the night and I’m scared that I might wash out. I need you to come coach me. I always got better when you worked with me on it.

  How’s all the folks at Casimir? Still buying candy? I can’t say I miss the place, wasn’t there long enough. But I never was anywhere long enough to call it home. And that’s why I really need you to come. This place is becoming home to me and I want you to share it. (And I don’t want to WASH OUT!)

  Mr. Quincrux—they call him the director here—told me to give you this number. All you have to do is call and someone will extract you from Casimir. I don’t know why all this spy stuff is necessary except that he said there are other “interested parties” and they are watching you. “So we must be circumspect,” he said. What’s circumspect? There’s not a dictionary in this whole freakin’ place and only employees have computer privileges.

  Anyway, please call the number. You’ll love it here.

  Your friend,

  Jack

  This is the third letter he’s sent asking me to come. I want to, I do. But something inside me balks at the idea of living all cozy and comfy with Quincrux. The man is a murderer and a monster and made me into this. I would rather kill them and die myself than join them. And Jack always mentions other “interested parties,” but I can’t sense them watching.

  Except for the Rider. The new Rider in the general pop.

  The bull in Commons looks tired—insomnia, likely—when I ask him why Booth isn’t on duty.

  “Called in sick.”

  “Sick? Booth has never called in sick.”

  He turns a yellow eye toward me and hitches a finger in his belt, near the pepper spray and the Taser. “Hell do you care, kid?” He looks me over

  –freakin’ smart-ass punk kid needs a foot in his ass–

  and turns back to scanning the boys in general pop, who’re making a thunderous noise moving toward the cafeteria and the classrooms.

  I think about his question. Why the hell do I care? This asswipe is new and hasn’t even learned our names, not to mention learned that playing the dozens with me is a losing proposition. I sniff. “Just used to seeing bulls around here, instead of steers.”

  Takes a while for it to sink in, but eventually, the word steer percolates down through the muddy water of his awareness. When the realization hits bottom …

  —oh no he did not just say what I think he—

  he snaps me up in his big meaty paws—bounces me like a red rubber dodge ball against the wall, and when I hit the ground, he easily wrenches my arms behind my back. Then he places his shiny, black, patented-leather shoe in the small of my back. Not hard, not vicious, simply officious and firm. I should just blow out the candles in this guy’s head, go in and start pulling his strings. But my face is turned toward the boys passing through the Commons like cattle in a chute and they’re so damned happy at my predicament. Laughing now, giving this bull—and I have to admit now that he is a bull—smiles and salutes. Except one.

  The kid in Admin. The one with rangy arms who never had tuberculosis.

  The boy with the Rider.

  He watches me half in disgust and half in fascination. He’s got his orange jumpsuit unzipped and the arms of it tied around his waist—an old campaigner, an old-school resident of other juvie halls in other days. He’s got that mean streak written all over him, bred in the bone, heavy scars on his knuckles and his ears already flowering. He’s a bruiser, born to violence. And savage.

  He stands there, watching me with a curl to his lip, and it’s either a sneer or a rictus of fear, some abject animal misery. Maybe he knows more about me than I’d like him knowing. Instead of toying with the bull’s mind, I blink and make another assault on the Rider. I go at him. I harden. I sharpen myself like a toothbrush whittled down to a shiv, the fire of my outrage at having this asswipe’s foot on my back but not at the asswipe himself, at the audience, the hundreds of smiles and laughs at me

  –oh he gots the narc’s ass pinned!–

  –cut off his damned hands, the thief–

  –trick ass little bitch gonna get stomped by that bull! hells yeah–

  being flopped belly-down on the Commons tiles by this bastard of a guard. For an instant, in my rage, I feel this pressure at the back of my head, like some ball of incandescent fire, pulsing, threatening to overthrow all reason and escape, to run rampant in the minds of all these foul-mouthed children like a forest fire leaping from treetop to treetop—these poor hateful boys, sneering and dismissive, but boys all the same, despite their do-rags and their muscles and scars—boys one and all. I couldn’t make them jump and march about like Quincrux, but I could burn up their minds in an instant if I let myself.

  But the Rider is there. And instead of blowing out this multitude of candles, I focus everything down to that single piercing point and make the hard run at his mind.

  It’s worse than running at a cinder-block wall. His mind is impervious, and whatever the amount of scratching and scrambling, I find no purchase on its hard, smooth surface. But he smiles a little, either the Rider or the boy, I can’t tell.

  The boy blinks, looks about the Commons as if discovering himself, turns, and joins the rest of the boys heading to the cafeteria and class. The guard grinds his foot on my back enough to let me know my place before he grabs my wrists and yanks me up, nearly popping my arms from the sockets.

  “A little lesson for you. Keep that goddamned tongue civil, boy, or next time you’ll have a little surprise.”

  “Taking the Lord’s name in vain? That’s—”

  He rolls his eyes and places his hand on my chest.

  I stop. Maybe I went a tad too far.

  He cranes his head to look at the faded numbers on my coverall.

  “Okay, ward number three thousand, four hundred and ninety-eight. You get what you want. You have my full attention.” He takes out a small notebook from his back pocket and the well-chewed nub of a pencil and writes something down. I can only assume it is my serial. “Go on, you’re free to run your mouth. Go ahead.”

  That doesn’t sound so good now, come to think of it.

  I take a step back, until his hand leaves my chest. I’m raw from the run at the boy and his Rider, the constant hate-spawned

  –this kid doesn’t know who he’s dealing with as god as my witness i will go nuclear on his sorry ass and not give one damn he was on tv. i’ll go pure frankenstein–

  thoughts I’m constantly receiving now. They say the center cannot hold. I’d say it’s totally crumbled and lying in ruin around us.

  I’m scared. I’m tired. There’s just so much hate and bad intentions behind people’s eyes, and it’s like a radioactive leak, the constant chattering noise of their minds. I turn as slow as possible, with my mouth shut, and walk to class.

  FOUR

  –it’s not just the grass and the wide expanse of field or the lights and the crowd roaring or the faces of the opposing team looking at me; it’s not the way the air smells or the heat making my jersey dampen with sweat and my shoulder pads slip some with each footfall; the breathless air full of noise and the clatter and ooofs of linemen crashing together; not the way the pigskin smacks into my palm with such authority and tucks tight like some precious infant waiting to be born on the finish line or ho
w the opposition falls away with each stride; no none of that at all. it’s that he’s watching and i’m putting all of their defenses behind me, i’m boundless and wild and leaping, trailing players like a comet dragging a rocky tail through the vast emptiness of the end field—he is watching, father—and will be proud and will love me and realize that I do it all for him and we can reset all the past and he’ll love me again and it will never end, never hit me again, he’ll love me–

  I kinda bypass classes at this point. It’s weird—I’m expected to attend, but I’ve tested out of everything, English, math, algebra, trig. Humanity is my classroom now, and I have a desk, front row, center.

  Eventually the people that you inhabit, they inhabit you. I have their memories, and maybe they have some of mine. And with that comes knowledge. Of quadratic equations, network routers, tantric sex positions, the novels of Dickens and the poetry of John Donne, the pathology of lymphoma, and the intricacies of love, which no one really understands. But I’ve bedded women (and men) and been to college fifteen times. I’ve killed everything that’s walked the earth, fought in Afghanistan, in Vietnam, in Korea. It’s a terrible weight, the murders, and at night, when I’m lulled into the pillow, it all comes back in a bilious rush. The edges get blurred, and the memories of flesh fuse into one being.

  I have bad dreams, and I don’t even know whose they are. They could be anyone’s. I’m just sixteen but have lived whole lives in other people’s heads. But I still must sit in class and listen to Mr. Allenby

  –so live that when thy summons comes to pass that innumerable caravan–

  lecture on the three-point enumeration. Say what you’re gonna say, say it in three points, and say what you said. Big fun.

  He drones on, and I watch the kids and think about the video. There’s thirty frames a second, every second. And it was right there, in front of me, that Ox gave me the beatdown and Jack did his thing.

  I reach out, lightly touching the flames of the other students’ minds, burning bright, each at a desk. It’s like running imaginary fingers through a candle flame. It’s better when they aren’t considering me. Their minds are calm and less full of hate. Then I go a little beyond, in the next classroom and the next until I’m out and high above the plane of earth, soaring disembodied over the land and heading east, looking for one particular brightness on the face of the moving waters and mountains and flowing field. And there’s a pull from the east, like a personal gravity that tugs at the invisible connective tissues that run from me to every other living, breathing creature.

  I could unlatch the parking brake and just roll on, toward the eastern seaboard and to my end.

  My doom.

  It would be easy. Because I’d end up in Maryland, where the Riders come from. It would be a release, falling into that well.

  When the class ends, it takes me a little while to get back fully incarcerado. I sit there until everyone is gone

  –the skinny freak-show thief can only stare and drool but we’ll show him–

  and make my body rise. It’s the first movements after going in the great blue yonder that remind you who and where you are. I grab my notebook, stand, nod at Mr. Allenby—George—who, it turns out, is a good guy, forty-two, popular with the ladies in high school, minor football star in college but discovered he enjoyed the rigors of composition far more than the gridiron; who ran some touchdowns because he was fast and dogged and feared his father, who’d beat him with a razor strop, hard, but never enough to injure him beyond bruises. Strange, the controlled, measured beatings, delivered with a steady hand by a blank-faced man who’d always utter, “This will hurt me more than it hurts you,” a bit of reasoning George had heard in television and movies but never expected to appear in the story that was his life. No, it was the fear George’s father wielded, not pain from the strop’s impact on his innocent flesh. The fear in so many ways was worse.

  I know George. I know him.

  Into the hall, there are no other wards around, except for a couple of titty-babies trying to cozen Mr. Mailer

  –grieving still for mother, grieving forever at her loss–

  into giving them better grades on their algebra quiz or to make a recommendation to the state shrink that they’re model wards of the state and ready to regain their place among the unsuspecting public.

  I hang back to let the boys vacate the classroom before I leave. It’s easier when they’re not swarming. Fewer covert punches to my back, fewer shoves. Fewer murderous thoughts like ringing bells sounding in the hollows of my mind.

  In the hall. Like a statue. The boy with the Rider stands waiting, like he knew I was coming.

  “Boy,” he says in a hoarse voice.

  Don’t know how to respond to that. He says it like he’s my grandfather or something.

  “I’m not your boy.”

  He raises his hand in a strange gesture, like he’s a priest giving a benediction. Then a confused expression passes over his features, like he’s had some hard thought or bad memory.

  “Boy,” he says, almost croaking. “Leave.” He takes two steps forward, bringing his body very close. “The elder will awaken. You must—”

  “The elder?”

  “Leave.”

  “I don’t get wha—”

  “Be ready. Be prepared. You must leave!”

  Something sparks there, in his expression, and the distance it seems to travel is terrifying.

  A long pause while he gives me the stink-eye.

  I say, “That’s what I was trying to do, man. And you were blocking the way.” I try to slide past him, but he sidesteps and stands in front of me again.

  Screw this noise. I start to turn when his arm reaches out and plants one right on my ear, a real ringer of a knock, and I can’t tell if it was with a fist or openhanded because my head’s vibrating like a bell and my ear feels like it’s on fire.

  With the pain, instincts whirl my body around to meet the larger boy, and my fists go up, not in some boxer’s pose. That is all too graceful for me, head ringing. I bring my fists up just to get something between him and me.

  Lower and slower, he says, “Leave, boy. There’s nothing for you here now. You must leave!”

  “Damn it, stop calling me boy.” I do stupid things sometimes. I fight. I fight what’s inevitable.

  I throw a punch.

  And it lands. The boy’s head rocks back, his mouth pops open. When he brings his head back forward, he blinks a few times in quick succession like he’s waking up. He raises his hand to his nose to wipe the blood welling from nostrils and dripping over his lip and patting on his white T-shirt.

  I drop my hands in surprise.

  “What the—” he says, staring at me hard. “Why the hell’d you do that, slim?” He glances around the hallway as if he’s surprised to be there. “What the hell?”

  His voice is different. Higher, more vibrant, more … present. But smooth and mellow, like he’s from some southern Louisiana parish swarming with mosquitoes, stinking of blood and barbeque.

  He doesn’t waste much time breaking me down into component parts, a big knobby fist whipping into my left side, and—again—the air whooshing out of me while his other paw clips me on the jaw as I’m falling, sending the world tilting out of control. The lime-green tile flooring rushes up and smacks me in the face.

  “Punk,” he says, wiping at his nose with his bare hand and leaving long red streaks up his forearm. “Why the hell’d you—” He stops, probably coming to the same conclusion I’m reaching

  –people are seriously messed up–

  and because of his Rider, I know that’s my thought and not his. The Rider’s lurking there, like some bouncer at a club, just waiting for me to try to get past the velvet rope.

  Yeah, people are seriously messed up.

  He looks about, scanning for witnesses, and then, with one more scowling look, skulks off toward the Commons.

  When I can get up, I follow the boy down the hall and into the Commons,
where there’s a constant, roiling commotion, the boys hooting, hollering, slap-fighting, singing, rapping, cursing, preening, posturing. Some look at me, recognize my distress, and smile. There’s a maelstrom of noise in the air and in the dim ether that I’m so attuned to, the mental frequencies. And in some ways, it’s easier in the Commons. There are so many thoughts flying about, I can’t focus on any single one.

  In the bathroom, I run in to two titty-babies, talking in hushed voices

  –him the snitch, the narc, oh shit be quiet jorge don’t say anything and just walk out–

  but they shut up when I enter and watch me with large, wary eyes. They scuttle out like cockroaches when I go to the mirror and inspect my face.

  My cheek’s swelling pretty good. I hope his nose is broken.

  Nothing for it except to go to the infirmary.

  Out of the bathroom, through the Commons, where the voices quiet as I pass, and I can feel their gazes on

  –little bastard thieving sonofa–

  –looks like someone gave him what he deserved for–

  –new fish ain’t no fish judging by the narc’s face, fugly motherfu–

  my back, as unwelcome as I am among them now, friendless, alone. But I’ll be damned if I bow to them, look scared or hunch my shoulders. They can hate me, but I can bear it and not let the pain show.

  –over there over there over there get him–

  –aw shit darrel–

  Someone yells, “Narc!” and I turn in time to see a boy’s body twist sideways in the air, hurtling toward me, elbows tucked tight in some imitation of a wrestling move. He smacks into my chest, his shoulder and elbow hitting sore ribs, and I pitch backward, but there’s something—someone—there behind my knees, kneeling, and I fall backward with my arms out. Falling, falling until my head meets the floor with a crack and the world flashes white then black and red, and I’m being cocooned by the howls of laughter and debris being tossed on me, bits of trash, wrappers, empty water bottles. Someone spits, and I feel it warm on my skin, on my neck, my nose, my face. Tracers push into the edges of my vision, but I’m not losing consciousness, just blinking rapidly and thinking, I’ve had worse. The Dubrovniks rearranging my guts, the memories of poor Elissa, who bore the torture of years in a pit—part of her I carry with me always and will never be free of—and the trials and invasion of Quincrux into my mind. My mother, her anger and grief and spite and neglect. My brother, Vig, lost to me.