He’d been riding that high for a week. These kids must have thought he had five-hundred-pound balls after what he’d done on the quad. It more than made up for not being able to free everybody when they’d first shown up at McKinley. Every day since he’d kidnapped Sam, he’d anxiously anticipated the parents next move, loving the constant tension of not knowing. But when they caved, and they delivered everything he asked for, it just … kinda sucked the fun right out of it.
His eye stung. It felt like there was a grain of sand under the lid, but no matter how many times he splashed water in it, the feeling persisted. He opened an individually packaged Rice Krispies square, and tried to see how big a bite he could take. His bite was so big, it started to hurt his jaw to try and chew through it. The chewy muck didn’t taste that great. Like Styrofoam and a sweet version of glue. Glue wasn’t sweet at all, he’d tried it. He’d always thought wood glue would taste sweet, because the color of it looked dessertish, but it turned out to taste awful.
With a burst of machine-gun fire, he died in the video game. He hadn’t been paying attention. That had always been his problem in school. He couldn’t pay attention to what the teacher was saying to him, even when he was talking right in his face, it was just too boring. His mind would start wandering in the middle of the teacher’s sentence. He’d start thinking of how many dance club foam machines it would take to fill the whole school with bubbles. He’d fantasize about the girls he was chasing. He’d try to think of ways to embarrass the teachers. They all thought he was dumb anyway, just because he couldn’t bear to listen to their boring bullshit. He found it really hard to focus during tests and he always tested terribly. He failed course after course, but his parents paid buckets to keep him enrolled. It made him feel like a fraud, like everyone thought he didn’t deserve to be there, but they had to tolerate him anyway. He resented his parents for keeping him there. He’d never wanted to go to boarding school in the first place.
He did learn one thing at St. Patrick’s though—breaking the rules is fun. It started with little stuff. He poured gin down the horn of his trumpet and kept it balanced against the wall as his secret liquor stash. He grew his hair past the acceptable length. He stopped wearing ties, and he’d untuck his shirt, both clear violations of the dress code. The school almost ran out of ties with all the ones they tightened around his neck when they caught him without one. He snuck into the girls’ dorm at night. He started pulling pranks on other students, and on the teachers, but eventually, all that stuff got boring too.
So, he decided to throw a party in the old abandoned boathouse, downriver from the dock where the crew team would put their shell into the water for morning practice. It was a bit of a hike, but it was far enough away from the main campus that they’d be able to make some noise and no one would know. Pruitt and Fowler had helped him set it up. The party was world-ending, it was so good. It was a brain-melter. He’d changed kids lives that night. It was that fun. Unfortunately, a groundskeeper heard the party, and they got shut down before the grand finale. He had been planning to clear everyone out of the boathouse at the end of the night and then set the rickety old thing on fire. It would have blown minds.
The boathouse party got him in a truckload of trouble. But the school had no proof it was him that organized the party. A hundred-odd kids had been brave enough to sneak out of their dorms, unnoticed, and leave campus to come to the party. They couldn’t all be expelled. The St. Patrick’s judicial council tried hard to get Gates to confess, they were looking for some way to trip him up and get him to reveal something, but he played dumb. Inside, he was celebrating. He took their accusation as a compliment. Basically, they were telling him, “Who else could have pulled off something so gigantically kick-ass? It had to be you, Gates.”
He didn’t get into as much trouble as he would have if they could have proved it. But his parents back home flipped. They were going to send him to military school but his little brother, Colton, talked them out of it. Somehow, Colton was able to convince their parents to enroll Colton at St. Patrick’s so that he could look after Gates.
Once his little brother showed up at school, everything changed. Colton was the only one who could lift him out of the dark moods he got sometimes. Colton looked out for him, talked him out of his crazier ideas, and took the blame for more of Gates’s fuckups than Gates liked to admit. He’d loved Colton, but he couldn’t think about him without also feeling the crushing weight of how much he missed him. He’d only lost Colton a couple months ago, and he knew that was why he was so down. He hadn’t been able to fully process it yet.
Gates fished around inside his beat-up camping backpack until he found his old phone, wrapped in a sock. They’d spent so much time hiding, away from electricity, that he’d hardly ever had the chance to charge it. It had lived at the bottom of his bag, a useless keepsake. He found the old charger wrapped in another sock. He plugged his phone into one of the extension cords and laid it on the floor. After a moment the phone chimed and a charging symbol appeared on the screen, but it needed more juice before it could turn all the way on.
“Gates?” a voice said from the front of the bus. He looked up to see Will poking his head into the bus. Will climbed up the short staircase with excitement. Gates wished he would go the hell away.
He liked Will in general. He’d saved Gates’s life on the first day he’d met him and had only brought good things to their group so far. Plus, he hadn’t dyed his hair some goofy color like the rest of the McKinley kids, so that had to stand for something. But Gates didn’t want to talk to anyone at the moment. He hoped he didn’t end up saying something horrible to the kid. He knew how easily aggravated he could get when he was down in the dumps like this. He had to keep a lid on his mood and hope whatever Will had to say was brief.
Will walked as he talked. “We missed you in the market, man! Everybody was shouting at us. It was like when you see the stock exchange in movies. A bunch of different girls made out with me to get their requests moved up the list. Can you believe that? We’re like, heroes. I mean, it’s all ’cause of you. It should’ve been you out there taking requests, really.”
“Oh, yeah?” Gates said with no enthusiasm. “Did they taste different?”
“Huh?”
“The girls you kissed.”
“Oh,” Will said, and thought about it. “Sort of? One was kind of spicy now that I think about it. Why? Does that mean something?”
“Just occurred to me, I guess. Is that what you came to tell me?”
“No, I came because … it’s a happy day in the school today, everybody’s loving it, and I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem right that the guy responsible for it all is sitting alone in his room.”
Gates let out a quiet sigh. “I’m in the middle of a bunch of things.”
“You sure? You gotta see how much stuff people gave us at the market, it’s ridiculous. Just come sift through it all.”
“Maybe later.”
“Right …,” Will said. It seemed like he was about to leave, but he paused. “Oh! Also, you know that observation room that looks out to the white room? They just got the control board hooked back up and you can control the sprayer thin-gee on the ceiling. We should get the Skaters to come pick up trash and we’ll nail ’em with it.”
“Eh … nah. Is that all?”
Will slumped, looking a little letdown. He went to leave, then stopped and turned back, looking uncomfortable.
“Listen, uh, I’ve never been one for telling people I appreciate them or whatever, but it’s something … I want to start doing. Ugh, I hate how dumb that sounds. But you get it, we could be dead tomorrow and all. So, uh … anyway, I know I’ve only been a Saint for a week, and that isn’t long, but, one week back was the lowest point in my life. If you hadn’t made me that offer, I don’t know if I would have survived. And like I was saying … today’s like the best day ever. I didn’t think people would ever treat me with that kind of respect again. You gave me a chance to erase the past from people’s memories, man, and I’m going to treat it like a total fresh start. Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks.”
Gates’s phone chimed again. He glanced down to its bright screen and saw Colton. He’d forgotten his old wallpaper photo on his phone was a picture of the two of them in their St. Patrick’s uniforms, before the infection. Gates had his arm around his brother. Colton wore his stupid black Ray-Ban sunglasses that he never wanted to take off. He thought his eyes were too close together, and he’d wanted to hide them. Colton’s hair was cropped close, and parted precisely on the side. He always kept it short and neat, even for the year they’d spent on the run together.
Gates’s mind flashed with the last memory he had of Colton alive. His brother was trying to turn himself over to the military. They’d been arguing about it for weeks. Colton believed the military was telling the truth, that there was a facility where the government would take care of them. He didn’t want to run anymore, and he thought Gates was being paranoid. Colton snuck away when he was out scavenging in town with him and Pruitt. Gates ran after him, but he only got to him right as Colton was walking up to the soldier to turn himself in. Colton had his arms up in the air. The soldier raised his pistol and fired a round into Colton’s head. The wind caught the cloud of red mist that puffed out of the back of his brother’s head and carried the blood away. Colton’s dead body flopped to the ground, the back of his head dug out like a ditch.
Gates cringed and tried to make the image go away with how hard he held his eyes shut.
“Hey, are you okay?” Will said.
Gates opened his eyes and clicked the display to sleep without looking at the phone. He turned to Will.
“Did you say I can spray people?” Gates said. Will grinned.
By the time he and Will had made it out of the bus, through the infirmary where they’d found the gurneys, and up the staircase to the observation room, Gates was already regretting leaving the bus. The control panel in the small room didn’t even light up or anything. The observation room was small and long, and was really just a long desk underneath a long window that looked down to the white room. A couple file cabinets that had been emptied out were stacked at the end of the room. There was a black control board in the center of the desk, with loose wires coming out the back, and a microphone jutting out of it like an antenna.