I’m twisting around like a fish. I’m hard to hold down. The kid on my head gets dumped off and another drops onto my chest with his knees on my arms. He knocks the wind out of me and slaps my face in various directions. Flake’s on his stomach with a guy on his legs and a guy on his back. The guy on his back takes off one of his cleats and starts beating on Flake’s head with it. The cleats are rubber. Flake’s head pounds into the dirt. “I’m gonna kill you,” Flake yells at him. “You’re gonna kill me?” the kid repeats, and pounds him with the cleat. “I’m gonna kill you,” Flake says. “You’re gonna kill me?” the kid says.
“Let ’em go,” one of the coaches hollers from the fence. “Now.”
Everybody piles off us, passing around congratulations. Flake gives a kick from where he’s lying but otherwise lets them go. I have my hands over my head. We hear them crossing the street.
There’s grass and stuff in my hair. My nose and mouth are bloody. My ear’s scraped up, too. My hand comes away from it wet. The blood’s stringy and slimy from the crying. It’s hard to spit. I don’t want to move because of my tailbone. I shift my butt and that’s enough to make me stop. Off in the distance I can hear the coach giving the kids shit.
“Fuck,” is all we can say, a couple times, because everything hurts. Flake sniffles and writhes around.
“You all right?” I finally ask him. Over on the practice fields, the teams are heading in and the kids who kicked our ass are running laps.
“Fuck you,” he says. I know how he feels: he wants the world to blow itself up, me included. He tips onto his back. His shirt looks like a slasher movie. His nose is a mess. There’s dirt in his eyes. He puts some fingers on his face and feels around. He hasn’t stopped crying yet.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa,” he says. It’s not very loud. He tips back onto his side. It’s one of the saddest sights I’ve seen all year.
“Aaaaauuaaaaauuaaah!” he screams. Even lying in the dirt, I jump a little. He wipes snot off his face and flings it. The kids running laps slow down to look over. Then they speed up again.
2
My mom sits next to me on the bed and helps with the ice. When the facecloth gets warm I pass it over and she dunks it in the bowl and wrings it out and hands it back. My lower lip’s swollen and one eye’s half-squinty. I look like Popeye throwing a tantrum.
“What’s the matter with you?” she says in a soft voice. Like everybody else, she really wants to know. “Why can’t you get along with the boys in your class?”
“They weren’t in my class,” I tell her. It’s hard for her to hear through the facecloth.
“Is his nose broken?” Gus wants to know from the other side of the door. He’s four and his favorite video’s The Making of Jaws documentary.
“He’s fine, Gus,” my mom goes. “He just wants some time to himself.”
“Can I see?” Gus asks.
“Then it wouldn’t be time to himself,” my mom tells him.
“You’re in there,” Gus goes.
“Why do you think you’re always picking fights?” she asks me quietly.
“Are there guts?” Gus asks.
“No guts,” my mom goes. “Are you watching the movie? ’Cause if you’re not watching the movie I’ll turn it off.”
“I’m watchin’ it,” Gus tells her.
He’s been on a Predator kick for a few weeks now. Flake thinks it’s a scream. Flake brings him magazines like Fangoria and Cinefantastique with gross pictures of how they do the gore. He shows them to Gus when my mom isn’t around. When Gus tells her about the gushy pictures Flake shows him, she says, “That’s nice.”
“I don’t pick fights,” I tell her.
“You just show up, and people hit you, right?” she asks.
I shrug. My eyes start to tear up because I’m feeling sorry for myself.
“So did you know any of these kids? They weren’t in your grade?” she says.
“Ninth-graders hate us,” I tell her.
“Why?” she asks.
“Well, eighth-graders hate us too,” I go.
Gus opens the door and comes in and closes it behind him. “Can I come in?” he goes. He gets on the bed and lies on his side and only looks at me a little bit. It’s something great he wants to save and not do all at once.
My dad comes home. We all just look at each other while he troops around downstairs. Then he comes up.
“What’s this, a meeting?” he asks at the door.
“You don’t look too surprised,” I go. Meaning about my face.
“I’m not,” he goes. He wears a shirt and tie and Levi’s to class. He gets the Levi’s at the Army-Navy store and spends like seventy-five dollars on the ties. “What happened to you?” he says.
“He was all bloody,” Gus tells him.
“He got into a fight,” my mom goes. She sounds like she’s been carrying a big rock up a hill for a hundred years.
“His shirt was all bloody,” Gus tells him.
“Some kids,” I go.
He turns into his room, shaking his head. I hear the hangers in the closet.
“Is he all right?” he calls to my mom.
“He seems to be,” she calls back.
“Was the Nightrider involved?” he wants to know.
He calls Flake the Nightrider because Flake’s always wanting to go out when I’m supposed to be in for the night. One time I got caught climbing off the porch roof at three in the morning. I slipped and landed on our recycling bin for tin cans. Flake said we would’ve gotten caught by deaf people.
“Apparently they had a disagreement with most of the soccer team,” my mom tells him.
“High school kids?” he says.
“JV,” I go. He’s still in his room, so I don’t see if he has any reaction.
“I don’t know what to do,” my mom says, I guess to him. “Maybe another school.”
“I’m not going to private school,” I tell her. I got showed around one last year after I had so much trouble in sixth grade. They probably also figured it’d get me away from Flake. The kid assigned to be my special friend for the day let me sit on a meringue square somebody’d put on my seat in one of the classes. When I got home I put the flyer down the disposal and turned the disposal on. “So how’d it go?” my mom asked, when she got home.
Gus starts jumping on the bed. He has this game where he jumps on the bed and I cut his legs out from under him with my forearm.
I tell him to stop it. I have a big pillow under my tailbone, but the jumping doesn’t help.
“Not now, honey,” my mom says. “Your brother doesn’t feel good.”
“Is he hurt?” Gus asks, jumping.
“You’re gonna be hurt, if you don’t get down,” my dad calls from the other room. “And are you watching that movie, or am I going to turn it off?”
Flake looks worse than I do.
“Look at you,” I go when he comes over after supper.
“I’m gonna heal,” he says. “You’re always gonna look like that.”
His dad cut his hair shorter so now his ears stick out even more. Plus he’s got these cartoon eyebrows.
The only thing that cheers us up besides somebody getting hurt is mosh volleyball. It’s the only sport we play. Flake doesn’t like to call it a sport. We invented it ourselves. One of us serves off the roof of the garage and the other has to put it back up onto the roof without letting it hit the ground. The roof edge is low so you can sky and pin the thing to the top and then it just rolls off and is pretty much unreturnable. But what’s great is, to slam it like that you have to throw yourself into the garage wall. The paint’s all covered with scuff marks and our legs are all covered with bruises. My dad hates the game because it knocks stuff off the walls inside. Once we knocked the ladder onto his car.