He’d been searching the room for ten minutes before he found a plastic squeeze bottle of honey hidden above one of the dormant ceiling light panels. Most of the things Will had been finding on his night trips were things people were hiding from their own gangs. When someone snatched up something really nice, like sixteen ounces of honey, they’d pocket it, not tell their gang, and then keep it somewhere away from home.
Whoever’s honey it was, Will was thankful for their greed. He brushed shards of glass off the windowsill, and sat by one of the shattered windows that overlooked the quad. Will squeezed honey into his mouth, piling it high on his tongue.
He heard a voice through the open window.
“It’s me, Sam.”
Will swallowed the pile of honey, and nearly inhaled it. He looked down to the quad and saw Sam standing underneath the window, about fifteen feet from the wall. His first thought was that Sam was talking to him, but that made no sense. Sam was looking higher than Will’s window.
As Will watched Sam, his emotional wounds from three weeks ago reopened. Will wanted to hurt Sam. To make him cry. He wanted to humiliate Sam in front of everyone, and break him so completely that he would never believe in himself again. Will wanted Sam to feel everything that he felt.
“I kept looking at that amp that’s up there,” Sam continued on from outside. Sam’s head was craned back, and he was staring to about the height of the roof. Will was careful to keep out of the moonlight.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about it, then I realized I knew it. The stickers that are on it. The colors, the way they’re placed. It’s yours. I mean, it is you, isn’t it?”
Will wanted to drop a desk on Sam, but not before he understood what was happening. The only amp Will knew of belonged to the man in the motorcycle helmet.
“Just give me a sign,” Sam called up. “I know I’m making a scene, I shouldn’t be doing this. Just one sign and I’ll go. I just need to know I’m not crazy. Please,” he said, his voice drenched in a level of emotion Will never knew Sam was capable of.
A glittering object fell from the sky, jingling as it went. Sam reached out and caught it. His face lit up as he looked into his hand. It was a key chain in the shape of Notre Dame’s mascot, the Fighting Irish leprechaun.
Sam’s head rose slowly, and it appeared that the psycho was feeling some form of love, but somehow Sam made love look angry.
“I knew it was you, Dad!” Sam said. “I knew it.”
Sam dashed out of the quad, clutching the key chain with both hands.
Will slowly shook his head. No. It couldn’t be true. The man in the motorcycle helmet couldn’t be Sam’s father. Life couldn’t be that unfair. How did the tyrant of the school, the kid who beat up people having seizures, get to have his father back, while Will would never see David again?
Will grabbed a desk and hurled it across the room. It spun through the air and crashed into other desks, making a loud clattering noise. Will refused to accept that this was how things would turn out. He’d make sure things didn’t work out for Sam in the end. There had to be a way.
“Give us that honey,” a voice said.
Will looked to the door to see three huff-heads from the ruins walking into the room. Burnouts. David had always been paranoid about getting mugged by burnouts and it never happened. Will had come to assume it never would. Whoops.
There was a big guy, a little guy, and a girl. The three of them seemed both exhausted and wired at the same time. Giant dark circles under their eyes. The big guy wore a dead teacher’s suit, with a brown bloodstain that covered the front of the dress shirt. The suit fabric was thoroughly soiled, and ripping at the seams, like the kid had lived in it for months. The little guy wore a heavy chain of combination locks as a necklace. No shirt, no pants, just loose boxers, black leather gloves, and tennis shoes. The girl wore two large mens sweatshirts, one like a normal human being would, and the other as pants. Her ankles came out of the sweatshirt’s wrist holes and she’d made suspenders out of backpack straps to keep her sweatshirt-pants from falling down. She had dirty gray dreadlocks that hung over her face.
From out of his inside jacket pocket, the big one pulled a short section of broom handle wood, with a four-inch screw driven through the center of it, like a basic corkscrew for wine bottles. He closed his fist over the broom handle part, and the long gold screw stuck out from between his fingers.
You could generally gauge how scared you should be of someone in McKinley by what kind of weapon they brandished. Knives and baseball bats were normal, but Will didn’t want anything to do with a dude who carried a punching spike.
They came at him. Will jumped out the window.
Right after his heels hit the ground, his knees hit his chin. His teeth clapped together, he fell on his side. He got to his feet and ran, stumbling and weaving, with a sore chin and aching teeth, still entirely disoriented from his fall. But he’d gotten away with it. The honey was his, and he could already feel his stomach churning through what he’d eaten.
A loud thump behind him. Will looked back. The big one was getting up and dusting his suit off. He saw the girl land on the ground, while the little guy in his boxers jumped from the second-floor window.
“Kill me now,” Will said to himself.
He bolted into the nearest hallway and ran all the way to the front foyer, honey in hand. Will could hear their footsteps closing in on him, and he was getting out of breath. He ran through the front foyer’s steel graduation doors, to hide in the white room and hope the burnouts ran past. The white room was glaringly bright, as before, and it was empty except for shiny, plump, black trash bags piled up by the walls. He turned to face the doors and walked backward through the white room, watching the steel graduation doors, and praying that no one came through.
The three burnouts entered. The big one in the dead teacher’s suit was coughing, with veins puffing out from his neck and forehead. He glared at Will. The little one had lost one of his leather gloves and the skin of his hand was badly burned. He was laughing like a panting dog. The girl with the gray dreads in her face held a permanent marker in her hand, and she had the uncapped marker stuck up her nose. Her nostrils were stained with blue. She held her other nostril closed with her finger and took long, slow inhales of the marker fumes. He could see one of her eyes. It was green, but it was so dilated that it was mostly black.
“Last chance,” the big one said. “Honey. Now.”
His teeth were brown. He brandished his punching spike in his fist, and the gold-plated screw gleamed in the stark light. The girl began to dance with herself, as if no one else was there. The little one took off his combination lock necklace. He let the heavy chain hang at his hip, in his gloved hand.
Will looked at his honey. He hesitated. The big one walked toward him and cocked his spiked fist back.
SSHTUHH
Will felt a door slide open behind him. He ran through the open doorway without looking and collided with a barrel-chested Saint who was trying to exit. Will saw a red button on the wall by the door and he smashed his palm onto it.
“No, wait,” the Saint said from behind him.
The big burnout was dashing toward Will, but the metal door slid out of the wall and slammed shut between them. Will heard the dull thump of the burnout’s fist hitting the door and a muffled whelp of pain afterward.
Adrenaline buzzed through Will’s body. He turned to the Saint, to thank him for saving his life. The Saint vomited all down the front of Will’s shirt.