“Aw, come on, I was just weaving a little!” Gates shouted, as the last of the Skater girls lowered herself off the edge and dropped to the floor.
“Bye, girls,” Will said, wistfully.
“Easy come, easy go.”
“Totally.”
They passed through a hallway intersection.
“My old gang used to live in a stairwell down that direction,” Will said. “David would have loved taking a joy ride in the cube.”
“Did he like to have a good time? Sounds like my kind of dude.”
“Well… not really. He more liked to worry all the time.”
Gates glanced at Will and saw that his mood had gone somber.
“Sounds like my brother, Colton.”
Will sat up. “Really?”
Gates nodded. “He was always worrying about me, trying to keep me out of trouble.”
Will nodded like he knew what that was like, then cleared his throat. “Uh… Fowler told me what happened to Colton. I’m so sorry, man. That’s awful.”
Gates tugged on the steering wheel, suddenly annoyed at how slow the cube was.
“There must be another gear or something,” Gates said.
“Do you miss him?”
They were crawling along. Gates needed more speed. He felt all around the base of the steering wheel and around the boxy dashboard that must have once held virus-testing equipment. His fingers found a little plastic pull handle in a recessed nook on the underside of the dash. He pulled it.
There was a dull thunk, and the cube sped forward.
“Ho ho! E-brake! We’ve been riding with the brakes on the whole time!” Gates said.
“Oh shit,” Will said. He gave the clear wall an excited double slap. “How fast does it go?”
The wobbly cube accelerated. The hallway began to race by.
“This thing can move!” Will said.
“We’ve got to see what she can do!” Gates said.
Will started laughing. Lockers and doorways whipped past. A group of Geeks had to dive to get out of the way when they saw a giant ice cube zipping toward them.
“Whoa! You almost hit them,” Will said.
“She’s still got more in her! She’s still going.”
The hallway ended at the open double doors to the basement, and they were fast approaching. The motor buzzed at a higher pitch.
“You gotta hit the brakes, hit the brakes,” Will said.
“We gotta wait. We’ll jump at the last possible moment!”
“What? Why?”
“It’ll be intense!”
“We’ll die. You’ll break the cube!”
“Once-in-a-lifetime chance, dude!”
“Ah!” Will screamed. “All right! Go! Shit, this is crazy!”
Will was laughing as he kicked open the thick back door to the cube. Ten feet from the top of the stairs, Will jumped. Gates turned halfway around, getting ready to jump, but still holding the steering wheel steady with one hand. He watched the slanting ceiling of the stairwell rush toward him, and for a moment he didn’t want to jump. A small part of him wanted to stay put, and hope the crash destroyed him. As the front tires were rolling over the top step, he jumped instead.
The sound of his torso slapping down to the floor was nothing compared to the cacophony of the cube crashing down the stairs. Will went running past Gates, to the top of the stairs. He pulled himself to his feet and rushed over to Will’s side. At the bottom of the stairs, by the closed doors of the basement, the thick plastic walls of the tube had broken apart from each other, and now were piled with the black plastic trash bags at the basement doors. The motorized base was bent and missing a wheel.
Gates turned to Will, who still stared down at the wreckage of the cube. This was a moment Gates was familiar with. Usually at this point, when he’d taken things this far, whoever he was hanging out with would politely excuse themselves and then avoid ever hanging out alone with him again, or would start yelling and screaming at him about how stupid a thing to do that was.
Will looked up at him and grinned. “We got to get something faster,” he said.
Oh shit, Gates thought to himself. He might just have a new best friend.
22
THERE WERE FOURTEEN CHOCOLATE HO-HOS on a paper plate on the floor. That was what the Saints had been giving Sam to eat. Junk. As worthless to him as eating stacks of Post-it notes. If his father had taught him anything, it was that his body was holy. This pile of shit cakes was an insult. Fourteen cream-filled slaps in the face, one for every day since the Saints claimed his father had delivered on Gates’s threat. But Sam refused to fall for that crock of shit. They were trying to mess with his head.
All the stuff he’d seen those Saint kids carry past his clear cell door, they must have somehow brought it in from the outside, before they’d gotten locked in here. It was all a show for Sam’s benefit. They wanted him to crumble and do whatever they said. They needed him to be a blubbering baby in front of his dad so that he would break down and stop starving them out, which was really the truth of what was happening. But his father would never give in. In all his life, Sam had never once seen his dad back down from a fight. So, neither would Sam. They’d stand against this together.
Sam sat on his cot, his hands behind his back, the only part of him still bound with packing tape. He was out of breath and sweating from his morning calisthenics. His body was getting weaker. It scared him a little, if he was being honest. He could feel his mind getting cloudier, and his eyeballs plumping out of their sockets. Starvation would do that to a person, but he’d been there before. He’d drink from the small sink to his right, by his toilet, awkwardly turning the faucet on with his cheek. Water was the only meal he’d had. He wasn’t going to bend to the Saints’ will in any way, he wasn’t going to put those processed, sugar clumps they called food in his body.
He could wait this out. He could do it. He just had to last until his dad stormed the school with the other parents, and came for him. Only, it was taking longer than he’d expected.
Sam looked up. Someone stood beyond the door, in the shadows, watching him. Sam stared the kid down, even though he couldn’t see his face. It was probably Will. He’d come and watch Sam for sometimes twenty minutes. Sam knew what that was about. Fear. The kid was in over his head and he knew it. Will was looking for some way to undo the knot he’d tied his dick into, but there was no way out for that kid. Sam was going to find Will when he got out. He was going to cut Will’s throat out.
The door to Sam’s cell opened.
It wasn’t Will. It was Gates that stepped in. He kicked the plate of Ho-Hos forward a foot on the floor.
“You really should eat more,” Gates said.
“Bring me a steak,” Sam said, his voice cracking from so little use.
“No problem. All we have to do is ask your pops.”
Sam laughed. Here’s where it came, the part where they’d force him to make a plea to his dad, to pull at his heartstrings, to cry and scream and get his dad to cry and scream too, all so the parents would finally give in.
“In your fucking dreams, rich boy,” Sam said.
“Whoa,” Gates said, frowning. “Fine by me. I don’t care.”
Sam didn’t quite understand the response, and it threw him off.
“You got a real temper, huh?” Gates said.
“You can’t break me down,” Sam said, getting more fed up by the second. “I’m never going to be your puppet. You can break every bone in my body, I am never going say what you want me to say.”
Gates twisted his head with a confused look and smushed his eyebrows down like a caveman with a cell phone.
“I don’t want you to say anything,” Gates said. “They just want to see you. If that means I keep getting what I want, fine by me.”