Ritchie saw Will looking at him. He flinched, and shook his head, quick and violent, like a chicken.
“This table’s broken,” Ritchie said, moving to a tipped table in the armory. “I’ll bash it up.”
Will nodded. He didn’t want to talk feelings with Ritchie, or anyone for that matter. If he popped the cap on his anguish, he was afraid he’d never get it back on.
Ritchie made a loud racket, stomping the table. He wasn’t giving anyone an angle on his face as he beat the living hell out of that wood. Will looked around at the others. Leonard was hugging himself and refused to open his eyes. Belinda had her arms wrapped around Lucy and whispered comforting words to her. Mort rubbed his temples like he had a bad headache. Colin was staring at Will with pity, but he looked away as soon as Will caught his eyes.
“Okay,” Will said with a clap, “let’s help Ritchie out, huh? Let’s get that wood up to the lounge.”
The group drifted up the stairs, trailing Will and his torch. He stepped onto the landing where the Loners shared meals together. It was also where David would do his speeches and gang announcements. Always wait till they’re chewing. That was what David used to say about delivering bad news to the gang. Will would never see his brother again.
He climbed up another flight, to the second landing, the lounge. The flat-screen TV he’d stolen from the Freaks was there, still faceup to be used as a table. The piles of library books were there too among the mismatched chairs. Their pages would be good kindling.
People dropped wood shards and chunks of table in the center of the landing. They clattered onto the floor. The noise of it was jarring in the unnatural quiet. There should’ve been the sound of seventy-seven other kids there, going about their daily tasks.
They assembled some of the wood and the crumpled-up pages of a pirate novel into a pile, inside a disembodied sink in the middle of the floor. Within five minutes of touching the fading torch to the paper, the whole sink was ablaze. The thirteen sat on the floor, in a tight circle, around it. They watched the black smoke rise up the stairwell.
The burning wood crackled. Loners stared into the flames, hoping to lose themselves in it. Now and then, they’d kick up conversation.
“Like, if I’d gone to St. Patricks, and had to go on the run…,” Belinda said, “I-I never would have made it. I can’t run fast.”
“I would have liked it,” Ritchie said.
“Getting hunted sounds good to you? I’d slit my throat if I had to live like that,” Mort said.
“I’m just saying I would have been good at it. I could’ve survived.”
“Do you think the others are okay out there?” Leonard asked in a thin voice.
“They’ll make it if they stay together,” Will said.
No one replied. He kept his focus on tending to the fire.
“Colin, cut it out!” Ritchie said.
Colin had been scratching at the crotch of his jeans for the last few minutes.
“What? I’m just itching my dick,” Colin said.
“I wish you had gotten out,” Ritchie said.
Silence settled on the group again. The knowledge that David was dead hung in the air like a stench. No one wanted to talk about it. Or maybe they didn’t want to talk about it around Will. He could see them looking at him with worry. Belinda broke eye contact every time Will looked at her. Ritchie wasn’t being an asshole to Will for once. Lucy was the worst; she looked at him like he was about to shatter into bits. He couldn’t deal with it.
Will got up and left them all by the fire. He decided to busy himself with chores. He gathered blankets from the sleeping area one flight up, for people to have something soft to sleep on. He organized the food into neat piles in the corner. He went and opened the third floor door to the hallway so the smoke would have somewhere to go. Will kept on like that, creating little jobs for himself and completing them, while ignoring every request for him to stop and sit by the fire with the others, until the Loners had all succumbed to sleep.
The fire dwindled in the blackened sink. Will sat by his sleeping gang mates, around the fire, watching its flames shrink, and die. When the fire went out completely, it took the light with it. Will had never been afraid of the dark, but in this darkness, this cold void, he began to panic. He needed to restart the fire immediately. He needed the light. There were some matches in his backpack.
Will stumbled up the stairs, feeling his way with his hand on the handrail. He rounded the corner, waving his other hand out in front of him like a blind man. The stair he slept on, his stair bed, was six steps up the next flight. He counted until he was standing on the fifth step, then he crouched and patted his hands around until he felt the canvas material of his backpack. He picked it up. The matches were in the front pocket.
When Will’s fingers touched the cool metal tab of the front pocket’s zipper, his mind flashed back to the first day of school, when David drove him to McKinley in his Jeep, and Will couldn’t stop nervously zipping and unzipping his bag. He remembered being scared of going to high school, but excited at the same time to be in the same school as his brother. He remembered the breeze whipping through David’s messy brown hair. The ratty black hooded sweatshirt he always wore. Pale Ridge rushing past as they cruised through green lights. David teasing him, giving him advice. They had no idea that a catastrophe awaited them that morning. The brutal world they would have to endure. They had no idea that David, the depressed quarterback who had quit the team, would rise to be the savior and protector of the rejected, defenseless kids without gangs.
David could have done something great if he’d had a normal life. If none of this had ever happened, or if he had survived whatever killed him. He could have helped people. He would have been a success, Will knew it. He had more potential than Will ever would. But David would never get any of that. He’d never get to be in his twenties, or his thirties. He’d never have a wife, or kids, or a career. He’d never grow into an old man. He’d never know anything but the struggle that started that day they walked into this school, the same struggle that eventually robbed him of his life.
The grief that Will had been running from all night took hold of him, and he crumpled down onto the steps. Tears gushed from him. He couldn’t control himself anymore. He sobbed, and moaned, and let the sadness pull him under.
He felt soft hands on his back, rubbing in an easy circle.
“Shhhh,” Lucy said. “It’s all right.”
He reached out for her and they embraced. Lucy began to cry as well. She must have been holding her feelings back all night, like he had. They sat there, crying and hugging each other in the dark, for what must have been hours, before they lay down on the hard stairs and fell asleep.
6
THERE WAS A MACHETE IN LUCY’S HANDS. David’s machete. He’d made it out of a radiator shell that he hammered until it was sharp. She’d found it dangling by a shoe string, in the furthest corner of the armory. She pulled out the blade and ran her fingers down the cardboard sheath. Originally, David had simply folded a piece of cardboard into a long rectangle and sealed it with duct tape. Lucy had removed the tape and cut the rectangular sheath into the shape of the machete. With great care, she’d sewn the edges back together with spiral notebook wire.
She was nearly finished now. She twisted the excess of the two wires together, until they were a little loop at the sheath’s tip. She took a leather cord that she’d cut from a belt and laced it through the loop. She ran the cord to the other end and fastened it to make a strap.
Lucy sat on David’s bed, legs folded under her to the side. She held the sheath out before her and admired it. The words “THE LONERS” were spelled across the face of it in silver thumbtacks. It was an impressive design. It would have looked great slung across David’s back. That could never happen now. She sheathed the blade and set it down on the floor.