“I don’t eat breakfast,” said Danny.
“From now on you do,” said Lieder. “My athletes eat.”
“I’m not an athlete,” said Danny. “I’m a runner.”
Lieder stood there, looking angry, but hesitating.
“I have to stay light if I’m going to be fast,” said Danny.
“You’re either on the team or you’re not.” Lieder glanced into the house, then faced Danny again, looking like he wanted a fight after all.
Danny could see that Lieder wanted to yell at him. Something was keeping him quiet. There was someone in the house he didn’t want to wake. Or someone he didn’t want hearing him yell at a kid.
“Listen, Mr. Lieder,” said Danny. “I want to do my bit for the team. But I won’t belong to you. You just timed me. If the speed you clocked for me is good enough for me to compete, then I’ll compete for you. I’ll listen to your advice and I’ll try to get better. I’ll try to get stronger and build up stamina. Stuff that makes sense. But you don’t control what I eat, and you don’t control my time. I come to practice when I can, but when I can’t, I don’t, no questions asked.”
“Then forget it,” said Lieder. “I don’t need a defiant little asshole like you.”
“Your call,” said Danny. “I offered, and you turned me down. Now I don’t have to hear any more complaints from Mr. Massey.”
“You didn’t offer shit,” said Lieder, getting even quieter as he took a step down from the door. “If you’re on the team, then you have to play by the same rules as the other kids.”
So Lieder still wanted him. Danny must have been pretty fast.
“I can see how you wouldn’t want to have one student getting special treatment,” said Danny. “But I don’t have any choice. My time isn’t my own. I sometimes have to pick up and be somewhere. It’s not my call, and I don’t want to have to put up with crap about it if I miss practice.”
“So go, then. Thanks for waking me up, you little prick.”
“Cool,” said Danny. He turned away, headed back to the street.
“You haven’t heard the last of this,” said Lieder.
Danny turned around and came right back up to the porch. “Yes I have,” said Danny.
“You’re a student. Unless your parents provide you with a note for each and every absence, you aren’t going to get away with disappearing whenever you want.”
“I stay throughout the school day,” said Danny. “I don’t miss classes. But before and after school, there’s stuff I have to do. I offered to share that time with the track team, as much as I can. That wasn’t enough for you. I get it-I even agree with you. I shouldn’t be on the team. But that’s it. No more crap about it. I let you time me and you didn’t want me enough to take me on the only terms on which I’m available.”
“Who the hell do you think you are?” asked Lieder, the bully in him at last coming out, his voice rising. “You sound like you think you’re some world-class star, negotiating with a pro team. You’re a minor, and a student, and the law says you belong in school, and the school says I’m a teacher with authority over you.”
“What is it?” asked a weak voice from behind Lieder. A woman’s voice-barely. It was such a husky whisper that it would have been hard to tell, if Lieder hadn’t whirled around, revealing a little old woman in the doorway.
A small woman-just the right size for bullying, thought Danny.
But no, Lieder had been trying not to disturb her. And now that Danny looked closely, he saw that the woman wasn’t old, just faded and sagging. Not his mother, as he had first supposed. Nor was she small-or at least, she wasn’t short. Average height, and since Lieder was no giant, they looked about right together as man and wife. Except that she was wasting away. Something was seriously wrong with her, her robe hung on her as if she were a child wearing a woman’s dress.
Cancer, thought Danny. At home Lieder deals with a wife dying of cancer or something just as bad. Then he comes to school and takes it out on the kids.
On Danny’s tall and skinny friend Hal. It was because Lieder was humiliating Hal that Danny had made a series of gates to help Hal get up the hanging rope to the ceiling of the gym yesterday. A series of gates that intertwined and turned out to be the start of a Great Gate.
It was too easy, to think that a dying wife was the reason Lieder was a bully. It came too naturally to Lieder, a habit, an aspect of his personality. He was probably always a bully. Only now he’s a bully with something else to worry about.
“It’s all right, Nicki,” said Lieder.
“Why don’t you invite this boy inside?” asked Nicki. “He looks cold.”
“I’m fine,” said Danny.
“He’s fine,” said Lieder.
“Come in and have some cocoa,” said Nicki.
“He has to get to school,” said Lieder, “and so do I.”
Danny had been willing to shrug off the invitation before, but the woman was insisting, and the trickster in Danny couldn’t help but enjoy the fun. Plus, he was tired and cold and pissed off at Lieder. “Actually,” said Danny, “I don’t have to be there till eight-thirty. I’m not on one of those teams that practices before school.”
“But cocoa’s not good for my athletes,” said Lieder.
“I think of it as an energy drink,” said Danny. “And I could sure use some warming up.”
“Come on in, then,” said Nicki.
As Danny came past him, heading for the door, Lieder gripped him harshly by the shoulder and whispered fiercely in his ear, “You’re not coming into my house.”
“What?” said Danny loudly. “I couldn’t hear you.”
Lieder didn’t let go. “You heard me,” he whispered.
Danny gated himself just an inch away. Yesterday morning he couldn’t have done that-created a gate and passed it over himself so tightly that it took only his own body and clothing, and not Lieder’s hand. But the gates he had stolen from the Gate Thief last night consisted of the outselves of hundreds of gatemages, and every one of them had been a trickster during his life, and every one of them had had more skill than Danny. He had managed to contain them in his hearthoard-his stash-but wherever that was kept inside him, he was able to access some of their knowledge, or at least some of their experience and reflexes and habits and talents.
He must have absorbed these things unconsciously, because he hadn’t thought of doing it, he had simply done it.
If I had known how to do this last year, in Washington, I wouldn’t have had to drag that murderous thug with Eric when I gated him out of the back room of that convenience store.
But there was something else that happened, something Danny hadn’t expected. When he gated himself an inch without moving Lieder’s tight-gripping hand, it moved his own body into space that Lieder’s fingers occupied. Lieder’s fingers were ejected from that space at such speed that the bones didn’t just break, they were pulverized.
Danny heard the gasp of pain, then saw the limp and empty-looking fingers and realized at once what had happened. Before Lieder had time to turn the inhaled gasp into an exhaled scream of agony, Danny passed a gate over Lieder’s body, which healed him instantly.
That meant Lieder no longer felt the pain, but he still remembered it, very clearly.
“Don’t ever touch me like that again,” said Danny.
“Come in and join us, daddy,” said Nicki from the other room. Apparently they were one of those married couples who still called each other mommy and daddy long after their children were grown. “You have time. The kids will just run laps till you get there.”
Danny knew that the kids would sit around chatting or napping, but he had no reason to disabuse Nicki of her fantasy. He had to deal with Lieder, whose face was still showing the shock and horror of that pain.
“Don’t you learn anything?” asked Danny softly. “When I tell you that there are some things I’m going to do, whether you like them or not, it’s a good idea to believe me and step aside.”
“This is my home,” whispered Lieder.
“And that was my shoulder you were gripping,” said Danny. “Boundaries, Coach Lieder.”