The Hiding Place Read online

  “It must’ve worked because at the next stop Michael and Alexandra climbed aboard and walked right past me like I wasn’t there. I kept my eyes out the window, watching the rain spatter the surface of puddles along the sidewalk. The remainder of the ride to school was uneventful, and as we came to a stop in the parking lot and Mr. Gavin engaged the wheezy pop of the air brake and swung the doors wide, I sat still in my seat and let the other kids get off before me, not wanting to hold up the line with my awkward three-legged descent. ‘You be careful now, Jason,’ Mr. Gavin warned me halfway down. He must’ve been referring to my crutches, but I took it more as an admonition for the days ahead.”

  I nodded. Beyond the fence where we were now standing, a squirrel darted across the street and was nearly struck by a passing car. I winced, but the tires missed its fragile body by a few inches. It reached the other side and scampered up a tree where I lost sight of it amid the leaves.

  “People talk about the calm before the storm,” he continued, “and that’s how it felt to me during those first few days. In the Emergency Department, the doctor told us that the stitches in my face would need to be removed in five days, and I used that time as a barometer. I told myself that if I made it that long without hearing anything from Michael or the rest of my peers, then there was a good chance the whole thing would just … blow over. It was flawed reasoning, I knew, but it gave me something to hold on to, something to set my sights on. Five days, I told myself. Just five days.”

  Jason paused, placing one hand on the iron rail. “I made it three.”

  His image seemed to fade a bit as I watched, as if he were being pulled—physically as well as mentally—into his own recollection. I could almost see him, not as he was now but as he might have looked back then: the uncertain countenance and boyish face of an adolescent, the scar along his left temple red and puckered beneath the stiches, the greatest losses of his life still ahead of him.

  He started walking again, slowly, his eyes scanning the buildings to our right. I matched his pace, wondering if he was seeing those buildings for what they really were, or if, in his mind, he was fourteen once more and on his way to school.

  “I was limping down the hall toward my locker,” he said. “My ankle had healed enough that I could finally walk on it, and I’d decided to leave my crutches at home that morning. So there I was hobbling along, still favoring my right ankle and keeping close to the wall so that I could lean against it for support if necessary. We had six minutes between classes, and the hall was full of conversations, laughter, the flow of student foot traffic. I stopped at the water fountain for a drink, and as I was bent forward I felt someone give me a light smack on the butt as they passed. I stood up quickly, looked around, but no one looked back at me, no one snickered—in fact, no one appeared the least interested in my response.

  “Something harmless, I told myself. Just a friend messing with me. It was certainly possible. Problem was, I didn’t have that many friends—except for Michael and Alex, and I had the feeling they’d fallen irrevocably off the list recently. And neither of them was in the hallway; I would’ve recognized them, even from behind. So I made a decision that it was nothing. I went to my locker, changed out my books, and headed off to science. I remember we were diagramming the GI tract of an earthworm that day—mouth, pharynx, esophagus, crop, gizzard, intestine—and all the while I kept feeling that light smack on my butt in the hallway. A scrunch-faced pimply boy named Bret Forester leaned over to study my drawing. ‘Don’t forget the anus,’ he whispered, just loud enough for a few others around us to hear, and a twitter of muffled laughter wound its way around the room as my ears turned red and miniature beads of sweat popped out on my neck and upper back. ‘Quiet,’ the teacher ordered, and the room filled with a heavy silence—the deadly, expectant communal anticipation of a crowd come to witness the offering of a human sacrifice. It’s nothing, I told myself, focusing my eyes on the surface of the teacher’s desktop two rows ahead, looking at no one, my ears still blazing, the sharpened pencil forgotten in my hand. It’s nothing, I thought again, the phrase repeating itself like a mantra until the overhead tone sounded, marking the end of class. ‘Nothing,’ I mumbled softly to myself as we filed through the open door. But of course I was wrong.

  “‘Hey, Jason. How ’bout a kiss?’ Bret Forester quipped somewhere off to my right. ‘I hear you like boys,’ he said, and there was no mistaking the motive behind that jab.

  “I didn’t think, didn’t deliberate. I responded out of pure self-preservation because to not respond—to continue to ignore it—would only make matters worse.

  “I dropped my books and swung. I wasn’t a fighter, wasn’t big or particularly athletic, but I had the advantage of surprise—and fury—on my side. My clenched fist struck him directly in the nose, making that scrunched-up face of his fold in on itself even more. He fell backward against the wall, his small ugly mouth forming a perfect circle of astonishment. And suddenly the blood began to flow—a startling amount for the single shot he’d taken. His nose was broken. I could see its crooked angle through the splay of fingers pressed against his face. I said nothing, just stood there and stared him down, waiting to see if he would come for me, ready to go to the ground with him if necessary. But bullies are really cowards, and all it takes is the proper show of force to back them down—at least temporarily.”

  Jason glanced at me then, and I could see a furrowing in his brow that hadn’t been there before. “But bullies can also be dangerous when crossed. And they have friends. So I stood there and did the math in my head, totaling the reinforcements on both sides of the equation. On my side, of course, it was just me. There was no one else I could count on, and I realized then and there that I would take a beating for this. They would gather their forces and come for me. I would be ready for them—expecting it—but I knew I couldn’t win. Not on my own. And even through the blood and pain, the cold, hateful look in Bret Forester’s eyes told me that he knew it, too.”

  Chapter 14

  I allot a certain amount of time each day to talk with my patients, and my session with Jason had already run over, but I couldn’t leave it at that. “Eventually, they caught up with you,” I surmised, and he nodded.

  “I couldn’t outrun them—not with my ankle the way it was—and so the first time they came for me I simply stood my ground.”

  “How badly were you injured?” I asked.

  Jason shrugged. “Not as badly as I’d anticipated. Black eye. Cut lip. Once I went down, I was able to get my arms up over my head and face, but they kept kicking me and managed to break a few ribs and bruise both of my kidneys in the process. The ribs took six weeks to heal, and there was blood in my piss for three days after the assault. But all things considered, I counted myself pretty lucky. Mostly, I was just glad it was over.”

  I waited for him to continue.

  “Except, of course, it wasn’t over. With guys like that, it’s never really over, is it? Once they set their sights on you, it becomes a compulsion, like a patch of dry skin they just can’t scratch to their satisfaction. And even though you’re cracked and bleeding—and on some level they must realize that they’ve gone too far—they simply can’t stop until something irreparable happens, until the wound is too macerated and ruined to tolerate anything further.

  “The second time they came for me was in the school bathroom. I fought back hard that time—hit one of the boys, Tim Maddox, in the windpipe, putting him out of commission. Clayton Flynn took a kick to the knee that I hope he still feels on rainy days, and I kept swinging at Bret Forester’s pimply, bulldog face, trying to break his nose for the second time. But there was a fourth boy, Billy Myers, who was mean, quiet, and probably the only one of them with true lethal potential. He’s locked up in a maximum-security prison somewhere right now, I just know it, but on that day he snuck up behind me while most of my attention was on Bret and he hit me in the back of the head with something hard and metal, and that’s all I remember of the f
ight until I woke up to a small crowd of students around me, some teacher’s voice calling my name, and my head resting on the lower lip of a urinal.

  “They took me to the hospital—my fourth visit in two months—only this time the ER doctor was a woman who made small noises I couldn’t interpret and shook her head as she examined me. They did a CT scan of my brain, which was thankfully normal, kept me overnight for observation, and discharged me the next morning with a diagnosis of concussion.”

  Jason’s eyes cleared for a moment. “My sister came to visit me in the hospital,” he recounted. “She sat at my bedside and studied me, saying very little. I had other visitors, of course, but it was her presence that I remember the most. We must’ve spoken to each other during that visit, but the only thing I remember was what she said to me just before leaving. She walked over to the bed, leaned forward, and planted a kiss on my forehead—which was pretty unusual behavior for her. She drew back a bit, observed me with a calculating look. I thought she was going to give me a brief lecture, tell me something useless like how I needed to stop fighting and just stay away from those kids. But what she instead said was ‘This will not happen again.’ Then she turned and left, leaving me to wonder how she could promise a thing like that. Yet, somehow, I believed her, and a half hour later I pulled the string to shut off the fluorescent light above my bed, closed my eyes, and slept better than I had in weeks.”

  “Was she right?” I asked.

  “In a way,” Jason replied, and he smiled as if I’d said something funny.

  About fifty feet from where we stood, Menaker’s groundskeeper, Kendrick Jones, spotted us and lifted an arthritic hand in our direction. His forearm was a tapestry of scratches, his face stained and weathered by the relentless sun. He tried to stand fully erect, but could not—his back permanently stooped from all those years tending the yard. I could see the dull, sightless opaqueness of his right eye, the result of being jabbed four years ago by the sharp end of a branch he’d been trimming. I tried to imagine how Kendrick might’ve looked his first day on the job, and whether he would’ve taken the position at all if he realized how the hospital would latch itself on to him like a parasite, sucking the youth and vigor from his body until he was nothing but a brittle, pathetic shell. I raised my hand to return his gesture, but his good eye had spied a wayward thistle near the fence. He frowned and scuttled after it, leaving the two of us alone once again.

  “Three weeks went by before they came for me again,” Jason told me. “I can’t say I was surprised. I knew they would come, knew they weren’t finished with me yet, especially since I’d gotten in a couple of good shots the last time. They wanted a decisive victory, wanted to humiliate me completely. I realized there was trouble as soon as I got off the bus that afternoon. The neighborhood was too quiet, the streets emptier than they should’ve been. Right away I got that fluttery feeling in my stomach, like I wanted to giggle and throw up at the same time. I’d only covered a half block, walking fast, when Tim Maddox stepped out from the bushes onto the sidewalk ahead of me. He smiled, but there was no humor in it, and as he started walking toward me I broke to the right, running but not all-out yet, saving my wind for when I’d really need it.

  “Bret lived three blocks away, and as I ran down the sidewalk he and Clayton stepped off his front lawn and into the street. Clayton had a bat in one hand, its thick end resting on his shoulder, and he looked eager to use it. I hooked left into the woods, moving through the trees until I came to the lip of a gulley. I could hear them entering the woods behind me, taunting me, calling out, ‘Wait up, we just wanna talk to ya.’ And all the while I kept thinking, Where’s Billy Myers? The stealthy one. The meanest of the four. The only one with murder in his eyes.

  “I ran along the edge of the gulley, my ankle beginning to ache. The path of my flight was looping around toward home. If I can get inside the house, lock the doors, I thought, then maybe I’ll be okay. They were chasing me through the brush, shouting to one another: ‘There he is!’ ‘Up ahead!’ ‘Get him!’ But I was getting close to the house, could recognize the thatch of trees that bordered our street, and even with my messed-up ankle, they were lagging behind, out of breath, all words and no steam. I remember thinking that my escape was almost too easy. It didn’t make sense that I was outdistancing them like this. And on the heels of that I kept thinking, Where’s Billy?”

  “It was a trap, wasn’t it? They were flushing you toward him.”

  Jason nodded. “Billy stood waiting for me at the edge of the woods. I was pretty winded by then, and as he came hurtling toward me down the slight hill there was no chance of dodging him. He meant to tackle me head-on, but I saw it coming and at the last second dropped to one knee and his forward momentum allowed me to take him out at the legs. He hurtled over me, somersaulting once in the air, and before I heard his body crunch against the ground behind me I was back on my feet and moving up the hill.

  “But he was fast, so fast, and I felt him snag my ankle from behind, bringing me to the ground. I kicked out with my other foot, caught him in the face with the sole of my shoe, but that only seemed to anger him. The others were bullies and opportunists, but Billy Myers was crazy—and he will kill me, I thought as he clawed his way up my body, pinning me to the ground, his eyes wild, spittle flying off his lower lip.

  “‘You’re gonna get what’s comin’ to ya, faggot,’ he hissed in my face, and he wasn’t talking about another beating this time, because he reached into the back pocket of his jeans, pulled out a black-handled thing that he dangled in front of my face, and with the flick of a spring-loaded switch, a six-inch blade shot out from one of its ends.

  “I was plenty scared then because—like I said—the look in Billy Myers’s eyes told me he had every intention of using that thing. I started bucking and thrashing beneath him, trying to throw him off me, but by then his reinforcements had arrived and they piled on top of me, too, holding down my arms and legs.

  “‘Hold him still, goddammit!’ Billy instructed as he yanked up my shirt and placed the cold point of the blade against my stomach.

  “‘Hey, Billy,’ Tim Maddox whispered, as if the rest of us couldn’t hear him, ‘you’re not gonna really cut him, right? You’re just messin’ with him.’ There was a pleading tremor in his voice, and I realized that he, too, was scared of Billy—of what he was, and what he was capable of doing.

  “‘Just shut up and hold him,’ Billy said. He looked calm now—tranquil even—as if a thin curtain had fallen across his face, leaving him devoid of emotion. Only his eyes betrayed him, revealing the nastiness beneath, and I stopped wondering if he was going to cut me and braced myself for the silent punch of steel through the flesh of my abdomen.

  “‘Excuse me,’ a female voice interjected, and I watched as all four of their faces looked up in unison. It was almost comical, the synchronized upswing of their heads, their jaws dropping open slightly. In the next second there was a whooshing noise as something cut through the air and connected with Billy’s forearm. I heard a resounding crack as the bat made contact. Billy screamed and rolled backward, clutching an arm that now hung at a grotesque angle from his elbow. The knife fell with a soft plop onto my stomach, and I looked down to see a single bead of blood welling up where the point had pressed against my skin. Billy’s arm had taken most of the bat’s force, but the follow-through of my sister’s swing caught Tim Maddox in the temple, sending him flying backward—ironic, since he’d been the one who’d brought the Louisville Slugger to the ambush in the first place but had tossed it onto the ground in order to get a better hold of me. If the bat hadn’t struck Billy first, if the bones in his arm hadn’t absorbed a good portion of the force of that swing, I’m fairly certain the direct impact to Tim’s head would’ve killed him.

  “Bret made a half lunge for the Slugger, but she brought it down in an ax chop onto his outstretched hand, and there was another crunch of bone and a howl of pain. She turned to Clayton next, who was scuttling away from her i
n a crab walk across the ground. She was three years older than all of us, but moved like an apparition, the bat rising above her head once more as she readied herself for the next swing. She’s going to kill them, I thought. She’s going to keep swinging that thing until they’re all stone quiet and dead. I called out her name, but she didn’t seem to hear me. She brought the bat down as hard as she could, and Clayton—thank God—rolled to the left so the fat wood slammed into the earth instead of his face, and then he was on his feet and running, blubbering, slipping down the embankment in a wake of sobs and ratcheting, gasping breaths. I got up and ran to her, the knife slipping from my belly and landing, forgotten, in the leaves. I put my arms on her shoulders just as she was turning her attention back to Billy. She spun around to face me, and her eyes were just … vacant … not registering me at all. I remember looking right into that face and not recognizing her, either, wondering to myself, Who is this person? And there was … I don’t know, a moment … during which I thought she was about to turn that bat on me. Because she didn’t know me, you see? She was just … gone.”

  He looked at me beseechingly, implored me to understand. I swallowed once and nodded.

  “I screamed her name, screamed it right into her face. I’d forgotten about Billy Myers and the rest of his pathetic band of delinquents. I’d forgotten that, less than a minute before, he’d pressed a knife against the skin of my belly, threatened to carve into me. All I could think about was that empty, shapeless space between my sister and me. It was like she had taken an unsuspecting step backward off a precipice, and I was standing there watching her body plummet downward, her upturned face becoming smaller and smaller until I could no longer make out her features. She could have been anyone—or no one—and that scared me more than anything that had come before.

  “I kept yelling her name, shook her a bit, and at last her eyes seemed to focus. She blinked and looked at me—finally—like I was someone she knew. The other boys were gone, scattered like roaches beneath the threat of her merciless foot. I took the bat from her hands, let it clunk to the ground, and we stood there in the woods—just the two of us—for a long time. ‘You okay?’ I asked, and I guess it was strange that I was the one doing the asking, but she seemed to understand what I was talking about and nodded back at me. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘I’m good.’