“No.”
“You get in a fight? That why they sent you here?”
I noticed Lexington watching me from the backseat.
“I had an accident when I was a kid,” I said. “It was a stupid thing. There are lots of little bones behind your face that you can knock loose pretty easily. The sphenoid bone. The ethmoid. It’s a fragile system.”
Williams leaned over and looked up into my nose. “Well, that’s a seriously loud whistle you got going on in there. It sounds like a kazoo, you know? Like someone honking on a kazoo.”
I glanced at Lex and saw that she was still watching.
“Can you hear it yourself?” Williams asked, still peering up into my nose. “It’s like
I rolled up my window.
Williams tried to get me to talk about myself some more, about what had landed me at About Face, but after I dodged his questions a couple of times, he grew bored and turned on the radio. The rest of the drive was uneventful. Lex kept to herself.
When we reached the city limits, I got off the highway and followed the blue H signs to the hospital. I parked as close as I could get to the entrance. Lex climbed to her feet and came toward me down the aisle.
“I’ll be right here when you’re done inside,” I said as she passed.
“It takes three hours,” she said. Her eyes were as green as limes. “You should go walk around town.”
“What would you recommend seeing?” I said to Lex.
She gave a tired smile. “Anything but the hospital,” she said, and then left the van.
I watched Lex cross the parking lot. At one point a car pulled out of a spot in front of her, and even though it didn’t come close to hitting her, she gave a little frightened jump, then stopped in her tracks. The car paused and the driver waved her across his path, but she insisted he go first.
“Nervous little thing,” said Williams. “So skittish.”
I thought about what Brill had said about her not having any friends. Things had been the same way for me at her age. I’d had a hard time of it, and watching her stand there alone and frightened in the parking lot, I felt my affection for Lex bloom.
She glanced over at me as the car finished its K-turn, and I waved and gave her my warmest grin. She smiled a tight-lipped, friendly smile, but even as she did, she crossed her arms over her chest, as though protecting her heart from me.
When I was ten, a bullet came screaming down out of the sky and slammed into the top of my head. I was on my way to school, walking through the field behind the schoolyard. My book bag was on my back, my hair was combed and still wet from the shower. I was already late, but I didn’t care. Because the day before, a girl I liked had passed me a note—Stephanie Leroux, I still remember her name. The note said that tomorrow she’d pass me a romance note, and so on that morning I was taking my time getting to school, enjoying my own anticipation. The day was perfect. Warm, with a glowing blue sky.
I remember hearing a faint static in the atmosphere, a kind of electric crackle. The next thing I knew I was lying on the ground, staring up at the clouds with a metal pebble lodged and cooling in my skull.
I learned later that there had been a race nearby, a charity marathon, and that the man in charge had mistakenly fired an actual bullet into the air to get things started. He came to the hospital almost every day I was there and cried into the rumpled edge of my bed. The woman who won the race also came by once, and gave me a trophy with a man on top, a man painted gold holding a ring of laurels over his head like a shield.
The doctors said that I was lucky, that if the bullet had been falling even a fraction faster, it would have pierced my skull, instead of sticking in the bone, and likely caused serious brain damage, if not death. As it was, the injury, while painful, wasn’t all that serious. “It’s that thick skull of yours that saved you,” said one doctor. He chuckled, then gave me a little punch in the arm. I had a seam of staples down the front of my head. Metal wires ran through my face like whiskers.
I was in the hospital only a month and a half, but when I left, I found that I was afraid to go outside. I developed an irrational fear of lightning—I thought I could sense it coiled in the air all the time, even on sunny days—and if I had to travel anywhere uncovered, I’d start to shake and sweat and stutter. My parents walked me around town day after day to help, but nothing changed. Children picked on me at school because of my jumpiness and my new white hair. They called me “skunk,” even after I dyed the white patch brown. They beat me up. I became afraid. My parents bought me a trumpet, which I played alone in my room. I was left back once, then twice. After that I left school altogether.
It’s funny how a hit like that can be all it takes to knock you off course. Hardly more than a tap or nudge, and suddenly you find that you’ve become someone entirely new, some dark version of yourself you never thought possible. One minute you’re a boy with promise, you’re an honors student, you have friends, a future; and the next you’re twenty-nine and living in the basement of your cousin’s house. Where has your chance at happiness gone? You don’t know. Whenever people talk about how the neighborhood has gone downhill, it feels like they’re talking about you.
I worked at my father’s comic book store. I delivered tanks of carbonated water for a soda company. I played the trumpet around town for extra money. I landscaped. I worked at a warehouse where they used pig fat to make fireplace logs that could burn all day. At night, I often traveled to Albany and drove up and down the fanciest streets, the ones with the most expensive houses, and watched the lighted windows slide by through the darkness like trays displaying all the things I didn’t have. Now and then I thought about stealing, about hurting people, but more often I wanted to be the one to catch someone else doing things like that. As I drove, I often fantasized about spotting some catastrophe I could prevent—spying a prowler creeping through the hedge; catching sight of the fire just now starting in the kitchen of that house. I wanted to be there to save someone else from the kind of disaster that had happened to me, because I felt that if I did, maybe I’d get another chance at things. Maybe someone would help steer me back to where I was supposed to be.
Every morning I tell myself that things will turn around, that today will be a new start. I lean in close to the bathroom mirror and say, “Ready. Set. Go.”
Though most of the cadets at About Face wanted to improve themselves, there were some, a handful, who went out of their way to be as bad as possible. A few were in gangs and had cryptic tattoos branded on their arms and necks. Some had relatives in prison, so their desire to end up there made at least a bit of sense. But others just seemed to enjoy being cruel. There wasn’t much room for them to do wrong, but they liked to throw their weight around. They teased and tried to injure other boys, some much bigger than themselves. They went around jabbing erections at each other, and at the drill sergeants. One cadet, a boy named Unger, refused to march in step; he’d stagger this way and that like a drunk, or shove the boy ahead of him and try to topple the whole line. Another, a Spaniard from New York City, kept hitting other boys in the groin with his belt, even after Brill punished him with fifteen-, sixteen-, even eighteen-mile marches around the grounds. The one that worried me most, though, was a local boy named Haden McCrae.
McCrae didn’t act out the way the other boys did; he didn’t fight or misbehave, but there was a lazy, unworried way about him that troubled all the drill sergeants. He always looked at us in a sleepy, heavy-lidded manner—he looked at us like he’d seen it all before. It was this calmness in the face of authority that made him so popular with the other cadets. This and the fact that at sixteen, McCrae had pulled an old man from his car, robbed him, and kicked him in the head until he was near death. Now, at almost eighteen, he was one of the oldest boys at the camp. McCrae was tall and lanky and pale, his face covered with thick, brown smears of freckle. His hair, before being shaved when he arrived at About Face, had been bright orange, and I could always spot his head from far off, glowing like a hot coal among the others.
Most of the grounds at About Face had an air of the military about them: everything sheared flat and laid out at right angles, as though plotted on a grid of crossed sabers. But below the camp lay thick woods, woods that
