It wasn’t until his eyes met mine that the realization this was really happening hit me. When he saw me, his gaze didn’t turn glassy and hard and cold. It softened into something deeper than recognition. The eyes were his. The rest was not.
I hurried over to him, stopped ten feet away, and hugged my chest so he wouldn’t see me shaking.
“You’re going to get arrested!” I hissed, barely daring to raise my voice above a whisper. “What are you doing?”
“They can’t arrest me for wearing an outfit,” Miles said, his eyebrows creasing. “Besides, I’m the mascot, see?” He nudged the saber sheathed at his hip.
“Hey, it’s Schizo Ridgemont!”
Some kids I knew from Hillpark walked by, looking shocked to see me alive. Miles whipped around, yelling at them in rapid German. The Hillpark kids shut up in surprise.
“I realize that you think you have to keep doing this, but . . .” I yanked on my hair. “But you’re dressed up like a Nazi. What about everything you said to Cliff? About not wanting people to call you that?” I hesitated. “How much . . . how much did they pay you to do this?”
Miles didn’t reply.
Someone passing by laughed loudly, and I caught the words, “The Nazi and the Communist.”
“Shut up!” I yelled. “You’re all so fucking inconsiderate! I’m trying to talk!” I turned back to Miles, lowering my voice again. “You don’t need to degrade yourself like this.”
That was a terrible cover-up, and he knew it, and I could tell that he knew it. The truth was that I was terrified of Nazis, and here one stood. “Please take the uniform off,” I whispered. “Please.”
He stared at me with a strange expression on his face and took a few steps forward, reaching out for me; I took a few steps back in response. He pulled his hat off and blinked at the sun in his eyes.
“Okay. Just give me a few minutes. My other clothes are in the pool locker room.”
He headed toward the school. I escaped up to the press box where Evan and Ian worked the baseball scoreboard controls and explained to them where Miles was and how I planned on hiding with them for the entire game.
“Isn’t this your old school?” Evan asked.
I nodded. “Unfortunately.”
“What happened? What got you thrown out?” “I, uh, spray-painted the word Communists on the gym floor. Things got out of hand; I was having a few problems at the time. Everything’s fine now.”
“It’s okay,” Ian laughed. “We really don’t care about your—problem? I guess, is what we’re calling it.”
“Well, that’s good.” Relief washed through me. I looked over at the Hillpark stands, then back at Evan and Ian, and remembered how much it had sucked the first time: how people hadn’t trusted me, how they made fun of the way I spun around every time I entered a room, my incessant picture taking, and how I hadn’t been that lonely since I was seven years old and my only friend had left me for Germany.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone climbing the stairs to the press box. A brown uniform flew up and landed on the scoreboard controls. “Your Nazi boyfriend won’t need that anymore!”
I spun, catching a flash of Ria’s blond hair. I looked down at Miles’s uniform, then over at Evan and Ian, and all three of us understood at the same time.
“Theo!” Evan called to the concession stand below us. “Come up here and run this thing for a second!”
The three of us sprinted to the school, each holding a different piece of Miles’s uniform. We barreled into the hallways behind the gym, through the locker rooms, and into the connected natatorium.
It had finally happened. McCoy had used Cliff and Ria as a distraction and Miles was laying on the tiled floor in a puddle of his own blood.
The natatorium was dark when we arrived. A lone figure sat on the bench next to the pool, soaking wet and clad in nothing but a pair of boxer shorts.
“Go get towels,” I said to Evan and Ian. They vanished into the locker rooms.
I sat down next to Miles. His glasses were missing and his eyes were unfocused. “I hate water,” he mumbled.
“I know.”
He looked like a waterlogged cat. His hair was plastered to his head. Goose bumps covered his skin, layered over fading bruises that dotted his torso and ran down along his ribs. A horrible green-yellow-blue one ran diagonally across his back. They were all old, not inflicted here.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I went into the locker room to change,” he said. “They ambushed me. Took my glasses. Threw me in the pool. They were gone by the time I got out, but it was slippery and I fell back in. Now you’re here. The end.”
He scratched at his legs, his arms, picked at his skin like there was something there. I remembered all the bandages. The smell of pond scum and algae. Animalia Annelida Hirudinea.
Leeches.
“You can’t let them do things like this to you,” I said.
“It won’t be much longer.”