Why couldn’t he stop wanting to do it again?
Somehow he made it through the day, dodging a detention for not having his homework finished by arguing with Mrs. Haberstramm that straight As on his tests should prove that he understood the material.
“I can’t give you credit for the work if you don’t turn it in,” she said with a sigh she reserved for all the students who tried to wiggle their way out of turning in their homework. “And it counts for half your grade, Niko. So, no matter how many tests you ace, if you don’t turn in the homework, you’re going to barely squeak by with a D, and that’s only if I’m generous.”
They agreed he could turn in all the missing homework he swore with an angel’s face he really had finished and had just forgotten to bring in. Every day. For months. She gave him until Friday. Three days. He was never going to make it, not if he worked all night, every night, and had nothing else to do. The futility of the arrangement, the challenge, should’ve motivated him, but Niko headed home and tossed his backpack on the recliner in the living room the way he did every single day after school.
Babulya had snacks ready in the kitchen. She and Theresa had been baking again. Cookies, fresh from the oven, cooling on wire racks. He snagged one, knowing she’d scold him about ruining his dinner but not mean it. She wouldn’t make cookies if she didn’t want them to be eaten, right?
Gathering a couple of cookies in one fist, he crossed the street and went through the Harrisons’ kitchen and into the den. Jenni was watching a soap opera while she painted her nails, and he tossed her a cookie. She squealed but managed to catch it.
“Jerk, you made me mess up my polish.” She ate the cookie anyway.
“Bitch,” Niko said, giving her the standard comeback they all used.
“Where’s your brother?”
Jenni and Ilya had been fooling around together for months, but they were acting like nobody knew it. Just to mess with her, Niko shrugged. “I think he went over to Kim Lee’s house.”
The way she flinched made him wish he hadn’t tried to tease her. He flopped onto the couch beside her and propped his feet on the coffee table, but first snagged the remote to change the station. He laughed at her cry of protest and held the remote up and out of her reach.
“Jerk,” Jenni muttered again, then fixed him with a sly look. “Allie isn’t home, by the way. She stayed after to do something for the play.”
Horrified and feeling caught, Niko forced himself to turn his burning face toward the TV screen. “Why do you think that matters to me?”
The pager on Jenni’s hip beeped, and she grabbed for it with a small, secret grin, studying the number on the little black screen. She held the pager to her chest for a moment. Did a little seated dance. Ilya wasn’t the one who’d paged her—he didn’t have one.
Curiosity piqued, Niko turned toward her. “Got a boyfriend or something?”
“None of your business, buttstain,” Jenni said, but she was distracted. Paying too much attention to the message on the pager to notice that Niko was close enough to snag it from her grip.
Getting under Jennilynn Harrison’s skin, as well as her sister’s, was a long-standing Stern-brother tradition. But what he saw spelled out on the pager’s screen set him back a step. It was a string of numbers and asterisks, a coded message. Niko didn’t have a pager, but he understood what it said because the list of codes and their meanings got passed around at school all the time.
I want to fuck you.
Niko’d seen porn. Randy Ebersole had found a whole stash of it under his dad’s workbench, and they all got drunk and watched it. But somehow, seeing someone say that to Jenni, watching her blush and giggle over it, made it all too real. Too . . . adult. Lots of their friends were having sex, but something about that message felt creepy.
“Give me that, shithead!” Jenni swept the pager out of his hand and punched him on the arm for good measure.
Both Harrison girls knew how to land a punch; Niko was lucky she hadn’t aimed for his face. He’d be sporting a black eye, for sure. Blushing now for a different reason, he avoided looking into Jenni’s face.
“Sorry,” he muttered. “You don’t have to be such a bitch about it.”
“Fuck you, Niko.”
They swore at each other all the time. Ragged on each other. Something about this felt harsher, though. Angrier. Jenni cursed at him like she meant it, not like a joke, and Niko swallowed hard against a rush of something that felt like thorns in his throat. He wanted to apologize but couldn’t make himself do it. He didn’t want to have seen what he saw. He just wanted to get out of there.
So, he ran.
Out of the house, across the street. Past his own house and through his backyard, into the field and the woods beyond. He ran until he had to bend over, thinking he might puke. Not far beyond him was the fence that surrounded the quarry, but he was nowhere near the place where they usually hung out to swim and mess around. Even so, he pushed through the vines and bushes and found a spot in the fence that let him through. He wasn’t the first to seek access, after all. Despite the signs warning people to stay away, nobody ever did.
Niko stood on the edge of the quarry, looking down to the water below. If he jumped from here, there was a good chance he would hit the water, legs and arms straight, making him a bullet. It was so deep there wasn’t a chance he’d hit bottom. But he could mess up the angle, screw up the jump, hit a dozen places along the wall on the way down. Thinking of this, he shifted, and one foot slipped on a crumble of pebbles, which pattered downward and plink, plink, so far down he couldn’t even hear them hitting the water.
Heart pounding, he stepped back, grabbing for the fence, for a moment certain he’d gone too far this time. He was going to end up a broken mess on the rocks below. It would be better to die if that happened, he thought, sort of incoherently, knowing it was smart to stay back from the edge, but somehow helpless to keep himself from leaning forward again, anyway. Better to be dead than hurt so bad you couldn’t take care of yourself, or to be in a coma, or something like that.