For the rest of class, I chafed at not being able to talk to Calvin. I was so close to maybe getting some real answers, and I couldn’t even get him to acknowledge me. I wanted to grab him around the neck and shake him until he told me everything he knew about Tommy, but instead I had to wait. I watched the sadistic clock at the front of the class slowly count down the minutes, and I definitely didn’t hear a single word of Ms. Fuentes’s lecture.
The bell rang, and Calvin Frye rushed out of the classroom. I refused to let him escape, so I left my bag and chased him into the hallway, ignoring Dustin, who called after me. Calvin walked quickly with his head down and his hands in his pockets. I was nearly carried in the wrong direction by a river of hungry students heading toward the cafeteria, but I saw Calvin duck into the boys’ restrooms, freed myself, and followed him in.
“Calvin? I know you’re in here.” I checked under the stall doors for feet. A pair rested on the floor at the end in the disabled-access stall. “Come on, don’t be a dick. Talk to me, all right?”
But Calvin didn’t answer, and I’d had enough of his games. I was going to force Calvin to tell me what he did or didn’t know about Tommy, even if I had to stuff his head into the toilet until he spilled everything he knew.
I didn’t want to catch Calvin with his jeans bunched around his ankles, squeezing out a load, so I shielded my eyes before pulling the unlocked stall door open. I expected him to yell at me, but . . . nothing. No frantic scrambling. No embarrassed shouting. I peeked through my fingers.
Calvin was fully dressed, sitting on the edge of the toilet, staring at his bare arm. He’d pushed back his sleeve to expose the pale underside, and it rested on his thigh. He held a razor in his left hand, lightly between his thumb and forefinger. Slowly he drew the blade across his arm from one side to the other, opening a thin two-inch gash. Tiny glossy red beads welled from the nearly imperceptible line, and from where I stood, it looked like his skin was weeping.
“Jesus Christ!” I rushed forward, smacked the razor from his hand, and grabbed his right wrist. More cuts—some scabbed over, some little more than faded pink slashes—decorated his arm like hash marks carved into a prison cell wall.
Calvin didn’t flinch, didn’t pull away. He simply looked at me. His face was pasty and pale, but his feverish eyes shone bright electric blue. With his free hand he brushed back his hood, revealing his mop of wavy blond hair, and tugged earbuds out of his ears. I hadn’t noticed the black wires snaking up through the neck of his hoodie before, and his teachers probably hadn’t either.
“May I have my arm back?” Calvin spoke quietly and calmly, like people caught him mutilating himself every day.
I released his wrist, and he pulled his sleeve down.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked.
“Inducing endorphin release and inhibiting amygdala activation.”
“What the—?”
The outer door slammed open; footsteps echoed against the tile. I caught Trent Williams’s reflection in the mirror at the same time as he saw me and Calvin. He was absolutely the last person I wanted to deal with. He lived for making others’ lives miserable, and now, after warning me about Calvin, he’d caught us together in a restroom stall. Dad once told me most bullies lash out because they hate themselves, but I was willing to bet Trent loved nobody more than himself.
“Don’t you boys look cute?” he said after a nervous pause.
“This isn’t what it looks like.” Between Calvin cutting himself and Trent busting in, I counted myself lucky I’d made word sounds at all.
Trent craned his neck.
“There’s room for one more,” Calvin said. Then he snapped his fingers. “Oh, that’s right, you only do that when you’re drunk.”
Calvin’s voice was sharper than his razor. Unlike most sensible people, he seemed completely unafraid of Trent.
Trent’s face paled—dropping three shades in less than a second—and I worried he was going to kill Calvin and then me for sport. But he said, “That’s fucked up. Even for you, Frye,” and stomped off.
Calvin stood. He was shorter than me, but not by much. “How about we meet up tomorrow after school?”
“No way,” I said. “We’re talking about this now.”
“I’m not sure the restroom is the most suitable location to discuss our project.”
I was shaking, and my voice trembled. “Not the project! Tommy!” I didn’t care if anyone heard me yelling. “You brought him up Friday night and then ran, and now you’re going to tell me what you know.”
In the few short moments since I’d followed him into the boys’ room, Calvin had added a slew of new questions to the list of things I wanted to ask him. Why was he cutting himself? What had he meant about Trent only doing that when he was drunk? And what the hell did his amygdala have to do with anything? But the only question I cared about at that moment involved Tommy.
“The restroom’s not the best place to talk about that, either.” Calvin stood and moved toward me, but I was blocking his exit and refused to step aside. “Look,” he said. “Tomorrow. We can meet after school.”
I’d waited the entire weekend to interrogate Calvin, and now he wanted me to wait another day. I was so sick of waiting, but short of binding his hands with my shoelaces and torturing him until he talked, I didn’t see that I had much choice. The tension fled my body, and I let out a frustrated sigh.
“I work tomorrow.”
“Oh.”
“We can still meet, though,” I said. “Do you know where Petridis Books and More is?”
Calvin nodded.
“Be there at three.”
“Cool.” Calvin smiled like everything had turned out exactly the way he’d planned.
I stepped aside to let him out of the stall. “You better show up or I’ll hunt you down wherever you go.”
“I’ll be there,” he said. “Promise.” Calvin brushed past me and left the restroom.
? ? ?
I drove Lua home before my appointment with my future ex-therapist. I hadn’t told Lua about Calvin invading a/s/l on Friday night or our encounter in the restroom during lunch. Normally, Lua would have been the first person I told, but I’d felt distance growing between us since Tommy had vanished. It’d started as a small, not-insurmountable fissure in our relationship, but had widened with each passing day into a bottomless crevasse I didn’t know how to bridge, and I was tired of shouting across it and her not hearing me. Instead of telling Lua why I’d really been late to lunch, I’d made up a story about eating bad sushi the night before. I’m not sure Lua believed me, but she hadn’t pressed the issue, because no one wanted gory diarrhea details.
But I did want to tell her.
“Your music selection sucks, Ozzie.” Lua scrolled through my phone, mocking every band listed, even though she’d loaded most of them. Her musical tastes evolved rapidly, and bands she loved today frequently became bands she’d ridicule tomorrow. She’d styled her hair messy and chaotic—the cool air through the open windows had blown it wilder—and she wore a corset dress that squeezed her breasts so tightly I worried one speed bump might cause them to burst free.
“Can I ask you something, Lu?”
“If you want to go to prom with me, you’ll have to wear the dress.”