“Okay, but there’s two things,” she explained. “Number one, if I die, which I might because I ate one of those mystery meat hot pockets at the cafeteria today, then you have to take over as chair and fulfill my duties and make sure there’s a full page tribute to my memory in the yearbook senior year. And you have to make sure that the photo of me isn’t something stupid that my mother picked.”
“Got it,” Jared had said, and thought, I really love you. He knew he was too young. He knew she was too young. How could he not, though? Mary was so beautiful, and she was so on the ball, but she made it seem completely natural, no stress, no strain. “What’s the second thing?”
“The second thing—” She grabbed his head with both hands and shook it back and forth and up and down. “—is that I am the Boss!”
As far as Jared was concerned, that was also no problem.
Now his sneaker came down on a flat rock sitting high and loose, and that, as it happened, was a problem, actually a pretty big one, because he felt a wobble and a sharp sting in his right knee. Jared gasped and drove forward with his left foot, concentrating on his breathing like they taught you in track, keeping his elbows working.
Eric was thundering behind him. “We just want to talk to you!”
“Don’t be a fucking pussy!” That was Curt.
Down into a gully, and Jared felt his hurt knee slide around and thought he heard a little ping somewhere under the thudding of his pulse and the crackle of dry leaves under his sneaker heels. Malloy Street, the one behind the high school, was up ahead, a yellow car flickering past in the gaps between the trees. His right leg buckled at the bottom of the gully, and the pain was unprecedented, hand-on-a-red-burner pain only on the inside, and he grabbed a thorny branch to yank himself staggering up the opposite bank.
The air was momentarily disturbed behind him, as if a hand had swiped right past his scalp, and he heard Eric swearing and the tumult of bodies tangling. They’d lost it while sliding down the gully behind him. The road was twenty feet on; he could hear the burr of a car engine. He was going to make it!
Jared lurched, closing the gap to the road, feeling a burst of that old track euphoria, the air in his lungs suddenly carrying him, thrusting him forward and holding off the agony of his distorted knee.
The hand on his shoulder spun him off-balance at the edge of the road. He caught onto a birch tree to keep from falling.
“Give me that phone, Norcross.” Kent’s face shone bright red, the acne field on his forehead purple. His eyes were wet. “We were kidding around, that’s all.”
“No,” said Jared. He couldn’t even remember picking his phone up again, but there it was in his hand. His knee felt enormous.
“Yes,” Kent said. “Give it.” The other two had gathered themselves and were running to catch up, only a few feet off.
“You were going to pee in an old lady’s ear!” cried Jared.
“Not me!” Kent blinked away sudden tears. “I couldn’t, anyway! I got a shy bladder!”
You weren’t going to try to stop them, though, Jared might have replied, but instead felt his arm cock and his fist shoot out to connect with Kent’s dimpled chin. The impact produced a satisfying clack of teeth slamming together.
As Kent tumbled down into the weeds, Jared shoved his phone in his pocket and got moving again. Three agonizing hops and he was at the yellow centerline, waving down a speeding tan compact with a Virginia plate. He didn’t register that the driver was turned around in her seat—and Jared certainly didn’t see what was happening in the rear of the car, where a bellowing old woman with tattered webbing hanging from her face was repeatedly gouging the edge of an ice scraper into the chest and throat of her husband who had cut said webbing from her face—but he did note the compact’s erratic progress, as it jerked right-left-right-left, almost out of control.
Jared tried to twist away, wishing himself small, and was just congratulating himself on his evasion technique when the compact hit him and sent him flying.
2
“Hey! Get your hands off my Booth!” Ree had gotten Officer Lampley’s attention by knocking on the front window of the Booth, a major no-no. “What do you want, Ree?”
“The warden, Officer,” said Ree, elaborately and unnecessarily mouthing the words, which Vanessa Lampley could hear perfectly fine via the vents situated under the panes of bulletproof glass. “I need to see the warden about something wrong. Her and no one else. I’m sorry, Officer. That’s the only way. How it’s got to be.”
Van Lampley had worked hard to cultivate her reputation as a firm but fair officer. For seventeen years she’d patrolled the cellblocks of Dooling Correctional, and she’d been stabbed once, punched several times, kicked even more times, choked, had drippy shit flung at her, and been invited to go and fuck herself in any number of ways and with a variety of objects, many of them unrealistically large or dangerously sharp. Did Van sometimes draw on these memories during her arm-wrestling matches? She did indeed, although sparingly, usually only during significant league bouts. (Vanessa Lampley competed in the Ohio Valley Slammers League, Women’s A Division.) The memory of the time that a deranged crack addict dropped a chunk of brick from the second level of B Wing down onto Vanessa’s skull (resulting in a skull contusion and a concussion) had, in fact, helped her take it “over-the-top” in both of her championship victories. Anger was excellent fuel if you refined it correctly.
In spite of these regrettable experiences, she was forever conscious of the responsibility that went with her authority. She understood that no one wanted to be in prison. Some people, however, needed to be. It was unpleasant, both for them and for her. If a respectful attitude was not maintained, it would be more unpleasant—for them, and for her.
And although Ree was all right—poor kid had a big scar on her forehead that told you she hadn’t had the easiest ride through life—it was disrespectful to make unreasonable requests. The warden wasn’t available for on the spot one-on-ones, especially with a medical emergency happening.
Van had serious worries of her own concerning what she’d read on the Internet about Aurora on her last break, and the directive from above that everyone needed to stay for a second shift. Now McDavid, looking on the monitor like she belonged not in a cell but in a sarcophagus, had been put under quarantine. Van’s husband, Tommy, when she called him at their house, insisted he would be fine on his own for as long as she needed to stay, but she didn’t believe it for a second. Tommy, on disability for his hips, couldn’t make a grilled cheese sandwich for himself; he’d be eating pickles out of a jar until she got home. If Van wasn’t allowed to lose her head about any of that, then neither was Ree Dempster or any other inmate.