“Is that even allowed, for nonplayers to ride on the bus?”
“Probably not,” he said. “We make our own rules, you and me. But no, I checked with Coach. He’ll just make you sign a form. Meet us at three in the parking lot.”
“I will,” I said and marched to class, and got halfway through it before I noticed my throat no longer hurt.
The invincible feeling lasted until I arrived at the parking lot.
“What’s he doing here?” Ott said as I boarded the bus behind Tariq.
“He’s here to take pictures for the yearbook,” he said, and I swooned with love at how effortlessly he could lie.
“He doesn’t have a camera,” Bastien said, but clapped me on the back anyway. Bastien loved clapping people on the back.
“He’ll use his cell phone, asshole.”
The bus had a faint medicinal smell. Spit was dried on the glass. The seats were dark-green plastic, stretched thin and thick with Sharpie’d slogans. I had fantasized about this, the team bus, being one of The Guys. Usually those fantasies became pornographic. “No making out, I take it,” I whispered to Tariq when we sat down in the back row.
He punched me. Tenderly.
“This is crazy,” I whispered. “You’re not scared about these guys . . . suspecting something?”
He elbowed me in the stomach, then kept his elbow there, then tickled me with his free hand.
“I’m petrified,” he said finally.
“Want me to stand up right now and make an announcement?”
“You would do that, wouldn’t you?” He looked at me in happy disbelief. “But no. I just wanted you here. These are my brothers, even if I spend more time hating them than liking them.”
The ride up was terrifying boredom. Asinine jokes. Exaggerated stories. Poorly remembered movie plots. Watching Hudson’s autumn desolation scroll by. Listening to bad music from cell phone speakers. Trying hard to tune out the surging stink of eighteen rival pheromonal signatures. I tried to enjoy being near Tariq, to think that maybe I might sort of fit in.
I was doing a pretty good job of it, I thought. And then, somewhere near Schodack, Bastien knocked a Snickers bar out of some boy’s hands.
“Your fat ass doesn’t need that,” he said and picked it up off the floor and pocketed it. “Last match you were so slow you lost the ball two separate times.”
After that, I spent the whole ride sucking my gut in.
Near Albany, we passed the exit for Canajoharie. And I thought, for the thousandth time, about Darryl. My friend who’d not just moved away, but abandoned me. For the thousandth time, I wondered why. Wondering made my stomach hurt.
I hate soccer. I will not describe the game. Tariq looked amazing, though. His long muscular legs pumped harder and struck faster than anyone else’s. I basically watched his legs for ninety minutes.
Hudson High lost. This surprised no one, except for maybe half our team, boys who were clearly deluded about the nature of their own abilities and also the world they lived in.
The coach wouldn’t let me in the locker room, which is probably just as well. Terrible things would have happened, and I wouldn’t have been able to handle the sight of so much skin. Someone would have seen me staring. Or noticed something happening in my pants. And I’d be murdered.
So I paced the halls of that strange, fancy building, with its high ceilings and the eerie absence of stale-tater-tot smell. Everything was made of marble at Albany Academy, even, apparently, the pale well-dressed boys and girls and parents frowning in my direction.
The Academy is a rich prep school, and they knew me for what I was: a poor, grimy student from another town, who only had the privilege of breathing the Academy’s sweet air thanks to their generous compliance with intramural athletic regulations.
I ignored them. This was a ninja knack I had long before starvation gave me superpowers, because if there’s one survival skill being a gay boy at a backwoods high school gives you, it’s the ability to be unbothered by the behavior of assholes.
Eventually Tariq returned, smelling like tea tree shampoo and dressed in a too-large sweatshirt, his black hair luminous, the rest of his team close behind him.
Bastien handed everyone an orange. Even me.
“Where’d you get these?” someone asked.
“Stole them out of a sports bag someone left in the hallway,” he said.
Everyone laughed. Everyone ate stolen oranges. The air filled up with the smell of peeled citrus. And while we were standing there, the team of us, waiting for who knows what, the Albany Academy team came through.
“You guys smell like cow shit,” someone said from inside the boisterous crowd.
“Cow? Nah, I think that’s horse,” another voice added.
“No,” said a wiry little guy at the head of the pack. “Pig. The hog-rendering plant is in Hudson, isn’t it?”
My fists tightened.
“My dad says it’s the last thing left,” Wiry continued, pushing the glasses up his nose with his middle finger. “Better up your soccer game, boys. Sports is gonna be the only way out for any of you.”
In the hooting and bluster that followed, I flashed back to my dodgeball massacre. To the pleasure of hurting people. And I stepped forward impulsively, into Wiry Boy’s personal space.
“What’s this skinny freak want?” he asked, then looked me in the eye.
I’m not going to lie. Skinny freak made me feel good.
I breathed deep, sucked in the smell of him. Memorized it. “Nothing,” I said, and reached out to touch his sleeve. “That’s a nice shirt.” With two pointed fingers I tapped in three different spots on his arm, triggering pressure points.
He yanked his arm away from me. “Get the hell away from me, freak.”
“Want an orange?” I asked, and lobbed mine at him. Not hard. His arm flew up to catch it—and then he screamed.
Muscles spasmed in response to the points I’d pressed, the signals from his brain diverted and rerouted, twisting his forearm in one direction and his wrist in the other, a harsh and sudden agony as the ligaments were stretched, stopping just short of a sprain.
“You okay, there, buddy?” I asked.
His friends stepped closer, eager for a rumble.
“Whatever,” he said, holding the arm to his body, confused and embarrassed to have no idea what just happened. “We’re going home. Have a nice drive back to your shitty homes in your starving, little nothing town.” He led his posse away.
Bastien stared at me. “What the hell just happened?” he asked, not unkindly.
“Guy broke his wrist recently,” I said. “I could tell by the way he carried it. Figured if I caught him off guard I could get him to move it in a way that would be pretty painful.”
“You’re a spooky kid, Matt,” Bastien said.
Heads nodded. A couple guys grunted agreement. I felt proud and happy, but weirdly exhausted. My heart was thumping so hard I could barely breathe.
You really need to eat something, a voice said, but I ignored it.
Ignoring the voices is an essential component of the Art of Starving.