As he walked to Starbucks to meet Wes, Donnie Verso was thinking about their friendship.
The kid wasn’t like Nathan or Lann or Vince or Peter. Not that stand-up. And wasn’t quite thinking right, the way he ought to if he wanted to hang with the Defend and Respond crew. Not muting his phone and alerting the bitch cop just as Donnie was about to crack her skull open and get her gun. Your phone, dude? Seriously? (Though, afterward, he thought maybe that had worked out for the best.) Yeah, yeah, he was good backup, a good lookout – he’d saved Donnie’s ass a couple of times, warning him that somebody was about to see him tagging a church or stealing a watch from Rite Aid.
But Donnie just couldn’t get Wes to go the extra step.
Oh, he wanted to. That was obvious. Because Wes was mad. Oh, yeah. Totally mad. Wes was as pissed off at his father for being dead as Donnie was at his for being alive. That kind of anger usually pushed you dark really fast. But the dude was hanging back.
He was sure the kid could do it, if he wanted to, even though they’d known each other only a month. Donnie had seen the twelve-year-old Wes around middle school from time to time, and hadn’t thought anything of him. A church humper? Probably. Science club? Probably. Another time, Donnie might’ve wailed on him. (Or Donnie and Nathan together, since Wes wasn’t small.) But there were other, easier, targets at school.
He was thinking of the first time they’d really spoken. One day after school Donnie and Nathan had gotten this * grade-schooler down by Asilomar and fucked him up a little, nothing bad. While they were doing it Donnie had looked up and seen Wes standing there. Like he was curious was all.
Wes had watched then pedalled off, not fast, not scared, like no worries.
The next day at school, Donnie’d cornered him and said, ‘The fuck you were looking at yesterday?’
And Wes said, ‘Nobody special.’
‘Fuck you,’ Donnie’d said. Not being able to think of anything better. ‘You tell anybody what you saw and you’re fucked.’
Wes said, ‘I coulda told somebody but I didn’t. ’Cause, duh, you’re here and not behind bars.’
‘Fuck off.’
Wes just walked away slow, like he’d biked away the day before.
No cares …
Then a couple days later Wes came up to Donnie in the hall and gave him a copy of Hitman, the video game where you could go around fucking people up, killing them for assignments and even strangling girls. He said, ‘My mom won’t let me play. But it’s a good game. You want it?’
Then a week later Wes was sitting outside and Donnie came by and said, ‘I couldn’t play it, I don’t have Xbox, but I got Call of Duty. I traded it at Games Plus. You want to play sometime?’
‘My mom won’t let me play that either. At your house, yeah.’
It took a couple weeks of games and pizza and just hanging out before Wes said, ‘My father’s dead.’
Donnie, who’d heard, said, ‘Yeah, I heard. Sucks.’
Nothing more for another week. Then Donnie sat down at the lunch table and they talked about shit for a while and asked, ‘I heard your dad was FBI. Somebody killed him?’
‘Accident.’
‘Like a car?’
‘A truck.’
Wes sounded as calm as Donnie’s mother after she took her little white pills.
‘You want to fuck up the driver?’
‘Yeah, but he’s gone. Didn’t even live here.’
‘Wish somebody’d run into my father. Don’t you want to fuck things up sometimes?’
‘Explode, yeah,’ Wes had said. ‘And my mom’s going out with this guy. A computer guy. He’s okay. He hacks code real good. But it’s like my dad never even existed, you know. And I can’t say anything.’
‘’Cause you’ll get the crap beat out of you.’
Wes had just repeated, ‘Explode.’
They hung out some more and finally Donnie let him into the Defend and Respond Expedition Service game. He needed a partner because Lann, fuck him, had moved.
Donnie, who spent hours a day at video games, had made up the game himself. Defend and Respond Expedition Service. But they thought of it as what it really was: DARES. Well, dares.
Donnie and now Wes were on one side, Vincent and Nathan on the second. One team dared the other to do something totally fucked up: steal something, shoot pictures up a girl’s skirt, piss on a teacher’s lesson plan. You got a point if you met the challenge – and came back with proof. At the end of the month, whoever had the most points won. They wrote it up like a board game with fake countries and codes and names – Darth and Wolverine – so that any parents looking the game over would just think it was like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter or whatever.
Wes hadn’t been sure about joining at first. Donnie’s crew wasn’t Wes’s flavor. But Donnie could see he was interested and, after the first couple dares, even though he only watched Donnie’s back, it was way clear that he got a high out of it. Like he’d almost smiled in Asilomar that time, watching Donnie and Nathan beat the crap out of the whiny little Lat.
But would he really come around? Donnie Verso wondered again.
He walked into Starbucks, got a coffee and sat down next to Wes, who was texting. He glanced up, nodded and put his phone away.
‘Hey.’
They bumped fists.
For the next ten minutes they talked, in whispers, about how best to get into Goldshit’s garage and steal their bikes back. Wes thought it was smart not to do it just the two of them but get Nathan and Vincent too.
Donnie thought that wasn’t a bad idea.
After a few minutes, Wes said, ‘I heard Kerry and Gayle’ll be at Foster’s. Want to go up there?’
‘Is Tiff with them?’
‘I don’t know. I just heard Kerry and Gayle.’
‘K. Let’s go.’
They headed out and turned north, making for the old department store, now a restaurant – at least on the first floor.