Entry Five

  Train Wreck

  I met Thomas at our school’s East entrance for wheelchair duty every day after last period. Our house was only about half a mile from the school, but I got in the habit of pushing the chair for him as we headed home. At first, I did it to win some brownie points with the new fam. It also helped us get home a little faster—an essential consideration on cold Illinois February days.

  After getting to know Thomas better, though, it became a subtle, call it subliminal, reminder of my potential to influence Thomas’s destiny—for example, by shoving him into oncoming traffic if he annoyed me one too many times.

  “Hey,” I said, walking up to him. “Ready, little brother?” He hated when I called him little, which was, of course, why I did it.

  Thomas turned his chair around and gave me a flat look that lasted about a second before his eyes went suddenly wide. He grabbed the wheels of his chair and rolled back, away from me, as fast as he could. “Check six!”

  I turned just in time to see Bradley rushing toward me, fists balled, face beet red. He shoved me, and I nearly tripped as I stumbled backward. I was still trying to regain my balance when his fists closed around two big handfuls of my t-shirt. He shoved me again, and I slammed into the row of lockers behind me.

  “What the hell is your problem, freak?” Bradley growled. I was about to ask him the same thing. “Proud of yourself? Huh?”

  The crowd around us was already chanting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Because high school.

  “Proud? Not usually, but…”

  Bradley, still clutching my shirt, pulled me off the lockers and then slammed me into them again. Dude needed to make up his mind. This time, the back of my head smacked into the metal locker door hard enough to make my head ring.

  “Why did you glue it?” he shouted into my face.

  “Wh—what?” Apparently, my fight-or-flight instinct needed to level up because it was only now kicking in. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Bradley shoved me yet again. He was pretty damn strong. He let go with one hand and pointed his finger at my face. “You glued the lock on my locker! I had to wait an hour for some guy with a bolt cutter, you idiot!”

  “Stop it! Stop!” Jan shouted, running toward us, weaving between throngs of gawking kids. “Brad, stop it!”

  I was having my very own Karate Kid moment. Ridiculous. I had no idea what Bradley was even talking about. Something had happened to his locker, something involving glue.

  Something involving… glue.

  Oh, you gotta be kidding me. I glanced over at Thomas. He’d wheeled back toward the entrance door as far away from me as possible, his eyes wide with terror. People with brittle bone disease could get hurt, or even killed, by a hard impact pretty much anywhere on their bodies. He had to be fearing for his life right about now, which was kind of appropriate since I had a distinct feeling that I knew where the suspicious glue had come from.

  Jan grabbed Bradley’s arm and pulled him back enough for me to get off the lockers.

  “I didn’t glue your locker, sphincter face,” I said. My hands were shaking, so I used them to smooth out my shirt.

  “Really? Then who did?” Bradley demanded, still shouting.

  I knew better than to look over at Thomas again. I could see him watching me out of the corner of my eye, no doubt wondering if I would rat him out.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  “Don’t know. Wasn’t me, though. Bradley, I love you too much to do such a thing,” I declared. I puckered my lips and leaned forward as if I wanted to give him a big wet smooch. It had the desired effect—he immediately recoiled in disgust.

  “What the hell is wrong with you freaks?” Bradley berated, his eyes darting from me to Thomas and, interestingly, to Jan. I guess he considered even his own girlfriend to be a member of the “geek squad.” Jan caught the look, too, and scrunched up her face.

  “Nate wouldn’t do that,” she said, and I hoped beyond hope that she wouldn’t glance over at Thomas. Jan had to have seen his model glue on the lunch table, but I was hoping in the heat of the moment that she hadn’t put two and two together yet.

  Bradley scanned all of us yet again as if he were some evil lie-detector robot from the future. Satisfied, or maybe not, he said, “No one better mess with my locker again, or there will be hell to pay.”

  Hell to pay? I’d bet my last lunch credit that Bradley Uppercrust the Third had learned that particular phrase from Bradley Uppercrust the Second.

  Before I could publicly reaffirm my undying love for Bradley again, he turned to Jan, grabbed her hand, and stormed off, yanking her after him. She looked back over her shoulder at me as she had in the cafeteria earlier in the day, but this time her eyes lingered on me, and there was something more than mere embarrassment in them.

  “Well, that was fun for the whole family, eh, Train Wreck?” I said, turning to Thomas. He smiled back at me very, very meekly.

  --------------------

  We were two blocks from school, and I still found myself looking over my shoulder every few seconds. I also found myself smiling.

  “I can’t believe you did that.”

  “He started it,” Thomas grumped. “He insulted Jan.”

  “Look, I get it. Jan’s been my bestie since I moved here, and I don’t like how he treats her either, but you put yourself in real danger. Think before you drink, dude. Grow up.”

  “I can’t, remember?” He was obviously referring to his disease, and I cringed. By the gods, I hated it when he started self-pity-tripping.

  I glanced back over my shoulder, again saw no sign of Bradley, and slowed down a bit. “Forget about him. He’s a butthead. Jan will eventually realize that.”

  “And until she does, we let him treat her like that?” Thomas asked. “You’re the one who is always droning on about how the party has to protect one another. So,” he shrugged, “I executed a taunt, like in ATO.”

  “Um, Thomas? That’s a game, dude.”

  He turned in his chair to look up at me. “But real life is more important than a game.”

  Grrr. Point for Thomas. “Fine. I’ll talk to her. Bottom line though, she has to realize certain things for herself, and she will. She’s smart as hell. Trust the Jan. Until then, no more taunting.”

  Thomas stared at the sidewalk as it rolled beneath him. Quietly, he said, “He’s a Grade A, USDA-certified meathead.”

  “Agreed, bro.” I rarely called him the B-word, but I thought it might cheer him up.

  “Anyway, since you are trying to cheer me up,” he said, apparently reading my thoughts, “if you were to accidentally take a wrong turn up ahead, right there on Fulton Street, we would accidentally pass right by that new store.”

  Thomas was talking about a new video game store that had opened about a month ago. We’d gotten a flyer advertising its grand opening, and then, as if the place was taunting us, more fliers had arrived every few days after that. The store was conveniently located in a strip mall not far from our house, and we both wanted to go see it before it went out of business.

  The fact that it would go out of business was a foregone conclusion. Game Stop had… stopped. The nationwide Game Fiend chain, which had briefly arisen like a fugly, ungainly phoenix from Game Stop’s ashes, had broken a land speed record in its race to file for bankruptcy, closing the doors on their last store over a year prior. The thing was—no one bought games on physical media anymore, and gaming hardware and memorabilia could be bought online. Except for the occasional, if you were lucky, pleasant interaction with a cute gamer girl, there was no upside to going to a gaming store anymore.

  “I don’t know,” I said, doing a quick mental calculation. Thomas’s mom was incessantly worried about him and usually called him around 4:30 every day to make sure I had gotten him safely home. “We’ll only have a few minutes to look around.”

  “That’s probably all it will take. What all could they actually have in there?”

  He made a good point. I picked up the pace and turned onto Fulton. “Okay, but we can’t take long. I don’t want to incur The Wrath of the Marge. We’re supposed to ask first.”

  “Silly ingrate, if we did that, she’d say no.”

  “True,” I said. My anxiety level was already climbing. I had promised Jan that I’d go to the game that night, and I knew Thomas’s mom needed only the slightest of excuses to yank the plug right out of my plans. “Alright. Hold on to your butt.”

  I picked up the pace until I was jogging down the sidewalk, pushing the wheelchair ahead of me. Thomas put his arms out to the sides and tilted them up and down like they were wings. He looked so childlike that it made me smile. Thinking, Marge would kill me if she saw me doing this, I turned my jog into a sprint that made Thomas whoop and start making jet fighter sounds.