My Name Is Not Easy (33 page)

“Heck if I know. All I know for sure is they aren’t going to turn me into some kind of lab animal. I seen what they do to lab animals.”

Sonny fi dgeted. “Least they pay your way home, summers,” he off ered.

Amiq looked at Sonny. “You can’t ever go home sum-

mers?”

He didn’t really have to ask. He knew it was true. But he’d never really thought about it.

“Mom’s got a lot of other mouths to feed,” Sonny said.

“Guess I’m down for the count.”

Sonny looked so sad all of a sudden that Amiq wanted to say something to make him laugh. He pinched his voice up tight again, just like how the general talked, like how generals in movies acted.

“An educated man we shall have,” he said.

And Sonny did laugh. Both of them laughed softly, like two educated men. It was not the kind of laugh you laugh when something’s really funny, though. It was more the kind you laugh when something bad happens and there’s nothing left to do but laugh.

Sonny looked out across the river to where the last of the sun was sinking behind a bald-topped hill. It was glowing like the embers of a dying fi re, and the shadows in Amiq’s hideout had started to get dark and fl ickery.
Flickering in a funny
way,
Sonny thought suddenly, just as the fl ickering began to
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M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y

sharpen into a small shaft of bright light. Without saying a word, both boys dropped down low on their bellies. Somebody who didn’t know much about walking in the woods was making a lot of noise, cracking dead wood with every step, swinging a bright light every which way. Amiq and Sonny lay still as stones. Sonny could feel his heart pounding hard against the cold ground. He thought maybe he could feel Amiq’s heart pounding just as hard, their two hearts pounding warnings back and forth through the hard, dark earth. Th

at fl ickering

light, searching the woods, made him think of the crazy gleam Father Mullen got in his eyes when he got really mad.

Th

ey waited, without hardly breathing, until the light faded off into a distant pinpoint, then went out altogether, like a snuff ed candle. Slowly they eased themselves back up, still afraid to even breathe.

“We better fi gure out a way to get back into the school or they gonna send the dogs out after us,” Amiq whispered, fi nally.

Dogs?
“What dogs?”

Amiq grinned. “Your mother’s dead dogs.”

Sonny punched him on the shoulder, hard, but that crazy Eskimo just kept on grinning that dumb old grin of his, the one that made you want to laugh out loud. Th

at grin that

made you think about making your own law, rather than following somebody else’s.

“What the heck you get us into, Amundson?” Sonny

said.

“What we got here, son, is a real honest ad-ven-shur.”

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T H E M E A N E S T H E A T H E N S / S o n n y a n d A m i q

“Yeah, well, we better come up with a way to get back in without getting caught, there,
cowboy,
” Sonny said.

“Piece of cake,” Amiq said. “Piece of cake.”

Amiq was not the best stepladder—his shoulders were bony, and he swayed a bit under Sonny’s weight. But even with all that weight on his shoulders, he was still acting like everything was easy, like everything would always be easy. He was going to push Sonny right up into the dorm window, and then Sonny was supposed ro lean down and yank him up.

“It’ll be a piece of cake,” Amiq says.

Sonny doesn’t think this is what you would call a brilliant plan, but he doesn’t have a better one, and time is running out. He gazes down the length of the shadowy gray wall from his uncertain perch, his eyes wary.

“See,” Amiq whispers, “all the windows are all dark. Everyone’s at dinner.”

“And why aren’t we at dinner, again?” Sonny asks.

“Th

e dogs,” Amiq says. “Th

e dead dogs.”

Sonny grins at the thought of the dogs with their Siberian measles. “Somebody’s gotta bury them,” he says with a little laugh. But he knows what Amiq’s really thinking. Amiq thinks they’ll tell Father that they lost track of time doing homework. Now that one’s really funny.

Amiq hangs on hard to Sonny’s sharp ankles while Sonny tries to pull himself up and wiggle into the partially opened window. In the fi nal moments, Amiq has to push up on Sonny’s feet because Sonny is just too darn long to fold up easily
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M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y

into a space like that. But fi nally his feet fl ap into the window, fi shlike.

Sonny glances sideways at the darkened hallway, and seeing no one, he pokes his head back out the window to give Amiq the all-clear sign. “Come on, hurry,” he says, reaching down.

Amiq’s arms are skinny but hard as birch saplings. His hands clamp onto Sonny’s wrists, and he pulls harder and harder, walking his legs up the wall.

Now they’re standing in the darkened space, the two of them together, feeling pretty proud of themselves, their laughter hushed but triumphant. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad plan after all.

Th

at’s when they hear the voice hissing in the shadows.

Th

e sound of it makes their blood run cold
.

“You boys think you’re pretty smart, don’t you.”

Father Mullen.

Smart is not at what they feel, following Mullen down the dimly lit halls, knowing they managed to pick the wrong time and the wrong window. Knowing it’s a mistake that’s going to cost them. Big-time.

And now Father is standing there in his offi

ce, telling them

that evil has consumed them, spawns of Satan. His words seem to vibrate in the air around them, like a deadly swarm of black mosquitoes. Father is so angry that whole sentences are rattling in his throat, just waiting to get out. Like wasps.

Th

e sound is so terrible, all they can do is stand there, in the middle of it, watching the way Father fondles that two-by-134

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