Rivals (7 page)

By which, of
course, Jill meant her circle of stuck-up friends. They were the only ones, in
Jill’s opinion, whose goodwill mattered.

“Whatever,”
Maggie shrugged. “Shoot.”

Dana Kravitz
looked over her friend’s shoulder at Maggie. She looked scared.

Maggie kind of
liked that.

“It’s only of
passing interest, but this associate of mine, who shall not be named, wanted to
know something about your brother. She was curious—just curious, mind
you, we are not brokering any kind of social arrangement here—whether
he’s seeing anyone.”

Maggie laughed
out loud. “What, my little dweeb brother? Be serious. I doubt he’s ever seen
a girl with her shirt off. Oh, I suppose there’s Lucy Benez.”

“Who? You
mean the cripple?” Jill asked. “He’s dating
that?”

“She’s
painfully obvious about being in love with him. But I don’t think they’ve even
held hands in a romantic fashion.” Maggie smiled wickedly. “Not that I would
know. I don’t exactly keep tabs on his love life.”

“No, of course
not,” Jill said. She turned around. “Alright, Dana. You may go now. Maggot and
I have practice in a few minutes. I’m sure you have some batons to twirl to
keep yourself entertained until I’m done.”

Dana Kravitz
nodded primly and fled the scene.

“You really
are a vicious animal, aren’t you, Pill?” Maggie asked.

Jill hefted
her stick in the air. “I’m a competitor.”

Coach Peters
blew his whistle and the girls’ field hockey team lined up for orders. Maggie
had been on the team since freshman year and though she’d never been a star
player the others had learned to rely on her. She was great on defense,
usually serving as the team’s sweeper, and she was always willing to smack an
opponent in the shinguards at the right moment, even if it meant taking a
penalty.

The coach had
always liked her, she thought. She put everything she had into the game. She
honestly loved it, in a way she loved very few things. Yet as he walked down
the line toward her, his face was scrunched up with worry and he had trouble
meeting her eyes. Just like the football players.

“Maggie, you
can go change,” he said, finally. He was speaking in a voice barely louder
than a whisper. She was used to him shouting commands at her—she liked
it when he did, because things made sense when you were out on the field with
your stick in your hand and somebody was telling you what to do. Now he
sounded apologetic and she felt very lost.

“Why? What’s
going on?” she asked.

He grimaced
and looked at the rest of the team. They were disciplined, winners all, and
they looked straight ahead. Of course, Jill couldn’t resist the urge to
whisper something to the girl who stood next to her, who started to laugh and
then controlled herself. Coach Peters shot a nasty look at Jill and then put
his hand on Maggie’s shoulder.

She shrugged
it off. “I want to know what’s going on,” she repeated.

“Do you want
to maybe talk to the principal? Because I need you to understand this wasn’t
my decision. But there’s no way we can let you play this season. It wouldn’t
be fair to the other grils—or the other teams, for that matter. Not now
that you’re… enhanced.”

“I’m not
taking steroids!” she insisted. “This is ridiculous!”

“I’m sorry,”
he told her. “The decision is final.”

She grabbed
her stick hard enough to make the fiberglass creak and then took her mouthguard
out of her pocket. “Here,” she said, and shoved it in the coach’s hand. “I
wouldn’t want anyone to think I was stealing school property. You can have my
stick if you can find it.”

“It’s in your
hand,” the coach said, looking puzzled.

She spun from
the waist and flung it into the sky. It would probably land in the next town
over. “Whoops,” she said.

“Maggie!” he
said, suddenly angry. “What did I teach you about self-control?”

“I can’t
remember. It must have been the day I wasn’t paying attention—the same
day you gave us the speech on how everyone should get a chance to play.” She
pushed past him and walked down the line of her former fellow players, trying
to get a reaction out of any of them. Hoping at least one of them would
protest, or even just say they felt bad. The only one who would look at her
was Jill.

“Maybe they
need someone in the pep squad,” Jill suggested.

Maggie told
her exactly what she could go and do.

“Okay,” Lucy
said, quietly. “That’s the guy. You see him?”

They were
sitting on a hill overlooking the school parking lot. Classes had let out a
few minutes ago and normally Brent would be on his bus headed home but Lucy had
assured him this would be worth his while. He wasn’t so sure yet. “Yeah, I
see him just fine.” Lucy had brought a pair of binoculars and had pointed out
a kid, just a freshman, walking along the edge of the parking lot. Brent could
see him just fine—apparently his eyesight had been improved as well as
his physical strength. The kid had his head ducked down and his arms were
around his backpack as if someone might try to steal it from him. He looked
scared.

“Now—the
target. He’s coming up from the gap in the fence, there.”

The target was
a senior. Brent knew him, or at least he’d been pointed out to Brent very
early on when he got to high school. It was Matt Perkins, the notorious bully.
Perkins was overweight and not particularly tall. He had hair that fell down
over his eyes and bad teeth. For the last two years he’d been preying on the
incoming freshman class, always choosing one or two new kids to pick on. He
would harass them until he grew bored and then he would pick a new one and
start in on them. He’d never bothered Brent—Perkins only went after the
scrawny kids, the little ones who couldn’t fight back.

“You want me
to beat him up?” Brent asked. He had to admit the idea was kind of exciting.

“Yeah, but you
have to do this right. He has to know why he’s getting beat down,” Lucy
explained. “He has to know it isn’t cool to prey on little kids.”

Brent frowned.
“Hey,” he said. “This isn’t personal, is it?”

“I don’t know
what you mean,” Lucy said. “If you’re trying to suggest something, such as, I
don’t know, maybe last year Perkins and I had a run in, you know, maybe he
shook me down for my lunch money every day for three weeks in a row, and maybe
he knocked me down and I couldn’t exactly fight back with these braces on my
legs, well—no. That has nothing to do with anything.”

“Uh-huh.
Okay. They’re about to cross paths.”

“Good luck,”
Lucy said, and squeezed his bicep. “Go be a hero.”

Down in the
parking lot Perkins was leaning against the side of a car, smiling so hard his
teeth flashed in the sunlight. The freshman was trying to back away but Brent
knew exactly how this was going to happen. If the freshman ran, Perkins could
chase him down easily. If he stood his ground Perkins would just beat him up.
The kid didn’t have a chance.

Which was
where Brent came in. Right? He knew that was how it was supposed to work. He
was supposed to protect the defenseless. Stand up for those who couldn’t stand
up for themselves. Nothing had ever looked so pure, or so easy.

He dug his
feet into the ground and jumped. He could hear Lucy cheering as he dropped
through the air, down the side of the hill, to land not more than ten feet away
from Perkins.

The bully
jumped in place as if he’d seen a ghost. “What—?” he had time to ask,
before Brent grabbed him and lifted him off the ground with one hand.

Perkins
struggled, kicking at Brent’s face and shoulders while his hands grabbed on to
Brent’s shirt and pulled. It was easy for Brent to fend him off, though.
Perkins wasn’t even particularly strong, just massive, and his weight meant
nothing to Brent’s new muscles.

He looked down
at the freshman, who had fallen over backwards and landed sitting on the
sidewalk.

“What’s your
name?” he asked.

“Ryan,” the
freshman said. “I mean, Ryan Digby.”

“This guy
giving you a hard time?” Brent asked.

The freshman
just nodded. He looked like he couldn’t believe this was happening.

“You want me
to teach him a lesson?”

Ryan Digby got
up slowly and shrugged. “I—I don’t know, I just want him—I want
him to stop. Every day he’s here. I live just over there,” he said, pointing
at some houses on the other side of a chainlink fence. “This is the fastest
way for me to get home. I tried taking the long way but he was just waiting
for me there, too. He kept telling me he was going to kill me. He said if I
gave him money he would let me live a little longer. I tried telling my Dad
but he just said I should learn to stick up for myself. I tried that, and
he—Matt—beat me up pretty bad.”

“Okay,” Brent
said. “I’ll take it from here. Why don’t you go home, now? I don’t think
he’ll be here tomorrow.”

The freshman
nodded and ran off. He looked terrified—but maybe that was just the
shock of seeing the tables turned on the bully.

“You’re dead,”
Perkins said, up in the air. “When you put me down, you’re going to be dead.”

“Interesting,”
Brent said. He put Perkins gently back down on his feet. “You going to kill
me now?”

The bully
roared like an animal and came charging at Brent. He was faster than Brent had
expected for someone so heavy and Brent had no doubt he could have seriously
hurt a normal freshman. To Brent it felt like he was being attacked by a
chipmunk. As Perkins punched and kicked at him, Brent just picked the bully up
again and then walked over to a patch of grass and dropped him on it.

Perkins
collapsed with an unpleasant “Oof,” as the wind sagged out of him.

“Are you going
to leave Ryan alone, now?” Brent asked.

The bully’s
eyes were burning with hatred as he propped himself up on his elbows. “That
depends. Are you going to be here tomorrow? Are you going to walk him home
every day?”

Brent dropped
to one knee and made a fist. He raised it high and prepared to bring it down.
He would have to judge this carefully—he needed to hurt Perkins, but not
permanently. He thought about what Maggie had said the night before.
We
can kill people pretty easily. Way too easily.

If he hit him
just
hard enough, though—

“Go on,”
Perkins said.

“What?”
Brent’s concentration faltered.

“Just do it.
I want you to.”

Brent shook
his head. “I don’t understand. You want me to hit you?”

“You think
you’re the first person to ever hit me? I can take a punch like a man. That’s
what my dad says. It’s important, taking a punch like a man. You don’t cry.
You don’t whine about how it wasn’t fair. The bigger the guy, the stronger the
guy who hits you, that just makes you tougher ‘cause you took it like a man.
So go ahead. Whatever you got, I’ll take it.”

“Your dad…
hits you?” Brent asked, horrified.

“Just when I
deserve it. I’m not telling you my life story.”

Was it
possible? Brent had been to an assembly on bullying his freshman year. The
teachers had claimed that bullies were people looking for control over their
own lives. That they hurt other people because they were being hurt
themselves. And Brent wasn’t so naïve as to think there weren’t dads out there
who hit their kids. Grandma hit Maggie sometimes, didn’t she?

“Get up,” he
said.

Perkins looked
confused. “You’re not going to hit me?”

“I’m not sure
yet. Just get up.”

Maggie stormed
into the house and slammed the door. Grandma was waiting for her, probably
with another list of rules, but she went straight to her room and slammed the
door there, too. As she had been warned Grandma had removed the speakers from
her computer desk. There were bare wires hanging over the edge of the
desk—instead of unplugging them properly, Grandma must have cut them with
a pair of scissors. Maggie howled in rage and tore open her desk drawer
looking for her headphones.

If she didn’t
get some music soon, something to channel her rage, she was going to explode.
It was that simple.

There was a
knock on her door. Maggie ignored it. She found her headphones and shoved
them into her ears, hard enough to hurt. Sat down at her desk and booted up
her computer. She had twenty-three emails waiting and new friend requests on
Facebook but she didn’t want to talk to anybody—she needed to be alone,
more than she ever had before in her life.

Grandma
knocked on the door again. Louder this time.

Maggie found
the track she was looking for, an old cut of thrash metal, and dragged the
volume slider all the way up. The music surged into her head, driving
everything else out, filling her up with darkness, somebody else’s darkness,
anybody’s darkness but her own.

It was good.
It was pure. It didn’t hurt anybody.

And then as
soon as it had begun it stopped. Maggie whirled around in her chair and found
Grandma staring at her through those huge glasses. She held the ear phones in
her hands and as Maggie watched she pulled them apart until the plastic
insulation split and the wire inside tore.

“I thought I
made myself clear,” Grandma said. “No music.”

“You can’t do
this to me right now,” Maggie said. She would try to be reasonable. She would
try to talk Grandma through this one. She promised herself that much. It was
going to be hard.

“You may not
understand why I do the things I do,” Grandma said, and Maggie could see the
old woman was about to launch into a whole speech. Probably about how she knew
what was best for Maggie, and that was all she wanted. How all the horrible
effed-up things she did were really just gestures of love.