The Glass Factory (37 page)

“CATCH IT!”

“Catch it, you idiot!”

Matty lunges forward but the softball bounces off the cracked asphalt and flies up at his face. He blocks it, fumbles with it, and the cold smooth sphere slips from his numb red fingers.

“Third!”

“Throw to third!” yells the coach.

“Weems, you stupid—!”

Matty scoops up the soft white ball and throws it without waiting and looking.

“Home!”

“Play goes home!” yells the coach.

The ball flies eight or nine feet to the right of my glove, nearly hitting Justina as she hustles down the base path towards home.

“Jeezus, Weems!” yells coach Murdoch.

The ball rolls under the chain-link fence and out into the parking lot.

Guess who has to go get it.

“Nice one, Matthew,” says Freddy at second base.

“Throws like a freaking girl,” says T.J. at first.

“Like a freaking—”

“Weems! Get off the field and help Antonia find the ball,” orders the coach.

“Yeah, get going, Matthew.”

“Yeah, Math-yewwwwwww.”

“Belongs with the girls, anyway.”

The cold March wind blows dirt in my face. I duck down and use the glove to get the ball out from under Mr. Schmidt’s car.

“Why don’t you get under the car with her, Math-yeewwww!”

“Yeah, Math-yeewwwwwwwww!”

“Makin’ her do all the work!”

My mom says boys and girls used to have gym separately. Sometimes I wish it were still that way.

I throw the ball back over the fence.

“Yo, she’s tougher than he is!”

“Just like a boy!”

“Hey, Buscarsela! When you gonna grow up?”

“When you gonna grow you-know-whats?”

“Yeah!”

Ha. Ha. Ha.

Jerks.

Coach Murdoch blows the whistle. Gym class is over.

Eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve.

Five more years of this.

We file in from the cold, girls to the left, boys to the right. Inside, I hear them pushing Matty against a locker.

We’re walking down Roosevelt Avenue to the bus stop.

“I’d like to kill that stupid coach,” says Matty.

“Why? He’s not the one picking on you.”

“He lets it happen.”

“Freddy and T.J. are the jerks—”

“And he doesn’t do anything to stop them.”

We get to the corner of 104th Street. The wind cuts right through my wool hat.

Matty watches me shiver, and says, “I gotta do something about it.”

Homeroom with the rest of the Bs, then Spanish, a bo-o-o-oring science class, math, English. I sit with Carlina Polo and we take turns reading each other’s book projects.

Matty spends the whole class not looking at me.

T.J. starts messing with him: “What’sa matter? She drop you for the real thing?”

Matty looks pale, his feet drumming nonstop. He looks like he’s getting up the nerve to smack T.J.

“Yeah, what went on under that car, anyway?” T.J. taunts him.

Matty’s wiping his sweaty palms on his pants. It’s not
that
warm in here.

The bell rings, stabbing the air with a sharp clang. Matty grabs his bookbag as if he’s afraid it might wriggle away and bite someone, and disappears out the door. Carlina asks me a question about the homework, and I almost lose Matty in the hallway before I spot him heading down the stairs. He slips into the crush of eighth and ninth graders and I have to push all the way down to the first floor before I spot his low, crew-cut head among the towering teens heading for the gym.

Matty doesn’t have gym today.

We’re supposed to be having lunch right now.

He becomes part of the crowd of older kids as they pile into the boys’ locker room, leaving me standing there in an emptying hallway.

The door to the gym. I press my face against the tall, thin window and try to see inside. Coach Murdoch is in there, setting up bright orange cones in two straight lines under the baskets. I’m about to knock on the glass, when I realize I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to get Matty in trouble. Maybe it’s nothing.

Maybe—

“What are you doing there, young lady?”

Mrs. Grinelli, the hall monitor, staring down at me like King Kong’s grandmother.

“Uh, I think I left something—uh—in the girls’ locker room and—”

“Is this the door to the girls’ locker room?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Where are you supposed to be right now?”

“At lunch.”

“Then get over there. You can watch the boys during your own gym class.”

Those creeps? Ewwwwwww.

I turn around and head down the hall.

Darn it.

Wish I knew how to lie better.

I’m going to my locker to get the lunch that I don’t feel like eating.

What would Mom do? She knows how to handle this kind of stuff. She was a cop for five years, and she’s tangled with some major psychos. Always says the blue uniforms made her look just like a guy.

Right.

Just like a guy.

I pull open my locker and take out the heavy winter coat and thick wool hat, stuff them under my arm. Can’t get into the locker room the front way thanks to Mrs. Grinelli, and the monitors are watching the exits, too.

This ain’t Kansas.

I push open the door to the girls’ bathroom, pull on my winter coat, zip it up, unlock the window and lift.

It’s stuck. The finger slots are too far apart for me to pull up with any force, so I put my fists under the lowest crosspiece and try to push. Nothing. I take a better stance, bend my knees and push up again. Groan. There’s a crack and it opens, letting in the stiff March breeze. I’m straddling the windowsill, stuffing my long hair under the wool hat just as the door opens.

It’s Alberta Torres. A big eighth grade girl. She’s trouble when she wants to be. She stands there looking at me in my heavy black coat, climbing out the first-floor window of the girls’ bathroom.

She smirks but doesn’t say anything. Guess I’ve gone up in her estimation.

I pull the hat down low and drop to the ground.

I run through the parking lot, under the chain-link fence, hit the hard diamond just as the boys who got stuck with outside gym class come filing out the door. The coach’ll be out in a few seconds, and nobody stops me as I slip inside.

After the brisk winter air outside, the heavy smell of damp socks and sweaty underwear is extra-extra scuzzy. At least nobody’s still changing.

I’d just barf.

Empty. Empty. Matty’s in the last row, sitting there with his hands gripping his backpack, waiting for the coach to find him and start yelling at him.

“Matty!” I whisper.

He sits up and thrusts his hand into the backpack.

“Jesus, Toni, what are
you
doing here?”

“What am
I
doing? What have you got in there?”

He doesn’t answer.

I sit down next to him. “Come on,
somos compañeros.
What have you got in there? Show me.”

He shows me. A huge silver-metal handgun. At least it looks huge to me.

“It’s my dad’s gun,” he says, like I couldn’t figure that out for myself.

“This is really stupid and dangerous.”

He puts the clip in.

“Matty—”

“I just wanna scare him. Like in the movies.”

No, it’s not like in the movies. My mom says a big gun in the face at close range will leave nothing but bone fragments and hair samples.

“I’ve been called names, too, you know.”

“It’s different for you,” he says.

Yeah: I have to keep that hurt inside.

“I mean it’s different for guys. I can’t be backing off all the time. I’m not a freakin’ loser.”

“Matty, you better take that gun home before your dad finds out it’s missing—”

“I was just gonna—”

“You were just gonna what?” bellows Coach Murdoch, marching over to us from the shower area. “What the heck is goin’ on here? And who are you?” he says to me.

“Uh—”

To Matty: “Whaddaya got there? Hand it over.”

“Coach, I—”

“I said hand it over!”

Coach Murdoch picks up the gun, now tiny in his hands, looks at it, pulls the trigger a few times click-click-click, hands it back.

“Nice toy. Now get the heck out of here. The both of youse.”

As we walk away from Mrs. Grinelli’s bone-drilling glare, I tell him, “You were lucky. That was stupid.”

Matty sighs deeply, and admits, “I don’t know why it didn’t shoot.”

“You have to chamber a round.”

“You what?”

“After you put the clip in, you have to rack the slide back to load a bullet into the chamber.”

“Oh.”

“You know, just like in the movies.”

What do I tell Mom? She’s always saying girls have to be so much more responsible.

“Man, when Murdoch told me to hand it over, I should have—”

Matty sputters, unable to say it, and starts kicking the crap out of the nearest locker and cursing furiously.

Just like a boy.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Kenneth Wishnia was born in Hanover, NH, to a roving band of traveling academics. He earned a B.A. from Brown University (1982) and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from SUNY Stony Brook (1996). He teaches writing, literature, and other deviant forms of thought at Suffolk Community College in Brentwood, Long Island, where he is a professor of English.

Ken’s novels have been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony, and Macavity Awards, and have made Best Mystery of the Year lists at
Booklist, Library Journal,
and the
Washington Post.
His short stories have appeared in
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Murder in Vegas, Long Island Noir, Queens Noir, Politics Noir, Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail,
and elsewhere.

His most recent novel,
The Fifth Servant,
was an Indie Notable selection, one of the “Best Jewish Books of 2010” according to the Association of Jewish Libraries, a finalist for the Sue Feder Memorial Historical Mystery Award, and winner of a Premio Letterario ADEI-WIZO, a literary prize awarded by the Associazione Donne Ebree d’Italia, the Italian branch of the Women’s International Zionist Organization.

He is married to a wonderful Catholic woman from Ecuador, and they have two children who are completely insane.

For more information, go to
www.kennethwishnia.com
.

Called a hard-boiled poet by NPR’s Maureen Corrigan, Reed Farrel Coleman has published thirteen novels. He is a three-time winner of the Shamus Award for Best PI Novel of the Year and a two-time nominee for the Edgar Award. Reed has won the Macavity, Barry, and Anthony Awards as well. He was the editor of the short story anthology
Hard Boiled Brooklyn
and coeditor of the poetry journal
The Lineup.
His short fiction and essays have appeared in
Wall Street Noir, Crimespree Magazine, The Darker Mask, Long Island Noir,
and several other publications. Reed is an adjunct professor of English at Hofstra University and lives with his wife on Long Island.