The Less-Dead (4 page)

Will holds up one hand. “Look, you don’t have to feel bad. I mean, it was a long time ago. It sucks, but I’m used to it now. Anyway, I had no other family to take me in, so after my parents died, I became property of the state. Since then I’ve lived in a lot of places—group homes, shelters, foster care—and, well, this last foster home in Austin … let’s just say I
really
had to get out. So I made the mistake of meeting with this dealer in town. He was selling high-quality weed—real expensive stuff. My idea was to work for him for a while, make a ton of money, and get out of here—head back to California, which is where I’m originally from. But it didn’t work out. Turned out there were a couple of undercover cops working at Anderson High—that’s where I used to go—and I got busted selling weed to some rich congressman’s kid. The police kept the details a secret, sent me to the Rock, and cut me this deal where I’d get off pretty easy if I helped them out.”

As I’m listening to Will’s crazy story, I’m also thinking about Kyle Lester. After his murder, I scoured the newspapers, trying to find out as much about him as I could. But there wasn’t much to know, except that he had no family and had been in foster care most of his life. Just like Will. When Kyle turned eighteen, he was out on the streets, and a few months later, he was killed. “Um, what do you mean?” I say. “How did you help the cops?”

Will studies me for a moment, leans in closer, and
whispers, “You see, there was this detective. He wanted me to wear a wire, so I did, and they caught the guy.”

“But I don’t understand,” I say. “I mean, you’re a kid in high school. That sounds really dangerous.”

“Yeah, I guess. Maybe if I had a family, they would have thought twice about it, but I don’t. And I know what you’re thinking. That I’m a narc, right? Well, maybe I am, but the guy sitting in jail right now is a rotten bastard, so I really don’t care.”

I shake my head. “No. That’s not what I was thinking. I just didn’t know cops could do stuff like that. You know,
use
people our age.”

He laughs and shrugs. “‘I’m nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too?’”

“Emily Dickinson.”

“Right. Come on, Noah, everyone gets used one way or another. Besides, I don’t think the cops look at it that way. For them, they’re just doing their job.”

Across the street, Doomsday marches to the corner and begins delivering one of his hellfire-and-brimstone sermons. Will smiles and shakes his head. “Here we go again.” But soon a young ponytailed guy, carrying a bedroll and walking a mangy-looking dog, strolls over to Doomsday and puts an arm around his shoulder. Doomsday shrugs him off and continues his rant.

The guy gives up. He cups a hand around his mouth and calls, “Will! Hey, come on, I need your help!”

“All right,” Will calls back. “Humor him for a while. I’ll be there soon.”

“Is the guy with the dog a friend of yours too?” I say.

“Yep, that’s Quindlan. He showed up on the Drag about six months ago. Since then he’s been hanging out with Doomsday and me. The three of us are pretty close. Anyway, I better go. I’ll look for you around school, okay? Maybe we can hang out?” Will stands, cocks his head to one side, and points to my T-shirt. “Cool shirt. The Kinks are like my all-time favorite band. Do you and Carson cover them?”

“Yeah.” I pick up my guitar and play a few bars of “You Really Got Me.”

Will grins. “You’re really good. You know, you should write that girl Aubrey a song. Sad and sweet like the one you were playing before.” He pats the notebook in his back pocket. “That’s what I do. If I’m feeling down, or I need to get something out, I write poetry.”

“That’s cool, but…” I shake my head. “Nah, I’ve tried to write songs. They suck. I mean, I can write the music okay, but the words are all wrong.”

“Dude, don’t give up. Sometimes I get stuck on words, but then I remember what Bob Dylan said. ‘A poem is a naked person,’ and ‘A song is anything that can walk by itself.’”

“A poem is a naked person,” I say. “Huh. I like that.”

“Yeah, I do too.”

“Hey, Will, before you go, there’s something I want to ask you. I know it’s a long shot, but did you by any chance know Kyle Lester? The guy who was murdered outside Urban Legend about a month ago? I remember reading in the paper that he’d been a foster kid.”

Will nods sadly. “Actually, yeah, I knew Kyle. We weren’t good friends or anything, but about a year ago we lived in the same group home. Why?”

“I’m not sure if you heard, but they arrested a suspect in his murder. I read it in the paper yesterday.”

His eyes widen. “Really? That’s great news. I’m glad they got that psycho off the streets. Hey, thanks for telling me.”

I watch Will walk down the steps. He’s about to cross the street, but then I get an idea. “Will, hold on!” He turns around.

I stand up, pull off my Kinks shirt, and toss it to him. “Keep it,” I say.

He looks at me like I’m crazy. “What? No way!”

“Really, man, I want you to have it. Besides”—I stretch out my arms to the sky—“I need to practice what Bob Dylan said, right?”

He watches me for a while. I expect him to laugh, but he doesn’t. He just stands there, staring. Across the street, Doomsday and Quindlan are staring at me too. Suddenly I feel very naked.

“All right,” Will says. “I’ll keep the shirt. But nothing’s free. As payment, I’ll help you write that song for Aubrey.”

“Okay. Fair enough.”

He waves goodbye, then walks across the Drag, dodging a taxi, and joins Doomsday and Quindlan.

A cool breeze blows. I’ve got goose bumps now. I cross my arms over my chest. The next thing I know, Carson is climbing the steps toward me. “Noah? What are you doing? Seriously, dude, I know you’ve got a decent build and everything, but there
are
other ways of getting Aubrey’s attention.”

“SO TELL
me the truth, Noah. These church girls, is it really true that they won’t put out until they’re, like, married?”

It’s Monday morning, and Carson and I have just passed through the metal detectors at the Rock. Carson came with me to church yesterday, and when Kat invited him to the movies this Friday night with the youth group, he immediately thought she was into him. Since then, he’s been scheming ways to get her alone and, hopefully, get into her pants.

We pause for a moment, turn our empty pockets inside out to show the security guards that we’re not planning to stab ourselves or anyone else with a pen in the bathroom today, and continue down the hallway. “Carson, shut up, all right? I’m sick of hearing about this. Besides, is that all you care about? Getting laid?”

“Well, no. It’s not
all
I care about. But it
is
a concern. I’m sixteen. A junior. The bases are loaded, dude. I’d like to at least
think
I’m on my way to scoring a home run.”

Carson’s bases are far from loaded, but I decide not to mention it. And while it’s true that we’re both hoping to lose our virginity in the not-too-distant future,
I
at least have a few standards. Like being in love. Which sounds pretty corny, I know, but after kissing Aubrey, the thought of
doing it
with someone else doesn’t seem right. “Yeah, well, the answer is yes. They don’t put out. So just keep on
thinking.”

The nasty odor of pork and beans is already wafting from the cafeteria. That’s another perk of being a student at the Rock. We’re served the same no-frills menu as the hard-core criminals at juvie. And forget about packing a lunch, since you never know—there might be vodka mixed in with our OJ, or weed baked into our brownies.

“Hey, isn’t that Will over there by the lockers?” Carson says.

I take a look. Sure enough, it is. “Yeah, that’s him.” Over the weekend I told Carson all about Will—how he lost his family, how he’s had to live in group homes and foster care, how he got busted for dealing and wound up wearing a wire for the police.

“Look at that. He’s wearing your Kinks shirt.”

As Will pops open his locker, Hawk—a loner goth with a spiked Mohawk and a silver bolt through his nose—comes up behind him. I don’t know the dude’s real name; I’m not sure anyone does. Mostly, he roams the halls like a ghost. He pats Will on the back; Will turns around and they greet each other.

“They’re friends, you know,” Carson says. “Hawk and Will. I’ve seen them together.”

“Really?” This strikes me as odd. I didn’t think Hawk had any friends at school.

Suddenly Will sees us. “Hey, Noah! Carson! Come on over.”

“Oh, great,” Carson says. “Let’s hope the security guards aren’t watching us. The other day I saw Hawk buying dope from Justin Kingsley.”

“Come on, don’t be so paranoid,” I say, although Carson has a legitimate point. At the Rock, guilt by association can be lethal.

Hawk studies me carefully as we walk toward the lockers. His Mohawk is dyed bloodred today, and he’s wearing heavy black eyeliner. I’ve never seen the guy smile, but strangely one side of his mouth is curled up.

Will says hi and introduces us to Hawk, who nods solemnly. Then Will holds out a fist to Carson. “I hear you’re pretty good on guitar too,” he says.

Carson shrugs and taps Will’s fist. “I’m all right. Noah’s better.”

This is true, but Carson likes to play up his false humility. It can be pretty irritating.

Meanwhile Hawk is looking me up and down, and it’s making me uncomfortable. “So, you’re Noah,” he says. “The guitarist from the Drag. The one who likes poetry. Will told me about you.”

“Oh yeah?” I say, stunned by the number of words Hawk just uttered. “Good things, I hope?”

But before Hawk can answer, three policemen turn the corner. They march directly toward us.

“Shit,” Hawk says. “Here they come.”

The officers surround Hawk. One starts reciting, “You
have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law… .”

“Spare me,” Hawk says, rolling his eyes. He holds out both wrists to the second officer, who quickly slaps on a set of handcuffs.

I look at Carson. His jaw is hanging open. We’ve seen arrests at the Rock before, but none this close.

“Move away now, boys,” the third officer says to us.

But Will doesn’t listen. He steps right up to Hawk. “Hey, are you going to be all right?”

“I’ll be fine,” Hawk says. “But what about you?”

“Don’t worry about me.”

“Move away,” the police officer repeats.

Will steps back. The cops shuffle Hawk past us. As they do, Hawk gives me a pleading look and whispers, “Noah, do me a favor, all right? Take care of Will.”

I nod and watch while the cops march him down the hall. The late bell rings. The security guard bellows, “Get to class! Now!”

“I want everyone to close their eyes, and listen to a poem by William Carlos Williams, entitled ‘The Red Wheelbarrow.’” It’s been several hours since we saw Hawk get arrested, and I’ve spent most of the morning shaking it off. Now I’m sitting in English, my last class of the day, and Mr. Dobbs is reading us poetry. One very surprising thing about the Rock is that the teachers are pretty cool. And it’s
not like they got fired from their old jobs and had to take sucky positions teaching juvenile delinquents; they’re here because they
want
to be. Some even have PhDs, like Mr. Dobbs, who used to be a professor at UT. Once, he told our class that he wanted to make an impact on kids at risk. He said it gave his life meaning.

Anyway, last week we read selections from the legendary rapper Tupac Shakur’s
The Rose That Grew from Concrete
. The poems were kind of depressing, but very well done, and the whole thing went over
really
big in class, since there are a lot of gangster types here at the Rock, and Tupac is their
god
. Even the major badasses were totally into it.

I’m pretty excited, because this week we’re beginning a new section on the imagists. I’ve read “The Red Wheelbarrow” before. I have a collection by Williams at home, but for some reason his poems really come alive when Mr. Dobbs reads them aloud.

I close my eyes. He recites, “‘So much depends upon—a red wheelbarrow—glazed with rainwater—beside the white chickens.’” He pauses a moment. “The poem paints a picture. Do you see it?”

Yeah, I do. I open my eyes and see all the badasses nodding in agreement. “Besides being a poet, Williams was also a medical doctor,” Mr. Dobbs explains. “This poem is said to be a depiction of what he saw while tending to a very sick girl in her home.”

I’m not sure why, but knowing this gives me a lump in my throat. It makes me admire Williams’s work even more.

“And now,” Mr. Dobbs says, “I’d like you to write your own poems using this model. I want you to begin with the
words ‘So much depends upon.’” He passes out paper and pencils, and no one even complains. “Remember, use an image. Make it vivid. Your words should create a snapshot in time.”

We start, and as usual I have no idea what to write. I try “So much depends upon my guitar,” but that turns out lame, so I decide to be romantic and write, “So much depends upon a girl,” but the words are sappy and sentimental. I sigh and turn my paper over. I write, “So much depends upon the murder of Kyle Lester.” But I don’t know where to go from there, seeing that Kyle Lester’s dead, and no poem, no matter how good it is, is going to bring him back.