Trollhunters (26 page)

Like someone caught in a burning building, Claire kicked through the railing of her balcony and leapt for the safety of the stage. I think in that moment we all imagined her beautiful body being
hopelessly mangled. But Steve stood there as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. He adjusted his body to catch her as he had caught endless types of passes in his career, and she swung
around in his grip like a ballroom dancer, her arms naturally clasped behind his neck.

There was a final smash as the balcony crumpled to lumber and scattered across the pit.

Everyone stood silent, blinking and panting.

Mrs. Leach knocked a fist to her chest as if beating back cardiac arrest.

Claire looked up at Steve, eyes wide and thankful.

Steve grinned.

My heart sunk.

He was still bouncing the ball with his left hand.

“What noise is this?” Lord Capulet said. “Give me my long-sword, ho!”

Claire laughed the only way she knew how. Steve, understandably surprised by her volume, held her more tightly. Relieved guffaws tore through the assembled cast and crew, and they hung upon each
other, delighted survivors of an event soon to go down in Saint B. Theater Department lore.

Roughly twelve years later, from the feel of it, rehearsal ended. I told myself that my foibles had been for the best: trollhunters had no time for school, much less extracurriculars. I told
myself to forget about it, go home, hunt trolls, come back the next day, and tell Mrs. Leach first thing that I was quitting.

Removing a pair of tights was a new challenge for me, and by the time I returned to the auditorium I was the only one left. I slipped through the side exit and, once outside, watched Steve suit
up and jog across the football field beneath the dead black rectangle of the jumbotron, while the practicing pom-pom squad clacked their Steve Smackers in appreciation. It left me numb. Steve
was
everything and he
had
everything. Not only was I no one, but I had no one—not Claire, not Tub, not Dad. The only path forward was to give myself fully to the night.

That evening we began to win. The fragments of my life’s failures—video games left unconquered, hobbies abandoned, sports left to guys much bigger—all
perfectly interlocked to supply me with everything I needed as a trollhunter. My whole miserable life, rather than being a waste, felt like it had been training for this.

None of my fellow warriors needed to comment upon the change in me. We all felt it, none more so than the Gumm-Gumms, whose softies we pierced and whose gallbladders we harvested for burning.
Our first conquest that evening was with a quartet of Wormbeards: hulking, bulbous creatures whose objectives were to whisper demoralizing insults to children while they slept so that the children
would be compelled to run away from home, sad little sojourns that always ended while passing beneath a bridge.

Wormbeards were so fat around the middle they could roll themselves at you like runaway boulders. They achieved impressive speeds that way, and I don’t think I’ll ever forget dashing
down Jefferson Street with Jack, Blinky, and ARRRGH!!! at my heels, chasing a rolling gray blob as it bulldozed mailboxes and road signs and a single fire hydrant. I burst through the jetting water
and threw Claireblade like a javelin. It sunk into the Wormbeard’s spine and he unballed, denting two cars with his outstretched paws. The next morning the damage would be blamed on a
hit-and-run driver. Only we hunters knew the truth.

We tried to intimidate the Wormbeards into revealing Gunmar’s location. They used their dying breaths to laugh at us. Using ARRRGH!!!’s nose and Jack’s astrolabe, we raced from
bridge to bridge trying to divine the secret opening to the Gumm-Gumm lair. Every door we took led us through sewer pipes and long-forgotten caverns, but sooner or later we’d find ourselves
back in a bland Saint B. suburb under assault from another troll lowlife.

Tuesday morning came fast enough to make me want to vomit. I plodded through hallways decked out in red-and-white crepe paper and in gym class flat-out refused to climb the rope because of my
sore muscles. Tub didn’t say a word in my defense while Coach Lawrence wrote me a detention slip. I carried that worthless slip of paper all the way to play rehearsal, where I was
unintelligible with exhaustion. Mrs. Leach had no choice but to call in Steve, and I was sure Claire preferred him anyway. With a mixture of relief and remorse I sunk into an auditorium chair,
sedated by the knowledge that my skills were the kind that had to stay hidden. Just a few hours more and I’d prove it.

The Yarbloods were the smallest trolls in the known universe. Complained about in everything from Sumerian pictographs to Egyptian hieroglyphs, these legendary nuisances were no larger than
mosquitos and fed upon children who played outside too late. The Yarbloods attached themselves to hair like lice and burrowed into a child’s skull to cause illness. We followed Jack’s
astrolabe to their latest hunting ground: a local orphanage.

Jack slathered a sour-smelling slime upon the upper lip of any kid we found within the grips of a fever. This slime made the kids need to defecate; we hid in the hallway while the first boy
stumbled to the bathroom. Afterward we ran in and Jack commanded me to reach down into the toilet. I did it without question until my arm was submerged in toilet water up to my shoulder. I felt it,
some kind of clog, and wrestled with it for a minute before yanking out a lump of white, mice-sized trolls clinging to one another with claws and teeth. The Yarbloods had grown quite a bit before
they’d been pooped out.

Unpleasant to catch for sure, but pretty easy to kill.

Sergeant Gulager crawled by in his cruiser as we were leaving. By the dashboard light I could make out his drawn face as he drained the latest in what was probably a long line of cups of coffee.
After seeing ARRRGH!!! with his own eyes in the junkyard, no doubt he was questioning his sanity, and yet he had a community to protect. So he was up every night, just like me, doing what he
thought was right. I thought about him as we trollhunters spent the next few hours burning gallbladders behind a vacant warehouse.

Wednesday came as it always did, though I’d have been hard-pressed to tell you the day of the week if you’d asked. The only way I was keeping track of time was by the rising number
of missing students in each class. Though I ignored Pinkton’s math, I made calculations of my own, adding up the vacant desks. It was no different at play rehearsal. Where was our Mercutio?
Our Friar John?

Then, in a crash, it was night. Meet the Zunnn—their dingy drawstring bags told you all you needed to know. They were out to nab kids for Gunmar, plain and simple. The Zunnn fought as a
team, rushing at us with arms locked like rugby players and wearing matching jumpsuits dyed with red and green stripes and helmets constructed from the skulls of larger trolls. It was rather
intimidating, truth be told, but their bash-and-smash technique was no equal to four well-wielded swords, a few dozen whipping tendrils, and a member of the ARRRGH!!! family fortified by a
three-course meal of cats. Even as they were losing, the Zunnn belted out their minor-key fight song. To counter I began shouting bits of Shakespeare coming to me from out of nowhere.

“Take the measure of your unmade grave, fiend!”

Off went a pouch of softies.

“Alack, there lies more peril in mine eye than twenty of thine swords!”

Off went a pair of hands.

“O! she doth teach the torches to burn bright!”

Off went a head, still wearing its helmet.

Never had a trollhunter slayed with such style. Even my companions were stunned. Soon the squad of Zunnn was no more and we spent the rest of the night on another fruitless search for the
Gumm-Gumms. More than once we had to hide to avoid the zealous eyes of Sergeant Gulager. He was everywhere, all of the time, and I was duly impressed. He wanted to help, that was obvious. But even
heroes had their limits. This fight was not for him.

When we got home, I didn’t think much of the light and sound coming from the TV. I packed Jack’s lunch, as I did each morning before grabbing a couple of hours of
sleep, but when I found him he was glued to the television. At first I couldn’t make sense of the wobbly, low-resolution footage, but then I recognized trolls, and not just any trolls.

The footage stabilized and I saw Blinky and ARRRGH!!!, standing in what looked like a kitchen, their faces smeared with peanut butter. The next thing I heard was human voices. My voice.
Tub’s voice. I went lightheaded and gripped for something to keep me standing. Nothing was there and I staggered, far enough to see the cables leading from the TV to a teddy bear—the
nanny cam that I had forgotten about.

Dad sat on the sofa, watching it in a stupor that suggested he’d been watching for hours.

Jack didn’t need to say a word: he’d forgotten to apply the schmoof. The packed lunch fell from my hand with a paper-bag crinkle. The noise broke through Dad’s trance, and with
aching slowness he reached for the teddy bear. The grainy footage blinked off and was replaced by early-show video of a sunken-eyed Sergeant Gulager refusing to confirm that more than four kids had
disappeared.

“Individuals cannot be considered missing until they have been gone for twenty-four hours,” he said.

“In light of these disappearances,” asked the reporter, “should the Festival of the Fallen Leaves be canceled for the first time in San Bernardino history?”

“Of course not,” Gulager said without emotion. “There is no reason for panic.”

Dad modulated his breathing before turning our way.

“We must band together as a community,” Gulager said from the TV.

Dad stood. The sofa springs creaked. He was much taller than Jack.

“We must show unity in the face of strife,” Gulager insisted.

Dad took a single step. His eyes swam with tears of confusion.

Beside me, Jack was nailed to the floor.

“Jack?” Dad whispered. “Is it really you?”

“Jimbo,” Jack said.

There was a pause, filled with the babble of a commercial break.

“I’m sorry,” both brothers said together.

Dad reached out to Jack, but his hand floated upward of its own accord. His eyes followed his hand, and his neck began to roll backward. Then, with the first lancets of morning light poking
through the chinks of the steel shutters and jabbing the counter on which was propped a framed milk carton photo of the brother lost forty-five years earlier, my dad, Jim Sturges Sr., originator of
the Band-Aid method of glasses repair and uncredited inventor of the Excalibur Calculator Pocket, fainted.

Eighty-eight percent. Pinkton had drilled the number into me for weeks. The math test was the next day, and that was the grade I needed. But all I could do was apply the
merciless percentage to other events in my life:

Eighty-eight percent chance that I would not be playing Romeo.

Eighty-eight percent chance that Tub would never speak to me again.

Eighty-eight percent chance that Gunmar the Black would return.

Eighty-eight percent chance that I would die upon the field of troll battle.