The Old Wheel, page 13
part #2 of The Adventures of Holloway Holmes Series
“About that—” I began.
“Did you text Ariana about Sunday?” Dad asked from where he was watching the BYU game.
I grabbed Holmes by the oxford. “We’re going to study now.”
“We could eat earlier or later if it works better for her schedule.”
“Can’t hear you,” I said as I towed Holmes down the hall. “Too busy learning about codependent bonds.”
“Covalent,” Holmes said.
I wasn’t sure, but I thought Dad was laughing.
When I closed the bedroom door, I said, “Good call with the tutoring thing. That’s going to be great cover.”
Holmes was staring at the clothes on the floor, dismay rising in his face. It made me feel kind of bad, the perpetually fresh disappointment and distaste that manifested every time he stepped into my room—as if he hadn’t been here dozens of times before.
“I know where all the clean ones are,” I said.
“Um, yes.” He swallowed. Then, tearing his gaze from the floor, he said, “It’s not a cover.”
“Hm?” I asked as I dropped onto my bed and took out my phone. There had been something about that New Zealand bird—
A pale, fine-boned hand that was ridiculously stronger than it looked covered my screen and pushed the phone down.
“I’m reading something.”
“I told your father I’d help you with chemistry—”
“H, no!”
“—and so I will help you with chemistry.”
“But that was, you know, talk. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“I am not going to lie to your father.”
“Why not? I do it all the time!”
Holmes looked at me.
“You have got to be kidding me,” I said.
“How do you expect to become a physician if you can’t pass high school chemistry?”
“I said that one time, and it was stupid, and I didn’t even mean it.”
His pupils were chemically hard and contracted, but the rest of his face softened. After a long moment, he said, “Sit at the desk, or I’ll ask your father if I can handcuff you there during lessons.”
“He’d think it was a sex thing.”
Color flamed in Holmes’s face. “Nice try, but I won’t scare that easily.”
“I’ll tell him it’s a sex thing.”
“Good,” Holmes said. “He’ll be pleased that all your hours of mindless pornography are finally paying dividends.”
My jaw legit dropped. “H!”
“Desk, please.”
“That was so amazingly bitchy.”
“Desk.”
“And, like, also kind of evil. Which I loved.”
“Do not make me get your father.”
He was blushing so hard that I was afraid he’d start being oxygen deprived, so I grinned and rolled off the bed. When he held out his hand, I rolled my eyes, but I slapped my phone into his palm. I sat at the desk, and Holmes brought back a second chair to sit next to me.
“Show me your notes,” Holmes said. “And the relevant section in the textbook.”
I opened the textbook. I flipped to the page where I’d written—succinctly and, I thought, brilliantly—Ionic and Covalent Bonds.
Holmes looked up from the page.
I tried for another grin, but this one slipped away. “Don’t, ok? I tried. It…it didn’t make any sense.”
For a long moment, Holmes was silent. Then he said, “Let’s begin with the structure of an atom.”
It was a lot. He was a lot. I mean, I’d known he was smart—genius-level brilliant—but it was one thing to know it, and it was another thing to have him recite atomic structure without once having to look at the textbook. And then ionic bonds. And then covalent bonds.
“But they’re both about sharing electrons,” I said. “There’s no difference.”
“They’re quite different, and to be more precise, they’re not both about sharing electrons.”
“This one takes an electron, and they get stuck together. This one shares an electron, and they get stuck together. It’s the same thing.”
Holmes took a slow breath. His pupils had dilated somewhat—maybe only in response to the dark room, but maybe the addies were wearing off. The shadows softened the palette of his face: giving him blues and grays that made him look like a chalk rubbing. We had done those (seventh-grade art, Ms. Prinze). The most important part, she had told us, was to get the paper tight against the surface of the object underneath. Conform—that was the word. It must conform to the surface. The way his cheek would fit into my hand.
“Think of it this way,” Holmes said, the words startling me back to myself. “Let’s say that an ionic bond is like a theft. One atom steals an electron from another atom.”
“But you said it gives its electron—”
“For the sake of the example, please. Let’s continue the metaphor. There’s an arrest. Both atoms are involved in the criminal proceedings—bound together, we might say, even though they are not sharing the electron. They are attached to each other through this process of transfer. It’s an imperfect analogy because it doesn’t address the question of ions, but I hope you’ll bear with me.”
He seemed to expect a response, and his face was so earnest that I hid my smile and said, “Of course.”
Nodding, Holmes continued, “Now, think of covalent bonds as something else. Not a theft, but—but an ongoing relationship, if you will. A friendship. Both atoms desire more out of their existence—in this case, to have a full outer shell of electrons. But they can achieve it only in partnership with another atom, by sharing one or more atoms.”
“Ok. I guess that makes sense.”
If Holmes heard me, though, he gave no sign of it. He struggled with the next words. “Like a friendship, when sharing electrons in this way, both atoms become more stable. Their bond is more stable. It’s stronger than an ionic bond. They continue to share electrons, in the same way that people must continue to share experiences, emotions, and intimacy. They require ongoing effort and investment. Covalent bonds are often found in molecules; they allow individual atoms to become more than what they would be on their own.”
He stopped, the silence sudden and punctuated, and his throat moved reflexively.
“That was really cool—” I began.
Holmes’s expression stilled. It was the only word for it: every sign of animation and life in his face ceasing, arrested mid-motion. He drew out his phone, angled himself away from me, and said, “Yes, Father?” After listening for several moments, Holmes said in an unexpectedly tight voice, “I thought it was understood that my past behavior posed significant public relations challenges and, as a consequence, it would be better if I did not attend.” Sometimes, when someone else was on the phone, you could hear the buzz of the other speaker’s voice. Not so with Blackfriar—the other end of the call was like a bottomless well. “I believe it would be best—” Holmes tried. It seemed impossible, but his voice ratcheted down further—an icy control that betrayed, more clearly than anything else, how distressed he was. “Father, I would prefer—” I didn’t know how much it cost him to say in a tiny voice, “Please.”
Whatever Blackfriar said, it made Holmes snap his jaw shut. His teeth clicked. His face was bloodless again, and after a few more of my thudding heartbeats, he disconnected and pocketed the phone.
In that same iron-dead voice, Holmes said without looking at me, “Jack, you’ll have to excuse me. I can’t continue our tutoring—”
“He treats you like shit,” I said. “In case you need an outside observer to tell you that.”
“I do not.” He stood. “I do not require your commentary on my family or my relationship with my family. Ever. Is that clear?”
“Yeppers.”
He was trying to set his jaw, but it was trembling.
“You know what you need?” I asked.
“I need to return to my residence—”
“You need to beat me up.”
Holmes stared at me.
“Definitely,” I said, stretching as I got to my feet. “You definitely need, like, an hour of nothing but beating me up.”
Chapter 12
The Polite Thing to Do
Holmes left via the front door, and he was annoyingly polite as he said goodnight to my dad. They even arranged the next torture—I mean tutoring—session. They both looked so pleased with themselves, I was tempted to fail chemistry just to teach them a lesson.
I said goodnight to my dad too. Then I went out my window. It was the polite thing to do. So my dad wouldn’t worry.
My phone said it was a few minutes after nine, and at this hour, the athletic center was closed and dark. Emergency lights puddled shadows everywhere, and on the other side of the windows, workout equipment was reduced to bulky outlines. No music, no voices in the halls. The lights on the tree in the atrium were off.
I still had my spare keys, so I let us in through the service door. After retrieving our gear from the locker room, Holmes led the way to the wrestling room where we’d run into Emma and Rowe and Glo. We were alone except for the mirrors, the weights, the tinsely Christmas tree. Wordlessly, Holmes began to change, and I followed suit: shorts and a t-shirt, mouth guard, headgear, shin guards. It was new, changing like this in front of each other—in the past, Holmes had always arrived ready to go. When it came to the hand wraps, he had to help me. His whole body buzzed with barely capped anger, but his touch was controlled as he wrapped my knuckles.
We’d started doing this in October, when Holmes was still recovering from a gunshot wound—which meant, since he had one functional arm and was moving slowly from head injuries and blood loss, we were almost evenly matched. At first, he’d been tentative, hesitant—pulling his punches, watching me each time like I might shatter, offering corrections in a very un-Holmes, mealy-mouthed mishmash. We’d had a talk about that. We’d had several talks, actually.
Now, he just tried to kill me every time.
I mean, sure, he called it other things. He said words like aerobic exercise and cardio and drills, but it all came down to trying to work me to death. Even the warmup was murder—stretching, plus moves that he didn’t call punches or kicks but were clearly designed to get your body ready to throw them. I wasn’t exactly gasping for air by the time we’d finished, but I was drenched in sweat, and I couldn’t smell the wrestling room’s engrained funk anymore—I could only smell myself.
He launched into a series of drills. Punches and kicks and blocks, at first in slow motion, each time with a correction. “Your shoulder is too high,” or “Bring your knee up,” or “Pivot at the waist.” And then (either because I was getting better or, more likely, Holmes gradually got worn down by incompetence), we ran through them faster and faster. When we finished, I was gasping for air. Holmes was breathing faster too, and a sheen of sweat glowed on his forehead and nose and cheeks. He looked alive, awake, alert. His pupils had dilated as his body burned off some of the speed. And there was an edge in his face, a blade that he normally kept hidden, and he whetted it every time we clashed.
The focus mitts next, with Holmes barking instructions as my breathing became more and more ragged. Then the self-defense scenarios. Holmes would charge me from behind, or we’d begin in a grapple, or he’d instruct me to pretend that the Christmas tree, our reflections in the mirror, his shadow—that they were other opponents, and I had to keep them controlled while fending him off. He took me down with a hip throw—harder than he’d done with Rowe, for sure; hard enough to drive the breath from my lungs. He put me flat on my back with a knee strike, and I swear I felt my ribs creak. He knocked me on my ass with an open-handed blow that was barely more than a slap. My whole face felt like fire, and my eyes welled up with tears.
“When I tell you to keep your hands up,” he said, standing over me, “keep your hands up.”
I nodded, breathing through the pain, at the crumbling precipice of pain and humiliation that would spill me into full-out crying.
“Get to your feet.”
I nodded again, measuring my breaths.
“Get up.”
Somehow, I got onto one knee, and the whole world went wobbly.
“Get up, Jack.”
“Give me a minute.”
“No, I will not give you a minute. Get up. Get up! I am not doing this for my entertainment, and I do not enjoy having my time wasted. I’ve told you time and again to keep your hands up.”
Someone had torn the paper rings on the Christmas tree, I noticed through my scrambled vision. Somebody had come in here and been an asshole enough to do that, knocking all the tinsel to the ground, ruining it.
Holmes caught the collar of my shirt and hauled me to my feet. “When I say get up, get up!”
The world—or maybe my vision—went a little more scrambly. I nodded, and when Holmes released me, I stumbled in a circle. I was having a hard time finding him. Maybe this was a trick. Maybe he was secretly a ninja, and he’d thrown a smoke bomb, and—
Something loomed up at me out of the darkness, and I threw a kick.
Well, kind of.
I didn’t hit the mat face first only because Holmes caught me, and the next thing I knew, I was propped up against one of the mirrors, the glass cold against my neck and shoulders. Holmes’s face swam in my vision. Fresh blood showed at his lip.
In a tight voice, he said, “Close your eyes until the dizziness passes.”
So, I closed my eyes.
He was holding my arms, keeping me upright. His hands were warm. He had this one knobby knuckle, and I thought I could feel it, but maybe that was my imagination. His breaths came fast and short, and after a moment, I could tell he was trembling. The smell of our sweat mingled in the air.
“H, I think I’m done for the night.”
He let out a bitter, tangled laugh. “I should take you to a hospital. I’m worried I’ve given you a concussion.”
“I’m all right. I’m all lemons purple upside-down cake.”
I cracked my eyes. Horror painted Holmes’s face.
My smile rolled downhill. “Kidding.”
His outrage was better than his horror.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Got a little dizzy at the end.”
“That blow disrupts the fluid in your inner ear,” Holmes said. “I shouldn’t have done it.”
“Should you have broken all my ribs?”
He touched my chest, his composure reassembling into a familiar frown, and palpated each rib.
“Ow.”
“Be silent.”
“You don’t have to dig in like that.”
“I said be silent.”
“You’re the one who beat me up. Jesus Christ, H! Are you trying to dig out my spleen?”
He pulled his hand back. “That’s not where your spleen is located.”
For a long moment, he watched me.
“I want to be wheeled out of here on a stretcher,” I said.
“Dear Lord.”
“I want a hero’s parade. I want weeping widows lined up on either side of the sidewalk.”
The corner of his mouth trembled; someone had tried to beat it out of him, this last fragment of childhood, and watching over and over what it had done to him was one of the most terrible things about knowing Holmes. He gave up and bit his lip, and then, in a broken voice, he said, “Am I forever going to be apologizing to you? Why can’t I do things right for once?”
I struggled to sit up, my skin peeling away from the glass in a way that told me my sweat was cooling and somebody (me or Dad) was going to have to clean the mirror. “First, yes, you’re always going to be apologizing to me because I’m perfect and, you know, never mess up.”
He shook his head. In the low light, his eyes looked like broken concrete.
“Second, I told you I wanted you to beat me up, and you did exactly what I asked. So, no apology necessary.”
“I hurt you. I—I used you as an outlet for my emotions.”
“Oh, really? Because I had no idea you were upset when I told you to beat me up. I’m just a simple janitor boy who can’t figure out what a complicated superior lifeform like a Holmes might be feeling.”
The outrage was back again. Apparently, Holloway Holmes hadn’t grown up with enough people giving him shit.
“But if you knew—” He bit his lip again. His teeth came away red. “Jack, I could have hurt you. Seriously, I mean.”
“No, you couldn’t have. You get a little carried away sometimes. And, yes, I could have done without the yelling at the end. But you’re my friend; you’re never going to hurt me.”
“I hurt everyone,” Holmes said in a savage whisper. He stopped for a moment, gathering himself. “I tell myself every day that your life will be better without me and that if I am to do one good thing, it would be to stay away from you. But I can’t. What does that say about me?”
“You’re as fucked up as the rest of us.” I shrugged. “Welcome to the club; we made jackets.”
He cocked his head.
“It’s a saying,” I said. “Do you want to tell me what your dad said?”
He hesitated. Then he shook his head.
“Want to beat me up some more?”
“No,” he said quietly. “But I would like to work the heavy bag. Unless you’d like me to accompany you home first.”
“See? That’s why you’re the genius. I should have thought of the heavy bag. Then I’d still have all my ribs.”
He glowered at me for a moment before remembering he was supposed to be feeling guilty, and I pushed him away with a laugh.
When Holmes came back from the storage room, he was wheeling the heavy bag on its portable stand. He settled into a relaxed fighting stance, and then he began to move: punches, kicks, elbows. His body flowed, everything becoming starlight and shadow. It was one thing to run through drills with him. It was another thing to know, firsthand, how easily he could hand my ass to me over and over again. But seeing this was something else entirely. We didn’t have rain much in this part of Utah, and I didn’t go to the Provo River often. But I had gone one day, when clouds were scudding across the sky. I remembered the dapple of light and shadow streaming over the water.
