The Old Wheel, page 2
part #2 of The Adventures of Holloway Holmes Series
Thursday morning, with the air so cold it felt like glass and the sky clear and the sun still coming up behind the mountains, I could pretend I wasn’t thinking about last night. On the quad outside Walker Hall, where I had most of my classes, kids walked hurriedly—most of them headed for Walker, but others going to the science building, or the athletic center, or making a late dash to the dining hall, or, if they had study time, the library or their residence.
“Fine,” I said, moving to pocket the gift cards. “I’ll return them.”
“No, no. I’ll take it. But—can you do one fifty?”
“Two hundred.” Double the face value, but—for a kid trapped at Walker—the only way he could get them. “Yes or no?”
“Yes, yes.” He whipped out his phone. “I can make the transfer in crypto, but I understand if you want me to run it through a cash app instead.”
I stared at him. “Cash. We agreed on cash.”
“Ok, cash app—”
“No. Not cash app. Cash. You pay me in cash.”
Travis squinted at me. “Uh, it’s an app.”
“Never mind,” I said, jamming the gift cards into my backpack. “Forget it.”
Travis wailed in outrage, but I slung my backpack onto my shoulder and started across the quad.
Cash was king; that was the bottom line for me—and, by extension, for dad. A lot had changed for us over the last two months: Dad had started getting the care he needed, and that meant he could work regularly, and I was back in school. But healthcare now didn’t take care of the bills—medical and otherwise—that had piled up after the accident, and even though Dad handled most of the calls from collectors, I knew we were still in serious trouble. Add to that my own growing expenses, such as a new phone, clothes for school, and having a girlfriend who had the totally reasonable expectation that every once in a while, I could actually take her out and do something fun, and I was starting to think I needed a full-time job. Especially when dicks-for-brains like Travis tried to pay me in crypto.
I sauntered through the crowd, smiling, nodding, keeping my eyes open for my regulars. Jimmy caught my eye, turned red, and looked away. Ryan frowned and gave a tiny shake of his head. Kai turned away from me, rucking up her backpack like that would make her invisible. Other Walker students took a different approach. Jessica gave me a huge smile and waved, but when I started toward her, she said something to the group of girls she was with, and they burst out laughing. I changed course, heading for Tevan and Brock and their little knot of meatheads; Tevan whooped and pumped his fist in the air, and Brock cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “What up, Abercrombie?”
It was the kind of fine-tuned assholery that kids perfected. None of it was enough that you could point it out. Nothing you could slap a label on. The stupid nickname came closest—Dad had bought me the hoodie from Abercrombie last Christmas, when we’d had no fucking money at all, and for him, it was the best shit ever because it had been cool when he’d been a kid. Trust the Walker kids to find a way to turn it into an insult.
“Fuck them.” The voice came from behind me, and I turned. Dawson McKee had dark hair and deep eyes, a kind of rugged masculinity that was attractive without being handsome. He had his hands in his pockets, and he glanced at Tevan and Brock as he said, “Bunch of ’roided-up ball-less fucks.”
“At least they’re not playing the janitor card yet.”
“Too soon. When they think people are forgetting, they’ll remind them.”
I thought about Ryan’s tiny shake of the head, how Kai had rucked her backpack up, the way Jessica’s smile had dissolved into laughter when I tried to approach. “Yeah, I don’t think anybody’s going to forget my dad shovels their shit. Or that I used to do it too.”
Dawson shrugged. “Probably not.”
In September, I’d caught Dawson and Aston—two of Walker’s social elite, members of the clique of hot, rich boys I called the Boy Band—in a compromising moment. Later, I’d seen a video that had confirmed my suspicions. Dawson had given me a few significant looks over the intervening weeks, and the message had been clear. He was giving me one of them now.
I grinned. “What?”
“You know what.”
“Gosh, golly.”
A tiny smile lifted the corner of Dawson’s mouth. Quietly, he said, “You’re cute.”
My grin got bigger.
“I want something,” Dawson said in that same low voice.
I burst out laughing. When Dawson frowned, I said, “Sorry, it’s just—usually people try to be subtle about it.”
“Why? You know you’re hot. You know I’m into it. And I want something. It doesn’t hurt to remind you that, you know, I’m into it.”
“What do you want? I can get you that Astroglide, but it’s going to take a couple of days. Maybe not until Monday.”
“Yeah? Lube, that’s the first thing you thought of when I told you I wanted something?”
I rolled my eyes. I rolled them big, for his benefit.
He laughed and inched closer. “Told you you’re cute.”
The five-minute bell rang, and students began to move toward Walker.
“Time’s up.”
“Swear to God you won’t laugh?”
I put my hand in the air.
“You won’t tell anyone?”
“Discretion is my middle name.”
Dawson’s heavy eyebrows drew together, and he did a quick, sidelong glance to make sure no one was close enough to hear us. “Viagra.”
It took me a beat too long. “Oh.”
“I’m not having problems, dickweed.”
“Dickweed? I thought I was cute.”
“It’s for fun. You know, to play. But I want the real stuff, none of that fake shit from the gas station.”
“Let me see.”
He had dark eyes, and they were surprisingly intense as they fixed on me. “What do you mean? You’ve always got the shit.”
That had been true a few months ago. I’d had a falling out with my dealer in Provo, though—if you count Holloway Holmes smashing his head into a truck and, subsequently, beating the shit out of him and his boys as a falling out. Until I found someone closer, I had to drive up to Lehi now, and that meant more time, more gas, and higher prices for everything. On top of that, the new headmaster, Dr. Cluff, was making my life harder than it needed to be: random searches, room checks, the threat of drug tests. “I mean, let me see. If I can get it, how much do you want?”
“What can I get for a hundred bucks?”
The stream of students heading into Walker had thickened, but I spotted a familiar face. To Dawson, I said, “Half up front. I don’t do credit anymore.”
“Come on; I’m good for it. Have I ever shafted you?”
I smirked.
“Enough with the cute stuff,” Dawson growled. “You know I’ll pay.”
“Half up front, Daw. Sorry.”
When I turned to go, he grabbed my arm. So low I could barely hear him, he muttered, “I could, uh, find another way to pay you.” His tongue touched the corner of his mouth, and he looked nervous—a lot more like a teenage boy, a lot less like the sexy caveman. “I told you, I’m into this whole thing you’ve got going.”
Because I had no idea what to do, I laughed, and I kept laughing as I slipped out of his grip. Dawson’s face darkened, and I tried to soften the laugh with a smile, the whole time putting more space between us. Before he could try something else, I turned and plunged into the river of bodies.
Stray elbows and swinging backpacks jostled me as the current carried me forward. My brain wanted to process the fact that Dawson McKee—Dawson McKee of the Boy Band—had just tried to trade sex for Viagra. Which maybe was irony, I guess? But that was a question that could wait until Language Arts. The bigger question was why—why he was so desperate for it, and why he couldn’t pay.
I barely caught Hayden before he stepped inside Walker. He stumbled when I tugged on his sleeve, and then he let me pull him to the side, out of the stream of students. He was one of those tall, lanky kids, with big eyes and a pathetic attempt at facial hair. He glanced at the students passing us, but none of them were paying attention.
“Hey,” I said, “I got it.”
He looked over at the other students again.
“It’s the same shit he uses—same dosage, same pharmacy, everything.” When he started to turn his head again, I said, “Quit looking, dumbass. Meet me in the bathroom in a minute.”
Hayden made a face.
“What?” I asked. “It’s legit; I checked it myself. You wanted what Holloway Holmes uses, and I got it.”
“Uh, I changed my mind.”
“You can’t change your mind. I already got it; you already paid half.”
“Fine, whatever, you can keep the money, but I don’t want it.”
I grabbed his coat when he tried to weasel away. “What the fuck?”
“Marcie said it was going to make me—you know, like him.”
“What? Smart? Strong? Able to operate on an hour or two of sleep?”
“You know,” Hayden said, his voice pitchy, his chest rising and falling rapidly. “A freak.”
He pulled free, and I let him go.
When the last student passed through the double doors, I dug my thumbs into the corners of my eyes, swallowed a scream, and kicked Walker’s bricks three or four times. Then I headed inside.
I was late, of course. Ms. Albrecht announced the tardy to the whole class. A few kids looked smug, but most of them were too tired this early in the morning to process much of what was going on. I took my seat, and Ms. Albrecht started class.
In a lot of ways, school at Walker was like my old school—you had good teachers and bad ones, students who wanted to clown and students who were natural people-pleasers and students who were uber-diligent and were aiming at the Ivys. Some of the classes were interesting, but most of them were boring as hell. I’d forgotten, in the almost year and a half since I’d been in school, how much time got wasted during the day, and how much instruction was spent on things that I had absolutely no interest in learning. In that sense, I’d take YouTube and Wikipedia over a classroom any day.
There were differences, however. The kids were one—the amount of money they had, for starters. It wasn’t the differences you might find in a normal school, with some kids coming from a trailer park and some kids coming from million-dollar homes. Walker was in a different stratosphere; these were kids with parents who only traveled on private planes, who had multiple homes, all of them worth millions of dollars, who had trust funds and estates and, Christ, I don’t know, polo horses.
And that much money had a trickle-down effect. The buildings at Walker, including the classrooms, were a far cry from my old school, with its painted cinderblock and drop-ceiling tiles. While it had been clean and relatively new, nobody would have ever mistaken it for anything but a public institution. Walker, on the other hand, looked like somebody had taken Mr. Boddy’s mansion straight out of the game Clue and decided to use it for a school. Or Professor Xavier’s mansion, if you wanted to go with X-Men. Or maybe Castle Dracula, if you wanted to go goth. The walls had dark wainscotting and old-fashioned plaster, and while the floor was linoleum because of all the snowy students trooping through, the hallways were filled with tables and trinkets and oil paintings and crystal chandeliers.
In the classrooms, the desks and chairs were real wood, none of that particleboard-and-laminate shit. You could tell the stuff was old, too—the kind of smooth, worn look that you can only get with time. Plus, generations of Walker students had carved the usual stuff anywhere it couldn’t be seen at a casual glance—names, dicks, the standard swears, plus some new-to-me ones like nipnubs and frotmeister. The real masterpiece, though, was some sort of hybrid Cleopatra-Sphinx with enormous boobs, which was kind of a tribute to Ms. Albrecht’s World History class, I guess. The place always smelled like Murphy oil soap and chalk dust and wet footwear, and I was still fighting several months’ worth of conditioning to grab a mop when I saw the tracks these kids were leaving all over the place.
I didn’t mind World History, mostly because I didn’t mind Ms. Albrecht—she was a petite woman, with a mane of blond hair, and she wore a lot of puffer vests and cute jeans, and if she hadn’t been fifty, she probably would have been a babe. On top of all that, she was a decent teacher, although she was, as recently demonstrated, also a hardass. But I couldn’t get interested in World History; I didn’t care about imperialism, which probably made me a traitor because at some point, way back in the ancestral line, I was some sort of product of imperialism. But it was boring, and so I let my brain go on autopilot, turning pages and passing back worksheets, while I tried to figure out how to solve my money problem.
The problem was liquidity. I’d read all four pages on Wikipedia about liquidity; liquidity was a big deal for someone operating in my particular shitstorm. I’d learned my lesson with Watson earlier that year: never buy on credit. So, as I had with Hayden, and as I’d told Dawson, I wanted cash up front. Half, minimum. But that meant that sometimes—like with Hayden—I got stuck footing the other half until I delivered. And, if the kid turned out to be a little shit like Hayden, I ended up with a prescription vial full of mixed amphetamines and less cash than when I started. Sure, I could sell the addies to Holmes the next time he ran out (which, yes, I felt like shit about, and yes, I continued to do, and yes, was about as fucked-up a situation as there was), but that didn’t help me now. I needed cash, not pills—cash I could use to buy Christmas presents for Holmes and Ariana and my dad; cash I could use to pay my phone bill; cash I could slip into the old jelly jar where Dad kept our grocery money, my one way of contributing without him noticing.
“Jack?” Ms. Albrecht said.
I looked up.
She waited.
Nobody laughed, but the movement of bodies, the shift and rustle of clothing, carried an undercurrent of amusement.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I spaced out.”
“I asked if you could list the imperialist powers.”
“Spain, um, England, the Netherlands.”
This time, someone did laugh. It sounded like Brock.
“From the nineteenth century, Jack. We’re talking about the nineteenth century.”
“Oh.” A flush moved into my face, and after a few pounding heartbeats, I shook my head.
“Russia, Italy, Germany, the United States,” another voice said. “And Japan.”
I made myself not look over. I didn’t want to see Aston’s smug face. It was bad enough that Dawson’s fuck buddy and joint member of the Boy Band was still here, at Walker, after he’d tried to murder Holmes. From what I could tell, he hadn’t gotten more than a rap on the wrist—community service, I’d heard. Because his grandfather was a bigwig in the Mormon church, an apostle. And because Aston had cried and told a sob story about how Headmaster Burrows had threatened him into helping. I didn’t doubt the last part—Burrows had been scary, and Aston had been desperate to cover up his big secret—but it didn’t count for much in my book. Aston had laid a hand on Holmes; that was the end of the story.
“Very good, Aston,” Ms. Albrecht said. “Jack, why don’t you tell us what you put down for number four?”
I glanced down. My worksheet, which I had diligently filled with scribbles, told me nothing.
“What were some of the driving factors for nineteenth-century imperialism?”
I rubbed my forehead, keeping my hand there as a shield.
Someone whispered something. Brock laughed again.
“Quiet, please,” Ms. Albrecht said. “Jack?”
I shrugged and lowered my head.
After a moment, she let out a disappointed breath. “No, Aston,” which meant the little shit had raised his hand again. “Axle, go ahead.”
Another member of the Boy Band began to speak, and the words buzzed in my head.
When the bell rang, I shoved everything into my backpack and launched out of my seat. Ms. Albrecht called my name, but I kept going, almost knocking over a girl named Juliet in the process. We had ten minutes of passing time, and my next class—Language Arts—was in Walker. The thought of milling around in the halls, while everybody either laughed in my face or pretended I didn’t exist, sent me toward the back of the building. I went out to the concrete apron that served as the faculty smoke pad, although everybody pretended there was no smoking at Walker (never mind the sand-filled bucket full of butts or the unmistakable odor of old cigarette smoke).
I shivered, pulled on my coat, and tried not to think about anything. Not class. Not cash. Not an extra thirty addies. Not the Boy Band. Not how fucked up it all was, that I’d been so jealous when I’d been on the outside, and now, it turned out, the inside was so much fucking worse.
I was so busy not thinking and wishing I had a vape that I didn’t hear the voices until they were almost on me. They were pitched low, but there was no mistaking the anger. I thought about ducking back inside Walker, and then I thought, Fuck it.
A moment later, Dawson and Aston came around the corner. Dawson’s face was red. Aston looked pretty as ever, with his messy blond side part and, even in December, his salon tan, but as I watched, he twisted away from Dawson’s grip and said, “Ask Riker.”
“I already asked everybody.” Dawson reached for him again.
But Aston shoved him. “I said no. Stop!”
“You can’t say no to me,” Dawson said. He opened his mouth to say something else, and then he saw me. Something twisted his face—frustration, I thought, but also something hotter, what I thought might be rage. He spun away from Aston and stormed back the way they’d come.
Aston half-turned, staring at me. He was breathing hard, and his hands opened and closed at his sides.
“Fuck off,” I told him.
He took another breath, a deeper one, like he was bracing himself. Then he walked toward me.
I shouldered off my backpack; I hadn’t ever actually gotten to punch Aston, and if he was about to pick a fight, I didn’t want my bag messing up my chance to break those perfect teeth.
