The Old Wheel, page 7
part #2 of The Adventures of Holloway Holmes Series
“I am Holloway Holmes.”
“Uh huh.”
After a moment, he moved his hands in his pockets, gathering the coat around himself. He wasn’t meeting my eyes again, and when he spoke, his voice was softer. “Jack, it is not that simple.”
It is, actually. That’s what I wanted to say. But I blew out a long breath, the vapor catching the sun to rise like an aura over Holmes’s head, and I didn’t say anything.
“Come on,” Holmes said. “I found Emma.”
We started north, up the canyon. We passed the faculty housing, and we passed the boathouse and the lake, and we kept going, which meant either the athletic center or the activity fields. The shadows got longer, softening the edges of the stone around us, and my breaths tasted like the frozen air and the lake. The ripple of water against the shore kept us company; it would freeze in January, I thought, but it was nice, now, to listen to it.
“We were not romantically involved,” Holmes said. The words had his usual controlled, emotionless delivery, but the bursts of vapor between them were sharp. We went another ten feet, snow crunching underfoot, fingers of light and shadow curling along his cheek. “I wanted you to know that.”
I nodded.
West, the sun was setting, and the sky was one of those firework sunsets: giant swaths of red and orange, so intensely vibrant that it looked like the world was ending—in a beautiful way, if that makes any sense. You could get glimpses of the valley, brown buildings and brown grass, all of it ant-sized and far away. Another world. We passed under a row of pines, and the smell of the fresh needles and resin and duff that had managed somehow to stay dry.
“He was important to me,” Holmes said.
I waited, but I was the one who spoke first. “Do you want to talk about it?”
After a few paces, I looked over. He was biting his lip, the blood scarlet, brighter than anything else in that world of half-tones and shadows.
“Because if you’re doing this for me,” I said, “you don’t have to. I trust you.”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s ok.”
“I don’t want you to misunderstand the nature of our relationship.”
“You never boinked. Not once.” Holmes’s face caught fire, so I grinned and added, “No smushing, smashing, grinding, humping. I bet not even any tongue tangling.”
He stopped walking. I’d never seen a white boy literally melt, and I thought about staying to watch, but I smirked, hiked up my backpack, and kept going.
His hurried steps came after me a moment later, and then a handful of snow went down the back of my shirt.
I screamed. Sue me; I’m a human being.
“H!” I danced in place, trying to shake the snow loose, which meant trying to dislodge my backpack and flap my shirt and coat, which meant I looked, I’m pretty sure, like a lunatic. Most of the snow melted before I could get rid of it, so then my back and underwear were wet and freezing. I eventually gave up. “What the actual hell?”
Holmes was watching me, a hint of uncertainty around his eyes. His face had an edge to it: challenge, anger, embarrassment. But the uncertainty told me even he didn’t know what this was—throwing down or messing around.
I went with messing around and gave him my best fake scowl. “Payback is a miserable son of a bitch.”
The anger and challenge lingered for another moment, but he couldn’t hold them. The smile that burst out was raw, untouched, a little rough around the edges. It changed everything about his face: the cold-chiseled perfection became something more, a kind of beauty lit up from within by happiness that he’d tamped down for so long, softening his mouth and eyes and cheekbones until he was almost too good to look at, like I didn’t deserve this.
As I scooped to pack a snowball, Holmes sprinted toward the athletic center.
“Yeah, you’d better run!”
I pegged him in the calf, the powder exploding to dust the backs of both legs and his chukkas. He didn’t slow or stumble, though, so I ran after him.
He was faster, of course. I mean, he was better at everything. But it was a little embarrassing that he was that much faster.
By the time I reached the athletic center, he had barricaded himself inside the vestibule. The smile had died to a tiny grin, a flicker that played at the corners of his mouth. He was holding the crash bar with both hands, and when I tried to yank the door open, it wouldn’t budge.
“There are other doors, motherfucker,” I said through the glass.
“You were being rude and ill-mannered, and you were saying inappropriate things, and—and you were teasing.”
I pressed my face against the door, flattening my nose against the glass, and Holmes giggled and turned his face into his shoulder for a moment. I almost got the door open then, but even distracted, he was freakishly strong.
“Fine,” I said, releasing the door, “here I come, you little weasel.”
“Truce!”
I studied him. Then I said in my flattest voice, “Temporary truce.”
“Jack!”
“You put snow down my shirt, you little shit. You’re not going to get away with that.”
“It was payback for what you said!”
I grimaced—I made a big show of it, because Holmes liked things like that, even though he wouldn’t come out and say it. Then I said, “Fine. But, you owe me a movie. With popcorn. And a drink. And nachos. And one box of candy.”
“Popcorn and a drink. The nachos are bad for you, and you drank the cheese when you thought I wasn’t looking.”
I burst out laughing. “A movie with popcorn and a drink. Deal.”
Warily, Holmes pressed the crash bar. The door inched open.
“I’m going to be frozen. I’m going to be lucky if my ass doesn’t freeze off. They had to give Jonny Evans a prosthetic butt because his ass froze off.”
“You said they had to make him a new butthole after that wedgie.”
“He had a rough life, H.”
He had his hands in his pockets again, and in a low voice, he said, “I do not want to be teased about Paxton.”
His voice echoed slightly in the vestibule. From beyond the next set of doors came familiar sounds: raised voices, doors opening and shutting, a timer buzzing.
“All right,” I said. “But you know, laughing about something, joking about it, even teasing about it—that makes it a little easier to handle. That’s one way to deal with stuff that you don’t know how to handle.”
He didn’t look up, but after a moment, he nodded.
“That’s how I deal with my impossible good looks,” I said.
Holmes shot me a look from under knitted brows.
“I have to laugh about it because it’s overwhelming, being this good looking. Some days, I don’t know how I live with it.”
He tried to slam me in the door, and I was laughing too hard to put up much of a fight.
“You’re not supposed to laugh at your own jokes,” he finally said, and he left me half-crushed in the vestibule doorway.
I caught up to him in the lobby. Dad had put up the giant Christmas tree, and instrumental Christmas music played over the speakers in the ceiling. A banner on the far wall read, Happy Holidays! Holmes led me through the athletic center, past the gyms, where someone was shouting, “Defense! Defense! Defense!” and past a multipurpose room where the Bloopies had gathered to do Pilates, and past the weight room where three-fifths of the Boy Band were making an effort to impress each other, which consisted of racking weights, leaning on weights, looking at their phones, doing maybe one set, and, in general, looking pretty for whoever happened to walk by.
I’d cleaned the wrestling room plenty of times, but I’d never had a class in there. When Holmes and I stepped inside, I wasn’t sure what to expect. The floor was covered by mats—for wrestling, obviously—and mirrors lined one wall. Dumbbells were racked to our left, and a much smaller Christmas tree, this one strung with tinsel and paper chains, to our right. The place smelled like sweat and BO and vinyl and chemically pine air freshener.
I recognized the three kids by sight, although I didn’t know their names. Two girls and a boy. The first girl wore her black hair in a pixie cut, and her cat-eye glasses looked painfully hipsterish. She had a reddish cast to her umber skin, and she wore a loose-fitting tracksuit. The second girl had long, dark hair; she was petite, where the other girl was statuesque, and she had a golden complexion. The boy was white—the kind of creamy white with ruddy cheeks that said America’s Heartland. His blond hair was cropped except for disheveled bangs, and he had a surprisingly sweet beard for a teenager.
The three of them hadn’t noticed us yet, and the boy was still talking.
“Not too high, not too high,” he was telling the petite girl. “Bring your hands down a little; you want to keep your guard low.”
Holmes snorted softly. The girl in the tracksuit, who was observing, made a face that the boy didn’t see.
“Ok, good. Now, kick me in the head.”
“In the head?” Holmes asked in a scandalized whisper.
I squeezed his shoulder and put a finger to my lips.
“Won’t that put Glo off balance?” the tracksuit girl said. “She could aim for the knee and keep her stability.”
“Trust me,” the boy said. “You always go for the head.”
I’d seen Holmes outraged plenty of times—mostly because of things I’d done or said, or occasionally, what he found in the mess of my bedroom (one time it had been a vape, and he’d gone nuclear, but that wasn’t as bad as the time he’d found a Pop-Tart in one of my socks)—but it was a whole new kind of pleasure watching him be outraged with other people.
The shorter girl—presumably Glo—threw a few wobbly kicks, each time barely catching herself before she fell.
“What if she kicked him between the legs?” the girl in the tracksuit asked. “She can generate more power, and she’ll definitely hurt him.”
“Well, yeah,” the boy said. “But that’s kind of fighting dirty, isn’t it?”
“Breathe,” I whispered to Holmes. “Your eye is going to pop out.”
“Let’s say he gets in too close,” the boy said. “The kick slows him down, but he keeps coming.”
“Because you couldn’t generate any power,” the girl in the tracksuit said. “Because you were trying to kick him in the head.”
The boy ignored this. “If he gets you in a chokehold like this—”
“Why are you grabbing your own neck?” the girl in the tracksuit asked. “I thought in a chokehold, you applied pressure to the back of their skull—”
Holmes had been making an increasingly distressed noise. He took a step, and I tightened my grip on his shoulder, but he shook me off. “I can’t,” he said in a low voice. “This is a travesty.” Then, in a louder voice, he called, “You’ve done at least eighteen things wrong in the thirty seconds that I’ve been watching, and four of them could have gotten you killed.”
Three heads whipped around. Three sets of eyes stared at us. The boy released the smaller girl, and the three made a triangle. I didn’t miss the fact that the girl in the tracksuit took the point, and I didn’t think Holmes missed it either.
“Hey, bro, we’re in the middle of something—” the boy began.
“You’re in the middle of giving terrible advice that might, ultimately, get these girls hurt. Stop now before you embarrass yourself further.”
Trailing after him, I gave a wave. “Also, hi. I’m Jack. This is Holloway.”
The girl in the tracksuit flicked a look at me, but most of her attention was on Holmes.
“Seriously?” the boy asked. “The Holloway Holmes? Bro, that’s so fire. I thought it was you, but we’ve never, like, talked, so—”
“Be quiet now,” Holmes told him.
Shock wiped the boy’s face clean. He shut his mouth. Then he grinned and nudged Glo. She just stared at us.
“We reserved this room,” the girl in the tracksuit said, “and we’re allowed to use it until five-thirty. We’d like some privacy.”
“We need to talk to you,” Holmes said. “We can either have this conversation here, in front of your friends, where you will most likely find it uncomfortable and embarrassing. Or, you can come with us, and we’ll conduct the interview in a more discreet location.”
“H,” I said quietly, and I tugged on his sleeve as I caught up to him. “Ease up—”
The blond boy’s smile had dropped away, and he frowned as he stepped forward. “Hold on, Emma doesn’t have to go anywhere with you.”
The girl in the tracksuit shook her head. “I’m handling this, Rowe.”
“No, this has got to be some kind of misunderstanding. What’s going on? Why do you need to talk to Emma?”
“I’ve told you once to be quiet,” Holmes said. “This conversation does not include you. I won’t tell you again.”
“Hey!” Glo said. “You can’t talk to him like that!”
“Dude—” The boy—Rowe, the girl had called him—shrugged. “—Emma’s my friend. It kind of does include me, you know?”
Holmes rounded on him, and the boy swallowed. He didn’t take a step back, though, which said something about his moral character—or, maybe more likely, his stupidity. Silence opened like a vacuum. From down the hall came the squeak of rubber soles on wood floors and the drumming of a basketball in play.
“I asked you to leave,” Emma said into the quiet. “I don’t know what you want—”
“You were Aston Young’s girlfriend,” Holmes said. “True or false?”
Emma stared at him. “I’m not talking about Aston,” she finally said. “I don’t want to talk to you at all. We’re working on something—”
Holmes opened his mouth, and this time, I squeezed his biceps. He glanced over at me, and when I shook my head, he shut his mouth again.
“We got off on the wrong foot,” I said with a smile. “Can we start over?”
“No,” Emma said. “I want you to leave now.” Turning her back on us, she said, “Rowe, show me again how you did that thing with your elbow.”
Rowe glanced sidelong at us, his face filling with color.
“Holmes can show you,” I said, the words leaving my mouth before I’d thought the idea through.
“We don’t need anyone—” Glo began.
“Yeah, um, that’d be all right,” Rowe said, the color in his face darkening. “It would be cool to have somebody to spar with. You know, somebody else who’s been trained.”
“No,” Holmes said. “We don’t have time—”
“Yep.” I caught his arm and angled him toward Rowe and Glo. “You guys have fun, while Emma and I have a chat.” I looked a silent question at Emma, and after a moment, she gave a grudging nod.
Holmes had gone still—the kind of stillness I had learned to recognize as his efforts to master tremendous anger.
“Level one,” I said quietly. “Hear me?”
“He wants someone trained,” Holmes said. “You heard him. He wants someone to spar with.”
“Fine. Level zero.”
“Jack!”
“I don’t trust you; you’ve got crazy eyes.”
Holmes wrested his arm away. “I do not have crazy eyes.”
“Level zero, H. Tell me.”
“Level two.”
“Level zero.”
“Level one, as you initially suggested.”
I gave him a look.
After a moment, he growled, “Very well,” and stalked over to Rowe and Glo.
At Holmes’s urging, the three of them moved down the length of the room. Rowe was bouncing on his toes, already grinning again, but Glo had a dubious look on her face.
“Bro, don’t you want to take off your coat?” Rowe asked.
“I don’t think that will be necessary.”
Emma watched them, and then she glanced at me. She wore no makeup, I realized now, and while the cat-eye glasses gave her a hipsterish look, her build under the tracksuit was athletic verging on muscular. Up close, I saw she wore fingerless gloves—another nice hipsterish touch. I wondered who she was trying to fool.
“What was all that about level zero?” she asked.
“Holloway has this crazy idea that I’m no good in a fight.”
“Because you once managed to miss a punching bag,” Holmes put in.
“I didn’t miss it,” I said to Emma. “Well, I did. But only because he distracted me. Anyway, he’s determined to make a killing machine out of me, so we train every once in a while. I had to make levels because it was embarrassing.”
“What’s level zero?”
“Still embarrassing, but it doesn’t hurt as much.”
To my surprise, she smiled. Then, smile fading, she said, “I’m not going to talk about Aston.”
“All right.”
“I have nothing to say.”
“Listen, he’s a prick; I get it.”
She shook her head.
At the other end of the room, Holmes said, “Let’s return to your instruction on the chokehold. I believe you were demonstrating how to escape?”
I sighed and rubbed my eyes.
“Yes, we dated,” Emma said abruptly. She was looking at us in the mirrors, so I did too. With that reddish cast to her skin, it was hard to tell if she was blushing, but she folded her arms and shifted her weight and looked like she wanted to step back from me. “It wasn’t anything serious. I don’t care about Aston; that’s why I broke up with him. The whole point of breaking up is so he’s not in my life anymore.”
“But that’s kind of hard at a place like Walker,” I said. “I’ve only been a student a couple of months, but I know how this place works. It’s a bubble. And Aston’s up there with the Boy Band and the Bloopies, and when he talks shit, it spreads fast.”
A clear, startled laugh came from Emma, and a surprisingly devilish grin crossed her face. “The Bloopies? The little mermaid doll toys?”
“They have color-changing tails.”
She laughed again, and I smiled; she had a nice laugh, and a nice face, and it would be a shame if she were behind all this stuff.
