“What are we going to tell my mom when she sees us?” I asked as we limped back to the school building. We would have been finished with rehearsal at this point had it been an ordinary day, so that meant it was time to call my mom from the phone in the lobby to ask for a ride home.
“Whatever we tell her, it’s got to be good enough for your parents as well as mine, because you know they’ll tell them,” Travis replied.
Our parents had become de-facto friends since Travis and I began hanging out. I don’t know if they would have become friends otherwise, since they don’t have much else in common. I could never remember exactly what Travis’s parents did, but it involved wearing suits and ties and traveling a lot to meet with rich people. They were on a business trip that day, in fact, away in some major city talking to the Executive Director of a company called Associated Strategies or something important-sounding like that. They weren’t going to be back until the end of the week.
Although Felmore had a decent amount of upper-middle class people, Travis’s parents didn’t exactly fit the Felmore mold. A rich, white-collar person in Felmore usually got that way by working in tech or academia. Travis’s parents seemed like they would fit in more in a city like New York or one of its wealthy suburbs. But I guess since they traveled across the country for work their employer let them live wherever they wanted as long as they were close enough to an airport, and I think Travis told me they chose Felmore because it’s quieter and real-estate is cheaper. Even though they barely ever spent any time in Felmore, I guess they thought it was worth the trade-off.
“We could say we were helping move a grand piano,” Travis started to brainstorm, “And we were trying to push it up the stairs as a couple other people pulled it from the other side. But they lost their grip and let go of it and it came falling down on us!” He looked at me, waiting for my approval.
Although Travis could be painfully literal at times, he was incredibly talented at making up stories on the fly. He had been using this skill against his unsuspecting parents his entire life. Sometimes I was grateful for it, since I did not possess this talent; whenever the two of us did something stupid that would have gotten us in trouble, Travis was usually able to make something up that both his and my parents believed. This story, however, would not have been one of them.
“That sounds like the most ridiculous crap I’ve ever heard,” I replied.
We limped in silence for a few more minutes before Travis started to brainstorm again: “Maybe we could tell her we were trying to move a drum set and-”
“I think we should just tell her the truth,” I cut him off.
Travis was silent for a handful of seconds, probably trying to think of any alternative to telling the truth before admitting, “Yeah, you’re probably right.”
We took a side door into the school building, so we had to go through a few hallways before we reached the lobby. As we made our way there, we heard a familiar voice talking to Ms. Putnam, and the owner of that voice was not happy.
“What do you mean you don’t know where he is?! It’s your job to know!”
Travis stopped in his tracks. His eyes widened in shock. Well, one of his eyes did. The other was a little too swollen to open that wide.
“Oh no,” he murmured.
It was his dad.
What was he doing back already? It could mean nothing good if he was here at school.
“I’m sorry, sir, but if your son were enrolled in one of our after-school programs, we would have his name listed in the program’s registrar. I don’t see any record that he ever joined one,” Ms. Putnam replied, her voice trembling. She sounded even more afraid of Travis’s dad than she was of us this morning, and she thought we had summoned a demon.
“Well, he’s definitely not at home! Are you telling me my son is missing and you have no idea where he is?” Travis’s dad bellowed.
I looked at Travis and asked him “What do you want to do?”
Travis closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “I don’t think there’s anything else I can do.”
He walked toward the sound of the voices. I joined him.
Travis’s dad’s hands were on the front desk, as he leaned over it, almost as if to threaten Ms. Putnam. He was a pretty intimidating figure normally. Even I, who had known him nearly all my life, still didn’t really know what to do or what to say around him when I was at Travis’s house. He was about 6’ 2” and in pretty good shape for his age, probably weighing at least 200 pounds in muscle. He looked like he had just come home from work, even though his work was thousands of miles away; he was wearing a suit and his black hair was slicked back with pomade, although it was a little messy. Think of the guy from American Psycho if he were middle-aged with a slightly better haircut.
Ms. Putnam looked like she was on the verge of tears when Travis and I walked into the lobby and Travis said “I’m here, Dad.”
Ms. Putnam looked as relieved to see us now as she was terrified to see us this morning. Although Travis’s dad looked relieved as well, his expression quickly shifted back to anger. As nervous as I was to tell my mother the truth, it must have paled in comparison to Travis coming clean to his dad.
“Travis, where were you?! Your mother and I had to cut our business trip early and came home to your brother and sister alone when you were supposed to be watching them! We told you you couldn’t go to that after school program while we were out of town, but apparently you haven’t been doing that either, since you never even enrolled in one! And what the heck happened to your face?!”
Travis’s dad always had his priorities in order.
“D-Dad, I c-c-can explain!” Travis stuttered. He wasn’t prepared to be the first one to break the news to his parents about what we had been doing for the past month.
“You can explain in the car. You’ve taken enough of my time already. Let’s go,” Travis’s dad snarled.
Travis looked back at me as he walked away with his dad. When we made eye contact we shared a look as if to say “This might be the end of the band, even if we find Charlie.”
Just as Travis’s dad reached for the front door with Travis following behind him, my mom burst in. The contrast between her and Travis’s dad couldn’t have been more stark. While Travis’s dad had just come home from a business trip and looked like it, my mom must have been doing chores all day. She wasn’t wearing any makeup or jewelry, her brunette hair was tied back, and she was wearing jeans, a worn-out Ethan Allen State University hoodie she’s had since college, and flip flops.
“Oh, hey Tammy! I found him!” Travis’s dad’s demeanor quickly switched to calm and friendly, a courtesy he did not grant Ms. Putnam.
“Hey Troy, that’s good. I apologize again! I didn’t realize Travis wasn’t supposed to be going to the after-school program while you were out of town. I hope you know I would have given you a call earlier if I had known he was supposed to be babysitting his siblings after schoo-Oh my God! Travis, what happened to you?”
“I’m about to find out!” Travis’s dad replied as he rushed out, Travis in tow, “You might want to ask your son the same question. Judging by the looks of him he wasn’t at any ‘after school program’ either.”
My mom’s eyes immediately shot to me when Travis’s dad said this. Even though we were standing about 15 feet away from each other I could still see her pupils shrink as she set eyes on me.
“Eric! Honey! What happened to you?”
Despite the way I had been treated all day I hadn’t once felt like crying, but something about my mother seeing me like this made a lump in my throat and my lower lip start to quiver.
“Can we talk about this in the car?” I asked, holding back tears.
“Sure thing, honey, let’s go,” she said.
After having an emotional breakdown in the car about which I will not elaborate, I regained my composure and told my mom everything: how the “after school program” Travis and I were attending was actually band rehearsal with Charlie. How we met Charlie. How everyone else at school thought Charlie was a demon we had summoned. How that further exacerbated our beef with Jeff and his friends. How that led to him and his friends beating us up.
My mom was silent for a few minutes. When she woke up that morning I don’t think she expected her son to tell her that he had been lying to her for a month, hanging out with a strange man, signed up for a battle of the bands without her permission, had incurred the ire of his entire school, and gotten beaten up. I mean, if she had found out about any one of those things individually, she probably wouldn’t have been very surprised, but I guess I outdid myself this time.
During that period of silence, I noticed my rash started to hurt again. But not like the last time in Purple Hair’s office when I was in constant, searing pain. This was more on-and-off. Like a flickering light bulb. It wasn’t exactly pleasant, but the pangs of pain were brief and spaced out enough for me to ignore them.
When my mom finally spoke up, she said “If I had asked Travis that same question, would he have told me the same thing?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Wait here for a few minutes,” she said as she got out of the car and walked back inside the school. When she returned she told me “You and Travis have a meeting with Principal Porter tomorrow” as she started the car and began driving out of the parking lot.
“What?!” I asked, “You got me in trouble with the principal?!”
“No, honey, far from it. I got the principal in trouble with me. Look, you lied to me and did a lot of things without permission for the past month, and once I’ve spoken to your father I’m sure we’ll have an appropriate punishment for that. But we’re going to have to think about that first. However, I don’t need to think about what your principal should have done. She is in charge of the school. If she let all the teachers, her employees, ignore you all day, and let you get assaulted by a gang of students on school grounds while you should have been in class, then she was not doing her job. Your visit with her tomorrow is her chance to tell you what her plan is to make sure this never happens again, and we’re going to have to hold her accountable.”
Suddenly I felt a little better. As a kid, most of the time it feels like it’s you against the adults. Regardless if they’re teachers, parents, principals, or guidance counselors, they’re the ones with the authority over you, they’re the ones who tell you what to do, and they’re the ones who punish you if you step out of line. I had forgotten that just because they all had authority over me, they didn’t always agree, and they didn’t always defer to each other’s authority depending on who was in charge at the time. I hadn’t met many adults who were honest enough to cop to this, but my mom was one of them.
–
“We’re meeting with the principal today?” Travis asked as we waited for the bus the following morning.
“Yes,” I replied.
“But we’re not the ones in trouble?” he asked.
“Well, we’re both in trouble with our parents,” I said, “But Porter wasn’t doing her job, which led to us getting beaten up, so now she’s in trouble with my parents.”
“I wish she were in trouble with my parents,” Travis mumbled bitterly, “If your mom hadn’t called my parents last night and asked me to come to this meeting with you, I don’t think they would have even considered the possibility that someone other than me was at fault.”
Even though my parents weren’t the kind of adults who would always defer to another adult’s authority, Travis couldn’t say the same.
I felt another flash of pain in my rash. The pain was still relatively minor, but it was a little more intense and frequent than when it started yesterday after I had fessed up to my mom.
Wait a minute, was Travis’s rash also hurting right now?
“What did you tell your dad?” I asked him.
“A bunch of bullcrap,” Travis chuckled, “What else would you expect from me?”
“It wasn’t the grand piano story, was it?” I asked.
“Heck, no. This one was much better,” he responded, “You should have been there. I told him we had been buying weed from Jeff, and had gotten so hooked that we smoked together after school every day under the bleachers. We were broke, but we convinced Jeff that we would pay for everything in a month when we both received our allowances. When the month passed and we still hadn’t paid up, Jeff got his friends to come beat us up. Can you believe how beautiful that lie was?” he asked, beaming with pride. Then his expression grew somber, “Well, until we got home and your mom called my parents, told them what you told her, and asked if I also wanted to meet with Mrs. Porter. So now I’m in even more trouble for lying to them twice.”
“Yeah, sorry about that,” I said insincerely.
As talented as Travis was at making stories up, they would usually entail us doing something even worse than what we had actually done, getting us both into even more trouble. Travis’s mentality on this issue was zero-sum: as long as his parents didn’t know what we had actually done, he had won. I had tried to get him to understand the concept of a cost-benefit analysis several times, but to no avail. With this weed story, however, I honestly couldn’t tell which would have gotten me in more trouble: what I actually did over the past month or what Travis claimed we did. But I knew if my parents had heard both stories they definitely would have believed Travis’s version over mine.
“So you never directly told your parents the truth?” I asked.
“I guess not, they found out by proxy,” Travis replied.
“Okay,” I mumbled, “Hey, just out of curiosity, how’s your rash?”
“What?” Travis asked.
SCRREEEEEEEECH!
The brakes of our school bus cut our conversation short once again.
The contrast between yesterday’s bus ride and today’s could not have been more stark. We were back to being on the low end of the totem pole. Heck, we may have even dropped a few pegs lower and were below the ground now. The word must have gotten around that Jeff and his gang beat the crap out of the so-called “demon summoners” yesterday and lived to tell the tale, signaling to the rest of our peers that the “threat” was over and they could go back to treating us like dirt.
Speaking of Jeff, he was sitting in the back of the bus again, smiling at us. But not his usual “I’m going to torment you later today” smile. This one was more of an “I won” smile. An “I don’t even have to torment you anymore, you’re that far below me” smile. The worst part was he was probably right. It almost made me miss the old smile.
Before we could meet with Principal Porter, Travis and I had to endure two grueling periods of class. That is to say, more grueling than usual, because this time we were the laughing stock of the entire student body and faculty alike. We must have been very high on her list of priorities.
Porter continued to demonstrate how urgent her meeting with us was by allowing her phone call scheduled before our meeting to run over. When we arrived at her office the door was closed and she had a curtain covering the window in the door. But we could hear her talking to someone.
Suddenly I remembered what Jeff told us yesterday about overhearing Porter’s conversation with Purple Hair. I put my ear to the door and motioned to Travis to do the same. Porter’s office was located in a small hallway off the staff lounge, not near any of the main hallways, so we could practically hold our heads to the door without anyone walking by and noticing.
“This was not part of the deal!…I thought you said you caught him!…So where is he now?…Whatever, the damage is already done. How do you think we’re going to get people to join the union when they find out about this?…Oh, you’ll kill the story? Given what happened with this so-called ‘metalhead recruiter’ you’ll understand if I have my doubts about your control over other industries!”
Travis and I shot each other a look of confusion and shock.
“…And even if you do, you’ve still got a lot more scabs to worry about than you’ve let on! I mean, how was Hemway-Fischer not already a member? She’s got short purple hair and talks about the heteronormative patriarchy for crying out loud!…Hey! Don’t try to turn this back on me!…You think our scab problem is because of a book by some Italian guy in our library?…I don’t care how many other school districts banned it! Maybe if you’d done a better job of recruiting we’d have banned it here, too!”
My stomach did a somersault. Could the conclusions I drew from the research and snooping we did over the past few days have been wrong?
“Oh yeah? Well what about scabs in other industries?…No, I’m not talking about mindless followers! I’m talking full-on scabs, the people your kind offered membership but they refused. I have to meet with some brat today because he got beaten up for hanging out with your ‘metalhead recruiter’ and now his scab mother is on my back!”
Wait, what did she just call my mother?
I didn’t have much time to ponder that question because just then Mrs. Porter must have realized what time it was.
“Oh, crap! They’re going to be here any minute! I’ve gotta go, but don’t think this is the end of this conversation!”
We didn’t hear her hang the phone up on the receiver, but when we heard her footsteps coming toward the door we realized we probably shouldn’t have our ears to it anymore. I signaled to Travis to get up and we acted as if we were just walking toward Porter’s office when she opened the door.
We were greeted by a less-than-genuine smile followed by “Eric! Travis! Come on in!”
“Thanks,” I said, “Sorry we’re late!”
“But she’s the one who was l-oof!” Travis said, not understanding that I was trying to make it seem as if we hadn’t heard any of Porter’s phone conversation. Fortunately I elbowed him in the rib cage before he could give that away. Unfortunately, my elbow and his rib cage were still incredibly bruised and sore from our encounter with Jeff yesterday.
We entered Porter’s office and sat down. Porter’s office was bigger than Purple Hair’s, although not extravagant. Porter also seemed to make the more economical decision of having two chairs for us to sit down in as opposed to the single couch that barely fit Purple Hair’s office.
Oddly enough, Porter also had a device that had been emitting some kind of vapor throughout the room, like Purple Hair had. However, this one seemed larger and more elaborate, decorated in bizarre designs of an art style I had never seen before. Instead of emitting a lightly-scented vapor made of essential oils or something, this one emitted a vapor that you could see. You could definitely smell it as well, but the smell was more akin to sulfur than essential oils. Porter quickly put the device in a desk drawer and tried to fan away the purple fumes out an open window as we came inside.
Speaking of which, Porter actually had a window in her office, unlike Purple Hair. Also, judging by the grinder and coffee beans on her office kitchenette, Porter didn’t waste time in the Dunkin’ drive-thru to get her coffee. And she drank it black. And she drank a lot of it. Her desk was perfectly orderly and clean. Not a paperclip out of place.
Porter herself was taller than the average woman at about five foot seven and was slim, but not overly skinny. Aside from her coffee habits it seemed like she kept herself in good shape, although the wrinkles that occupied her pale face revealed that she must have been at least 40. She had dark brown hair (that she probably dyed) tied back in a bun, wore wire frame glasses over her gray eyes, and a gray blazer and skirt with a white blouse.
“Eric, as you know, your mother wanted me to speak to you and Travis about the feud you’ve been having with Jeff and his friends,” Porter began, “From my understanding yesterday wasn’t the first time you two have had a confrontation with them by the bleachers. How about we begin with the incident between you and them that happened last month?”
That wasn’t exactly what I was expecting.
“I thought my mom wanted us to talk to you because Jeff and his friends savagely beat us yesterday after we had spent the day being ignored by everyone who works here?” I asked, trying to challenge her while still giving her the benefit of the doubt.
“In my experience, I find it better to start at the beginning of the conflict so we can better understand how it led to what happened yesterday,” she replied.
Travis and I looked at each other, both of our faces showing skepticism, but I humored her:
“Travis and I were hanging out under the bleachers a month ago after classes let out when Jeff and his friends approached us and confronted us about something stupid,” I started to recall.
“Something stupid?” Porter cut me off, “Care to go into any more detail than that?”
I genuinely didn’t remember what sparked that confrontation a month ago. Travis and I had been getting into conflicts with Jeff and his friends for ages, and they were all over nothing. Jeff just used a lame excuse to pick on the only people lower on the totem pole than himself. But all that seemed like ancient history since we met Charlie and developed an actual beef with Jeff.
“It was a month ago, Mrs. Porter, I honestly can’t remember at this point. Not something worth fighting over, I remember that much.”
Porter seemed to be satisfied with that answer and said “Go on.”
“I told them to get lost, which ticked them off. One of them pushed Travis to the ground and started wailing on him, and another one almost punched me in the face. That’s all that happened.”
“Almost punched you in the face?” Porter asked in a somewhat challenging tone, “Why did he ‘almost’ punch you in the face? Did he have a change of heart at the last second?”
I thought my mom told me I was meeting with Porter because she was in trouble, not me. So why did I feel like I was the one getting grilled for having the audacity to not get punched in the face? But I continued, trying to give her the benefit of the doubt:
“No, someone blocked the punch,” I said hesitantly.
“Someone blocked the punch?” Porter asked, “Who?”
“Charlie,” I answered, wondering why I felt like I was answering a bunch of leading questions, “The new janitor.”
“Then what happened after that?”
I glanced at Travis in confusion. He looked just as confused as I was.
“Nothing,” I said, “Charlie told Jeff and his crew to get lost and they did. That’s it.”
“That’s it?” Porter asked, with the tone a teacher has when you answer her question correctly but don’t explain how you got the answer.
I stared at her, puzzled, for a few seconds before answering “Yeah.”
“You didn’t say anything to Charlie? He just broke up the fight and left?” she asked, a hint of sarcasm in her tone, but not enough to call her on it.
“Well, we talked about a concert we were planning on going to, but that was it. We didn’t say more than a few words to each other,” I replied.
“Then what happened the next day?” she asked.
“What?”
“The next day, Eric, what happened at school after that?”
“Are you going to ask us what happened every day until you get to yesterday?” Travis blurted out.
Porter, not knowing Travis, probably thought he was being a wise guy, but I knew he was completely serious. I braced for a scolding, but Porter surprisingly kept her cool. Maybe we did have some influence over the situation after all.
Smiling, although clearly showing restraint, Porter replied “No, Travis, I’m just trying to get a big-picture idea for what led to yesterday. Would you care to tell me what happened the next day?”
I could pick up some snark in her voice. This woman was not used to having the tables turned on her and although she was keeping it together for now, she definitely did not like it.
“Sure,” Travis replied, “All the other kids at school thought we had summoned a demon to threaten Jeff and his crew.”
“A demon?” Porter asked. I think she was trying to make her voice sound incredulous, but something seemed off about the way she asked it.
“Yup,” Travis replied, “No one would go near us. They were all too afraid, including Jeff.”
“Why would they think you summoned a demon?” Porter continued to struggle to sound confused.
“I don’t know!” Travis shot back, “Maybe you could ask some of your employees who work here, since they acted the same way around us yesterday, the day you’re supposed to be asking us about.”
Okay, that time he was kind of being a wise guy.
Porter continued to stay calm, although it looked like it was becoming harder for her every time Travis opened his mouth.
“Don’t worry, I’ll get to that,” she said through a fake smile, “So, Eric, did you see Charlie again after that?”
“We saw Jeff Hennessy and his friends again after that,” Travis interjected, “Like yesterday.”
“Thank you, Travis, I’ll get to that!” Porter hissed as a vein started to bulge in her forehead, before switching to a much sweeter tone and asking me “Eric?”
My mind scrambled to think of an answer. If I told her the truth about meeting Charlie the next day, she would inevitably continue to pry until I told her about the agreement we made with Charlie. Although I had no loyalty toward him at this point, I wasn’t exactly enjoying the sensation my rash started to give me when I told my mom about all that. I didn’t want to make it any worse by telling someone else. Especially Porter, given how much she seemed to want to know about a janitor that her school hired. That didn’t seem normal to me.
“No,” I answered, trying my best to sound genuine, “I haven’t seen him since, not even doing ordinary janitor stuff.”
Although I was a terrible liar, I at least knew that it was easier to lie if you incorporated some truth into it. Any other student at Felmore Middle School other than Travis and me wouldn’t have seen Charlie since we made our deal with him, so that part was kind of true.
Porter seemed skeptical. I think my line about not even seeing Charlie do janitor stuff just made me look even more suspicious by overexplaining. But she didn’t question me further, instead taking a deep breath before asking Travis the same question: “Travis, what about you? Did you see Charlie again after that?”
“Nope,” Travis replied casually, not even looking at her as he leaned back in his seat and checked his fingernails, “I think I’d remember seeing a guy who looked like that again. But you know who I did see after that?”
“Yes, okay, Travis! What happened between you two and Jeff yesterday?” Porter practically shouted.
“I thought you’d never ask!” Travis exclaimed as he sat forward again.
My heart sank as I realized he was about to tell Porter we had been getting weed every day from Jeff for a month.
“But I’d like to hear it from Eric, since it was his mother who called for this appointment,” I could hear the smugness in Porter’s voice as she said that. Maybe we had some influence over the situation, but Porter wasn’t going to miss a chance at a subtle power move when she got it. It also didn’t help that she had been wearing me down this entire time, making it even more difficult for me to construct a convincing lie on the fly. If we weren’t in trouble with the principal before, what I was about to say was about to get us there.
“Eric?” she asked.
I was silent for a second or two before beginning: “Well, you know how I told you I couldn’t remember what sparked the initial confrontation between Jeff and us? That wasn’t entirely true. The truth is Travis and I had bought a lot of weed from Jeff the day before, and we told him we would pay him for it the next day. When Jeff came to collect his payment, we didn’t have his money, so he and his boys started to beat us up. But when Charlie protected us it scared Jeff and his friends away. For a while, that is. After a month of not seeing Charlie anywhere, just like we hadn’t, Jeff realized there was nothing to be afraid of anymore, and he and his friends finally got even with us.”
“Eric!” Travis blurted out, “I can’t believe you would make something like that up and tell the principal of all people!”
Travis had said one sentence, but it had two very different intended meanings. For Porter, Travis was making it seem as if he was trying to cover his hide, accusing me of lying about the weed, even though it was true, because he didn’t want to get in trouble. But for me, he was saying that he was amazed at how effectively I was able to construct a lie by combining the story he had told his dad the day before with bits and pieces of the truth.
“Calm down, now, Travis,” Porter shot back in an authoritative, but not aggressive, tone.
She was silent for a few seconds. After what Jeff told us he overheard from her conversation with Purple Hair, and what we ourselves overheard from her phone conversation just moments before, I knew she didn’t really believe what we told her. But as a school principal, she had to take admissions of drug abuse by her students seriously. A lot more seriously than rumored demon janitors.
She broke the silence by asking “Did you buy the drugs from Jeff on school grounds?”
That wasn’t the response I was expecting. I replied in the affirmative.
“If we were to search your bags and your lockers, would we find them?” she asked.
Before we weren’t supposed to be in trouble but she was interrogating us as if we were. Now I was confessing something to her that should have gotten us into deep trouble immediately, and she was interrogating us as if we shouldn’t be. What was with this lady?
“N-no,” I replied hesitantly, “We smoked all of it.”
Porter narrowed her eyes, rested her chin on her hands, and lowered her voice as she said “I’m not technically supposed to divulge the disciplinary records of other students, but I’m sure it’s no secret that Jeff Hennessy is a frequent guest in my office. He’s not very good at not getting caught when he does something wrong. Now you’re telling me that it’s been an entire month since he engaged in a very serious infraction, an illegal one at that, and this is the first I’m hearing about it? You yourself said this happened in front of an adult, an employee of this school. Charlie would have been obligated to report this.”
I had never been so afraid to not get in trouble in my entire life. The glowing look of pride Travis had held moments before was quickly fading.
“I’ll be speaking to Jeff about what happened yesterday after I’m finished with you two. If I ask him about what you just told me, would he confirm it?” Porter asked.
I stared back at her silently for a few seconds before saying “No…but that’s just because he doesn’t want to get in even more trouble.”
“So why are you admitting it? she asked. I stared back at her in silence. She cracked a smile, “So in other words, it doesn’t sound like you have any evidence that what happened yesterday was because of marijuana.”
I smiled back at her. Travis stared at me in bewilderment. What did I have to smile about? None of this meeting had gone even close to how we had hoped.
“It’s funny you should say that,” I said, “Because it doesn’t sound like you have any evidence Charlie exists.”
Porter’s demeanor turned from smug satisfaction to contempt.
“I’ll find him before you do,” she growled.
“Who said I’m looking?” I replied.
–
Travis and I walked through the halls of Felmore Middle School after Mrs. Porter told us, in a manner of speaking, that we were welcome to vacate her office. As we made our way to our next class, we passed Jeff walking the other way, probably to Porter’s office. But he wasn’t accompanied by the same friends who had helped him beat us up the day before. He was chumming it up with the guys on the varsity lacrosse team.
Before today, the varsity lacrosse players wouldn’t have been caught dead hanging out with Jeff. Jeff was far from athletic, spending every game on the bench and only making the team at all because his dad was friends with the coach. The varsity team saw him as a pathetic wannabe, someone who acted tough by picking on the only kids in school who were even bigger nobodies than him.
Except for the past month, Travis and I weren’t nobodies. We were still pariahs, for sure, but not because no one cared about us. The lacrosse players, just like everyone else in the school, thought we had summoned a demon, and were just as afraid of us. When Jeff beat us up yesterday, he wasn’t just punching down like he had been before. This time, he was taking the biggest, baddest tough guys in the school down to size, allowing the jocks to take that title back for themselves. And if Jeff was the one to do it, then even he had a place with them. He shot us another one of his “I won” smiles as he passed us without saying a word. He didn’t have to waste his breath on us anymore.
“No,” I said to no one in particular as I jolted to a halt.
“What?” Travis asked, also stopping.
“No,” I repeated, “I refuse to accept this as our reality.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you see, Travis? We’re at the bottom of the pecking order again! After everything we’ve been through! Everything we’ve achieved in the past month! Now we’re just back to square one? I don’t think so!”
People were starting to stare as they walked past us. I ignored them.
“Eric, we have no one. Everyone in this building thinks even less of us now than they did before they thought we summoned a demon.”
“I don’t care,” I retorted.
“None of the other students have our backs.”
“I don’t care.”
“Not even Tom Seiks will look out for us now. We ruined that.”
“I don’t care.”
“None of the teachers will stand up for us.”
“I don’t care.”
“Porter especially has it out for us.”
“I don’t care.”
“Not even Purple Hair will defend us.”
“I don’t care.”
“Even your mom couldn’t help us.”
“I don’t care.”
“And Charlie’s gone.”
“I don’t care. We’ve still got what we learned from him. We’ve still got the songs we wrote. Heck, we still have a bunch of his guitars and basses. Charlie or not, I’m still going to be a metal god.”
“Eric, the battle of the bands audition is this Saturday. What are we supposed to do without our drummer?”
“I don’t know, but I’m not going back to how things were before. Are you with me?”
Travis looked at me for a few seconds before cracking a smile.
“Let’s do it,” he said.