فصل 22

22

Alien

We headed back the way we came, in the direction of the giant screen. That’s when we walked straight into a group of kids we didn’t know. They’d just come out of the woods, doing stuff I’m sure they didn’t want their teachers to know about. I could smell the smoke now, the smell of both firecrackers and cigarettes. They pointed a flashlight at us. There were six of them: four boys and two girls. They looked like they were in the seventh grade.

“What school are you from?” one of the boys called out.

“Beecher Prep!” Jack started to answer, when all of a sudden one of the girls started screaming.

“Oh my God!” she shrieked, holding her hand over her eyes like she was crying. I figured maybe a huge bug had just flown into her face or something.

“No way!” one of the boys cried out, and he started flicking his hand in the air like he’d just touched something hot. And then he covered his mouth. “No freakin’ way, man! No freakin’ way!”

All of them started half laughing and half covering their eyes now, pushing each other and cursing loudly.

“What is that?” said the kid who was pointing the flashlight at us, and it was only then that I realized that the flashlight was pointed right at my face, and what they were talking about—screaming about—was me.

“Let’s get out of here,” Jack said to me quietly, and he pulled me by my sweatshirt sleeve and started walking away from them.

“Wait wait wait!” yelled the guy with the flashlight, cutting us off. He pointed the flashlight right in my face again, and now he was only about five feet away. “Oh man! Oh man!!” he said, shaking his head, his mouth wide open. “What happened to your face?”

“Stop it, Eddie,” said one of the girls.

“I didn’t know we were watching Lord of the Rings tonight!” he said. “Look, guys, it’s Gollum!”

This made his friends hysterical.

Again we tried to walk away from them, and again the kid named Eddie cut us off. He was at least a head taller than Jack, who was about a head taller than me, so the guy looked huge to me.

“No man, it’s Alien!” said one of the other kids.

“No, no, no, man. It’s an orc!” laughed Eddie, pointing the flashlight in my face again. This time he was right in front of us.

“Leave him alone, okay?” said Jack, pushing the hand holding the flashlight away.

“Make me,” answered Eddie, pointing the flashlight in Jack’s face now.

“What’s your problem, dude?” said Jack.

“Your boyfriend’s my problem!”

“Jack, let’s just go,” I said, pulling him by the arm.

“Oh man, it talks!” screamed Eddie, shining the flashlight in my face again. Then one of the other guys threw a firecracker at our feet.

Jack tried to push past Eddie, but Eddie shoved his hands into Jack’s shoulders and pushed him hard, which made Jack fall backward.

“Eddie!” screamed one of the girls.

“Look,” I said, stepping in front of Jack and holding my hands up in the air like a traffic cop. “We’re a lot smaller than you guys …”

“Are you talking to me, Freddie Krueger? I don’t think you want to mess with me, you ugly freak,” said Eddie. And this was the point where I knew I should run away as fast as I could, but Jack was still on the ground and I wasn’t about to leave him.

“Yo, dude,” said a new voice behind us. “What’s up, man?”

Eddie spun around and pointed his flashlight toward the voice. For a second, I couldn’t believe who it was.

“Leave them alone, dude,” said Amos, with Miles and Henry right behind him.

“Says who?” said one of the guys with Eddie.

“Just leave them alone, dude,” Amos repeated calmly.

“Are you a freak, too?” said Eddie.

“They’re all a bunch of freaks!” said one of his friends.

Amos didn’t answer them but looked at us. “Come on, guys, let’s go. Mr. Tushman’s waiting for us.”

I knew that was a lie, but I helped Jack get up, and we started walking over to Amos. Then out of the blue, the Eddie guy grabbed my hood as I passed by him, yanking it really hard so I was pulled backward and fell flat on my back. It was a hard fall, and I hurt my elbow pretty bad on a rock. I couldn’t really see what happened afterward, except that Amos rammed into the Eddie guy like a monster truck and they both fell down to the ground next to me.

Everything got really crazy after that. Someone pulled me up by my sleeve and yelled, “Run!” and someone else screamed, “Get ’em!” at the same time, and for a few seconds I actually had two people pulling the sleeves of my sweatshirt in opposite directions. I heard them both cursing, until my sweatshirt ripped and the first guy yanked me by my arm and started pulling me behind him as we ran, which I did as fast as I could. I could hear footsteps just behind us, chasing us, and voices shouting and girls screaming, but it was so dark I didn’t know whose voices they were, only that everything felt like we were underwater. We were running like crazy, and it was pitch black, and whenever I started to slow down, the guy pulling me by my arm would yell, “Don’t stop!” Voices in the Dark

Finally, after what seemed like a forever of running, someone yelled: “I think we lost them!”

“Amos?”

“I’m right here!” said Amos’s voice a few feet behind us.

“We can stop!” Miles yelled from farther up.

“Jack!” I yelled.

“Whoa!” said Jack. “I’m here.”

“I can’t see a thing!”

“Are you sure we lost them?” Henry asked, letting go of my arm. That’s when I realized that he’d been the one who was pulling me as we ran.

“Yeah.”

“Shh! Let’s listen!”

We all got super quiet, listening for footsteps in the dark. All we could hear were the crickets and frogs and our own crazy panting. We were out of breath, stomachs hurting, bodies bent over our knees.

“We lost them,” said Henry.

“Whoa! That was intense!”

“What happened to the flashlight?”

“I dropped it!”

“How did you guys know?” said Jack.

“We saw them before.”

“They looked like jerks.”

“You just rammed into him!” I said to Amos.

“I know, right?” laughed Amos.

“He didn’t even see it coming!” said Miles.

“He was like, ‘Are you a freak, too?’ and you were like, bam!” said Jack.

“Bam!” said Amos, throwing a fake punch in the air. “But after I tackled him, I was like, run, Amos, you schmuck, he’s ten times bigger than you! And I got up and started running as fast as I could!”

We all started laughing.

“I grabbed Auggie and I was like, ‘Run!’ ” said Henry.

“I didn’t even know it was you pulling me!” I answered.

“That was wild,” said Amos, shaking his head.

“Totally wild.”

“Your lip is bleeding, dude.”

“I got in a couple of good punches,” answered Amos, wiping his lip.

“I think they were seventh graders.”

“They were huge.”

“Losers!” Henry shouted really loudly, but we all shushed him.

We listened for a second to make sure no one had heard him.

“Where the heck are we?” asked Amos. “I can’t even see the screen.”

“I think we’re in the cornfields,” answered Henry.

“Duh, we’re in the cornfields,” said Miles, pushing a cornstalk at Henry.

“Okay, I know exactly where we are,” said Amos. “We have to go back in this direction. That’ll take us to the other side of the field.”

“Yo, dudes,” said Jack, hand high in the air. “That was really cool of you guys to come back for us. Really cool. Thanks.”

“No problem,” answered Amos, high-fiving Jack. And then Miles and Henry high-fived him, too.

“Yeah, dudes, thanks,” I said, holding my palm up like Jack just had, though I wasn’t sure if they’d high-five me, too.

Amos looked at me and nodded. “It was cool how you stood your ground, little dude,” he said, high-fiving me.

“Yeah, Auggie,” said Miles, high-fiving me, too. “You were like, ‘We’re littler than you guys’ …”

“I didn’t know what else to say!” I laughed.

“Very cool,” said Henry, and he high-fived me, too. “Sorry I ripped your sweatshirt.”

I looked down, and my sweatshirt was completely torn down the middle. One sleeve was ripped off, and the other was so stretched out it was hanging down to my knees.

“Hey, your elbow’s bleeding,” said Jack.

“Yeah.” I shrugged. It was starting to hurt a lot.

“You okay?” said Jack, seeing my face.

I nodded. Suddenly I felt like crying, and I was trying really hard not to do that.

“Wait, your hearing aids are gone!” said Jack.

“What!” I yelled, touching my ears. The hearing aid band was definitely gone. That’s why I felt like I was underwater! “Oh no!” I said, and that’s when I couldn’t hold it in anymore. Everything that had just happened kind of hit me and I couldn’t help it: I started to cry. Like big crying, what Mom would call “the waterworks.” I was so embarrassed I hid my face in my arm, but I couldn’t stop the tears from coming.

The guys were really nice to me, though. They patted me on the back.

“You’re okay, dude. It’s okay,” they said.

“You’re one brave little dude, you know that?” said Amos, putting his arm around my shoulders. And when I kept on crying, he put both his arms around me like my dad would have done and let me cry. The Emperor’s Guard

We backtracked through the grass for a good ten minutes to see if we could find my hearing aids, but it was way too dark to see anything. We literally had to hold on to each other’s shirts and walk in single file so we wouldn’t trip over one another. It was like black ink had been poured all around.

“This is hopeless,” said Henry. “They could be anywhere.”

“Maybe we can come back with a flashlight,” answered Amos.

“No, it’s okay,” I said. “Let’s just go back. Thanks, though.”

We walked back toward the cornfields, and then cut through them until the back of the giant screen came into view. Since it was facing away from us, we didn’t get any light from the screen at all until we’d walked around to the edge of the woods again. That’s where we finally started seeing a little light.

There was no sign of the seventh graders anywhere.

“Where do you think they went?” said Jack.

“Back to the food trucks,” said Amos. “They’re probably thinking we’re going to report them.”

“Are we?” asked Henry.

They looked at me. I shook my head.

“Okay,” said Amos, “but, little dude, don’t walk around here alone again, okay? If you need to go somewhere, tell us and we’ll go with you.”

“Okay.” I nodded.

As we got closer to the screen, I could hear High on a hill was a lonely goatherd, and could smell the cotton candy from one of the concession stands near the food trucks. There were lots of kids milling around in this area, so I pulled what was left of my hoodie over my head and kept my face down, hands in pockets, as we made our way through the crowd. It had been a long time since I’d been out without my hearing aids, and it felt like I was miles under the earth. It felt like that song Miranda used to sing to me: Ground Control to Major Tom, your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong …

I did notice as I walked that Amos had stayed right next to me. And Jack was close on the other side of me. And Miles was in front of us and Henry was in back of us. They were surrounding me as we walked through the crowds of kids. Like I had my own emperor’s guard. Sleep

Then they came out of the narrow valley and at once she saw the reason. There stood Peter and Edmund and all the rest of Aslan’s army fighting desperately against the crowd of horrible creatures whom she had seen last night; only now, in the daylight, they looked even stranger and more evil and more deformed.

I stopped there. I’d been reading for over an hour and sleep still didn’t come. It was almost two a.m. Everyone else was asleep. I had my flashlight on under the sleeping bag, and maybe the light was why I couldn’t sleep, but I was too afraid to turn it off. I was afraid of how dark it was outside the sleeping bag.

When we got back to our section in front of the movie screen, no one had even noticed we’d been gone. Mr. Tushman and Ms. Rubin and Summer and all the rest of the kids were just watching the movie. They had no clue how something bad had almost happened to me and Jack. It’s so weird how that can be, how you could have a night that’s the worst in your life, but to everybody else it’s just an ordinary night. Like, on my calendar at home, I would mark this as being one of the most horrific days of my life. This and the day Daisy died. But for the rest of the world, this was just an ordinary day. Or maybe it was even a good day. Maybe somebody won the lottery today.

Amos, Miles, and Henry brought me and Jack over to where we’d been sitting before, with Summer and Maya and Reid, and then they went and sat where they had been sitting before, with Ximena and Savanna and their group. In a way, everything was exactly as we had left it before we went looking for the toilets. The sky was the same. The movie was the same. Everyone’s faces were the same. Mine was the same.

But something was different. Something had changed.

I could see Amos and Miles and Henry telling their group what had just happened. I knew they were talking about it because they kept looking over at me while they were talking. Even though the movie was still playing, people were whispering about it in the dark. News like that spreads fast.

It was what everyone was talking about on the bus ride back to the cabins. All the girls, even girls I didn’t know very well, were asking me if I was okay. The boys were all talking about getting revenge on the group of seventh-grade jerks, trying to figure out what school they were from.

I wasn’t planning on telling the teachers about any of what had happened, but they found out anyway. Maybe it was the torn sweatshirt and the bloody elbow. Or maybe it’s just that teachers hear everything.

When we got back to the camp, Mr. Tushman took me to the first-aid office, and while I was getting my elbow cleaned and bandaged up by the camp nurse, Mr. Tushman and the camp director were in the next room talking with Amos and Jack and Henry and Miles, trying to get a description of the troublemakers. When he asked me about them a little later, I said I couldn’t remember their faces at all, which wasn’t true.

It’s their faces I kept seeing every time I closed my eyes to sleep. The look of total horror on the girl’s face when she first saw me. The way the kid with the flashlight, Eddie, looked at me as he talked to me, like he hated me.

Like a lamb to the slaughter. I remember Dad saying that ages ago, but tonight I think I finally got what it meant. Aftermath

Mom was waiting for me in front of the school along with all the other parents when the bus arrived. Mr. Tushman told me on the bus ride home that they had called my parents to tell them there had been a “situation” the night before but that everyone was fine. He said the camp director and several of the counselors went looking for the hearing aid in the morning while we all went swimming in the lake, but they couldn’t find it anywhere. Broarwood would reimburse us the cost of the hearing aids, he said. They felt bad about what happened.

I wondered if Eddie had taken my hearing aids with him as a kind of souvenir. Something to remember the orc.

Mom gave me a tight hug when I got off the bus, but she didn’t slam me with questions like I thought she might. Her hug felt good, and I didn’t shake it off like some of the other kids were doing with their parents’ hugs.

The bus driver started unloading our duffel bags, and I went to find mine while Mom talked to Mr. Tushman and Ms. Rubin, who had walked over to her. As I rolled my bag toward her, a lot of kids who don’t usually say anything to me were nodding hello, or patting my back as I walked by them.

“Ready?” Mom said when she saw me. She took my duffel bag, and I didn’t even try to hold on to it: I was fine with her carrying it. If she had wanted to carry me on her shoulders, I would have been fine with that, too, to be truthful.

As we started to walk away, Mr. Tushman gave me a quick, tight hug but didn’t say anything.