Tweed's chops were just about blown.
The dance band's frantic swing through non-stop charts-heavy on the 'bones and light on the rests-had been more grueling this year than last.
Even the slow numbers felt manic.
Bongo by her side, grabbing at catch-breaths, had been his typical goofball self.
But Dex, Dol, Estlin, and a half-dozen other seniors had acted like square pegs in round holes, hurtling along familiar routes of sound toward two unlucky classmates' moment of truth.
Tweed had been relieved to see Mr. Versailles filling in as chaperone. It meant he wasn't this year's slasher.
But the bristling boxes of riding crops that appeared beside the stage made Tweed shudder, not because she hadn't delivered and received their bare-backed pleasures a time or two in her young life. No, but because when they were dispersed, it would mean that Principal Buttweiler's opening remarks were done and that the moment had arrived to go where the envelope directed, waiting there and cowering.
"The prunes are hot for blood," Bongo cupped into her right ear as she counted.
Glancing into chaperone corner, Tweed saw Mr. and Mrs. Borgstrom edged now on their chairs, in their seventies and shriveled, the adoptive mom and pop of a junior boy whose hair was black and whose ways were sullen and sulky. Their jaws had notches, discolored jags that marked each year they had been married, a practice fallen away in the fifties.
Then the count clicked over in her brain and her horn rose to join in the final verse of "Lobe Town Blues," a dirge filled with quirky delights and a chance for each section to show off.
Festus Targer, his cymbal shimmering beneath them, held them back. Festus had it in him, assuming he survived next year's prom, to make it big as a drummer.
Jiminy Jones nodded an okay at the principal, who was chatting, hands in his coat pockets, with Nurse Gaskin among the chaperones. Mr. Jones' pudgy fingers brought the band to a skillful close, his satisfied smile's peculiar clash with her fears reminding Tweed how remote his age made him from the coming sacrifice.
The applause seemed heartfelt. Jiminy bowed, waved a section at a time to its feet, then the full ensemble.
Tweed put the trombone, sectioned, back into its case. She wondered who would next reassemble it. Herself? Or its inheritor?
Dex's hand held the envelope. His features were strained.
Damn the rules, she thought. It was insane-her dad more right than she had given him credit for-that people as whole and good as Dexter Poindexter fell each year under the red blade of the slasher. He had promised her father protection he couldn't possibly deliver, but she vowed that she would fight to save Dex too, if it came to that.
Passivity and paralysis were not her style.
Nor his.
Tweed took Dex's hand.
They shared a nervous embrace.
"Ready?" he asked.
"There's gonna be one dead teacher," said Tweed, "if he even tries to hurt you."
Dex smiled. "We'll waste him."
Principal Buttweiler stood off to the left on a floor scattered with shags of sawdust.
His hands were crossed straight-arm below his belt, a slim packet of index cards down-angled in one hand. His nods and smiles were more perfunctory than usual, rotating lights turning his strained face blue, then orange, then a sickly shade of yellow.
The poor man had been dealt a savage blow. But Tweed's sympathy did nothing to dampen the chill she felt as his eyes fell upon her and Dex, deep and unmistakable (or was she just on edge?), the message they shouted: "You two are the ones. Tonight we're going to see you bleed, mourn you, futter you, use the stoppage of your young hearts to remember this night by."
Dex drew her along into the light-shade-light of their horded classmates, come down now, all of them, from the bleachers. They huddled close to the mike where Jiminy Jones had announced each number and where the principal stood, adjusting the mikestand upward.
Nurse Gaskin felt Bix Donner's needy eyes bore into the back of her head. It was hard, wanting to engage this absurd man's spouses in conversation, but knowing that any attempt she made would be interpreted by Bix as encouragement.
When Futzy approached her, Delia had squinted so as to pretend harsh lights were her reason for rotating the axis of their conversation. But in fact it had been to put Mister Pinhead Asshole out of eyeshot.
Now Futzy was knuckling the mike head.
The principal wore his humiliation with dignity. Futzy's lobes reminded her of those of his slain daughter Kitty, Delia's lost heartthrob two decades before.
"Is this on?" he said. "Can everyone hear me?"
The man had class. He didn't even look at them as he asked the question, striking a pose for the ages. They were pieces of shit-he knew it and so did she-and a deserved flush was about to take place. He would flush 'em all, as would she, if that were possible.
"It's a momentous night, isn't it, boys and girls?" he began. "In the petting-zoo portion of your time here, we pampered you. While you cut open frogs and pig embryos, we did the same to your brains. We felt along runnels of thought and redirected rivers. And now, poised to leave this slaughterhouse, you, or rather a token couple from those here gathered, shall be sacrificed."
Delia surveyed the faces, mapped memories of a broken arm, prankish debaggings, sneers, jeers, the flow of a dispensatory river of pills and liquids, the probings of countless needles beneath baby-smooth and zit-infested skin-all of it recalling to mind what this graduating class meant to her.
She had been their nurse, seen their health impaired, and healed them.
"You and you. And you." He pointed to three seniors close to Delia. "Distribute these riding crops. This is not a new tool, surely, to many of you. It symbolizes the pain I and my staff have taught you to inflict and endure. With care, these crops will last many years. You have found a first love at this school-or, in some cases, the school has had to find one for you, pairing you for an evening-"
An amused ripple moved through the seniors.
"-and soon, the two of you will engage in a search for a third.
"It is customary for your principal to extend his heartfelt wishes at this point, his hopes that you and your love find the threesome you deserve."
Clever man, Kitty's father was. Futzy's tone teetered between making and denying them the wish he had spoken of.
The man's hurt ran deep.
It touched a cold place in Delia.
"Take your time, rummage long and leisurely through the mate-heap roiling before you in the ensuing years. Choose wisely, both in what you do, and in whom you do it with. Most people settle, mindwise, for pretty meager fare. Don't you be one of them."
Yes, she thought, and some never get chosen.
Annoyance and botheration sounded in Delia's ear: "I love this moment."
"What?"
"This moment," Bix repeated as she turned. "The fear absolutely sizzles. And the longer their faces are now, the more gleeful they'll be the rest of the evening."
"Hold this for a second?" She handed him her drink, an expectation in her tone, but not in her intent, that she would be right back.
"Sure." He bobbled it but took it.
The fog had begun to thin. The dry ice was nearly evaporated.
"But enough advice from your shortly to be former principal," said Futzy as Delia sauntered coolly away. "Open your envelopes now. No need to use the eraser end of a number two pencil. A finger will do nicely. Go at once to where the pink sheet tells you to be-on pain of death if the detection scanners find you elsewhere-and do not stir from that spot until the ringing of the second bell."
The rapture on the faces of the Borgstroms, as Delia passed them, was an extraordinary sight to behold. Their jaw-notches positively glowed with anticipation.
Peach popped her gum. "Let's go," croaked Cobra, grabbing her wrist.
She jerked about into his tug, reluctant to leave the gym with its orange and blue and green lights, its glints of sequins and spangles. Even the buffed brown of the gym floor struck Peach as beautiful. But delay might mean death, and Cobra's word- he thought so, anyway-was law.
In the glow of night light, the hallway was dim and spooky. The click-click of heels and the rustle of pastel dresses beside tuxedo'd boys made everything feel somehow like a movie set, one last masquerade before real life began.
"Where we headed?" she asked.
"Shut it," Cobra snapped.
She did.
He hadn't even shown her the envelope, the one the shop teacher had given them.
Cobra's eyes were a flat gray. That, Peach was convinced, was how he saw the world-if his taste in clothes was any indication.
She had had sex with that weird old guy from Topeka just because she knew Cobra really wanted a coat he kept mentioning, and the fifty-dollar bills the guy peeled off into her hand would buy it.
But when Cobra came back from the store with the coat, it turned out to be the same old lousy leather as always, an uninspired black with three silver studs along the right sleeve. Hardly worth being flogged for. Hardly worth the taste of some grown-up's dick.
A bunch of kids-most of them dorks, though Babs Nealy and Kinny Conner waved at her-hustled up the stairs by the glass doors to the butchery wing.
Cobra hurried her past the stairs, shoving a scrawny hawk-nosed nebbish out of the way. "Move it!" said Cobra, both to the hawk-nosed guy and to her. Peach gave the kid an apologetic look before Cobra yanked her onward.
That was another thing about Cobra: The violence he visited upon her always arose from smolders of hate. Rarely did he give her the kind of whap, poke, or pinch that signaled true love.
Cobra called that pop-song bullshit. She didn't think so.
Peach watched Tweed Megrim and Dexter Poindexter go into the chem lab. Neat kids. A little unformed for her tastes, but sometimes maybe bland was better.
Twin inverted J's of silver gleamed inside, tall thin spigots over sinks. Then Cobra strong-armed her past the labs.
"Did they stick us on the first floor?" she asked. She was afraid Cobra would try to bulldoze through the shoving mass of students on the stairs to their left.
Instead he dragged her, without reply, toward a darkened classroom set in the corner of the next turn. He yanked open the door and pushed her through.
Desks were shoved together in the center of the room in a logjam of fake-wood planes. Along the walls hung posterboard squares with a number scrawled in black felt-tip pen.
A couple of girls, Dixie Rathbone and Bliss somebody, slumped like stuffed scarecrows on the floor beneath the blackboard.
"Here," Cobra said.
Peach saw their number and beneath it a dark arrow directed downward. Pillows had been placed on the floor, thin as a threadbare blanket but gentler on the butt than hard tile.
She settled in. Cobra humphed down by her side. From where they sat, Peach could see Dixie and Bliss. She wondered if they were the ones, if they'd be slaughtered without warning, if she and Cobra and the others arrayed around the classroom would witness the sacrifice. She wiggled fingers at them, but they didn't move, almost as if they were dead already.
Commotion outside the door, raucous boy-talk. From the unclaimed numbers on the walls (she had overheard Bowser mention theirs), Peach guessed Bowser McPhee and his date Fido Jenner. A moment later, they walked in.
Peach had always thought Bowser was cute and little-boy brash and funny, a ferocious mismatch for Fido in her opinion. He had picked up a book she dropped once, then blushed and stammered like an idiot when she kissed his right lobe in thanks.
Now he and Fido started along the far wall, looking for their number.
"Over here," Peach yelled to them.
Cobra smacked her for speaking.
"Thanks," Bowser said. He and Fido collapsed ten feet to her left, beneath their sign.
"Hey weenie," Cobra said, "shut the fuck up."
"Come on, Cobra," Bowser replied, clapping a hand on Fido's knee. "Everybody's up against it tonight. Lighten up, okay? It's a free country."
Cobra tensed beside her.
"Listen, doggie boy. Your fuckin' free country's got two things in it: your face and my fist. You say another word, they're gonna fuckin' connect. It's gonna be one bloody mess of zits, skin, and flesh, you dig, scumwipe?"
She could see Bowser retreat inside his skin, though he glared iron pellets at Cobra. That took more guts than most kids had.
Too bad.
Peach knew, but never told anyone, that when it came right down to it, and without of his gang members around, Cobra would fold.
She had seen, alone late at night, the little boy in him. She knew Cobra was one scared coward hiding beneath layers of protective armor.
She also knew that she was just about ready to dump him.
The bell suddenly clanged. It sent a shock through her system.
Same damn bell signaled the end of one class and the beginning of the next. But in this context, it sounded three times as loud.
All talk ceased. A pall fell over the half dozen in-turned duos seated around the room.
Twenty minutes until the next bell, the one that meant find-the-dead-folks.
Those twenty minutes might be choke-thick with silence.
Or the shiv of a scream might slide into their heads from a nearby classroom, a scream both chilling and relieving.
Or the wall they leaned against might give way and a rough hand draw quick steel across their throats.
On the opposite wall, above two dorky girls in scared embrace, a large clock ticked.
Cobra's hand slipped into hers where no one could see and gave it a private squeeze.
His terror met hers.
Robert Devereaux
Slaughterhouse High
10. Defying Gravity
Dark delight.
The school understood perfectly.
Through the glass doors that led into its butchery wing waltzed Flann Beckwith and Brandy Crowe, high-toned worshipers of style, the best slap'n'smack dancers Corundum High had ever seen. Flann and Brandy were odds-on favorites for prom king and queen, despite the run Rocky and Sandy had given them.
Whoever assigned stations-many doubted its much touted randomness-had surely wanted to bring Flann and Brandy down a few pegs.
They'd be pegged down all right.
All the way down.
Though the hallway grate below the peephole muffled sound, Flann's voice came through loud and clear. "Christ, what a stench! I thought for sure we'd smelled our last carcass at Monday's final."
Brandy flumphed, "Someone's got it in for us."
"It'll seep into your dress. And my tux."
"I hope they've given us blankets in there," Brandy said. "Even a minute'll get pretty cold."
The taps on Flann's spit-polished shoes came to an abrupt halt outside the refrigeration room. "Nothing we can do about it now. But before the night's over, I'm complaining to somebody. After you, hon."
Sickening.
Even here they moved with grace. Brandy twirled out of view, and Flann's taps followed.
In this part of the school, the backways were tight and ill-lit. They stank of old oak, wet and rotting.
Motor hum from the refrigeration room masked sound from back here. But it also turned the couple, the dapper Flann and his redheaded Brandy with the cinnamon heart, into soundless mouths.
Fortunately, the hanging racks of butchered flesh and the ice sculptures provided ample concealment. Moreover, the large panel farthest from the couple's designated spot had taken two drops of lubricant a half hour before.
Minimal slide, open, shut.
A chilled world stole away all warmth.
Man-sized Ice Ghouls waited here. Legions of them, opaque glassy shapes, sleek and muscled save for a fat howling ghoul who terrified by sheer bulk. Each one raised an icicle dagger, but the howling ghoul's was thickest and most menacing.
Out through their massed numbers, cautious in movement, an ice pick rode tight aslant the killer's torso.
Brandy sneezed.
These two had everything. Good looks. An unending stream of sycophants. A smoothness of manner and tone that erased all grief. Unlimited future prospects. Flann's voice rode upon their assured arrogance. "You okay?"
It would be a pleasure to finish them.
"It's nothing." A sniff, a soft blow, one nostril, then the other. "At least we're out of danger."
"Somebody," Flann insisted, "is gonna lose his job."
"It's okay. It's only ten more minutes. No one ever touches a finalist. That's the law."
"They can't do this to Flann Beckwith."
"We're fine," said Brandy. "We're all alone. Just us and nobody else. And you look real sexy. Sexy as money."
"Really? You think so?"
Racks of crayola'd pork flesh serried by as the killer threaded through them.
Sides of meat hung near the doomed pair, a protective veil of butchered beef providing one last barrier if only they'd keep jabbering.
"I'll tell you what I think." Her prom dress rustled. The sounds of thick smooching and shared mmmm 's betrayed what they were up to. Then they abruptly stopped. "Did you hear something?" asked Brandy.
Caught breath, three haunches away.
"Hey, relax," said Flann. "All I hear is my heart. And yours."
"Mmmm, you're warm."
"You too." There was a slight rustle, as of tinsel brushing against a glass ornament.
"Do you think we should?" Yield filled her voice.
"Who's to know?" More rustling and Brandy's vulnerable moan. "I'm going to suck my sweetie's lovelobe."
The killer stepped free of concealment.
Flann was stylishly hunched over, almost a choreographed flamenco pose. Brandy's eyelids were closed, her chin nestled upon his left shoulder as he mouthed her lovelobe. From his right hand hung her silken lobebag, limp as a finger puppet.
A gleam of debutante eyes opening. Flann's embroidered suit-back, a stretched target. The brutal drive of cloaked resentment.
Then came a pin-cushion zit of pierced felt, the ice pick's keen tip driving through expensive cloth.
The body accepted puncture and impalement as though they were crude afterthoughts, the sudden flair of the ice pick handle stopping its forward hurtle in a pit of depressed serge.
Flann's head pitched forward as three bodies sandwiched unbalanced against the wall. A shove at his suit helped unflesh the weapon.
Brandy's eyes widened. Her mouth readied a scream.
Her boyfriend flailed about, arms whipping wide and ineffectual. The lovelobe his teeth had abruptly severed hung like a blood-engorged tick from his lips. Staggering like a drunk upended in a slippery room, he fell away, his skull making a loud smack against the white wall.
Screams now, muffled in the insulated room.
Screams wrapped in puffs of breath.
Brandy's left hand rose to her maimed ear, blood gush vining down her frail wrist.
The ice pick lifted once. It pinned the girl's right hand rising to resist, pinned it like a stuck butterfly against her left breast, and filled her heart with steel.
Her eyes held, even as they clouded with death. Healing lay in Brandy's empty gaze. And in Flann's. Those eyes begged to be icicled, as had Sheriff Blackburn's.
Behind them through racks of meat waited the fat ghoul, an icicle dagger upraised at the end of his massive arm.
That would do fine.
But time pressed.
Do Queen Brandy first. Then her lover. Come out of the cold, regain warm passageways, again dare the fear of heights.
The next bit of payback would be a challenge and a thrill, courage and sheer strength tested to the limit. But close by awaited love and healing and an end to years of torment.
Through the motor hum and the meat racks, the leaden-footed dancers' shoetops scuffed across the floor.
Gerber Waddell sat in his supply closet, the door closed, a dim lightbulb over his head.
Like a great ape after eating, Gerber settled cross-legged on the floor, scratching his belly through janitorial denim.
Thoughts struggled to pierce his rage.
Something not right was seeping through the school tonight. This weren't your ordinary prom, no way, no how.
He was used to grisly thoughts on prom night.
Young bad flesh in rich clothing.
The anticipated smack.
That's how Gerber always heard it in his head when they brought the victims in. Smack! An echo from the slash that few if any saw, 'cept for its aftermath, which he had to clean up lest it settle into the walls.
Couldn't have it settling into the walls.
Had to make them pristine again.
Well tonight, he was hearing lots more oof too, feeling bad things transpire, almost as if he were right there and they were happening in front of him.
He had a feeling there'd be lots more cleanup than usual. Lots more walls to make pristine.
They didn't pay him overtime neither.
He remembered the hospital geeks.
In particular he remembered good ol' Gary the nose-picking nurse, who must've thought Gerber was some piece of meat that cared not a whit about the niceties of living. Nope, good ol' Gary could just, privileged as you please, snuk a finger up into his nostril right in front of the sliced-up brain guy lying on the bed.
Gerber's head had hurt after the operation. But otherwise, he hadn't felt any different. He wanted to shove an ice pick up Gary's nose, get a bloody booger on its tip, maybe take some of his brain out along with it.
His hand went to the utility belt: Axe head. Plastic pouch o' screwdrivers. Empty place.
Gerber looked down.
No ice pick.
He sighed.
Always losing stuff. The Bleaks was always getting on him about that, about stuff being lost around the house.
Missus Bleak always pig-yammered at him out of her lipsticked oinker of a yap, till he'd had enough and cried in front of her like a big baby. But in his head she was taken apart, all that flab torn open so the blubber came spilling out on the rug and he weren't about to clean might mind you, dance on it. Nor would he care a tinker's damn about his boots, nope, he'd just make sure he didn't slip on the grease and bang the back of his head where the surgeons had left the deep dimple.
Did they need him at the prom?
Probably so, but goddamn if he would go where they wanted him to go. Not with all the early unscheduled oof in his head, not with all the unruly visions of struggle warring up there.
He didn't want to see nobody.
I better get up, he thought. Head off to the next place. Where was that? His feet would know, as they always sooner or later did.
It was quiet in the supply closet. Quiet and close and difficult to breathe. They oughta make these denim suits with air holes, not make a head janitor sweat.
Maybe they wrung 'em out, he thought. Maybe they grabbed 'em out of Missus Bleak's bathroom clothes hamper. Maybe they fueled Corundum High with his sweat.
Gerber smiled.
Them teachers ain't got nothin' on me, he thought. Them shitty students, they pass through this place like a digested meal. Gerber, he repairs the walls and linings, frees up blockages, keeps the little shits moving through until they blat out the low-slung buttock end o' things.
But there be rumblings in these walls more than usual. They angered him, and frightened him.
Never you mind that.
Nope, I won't.
He got up, swirling with his palms on the concrete floor and shoving off, then letting his feet figure out where to take him next.
Kyla Gorg looked askance at her lover. "Hey come on, Patrice. The drawing's random. Even if it wasn't, and really some muckety-muck picks who's to be killed and where, they wouldn't be stupid enough to use the same location two years running."
"Yeah maybe," said Patrice, worrying a thin layer of chiffon between her pudgy fingers. "But there's always a first time."
"We're safe as a snug bug in a rug here. So chill out, okay?" Kyla thought her date was such a chickenshit.
Generations had survived prom night.
They could too.
"It's so creepy." Patrice was scandalized. "I can't believe they'd seat us here. Ugh, you can almost smell the blood."
"Oh, stop it!"
Kyla surveyed the dim cold kitchen, a rare look at a place ordinarily out of bounds.
Two other couples were tucked like ungainly dolls amidst sink units and stoves and preparation tables, murmuring in a darkness lit only by one feeble fixture above the cash register.
The white sign that bore their number had seemed to float on the wall when she and Patrice came to it. In this precise spot, the year before, Melody Jinx and her date had waited and bled and died.
Surely the area had been scrubbed down. But the wall paint was ugly green anyway and what Kyla had touched felt, well, greasy.
Tell herself a million times it was only her imagination, she could still see blotches of gore all around them. Melody's ghost, seeping through the walls and floor where Melody had eaten a cleaver, seemed to wrap them in cold mist.
Again Patrice's worry-wart voice: "I wonder where he is."
"Fido?"
"Of course Fido. Who else?"
"Fido's never going to be ours," Kyla said, with what seemed to her like grown-up resignation. "We have to face it, now that we're graduating."
"Don't say that!"
"Come on, Patrice. Folks expect us to triple up with an overweight man, just like on Fat and Fed Up."
"Ugh, I hate that show. And I hate overweight men."
"You like me, don't you?" Kyla asked.
"Sure I do." A ghostly jellyfished hand came down on Kyla's knee and orange-juiced there its assurance. "But thin old, wiry old Fido is who I want. He's nice and cuddlable and cute and sweet and kind and scrumptious."
"And out of reach."
"We don't know that. Not for sure. And the night is far from over."
Kyla said nothing.
What was the use?
Give Patrice a last try at her dream, the one she'd first dared to voice in tenth grade.
It had been fun to moon over Fido in private, a secret passion they used to fuel their lovemaking. Kyla had often pictured him with them as her lover's whip cut across his quivering flesh. Once-amazing experience-they had closed their eyes, stroking and sucking at one another, imagining it was him: Fido Jenner, split, blimped, making it with himself.
"I'll bet Ms. Foddereau's the slasher," said Patrice.
Kyla pictured the teacher's flat seamless face. Echoes of her dry humor. The old crone stood before a butcher block, working her bloody hands into an open pork belly.
"I'll bet it is," said Kyla.
That sly smile, that seemingly offhand remark about fat, the ripple of a chuckle it had set off in class the year before.
Kyla warmed to the idea. "Boy, if it is, I'd love to see her try to surprise us. I'd love to overpower the superior little bitch and wrench her chin up while you sever her trachea, slicing deep to the spine with that bone saw up there." Among knives on the opposite wall, the bone saw gleamed.
"Yeah, bring her on!"
"We'll filet the smile right off her friggin' face," Kyla said.
"Butcher, cleave thyself."
The grimness silenced her, cutting short her glee. A teacher, probably right this moment, was ending two of her classmates' lives.
Not many friends amongst them, but they were okay kids. The prospect of beholding a slain couple sobered Kyla, even as it touched some atavistic nub of delight inside her.
"Patrice?"
"Yeah?"
"It's freezing in here. Hold my hand?"
"It feels real weird, mister, escaping this way. Almost like you're betraying your friends or something."
Zinc, the smallish second trumpeter, spoke to Bray in the dim obscurity of the girls' gym, half-hearted hallspill providing the only light.
Winnie stood far off, waving her hands and flapping her lips to convince a cluster of young girls about God-knows-what.
"It's nothing you could have prevented," said Bray in an attempt to comfort the kid.
Zinc shook his head, eighteen looking fifteen, his height a paltry five feet. "Doesn't matter. That Russian guy, the scientist with the bushy eyebrows, you know who I mean… he says people can control their fate, that there's a psychic link between your deepest desires and what actually happens to you."
"I don't believe that for a second."
"That's what he says."
"People say all sorts of wrongheaded things."
The other trumpeter, the defiant-looking one, was resting his elbows on the trampoline pads in the center of the gym. His knuckles thudded an off-rhythm against the thick springs.
He had been clipped and curt when, on their way here, Winnie had offered a compliment on his playing. Now his restless drumming stopped and he strode over to them.
"Hey, Zinc," he said, "let's try it out."
"You don't mean jumping on the tramp?" The kid was incredulous.
Sarcastic: "No, I mean lobesucking. Come on, it'll be a blast." The taller boy, a lick of hair sickled over his forehead, pointedly ignored Bray. Grown-up, over-the-hill has-been, Bray could almost hear him thinking.
"Don't, Butch. You'll break your neck."
"Well, jeez, at least spot me. Come on, man. Sailing on up into the darkness? It'll get your juices flowing."
Balancing on one foot, he wrenched a shoe off and tossed it down thock fwap-fwap-fwap.
Its mate quickly followed.
"Is he always like this?" asked Bray.
"Only when something's eating him. The prom, you know. Going away to school next year."
The charcoal blur hoisted himself up onto the edge of the trampoline, then hop-rolled onto its yield of canvas.
"Let's spot him."
They skated across the smooth gym floor, a sensation like a layer of ice beneath the soles of their shoes. Other kids were coming in from all directions, and Winnie, turning her head, joined him.
"Couple o' converts?" Bray asked about the girls she had been talking to.
"Discontent is everywhere," said Winnie, "a micron or two beneath the skin. What's with your musician friend?"
The trumpeter had found the discolored center of the canvas. He staggered at first, then eased into a gentle bounce.
"Who knows? Maybe he wants to die."
"Hey, you guys," Butch shouted on the uplift. "It's all a crock. ( Sproing!) stop it, and we ought to."
Worked up already to nearly ten-fifteen feet, change falling out of his pockets and spinning on the canvas below, Butch stiffed up suddenly, knees bearing the brunt, arms shot out to the sides for balance. He bent and swept the coins off, metal clatters as they waterfalled through the springs, pinging and rolling across the floor.
"Zinc, come on, man," he said.
Then Zinc monkeyed up.
Bray steadied Zinc on the pads, and Butch helped him over the crisscross of springs. His shoes whip-rolled toward Bray, then fell floorward in twin thuds. "I can't believe I'm doing this." Standing, he linked hands with his lover and began a slow seesaw. "Woe, woe, woe!" he said, one at each bounce.
Bray glanced at Winnie. She looked sharp-eyed and stunning, a heartmelt.
"Kids," she commented in awe and disgust.
The seesaw diminished to nothing. The boys bounced now in synch and rising, white cuffs and clasped hands, their moonish faces alight with thrill, their arms angling out on the downfall, then snapping down flat like collapsed umbrella struts as they shot skyward once more.
A drifting horde of seniors, some of them tender, others not, rectangled all about, shouting encouragement and holding their hands up to offer instant rebuff against a bad fall.
Butch and Zinc were ill-lit as they pizza-doughed the canvas and it rebounded them upward. But on the rise, they slipped into even greater obscurity, a sleeve of blackness enveloping them, then releasing them on the downfall.
There was no ceiling visible. Just the one Bray sensed up there, climbing ropes strung up way high like dreams of vines, no limits to how daring the trumpeters might get.
Vanish.
Re-emerge swiftly downward, a plunge through squid ink into the dim ocean below.
Then arrow upward again, squeals of delight rocketing from their mouths.
Bray fancied he heard a noise up above, a metal strut adjusting to chill or weight.
Down again they shot, but Bray kept his eyes above, a dark shift in blackness he assumed he had to be imagining.
Up they rose.
But suddenly there oofed, above, an expulsion of breath, a blow to the belly, and one boy came down empty-handed, a look of terror smeared across his face.
It was the monkey-looking kid, too distraught to keep himself from an upward bounce as lofty as the previous one. Then he too, with a high choking sound, stuck up there.
Swift whickers of pain fell from above. More mechanical sounds, black on black, loud creaks, a spider dandling its web about trapped flies.
Someone asked stupidly, "Where are they?"
"Get the lights," Winnie called weakly, and it seemed to Bray that she thought she had shouted it.
Yes, I'll do that, he thought. I'll get the lights.
But all Bray could do was stare up into the blackness and listen to the bold shifting sounds, the creaking obscenity of movement and stretched rope, the shifts of some murderous shape about its work.
"They can't tender."
Others took up her word, the unfairness of it all and the shock in their voices.
In front of him, the trampoline canvas popped like a bedsheet snapped in a breeze.
Then again.
A wash of pops rained down, a sudden shower, foul-smelling.
Bray caught on his chest a slap of liquid, a spray against his face. And a second inundation fell from above as kids backed away.
Bray felt Winnie melt against him. "Jesus, Bray," an echo of her lost strength, "what's our guy doing?"
Above, there sounded a clattering as though a handful of drumsticks were being badly negotiated.
Then something fell, shattering: an icicle, its fragments skating across the darkened canvas, smashing hard, and skidding across the floor.