I was flipped through the air—my stomach lurched—and then I felt hard cement reverberate up my ankles. I blinked; everything looked green. I shuffled my feet and heard water, and then slipped and felt against my back two twists of metal, hot and cold. I slid until the seat of my pants hit standing water.
“You’ll have to forgive Trask,” Rhino stage-whispered. One of the metal knobs whined. Vibrating through the wall, the digestive squeals of plumbing coming to life. “When it comes to you, he gets a little agitated.”
The water blasted. I gasped—it was freezing and every muscle in my body clenched at once. For a shocking moment I was the corpse and this was rain and I pleaded for my father’s shielding. Then I blinked and watched the puddle turn pink: proof of life. Rhino exclaimed in a mixture of shock and glee. My eyes saw through water. Soaking pants; fingers, my own, clawing blindly at the air; my shoe heels scraping senselessly at the drain in the floor.
I caught a flash of Woody, leaning against the far wall, perfectly dry. “Soap,” he said.
“Scrub-a-dub-dub,” sang Rhino. “No more stinky-winky.”
A terrible taste hit my bleeding tongue and I became aware of a turquoise liquid, dribbling. Then more of it, appearing in splotches across my stomach and pants. I squinted through the downpour and saw Rhino pumping soap from a dispenser and flinging it at me in handfuls. My eyes stung. Suds slid down my face in foamy tears. The hard walls of the shower made it sound as if the entire school were laughing.
God is good.
“All purty,” Rhino announced. He daintily dipped his hands in the water stream to rinse them. I sensed his retreat and heard the dull thwack of a high-five.
Woody’s breath warmed my ear.
“Stick to your own kind, Crotch. Or we can do this again next semester.”
Footsteps splished through puddles and they were gone. I traced their progress and noticed other faces poking around the corner. There were four or five of them, their jaws agape, and not just boys, but girls, too. I scooped a mountain of bubbles from my lap and spat the synthetic tang of cheap soap. Woody and Rhino had succeeded—I was nothing if not clean.
I tried to stand but slipped in the turquoise lather. There was laughter. More voices now, too many. I reached for the knobs to pull myself up but they too were slick. It was getting darker; more and more heads blocked out the locker room lights. I barely heard the noise of someone pushing through the throng, and even when he was kneeling at my side and tugging at my arm I barely saw him. It was Foley, trying to help me up, his black pants soaking blacker, and all I felt was jealous rage that, even here, almost no one saw him. “Joey, come on, man.”
I slapped away his hands and lurched. The nearest onlookers shrank back as my shoes fanned water. I tromped through the shower and past the red rows of lockers, meeting no one’s eyes, concentrating upon the squish of my socks. I had the door pushed open before I felt Foley’s dry fingers take handholds of my soggy clothing.
“Joey, man, I told you to stay away from them—”
“Move.”
“Joey—”
“Move.” I wrestled against his embrace. He lodged himself into the doorframe for leverage.
“Joey, what the hell?”
“Move.” I lowered my head and bulled forward, knocking him aside even as he tried to keep hold. I shouldered the door. It smashed against the far wall and rocketed back. Foley screamed, a high girlish noise that I instantly hated him for, and I looked over my shoulder to see blood patterned across the brick. The door had slammed his finger, and he held the misshapen purple thing in front of his face in disbelief.
Keep moving, I told myself. Up the steps, up the steps.
Three bounds later the stairs were history and I was through the door to the gym. While I trailed shower water across the floor, Stettlemeyer showed Gripp funny snapshots she had stored on her phone.
I made it to the cafeteria right as the bell was ringing. An excess of quarters hung heavy in my sodden jeans and I plunged the coins home, stamping out Boris’s number. It rang and rang, burying the last echo of Foley’s pain.
An automated message picked up. Somehow I waited until the beep.
“Boris, call me now. Right now. This is Joey.” I recited the number. My voice was all over