Students passed on their way to the day’s last classes. I eyed them, shifting my feet in a growing puddle.
Twenty minutes later, I deposited more money and called again to the same result.
“I’m not screwing around, Boris,” I said. “Call me back. Call me back.” I gave the number again and hung up.
Fifteen minutes passed.
“Boris, where are you?” Bound by the cord, I paced in a tight circle, my wet clothes clinging uncomfortably. “Don’t tell me you have this thing off. You don’t ever have it off. You’re avoiding me. Stop avoiding me! You have the number. Call it.”
Ten more minutes.
“What the fuck is your problem?” I shouted into the phone, my voice breaking. “You’ve got no right to treat me like this! I need you! I need you to call me! Pick up your fucking phone and call me!”
Five minutes later the pay phone rang. I jammed the receiver against my lips.
“Boris!”
“This better be good,” he said.
“I’m coming home. Now. I mean it. Right now. I’m heading to the train station right now.”
He groaned.
“I don’t believe this,” he said. “You need to learn how to keep it together.”
“Can you wire me money? I’m heading there now and I don’t have a dime.”
“Wire you …? What does that even mean?” He was speaking softly as if from a public place. “Of course you don’t have a dime, you’ve spent it all dialing my number three thousand times.”
“Find out the number to the Bloughton station,” I said. “Call them. Arrange it. Put it on Thaddeus and Janelle’s card. I don’t care how you do it!”
He paused. “I’m not putting anything on anyone’s card.”
I could barely keep my voice down. “Why the fuck not? You’ve done it before! Boris, I need this!”
“What you need is help, Joey.”
I heard through the receiver someone saying “Shh,” followed by Boris’s muttered apology.
“Where are you? You’re not in school?” I was surprised at my own accusatory tone.
“What’s it to you?” Boris snapped. “Last day of school here was yesterday, moron. Thaddeus and Janelle took me out to a movie. Which I’m missing.”
The image of something so cozily privileged as the graduate-degreed Watsons escorting their well-behaved son to a subtitled movie at an art-house theater that probably sold imported beer and gourmet coffee, and all as a reward for something as mundane as concluding another semester, consumed me with envy and spite.
“Who gives a shit?” I howled. “We’ve been best friends for a million years and the moment I need you all you can do is complain about missing some movie? Are you kidding me? Get out of there.”
“Were,” Boris said. “We were best friends. I don’t even know you, dude.”
I closed my eyes and let the words sink in. Through the receiver I heard piped-in movie-theater smooth jazz, laughing strangers, the distant flutter of popping corn. My side of the phone was even louder—boys shouted as they bought vending machine food, girls in the hallway squealed, and their volumes increased as they pressed closer in their eagerness to confirm that Crotch was indeed hunched over the pay phone, drenched and crying.
Crying—yes, I was. The tears felt different, oilier somehow, from the rest of the water beading my face.
“Boris,” I said.
“I don’t think you should call me anymore.”
“Boris, please, listen.”
“Don’t call me anymore.”
“Please listen.”
“Don’t call.”
“Please.”
“Don’t.”
It was the last word he would ever say to me. The dial tone was deafening.
I turned to face the gawkers. Their eyes were too bright, their postures too predatory, the smiles on their faces too ravenous—they were the freaks, not me. I fumbled the receiver at the phone. It fell and dangled, but by then I had plunged into their ranks. They parted to make way, their enraptured whispers like tires through wet pavement.
My last hope: Simmons and Diamond. I didn’t care about the retribution I would suffer once Woody and Rhino had been suspended. All I cared about was that the principal and vice principal acted speedily on my behalf. Really they had no choice. The abuse had been vicious and the witnesses many.
Passing my locker, I snatched my biology text but nothing else, not even my coat. Moments later I closed in on the familiar wooden letters: PRI CIP L’S OF ICE. Laverne was standing just outside the doorway, struggling to direct her second arm into a coat sleeve.
“You’re wet,” she said, blinking at me in surprise. “Joey, you’re all wet. What happened?”