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The blood flow slowed some more.
“I can’t keep this up; we need help,” Mack said.
Stefan’s eyes flickered with what would surely be a temporary understanding of the word we.
A powerful word, we.
“You have a cell phone?” Mack asked. Cells were absolutely banned at school, so only about two-thirds of the students carried them.
Stefan nodded. His never exactly perky expression was even duller than usual. But he jerked his chin towards his pants pocket.
“OK, you need to pull on this tourniquet, right?” Mack said. Seeing the blank expression, Mack explained, “The shirt. Pull on the knot with your left hand. Pull hard.”
Stefan managed to do this but barely. Mack noticed that his fingers were clumsy, fumbling. His strength was fading.
Mack pried the cell out of Stefan’s pants pocket and dialed 911.
“Nine-one-one, what is the nature of your emergency?” a bored voice asked.
“I have a nine-year-old boy pumping blood all over the place,” Mack said.
“Nine?” Stefan asked, like he wasn’t totally sure it wasn’t true.
“They’ll come faster for a bleeding kid than a bleeding teenager,” Mack explained, covering the mouthpiece. “Now shut up.”
It took eight minutes for the ambulance to arrive, which, as it turned out, was barely fast enough.
After the EMTs took Stefan away, Mack made it home unmolested by any more bullies, possibly because he was shirtless except for the neck band of his destroyed T-shirt and his hands were red with blood up to the elbows. That sort of fashion choice tends to discourage people from bothering you.
Mack’s father was home when Mack came in the side door. His father was staring into the refrigerator with the door open, looking like he might see something really cool there if he just kept searching.
“Hey, big guy,” his father said.
“Hey, Dad,” Mack said.
“How was school?”
“Enh,” Mack said. “School’s school.”
“Yeah. I hear you,” Mack’s dad said without looking up.
Mack headed towards the stairs and the shower.
et’s just skip the part where Stefan lost two pints of blood. And the part where the doctor told him he could easily have ended up dead.
Let’s skip over the slow workings of Stefan’s mind as he sought to make some sense of the fact that he had come quite close to dying at the age of fifteen.
And while we’re doing that, let’s skip over the fact that Mack’s father didn’t notice that Mack was more or less covered in blood.
Mack’s parents didn’t pay a lot of attention to him.
It wasn’t really sad or tragic. They weren’t bad parents. It was just that at some point they had given up trying to figure Mack out.
He’d had one phobia or another since age four. His mother had tried many, many, many (many) times to talk him through these irrational fears. His father had tried as well. And sometimes both at once. And sometimes both at once with a school counsellor. And a minister. And a shrink. Two shrinks. Two shrinks, two parents, a minister, a school counsellor. But they had never had much success.
In between talking Mack out of being terrified of things that weren’t really scary, they had tried to talk him into being scared of things he actually should be afraid of.
Things like bullies, for example.
The boy had no sense. That was clear to his parents and everyone else. The boy simply had no sense.
So, over time, Mack’s parents had learned to steer around him. They’d given him his own space. Which was how he liked it. Mostly.
Mack assumed that when Stefan returned to school he would have to demonstrate his toughness by giving Mack a serious beat-down. The upside was that in anticipation of the epic bloodbath, the other bullies were leaving Mack alone. It was just possible that Stefan would be irritated with any bully who presumed to prebeat Mack. No one wanted to deny Stefan his clear rights.
So in the short term, things were good for Mack in the aftermath of the Wednesday Massacre (as it came to be called).
Stefan was not back at school on Thursday or Friday.
“Maybe he croaked after all,” Mack said to himself on Friday. “And that would be bad. Yes; bad.”
But when Monday rolled around, that guilty hope was banished.
Stefan was definitely not dead. He had a massive bandage on his arm, white gauze wrapped by a sort of weblike thing. But Stefan wouldn’t need both arms to murder Mack.
It was a scary moment when Mack looked up and saw Stefan’s sullen face at the far end of a hallway full of kids on that fateful Monday.
It was scary for Mack and the few kids who considered him a close friend. But everyone else was just plain giddy. This was the most anticipated moment in the history of Richard Gere Middle School. Imagine the degree of anticipation that might have greeted the simultaneous release of an Iron Man movie, a brand-new sequel to a Harry Potter book and albums by the top three bands all rolled into one happy, nervous, “OMG, I totally can’t wait to see this!” moment.
The kids saw Mack step into the hallway.
They saw Stefan also in the hallway.
The kids parted magically in the middle, as if they were hair and someone had dragged a comb right down the middle of the hallway.
There was a part. That’s the point. Kids hugging the lockers to the left. Kids hugging the lockers to the right. And all the kids were incredibly excited.
Mack felt a lump in his throat. He was excited, too, but of course in a very different way. He was excited in the way that had to do with thinking, So, I wonder if there really is an afterlife? That kind of excited.
“Should I run?” Mack wondered.
He sighed. “No. Wouldn’t do any good, would it?” No one answered, so he answered himself. “Better to just take my beating here.”
If Stefan pounded him here in the hallway, some teacher would probably break it up. Eventually.
So Mack squared his shoulders. He tugged at the back of his T-shirt. He rolled his neck a little, loosening the muscles there. He wasn’t going to win this fight, but he was going to try.
Stefan walked straight towards him, his overly adult biceps barely contained by his T-shirt sleeves. Stefan had pecs. Stefan had muscles in his neck. He had muscles in places where all Mack had was soft, yielding flab.
Mack walked towards him and oh, boy, you could have heard a pin drop. So everyone certainly heard it when Santiago dropped his binder and everyone jumped and then giggled – and the anticipation just grew because now it had an element of humor to it.
Stefan came to a stop five feet from Mack.
And at that moment, a very, very old man wearing a black robe that kind of hung down over his face – a man who Mack could not help but notice smelled like some unholy combination of feet, garbage cans and Salisbury steak – simply appeared.
Appeared as in, ‘Not there,’ followed immediately by, ‘There.’
“Ret click-ur!”
That’s what the apparition cried. And no, it did not make any sense.
And weirdly all the kids in the hallway – all except for Mack and Stefan – were bathed in a sort of overbright light. It was like the light in a bus station bathroom. Wait, you’ve probably never been in a bus station bathroom (lucky for you), so imagine the kind of light you’d get if you floated up and stuck your face in a Wal-Mart ceiling light.
It was an eerily bright light of a colour that seemed to drain all signs of life out of normal kids’ faces.
“Hold!” the old man said in a whiny, hectoring croak of a voice.
And he lifted one wrinkled, age-spotted hand. The fingernails were long and yellow. The cuticles were greenish. Not happy, flowery meadow-green but mouldy, eewww-something-is-growing-on-this-sandwich green.
The aromatic, ancient, green-nailed apparition stared at nothing. Not at Mack. Not at Stefan. Possibly because his eyes were like translucent blue marbles. Not blue with a little black dot in the middle and a lot of white all around, but a sort of smeary blue that covered iris, pupil and all the other eye parts. As if he had started with normal blue eyes, but they’d been pureed in a blender and then poured back into his eyeholes.
Mack froze.
Stefan did not freeze. He frowned at the ancient man and said, “Back off, old dude.”
“Touch ye not this Magnifica,” the old man said. And he stepped between Stefan and Mack and spread his arms wide.
Then he dropped his arms, seeming too tired to hold them up.
“Fie-ma (sniff) noyz or stib!”
At least that’s what Mack thought he said. That’s what it sounded like.
And suddenly Stefan was clutching at his chest like something was going very wrong inside. His face began to turn red. He didn’t seem to be breathing very well. Or at all.
“Hey!” Mack yelled.
Stefan definitely did not look good.
“Hey, hey, hey!” Mack protested. He had some questions for the old man, starting with, Who are you? Where did you come from? How did you just appear? And even, What’s that smell? But none of those was quite as urgent as the question he did ask.
“Hey, what are you doing to him?”
The old man’s eyebrows lifted. He turned towards Mack. His creepy blue eyes were on him without seeming to focus and he said, “He may harm you not.”
“That’s fine, Yoda, but he’s not breathing!”
The old man shrugged. “It matters not. My strength fails.”
And sure enough Stefan coughed and then sucked air like a drowning kid who had just barely made it up off the bottom of the pool.
The old man blinked. He seemed perplexed. Lost. Or maybe confused.
“I fade.” The old man sighed. His shoulders slumped. “I weaken. I will return when I am able.”
Then, with a wheeze, he added, “My head hurts.”
And he was gone. As suddenly as he had appeared.
His smell left with him. And the light.
And suddenly, the kids were moving again. Their eyes were bright in anticipation again.
Mack looked at Stefan. “I know you have to beat me up and all,” Mack said to Stefan, “but before you do, just tell me: Did you see that?”
“The old guy?”
“So you did,” Mack said. “Whoa.”
“How did you do that?” Stefan asked.
“I didn’t,” Mack admitted, although maybe he should have pretended he did.
“Huh,” Stefan commented.
“Yeah.”
The two of them stood there, considering the flat-out impossible thing that had just happened. Mack could not help but notice that none of the other kids in the hallway seemed upset or weirded out or even curious, aside from a certain curiosity as to why Stefan had not yet killed Mack.
They hadn’t seen any of it. Only Mack and Stefan had.
“I wasn’t going to kick your butt anyway,” Stefan said.
Mack raised one skeptical eyebrow. “Why not?”
“Dude – you saved my life.”
“Just now you mean?”
“Whoa!” Stefan said. “That makes two times. You totally saved my life, like… twice.” He’d had to search for the word twice and he seemed pretty pleased to be able to come up with it.
Mack shrugged. “I couldn’t let you bleed to death, or even choke. You’re just a bully. It’s not like you’re evil.”
“Huh,” Stefan said.
“Kick his butt already!” Matthew shouted. He’d tolerated this cryptic conversation for as long as he could. He had waited patiently for this moment, after all, for the king of all bullies to destroy the boy who had caused him to be painted yellow.
Bits of yellow could still be seen in the creases of Matthew’s neck and in his ears.
