Chapter 11: Lionheart

Light was the problem. It always had been.

His eyes let in too much of it, and the too-much came back at him as pain, and he had spent his whole life building around that one fact. He sat with his back to windows. He kept his hair long and let it hang. He wore glasses in class that he didn’t strictly need, because glass in front of it was better than nothing, and then the snow came and took the whole system apart.

It started on the twenty-second and it didn’t stop. The light came off the ground and up, and got him from underneath, where none of his arrangements covered him, and by the twenty-third his left eye was a hot coal in his face and there was a patch taped over it.

He had stopped looking up at anything.

He was twelve years old. He was in the seventh grade.

The bullying had been going on since September. By December it had stopped being an event and become the schedule. He had stopped counting the days, and he had stopped telling anyone, which was a decision he’d made in a hallway in October and had never gone back on. He had never once seen it work out for the person who told.

At noon he came out of the cafeteria into the cold and got about ten feet.

“Hey.”

They were at the corner of the annex, where the side door empties onto the strip of concrete between the buildings. Two of them came around in front of him. One came in behind. Dane Ashby came last, unhurried, in the same jacket he wore every day of his life.

“Nice patch,” the first one said. “You finally going full pirate?”

“Turn around,” said the second. “I want to see under it. Bet there’s nothing in there.”

Eli kept his head down and said nothing. There were words in him. There were always words in him, complete ones, in order. They got as far as his throat and stopped there, the way they had stopped since he was seven.

“Look at the hair,” the first one said. “It’s always in his face. It’s like a curtain. What are you hiding in there, huh? You that ugly?”

“Little man’s got a secret.”

Dane had come up level with him by then.

“Get his arms,” he said.

They got his arms. Dane stepped in and put a foot in his stomach.

Eli came up out of the pain swinging. That was the shape it took with him: not crying, not backing up, something older than he was, all of it at once and none of it planned. He got an elbow loose. He got a hand on somebody’s jacket and held on, and the words were right there in his mouth, and nothing came out of it at all.

“You’re looking at me.” Dane was close, and bored, and careful about his shoes. “Keep it up. I’ll do the other one and you can wear two of those.”

Then the window opened.

It opened over his head, in the wall of the annex, and for a second nothing happened except a rectangle of warm light on the snow. Then an arm. Then a shoulder and half a boy, who leaned out over them with his eyes at half-mast and his hair standing up on one side, in a black-and-white jacket with leather sleeves.

He looked around at the four of them the way you look at weather.

“Picking on a kid?” he said.

His breath made a cloud. He was smiling. Eli noticed that the hands on his arms had gone slack — all of them, at the same time — and that not one of them was smiling back. Dane didn’t answer.

The boy put a hand on the sill and came out of the window and dropped, which was further than it looked. Standing, he was taller than all of them by most of a head. He stretched with his arms over his head, and yawned where they could see it, and then cracked his knuckles, one hand and then the other.

“So here’s my problem,” he said. “I was asleep.”

Nobody moved.

“I was dreaming I hit the lottery. The real one, where they take your picture and hand you a check the size of a door. I had the ticket in my hand. I was walking up to the counter.” He looked at Dane. “And then you people started up out here, and the ticket’s gone. So. What are we going to do about it?”

“Get him out of here,” Dane said, and shoved the boy next to him, a kid named Zack, hard enough that Zack had to take a step.

Zack swallowed and grabbed Eli’s arm. “Come on. Move.”

The kick caught him in the side and took him off the ground. It was very fast and very loud, and Eli heard it before he understood it — one crack of contact, and then Zack folded into the snow with nothing in his lungs.

Eli almost went over with him. Zack still had his arm, and the force came through Zack and up into Eli and lifted him off his feet, and he hung there for half a second, held up between two hands that didn’t know what to do.

Then the hand let go, and he got his feet under him.

The boy from the window was already crouched over Zack with his hands on his knees, all concern, almost friendly.

“Sorry. Sorry, that’s on me.” He shook his head like it was his own bad luck. “Bad knee. The reflex on that one goes off at nothing. Look—“

He started to raise the leg again, and all three of them went back a step, and Zack, who was on the ground and had nowhere to go, tried to go backward anyway, through the snow, on his elbows.

Dane’s ears were red. He looked at the tenth grader, and at Eli, and put the whole thing on the only person there who couldn’t do anything about it.

“Freak,” he said, quietly, and turned, and walked off across the courtyard, and the others went after him like it had been their idea.

“Run, then,” the boy said. He scratched at the hair standing up on his head and watched them go. “Boring.”

Then he looked down at Eli.

“Hey.”

Eli looked at the snow between his own feet.

“Hey. Kid.” A hand closed on his arm again, gentle this time, and turned him a little; when Eli wouldn’t lift his head, the voice dropped and went quiet, in a way that seemed meant for one person and not for the courtyard.

“You all right? You want me to walk you up to the nurse? I know where it is. I’m a regular there.”

Eli shook his head. He didn’t say anything at all. There was one thing he wanted in the world, and it was for the looking to stop.

It didn’t stop. The hand moved up off his arm and became fingers, and the fingers came to the corner of his face, and Eli felt the tape lift, just at the corner, and the cold get in under it.

“Don’t keep your head down like that,” the voice said. “Let me see. Is it your eye?”

“No.”

He got it out fast, and he got a step of distance, and he got his head as far down as it would go.

“Thanks.”

Then he ran.

There was nothing left in the courtyard but his own tracks in the new snow, and behind him another set, going back to the wall, and up.

He didn’t know his name. That was the thing that kept coming back at him for the rest of the day — through fifth period, through sixth, through the walk down to the auditorium, where the whole school was herded in for the last afternoon before break.

The winter assembly had poems in it. It had a chorus, a dance number, two solos, and a skit that had been funny at rehearsal, reportedly. There was a red curtain at the back of the stage with a banner tied over it, and by the fourth act the whole room had gone quiet and slow, the way a room goes when it has given up.

Eli sat with his hands in his sleeves and didn’t listen.

“Next,” the announcer said, reading off her card, “a solo — ‘Lean on Me.’”

Somebody laughed and somebody shushed them, and Eli didn’t even look up. He heard the microphone settle into the stand. He heard sneakers coming up the stage stairs at a run, which was not how people came up stage stairs.

“—Quin Cornell,” the kid said into the microphone, “tenth grade,” in a tone that suggested the whole thing was a joke he was letting the auditorium in on. His eyebrows were up.

Eli’s head came up with them. He knew the jacket before he knew the face.

Quin Cornell.

Quin Cornell.

He said it twice, in his own head, where nobody could take it off him.

The track didn’t come up. He sang two lines of the announced song without it — straight, plain, no accompaniment — and the sound went out over four hundred bored kids like it was nothing at all. It was good. Eli’s hands came out of his sleeves.

Then he stopped, in the middle of the third line, turned around, and raised an arm at the wings.

Three more of them came up the stage stairs and across the boards, and the whole school sat up, and the red curtain came off its rope — banner and all, in a heap — and there it was behind it, already set: a drum kit, two guitars on stands, a bass, four amps with the cables taped down to the floor.

Nobody had looked behind that curtain all day.

Eli sat up in his chair.

They went to their places like they’d done it a hundred times. The tall one picked the electric off its stand, hung it on, and walked back to the microphone, and the drummer clicked the sticks twice, and the first hit came down, and the guitar came in over it — sharp, rude, four notes — and the room went up like a line of fire.

The song was his own. It was called “Lionheart.”

Four hundred kids who had been asleep at 1:40 were on their feet. The sound came back off the back wall and rolled over the front, and the girl in the row ahead of Eli grabbed her own chair back like the floor was moving, and the boy next to her held up a phone, and none of it reached Eli at all.

[ I don’t stay down ]
[ I don’t stay down for anybody ]

By the second time through, the whole auditorium had it.

Eli stayed in his seat. He had been shut off for a long time. The sound went through him like current through a dead line, and everything in him came on at once, and it hurt, and he did not want it to stop.

Then the amps cut out.

Not the drums; nobody can unplug a drum. Everything else went, in one second, mid-bar — guitars, bass, vocal — and the guitar rang on in the room for a beat after it was gone, and the drummer, who hadn’t been told, kept going for two more and then stopped.

The Dean came up the stage stairs two at a time.

Quin laughed. He laughed through all of it — through the Dean’s hand on his sleeve, through whatever the Dean was saying into his ear, through being walked to the edge of the stage in front of the whole school. And at the edge he stopped, and turned back, and put both hands to his mouth.

“Happy New Year!”

Everything Eli had been holding down — the crosswalk, the room with the flags in it, the two years of nothing coming out of his mouth, the halls of this building since September — came up in one wave, went over him and over the stage and over the kid being walked out the side door, and then went back down.

Where it settled was the small red mark in the middle of his palm.

He looked at it for a long time. Then he looked up again, and the stage was empty, and the lights were coming up in the rest of the room.

The Dean took it from there. He wanted an apology: in writing, read out loud, at dismissal, in front of the school, with Quin standing at the rail. Quin wrote one. Nobody ever found out what was in it, except that the Dean read the thing twice and then dropped the reading altogether, and stood him up on the platform by the flagpole instead, at dismissal, in the snow, while he talked about the standards of this school.

And that was where Eli got the rest of it — standing in his class’s row in the cold with his hands in his sleeves, listening to the row next to his.

“He used to do the announcements, you know that? He was the student speaker in November. Whole school.”

“—and he took the medal at the science competition last month. That’s him. Top three in his class and he doesn’t even try.”

“I heard his dad’s in business, and his mom teaches at the university. Like, a professor. And look at him.”

“Money, brains, and a face. Some guys get all of it.”

“I think he’s cool,” said somebody at the end of the row. “He sings so good.”

“Don’t even start.” The kid next to her had his hands jammed up in his armpits against the cold and his eyes on the platform. “Mr. Brandt had him in the office again. I was standing outside with my late pass and I heard the whole thing. Listen—“

He put his head back and dropped his voice into the register of an adult who has had enough.

“’In twenty-six years I have never had one like this. He fights. He cuts class. And the grades — top three, every single term. You can’t talk to him. You can’t punish him. You shout at him and he smiles at you. I have a headache every night of my life.’”

The row laughed. Two girls did the voice back and forth to each other for the rest of it.

Eli didn’t laugh.

He stood in his row with his head down and his open eye narrowed against the light coming up off the snow, and when he could do it without being noticed, he looked up the field at the platform. Quin was up there with his hands in his pockets, in the black-and-white jacket, tall and thin and bright against the flat white sky, looking out over the whole school like he was enjoying himself.

Eli looked at him for the rest of it and didn’t hear a word the Dean said.

After dismissal he took the long way home, and there was a shop on the side street, a small one, with a neon sign in the window and nobody in it, and he rode past it, and then put his feet down in the slush and stood there for a few seconds.

Then he went back.

The woman behind the counter was maybe twenty-five, with a tray already out and a mirror on a stand, and she didn’t make it a big deal.

“What are we doing?”

“One,” he said. “Left ear.”

She laid the studs out against a black cloth and let him pick, and while she wiped everything down she said, “We don’t get a lot of boys your age, you know that?”

Eli thought about it for two seconds and decided a stranger was fine.

“Because I met somebody,” he said. “And I know his name now.”

The needle went through and it didn’t hurt much at all. He looked at himself in the mirror with the steel in his ear and the patch over his eye, at the small dent in the lobe and the thing that was going to stay in it, and he understood what it was: a mark on a list. A souvenir from a thing that had actually happened.

She gave him a card with the aftercare on it and told him to keep soap off it for a day. He read the card twice, put it in his pocket, and rode home with one hand cupped over that ear the whole way.

Then he started following him.

After that, he was wherever Quin Cornell was, at the distance that could survive a turned head. He learned the walk. He learned the laugh he used in the halls, which was not the laugh he used on a stage, and not the one he had used on the four of them in the snow. He learned which door the tenth grade came out of at lunch. He never once let himself be seen. Nobody ever told Quin Cornell who the kid with the patch was, because the kid with the patch made sure that nobody could.

He didn’t want to be helped and he didn’t want to be looked at, and there was one reason under both of those: he would rather have stayed a shadow on a wall than stand in front of that person as something to feel sorry for.

Then he found out the thing that changed it.

He heard it in a hallway, the way you hear things at twelve — two older kids, talking over his head, not seeing him, the way nobody in that building ever saw him. The kid who had come out of the window had a band. He had had one for a while. He was looking for somebody, and the piece he couldn’t find, the piece he had been looking for the whole time, was a bass player.

Eli walked the rest of the way to class and sat down and didn’t hear one thing that happened in it.

Why not me.

Because a shadow can’t hand anybody anything. If the person it’s following goes down, it goes down with him, and nobody in the world ever finds out it was there.

He learned, later, that the person he was following could come down like anybody else. He learned what that did inside his own chest when it happened.

Being a shadow wasn’t enough. He would be the hunter — come at him on his own legs, in his own right, wanted, not pitied, with the whole mess of the other person’s life held in his hands.

He was twelve years old, and he put up two targets in the gray blur of his sight.

One of them was filthy. That one wore a flowered shirt and drove a car and came to a school every afternoon to pick up his son, and he was not in jail and he was not sorry, and Eli was going to make him answer for it.

The other one shone. It stood on a platform in the snow with its hands in its pockets.

It took him six years.