Fake ID Page 3

  “I felt like something was missing until you started nagging. Now I’m content.” Dad landed a sarcasm uppercut, his stock and trade.

  I closed my door, maneuvered around unpacked junk, and lay on my unmade bed. Earbuds in, iPod cranked, I stayed there until the sun went down, then fell asleep with a rapper shouting at me.

  At least his yelling had a good beat.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE NEXT DAY, I GRABBED A roll of quarters from one of the open boxes in my room. When I walked into the gym, I formed a fist around the coins, anticipating another run-in with Zach Lynch. Coach Peyton stopped me before I made it to the locker room.

  “Schedule change, Pearson.”

  He handed me a warm sheet of paper fresh off the printer. All my classes had been switched around. I was now due in English this period.

  “Why?” I said.

  Peyton gave me a look that made me feel like I was coated in slime. “Better for everyone. Now get.”

  He went into his office and closed the door. Kids exited the locker room in their tight uniforms, ready to stretch and jump. Even though I still wore my street clothes, I felt more exposed than them, and tried to spot a familiar face. Eli. Or Reya. Or even Zach. Someone who might make eye contact, nod, and let me know that totally random schedule changes were the norm at Stepton High. I didn’t see any of them.

  The warning bell rang, and I didn’t have a hall pass today. I got going, slipping the roll of quarters I’d been planning to bash Zach’s face with in my pocket. I’d use the money to get a soda or some candy from one of the vending machines.

  Maybe this change was better for everyone.

  The rest of the week felt like starting over at a completely different school. I didn’t see any of the people I’d met on my first day. No more photo ops or student guides. No one tried to beat me up. All of my day-one drama faded like every other school experience I’d had.

  Homework piled. I did most of it and managed to unpack the boxes in my room, a good distraction between the alternating fights and prolonged silences from my parents.

  At the start of the weekend, I left school contemplating a very serious question: What do people do on Fridays in Stepton? I got home, found Mom staring through the living room window, almost trancelike, and new questions came to mind.

  “Mom?”

  She spoke without looking at me. “What direction do you think that is?”

  “South,” I said, having memorized much of the town’s topography. “Why?”

  “I bet Florida is nice this time of year. Remember when we all went to Disney for the first time?”

  No, I didn’t. I was like four. I sniffed and detected the smell of dinner in the oven, only slightly stronger than the scent of fresh bleach. “Did you spend all day cleaning again?”

  “Just the morning.”

  I asked my real question. “Mom, are you going crazy?”

  She smiled. “Going? I think we all arrived at that destination a while ago.”

  Maybe she had a point. On many days I felt like I was on the far side of sane. The constant game of make-believe got to you after a while. When you’re in the Program, you got what’s called a legend. It sounds epic, like that Will Smith movie with the zombie vampires, but it’s not. Trust.

  Every new identity needs a backstory. You can’t just move to a town and start stuttering when your neighbor asks where you’re from and what brought you to the area. Thus the legend, a detailed history of everyone in the family.

  The Pearsons were the victims of an auto industry layoff in Detroit. We moved to Virginia because the cost of living was cheaper than up north. Dad, he’s good with numbers, so they got him a job at a local accounting office. Mom worked as a Realtor at our last assignment, but they made her a housewife here. Me? My legend says I’m an average teen who likes to play lacrosse, is an overachiever when it comes to science, and enjoys hip music.

  Really, that’s what it says: “enjoys hip music.”

  They told us they factored in aspects of our true selves, but after four do-overs, I imagined the guys in the legend department playing Wheel of Personalities and assigning us whatever the needle stopped on. Mom caught a bad spin this time.

  She’d always had a job before. Busy. Gone all day. Ever since we got to Stepton, she’d been stuck in the house, alone, nothing to do but think and clean. Clean and th—

  A booming sound echoed through the house. A sound like gongs.

  Mom and I locked eyes. I felt like we were rabbits in the forest, and that noise was incoming bulldozers.

  “What is that?” I said. It happened again. Dong-DONG-dong-DONG.

  Mom bent her knees like she was about to dive behind the couch. “Is that—?”

  She didn’t finish because she didn’t have to. I knew what it was. Yes, that.

  The doorbell.

  We crouched by the windowsill, peeking through the blinds. An unexpected visitor? We’d barely had any during our time in the Program, and they were always a source of anxiety. In the event my family’s enemies showed up to kill us, we had an emergency procedure . . . provided you weren’t, you know, already dead. It involved evacuation. Making sure you weren’t being followed. Getting to a safe house. In the panic moment, it occurred to me that assassins might not be nice enough to ring.

  “Who is it?” Mom asked.

  “I don’t know.” I did know. The person stepped away from the door like they might leave, giving us a better view. I recognized the blue crown emblem stitched into his bag. “Eli.”

  Mom said, “Who?”

  “What’s that wonderful smell, Mrs. Pearson? Meat loaf?”

  I grabbed Eli’s backpack strap and dragged him toward the stairs. “Don’t worry about it. You aren’t staying long.”

  “Nick,” Mom said, “you’re being rude.”

  I ignored her, pulling Eli along.

  He said, “It was a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Pearson.”

  In my room, with the door closed, I turned on him. “WTF, dude?”

  “I could ask you the same thing.” He dropped the exaggerated pleasantries. “You never came back.”

  “What are you—?” I flashed on my first day and the J-Room. God, it felt like it happened last year. “Oh, right. My schedule got changed.”

  “I know. That only accounts for school hours, though. I waited until like five on Tuesday.”

  “Sorry, I forgot. My bad.”

  “It is.”

  What was this? I felt like my parents when they argue. “You know this is weird, right?”

  Eli wasn’t shy about checking out my room, touching things on my desk, eyeballing my posters. Violating my personal space. Now I knew how he felt when I grabbed his camera in the J-Room. “Eli, how did you know where I live?”

  “Small town. I barely had to ask.” He examined the disks stacked next to my game system. “Mostly sports. No shooters?”

  He had a twinge of disgust in his voice. A challenge I met with enthusiasm. I grabbed a plastic GameStop bag I’d unpacked the night before and pulled the shrink-wrapped disk from it. “I got the new Modern Battlefield last week, haven’t had a chance to play yet.”

  He reached for a controller. “That’s too bad, since I’ve been playing all this week. I sense a brutal defeat in your future.”

  Eli made himself at home, taking a seat in my desk chair. Kicked off his shoes. Deputy Marshal Bertram droned in my mind, buzzing all kinds of warnings about being alert, and being suspicious of people I don’t know.

  I ignored the voice. This guy was in my room, talking trash. I needed to shoot him with a rocket launcher. “Load it up.”

  Two hours later, Eli was up six death matches to four, but I was mounting a comeback. Empty plates stained with meat loaf gravy and mashed potato remnants rested at our feet. Crumpled orange soda cans crested the lip of my trash bin. Old-school rap bumped through my iPod dock. Eli was a fan, which made the trouncing he was giving me forgivable.

  I never found out
what the average Steptonian did on a Friday night, but we were doing fine.

  We stopped around seven o’clock at a 10–10 tie, mostly due to finger cramps. We agreed to a tiebreaker when we’d had a chance to rest, so we could bring our A games.

  Eli powered down the system and rubbed fatigue from his eyes. “Your schedule got changed because of what happened with Zach.”

  “What?”

  “Russ was running his mouth about what they did to you. It got back to Coach Peyton. He wants to keep Zach eligible for football, so they decided to remove anything that might trigger his poor impulse control.”

  That marinated a moment. “I’m the problem?”

  “That’s the way they see it. Welcome to Stepton, where the innocent are the guiltiest.”

  “And you know this, how?”

  He gave me a sideways look. Right. He’s got a lot of influence in Stepton High. He said, “You coming to the J-Room on Monday?”

  “You’d make a great car salesman.”

  With an eyebrow arched, “Well?”

  “Promise not to come by here without shooting me a text first. My parents are funny about that sort of thing.”

  “Your mom didn’t seem to mind.”

  “She’s not my only parent. Text me.”

  “I promise. So, J-Room?”

  “I’ll come by Monday.”

  “Good, because I’m expecting you to get invited to a Dust Off fairly soon, and I want to prep you.”

  “Invited to a what?”

  He handed me his cell. “Put your number in.”

  I took it and two versions of Bertram got into a shouting match in my head like the devil and the angel in cartoons. One screamed about acting normal, and the other yelled about being careful. It might look weird if I didn’t give up the digits, so I went with normal, despite some concerns. I entered my number. “What is a ‘Dust Off,’ Eli?”

  “A Dust Off—a party. Don’t worry, we’ll go over everything next week.”

  He took back his phone with my number entered and pressed Send, and my cell buzzed in my pocket. “Okay,” he said. “You should have my number now. If anything comes up over the weekend I’ll be in touch. Otherwise, Monday.”

  Eli tried to leave. I grabbed his shoulder, stopping him. “Whoa! What just happened?”

  “I spared you a weekend of fixating on my victory.”

  “No, I mean this party thing. What’s that about?”

  He smirked and gave me what I’d come to think of as general Eli weirdness. “Patience. We’re forming Voltron: Defender of the Universe. Just wait.”

  Was he speaking English?

  His phone rang. “I gotta take this. Monday, don’t be late or I’m coming by for dinner and a movie next time.” He took the stairs and shouted, “See you later, Mrs. Pearson.”

  The front door slammed and he was gone. Mom met me on the first-floor landing. “I’m glad you’re making friends, sweetie. He seems nice. And hungry.”

  I stared at the door like I could still see Eli through it. “I’m not exactly sure he is a friend. Not yet.”

  “At least he left before your father came home. Whatever that boy is, we don’t want him to get a bad impression of us, do we?”

  Before I could answer she returned to a mop and bucket in the kitchen.

  Eli could’ve stayed an hour—or four—later and still maintained a good impression of us. Dad didn’t get home until almost eleven o’clock, kicking off Friday Night Fights at the Pearsons’. Mom was asking what my strip-mall-accountant father was doing so late on a Friday. So was I. History tells us he probably wasn’t feeding the homeless.

  Of course, he didn’t give a straight answer, or any answer. Unless you counted grunts and attitude. I tried not to make too much of it. We’d only been in town a week. That’s a short time to stir up any serious trouble, even for Dad. Still . . .

  I stayed up practicing Modern Battlefield—and contemplating Dad’s tardiness—while police sirens wailed low somewhere in town.

  CHAPTER 6

  ON MONDAY, I LEARNED Of THE phenomenon known as the Dust Off. Not from Eli but from the organizer himself, during lunch.

  I searched for an isolated seat where I could force-gag a rectangular slice of pizza down my throat. A crowded table in the middle of the cafeteria generated most of the noise in the room, a murmuring roar. Pretty girls and bulky guys packed in so tight some didn’t have chairs. Yet a lanky kid with dirty-blond hair waved more people over. I turned to see which attractive/athletic person was being beckoned. The only thing behind me was a wall.

  I looked back to what was literally the center of attention, and the kid changed his gesture. He pointed at me, mouthed the words “Yeah, you.”

  I moved toward them, reluctantly. In a different lunch period, Zach Lynch would be the alpha in this popularity pack, and going to his lair would lead to something stupid or violent. Probably both. The influence of the school’s football star might extend beyond a single lunch period, meaning I could still be walking into a bad situation. The worst thing: that realization came when I was already among them.

  The kid that waved me over sat on a table, his legs swinging. His skinny jeans were so tight they looked like scar tissue. He wore an equally tight black T-shirt under a denim jacket. All in all a lightweight. One punch would knock him into his next class. I sized up other, more formidable guys in the group as most of the conversations tapered off. Everyone became aware of my presence, and my skin went clammy, making my underclothes stick to me.

  Skinny Jeans said, “You’re new. Nick, right?”

  “Yeah. Who are you?”

  “Carrey.” He tapped a large, black guy in a letterman jacket on the shoulder. Seeing other brown faces relaxed me. “This is Lorenz.”

  “‘Sup.” Lorenz offered his palm and I slapped it.

  Carrey introduced me to a few more people, who were friendly enough, but I still didn’t get where this sudden burst of goodwill was coming from. I’d eaten here all last week and no one cared. Why the change now?

  My cold pizza got colder and I noticed a couple of hot girls at the end of the table with a dark-haired guy wedge between them. He was twisted away from me—to better manage the girl in his lap. With his free hand, he stroked the thigh of the second girl, who sat on the table, kind of like Carrey, but with her legs spread so that the guy and girl #1 were positioned between them.

  They all wore jeans, so it wasn’t like the girl on the table was full-on panty vision, but still . . . it was raunchy. I guess I’d brought a little bit of Idaho with me. There, couples couldn’t get that close at a school dance, forget about a broad-daylight three-way in the middle of the cafeteria. I expected some teacher to break it up, but all of them seemed interested in something other than the erotic powwow I was witnessing.

  Carrey said, “Hey, D, he’s here.”

  The dark-haired middle of the people sandwich craned his neck and spotlighted me with bright, traffic-light green eyes. “My man!”

  He nodded and the girl in his lap climbed off, pouting. The girl on the table swung one leg up and away, but slowly, for the boy’s benefit. The move might score her bonus points at a future strip club audition, but today it just allowed “D” an escape from her thigh lock.

  “D” stood, his long cargo shorts exposing half of his muscular calves, and a loose, natty sweater hung over his torso. He was my height, but lighter, fitter. He bounced when he walked. All swagger.

  Hey, D, he’s here. . . .

  What did “D” want with me? When he introduced himself, I knew. Because of Eli. “What’s up, Nick. I’m Dustin. Heard some good stuff about you.”

  “Then he’s all like, ‘People said Zach’s boys jumped you but you gave them the business,’ and everyone started laughing,” I said to Eli in the J-Room after school.

  He leaned back in his chair with a serious look on his face. “Go on.”

  I told him the rest, about how Dustin kept giving me props for standing up to “Roi
d Rage Zach” and then invited me to his party on Saturday.

  “Anything else?” Eli said.

  “No, the period bell rang and everyone jetted. But he told me to come to the”—I felt stupid calling it a Dust Off, a horrible play on Dustin’s name—“party. Just like you said.”

  He stroked his chin like there was hair there. “It happened faster than I thought, but I think we’re still okay.”

  “About that . . .”

  “You want to know how I knew he’d invite you,” he said.

  I shook my head. “No. I got that part figured. You told me Russ had been running his mouth, and that got my schedule changed. Thing is, I don’t think Russ would’ve told people I put up a good fight. Makes Zach look bad. But Dustin couldn’t shut up about all this respect I had because of the way I handled myself. Funny how neither version mentions you showing up with your trusty camera.”

  He went silent.

  “Eli?”

  “Okay, I leaked the story. With some edits.”

  My fingers curled around an imaginary roll of quarters. “What do you think you’re doing, man?”

  “I knew if you had enough buzz, people would notice, and you’d get an invite to the Dust Off. It’s a good thing.”

  I don’t like people telling me what’s good for me. We hardly ever agree. “Let me guess, you didn’t get an invite.”

  He wouldn’t look me in the eye. “I’m not into cliquey stuff like that.”

  “What, I’m supposed to go spy on the kids at this party, bring you some dirt to print in your paper? Then they can treat both of us like outcasts?”

  He jerked like I’d jabbed him with something hot. “It’s not like that, Nick.”

  “Right now it seems like you’re using me for . . . hell, I have no idea what this is about. Here’s what I do know: the story you ‘leaked,’ that’s going to get back to Zach, if it hasn’t already. You think he’s going to pat me on the back and invite me to his house? I don’t need you making more trouble for me, Eli.”

  I grabbed my stuff, for once heeding all the warnings I’d heard from the U.S. Marshals over the years. Whatever Eli was trying to pull me into smelled bad. I didn’t need details; I just wanted to steer clear. Plus, I had to get to the conference call with Bertram. “I’m gone.”