Free Dead Water Zone by Kenneth Oppel Page B

toward the glistening puddle of Randy’s saliva.
    “Randy, come on!” Paul shouted, but they held him tight.
    “Shut up and watch.” Randy grinned. “This is for your viewing pleasure.”
    They’d been ambushed on their way home from school. They’d been taking the secret route through the park for months, but Randy had found out and was waiting with a whole bunch of his friends.
    Peter and Gavin dragged Sam’s face into the spittle, but his lips were clamped tight. He tried to raise a hand to wipe his cheek, butthey restrained him.
    Randy prodded him in the ribs with his sneaker. “Forget it,” he said. “We like you like this. Don’t you think it suits him?” he asked the crowd. Laughter.
    Paul looked around in revulsion. “That’s enough!”
    Randy looked at him with interest. “You love it, Paul. Admit it, you love seeing this.”
    Paul caught his brother’s eye, but Sam looked away.
    “There’s not much to him, is there?” Randy said. “Let’s see how little there really is.”
    Sam started to struggle again. Paul couldn’t bear the panic in his eyes.
    “Randy, that’s enough, damn it!” he yelled. He struggled with all his might, but the three boys holding him only clamped down tighter.
    “Paul, you’ve always wanted this,” said Randy.
    Gavin and Peter were ripping Sam’s shirt. Paul watched, mesmerized. They pulled away the tattered fabric, exposing Sam’s pale chest. Then they dragged his naked, firepole arms over his head so that he looked even skinnier, skeletal.
    “Look at his arms!”
    “His chest’s weird!”
    “His jeans,” Randy said.
    “No,” Paul mumbled. “No!”
    When they were finished, Sam was stripped down to his underwear, lying on his side, his knees pulled up to his chest.
    “Sam, you okay?”
    Sam stood up, his back to Paul, and dragged his jeans on. He arranged the tatters of his T-shirt over his shoulders and walked away.
    “Sam.” Paul followed at a slight distance. “Sam, I tried.”
    Sam kept walking.
    “They held me back.”
----
    “There was nothing you could’ve done,” said Monica.
    He wanted to believe her. Nothing he could have done. But he’d come too far with the truth now. “I told Randy Smith where we’d be. I told him to wait there for us.”
    She didn’t say anything.
    “I didn’t plan it, not really.” He studied her face, trying to decipher the look in her piercing eyes. “He was so pleased to be going away to college, so happy to be leaving Governor’s Hill. It shouldn’t have made me so angry, but I felt like he’d forgotten all the things I did for him, taking care of him. None of it was important to him anymore.”
    “So how did it happen?”
    “I was in the locker room after swim practice one day, and Randy was there, and they started baiting me about Sam. Usually it’s like flashes of dark colors in my head. But this time, I just started agreeing with them. And the more they went on, the angrier I got—not with them but with Sam. I just blurted out about our secret way home from school. He was going to wait there for us. He’d give Sam a scare, that was all, maybe a few shoves. That was our deal.”
    “Randy broke it. Not you.”
    “Well, I was an idiot to believe him, wasn’t I? Paul—who suddenly trusts the enemy.” The enemy. You love this, Paul. Admit it, you love seeing this. And somewhere deep inside him, a very quiet voice had replied, Yes, I do.
    “Did Sam know it was you?”
    “No. But he still blames me. When I came down here, I was hoping I could somehow fix things between us.” He combed his fingers restlessly through his hair, suddenly assailed by doubts. “But it’s been so long now. Maybe he doesn’t want me here at all; maybe I just imagined it to make myself feel important. How can I convince him to stop taking the water? What would I say?”
    Monica stood and lit an old oil lantern hanging from the ceiling.
    “I don’t know what I’d say if I found my mom.I’d probably be angry as