Free Pressure by Jeff Strand

and removed it from his neck.
    His skin was red and glistening where the rope had dug into it.
    Peter and I helped Darren down from the crate. I hurriedly unwrapped the duct tape from around his head, ripping off some hair in the process. Darren sucked in a deep breath, sounding like he was hyperventilating.
    “Aw, God…look what we did to his neck!” Peter said, his voice frantic.
    Jeremy still hadn’t moved.
    Darren fell to his knees, coughing and choking. I tried to free his wrists, but my hands were trembling too badly to unpeel the edge of the tape.
    “Are you okay?” Peter asked. “Can you breathe?”
    Darren continued coughing. He might have been sobbing, too, but I couldn’t tell.
    “We didn’t mean it,” I insisted. “We were just trying to scare you.”
    “Get away from me!” Darren managed to shout. “Just leave me alone!”
    We all moved away from him. Darren stayed on his knees for an unbearably long time, just staring at the ground and trying to catch his breath.
    Finally he spoke: “My neck hurts.”
    “We’re sorry,” I said.
    “I mean it really hurts. It might be broken.”
    “It can’t be broken,” Peter said.
    “Shut up! You don’t know! Get this off my hands!”
    It took a couple of minutes, but I finally managed to get the tape off his hands. He held them in front of him, clenching and unclenching his fists; then he touched his neck and gazed at his red fingertip.
    “I’ll probably have to go to the hospital.”
    “You might not,” said Peter. “It doesn’t look that bad.”
    “Well, it feels that bad! You guys made me bleed out my neck! I might die! I hope I do die. Then we’ll see what happens to you!”
    Jeremy suddenly came out of his daze. “So, we’re even, right? You killed his dog and we got back at you.”
    “I didn’t kill his dog!” Darren shouted, so loud that Peter, Jeremy, and I all instinctively looked back to make sure nobody was around to hear.
    “But you cut him up.”
    “So what? I cut up a dead dog!” Darren ran his palm across the side of his neck and held it up to show us. “Look what you did to me! His dumb dog was already dead when I found it, so all I did was biology. You guys were almost murderers!”
    “No, we weren’t,” I said. “I told you, we were just trying to scare you.”
    Darren shoved his palm into my face. “That’s not what this looks like.”
    “But it’s true. We were going to let you down.”
    “I don’t care. I’m going back to school, and I’m going to tell Mr. Sevin exactly what you fuckers did to me.”
    He walked off.
    We helplessly watched him go.
     
    Chapter Seven
    “He won’t tell anyone,” said Jeremy, as Darren turned and vanished from sight.
    “What do you mean?” I asked. “How can he not tell anyone? You think he’s just going to wander around with a bloody neck?”
    “He can wear a turtleneck! It won’t be just us three who get busted if he says anything. He will, too. You think he wants that?”
    “He might decide that it’s worth it,” said Peter.
    “Don’t be stupid. He’s not going to say anything. He’s a messed-up dog killer. We might get kicked out of school, but he’ll get stuck in a psycho house.”
    “He didn’t kill the dog,” I said.
    “Then what he did is even more messed up! Let him go cry to Sevin. He’ll be sorry.”
    I felt like I was going to vomit. I couldn’t get kicked out of Branford Academy. Who knew what my parents would do with me next? It was bad enough what they did when they just didn’t want me around; if they were genuinely mad at me, I might end up someplace more miserable than I could imagine.
    Or I could end up in juvenile hall.
    The police would certainly realize that we’d only been trying to scare Darren, that we weren’t really going to rip out his guts, but if he told on us, I was truly, deeply screwed.
    “I’m gonna run up ahead and talk to him,” I said.
    “Don’t bother,” said Jeremy. “Let the freak go.”
    “No, I’m