Free Flyers (9781481414449) by Daniel Hayes

younger kids, and even a lot of the older ones, really thought he was hot stuff because he’d “been there,” as he always put it when referring to his drug days, and I figuredsome of them would end up “being there” themselves so they could be just like him. I hoped the junior high kids didn’t have anything major they needed resolved because when Emmett spotted me after the pileup in the gym doorway, he jettisoned his active listening skills (which consisted of rephrasing a speaker’s words—nonjudgmentally, of course, and acting like he cared) and started giving the kids the bum’s rush.
    â€œI hear ya, man,” he said to the earnest-looking kid who’d been doing most of the talking. “I hear ya. Be cool.” He held up a hand to be slapped, and that slap was the last and only thing the kid got from a rapidly receding, caring but nonjudgmental Emmett.
    â€œOh, God,” I said to Bo as Emmett approached. “I’m not up for this.”
    Bo laughed and lifted my arm so that my hand would meet Emmett’s hello slap.
    â€œGabe, my man,” Emmett said, parlaying the slap into a hug.
    I stood there and got hugged. The only thing on me that moved was my stomach, which I could feel tightening. I knew the reason I was on Emmett’s A-list, and it made me want to punch him in the head. It so happened that Emmett had been on the scene with us a few weeks earlier when Pop had caused a commotion on Main Street. Emmett had been staying at Bo’s house that whole week because Bo was the head-honcho-captain-commander-in-chief or some such thing of our social worker Bob Chirillo’s peer leadership group, which specialized in talking about and putting on skits about drugs and drinking and suicide and other cheerful matters. The fact that Bo was even in peer leadership was strange, because in real life he’s the last guy who would sit around discussing any ofthese things. But Bo’s pretty much into every school activity there is—sports, band, politics (he’s class president), student council, you name it—and that’s the kind of person peer leadership recruits.
    Anyway, that whole week Emmett had been at the school talking to us—no, Emmett’s word was educating us—not only about the dangers of drugs and alcohol, but also about things like model cement and Wite-Out used “inappropriately,” and that Friday evening was the big drug awareness rally in the school auditorium. And because Emmett was the type who really got off telling everybody how far down he’d been, and how his family was dysfunctional, and how many different drugs he’d taken in his life and in what combinations, and how many times he’d woken up in alleyways in neighborhoods that were tougher and meaner than anything we’d ever seen living in a nothing-happening place like Wakefield, and because Bob Chirillo and Ray Phineas, our Barney Fife D.A.R.E. officer, were both in seventh heaven basking in Emmett’s reflected glory and whenever they could adding their own two cents worth, which generally grew into folding money, the panel discussion ran way overtime. So I didn’t get to check on Pop as early as I should have, and he overdid it at Willie’s. Charlie did manage to get Pop’s keys so he wouldn’t drive, but Pop, after a while, had set off for further adventures on foot.
    And it just so happened that right after the rally let out, Pop was coming out of the Cloud Nine tavern and, by this time, was feeling no pain. Our village’s traffic light—the only one we had unless you counted the one out by the Kmart plaza, which was technically outside the village limits—had already switched to its blinking mode for the night, and traffic was starting to back upbehind the flashing red. Pop, who tended to be public-spirited with or without the inspiration of alcohol, must have thought he could be of some