“He didn’t,” Toshi said and rubbed at his temples. “It’s always been the three of us.”
“You embarrass us. You’re weird; you’re not really one of us. We’re sick of you.” I left him then, marching on ahead, and for about a hundred steps, I felt good for asserting my position as Jay’s only real friend, and then for the next hundred steps, I felt a little queasy, and then an image of Toshi’s thin xylophone of a chest smeared with peanut butter flashed through my mind, and I felt downright terrible about what I’d said, but there was no taking it back, now, not without making me look like just as much of a wimp as Tosh.
Chapter 10
The Monday following the party, everyone at school was talking about the piss bombs; the rumor was that the rival high school soccer team had done it. People said there had been ten bombs, or twenty, and some of them had been filled with hot sauce or shit or little pieces of metal. I felt like a secret celebrity, which was nice, though it would have been killer to be a non-secret celebrity, to have everyone at school know my real name for once.
But in fifth period, when my name, along with Toshi’s and Jay’s, was called over the loudspeaker, fear filled my chest.
The principal gathered us into her office. “We take acts of terrorism very seriously at this school,” she said.
Jay shook his head. “Terrorism?”
“Shut your mouth. What the three of you did on Saturday night was unacceptable. It was a biohazard, too.”
“And what is it that you think we did?” Jay’s voice was hard, which didn’t help his case any in the principal’s eyes.
“You’re off the team,” she said. “We don’t need a hooligan like you representing our school in sports.”
“No.” Jay wriggled like a trapped animal. “That’s not fair, seriously. I didn’t do anything.”
The principal had it all planned out: at the right moment in her little speech, the police barged in and dropped their meaty hands onto our shoulders. One of them was the D.A.R.E. officer, and he looked way happier than he did when he was up on the assembly stage telling all us kids why drugs were bad. The officers hauled us out to their squad car, then shoved the three of us into its backseat. Beside me, Toshi shivered and gnawed his bottom lip. It felt like I’d been dropped inside a movie and the whole façade would fall away at any moment, but when I pressed against the door of the police car, it stayed solid and unmoving.
“What the hell is happening?” I said. The police were standing on the sidewalk, gossiping with the principal. “How are they allowed to do this?”
“I told Mark it was us,” Jay said. His distress blew through the air like a hot wind.
“You did what?”
“That pussy bammer must have told on us. What kind of man snitches like that?”
“Everyone thought it was Dover High!” I said. “Why would you ruin that?”
“It was a killer idea,” Jay said, “and it was mine. If the wrong people get credit, that takes away half the fun. When Mark found out that it was my piss in his eyes—you should have seen him freak.”
Toshi whimpered.
“We are in so much trouble,” I said as the policemen let themselves into the car.
“They can’t really kick me off the team.” Jay shook his head. “They can’t; there’s no way. It wouldn’t be fair. Besides, they need me.”
At the station, a lady police officer took each of our fingers and rolled them across a pad of ink, then across a sheet of paper. She was kind of pretty, and normally, having her touch my hand like that would have given me a boner, but I was too scared.
They took our pictures with a slew of numbers held beneath our chins, and then we were handcuffed to a bench in the hall.
After maybe an hour, an officer came to talk with us.
“How does it feel to be treated like real criminals, boys?” he said.
“We didn’t do it!” Toshi blurted out. “One in twenty-five on death row are innocent. It’s easy to get it wrong.”
The officer rolled his eyes. “I know everything. And I know that I have enough on you to keep you here in jail.”
“It was just a prank,” I said. “It wasn’t terrorism or whatever. Nobody got hurt, right?”
“You need to understand there are repercussions to your actions,” the officer said. “You’re lucky we caught you so that you can figure out early on how criminals get punished. I’m going to leave you to think about what you did. Think about how to be men.” He walked away and poured himself a cup of coffee, and we didn’t see him again for three hours. At first, we speculated about whether or not they could trace piss the way they could blood, and Toshi, on the verge of tears, kept sucking snot back up into his nose. Then we all fell quiet and restless and I tried to only think about the pinch of my wrist inside the handcuff.
When the officer finally came back, he said that we each could have a phone call. “Get someone to come pick you up. I want you out of my sight.”
He uncuffed Jay first and led him over to a phone a couple of yards away while I said, “Wait—we can go? You’re letting us go?”
The police officer watched Jay dial. “Dad,” Jay said, and, “yes. Yes. Yes. Okay.”
When Jay was beside me, again manacled to the bench, he said, “My dad won’t come. He’s mad I’m off the team. He’s real mad.”
But Toshi’s dad said he’d come for all three of us, which was good, since my dad didn’t answer.
Standing on the sidewalk in front of the police station, Tosh said, “I think they were just trying to scare us. I don’t think they had any intention of keeping us in jail, but they wanted to make it seem really serious with the mugshots and the fingerprinting.”
“My dad never came to one of our games,” Jay said, “but still I think he hates me. Now I don’t play. That bitch principal.”
“There’s my dad,” Toshi said. “Pulling up in the parking lot. I bet he’s going to ground me, no book or horn or anything. Probably my skull will collapse from boredom.”
Jay glanced at the rows of cars, then stared in the opposite direction. “I’m walking.”
“What?”
“I can’t be cooped up in no car right now.”
I sort of felt like following him, but I knew it was a long walk, and the ordeal had left me bone-tired.
“I still don’t believe you,” Toshi said to me as we watched Jay getting smaller. “That Jay doesn’t want me around anymore.”
“Whatever,” I said.
Chapter 11
Jay was sprung from class early on Thursday to go with his family to that conference in Kentucky. During lunch, while I stared at Jay’s empty seat, I thought about the time in third grade when his parents had come for him, the possessive way they steered him off. Jay seemed to belong to his family more than I did to mine, but maybe that was because my family was just my dad—not really enough people to make an actual one.
After school, Toshi and I met up, but without Jay there, we weren’t sure what to do with ourselves. We only talked about him.
“I wonder if they’ll drive straight through,” Toshi said.
“All the way to Kentucky?”
“That’s how people get aneurysms. They don’t move their legs, and their blood clots…”
In front of Jay, Toshi and I had pretended to be friends, but now that he was absent, I wasn’t sure if I should keep pretending that things were fine—only, I wasn’t even sure that things weren’t fine. Toshi was still a part of our crew, and now that Jay was gone, I wouldn’t have had anyone to stand beside if not for Tosh. Maybe Toshi talking shit about my dad being a drunk, and me telling Tosh that he was weird, that Jay wanted him out of our group, was ultimately inconsequential, just like the fight we’d gotten into in the sixth grade over my Gameboy that I said Toshi had broken and Toshi said was broken already. I had hated him fiercely for about three days, and then all my anger had disappeared, and we were normal again.