Leverage by Joshua C. Cohen Page A

the blond roots are showing. For a second, I think she looks familiar, but I get distracted by her ears, each of which has about fifty-seven piercings. As she speaks, a glint of metal piercing her tongue causes a slight lisp. Makes me wonder how she eats. Or kisses.
    â€œKurt?” she asks, using my name like she knows me. Those blue eyes lock on mine, never drifting to my scars, not even for a moment. I nod at the question and duck my head. “Kurt.” She repeats my name. “You don’t remember me.” She reaches up and pulls her hair back as if that somehow will explain everything.
    â€œIt’s Christina,” she says. “Tina. I was at Meadow’s House when you were there. Well, only for a few months, thank God, before they transferred me. On the girls’ side. Well ... duh, of course on the girls’ side. I mean, why would I’ve been . . .”
    Meadow’s House .
    The name reaches out and clutches my throat and I can’t breathe. It trips off her tongue—metal piercing clacking against her teeth as she pronounces it—and makes me ill. I push my plate away. Kids came and went from Meadow’s House. The lucky ones were adopted. Others, like me and Lamar, just got stuck. Crud Bucket ran the boys’ wing. He owned it and he owned every boy that passed through it. When the men in coats and ties asked me to tell them exactly what happened, I started from the beginning and didn’t leave out a single thing Crud Bucket did to me and Lamar. I couldn’t forget if I tried.
    But no one at Oregrove is supposed to know about Meadow’s House. No one. They told me that. No one will know about my past. They promised!
    â€œI duh-duh-don’t know you.” I push the words out.
    â€œI was there,” she says, her mouth rising at the corners. “I remember you, Kurtis. I remember your friend,” she says. “I couldn’t believe what they said happened on the boys’ side—”
    â€œNuh-nuh-nuh-nothing happened,” I say, unable to meet her eyes. “Go buh-buh-buh-back to your friends,” I tell her. “We duh-duh-don’t know each other. I duh-duh-duh-don’t know yuh-yuh-you.” I press down on the table to get my legs out from under the bench. I rise up, getting bigger, towering over the little goth girl pouting up at me with confusion on her milky face. She’s scrawny. Almost as scrawny as me and Lamar back then. Bad thoughts surface like swamp gas and I need to escape, to hustle to the weight room and start stacking plates and heave some pig iron until my memory fails—or my body does. Staring down at this girl, I want to grow even bigger, reassure myself that no one will ever hurt me like that again.

9
    DANNY
    F irst thing hits all of us is the smell.
    A sickly sweet odor creeps up our nostrils; the type you whiff when driving past a crushed dog or pulpy raccoon on the side of the road, flies buzzing all over the bloated fur and gore. The larger locker-room area usually smells bad but not this bad. We have it all to ourselves since our team works longer and harder than any of the other sports and by the time we finish, everyone else has gone home. Coach Nelson made the right call, leaving through the front of the gym and sparing himself the whiff of death. As we head toward our team locker room, built off from the main room locker room, the stench only gets stronger.
    â€œDamn, Paul.” Fisher coughs. “You wanna start using deodorant or showering or something? You’re killing me here.”
    â€œWhatever it is, Fish,” Paul answers, “it must’ve crawled out your ass.”
    â€œIt’s worse than that practice when Fisher ate only CornNuts for breakfast and lunch,” Gradley says, waving his hand in front of his face. “Fisher, you been eating CornNuts again?”
    Ronnie Gunderson, unlucky enough to reach our team locker room first, flicks the light switch