Leverage by Joshua C. Cohen Page B

and squeals—yeah, squeals—as he reels backward out of the room.
    â€œYuck!”
    Ronnie—not to overstate things—is a tad sensitive, being a youth-camp Christian and all. One more reason I’m not jazzed about being mistaken for him, which happens a lot. I mean, besides being even smaller than me, Ronnie is, like, fragile—almost dainty. He never swears, either, which I don’t trust. None of it would bug me that much if people didn’t accidentally call me by his name and vice versa. Then, again, he bugs Fisher way more than he does me and no one confuses them.
    â€œWhat’s your problem, fairy?” Vance Fisher snaps as Ronnie backs into him. Fisher’s face, like the rest of ours, is scrunched up against the smell. Vance pushes Ronnie out of the way and then stops in the middle of the team-room doorway like he’s hit a glass wall. Curiosity drives the rest of us to push in past Fisher.
    A dead squirrel, its belly split open and its guts hanging out, is nailed into the center of Bruce’s locker. A scrawled note, smudged with crimson streaks and pasted below the body, reads WAIT ROOM IS OURS!!!
    The squirrel’s head is cut off and wedged into the middle air vent of Bruce’s locker. Someone’s also taken the trouble to smear squirrel guts across all of our lockers, making sure to wipe the goo over our locker dials so we’ll have to touch it while spinning our combinations.
    â€œGross.” Paul sighs, then spits into the wastebasket.
    â€œIs there a waiting room in the school I didn’t know about?” Vance snickers. “Dumb fucks can’t even spell.”
    â€œGee, I wonder who did this?” Bruce grumbles. He looks grim, as if he’s just been told his shiny, new senior year is going to suck.
    â€œJust a little varmint, fellas,” Fisher says. He walks over to the squirrel and with his bare hands yanks the thing off the nail. It sounds like a shirt tearing. Then he pinches the decapitated head with his fingers and pries it out of the locker vent. He goes over to the wastebasket and tosses in the remains, surprising me with how he handles the situation. “That the best those goons can do?” he asks. “Shoot, this ain’t nothin’ compared to deer season. You field-dress a twelve-point buck sometime and that makes this look like someone sneezed on your sleeve.” Fisher gives us his goofiest grin. “Ronnie,” he says, “go make your frosh ass useful and get a heap of paper towels, wet them, and pump the hand soap on them. We’ll have these lockers cleaned up in two minutes.”
    Ronnie does as he’s told while the rest of us just stand there scratching ourselves, stuck until the locker dials get cleaned up. Bruce starts pacing a small circle in front of the bench, softly bumping his fisted knuckles against each other. “We ain’t letting ’em get away with this,” Bruce says. Something’s churning inside him. The muscles of his neck, arms, and back clench into a hard shell. “No way I’m letting these wads think they can get away with this.”
    â€œDamn straight,” Gradley agrees.
    â€œWe got to tell someone,” Pete Delray, the other freshman, says. Bruce turns to him with a look of disgust.
    â€œYou go ahead and tell someone, Pete, and get back to me when they decide to do something,” Bruce grouses. “School ain’t gonna do shit to those guys.”
    â€œBut—”
    â€œNo, we take care of this by ourselves,” Bruce speaks over Pete’s protest. “They think they’re untouchable—especially Miller, Jankowski, and Studblatz. Well, we ain’t a bunch of pansy cross-country runners. They’re going to find that out.”
    â€œI’m liking what I hear,” Fisher says, the only one of us who seems to be enjoying himself at the moment.
    Ronnie Gunderson looks like he wants to disagree but