Spencer and Alek had been the only two people for years who didn’t buy into the system, but Anthony had that same independent streak Spencer and Alek had, the same eye for mischief. It wasn’t just that the school days had been so monotonous for so long; the school had its tentacles in other parts of their life. Aside from paintball and airsoft gun battles, Spencer and Alek hadn’t really had lives outside of the school. Now they did.
If Anthony provided a breath of fresh air—a kid who wasn’t a drone like all the others seemed to be, a freethinker like Spencer and Alek, a kid with style, and a window into culture Spencer and Alek had no other exposure too—he was obviously just as bowled over by them. The first time he went over to Spencer’s house and saw all the guns—toy guns, airsoft guns, paintball guns, an actual shotgun in Spencer’s bedroom—his jaw dropped.
“Your parents let you have this?”
Spencer shrugged. “You’ve never seen one of these?”
“Nah, not a for-real one.”
“You’ve never been hunting?”
“No, I mean … black people don’t really hunt. It’s not like a thing we do in our leisure time.”
Anthony had never seen anything like it. Spencer began to understand that in this way too Anthony’s life had been a little different from his, that Anthony’s family had real exposure to tragic gangland violence. Anthony’s father was a delivery driver who became a pastor, a pastor who became a fixture in the community. He was the kind of man who counted the mayor and chief of police as personal friends, along with whatever celebrities Sacramento could claim, because whatever your politics were and whatever your religion was, you respected a man who went out to talk to gang members and put his body in front of violence. Pastor Sadler tried to build relationships with the people at the fringes of society, connecting his own flock with the dope peddlers and gangbangers. He tried to pull the police into it, build up relationships between police and those inclined to violence in depressed parts of the city, so that the two groups wouldn’t only see each other when people started shooting, and so that people shooting might be avoided in the first place. Even before he was ordained, Anthony’s dad had seen guns ruin far too many lives far too close to him to let his children have them as toys.
In this he mostly succeeded, keeping his children from having any exposure to guns, even while they lived in a community riddled with them. It was only when Anthony went from a public school in a rough neighborhood to the small private school in a safe one that he finally was exposed to guns.
At Spencer’s house, Anthony was out of Pastor Sadler’s reach, and he was blown away. He saved up $30 immediately to get his own airsoft gun, upgraded to an MP5, then an airsoft shotgun, and he got lost in the epic battles Alek and Spencer staged in front of their houses and down in the woods behind Schweitzer. Whole Saturdays disappeared while the three of them charged through the woods, then left and charged up Woodknoll Way toward an awaiting army. They recreated epic battles from the movies. At school the only class the three of them found at all interesting—the one subject they couldn’t even pretend not to care about—was history, because their teacher talked all the time about the world wars, and then the boys went out after class and on weekends to relive the great heroic battles: the landings at Normandy, the bombardment at Khe Sanh.
It helped that their history teacher seemed the most … well, normal. He was animated, and he fueled the boys’ interest in wars and the sporadic acts of heroism throughout history. They studied FDR; the idea of a person like that, leading a country through its greatest challenge while he himself was in physical pain, it was energizing. The teacher went into more depth about the wars than any other teacher had: World War II, Vietnam, and especially this one man, FDR, who’d handled a frenetic world and despite it had done the right things at the right times to defuse dangerous situations at critical moments. In class the boys held on to every word.
They’d watch movies, Saving Private Ryan, Letters from Iwo Jima, the fascists in the movies feeling a little familiar, Black Hawk Down, Glory, Apocalypse Now, and by the time the credits rolled, they’d swung onto their elbows and were talking over each other, “What I’d do when I got to the beach is hide behind the boat until they were reloading.” History wasn’t boring, not if you pulled open the curtains just enough so you could imagine yourself on stage. Playing the part of an infantryman charging the shoreline or a pilot buzzing the treetops to skirt enemy radar. They dreamed up scenarios in which they defeated a threat against all odds and saved the day; it got their pulses beating, and then they went out and shot each other with pellets, imagining what would happen if one day, it was one of them in the line of fire.
“I WANNA GO TO THE PROM,” Anthony said.
Spencer laughed. “You mean like with me?”
“No, man! I mean just in general, we don’t have it here. That’s my point, there’s no prom here, or homecoming, no—I don’t know. No public school stuff.” Anthony was already preparing to leave. He had a better chance to make something of himself in sports at a public school, and find a girlfriend too. Spencer couldn’t argue. You weren’t even supposed to talk to girls here. If he’d had a chance to escape, he would have taken it too.
So Anthony moved on, but the bond between them was set. They stayed in touch, Anthony still came over to play with guns and watch World War II movies. But school wasn’t the same without him there. He’d brought something new and exciting to their lives, and now that he was gone this place was even harder to tolerate.
A new school year started. Again, it was a community of two. Spencer and Alek, a bunch of people they didn’t understand, a bunch of people who didn’t understand them.
It was then, that first year after Anthony left, that the school finally went too far.
To Spencer, it was clear. Alek was singled out; he was quiet and didn’t complain, but like Spencer, everyone knew Alek didn’t buy in to the whole code. The ritualistic trips to the principal’s office were no longer enough; pressure mounted. A teacher nosing around the students’ backpacks took out Alek’s iPod, scrolled through the songs, and found one with a bad word. Another claimed to have overheard Alek talking about an argument with a classmate, and that was enough. Alek was labeled a problem child.
He was only in eighth grade, but Spencer watched him patted down every day before school like he was some kind of ex-con, and they went a step further. The school believed he needed to live with his father, and presented the new arrangement as a fait accompli to Heidi. She felt blindsided. It was dizzying; it didn’t make sense, the very school that had asked her again and again to help them, to coach soccer, volunteer in the lunchroom, volunteer in the nursery, suddenly deciding someone else’s home would be better for her child. She’d hardly had the chance to make sense of the absurd idea that Alek—Alek!—was being called a problem child, or the chance to speak her mind, before he was gone, first to his father’s house just across town, then even farther.
Spencer thought the whole thing was bullshit. He hated the place even more for separating him from his best friend. The notion that Alek, of all people, was some kind of threat was so ridiculous it was almost funny. Spencer worried about him, although when he went to visit Alek at his dad’s house, Alek seemed to be doing just fine.
“Wow,” Spencer said, running a hand over a speaker box, part of an elaborate intercom system Alek’s father had installed. “You’re pretty spoiled now.”
“Dude, I’m not spoiled.” Just then, the intercom crackled to life and a woman’s voice came over it. “Alek? Honey? Would you like chocolate sauce on your brownie?”
Spencer looked at Alek. “Okay,” Alek said, “maybe like a little spoiled.”
JOYCE WATCHED WHAT Heidi was going through with sadness. Spencer didn’t think his friend was deserving of so much attention, but was happy his mother was finally getting her blood pressure up about