With his free hand Mack grabbed the aromatic T-shirt and clumsily tied it around Stefan’s massive bicep. He knotted it tight, all while keeping his palm pressed down on the red gusher.
The blood flow slowed some more.
“I can’t keep this up; we need help,” Mack said.
Stefan’s eyes flickered with what would surely be a temporary understanding of the word we.
A powerful word, we.
“You have a cell phone?” Mack asked. Cells were absolutely banned at school, so only about two-thirds of the students carried them.
Stefan nodded. His never exactly perky expression was even duller than usual. But he jerked his chin towards his pants pocket.
“OK, you need to pull on this tourniquet, right?” Mack said. Seeing the blank expression, Mack explained, “The shirt. Pull on the knot with your left hand. Pull hard.”
Stefan managed to do this but barely. Mack noticed that his fingers were clumsy, fumbling. His strength was fading.
Mack pried the cell out of Stefan’s pants pocket and dialed 911.
“Nine-one-one, what is the nature of your emergency?” a bored voice asked.
“I have a nine-year-old boy pumping blood all over the place,” Mack said.
“Nine?” Stefan asked, like he wasn’t totally sure it wasn’t true.
“They’ll come faster for a bleeding kid than a bleeding teenager,” Mack explained, covering the mouthpiece. “Now shut up.”
It took eight minutes for the ambulance to arrive, which, as it turned out, was barely fast enough.
After the EMTs took Stefan away, Mack made it home unmolested by any more bullies, possibly because he was shirtless except for the neck band of his destroyed T-shirt and his hands were red with blood up to the elbows. That sort of fashion choice tends to discourage people from bothering you.
Mack’s father was home when Mack came in the side door. His father was staring into the refrigerator with the door open, looking like he might see something really cool there if he just kept searching.
“Hey, big guy,” his father said.
“Hey, Dad,” Mack said.
“How was school?”
“Enh,” Mack said. “School’s school.”
“Yeah. I hear you,” Mack’s dad said without looking up.
Mack headed towards the stairs and the shower.
Let’s skip over the slow workings of Stefan’s mind as he sought to make some sense of the fact that he had come quite close to dying at the age of fifteen.
And while we’re doing that, let’s skip over the fact that Mack’s father didn’t notice that Mack was more or less covered in blood.
Mack’s parents didn’t pay a lot of attention to him.
It wasn’t really sad or tragic. They weren’t bad parents. It was just that at some point they had given up trying to figure Mack out.
He’d had one phobia or another since age four. His mother had tried many, many, many (many) times to talk him through these irrational fears. His father had tried as well. And sometimes both at once. And sometimes both at once with a school counsellor. And a minister. And a shrink. Two shrinks. Two shrinks, two parents, a minister, a school counsellor. But they had never had much success.
In between talking Mack out of being terrified of things that weren’t really scary, they had tried to talk him into being scared of things he actually should be afraid of.
Things like bullies, for example.
The boy had no sense. That was clear to his parents and everyone else. The boy simply had no sense.
So, over time, Mack’s parents had learned to steer around him. They’d given him his own space. Which was how he liked it. Mostly.
Mack assumed that when Stefan returned to school he would have to demonstrate his toughness by giving Mack a serious beat-down. The upside was that in anticipation of the epic bloodbath, the other bullies were leaving Mack alone. It was just possible that Stefan would be irritated with any bully who presumed to prebeat Mack. No one wanted to deny Stefan his clear rights.
So in the short term, things were good for Mack in the aftermath of the Wednesday Massacre (as it came to be called).
Stefan was not back at school on Thursday or Friday.
“Maybe he croaked after all,” Mack said to himself on Friday. “And that would be bad. Yes; bad.”
But when Monday rolled around, that guilty hope was banished.
Stefan was definitely not dead. He had a massive bandage on his arm, white gauze wrapped by a sort of weblike thing. But Stefan wouldn’t need both arms to murder Mack.
It was a scary moment when Mack looked up and saw Stefan’s sullen face at the far end of a hallway full of kids on that fateful Monday.
It was scary for Mack and the few kids who considered him a close friend. But everyone else was just plain giddy. This was the most anticipated moment in the history of Richard Gere Middle School. Imagine the degree of anticipation that might have greeted the simultaneous release of an Iron Man movie, a brand-new sequel to a Harry Potter book and albums by the top three bands all rolled into one happy, nervous, “OMG, I totally can’t wait to see this!” moment.
The kids saw Mack step into the hallway.
They saw Stefan also in the hallway.
The kids parted magically in the middle, as if they were hair and someone had dragged a comb right down the middle of the hallway.
There was a part. That’s the point. Kids hugging the lockers to the left. Kids hugging the lockers to the right. And all the kids were incredibly excited.
Mack felt a lump in his throat. He was excited, too, but of course in a very different way. He was excited in the way that had to do with thinking, So, I wonder if there really is an afterlife? That kind of excited.
“Should I run?” Mack wondered.
He sighed. “No. Wouldn’t do any good, would it?” No one answered, so he answered himself. “Better to just take my beating here.”
If Stefan pounded him here in the hallway, some teacher would probably break it up. Eventually.
So Mack squared his shoulders. He tugged at the back of his T-shirt. He rolled his neck a little, loosening the muscles there. He wasn’t going to win this fight, but he was going to try.
Stefan walked straight towards him, his overly adult biceps barely contained by his T-shirt sleeves. Stefan had pecs. Stefan had muscles in his neck. He had muscles in places where all Mack had was soft, yielding flab.
Mack walked towards him and oh, boy, you could have heard a pin drop. So everyone certainly heard it when Santiago dropped his binder and everyone jumped and then giggled – and the anticipation just grew because now it had an element of humor to it.
Stefan came to a stop five feet from Mack.
And at that moment, a very, very old man wearing a black robe that kind of hung down over his face – a man who Mack could not help but notice smelled like some unholy combination of feet, garbage