We headed back the way we came, in the direction of the giant screen. That’s when we walked straight into a group of kids we didn’t know. They’d just come out of the woods, doing stuff I’m sure they didn’t want their teachers to know about. I could smell the smoke now, the smell of both firecrackers and cigarettes. They pointed a flashlight at us. There were six of them: four boys and two girls. They looked like they were in the seventh grade.
“What school are you from?” one of the boys called out.
“Beecher Prep!” Jack started to answer, when all of a sudden one of the girls started screaming.
“Oh my God!” she shrieked, holding her hand over her eyes like she was crying. I figured maybe a huge bug had just flown into her face or something.
“No way!” one of the boys cried out, and he started flicking his hand in the air like he’d just touched something hot. And then he covered his mouth. “No freakin’ way, man! No freakin’ way!”
All of them started half laughing and half covering their eyes now, pushing each other and cursing loudly.
“What is that?” said the kid who was pointing the flashlight at us, and it was only then that I realized that the flashlight was pointed right at my face, and what they were talking about—screaming about
—was me.
“Let’s get out of here,” Jack said to me quietly, and he pulled me by my sweatshirt sleeve and started walking away from them.
“Wait wait wait!” yelled the guy with the flashlight, cutting us off. He pointed the flashlight right in my face again, and now he was only about five feet away. “Oh man! Oh man!!” he said, shaking his head, his mouth wide open. “What happened to your face?”
“Stop it, Eddie,” said one of the girls.
“I didn’t know we were watching Lord of the Rings tonight!” he said. “Look, guys, it’s Gollum!”
This made his friends hysterical.
Again we tried to walk away from them, and again the kid named Eddie cut us off. He was at least a head taller than Jack, who was about a head taller than me, so the guy looked huge to me.
“No man, it’s Alien!” said one of the other kids.
“No, no, no, man. It’s an orc!” laughed Eddie, pointing the flashlight in my face again. This time he was right in front of us.
“Leave him alone, okay?” said Jack, pushing the hand holding the flashlight away.
“Make me,” answered Eddie, pointing the flashlight in Jack’s face now.
“What’s your problem, dude?” said Jack. “Your boyfriend’s my problem!”
“Jack, let’s just go,” I said, pulling him by the arm.
“Oh man, it talks!” screamed Eddie, shining the flashlight in my face again. Then one of the other guys threw a firecracker at our feet.
Jack tried to push past Eddie, but Eddie shoved his hands into Jack’s shoulders and pushed him hard, which made Jack fall backward.
“Eddie!” screamed one of the girls.
“Look,” I said, stepping in front of Jack and holding my hands up in the air like a traffic cop. “We’re a lot smaller than you guys …”
“Are you talking to me, Freddie Krueger? I don’t think you want to mess with me, you ugly freak,” said Eddie. And this was the point where I knew I should run away as fast as I could, but Jack was still on the ground and I wasn’t about to leave him.
“Yo, dude,” said a new voice behind us. “What’s up, man?”
Eddie spun around and pointed his flashlight toward the voice. For a second, I couldn’t believe who it was.
“Leave them alone, dude,” said Amos, with Miles and Henry right behind him.
“Says who?” said one of the guys with Eddie.
“Just leave them alone, dude,” Amos repeated calmly. “Are you a freak, too?” said Eddie.
“They’re all a bunch of freaks!” said one of his friends.
Amos didn’t answer them but looked at us. “Come on, guys, let’s go.
Mr. Tushman’s waiting for us.”
I knew that was a lie, but I helped Jack get up, and we started walking over to Amos. Then out of the blue, the Eddie guy grabbed my hood as I passed by him, yanking it really hard so I was pulled backward and fell flat on my back. It was a hard fall, and I hurt my
elbow pretty bad on a rock. I couldn’t really see what happened afterward, except that Amos rammed into the Eddie guy like a monster truck and they both fell down to the ground next to me.
Everything got really crazy after that. Someone pulled me up by my sleeve and yelled, “Run!” and someone else screamed, “Get ’em!” at the same time, and for a few seconds I actually had two people pulling the sleeves of my sweatshirt in opposite directions. I heard them both cursing, until my sweatshirt ripped and the first guy yanked me by my arm and started pulling me behind him as we ran, which I did as fast as I could. I could hear footsteps just behind us, chasing us, and voices shouting and girls screaming, but it was so dark I didn’t know whose voices they were, only that everything felt like we were underwater. We were running like crazy, and it was pitch black, and whenever I started to slow down, the guy pulling me by my arm would yell, “Don’t stop!”
