Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [20]
“You’re going to have to pay for that,” Tory said, and for a moment Jude thought he meant money.
Then Tory took a step forward and shoved Jude back into the snow. It wasn’t a particularly brutal shove, but he didn’t try to get up. The snow had stopped falling and the sky was clearing, a gauzy cloud traveling over a spray of 3-D stars. Down the waist of his jeans, the packed snow numbed his back.
“You think you and your little friend can just walk in here, you little freak?”
“We didn’t—”
Tory kicked at the snow, his boot stopping just short of Jude’s face. Snow pelted the molars in Jude’s open mouth, the inside corners of his blinking eyes. He had never been jumped before, and he braced himself for the boots. More than any other moment in that endless and disappointing day, he wanted to be blacked out, knocked out, out cold, gone. But when the boots came, they kicked him over, flipping him onto his belly like a fish in a pan. Coming down on his chin, he bit his tongue. Warm blood filled his mouth. He heard the zip of a belt through belt loops and then he felt the belt, not on his back but around it. The others held him down while Tory threaded the belt around Jude’s trunk, clamping his hands behind his back and cinching it over his crossed wrists. They grunted wordlessly, as though lassoing a calf. Jude closed his eyes. Then, through the ear pressed to the ground, the ear listening for his tribe to come stampeding to his rescue, he heard the gentle trickle of liquid, a tributary making its slow way through the crystals of snow, and he opened his eyes to see the golden pool forming before him. Beer. He opened his jaw for it as Tory shoveled in the handful of soaked snow—he struggled to bite down on his knuckles, but already his mouth was too full—and just as he heard the woodpecker reel of laughter above, and the halfhearted protest of one of the girls, he discerned the true contents on his throbbing tongue, and tasting the ammonia through the aluminum of his own blood, his mouth stuffed open with snow as with a pair of balled socks, he gagged, and then vomited, his mouth now filling with vomit as well.
When Teddy and Eliza found him alone in the snow, perhaps ten minutes, perhaps an hour later, they were standing elbow to elbow, as though hiding something between their bodies. They unbuckled the belt and helped him to his feet. “Oh, shit,” Eliza kept saying, her hand over her mouth, but Teddy was dusting the snow off Jude’s jeans, saying, “You’re fine! You’re fine, right? You’re fine, man, right?”
Jude tried to spit into the snow. He couldn’t feel his tongue or his face.
Teddy was sort of panting. Teddy was messed up. Jude did his best to cock his head. Are you messed up? he asked with his eyes, and Teddy’s black eyes blinked back, with painstaking slowness, with remorse, Yes.
They practically had to force Eliza onto the train. She wanted to stay until they were home safely, but Jude wouldn’t let her, and Teddy pressed his hand to the small of her back as she climbed the stairs of the car. She didn’t have to ask Teddy if he was coming with her. She knew he couldn’t leave Jude now. Teddy watched the train disappear without him.
Now he let the force of the snow, falling again, carry his body down the hill, past his own street and his empty house, toward Jude’s. The antiseptic flakes burned his skin. His heart was skidding on ice.
“You okay?” he asked Jude for the fourth time.
Jude nodded, hobbling stiffly beside him. He was holding something. Out of the pocket of his jacket snaked the end of the braided belt, wet with snow. “Where were you guys?”
Teddy had hoped to find something heroic about Jude’s defeat, something that could be salvaged and spun into a story for Johnny or Delph or Kram. But now it felt unusable, a black stain, and entirely tangled with the bright memory of what he’d done in the dark while Jude lay outside in the snow. That was a story for another time, too. “Looking for you,” Teddy said.
Up ahead, the frozen lake was lit like the ocean, like there