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Dalton stared in the direction Ambyr had gone.
The blond boy shifted his weight uncertainly. “Um, Mr. Weber, I’m sorry—”
A half-formed laugh fell from Dalton’s mouth. He rubbed his chin, and then another laugh, a real one, came. His gaze shifted to the boy. “That was excellent, Ross. Excellent!”
Ross ducked his head, but he grinned. “She was being such a bitch. She can’t talk to you like that.”
“Yes, well.” Some of the humor faded from Dalton’s face, and he looked sallow again, too tanned, skin massaged with too many creams. “You have to do something for me. You have to pretend you didn’t hear any of that, all right? Forget all about it. She’s not a nice person. And the next time she comes, you’ll have to stay clear—she holds a grudge.”
“Oh, I’m not scared of her. I can be a bitch too.”
“For my sake, dear one. For my sake.”
Ross’s smile got bigger, and he lowered his head to hide it.
“Now, we’ve got to hurry and clean this up before it sets. If the theater fines us for the carpet, we’ll be sunk. Chip-chop, love. Run and grab something.”
Ross turned and jogged back the way he had come.
As the sound of his steps faded, Theo pressed out into the hall. Dalton had his phone in one hand, and he was doing something, a little smirk pasted onto his face. He looked up, and a string of reactions flashed across his face: shock, fear, and then the oily unctuousness that Theo remembered from staff meetings.
“Well, hello, Theo.” He shoved his phone into his pocket. “What are you doing here?” A little laugh. “Did I miss a PLC meeting?”
The pills made a bulge in the pocket of his tight jeans. And for a moment, Theo remembered: the way one fit under his tongue, the weight of it, the edges pressed against sensitive muscle and membrane. The relief as it began to dissolve, his brain anticipating the relief before it could make its way through his bloodstream. The tension, and then the release. Like a key. Like his body and mind were a series of locks waiting to be opened.
It was the dream, he told himself. The sleepless nights. It’s knowing what this piece of shit has done. Theo had a million reasons, and he lined them up for himself, neat as you please. But what he remembered was how the pill, once it had absorbed enough of the moisture in his mouth, began to crumble, and the secondhand rush it gave him, knowing it would dissolve faster, knowing he’d get more of it, knowing he’d get it faster.
He punched Dalton in the mouth.
The theater teacher went down. He did it the way he did everything else, stagily, his legs flying up, his arms windmilling, like he had trained his body to the consummate peak of theatricality, and now, in a moment of genuine distress, he couldn’t turn it off.
“Theo!” Auggie barked.
Dalton warbled a cry, part pain, but mostly disbelief.
Theo bent and grabbed the collar of his button-up. Sometimes you had to use the hair, if you wanted them to play along, but with someone like Dalton, someone who was scared and who was—aside from the drugs and, most likely, the abuse of a minor—a good citizen, someone who went along to get along, usually a shirt was enough. Even in the bad old days, even in claptrap bars and shithole saloons, guys who thought they were rough and tough, lots of them were that kind—in a classroom, Theo would have called it prosocial, or conformist, or a dozen different things. Right then, though, he just knew it on instinct; that part of him was awake again, scenting violence in the air, raising a shaggy head.
His instincts were right: instead of lying limp and forcing Theo to drag him, instead of fighting back, Dalton scuffed along with his legs, trying to keep up—and, in the process, inadvertently helping Theo drag him toward the bathrooms.
“What the hell are you doing?” Auggie asked.
When they reached the door, Theo hit it with his shoulder, and then he held it open with his heel while he dragged Dalton inside. Dalton was still making those baby-bird cries, reaching back to bat at Theo’s arm, his touches butterfly light. Theo got him a little farther into the bathroom. It was an older style, done in blues and greens that suggested home décor circaThe Partridge Family, with little square tiles covering the floor and halfway up the walls. Easier to clean, Theo thought as his foot smudged a drop of blood that had fallen from Dalton’s mouth. The mirrors were rectangular and banded in stainless steel, and Theo looked away from the thing moving in them. He changed course again, shoving Dalton toward one of the stalls.
“Theo! Hey!” Auggie’s voice wasn’t Auggie’s anymore. He caught Theo’s arm. Theo rounded on him, but Auggie stayed where he was, face set with a challenge. “What in the world—”
“Wait outside.”
“No, I’m not going to wait outside. What’s wrong with you?”
“Then let go of me.”
Maybe it was something in his voice. Maybe it was whatever had clawed its way up out of the past, that feral thing from the bad old days. Auggie’s eyes got wide, and he released Theo’s arm.
Dalton was on his hands and knees, one hand on the door to a stall. “My tooth,” he was saying. Theo couldn’t see his face, but he could see three drops of blood clustered together on the tiles. “I think you chipped my tooth.”
Theo moved behind him. He grabbed his collar again and forced him forward, into the stall. The toilet was the old kind, long and deep. It looked clean, or as clean as a toilet ever got.
“Theo,” Auggie said, and he sounded lost and far off, and that made sense because the part of Theo that heard him, the part that understood the timbre of Auggie’s voice as fear—fear for you, that part of him recognized, he’s afraid of what’s happening to you—was down at the bottom of a well again. In the deep-dark place. Staring up toward that little circle of light and order and sanity, where Auggie’s voice drifted down to him.
