Lex Thomas - Quaranteen

More laughs. Ritchie hung his head, playing along as usual.

As David scanned the jubilant faces of his gang, their laughter filled him with purpose. He wanted to do right by them.

Everything that happened before was worth it for this feeling. He punched Ritchie playfully on the arm. Having Ritchie and Gonzalo around was great. He’d forgotten what it was like to have solid people with him that he could count on.

They knew what it meant to be part of a team.

Will walked down the stairs, through the crowd, shirtless.

David’s smile faded. Will paid no attention to David, didn’t even look at him. He maneuvered through the crowd of attentive listeners, grabbed his share of dinner, then tromped back up the stairs. David forced a smile for his audience.

“Anyway, the point is, we’ve got friends on that side of school now, and we’re gonna do the same for any of Violent’s girls who come to us for help. Sound good?” They cheered in response.

“Solid. Have a great dinner, everybody,” David said, and he made his way to the second flight, through back pats and high fives. He took his tin-can dinner from Nelson and headed up.

He had one thing on his mind: crashing. Two more flights and he could fall face-first onto the sofa cushions in the corner of his room and check out completely. It’d been a long day.

Running the Loners had been a privilege so far, but it left him exhausted.

“David?”

David turned to see Dorothy. Her greasy, white hair hung to one side, her shirt was wrinkled, and she had ink stains on her fingers.

“Oh, hey, what’s up?” David said.

She held out her hand to reveal a perfect paper square with a tiny portrait on it. She placed it in David’s hand.

“It’s you,” she said.

“Hey… cool. I love it. Thank you.”

She had been giving him tiny homemade gifts every couple days. He was starting to feel she did it out of guilt.

“Listen, Dorothy, I just want you to know that no matter what went down with the drop, it’s in the past. You’re a Loner now-”

A look of horror twisted Dorothy’s face and had gotten worse with each word David said. She turned and bolted down the stairs.

“Okay,” David said.

He studied the miniature portrait. The lines were light and wobbly. The look on his face was stern, and he stared off into the distance. What was he supposed to do with these things?

He tucked it in his jeans pocket and rounded the banister to the second-floor landing, the lounge.

Ten class chairs sat in an imperfect semicircle; piles of library books on loan from the Nerds were scattered around the room. Mort sat on one of the piles, reading a paperback, probably staining the pages with sweaty fingers. Belinda was checking her hair growth in the gang’s only mirror, mounted on the wall. There were a dozen Loners crowded together in the corner watching one cell phone screen. They leaned forward in a huddle to hear the audio from its little speaker. It was one of three phones in the whole gang. By now, it was hard not to know every song and every video on those three phones by heart, but they listened anyway.

Will came bounding down the stairs into the lounge.

“Boom,” Will said. He held out a double-wide power strip with four phone chargers plugged into it, their cords draping off like dead snakes.

“How sweet is this?” Will said.

The dozen cell phone watchers nodded and ooh’d.

“Where’d you get those?” David asked.

Will’s face grayed at the sight of David.

“Don’t you worry about it, boss. All you need to know is they’re ours now,” Will said.

Boss. The word dripped with sarcasm. He’d given Will plenty of space since the gang formed; he wanted things to cool down between them. He thought a little time apart and the camaraderie of a gang would dull Will’s anger. No such luck.

“Four chargers. Kinda seems like overkill, doesn’t it?” David said.

“Yeah, now. But if we wanna be legit, we’re gonna need a phone for every Loner.”

David saw the faces of all the kids in the huddle bloom with hope.

“C’mere,” David said to Will with a hook of his finger. Will followed him to the barricaded entrance to the second floor.

David cleared his throat and dug in with a hard whisper.

“We’re barely getting by as it is, don’t put pipe dreams into people’s heads about personal phones.”

“We’re all cooped up in this staircase with nothing to do. We need somethin’. Just food and a place to sleep isn’t enough.”

“So, hang out. Tell stories. Sing your camping songs, I don’t know. But don’t say ‘phones for everybody.’ You say it, and then I gotta deliver. You get that? You’re not the one who has to answer for it. They’re all looking at me.”

“Yeah, and you just hate that, don’t you?” Will was always going to act like a little shit to him, no matter what David provided for him.

“Did you steal them?” David asked.

“What, like that’s a sin? Don’t pull the whole golden boy thing with me, man. I know you.”

Will was baiting him. He wanted David to flip out in front of everybody.

“No phones,” David barked, loud enough that the whole landing heard him. They groaned. He wasn’t going to deal with this now. He left Will by the door and charged up the next flight. Only one more set of stairs after that, and he’d be home.

He high-stepped it across made and unmade beds on the next landing. This was where most of the gang slept. It was first come, first served for floor space, the rest had to take a stair. The stairs were only a foot and a quarter wide and weren’t comfortable to sleep on, but you could fit.

On the last flight up, a lot of Loners were working hard.

They stacked wooden planks, salvaged from food-drop pallets, onto each stair until it was flush with the stair above. It effectively doubled the width of each stair. Eventually, with enough planks, the whole gang could have a double-wide stair to sleep on. Lucy was on her hands and knees, helping place planks. He climbed the steps up to her.

“Hi, David,” she said. Her voice gave him a surprising little rush.

“Hey.”

She stood and dusted off her hands, her brown eyes as big and hypnotizing as ever. The blonde was long gone from her hair now; it was a shining white. The tips of it stroked her

soft freckled shoulders. She wore a new dress he’d never seen before. It was white, and somehow she’d kept it impossibly clean while doing this manual labor project.

“Did, um… did Dorothy find you? She was looking for you,” Lucy said, stepping after him and letting her hand slide along the banister behind her.

David pulled the hand-drawn portrait from his pocket.

He’d given Lucy a glimpse of Dorothy’s other gifts in the past.

Lucy covered her mouth with a little gasp, and her eyebrows parted sympathetically. “She loves you,” Lucy said.

“Oh, God, don’t say that,” he said.

“But it’s so sweet. I hope you’re keeping them safe.” David nodded, but he didn’t know what he’d done with the last couple pieces-the paper-clip medal and the index-card diorama.

“I wish I could make things like that. I’m just not creative,” Lucy said.

“That’s not true,” David said, pointing to the wooden bunks,

“You’re doing a great job here.”

Lucy flitted her big eyes in that pretty-girl way that reminded David of Hilary.

“David,” she said, “industrious is not the same as creative.” And then, when she said something like that, David remembered how little Lucy was like Hilary. That seemed like the kind of worldly wisdom a grandmother might’ve wielded.

David had been learning a lot about Lucy over the past few weeks. She wasn’t just the delicate flower he’d thought she was when he saw her by the graduation booth.