Lisa Ko - The Leavers

He took off his shoes, took off the athletic shorts Kay had bought. The crumbs stayed on the edges of rows, scuttling to change without being noticed, but the other boys joked and yelled out to their friends.

Shawn Wecker, his foot tangled in the fabric of his shorts, stumbled into a locker. He was a small boy with a shriveled face, so pale he’d been nicknamed Ghost. “Fag,” one of the other boys said. “Ghost is a fag.”

“Fuck you!” Shawn yelled back. “Fuck! You!” The locker room’s collective response was laughter, so much worse than anger, and Shawn slunk away. Then Deming felt the shove, a blow between his shoulder blades. He tipped forward.

It was Cody. “What are you looking at? Chinese retard.” On the side of his face was a flying saucer — shaped mole. He pushed Deming again, but this time Deming charged Cody and knocked him backwards. Cody stumbled, making a sound like oofaa . He was less graceful than even Travis Bhopa; he was big but lacked balance. This struck Deming as both comic and predictable.

There was a weight on him, a jab in his side. One elbow, then another. Deming cried out and the weight rolled off. Cody collected himself. Deming stood up. “What the hell?”

The weight was Shawn Wecker, his face snarled.

Deming walked away. “Retard,” Cody repeated. “Chinese retard.” It sounded like a bawl, fleshy and raw, an animal turned inside out.

In gym they played kickball, a sport Deming had never played before. When it was his turn to kick, he heard a snicker and a voice go, “Nice shoes.” He looked down at his new Nikes and the ball socked him in the gut. When he whirled around he saw a row of boys trying not to laugh.

After school, he walked home by himself. It wasn’t that far, only a half hour, but the view was relentlessly unchanging, house after house, tree after tree. The tight streets unrolled into mini-fields, so vast that looking at them made him dizzy, frightened at the unendingness. As he got farther from school, the spaces between houses were bigger than the biggest houses themselves. He had grown so unaccustomed to hearing cars that when one drove past, he jumped.

Passing the railroad tracks, he heard footsteps behind him and tightened his stance, anticipating Cody and his friends.

A boy’s voice said, “Hey.” Deming lunged. But it wasn’t Cody, it was a kid whom Deming had observed with curiosity, Roland Fuentes. He looked different than the other kids; he, too, wasn’t one of them. Deming had heard people say Roland’s last name with an exaggerated accent, drawing out the syllables like a mockery, though Roland never reacted. “Hey,” he said now to Deming, “I’m Roland. You’re Daniel, right?”

Roland Fuentes was in the smart math class with the girl from the cafeteria, Emily Needles. He would’ve fit in fine in the city, but in Ridgeborough his speed and determination made him suspect. He jutted his chin forward as he moved, eyeballs darting like a nervous bird. His skin was browner than the bond-paper-white of Amber Bitburger and Shawn Wecker, and his dark hair was baby fine and thinning, or perhaps it had never filled in, if a boy could be balding before junior high.

Together they crossed the tracks, kicking up gravel. No trains, to Deming’s knowledge, ever went through here.

“You in Dumpkin’s homeroom?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m in Moore’s.”

Deming knew that but wasn’t admitting it.

“Where do you live? I live over on Sycamore.”

“Near there,” Deming said. “On Oak.”

“Where are you from?”

It didn’t seem as annoying when it came from Roland. “The city. The Bronx.”

“Cool.”

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“Mars!” Roland was small but his voice was the lowest out of all the boys’, a scratchy, gravely baritone. “No. I’m from here. Ridge Burrow.”

Roland said he and his mom lived on the corner of Sycamore and his dad was dead. “But I don’t remember him. He died when I was three and a half. In a car accident.”

“My dad died, too,” Deming said. He suddenly wanted to be friends with Roland, to be friends with anyone. “In China.”

“Did your mom die, too? Your real mom.”

The word came out before he could stop it. “Yeah.”

At dinner Peter asked if Deming had a good day at school and Deming said yes, he made a friend. Kay asked if he liked his teachers and he said they were okay, a little boring. She laughed and said, “ Lump -Kin.”

“What a name,” said Peter. “The kids must go to town on that one.”

After dinner, Peter and Kay taught Deming gin rummy, and they sat together at the kitchen table and played cards until it got dark outside.

Upstairs, in the silence of his room, Deming spoke Fuzhounese to his mother and told her he was sorry for saying she was dead.

ROLAND AND DEMING HAD no classes together except for gym, but at recess they wolfed down their sandwiches and forsook the playground for the computer room, where crumbs and nerds of all grades played video games. Sometimes they’d see people in there they wouldn’t have expected, like Emily Needles, or even once, Cody Campbell.

For two weeks they dominated the top scores for all the games, beating their own records. No matter what game you played, you’d only see two names, DWLK and RFUE. At first, Deming had typed DGUO, but Roland had asked, “What’s Dee Goo Oh?” and it was too complicated to explain. (He’d written “Deming Guo” on his worksheet the first day of school and Mrs. Lumpkin had called him up to her desk after class: “Is there a problem? Is this a joke?”) Whenever Deming won another game, Roland held a hand out and said, “Who’s awesome? D-W-L-K is awesome!” Deming returned the high-five and glanced around the room, wishing Roland would keep it down. It wasn’t safe to be bragging like that in Ridgeborough, and he didn’t like how Roland jumped up and down when he typed in RFUE, pumping his fist in the air. But between games Deming returned to the top score boards to look at the repetitions of a name that was supposed to be his.

In math, Mr. Moore drew obtuse angles and Amber Bitburger chewed on the ends of her white-yellow hair. Stay awake, Deming told himself. Stay alert . The easiest way to make sure he wouldn’t get comfortable was to remember he was on a mission, that gin rummy and meatloaf and flannel blankets were a part of his investigation. If he held everyone at arm’s length, it wouldn’t hurt as much when they disappeared.

After a few weeks, the wooden floors of the Wilkinsons’ house no longer felt so slippery, and when people said “Daniel” he answered, didn’t think they were talking to someone else. No longer did Peter and Kay look as unusual to him, the shade of their skin and the shape of their noses as normal as the low buzz of the empty streets, and he didn’t always remember to dial his mother’s phone number at night. When he did he always got the same message: This call cannot be completed at this time. Now it was his face that seemed strange when he saw it in the mirror.

He told himself his mission supervisors could come for him at anytime, yank him out of class, drag him from the kickball game, approach him in the cafeteria as he ate PBJ on wheat, seemingly unaware. For he could never be unaware. There was always the possibility that one afternoon there would be his mother or Leon or even Vivian in the cafeteria, ready to pick him up and bring him home, or a rap on the door at Homeroom, Daniel Wilkinson excused as the rest of the class murmured “Oooo” like he was in trouble, and in the principal’s chair would be Mama, her face a warm light, apologizing for taking so long, rolling her eyes behind Principal Chester’s back. They would jump on the next bus to the city, and Deming could clear the lint from his throat, loosen his milk-coated tongue.