Chapter 2

Marvick saw the note. Not so much "note" as graffiti, but it was addressed to his, on the painted cinder-block wall above the machines.

DEAR DORK, it read, WE FOUND TRASH IN THE MACHINES AND THREW IT DOWN THE CHUTE. IF YOU WANT IT, DIVE FOR IT.

"Shit,"he breathed, and had to blink back tears again, for an entirely different reason. Blind, stupid rage.

Jason. Well, Jason and then his followers Jason army anyway. Why was it the hot mean boys always ran in packs, like hyenas? And why, with all the punky hair and muscular legs and more of Daddy's money than Daddy's accountants, did they have to focus on him? Well they are bullies anyway and they don't Care about their victims.

No, he knew the answer to that.

He had made Jason look stupid in front of his friends, and some hot upperclassmen and girls . Not that it had been all that hard; he had just been walking by, heard Jason saying that World War II had been "that dumbass Chinese war thing."

And by simple reflex, he had said, "It wasn't." The whole lot of them, slouched all over the couches in the dorm lobby, looked at him with as much blank surprise as if the Coke machine had just spoken up.

Jason, his friends, three of the beautiful and hot girls.

"World War II," Maverick had plunged on, panicked and not quite sure how to get out of what she had gotten himself into. "I just meant - well, it wasn't the Korean War. That was later. World War II was with the Germans and the Japanese. You know, Pearl Harbor?"

And the girls had looked at jason and laughed, and Jason had flushed - not much, but enough to ruin the cool perfection of his looks or might say face expression. "Remind me not to buy any history papers off of you," the cutest of the girls had said. "What kind of dumbass doesn't know that?" Though Maverick had been sure none of them had, really. "Chinese. Riiiiight."

Maverick had seen the fury in Jason's eyes, quickly covered over with smiles and laughter and flirting.

Maverick had ceased to exist again, for the girls.

For the boys, he was brand-new, and unwelcome as hell. He had been dealing with it all his life. Smart and small and average-looking wasn't exactly winning the life lottery; you had to fight for it, whatever it was. Somebody was always laughing at, or hitting, or ignoring you, or a combination of the first two.

He had thought when he was a kid that getting laughed at was the worst thing, and then - after the first couple of school-yard showdowns - getting hit jumped up to number one. But for most of his (brief, two-year) high school experience, being ignored was worse by far. He had gotten there a year earlier than everybody else, and left a year ahead of them. Nobody liked that.

Nobody but teachers, anyway.

The problem was that Maverick really loved school. Loved books, and reading, and learning things - okay, not calculus, but pretty much everything else. Physics. What normal boys loved physics? Abnormal ones.

Ones who were not ever going to be hot.

And face it, being hot? That was what life was all about. As Jason had proved, when the world had wobbled off its axis for a few seconds to notice Maverick, and then wobbled right back to revolve around the pretty ones.

It wasn't fair. He had dived in and worked his ass off through high school. Graduated with a perfect 4.0, scored high enough on the tests to qualify for admission to the great schools, the legendary schools, the ones where being a brainiac mutant boy-freak wasn't necessarily a downside. (Except that, of course, at those schools, there were probably hot tall leggy brainiac mutant boy-freaks.) Didn't matter. Mom and Dad had taken one look at the stack of enthusiastic thumbs-up replies from universities like MIT and Caltech and Yale, and clamped down hard. No way was their sixteen-year-old son (nearly seventeen, he kept insisting, although it wasn't really true) going to run off three thousand miles to go to school. At least not at first. (Maverick had tried, unsuccessfully, to get across the concept that if anything would kill his budding academic career worse than being a transfer student at one of those places, it was being a transfer student from Texas Prairie University. Otherwise known as TPEwwwwwww.)

So here he was, stuck on the crappy top floor of a crappy dorm in a crappy school where eighty percent of the students transferred after the first two years - or dropped out - and the Jason stupid boys were stealing his wet laundry and dumping it down the trash chute, all because Jason couldn't be bothered to know anything about one of the world wars big enough to rate a Roman numeral.

But it isn't fair! something in him howled. I had a plan! An actual plan! Jason slept late, and Maverick had gotten up early just to do laundry while all the party crowd was comatose and the studious crowd was off to classes. He had thought he could leave it for a couple of minutes to grab his shower - another scary experience - and he'd never even thought about anybody doing something so incredibly low.

As he bit back his sobs, he noticed - again - how quiet it was up here. Creepy and deserted, with half the boys deep asleep and the other half gone. Even when it was crowded and buzzing, the dorm was creepy, though. Old, decrepit, full of shadows and corners and places mean boyd could lurk. In fact, that summed up the whole town. Morganville was small and old and dusty, full of creepy little oddities. Like the fact that the streetlights worked only half the time, and they were too far apart when they did. Like the way the people in the local campus stores seemed too happy. Desperately happy. Like the fact that the whole town, despite the dust, was clean - no trash, no graffiti, nobody begging for spare change in alleyways.

Weird.

He could almost hear his mother saying, Honey, it's just that you're in a strange place. It'll get better.

You'll just have to try harder.

Mom always said things like that, and Maverick had always done his best to hide how hard it was to follow that advice.

Well. Nothing to do but try to get his stuff back.

Maverick gulped a couple more times, wiped his eyes, and hauled the arm-twisting weight of his backpack up and over his shoulder . He stared for a few seconds at the wet pair of boxers and one sock clutched in his right hand, then hastily unzipped the front pocket of the backpack and stuffed them in. Man, that would kill whatever cool he had left, if he'd walked around carrying those.

"Well," said a low, satisfied mocking voice from the open door opposite the stairs, "look who it is. The Dumpster diver."

Maverick stopped, one hand on the rusted iron railing. Something was telling him to run, but something always told him that: fight-or-flight - he had read the textbooks. And he was tired of flighting.He turned around slowly, as Jason Sawyer stepped out of the dorm room - not his, so he had busted Sam's lock again.Jason's running buddies Gale and Adam filed out and took up flanking positions. Soldiers in flip-flops and low-rise jeans and French manicures.

Jason struck a pose. It was something he was good at, Maverick had to admit. Nearly six feet tall, Jason had flowing, shiny black hair, and big blue eyes with sharp brows. Perfect skin. One of those model-shaped faces, all cheekbones and thin lips with sharp jawline. He was just like from magazine model.

He was rich, he was handsome, and as far as Maverick could tell, it didn't make him a bit happy. What did, though - what made those big blue eyes glow right now - was the idea of tormenting Maverick just a little more.

"Shouldn't you be in first period at the junior high by now?"Jason asked. "Or at least getting your first teenage hormones?"

"Maybe he is looking for the clothes he had left lying around," Adam piled on, and laughed. Gale laughed with him. Maverick swore their eyes, their pretty jewel-colored eyes, just glowed with the joy of making him feel like shit. "Litterbug!"

"Clothes?" Jason folded his arms and pretended to think. "You mean, like those rags we threw away?

The ones he left cluttering up the washer?"

"Yeah, those."

"I wouldn't wear those to sweat in."

"I wouldn't wear them to scrub out the girls' toilet," Gale blurted.

Maverick, annoyed, turned and shoved him. "Yeah, you know all about the boys' toilet, don't you? Didn't you do Steve Gillespie in ninth grade in there?"He made sucking sounds, and they all laughed again, though Gale looked uncomfortable. Maverick felt his cheeks flare red, even though it wasn't - for a change - a dis against him. "Jeez, Gale ,Steve Gillespie? Keep your mouth shut if you can't think of something that won't embarrass yourself." Gale - of course - turned his anger on a safer target. Maverick. He lunged forward and shoved Maverick back a step, toward the stairs. "Go get your stupid clothes already! I'm sick of looking at you, with your pasty skin - "

"Yeah, Junior High, ever heard of sunshine?" Adam rolled his eyes.

"Watch it," Jason snapped, which was odd, because all three of them had the best tans money could buy.

Maverick scrambled to steady himself. The heavy backpack pulled him off-balance, and he grabbed on to the banister. Gale lunged at him again and slammed the boot of his leg painfully hard into Maverick's collarbone. "Don't!" Maverick yelped, and batted Gale's hand away. Hard.

There was a second of breathless silence, and then Jason said, very quietly, "Did you just hit my friend, you stupid little fag?Where do you think you get off, doing things like that around here?"

And he stepped forward and punched Maverick across the left cheek,hard enough to draw blood, hard enough to make flares and comets streak across Maverick's vision, hard enough to make everything turn red and boiling hot.

Maverick let go of the banister and slapped Jason right back, full across his pouty mouth, and for just a tight, white-hot second he actually felt good about it, but then Jason hissed like a scorched cat, and Maverick had time to think, Oh crap, I really shouldn't have done that.

He never saw the punch coming. Didn't even really feel the impact, except as a blank sensation and confusion, but then the weight of his backpack on his shoulder was pulling him to one side and he staggered.

He almost caught himself, and then Adam, grinning spitefully, reached over and shoved him backward, down the stairs, and there was nothing but air behind him.

He hit the edge of every stair, all the way to the bottom. His backpack broke open and spilled books as he tumbled, and at the top of the stairs Jason and the Jason army laughed and hooted and high-fived, but he saw it only in disconnected little jerks of motion, freeze-frames.

It seemed to take forever before he skidded to a stop at the bottom, and then his head hit the wall with a nasty, meaty sound, and everything went black.

He later remembered only one more thing, in the darkness: Jason's voice, a low and vicious whisper.

"Tonight. You'll get what's coming to you, you freak. I'm going to make sure."

It seemed like seconds, but when he woke up again there was somebody kneeling next to him, and it wasn't Monica or her nail-polish mafia; it was Erica, who had the room at the top of the stairs, four doors down from Maverick's. Sam looked pale and strained and scared, and Maverick tried to smile, because that was what you did when somebody was scared. He didn't hurt until he moved, and then his head started to throb. There was a red-hot ache near the top, and when he reached up to touch it he felt a hard raised knot. No blood, though. It hurt worse when he probed the spot, but not in an oh-my-God-skull-fracture kind of way, or at least that was what he hoped.

"Are you okay?" Sam asked, waving his hands kind of helplessly in midair as Maverick wiggled his way up to a sitting position against the wall. Maverick risked a quick look past his up the stairs, then down. The coast looked Jason-clear. Nobody else had come out to see what was up, either - most of them were afraid of getting in trouble, and the rest just flat didn't care.

"Yeah," he said, and managed a shaky laugh. "Guess I tripped."

"You need to go to the quack shack?" Which was college code for the university clinic. "Or, God, an ambulance or whatever?"

"No. No, I'm okay." Wishful thinking, but although basically everything in his body hurt like hell, nothing felt like it had broken into pieces. Maverick got to his feet, winced at a sore ankle, and picked up his backpack. Notebooks tumbled out. Sam grabbed a couple and jammed them back in, then ran lightly up a few steps to gather the scattered textbooks. "Damn, Maverick, do you really need all this crap? How many classes do you have in a day?"

"Six."

"You're nuts." Sam's, good deed done, reverted to the neutrality that all the noncool boys in the dorm had shown him so far. "Better get to the quack shack, seriously. You look like crap."

Maverick pasted on a smile and kept it there until Sam's got to the top of the stairs and started complaining about the broken lock on his dorm room.

Tonight, Jason had leaned over and whispered. You'll get what's coming to you, you freak. He hadn't called anybody, or tried to find out if possible Maverick had a broken neck. He didn't care if Maverick died.

No, that was wrong. The problem was, he did care.

Maverick tasted blood. His lip was split, and it was bleeding. He wiped at the mess with the back of his hand, then the hem of his T-shirt before realizing that it was literally the only thing he had to wear. I need to go down to the basement and get my clothes out of the trash. The idea of going down there - going anywhere alone in this dorm - suddenly terrified him. Jason was waiting. And the other boys wouldn't do anything. Even Sam, who was probably the nicest one in the whole place, was scared to come right out on his side. Hell, Sam's got hassled, too, but he was probably just as glad that Maverick was there to get the worst of it. This wasn't just as bad as high school, where he had been treated with contempt and casual cruelty - this was worse, a lot worse. And he didn't even have any friends here. Sam was about the best he had been able to come up with, and Sam was more concerned about his broken door than Maverick broken head.

He was alone. And if he hadn't been before, he was scared now. Really, really scared. What he had seen in the Jason Mafia's eyes today wasn't just the usual lazy menace of cool boys versus the geeks; this was worse. He had gotten casual shoves or pinches before, trips, mean laughter, but this was more like lions coming in for the kill.

They're going to kill me.

He started shakily down the flights of stairs, every step a wincing pain through his body, and remembered that he had slapped Jason hard enough to leave a mark.

Yeah. They're going to kill me.

If Jason ended up with a bruise on that perfect face, there wasn't any question about it.