Dark Places(34)

“Hey!”

He turned around, the bag swaying wildly on the hook and falling to the bottom of the locker. Mr. Gruger, the wrestling coach, was standing with a newspaper in his hand, his rough, splotchy face twisted up.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing in that locker?”

“I, uh, it was open.”

“What?”

“It was, I saw it was open,” Ben said. He shut it as quietly as he could. Please fuckfuckfuck just not let any of the team come back in, Ben thought. He could picture all the angry faces aimed at him, the nicknames to come.

“It was open? Why were you in it?” Gruger let the question hang there, didn’t move, didn’t give any clue what he was going to do, what level of trouble this was. Ben tried just staring at the floor, waiting to be chastened.

“I said, why were you in that locker?” Gruger smacked the newspaper against his fat hand.

“I don’t know.”

The old man just kept standing there, Ben thinking all the while, just yell and get it done with.

“Were you going to take something?”

“No.”

“Then why were you in it?”

“I was just …” Ben trailed off again. “I thought I saw something.”

“You thought you saw something? What?”

Ben’s mind flashed on things forbidden: pets, drugs, titty magazines. He pictured firecrackers and he thought for a second he’d say the locker was on fire, be a hero.

“Uh, matches.”

“You thought you saw matches?” The blood in Gruger’s face had moved from his cheeks straight up to the flesh beneath his fuzzy crewcut.

“I wanted a cigarette.”

“You’re the janitor boy, right? Something Day?”

Gruger made the name sound silly, girlish. The coach’s eyes examined the cut on Ben’s forehead, then marched pointedly up to his hair.

“You dyed your hair.”

Ben stood under his thatch of black and felt himself being categorized and discarded, sectioned off into a group of losers, druggies, wimps, fags. He was sure he heard that word snarl into the coach’s mind—Gruger’s upper lip twitched.

“Get out of here. Go clean somewhere else. Don’t come back in here til we’re gone. You are not welcome here. You understand?”

Ben nodded.

“Why don’t you say it out loud, just so we’re clear.”

“I’m not welcome here,” Ben mumbled.

“Now go.” He said it like Ben was a boy, a five-year-old being sent back to his mother. Ben went.

Up the stairwell to the janitor’s dank closet, a droplet of sweat dripping down his back. Ben wasn’t breathing. He forgot to breathe when he was this angry. He got out the industrial-sized bucket and rattled it into the sink, ran hot water into it, poured in the piss-colored cleaning mixture, ammonia fumes burning his eyes. Then heaved it back into the wheelframe. He’d filled the bucket too heavy, it tipped as he tried to get it over the edge of the sink, sloshing a half-gallon of water down his front. His crotch and leg were nice and soaked. Looked like he wet himself, Janitor Boy Day. The jeans stuck to his thighs, turned rigid. He’d have three hours of shitty grunt work with a wet crotch and jeans like cardboard.

“Fuck you, fucker,” he muttered quietly. He kicked the wall with a workboot, spraying plaster, and smashed the wall with a hand. “Fuuuuuck!” he bellowed, his voice going high at the end. He waited in the closet like a coward, worrying that Gruger would track the scream and decide to screw with him some more.

Nothing happened. No one was interested enough to see what was going on in the janitorial closet.

HE WAS SUPPOSED to have cleaned a week earlier, but Diondra had whined it was officially Christmas break, leave it. So the cafeteria trash was filled with old soda cans dripping syrup, sandwich wrappers covered in chicken salad, and moldy helpings of 1984’s final lunch special, a hamburger casserole with sweet tomato sauce. All of it rotten. He got a little bit of everything on his sweater and jeans, so in addition to ammonia and B.O. he smelled like old food. He couldn’t go to Diondra’s like this, he was an idiot to have planned it like this in the first place. He’d have to bike home, deal with his mom—that was a thirty-minute lecture right there—shower, and bike back over to her place. If his mom didn’t ground him. Screw it, he’d still leave. It was his body, his hair. His fucked-up faggoty black hair.

He mopped the floors, then bagged the trash in all the teachers’ rooms—his favorite chore because it sounded big but amounted to gathering bunches of crumpled paper, light as leaves. His final duty was to mop down the hall that connected the high school to the grade school (which had its own embarrassed student-janitor). The hallway was papered with loud notices about football and track and drama club on the high school side, and then slowly disintegrated into children’s territory, the walls covered with letters of the alphabet and book reports on George Washington. Bright-blue doors marked the grade-school entrance, but they were ceremonial; they didn’t even have locks. He mopped his way from Highschooland to Kiddieville and dropped the mop into the bucket, kicked the whole thing away from him. The bucket rolled smoothly across the concrete floor and hit the wall with a modest splash.