“Jacob. Come on, Jacob. Wake up.”
Blearily, I opened one eye to see my mom standing over me, her hands on her hips.
“Hey, buddy, it’s time to get moving,” she said.
Yay. Another day in hell.
I grudgingly threw off the covers. High school was turning out to be way worse than I had ever imagined. I was six weeks into my freshman year and hated every minute of it.
As I stepped off the school bus that morning, the crowd jostling through the entry doors to West Craven High School swept me away. It felt like being on a bumper car ride at the fair, only no car to protect me. I was shoved, elbowed and slammed back and forth as I struggled towards homeroom.
Every day it was like this. Wherever I went, some guy would knock my book bag off my shoulder, or one of the football jerks would walk by and slam my locker door shut just as I finally got the combination. It’s not like I was really getting bullied or anything, but it was constant subconscious harassment.
Today I had to give a presentation about global warming in front of my Earth Science class. It wasn’t that I hated learning about stuff like that. It was actually kind of cool. But we had to work on the project with partners, and I got stuck with the Robby Morton, funny guy.
This kid really thought he was a comedian. He got his rocks off by heckling anybody who would let him get away with it. He really had it out for my friend Austin, making fun of him for wearing too-short jeans or teasing him about his occasional stutter. It didn’t help Austin’s case much that he wore thick-rimmed eyeglasses and was super smart. Austin had been picked on some in middle school, but that was cake compared to how he was pushed around in high school. I stood up for him as much as I could, but I couldn’t be around all the time.
And there I was, stuck with my friend’s biggest tormentor as my project partner. I wished I could think of a way to humiliate Robby in front of everybody like he was always doing to Austin. As it was, I’d had to do almost all the work on our project. Every time we were supposed to be working on it, he was playing Minecraft on the PC instead of researching global warming. Now all he just had to read the note cards I gave him when we put on our presentation in second period.
I should have known it wouldn’t be that simple. Robby took it as an opportunity to put on a show.
I’d made a poster with a drawing of a globe, and a couple of bar graphs showing temperature increases over time. Robby had drawn boobs on the earth. When I read out the statistics from my notes, he repeated everything I said in a high, girly voice. Then he started making fart sounds. What a dumbass!
Mrs. Bateman was really irritated, and gave us a C. I never make Cs! It would have definitely been an A project if it wasn’t for that jerk Robby.
P.E. was next, and the torture just continued. We were standing around next to the bleachers waiting for Coach Jones to finish explaining basketball drills. All of the sudden, Austin and I both got pantsed! Freaking Robby Morton had snuck up behind us and snatched our gym shorts down to our ankles!
As I was bending down to grab up my shorts, I glanced over at Austin. I let out a groan of dismay: Robby had pulled down his underwear along with his shorts. He was completely bare-assed!
Everybody was hooting, jeering and laughing. I mean everybody! Even Coach Jones was laughing at us. I got my shorts up and yelled “Asshole!” at Robby. Austin got his shorts up and took off running.
I made it through the rest of another hellatious day in high school, but I didn’t see Austin after gym. Later that night, he was on X-box Live playing Black Ops like most nights. He was really pissed. I knew he’d be upset but I had never seen my quiet, shy buddy with this kind of rage. He was talking some really wild stuff.
At one point during the game, he had an MP40 and was blowing away zombies. Every time a zombie’s head exploded in a bloody mess, Austin would yell out, “How do you like that, Robby? Take it, Robby! Yeah, look at Robby’s head explode.”
I tried to talk to him a couple of times. Besides telling me he’d gone to the school nurse and then checked out early after the pants incident, he wasn’t talking anything except killing Robby Morton.
I knew that, when we were playing a game we could get really into it, but it was creeping me out how obsessed Austin was with pretending to shoot Robby.
The days passed by, like they do, and finally we were into the last week of school before Christmas break. I hadn’t spent much time with Austin in a while. We still played X-box together most nights, but we played with a whole group of guys and didn’t really do much talking about anything except our next mission. Austin didn’t flip out like he had that night he got pantsed, but he was still calling the zombies by the name of his nemesis. Zombies were now Robbies, and Austin was out to annihilate them all.
One day, Austin grabbed my arm as I passed him in the hallway on the way to lunch.
“Hey, Jacob,” he said. “You want to come over this weekend? You can ride the bus home with me Friday.”
I shrugged my shoulders and said, “Sure, sounds cool.”
We only had to go for a half-day on Friday, and then we didn’t have to go back to school until after New Year.
I had no idea when I stepped off the school bus at Austin’s house that Friday that I was going to leave the next day as a different person.
The minute we walked into Austin’s bedroom and shut the door behind us, I realized that my old buddy was totally messed up in the head. The back of his bedroom door was completely covered top-to-bottom with pictures of Robby Morton, stolen off Facebook. Some had black marker mustaches and demon horns; some were almost completely scribbled out. Standing out right in the middle of the whole Robby collage was a huge hunting knife stabbed through Robby’s forehead.
I turned questioning eyes on Austin as he plopped down in front of the TV on his game chair. I had a really bad feeling in my gut.
I said, “Talk to me, bro. What’s up with the serial-killer shrine?”
Austin sat silently for a couple of minutes and finally raised his eyes to look at me. His bleak expression gave me chills. “I hate that asshole.”
“Me, too, bro! I can’t stand Robby Morton. He’s a complete jerk and someday Karma is going to bite him on the ass,” I answered. “But the whole picture thing is kind of overkill. What, are you trying to put voodoo on him or something?”
Austin’s eyes glittered with hatred as his lip curled in disgust. “I don’t plan to wait for Karma. I’m gonna get that asshole myself. He’s got a big payback coming and I’m the one to give it to him.”
Just then, Austin’s dad poked his head around the door. “You guys want some pizza? I got stuffed-crust meatlovers…”
So we dropped the subject and went and stuffed our faces with gooey cheese and pepperoni, and then went back in Austin’s room and snatched up the game controllers. Neither of us said anything else about Robby. We just focused on Black Ops. It wasn’t over, though. Not by a long shot.
About two in the morning, we were in the middle of another zombie hunt when Austin flung his controller onto the floor.
“That’s it!” He shouted, “That is it. Tonight is the night, dude. Come on, let’s go!”
He was out of the room in a flash. By the time I caught up to him, he was opening the front door.
“Wait, man! What’s going on?” I struggled to put on my shoes while hobbling down the steps behind Austin. He didn’t even slow down, much less respond.
He made a beeline for his dad’s Ford F-150. I guess he’d grabbed the keys on his way out the door because I heard a beep-beep just before he opened the driver’s side door and climbed in, only to climb right back out again. He held his dad’s Browning X-Bolt hunting rifle that normally rested on the rifle rack in the truck’s back window.
“Jesus, Austin! What the hell are you doing?”
“Just follow me, Jacob. We are going to make sure that Robby Morton never picks on anybody ever again. If we cut through the back yards, we can be at his house in five minutes.”
Before I could say a word, Austin took off at a jog, with that rifle leaning against his shoulder. I hesitated in a total state of panic. Crap! What should I do?
I knew I had to stop him before he killed someone. I couldn’t decide if I should run back into his house and get his dad, or if I should catch up to him before he got too far ahead of me. In the end I opted to give chase, thinking there might not be enough time to wake up Mr. Willis before Austin did something really, really bad.
I ran after him into the darkness. First, I had to climb one fence, then another, as I ran through the night on a desperate mission to stop my friend from committing murder. I mean, yes, Robby Morton was a complete asshole, but you couldn’t just go shoot someone for being an asshole!
I caught up to Austin just as he slid to his knees next to some scraggly crepe myrtle bushes. I squatted down next to him, struggling to catch my breath as I gasped out, “Once again, bro: What. The. Hell. Are you doing?”
When he turned his head to look at me, the moonlight struck his face and revealed the tears shining in his eyes. I knew then that this situation was a matter of life and death. I could see he’d reached a breaking point. Austin had the look of a cornered animal about to desperately strike out and attack.
He said, “Do you know how many times Robby Morton has shoved me into a wall? Do you have any idea how often he makes fun of me and gets everybody to laugh at me? Can you imagine how it feels to have the entire gym class pointing at my junk and laughing?”
His voice grew shrill and high-pitched as he continued. “He will never stop making my life hell unless I stop him first.”
At this, Austin lifted the rifle and pointed it toward the brick house we crouched behind. I looked where he was aiming and could see lights shining through two windows on a corner bedroom. Inside, Robby Morton was clearly in view, dancing around as he played air guitar in front of a full-length mirror. Different scenarios flashed through my mind in the space of seconds as I tried desperately to figure out what to do. Robby the Jerk was jamming out and had no clue he was about to get another hole in his head.
Austin peered down the length of the rifle, watching the guy who made his life a living hell dance around with a pretend guitar.
Austin spoke, his voice filled with darkness. “I was making a plan, you know. I was going to do it at school. I wanted to take out Coach Jones, too, and all those snotty girls who laughed at me.”
He glanced over at me without lowering the rifle.
“You’re the reason I decided to scrap that plan, dude. You’re a good guy, Jacob. You have always tried to look out for me. I wouldn’t have shot you, but I thought I might accidentally hit you when I opened fire.” He looked back to the window and said, “So I decided to cut the head off the snake, you know? I get rid of Robby Morton and the rest of them will forget all about me and leave me alone. Right, Jacob?”
Austin turned to me. His eyes were huge, watery.
He said, “They’ll all leave me alone if their evil leader is gone… Right?”
I knew I only had a few seconds to prevent disaster. I thought about trying to grab the gun. I tried to think of the right things to say to make him put the gun down. Seconds ticked by. Finally, I just looked over at my desperate friend and opened my arms wide.
“I got you, buddy. I got your back. You don’t have to do this. I got you.”
Austin looked really confused. He shook his head and blinked. I kept my arms open. The gun dropped to the ground as Austin grabbed me in a bear hug. His whole body shook with sobs as I held onto him.
The rest of that night is kind of a blur. I know we got back to Austin’s house just as his dad was stirring sugar into his first morning cup of coffee. He took one look at us–at the rifle I carried pointed at the ground and how I had to hold Austin up to keep him from falling–and ran to help carry his son over to the couch.
Austin sat there in a daze, huddled in the blanket his dad had wrapped around him. Mr. Willis listened to me tell him the events of that night and some of what Austin had been dealing with at school.
Two weeks later, I got a postcard from Austin. He was in Brynn Marr, a nearby psych center with mostly teenage patients. The card simply said simply, “Thanks, bro.”
After Austin’s dad talked to Robby’s parents, about how their son been tormenting other kids, the Mortons sent him to a shrink. Robby still tried to rag on me a couple of times at school, but all I had to do was picture him playing air guitar in front of his mirror like a dork–and I just smiled. Eventually he left me alone.
Austin never came back to West Craven. His dad transferred him to Arapahoe Charter School, but we stayed tight. We logged in a ton of hours shooting zombies together on X-box Live, but we never named any of them again.