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Chapter One
THE PIT
March 1976 Lance Drex, or "D-Rex" as we lesser creatures nicknamed our feral classmate, was never one to miss an opportunity to wreck someone's day. So, when he noticed me alone in one of Stone Canyon Prep's most notorious hunting grounds, it must've whetted his appetite for something mouthwatering to devour at his toothy leisure. Despite the tuna-fish-breaded, maize-haired prick as I did, I'll cede him this: He had a promising future ahead as a bouncer or mafioso, the sort never happier than ambushing victims from behind with a one-finger jab in the scruff of the neck, then whipping them around for a rag-dolling that'd eventually come for them in their sleep.
Poke. Crash.
D-Rex had me pinned up against the lower-school's wall of lockers, where Stone Canyon bullies unmasked their true selves, wham-bam fast; think Trans-Am-driving seniors peeling out for weekends. His blindside was so effortless, so casual, that it was as if yours truly was constructed from hobby-store balsa wood, not a hundred-twenty-three pounds of rotating, adolescent insecurities.
The last punch I'd thrown? A third-grade fracas over a cafeteria sloppy joe. D-Rex's dominant right hand, whose bony knuckles half a dozen of us knew on a first-name basis, bunched into a mocking fist brushing against my not-so-brave chin. Nothing new here, your basic terror-by-numbers, though mouth-breathing D-Rex pretty much bombed every math test where he couldn't swipe the answers.
"Say it! I want you to say, 'Luke Burnett is a flaming rump ranger.' You know it's true, um… Ranger-boy."
More from his greatest-hits collection, menacing someone to proclaim looney things about themselves. For variety, he sometimes was maniacal that I confess I was a "Snoopy Luke-Ass."
Well, not anymore. Not this boy. Uh-uh. Impulsive, suicidal: I'll take my chances. The days of him manhandling me so I'd be his puppet were done. I'd find the spine to defy him, that or risk hating myself more than I did him. Ol' Lance/D-Rex would have to grab someone else to make himself feel better about the shitty hand life dealt him.
"Tick, tick," he said, up in my face, so close that a leftover shred of Wonder Bread in his teeth loomed like half a slice.
"I'm not a Ranger, so I won't say I am. Sorry to disappoint you." I couldn't believe those words leaked out of my windpipe. It was exhilarating, even if it meant I was about to be reduced to pulpy heap.
My refusal to parrot his magic words turned his scowl into a drape of bewilderment, but not for long. With his right hand still pressing me against a locker, he un-balled his left fist, stroking his jaw in cartoonish deliberation.
"You back-talking me, Millie-Can't?" hatchet-ing the embarrassing, Caltech-inspired middle name D-Rex knew made me flinch. Luke Millikan Burnett. Millikan, really? My parents should've just had Freely Abuse Me tattooed on my forehead. "How 'bout I sock you in the nose?"
But I couldn't wilt. Wouldn't beg. I needed a strategy, not a white flag, and the only rung able to climb above the fear was, don't laugh, Henry David Thoreau, whom we'd just learned about in English. If civil disobedience was kryptonite against the tyrannical machinery of government, why not the unjust, ass-whooping promised by a boy tyrannosaurus?
Adopting that, I braced myself for a jolt of pain, D-Rex's native language. His signature move was a between-classes "dead arm," a compact punch directly in the shoulder joint that numbed your bicep and pulsed fire down the funny bone. How could it not? At thirteen, the guy could flex muscles he probably had coming out of the womb.
"Go ahead and punch me," I said. "I don't care." Clearly I did, or my eyes wouldn't have welled up, straining to contain hot tears.
"Oh, wah-wah," he said. "How about something different?"
Before I could wrap my head around what that'd be, he got busy manufacturing it, sniffing and snorting, followed by a hammy uwhick from the back of his throat. He worked his jaw, swished that "something" inside his mouth, presenting for my horror a tongue holding a disgusting, yellow-green loogie the size of a wad of Bazooka bubblegum. I saw the future, and it was spelled ultimatum. Either I'd relent in acknowledging my mythical ranger-ness or D-Rex would refashion my face into his spittoon.
There was no one around to stop him, notably me and the worthless Henry David Thoreau.
Jesus, I wanted to scream into his Neanderthal face. You want to make me bleed? Oh, maybe you didn't hear: I've already been bled out… You ever see someone who mattered to you,laid out in a box, looking like a wax figure at that stupid Madame Tussauds museum? Thought so.
As if that'd repel him from terrorizing me. No, shrieking about the worst moment of my life would only gift-wrap him material for another verbal slice-and-dice. Speaking of unfair, it's drubbings like this when a kid learns the true nature of a world prettier from space, how it owes him nothing—an explanation, a rentable Billy Jack—in the silent winds of its desertion.
Trapped, I retreated where I normally did when a planet of billions of people double-downed on cruelty or loss. I floated out of the present, into the castle between my own ears, where the monster whose superpower was sniffing out prey more flight than fight couldn't hurt me...
