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Somehow, they made it to the high school. The night was still and surprisingly cool. The sky was clear. As soon as Jem was out of the car, he struck a Heisman pose, the football tucked up against his chest. Then he sprinted across the lot toward the football field. Laughing, North took off after him, and he could hear the other guys behind him.
The field lights were off, but the ambient light from the city around them, combined with moonlight and starlight, turned the field into sketched-out sections of turf mixed with thick shadows. North wasn’t sure how it began; the pick-up game just seemed to happen. At one point, he had the ball, and then Theo was on him, riding him down to the ground. The turf felt like ice against North’s hot cheeks. Dew soaked his shirt. When he rolled over, Auggie (remarkably recovered after some noisy puking) and Shaw had turned the lower bleacher into a stage and were doing a cheer.
Later, and after another chant, John-Henry took them inside the school. He did a trick, jumping up to slap the corner of a fire door, and it made the door pop open. Which was pretty badass, even though Theo had a key to the building. North remembered standing in a dimly lit hallway, looking at the trophies, smelling floor wax and dry erase markers and thinking that schools never changed. He caught a glimpse of something, Emery with his arms around John-Henry, both of them staring at the trophies like they meant something else, something only for them.
And much later, they were sitting on the bleachers. Auggie fit in the vee of Theo’s legs, and Jem was asleep with his head in Tean’s lap. Emery and John-Henry huddled together. The morning was so cool it was almost cold, and the sky was a gray thinning to white. North tucked Shaw under his arm, and his head rested on Shaw’s, and he could feel Shaw breathing, the slow, full easiness of it all. The sun came up, light spilling across the field, climbing the bleachers, bronze riding the edge of the turned aluminum. It caught that coppery patch in Shaw’s hair, and North felt something rising inside himself to meet it, and he realized, with something like wonder, that it was morning.
23
The keening note of a tuning fork filled their room at the motor court, and North realized he was dying.
The hangover wasn’t actually all that bad—at least, North refused to let it be that bad, since it had been one night, and he was still young, and he could handle his booze. He had a faint memory, at one point the night before, of Theo ordering another round of shots after North had tried to slide under the table, but he was confident (pretty sure, anyway) he was remembering that wrong.
What he was not remembering wrong—because it was currently happening—was how that fucking tuning fork made his head want to split in half. A noise grew in his throat as he pulled a pillow over his face.
“It’s cleansing,” Shaw announced with the kind of chipperness that inspired murders and torture dungeons and decades of unrepentant bullying. “You just hit it like this—” The note came again, like an icepick going into North’s ear. “—and it drives off all the bad vibrations and unclean energy. You’re going to feel better in no time.”
Under the pillow, North squeezed his eyes shut and managed to rasp, “I’ll feel better after I sleep.”
“Did you know Leonardo da Vinci only slept twelve minutes every year? And that was before anybody invented Coke! Oh, and North, you know what else is amazing about a tuning fork?” The fork’s high-pitched note rang out again, and North moaned in spite of himself. “It doesn’t run out of uses! I can hit it again and again and—”
North managed to flop his way to the bathroom before he started puking. Barely.
By the time he’d finished, he was pretty sure he’d lost a layer of stomach lining and his skin was starting to crack like an exoskeleton. He crawled back to bed.
“Please,” he whispered.
“See?” Shaw said brightly, throwing open the curtains. “It worked like a charm.”
Shuddering, North squirmed under the covers and pulled the pillow over him again.
“Your body is full of toxins,” Shaw announced. The clatter of plastic came, and then the click of glass. Water ran. North tried to think what could be happening, but all he could imagine was that Shaw had perfected some other, even greater torture, and now that he’d gotten bored with the tuning fork, he was moving on to the next step of his plan—the goal of which was, clearly, to kill North while he was in a weakened condition. “Not only the alcohol—although, this is why I always tell you that cannabis is much, much healthier for you, not only because it’s natural, but because your aging body—”
North found the TV remote blindly and chucked it in the direction of the voice.
“Oh no,” Shaw said. “You were way off. Kind of like last night when you threw that pass to Emery, and then Jem caught it, and you tried to tackle Jem, only you didn’t tackle him because you fell on the ground again, and you made that noise like the time I had a hurdy-gurdy—”
Another moan was rising in North.
“Yes! Exactly like that!”
Shaw kept talking, but between the pounding headache and the focus required to keep his stomach from shedding another layer of lining, North couldn’t really keep track of it. He only knew one thing: when he recovered—if he recovered—he was never, ever, ever allowing Shaw to touch a Coke. Not ever again.
After a while, a smell like hot grass filled the room, and a few minutes later, the mattress sank as Shaw sat next to North.
“Drink this,” Shaw said, peeling the pillow away.
North squinted against the light. “Is it poison?”
“It’s a healing tea Master Hermes taught me to make. It’s especially for hangovers.”
“What’s in it?”
“Oh, um. Plants?”
Maybe it was poison, North thought. Maybe it would make everything better. He took a swallow, and his stomach heaved. “Holy fuck, it tastes like butt grass.”
“You have to drink all of it, or it won’t work,” Shaw said and then proceeded to force North to drink the rest of the tea.
