The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys Read Online Free Page A

opening of doors and our classmates poured out noisily and the teachers bunched together and I stared amazedly at Margie Flynn’s face as it smiled past mine, became the back of a beautiful head, and turned the corner. The gang affected poses of relaxation. Kavanagh looked towards the teachers, held the envelope behind his back in both hands, waggling it. Joey blinked like a machine, grunted, sniffed.
    “I’ll ponder this over the next few weeks, regarding your graduation,” Kavanagh said. He slit his eyes at the bulletin board. “It’s hard to believe he’ll rise after a crucifixion that gory, boys.” He nodded at the teachers, then walked to the glass bridge, and the manila envelope was the last thing to disappear.
    Joey pounded into the lavatory.
    Tim, Rusty, Wade, and I gaped at one another. Faces pale, or red. Eyes wide or squinted. And then we began to laugh wildly, and the teachers scowled at us as they paused to survey the drawing, and Rusty doubled over in an agony of compressedlaughter, farted like a buffalo, and the teachers pretended not to have heard and drifted away. Our laughter stabbed in breathless spasms as our classmates flowed around us.

    Rusty and Tim were eating from paper cones filled with french fries, mustard-slathered. I sat across from them and stared at my hamburger. My stomach was queasy and I began to think about burgers, beef, cows in the slaughterhouse spilling out their bowels, and my thirty-five cents was wasted. Wade poured barbecue potato chips into his mouth from a large bag he’d brought. Joey was still upstairs in the bathroom, locked in a stall, moaning.
    Every minute or so Tim and Rusty would titter and then everybody would catch it, laughing convulsively, mouths filled with mush. Finally we became exhausted. Wade folded his potato chip bag into a football and flicked it into a dive across the aisle and into a trash barrel. Margie was sitting down there on the girls’ side. Our gazes crossed and something jammed in my stomach and then spread, that pleasant ache.
    I looked up above her, into the other dimension of the hallway, and saw our mural of the gothic Christ, his wounds brownsmudged with our blood, the same that beat confusedly in my own heart.
    “We’re going to be thrown out of school,” I said. “Margie’s going to think I’m trash, a pig.”
    “I have a plan to save us,” Tim said. “We’re going to be legendary.”
    Miss Harper was slowly hobbling past our mural. She did not look at it. She leaned on her cane, rolled the leg forward, stepped. Suddenly I felt tremendously sorry for her, and my throat tightened and I had to blink.

    All the boys were playing softball. Our gang, though, was sprawled around the big oak tree, for a meeting. Every few minutes I looked up to see Margie, far away on the bleachers, talking to another girl. I invented their conversation, inserted myself as topic. On the soccer field an old man swept a metal detector in front of him, a wire running from the disk, up the handle, and into his earplug. Birds peeped above us.
    Tim slid his fingers behind his ears and flipped longish blond hair out over them. He beat the regulations by slicking it back. He laid down his copy of
The Call of the Wild,
then growled and spit. “Goddamn allergies,” he said. Then, “There’s Joey. Hey, Joey!”
    Fat Joey O’Connor ambled over, his eyeglasses blinding me until he entered the shade and I saw his eyes twitching behind the lenses. Sweat blotched under his arms, hair stuck to his brow in slashes. He shook his head, astonished.
    “I’m dead. We won’t graduate,” he moaned. “I just had a bad episode in the bathroom.”
    “Have a seat,” Tim said. “We’ve already got an exit from this situation.”
    I was arranging green cubes of bottle glass into a mosaic in the dirt. Rusty, slumped against the trunk, methodically scraped his orthopedic shoes on a big root that looked poured onto the ground like lava. Wade squeezed a pair of