“Get this guy a drink!” Fowler said to the room.
A cute Saint girl in a sweater and tights sauntered up to Will with a bottle of vodka in her hand. She had dark eyes and short, white, wispy hair, like a baby chick. She smiled and tilted the bottle toward his lips.
“Open wide,” she said.
Will parted his lips and let her pour vodka into his mouth. She winked at him and continued on her way, sharing her bottle with others.
“Where did this vodka come from?” Will said.
“Tiffy found two crates in a locked closet off the soldiers’ infirmary,” Fowler said.
“Man, what a score,” Will said. His bottle of honey didn’t seem so impressive anymore.
“Hey, let me introduce you around.”
Fowler pulled Will over to a group of people standing in a circle. “This is Beaumont, Robert, Preston, Beatrice, Matt, Chauncey, Babs, Stewart, Dianne, and Fisk. Everybody, this is … What was your name again, man?”
“Will.”
“Right. Everybody, this is Will.”
“Out of the way!” someone screamed from behind Will.
He turned to see Gates, on all fours, atop a moving tower of three, precariously stacked, hospital gurneys. Two other Saints pushed the wobbling stack of gurneys, running at a full clip.
“Faster!” Gates yelled. “Faster!”
The Saints smiled like fools as they poured on the speed, and the unstable gurney-tower sped into the crowded mess hall. Gates stood and spread his arms wide, with a bottle of vodka in one hand, and his long hair flapping behind him.
“I am the party God. Hear my—oh shit!”
The gurney tower tipped, and came crashing down. Gates flew over the heads of some Saints sitting at one of the metal tables, and slammed to the floor where Will couldn’t see.
Five seconds later, he popped up to his feet, grinning madly. He tried to take a swig off his vodka bottle, only to discover that he held only the bottle’s neck and the rest of it had shattered in the fall. He laughed, and held his fists over his head in victory anyway. The crowd went nuts for it. Best party entrance Will had ever seen. Of course, he’d never gotten the chance to go to a real high school party before the quarantine. In a way, this was his first.
“That was insane!” Fowler shouted.
Gates looked over at Fowler, still riding the high of his stunt, and his clear eye locked onto Will. His other eye was shut.
“I know this guy,” Gates said, smiling. He walked over. “How are you here?”
“I puked on him so I invited him to the party,” Fowler said.
Gates busted up, laughing. “Aw, shit. I wasn’t expecting that. Well, that’s the price of admission, I guess. What do you say, Will, was it worth it?”
“Believe it or not, the puke was one of the better parts of my day.”
“Ha-ha, nice. Well, you’re here now,” Gates said, finally opening his other eye. It was still red. “Welcome to our party.”
“What’s the occasion?”
“We found vodka.”
“That’s it?”
“You need more of a reason than that?”
“I guess not.”
“Come sit with us.”
Will followed Gates and the others to a nearby metal table and they all sat down. Will couldn’t stop looking at his red eye. A pale boy in a purple Patagonia fleece came running up to Gates.
“You are a madman, I can’t believe you just did that!” the boy said.
“It was fun,” Gates said.
“Fuckin’ maniac, this guy,” the boy said.
“We got a lot of ’em around here,” Will said.
“Shit, I’m no maniac,” Gates said. “I’m a regular guy.”
“Liar!” a smiling Saint girl with a missing pinkie finger said. “Gates, you are a lunatic, and you know it. You filled a water gun with your own blood to spray on soldiers to see if they would die.”
“That was an experiment!” Gates said, clearly enjoying the attention. “Hey, if that’d worked we could have made poisoned arrows and all sorts of stuff. How sweet would that’a been?”
Kids nodded and laughed. Evidently, it would’ve been sweet.
“Remember the time you talked those soldiers out of searching the barn we were hiding in?” a curvy girl in long underwear said. She turned and spoke directly to Will. “He had his hair dyed brown at the time, right, and when he sees them coming he puts on this old haz-mat suit we found, then goes out there and feeds these soldiers a line of bs about him being some college kid—”
“Randall Beckwith,” Gates said, and clapped. “I went to Princeton!”
The girl nodded. “Right, he said he was the son of the man who owned the farm, who said he flunked out and was back home to tend to things—”
“While I went to community college,” Gates interrupted again. “That was my favorite part. Randall was a real fuck-up.”
“So, the whole time he’s talking to him, he’s trying to keep his back to them, ’cause the ass of the haz-mat suit was ripped out. I mean, if they saw that, the jig was up.”
“Did they?” Will said, cracking a smile.
The girl shook her head. “He talked to those guys for twenty minutes, never broke a sweat! One of the zillion times this guy saved our lives.”
“That’s nothing,” a boy with a bottle of vodka duct-taped to his hand said. “I’ll take it back further than that. What about at St. Patrick’s?” The Saints all around the table began to smile and lean forward at the mention of their old school. “Your parents made you get braces—”
Everyone started to laugh. Gates laughed and nodded his head like he was used to hearing about this. Another girl chimed in, “He hated those braces.”
The boy pointed at Gates. “Hate is not a strong enough word! You reviled them.”
“Ooo, what’s up, Vocab!” someone said.
The boy laughed. “Any sane human being woulda complained about them, maybe searched out alternatives to braces on the Internet. This guy tore his braces off with pliers, and he wants to say he’s not a maniac? Fuck you, dude!”
The rest of the Saints burst with laughter. Gates slammed his fist down on the table repeatedly, laughing so hard he nearly fell off the bench. “I did do that,” he said.
Tearing off your own braces was one of the most badass things Will had ever heard.
“How bad did that hurt?” Will said.
Gates looked at him with tears in the corners of his eyes, still red in the face from laughing. “To tell you the truth, I was on so much Ecstasy at the time, and I was doing it in a hot tub, so that part of my body was feeling really good, and the mix of the two feelings … didn’t feel that bad.”
“That’s pretty weird, man,” Will said. “I heard you partied hard, but that’s out there.”
As soon as Will said it, he regretted it. Had he just insulted his host? He didn’t even mean anything bad by it. In truth, he was more in awe.
“I guess it is,” Gates said with a chuckle. “But it was a once-in-a-lifetime situation, a new experience. Like getting trapped in this place. I don’t know what it means yet, or what we can do about it, but it’s new, it’s different, and it’s definitely not at all what we thought it would be—”
“You really thought we had it made in here?” Will said, recalling Gates’ story the day the parents had sealed them back in.
“Totally. We thought it was like summer camp here, and you all were chilling in a safe, clean school. Then, we get here and it’s like one big battlefield, you guys all hate each other, the whole place is trashed! I mean, what the hell happened, how did it get like this?”
The other Saints in the room halted their conversations and looked over at Will. For a moment he didn’t know what to say, it had been bad for so long. He had a stab of doubt that maybe it was their own fault that things had gotten so bad in McKinley, like maybe if St. Patrick’s Academy had been quarantined, they all would have gotten along fine, and filled their time with happy parties like this one. The Saints were still staring, and waiting for Will to speak.
He started at the beginning. He told them about the first day of school. He told them about David. He told them about the seniors losing their minds before the graduations started. He told them about Danny Liner and how Sam had murdered him in front of the whole school with a spike to the neck. He told them how the other gangs came quickly after Sam formed Varsity, just to have a shot in the drops.
The more he talked, the more the Saints from other tables drifted over, until they all crowded around his table, listening. Will felt like a fireman visiting a kindergarten class. One by one, they asked him everything about life in the school: what a Geek show was, what the deal was with Jackal, what was in the ruins, what Varsity and the Pretty Ones’ pool was like, how the market worked. No matter how many questions he answered, they had more. He grew to like the Saints across their Q&A. They were normal kids who’d been through hell, just like McKinley kids had. And they were scared about their new life here. That was something Will could relate to.
“Can I ask you a question? It might be a not that cool thing to ask,” Will said to Gates, once the Q&A had died down.
“I bet I can take it.”
“What’s going on there with your eye?”
Gates sighed. “I don’t know. Been like this for months. It stings all the time.”
“Huh,” Will said. “That blows.”
“You’re telling me.”
Saints at the table next to them stood on the metal benches, and did shots of vodka together.
“Do you guys not know how valuable that vodka is?” Will said to Gates. “You could have traded those bottles for anything in the market.”
“We’d rather drink it.”
“Yeah, but, all of it in one night? You could have stretched it out for a few months.”