Mobile Library by David Whitehouse Page B

It was a total of three hundred and eighty-four steps across the playground. The far gate, locked during lesson time, was only twice Bobby’s height and so could be climbed with relative ease. There were twelve doors along the route that it was possible teachers could emerge from, but on the whole they liked to stay in the staff room, tarring their tongues with black coffee.
    He waited for Mrs. Pound to leave her office, packed his belongings into a plastic bag and left through the side door of the administration building. It was lunchtime and the yard was busy. He put his back to the wall, crouched down low and began shuffling toward the drain. His plan was to circumnavigate the entire school unseen and at the far end make a dash for the bushes beside the basketball court. From there he could get to the gate undetected. The drain was blocked with leaves and mud, so he gave it a wider berth than he had anticipated, but no one noticed him by the time he got to the basketball court, where he paused to breathe and tighten his shoelaces.
    Bobby reached the gate to find three figures climbing over it, coming in his direction. Though they were still some distance away, he immediately recognized them as Amir, Big Kevin and Little Kevin. Suddenly he became aware that the moves he wanted to make weren’t those he was actually making. Instead of turning and running, he found himself frozen in an awkward squatting position. Their laughter sounded tinny. Bobby wondered if he was shrinking, and whether his heart would soon outgrow his chest, which he could feel happening already. He closed his eyes and wrapped his arms around his face. Warm droplets of piss spotted his crotch, cooling as they slithered down his thigh. The three boys approached as the piss forced itself through the polyester. He wondered what would happen if they were in a book.
    Sunny the cyborg sliced the gate in two with the red-hot lasers blasting from his eyes. The steel in his feet crushed the stones and left imprints of his might in the ground. A charging sound, electricity gathering in the chamber of his enormous metal engine, then the titanium cannons reconfiguring, the robotic buzz of the gun barrel forming, the whir and click and fire. The smell of flesh, their skin and hair burning to vapor. Chinese lanterns—scorched hearts inside a charred rib cage—rocking. A metal arm clasped Bobby’s shoulders, and a high-powered headlamp cut a pathway through the smoke.
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    When Bobby opened his eyes, all of them, or those that had existed, were gone. He plucked a leaf from the bushes and wiped his groin, but it did little to mop the stain. He waited for his hands to stop shaking, then climbed over the gate, catching his shirt on the spike and tearing a gash in the cotton.
    A stitch needled his ribs by the time he arrived on the corner of Sunny’s street. There was no sign of his mother’s car parked outside. After rapping three times on the door, he hid around the side of the house. Nobody came. He tried again, harder this time, in case Sunny had already had his entire head replaced with metal but not had a chance to have his ears tuned to the correct frequency. Still nobody came. He used the secret hole in the fence to access the back garden. It had grown since he was last there and he sank ankle deep into the plush rug of the grass.
    He tried the back door but it was locked. At the rear of the house the kitchen window still comprised only a plastic sheet. He peeled the tape away from the corner and peered inside. The kitchen was bare. Not just of food, of everything. The table. The chairs. Even the sink. Grease framed the space where the oven had been.
    Bobby climbed in through the hole and entered the living room. A clean square of carpet in the shape of an armchair. A patch free of dust that was once the television. Walls with faint outlines remembered the pictures they held, the pictures of Sunny when his