The dust in Oildale, California, always tasted like rust and exhaust fumes, but to twelve-year-old Leon Stanton, running for his life down the cracked asphalt of the industrial park, it currently tasted like copper. Blood trickled from a split lip, running down his chin in a thin, warm line, and his sneakers slapped frantically against the broken ground. His lungs burned, screaming for oxygen, but he could not stop. He dared not even look back, because looking back would slow him down, and slowing down would end the only advantage he had left, which was that he was still moving at all.
Behind him, the cruel, echoing laughter of Brad Jenkins and his two shadows, Kevin Doyle and Tyler Higgins, bounced off the corrugated steel of the industrial park warehouses. The warehouses stood in long, sun-bleached rows, their loading doors shut and their windows filmed with grime, and the sound of the boys' laughter came back off the metal in hard, flat slaps, as if the buildings themselves were laughing at him. Brad was fifteen, a giant who had failed the eighth grade twice, a boy whose shoulders had outgrown his shirts and whose fists had outgrown any sense of what they were for. At home, people said, things were turbulent — a word Leon had heard adults use when they did not want to say the plainer thing. Whatever it was that happened behind Brad's front door, it came out at school as pure, unadulterated torment for anyone smaller than him.
And Leon, small for his age, quiet, and armed only with a stutter and second-hand clothes, was the perfect target. His jeans were frayed at the cuffs and a size too long, handed down and then handed down again, and his shirt had another boy's name faded into the tag. His shoes were the kind that squeaked on linoleum and came apart at the toe. None of that mattered to Brad except as something to point at, and Brad pointed at everything. He had been pointing at Leon since the first week of school, when Leon had tried to answer a question in class and the words had caught in his throat like a knot in a shoelace, and the whole room had gone quiet in the wrong way. Brad had found his hobby that day, and he had never once grown tired of it.
You can't run forever, Stanton! Brad's voice roared behind him, and it was followed by the clatter of a hurled rock skipping mere inches from Leon's heels. The rock struck the asphalt and skittered away in a spray of grit, and Leon's heart hammered so hard he could feel it in his throat. "We're going to break your legs this time!"
It was not an empty threat. Two days prior, Brad had pushed a kid down a flight of concrete bleachers, and the kid had come up with a fractured collarbone and an arm in a sling, and the whole school had known about it by lunch. The kid's name was Marcus, and he was in seventh grade, and he had not done anything except be in the wrong place when Brad wanted someone to fall. The school administration had turned a blind eye. Everyone knew why, even if nobody said it out loud in the hallways: they were terrified of Brad's father. Doug Jenkins was fiercely litigious and aggressive, a man who wrote letters on legal letterhead and raised his voice in offices until the people behind the desks agreed to whatever would make him leave. He had sued the school before, and the principal knew it, and the teachers knew it, and so Brad walked the halls like a boy who had already been told there would be no consequences.
Leon knew that if they caught him today, in the deserted stretch of the industrial park where nobody went after four o'clock, he was going to the hospital. He had done the math in his head while he ran, the way a kid does when there is nothing else to think about except the ground under his feet and the voices behind him. There were no teachers here. There were no other kids. There were no open shops with a grown-up behind a counter who might look up and say, hey, what's going on out there. There were only warehouses, and fences, and the long, empty road, and three boys who were faster than he was and gaining with every step. His legs were already trembling. His side ached with a stitch that felt like a hook under his ribs. The blood from his lip kept coming, salty and warm, and he wiped it with the back of his hand without slowing, smearing it across his cheek.
He had not started today meaning to run. He had started it meaning to get home, and for a while it had seemed like an ordinary day, the kind he could survive by being careful. The morning had gone as mornings usually went: he had slipped into his classroom before the bell, kept his eyes on his desk during roll call, and answered nothing unless he was called on. Lunch had been quiet; he had eaten at the end of a table, tray close to his chest, the cafeteria noise washing over him without landing, which was the best he usually hoped for. After lunch there had been a worksheet in science, rows of questions about the water cycle, and he had stayed late to finish it because the teacher had said it was due tomorrow and Leon did not want to carry unfinished work home to a kitchen where his mother would ask about it with tired eyes.