Chương 2: Dead Last

Nita Sowerby had written the board up on Monday evening while Abe was on the bus, so by the time he got to school on Tuesday it'd been sitting there all night and half the morning. The board lived in the corridor outside the gym. Four hundred people walked past it every single day, and Nita kept it in green marker because she'd appointed herself to do it in the first week and nobody had been brave enough to stop her. Abe had spent the whole night deciding he was going to look at it properly.

He'd been awake on the floor of his room since he got off the bus. He'd done push-ups until his arms gave out and nothing had happened. Then he'd lain there on his back and gone through it one more time, the ticket and the woman's page and the noise all coming back at once. It had happened. He had no idea how to make it happen again. He'd spent a whole year walking past that board fast so he wouldn't have to read it. At about two in the morning he decided he was finished doing that.

It had felt like a fine decision at two in the morning, and it felt a great deal worse at eight twenty with his bag on his shoulder and the corridor full of people. The corridor was still arguing about it.

"She's put 'heals a bruise.' That is not what it does."

"It's what it does, Ryan."

"It does a lot more than a bruise." Further down, Ellis Naylor was explaining to two people at length, and completely wrongly, why Mind was a waste of a column. Abe went and stood in front of it and read it anyway. The board had four columns and then a fifth. Name, then your layer, then Body, then Mind. Then a wide one at the end where Nita wrote down what your Talent did. The layer is a count of rungs. There are two ladders, Body and Mind, and everybody Awakens at the bottom of both with a one in each column.

Climb a rung on either ladder and your layer goes up by one, and so does that column. The other two columns can run ahead of it. Every so often a skill gets good enough that it turns into a better version of itself, and when that happens it pays a point into Body or Mind on top of everything else. A rare one pays two. That is why the names at the top of that board have bigger numbers in those columns than their layer could ever have given them. DANFORTH, P. · Layer 4 · Body 4 · Mind 4 · reads a room CROFT, M.

· Layer 3 · Body 5 · Mind 1 · cuts through Then the rest of them, all the way down. Layer 3s, then a long run of Layer 2s, each with a word or two beside it. Sees in the dark. Never gets lost. Heals a bruise. Then the newest group at the bottom, all sitting on Layer 1 with ones in both columns, because nobody climbs anything in their first two weeks. Nell Mott was in there with lifts what she holds written next to her name, which Abe thought was about the nicest thing you could write about anybody.

Then a ruled line. Somebody had drawn it across the board months ago, purely so that the bottom would look like a bottom, and the last row on the board sat underneath it. Then: DOLAN, A. · Layer 1 · Body 1 · Mind 1 · The last column was empty. Abe stood and looked at the empty space where his Talent was supposed to be written down, and it hurt. The numbers didn't hurt. He checked, because he'd been braced for them all night, and there was nothing there. He'd been awake since midnight on Friday.

Nobody in history had ever climbed anything in three days, and five other names sat up there on ones with him. Numbers like that go up. The empty space was different. The empty space was going to sit there until somebody gave Nita something to write in it. Nita had left it blank because Nita was a decent person. She'd watched him do sixty push-ups on a gym floor, she'd come out to the corridor with her marker afterward, and she hadn't been willing to write a joke about him where four hundred people could read it.

So there was nothing there at all, and Abe would honestly have preferred the joke. A joke would've meant somebody cared enough to write one.

"You're famous," said Croft. Abe had heard him coming from six feet away. Miles Croft had a voice built for corridors.

"Am I."

"Nita's left you a hole." Croft stopped next to him with his hands in his pockets and looked up at the board with what seemed to be real wonder, which was somehow worse than sneering would've been.

"Two hundred names on there. Every single one of them has got something in that last column. Even Mott, and Mott woke up on Wednesday."

"Mott had something to show."

"So show us yours."

"I did."

"You did push-ups." Croft said it happily, like he was reminding Abe of a nice afternoon the two of them had spent together. Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

"For about six minutes. Then Tench told you to stop, and the whole year went out to break, and not one person in that gym could tell Nita a single word to put in your box." Abe didn't answer, mostly because all of it was true.

"So what does it do?"

"It works while I train."

"So does a skipping rope." Three people behind Croft laughed. Abe couldn't think of anything to say back, because it was a good line and it was very nearly right. Croft said it cheerfully. He wasn't standing there trying to hurt anybody, but he was completely sure he understood how the world worked, and he liked saying so out loud where people could hear him. Abe hated him anyway, and had done since the first week of term. The jokes were the smallest part of it.

Miles Croft had never once in his whole life had to wonder whether he was going to turn out to be somebody, and Abe thought about that most days. Then Croft looked back up at the board, at the names above his own, and pulled a face.

"Look at Danforth, though. Body 4. Four." Croft shook his head slowly, like a man talking about a friend who keeps making the same mistake.

"Half his hours go on some pottery thing his coach makes him do on Sundays. Genuinely the best in our year, and he spends every Sunday of his life making a bowl." Abe looked up at the board too. Danforth was one whole layer above Croft, in the column that everybody in Calder used to decide who was winning, and neither of them said a word about it. Croft didn't seem to see it. Abe did see it, and it didn't mean anything to him, because he had no idea yet what he was looking at.

Then Croft reached up and tapped the board, once, on the wall just under Abe's name.

"Don't let them rub you out, Dolan," he said.

"Somebody has to be last." Then he went off down the corridor with the three of them laughing behind him. It had taken about forty seconds. Croft hadn't said one single thing that would've gotten him in trouble if Abe had told a teacher about it. Piers Danforth caught up with him on the stairs, and Piers Danforth had never done that before. Abe had spoken to him maybe four times in five weeks and every one of those had been about a door or a chair.

"That was foul," Danforth said.

"It was accurate."

"Yeah. It's still foul. He knew it was foul when he said it, that's why he said it." They went down a flight. Danforth looked over the rail to see who else was in the stairwell. Abe had not expected him to check.

"I'm going to tell you something I shouldn't. Croft's own demonstration went wrong in August, in that exact room, and he cried about it in the locker room afterward, and about eleven people saw." Abe stopped.

"He didn't."

"He absolutely did." Nothing happened on Danforth's face. Two flights further down, Abe worked out that this had been a joke.

"I wouldn't repeat it. Nobody would believe you anyway. I'm telling you because it happens to nearly everybody, and because the board moves."

"How fast?" Danforth started to say something, stopped, and started again. Abe watched him pick the true answer over the kind one, and watched him not enjoy it.

"Fast at first. Everybody gets Layer 2 inside a few weeks and everybody feels great about it. Then it gets harder every single time, forever."

"How far does it go?"

"Most of us finish the year on three. Top of that board, six. Seven if you have a really good year, but those ones all have a coach, and four hours a day, and someone at home buying their essence." He heard himself and looked slightly ill about it.

"Sorry. You did ask."

"What's the record?"

"In Calder? Nine. A woman called Halloran, who works in an office. She got there before either of us was born and nobody has touched it since." Nine. Abe held on to it. The best anybody in his whole city had ever managed was a single digit, and it had been standing there longer than he had been alive. They came out at the bottom into the noise of the corridor.

"What happens if you haven't got two hours a day?" Danforth was quiet.

"Then slower," he said.

"I don't know a way to say that which isn't rude."

"It's not rude if it's just true."

"No, it's still rude," Danforth said.

"I just can't help it." The rain started while Abe was walking home from Riddell's, and by the time he reached the apartment it was coming down hard and sideways. Peg was asleep in the chair with the television on low. Abe put the blanket over her and she didn't wake up, and he counted that as a win. There was a plate under a bowl on the counter, and under the plate a note in June's handwriting. ate at 6 like a normal person. the board is stupid. love j. Her school was his school. Of course she already knew.

Abe ate the cold dinner standing up at the counter. Then he went out the back. There was a concrete yard behind the building where the trash cans lived, about the size of two parking spaces. It had a wall around it, a drain in the middle that had never drained properly, and a security light that had been broken since before he moved in. It was the only place he had. He got down on the wet concrete in the rain and started doing push-ups. He had tried it eleven times since he got up.

In the bathroom, on the walk in, twice in the corridor with his back to the board, and once sitting at the back of a lesson with his hands flat on the desk. Nothing had come. He was not trying now. There was nothing left in him to try with, and he was cold, and his dinner had been cold. The rain came down the back of his collar and kept going. The concrete was freezing. His shoulders started complaining at about twenty and started shouting at about forty.

He tucked his elbows in like Tench had told him to five weeks ago, and he kept going. Fifty. Fifty-five. Down and up. The hiss of rain on concrete, the sound of his own breathing, the count, and nothing else in the world he had to do except the next one. Sixty. And then the rain stopped. It didn't stop the way rain stops. Abe kept counting for a beat and a half before his ears caught up with him, like when you keep walking after the last stair. The hissing sound of it was gone. All of it, everywhere, at once.

He held the push-up at the top with his arms shaking, and he looked up. The rain was hanging in the air. All of it. Thousands and thousands of drops, gray and small and perfectly still, held up between the sky and the concrete like somebody had pressed pause on the whole night. Light from a kitchen window two floors up caught them, so that the drops lit up one above another above another, a staircase of tiny beads going up past the roofline and into the dark. Abe forgot to breathe.

There was a drop the size of a pea hanging a hand's width from his face. He could see the wall of the yard inside it, bent and upside down and small and perfect. Out past the wall a car had stopped in the middle of the road, and its headlights were two solid cones of light that didn't move. A pigeon hung over the roof of the next building with its wings spread, going absolutely nowhere. In the apartment upstairs a television had been talking. It was not talking now.

The whole city had gone quiet and still and beautiful, and Abe Dolan was kneeling in a puddle behind the trash cans in the middle of it, and he was the only thing in it that moved.

"Oh," he said, out loud, to nobody. His voice worked. His breath came out as a cloud and hung in front of his face for a moment, and then it started moving again, warm and alive, in the middle of a city that had stopped. Abe knelt in a puddle behind the trash cans with his arms screaming and his heart going like a drum, and he started to laugh. He laughed until he nearly put his face in the water. He was so happy he couldn't hold his own weight up. Then he sat back on his heels to look at it properly.

The rain hit him in the face. All of it, all at once, the whole night coming down again out of the sky, and the hiss came back on like somebody had turned a tap. Abe knelt there in the wet with his mouth open. He had a guess about what had done it. He got his hands back down on the freezing concrete and pushed himself up, slowly, one more time. Sixty-one. The rain stopped in the air. Abe stayed at the top of that push-up for a long time, holding a stopped rainstorm up with his arms, and he wasn't laughing anymore.

Twice now. Once on the bus, and once here in the yard. He had all night to find out what he had done.