The Giant by Lex Thomas

Author:Lex Thomas [Lex Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub

18

David looked up at Gonzalo from a couple stairs below, holding onto the railing and looking like Gonzalo had just punched him in the gut.

“Listen,” Gonzalo went on. “I’m just trying to be straight with you. We had a good run with that first food drop, and then the last one. You guys got a base now. I made sure it’s good and fortified. You got a solid rep, and Varsity’s totally backed off. You don’t need me anymore.”

Gonzalo was sitting on the third-floor landing of the Stairs, the stairwell his new Scrap gang had claimed as their new base. David took a step up toward him. “It’s not about needing you, man. It’s about wanting you here. I mean . . . can I ask why you want to leave? Is it something we did? Something I did? Is it about the smell? Because I’m planning on enforcing daily bathing.”

Gonzalo shook his head. This was exactly why he’d wanted to leave when everybody was sleeping, but if he was ever going to set foot in the quad again, he knew he’d have to explain himself to David. Except he didn’t want to talk anything out. He just wanted to disappear and be done with it.

“I know a lot of kids in the Stairs are a little cagey around you. Or, like, really cagey,” David said and sighed. Gonzalo couldn’t argue. “It’s going to take a while for all of us to gel. I mean, you’ve gotta remember, we’ve all been Scraps for a long time. Being alone that long tends to make people a little eccentric.”

“Eccentric” was putting it lightly. They’d decided to name the gang the Loners, and Gonzalo couldn’t have come up with a better name if he’d tried. Nearly a hundred head-cases cooped up in this stairwell like emotionally disturbed bees. There were these twins, a brother and sister, who were always sniffing each other’s pits and picking at each other’s scalps. There was a half-blind kid who farted three times every minute. There was a girl whose hobby was peeling off layers of her skin. There was hardly a person in the gang who didn’t have a flaw they’d been mocked for. One was fat in spite of a year of starvation. Some stuttered. Some had thinning hair, even some of the girls. Most smelled. Others were so excited to have people to talk to that they never shut up. Voices that honked. Voices that squeaked. It seemed crazy to think it, but he missed the senior lounge. The seniors never made a noise.

“I don’t think they like me,” Gonzalo said.

As happy as they’d been to have Gonzalo fighting for them, behind closed doors everyone still seemed to be expecting him to snap at any moment and go on a rampage.

“They don’t know you,” David said.

“Neither do you.”

David opened his mouth to speak but then paused. He exhaled and let his shoulders slump. “What I’m trying to say is, nobody’s gonna know you as long you’re snarling like you do all the time.

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