The Fugitive Grandma Lives

Chapter 9 - The Killer Boys

During the same sunny afternoon that his grandmother lunched at the country club, Johnny sat in class at Palm Valley Middle School where he was enrolled at Billy Chase, a new student transferred from somewhere back east. He was at his desk, sitting between three other boys who slouched in their chairs, texting each other furiously while the teacher gathered up papers and waited for the bell to dismiss them.

This trio was known throughout the school as Killer Boys, the coolest of the cool, possessing the coolest haircuts, best mountain bikes, the newest cell phones, the freshest memes on the Internet. They were all stars roles in various local sports teams and kept the teachers happy with better than average grades.

They were not very nice to other kids in the school who they judged to be less talent and popular. In fact, their greatest skill seemed to be their ability to be cruel and insult the ones who least deserved it. He'd seen them be rude to adults too, like the skinny woman who stocked the shelves at Great American where they deliberately knocked products off the shelves to make her clean up the spill.

"That's her mom!" he remembered hearing one of them say.

Now they were all laughing at something on the screens of their phone. Johnny could make out the letters "GB" on their phone screens but he was used to being out of the loop. He was the only kid in the class who didn't have a phone because his father and grandma were worried that the Feds might snoop on their calls. They didn't know he had figured out a way to connect his iPad in the bedroom to the neighbor's Internet router. They didn't know he was visiting the Comic Club incognito as Captain's Disciple under the sheets when he went to bed at night.

Johnny thought about The Seer, the mysterious avatar from the Comic Club, the one who knew so much about him and promised to help his grandmother live forever. Johnny still remembered the first time he understood death, when he was five years old and his pet guinea pig Skinny got sick. His father explained that everybody will die some day and Johnny cried in his pillow that night.

"Hey Billy," said Brad, the leader of the Killer Boys, interrupting Johnny's thoughts. "Anyone ever tell you that you have a face only a grandmother could love?"

"Billy Chase, if you were any dumber they'd have to water you," said Phil, Brad's second in command.

"I'll bet you have a date with a scratch and sniff poster this weekend?" their buddy Lance added.

"What do you expect? The guy is from Ohio, wherever that is."

Their attention was diverted to another classmate returning from the principal's office, a tall, skinny girl who always dressed in black and never smiled.

"There she is," Brad whispered. "They held her back a year, she's already fourteen."

'She was too dumb to move up with the rest of her class!" Phil said.

"And ugly," Lance added. Johnny thought she'd be very pretty if she ever smiled, but didn't dare say anything to interrupt the boys.

Phil shrugged. "You can always put a bag over her head."

"She lives in those gross apartments next to the mountain."

"What do you expect with a mom mopping aisles at Great American?"

"Remember we kept tipping over all those bottles of salad dressing and she had to go fetch them up?" Lance laughed.

"Just like a dog."

"Why don't you guys shut up," Johnny muttered under his breath, unable to control himself. The bell finally rang and everyone rushed out of the room for their next class period.

In between classes, the three boys cornered Johnny in the bathroom.

"You don't ever tell us to shut up," Phil said, pushing Johnny against the wall by the toilet stalls. "You got that?"

"Got it."

"We saw you at the store, too, Billy Chase," Brad said in a teasing tone. "Don't you know what we've been looking at on our phones?" The boys all taunted him by holding out their cell phones. "Don't you know what 'GB' stands for?" Johnny tried to grab one of their phones away as danced around him. "GB! GB!" they howled.

Johnny finally snatched away Brad's cell phone and the screen they were laughing about. It was a picture of him and his grandmother in the parking lot at Great American, the moment he caught her so she wouldn't fall.

In the picture, Johnny and his grandma both looked pathetic and panic-stricken. They had tagged his image with his nickname.

"GRANNY'S BOY"

He chucked the cell phone in the toilet and flushed.