paper cranes | stanley uris

ONE

Samantha couldn’t get out of that school fast enough. The halls were probably more active today than they had been all year, everyone dumping the contents of their lockers into their backpacks to throw out at a later date. The only good thing about that was that everyone leaving meant no one would be at the nurse's office, where she was headed.

She fought the crowd, accidentally bumping into someone as she passed a group blocking off half of the hall and nearly causing her bag to fall of her shoulder. "What the fuck?" She called a sorry over her shoulder to whoever the owner of that voice was without thinking and ducked into the office, hurrying past the walls of posters encouraging a healthy amount of time to wash hands for and coming to a stop at the desk.

The nurse was a kind old woman with grey hair always tied up in a tight bun on top of her head. Probably gave her a complex. Her back was currently to her, so Sam cleared her throat impatiently to catch her attention. The old woman turned and smiled. “Here for your prescription I presume?” Sam offered a tiny smile, watching as the woman shuffled into her little closet where she kept those orange bottles to retrieve the one with her name on it. “My gran would kill me if I left a good few doses here for the summer,” Sam chuckled a little awkwardly and reached up to grip the strap of her backpack.

She worried at her chewed lip and gently tapped the toe of her converse on the floor. She was so ready to go home. Maybe if she’d left immediately like everyone else she’d be home by now, but there was no way she wasn’t going to be late. Especially not after she heard the door open behind her and that all too familiar voice.

“Hey, Druggy.” Sam squeezed her eyes shut. Henry Bowers. “Don’t tell me you’re stealing pills from the school now.” She felt Patrick’s hands grip her shoulders and spin her around to face him, and then his stupid face was just inches away from hers. Feeling a surge, she pushed him back.

“Give it a break, Bowers.” Sam tried to sound bigger than herself, but her voice wavered. Henry stepped up to her and reached out to grab the front of her striped shirt, pushing her back against the edge of the desk. It dug into her back. “How about I break you?” he spat threatenly in her face, and she got the urge to rip that mullet off of his head.

“Henry,” one of his friends hissed, jutting his chin out towards the room behind her where she couldn't see. The nurse must be coming back. “Come on.” Bowers tugged her by her shirt out of the office and down the emptying hall towards the pair of double doors leading to the front, being held open my forgotten social studies textbooks.

Bowers and his boys wasted no time selecting a new target, a group of boys near the trash cans, pulling their backpacks back onto their backs. Henry let her go for long enough to grab one of the boys’s bags, the boy had glasses that nearly fell off when he was pulled back right into another boy, sending both of them tumbling to the ground. Patrick grabbed Sam by the back of her shirt and shoved her on top of the boys on the grass. Her backpack fell off of her arm beside them.

There was a collective groan from the three of them, and immediately she moved to crawl off of them while Patrick crouched down and plucked a kippah from the ground where it must have fallen off one of the boys's heads. "Nice frisbee, flammer." Sam was just getting to her knees, able to look up and see the second boy, one with tight curls and a blue collared shirt reach for it. "Give it back!" he tried just as Patrick threw it through the open window of a passing bus.

Now on her feet, Sam offered a hand to the boy with an apologetic smile, both for his kippah and for falling on him. Once he'd taken it and pulled himself up, she did the same for the other boy. This was the one with the glasses that she now saw had panes so thick they made him look like a slightly greasy haired bug. "Whoa," he muttered upon seeing her and reached up to straighten his glasses. She ignored him and turned to see where Bowers had gone now, but he was walking away. Good.

One of his boys she recognized, Bill, from the news stories. His younger brother had gone missing a while back, the whole small town had been talking about it. "You s-s-suck Bowers!" Bill called out, the words bursting out of him, making the three older boys stop walking and turn around to face them. Sam instinctively took a step back and reached down for her bag where it still lay on the grass, empty, and dragged it up and onto her back.

"This summer's going to be a hurt train, for you and your faggot friends," Henry was saying, licking the palm of his hand and wiping it down Bill's cheek. "You too Crackhead. We'll make sure to be seeing you around." That one was directed to her and it stung, but Henry was gone before she could even look up from the ground she was staring hatefully at.

Okay, yeah, she was going home now. She started to back up and turn away. "A-a-are you okay?" Bill's voice stopped her and she glanced back, her body naturally turning. "Oh, yeah. If there's anything I'm used to it's Henry Bowers," she told him, her thumb tucked under her backpack strap. "Sorry, for falling on you," she said then to the two boys in question.

The one with glasses smiled cheesily. "Don't worry about it, babe. The way I see it, we were meant to run into each other sooner or later." One of the other boys, the shorter one, shoved him. "Shut the fuck up, Richie." Sam watched in amusement as the boy rounded on her. "Wait. You're the one who ran into me! In the hallway, just now!"

Sam reached up to run a hand through her hair. "Yeah. Sorry about that too." Well, wasn't that just great? She'd screwed things up with these guys now too. "It's okay," the boy who had lost his kippah said, speaking up for the first time. She turned her eyes on him.

"I-I'm Bill," the boy brought her attention back to him. "I know." After a moment she smiled. "We had science together." Bill smiled too. "This is Richie-" "They call me Thrashmouth, but you can call me anytime-" "Eddie, and Stanley." Sam took her hand off of the strap of her bag and lifted a hand in a wave along with a smile. "Sam." She looked over all of them, placing names with faces. Her eyes stayed on Stanley for a moment. Then she looked down.

"Well, I should get going." She jabbed a thumb over her shoulder. "You guys stay safe this summer. Bowers sounded pretty serious about… you know, making it a hurt train." She offered them all a smile and then turned around to begin walking away. "Bye." She glanced back over her shoulder, unable to tell which boy it came from. Her eyes found the ones with curls. "Bye."