So in the short term, things were good for Mack in the aftermath of the Wednesday Massacre (as it came to be called).
Stefan was not back at school on Thursday or Friday.
“Maybe he croaked after all,” Mack said to himself on Friday. “And that would be bad. Yes; bad.”
But when Monday rolled around, that guilty hope was banished.
Stefan was definitely not dead. He had a massive bandage on his arm, white gauze wrapped by a sort of weblike thing. But Stefan wouldn’t need both arms to murder Mack.
It was a scary moment when Mack looked up and saw Stefan’s sullen face at the far end of a hallway full of kids on that fateful Monday.
It was scary for Mack and the few kids who considered him a close friend. But everyone else was just plain giddy. This was the most anticipated moment in the history of Richard Gere Middle School. Imagine the degree of anticipation that might have greeted the simultaneous release of an Iron Man movie, a brand-new sequel to a Harry Potter book, and albums by the top three bands all rolled into one happy, nervous, “OMG, I totally can’t wait to see this!” moment.
The kids saw Mack step into the hallway.
They saw Stefan also in the hallway.
The kids parted magically in the middle, as if they were hair and someone had dragged a comb right down the middle of the hallway.
There was a part. That’s the point. Kids hugging the lockers to the left. Kids hugging the lockers to the right. And all the kids were incredibly excited.
Mack felt a lump in his throat. He was excited, too, but of course in a very different way. He was excited in the way that had to do with thinking, So, I wonder if there really is an afterlife? That kind of excited.
“Should I run?” Mack wondered.
He sighed. “No. Wouldn’t do any good, would it?” No one answered, so he answered himself. “Better to just take my beating here.”
If Stefan pounded him here in the hallway, some teacher would probably break it up. Eventually.
So Mack squared his shoulders. He tugged at the back of his T-shirt. He rolled his neck a little, loosening the muscles there. He wasn’t going to win this fight, but he was going to try.
Stefan walked straight toward him, his overly adult biceps barely contained by his T-shirt sleeves. Stefan had pecs. Stefan had muscles in his neck. He had muscles in places where all Mack had was soft, yielding flab.
Mack walked toward him and oh, boy, you could have heard a pin drop. So everyone certainly heard it when Santiago dropped his binder and everyone jumped and then giggled—and the anticipation just grew because now it had an element of humor to it.
Stefan came to a stop five feet from Mack.
And at that moment, a very, very old man wearing a black robe that kind of hung down over his face—a man who Mack could not help but notice smelled like some unholy combination of feet, garbage cans, and Salisbury steak—simply appeared.
Appeared as in, “Not there,” followed immediately by, “There.”
“Ret click-ur!”
That’s what the apparition cried. And no, it did not make any sense.
And weirdly all the kids in the hallway—all except for Mack and Stefan—were bathed in a sort of overbright light. It was like the light in a bus station bathroom. Wait, you’ve probably never been in a bus station bathroom (lucky for you), so imagine the kind of light you’d get if you floated up and stuck your face in a Wal-Mart ceiling light.
It was an eerily bright light of a color that seemed to drain all signs of life out of normal kids’ faces.
“Hold!” the old man said in a whiny, hectoring croak of a voice.
And he lifted one wrinkled, age-spotted hand. The fingernails were long and yellow. The cuticles were greenish. Not happy, flowery meadow-green but moldy, eewww-something-is-growing-on-this-sandwich green.
The aromatic, ancient, green-nailed apparition stared at nothing. Not at Mack. Not at Stefan. Possibly because his eyes were like translucent blue marbles. Not blue with a little black dot in the middle and a lot of white all around, but a sort of smeary blue that covered iris, pupil, and all the other eye parts. As if he had started with normal blue eyes, but they’d been pureed in a blender and then poured back into his eyeholes.
Mack froze.
Stefan did not freeze. He frowned at the ancient man and said, “Back off, old dude.”