48 HOURS UNTIL EXTRACTION

This isn't happening again.

I'm just going to walk in there, tell them all to go to hell, and hope they leave me alone.

Maybe if I pretend I'm someone different, they'll treat me better. Or, could I just maybe disappear? Okay, Johnny, let's just get this over with. That was me suffering through the five stages of grief every morning before school. No, no one died, just my soul. I went to Lincoln Park High School in Chicago.

High school was like a petting zoo, and all the other kids were cute little frolicking goats. Me? I was Black Phillip from that movie, The Witch. I had a reputation for being the weird gay kid. It didn't help that my best friend had been burning sage at her locker every morning since the start of sophomore year. That is, until Principal Welder told her it was against the rules. Alison declared it was against her religious freedom, threatened to go to the ACLU and make it into a big deal, but she never followed through. She lost interest and moved on to using a dowsing crystal to search campus for hidden gravesites.

I was sliding up the handle of my dingy red locker when Spencer Pruitt slammed his hand on the door. "Hey!" he said, putting his face right in mine. Spencer was a tower with a neck like a honey ham. He took out his phone and scrolled through it. "I saw this movie about you on Netflix last night." He chuckled and showed me the screen: Gayby. "Is that what they call baby fags when they're born?"

Spencer had started tormenting me in the ninth grade. I didn't even know why. Back in middle school, Spencer was a quiet D&D nerd. Then puberty hit, and he turned into a six-foot-tall gorilla-human hybrid with a thirst for blood.

I tuned him out, fidgeting with my locker until he slammed his hand against it again. "Hey, gayby, I'm talking to you."

"Hey, Spencer!" Alison called from down the hallway. Wedging herself between two sour-faced cheerleaders, she headed for my locker. Once she was beside me, she gave Spencer a curt smile. "You know, for someone with a micropenis, you sure do produce a lot of testosterone. Have you ever thought of submitting yourself to a scientific study?"

"You're both freaks. I should ruin you right here." 

Alison flipped him off as he walked away. "That guy is such a troglodyte." She leaned on the locker next to mine. "You see, J, if guys bottle up their gayness for too long, they become Spencer Pruitt."

"What?" I said, finally getting my locker open.

"He's got a huge crush on you. Duh. The only thing he wants to ruin is your—" She looked pointedly down at my butt.

"Gross. What're you even talking about?" I looked over at Spencer, still glaring at me from his group of equally boneheaded friends. "That guy hates my guts."

"Look at how he's staring at you. That's repressed longing. You remind him of what he can't have because of heteronormativity or whatever."

I closed my locker and we headed for homeroom. "Sure, that's what it is."

"What, you don't believe me? He's a wrestler, J. It's scientifically proven that's the most homoerotic sport in the world."

During English, Alison texted me memes while I watched the clock ticktock, ticktock, ticktock. My neck going slack, I laid my head on the desk and counted every tick. One. Two. Three. When I got bored, I turned my face to the side and stared at the classroom door, imagining a black mist filling the hallways. Some unknown force was invading, so while my classmates cowered, I darted to my feet, the only one fit to stand against the impending evil. The mist seeped in under the door and materialized into a giant talking troll, who then pointed a mechanical claw at me and said, "Johnny, you must be destroyed!" 

I threw back, "No, you must be destroyed!" as a magical sword appeared in my hands, then I charged the fiend, leaping into the air and bringing my blade crashing down on it. My classmates gasped as I—the weird, quiet, and probably gay kid— wowed them with my swordsmanship.

One perilous swing after another, I forced the beast out into the hallway. Students hurried out of their classrooms to investigate the clatter, raising hands to their gaping mouths as I kicked off walls and lockers, smacking my blade against the monster's mechanical arm. Then the bell rang, snapping me out of my daydream. I really needed to stop watching Scott Pilgrim vs. the World so much.

My torture continued in P.E. I always wore gym clothes under my regular clothes because I was too embarrassed to get undressed in front of the other guys. I wasn't fat, but I certainly wasn't fit. Just awkward. Spencer caught me sitting on the bench tying my shoes and clomped over, holding a jockstrap. "Hey, freak," he said, dangling it in front of my face. "You perverts like this stuff, right? You sniff them or something, don't you?" I continued tying my shoes. "C'mon," he insisted. "Don't you want to sniff it, pervert?" He snatched the back of my head and shoved my face into the jockstrap. Surprisingly, it didn't smell like Spencer's balls - close call.

The coach passed by and caught Spencer holding me in a headlock. "Pruitt!"

Spencer whisked the jockstrap behind his back. I popped up onto my feet and furrowed my eyebrows at him.

"Just messing around with him, Coach," Spencer said. "Move it along, Pruitt." Spencer snarled at me and walked away. The rest of the day passed in more or less the same way, a metaphorical jockstrap-to-the-face kind of day. Because Alison didn't live far away, after school she could walk home, but me—I had to take the bus. Slumping into a squeaky vinyl seat, I hoped the springs poking through would stab me to death. Kids screamed and shot spitballs and slung wads of paper at each other, their whining and screeching—like a swarm of doomsday locusts—a perfect reminder of why I hated my life.

Thirty painful minutes later, the bus dropped me off not far from my house. Our neighborhood used to be middle class, but the crabgrass growing through the cracked sidewalks told the story of white flight into trendier subdivisions since then. My neighborhood was like a ghost wandering in an urban wasteland.

My dad and I lived alone on a cul-de-sac among a bunch of other squat little houses whose residents were being shaken down by the landlord for exorbitant rental fees. I walked in the front door and found Dad slumped on the couch in front of the tele- vision. He leaned forward a little bit and grunted. "Hey there, kiddo."

"Hey." I slipped my shoes off and stored them on a rack near the door.

"How'd your day go?"

"Same as always. Yours?"

"I got a gig writing a freelance article for some up-and-coming music blog."

"Is this like that last up-and-coming music blog that refused to pay you?"

"Come on, Juanito. You can't be so cynical. You need to have some faith in people."

"Consider my faith officially spent." Today's mail was on the entryway table. One of the letters was from Dad's divorce lawyer. He hadn't even opened it yet.

"Have you talked to Mom?" I asked.

Dad got quiet. He settled back in the recliner, TV images dancing in his lifeless eyes. "No."

"Isn't Mom supposed to come see me this weekend?" "I don't know. I think she has something to do with that Michael."

I wasn't surprised. "Have you bought groceries?"

"No."

"Dad, there's nothing to eat in there."

"We'll go get pizza or something." "Dad, the last time we spent the budget eating out, we had to eat rice and fried eggs for three days."

My dad sat up. "Juanito! Let me be the adult, okay? I've got this. Do you want to go get pizza or not?"

"No. I'm not hungry." I started for the stairway.

"You just going to lock yourself up in that room, Count Dracula?"

"Yes." I hurried upstairs before he could make any more conversation. Once in my room, I shut the door with my back and snatched my headphones off the desk. I slipped them on, scrolled through my phone for my "I Hate Myself" playlist, and crashed face first onto my bed, zoning out as music filled my ears. The late afternoon sunlight came in through the window, orange at first, then, as I lay there, going red, purple, black.

Rolling onto my back, I looked up at the little stars glued to my ceiling. They'd used to glow, but over time, had grown dim. After a while, boredom struck, so I grabbed my phone, Googled some random porn, and slipped my hand into my boxers. I didn't get far before my phone dinged with a text from Alison:

Hey, loser. Stop playing with your wiener and come to the mall. I'm at the arcade.

Busted.

•

On my way into the arcade, I accidentally crashed into a man wear- ing a crisp white suit. He grabbed my shoulders to keep me from hitting the floor, then flashed me a big fox-like smile that put me at ease. The air around him smelled like the pages of an old book— earthy, warm.

"Sorry," I stammered. "It's fine," he said. "Sometimes I get caught up in daydreams too."

I flashed a shaky smile and kept on my way, braving the sour-smelling underarm stink of the arcade, looking for Alison. Briefly, I looked back: the smiling man in white was gone, almost like he'd never been there at all.

Beyond a gaggle of sweaty fighting-game fanatics, I found Alison playing her favorite zombie shooter. She called it training for the zombie apocalypse. One eye shut, she lined up the sight of the plastic gun with a zombie's head. Boom. The head exploded. "Another one bites the dust," she said, blowing the plastic barrel as though it were smoking, then holstering the gun on the cabinet. "Come on. Kurt and Chloë are waiting for us."

In the food court, we met up with Kurt, a shaggy-haired pot- head who carried his skateboard everywhere, and his girlfriend, Chloë, a cybergoth girl with a neon-pink dreadfall. They didn't go to Lincoln with us—I actually had no idea which school they went to. As far as I was concerned, they were Alison's mall friends who didn't like me much. Kurt used to call me a "soft-boy faggot" until I pierced my ears and started wearing all black. Then he said I was a poser until he got messed up at a party one time and kissed me. After that, he never bothered me again because he was scared I'd tell Chloë.

Gross mall-Chinese food in hand, we sat down at a round table. Alison and I were sharing a plate. While I prodded a slimy piece of broccoli with a spork, Alison kept glancing behind her.

"What're you looking at?" Chloë asked.

Alison spun around in her seat. "Nothing."

"She's looking at that table of jocks over there," Kurt said, grinning. He pointed at a table on the other side of the food court, where Spencer and his goons were sitting. Alison was probably looking at Todd Pilkerton, one of Spencer's good friends, a dark- haired guy who also had a neck like a Christmas ham and not much in the brain department. They were accompanied by Matt Bowler and Nick Price, two other jocks who went to our school. Ali had had a crush on Todd back in middle school. They used to be friends—he even came to her twelfth birthday party and spent the night with us—but after she transitioned, things went south. He wasn't really Ali's type, but I think she remembered how he used to be, and she was stuck on that. I chuckled and went back to stabbing the broccoli, pretending it was Spencer's head.

Chloë turned her sights on me. "What's so funny? Who's she looking at?"

"I don't know," I said. Chloë raised an eyebrow at me.

"Come on, Johnny," Kurt said, kicking me under the table.

"Yeah, tell us who it is."

"You guys, quit it," Alison said. 

Kurt grabbed my shoulders and shook me. "Dude, come on, who's she looking at?"

Chloë got up on her knees on her seat and leaned across the table toward me. "Tell. Us."

"Come on. Tell us." Tell us tell us tell us tell us tell us tell us tell us tell us—dammit.

"Todd Pilkerton! Leave me alone!" I said so loud the people at the table next to us gave us dirty looks.

Alison stabbed the toe of her boot into my leg. "Johnny!"

"Ow!" I shrank in my chair and mouthed Sorry. Kurt adjusted his cap and laughed. "What's the big deal? It's just some dumb jock."

"He goes to our school," Alison said, teeth gritted.

"So? Tell him you like him," Chloë said.

Alison shook her head. "No. Oh my god, no."

"Then I'll do it for you!" Chloë rose to her feet and headed to Spencer's table.

"No!" Alison reached for Chloë's arm, but her fingers fell short of catching her sleeve. Alison recoiled like she was watching a nuclear explosion in slow motion.

We held our breath as Chloë walked up to Spencer's table. Her big fuzzy boots and neon-pink hair had Spencer's crew gaping at her like a freshly landed space alien. Chloë hunched over close to Todd and pointed at our table, drawing his attention to us. Alison curled her fingers back, balling her hand into a fist. I shouldn't have opened my big mouth. This was all my fault. When Chloë finished talking, Spencer said something we couldn't hear, and Todd's face went red. Then Spencer, Matt, and Nick exploded into knee-slapping laughter. Todd shot his goons a nasty glare and shut them up, then he scowled at Chloë and said something back to her.

Chloë puffed up like a blowfish, snatched a soda cup off the table, and emptied it on Todd's head. Then we burst into laughter as Chloë launched into invective: "What's wrong with you cis-white-hetero dirtbags! Are you for real, right now? You ought to check yourselves and deconstruct your patriarchal notions of gender."

Everyone in the food court turned to stare as Chloë roared like a neon-maned lion. I watched Alison's body tighten, stiff as a poker, her usually pale skin going two shades lighter. Todd and his friends gaped at Chloë as she swung her neck around and unloaded every bit of social justice vocabulary the internet had taught her. They didn't entertain her tirade long before shooting to their feet.

"We've got to go, Kurt. Tell Chloë we left, okay?" Alison grabbed my arm and yanked me off the seat. We rushed outside and headed around the mall for the bus stop near the Sears entrance. Darkness caped the parking lot on that side of the mall because the ancient lampposts barely worked. People never parked there, so it was kind of sketchy, but it was the closest bus stop.

"I'm sorry, Ali," I said.

My words missed her. "I can't believe Chloë did that!" she said, loud enough for the squirrels hiding in the landscaped buffers to hear. "She's so weird. All she ever does is sit online and call everything problematic, like she's supposed to parade me around and fight for me all the time. I can't stand it. I'm, like, this isn't Tumblr, Chloë, no one cares. And she's like blah, blah, blah, social justice—"

"Isn't that good, though? That she stands up for you?" Alison stopped walking. "Why are you still in the closet, J?"

"I—I don't know," I said, looking at my feet.

"I do. It's because you're scared. Because we don't live in a stupid teen movie where everyone does a musical number when you come out. The world is full of jerks who don't like us for no good reason. Sometimes, you don't want to be the center of attention in a room full of strangers. People like Chloë don't get that. To them, it's all about looking more 'woke' than everybody else."

I tried lightening the mood. "People should do musical numbers when you come out."

A red Miata screeched by, power-sliding to a stop in front of us. Todd, Spencer, Matt, and Nick piled out through a pair of suicide doors. Todd slammed his door shut and cracked his knuckles. I grabbed Alison's hand so we could run away, but before we could move, they circled us like a pack of Lacoste-wearing jackals.

"Did you think that shit was funny?" Todd said. "You think trying to embarrass us was a good idea, freak?"

"Chloë was just being a jerk, Todd," Alison said. "We didn't do anything to you."

Todd walked over and sized me up, towering over me. He pressed his hands against my chest, deep and hard, and pushed me down. Pain shot up my back as I slammed onto the ground. When I saw him snatch Alison's shirt collar, I scrambled to my feet, but Nick drove his fist into my stomach, and I fell to my knees, gasping. Alison's eyebrows shot up when she saw Todd hit me. "Todd, we didn't have anything to do with Chloë being weird. Leave us alone."

"So you like me?" Todd said. "You think I'm cute?" Alison's body went rigid. She looked away, too embarrassed to keep her eyes on him. Hyena-like, Todd chuckled and gave his friends a quick nod. Then his face soured, and he kicked Alison in the stomach. She screamed and dropped to the ground, her arms wrapped around her midsection, covering the sooty boot print on her shirt.

"Leave her alone!" I yelled, struggling to my feet. I flung myself at Spencer and Nick, but they grabbed me and held me back. "Leave her alone!" I shouted again.

Todd and Matt loomed over Alison, their shadows swallowing her in darkness. "You know, the world would be better off if freaks like you just died!" Todd kicked her in the back. She yelped, twisting her arms around her body and reaching her trembling fingers toward the injury.

I reeled back my arm and slugged Spencer in the mouth. Shoving past Nick, I charged for Alison, but Todd socked me right in the jaw, throwing me off balance. Then Nick wrenched the scruff of my shirt and jerked me back. I thrashed around, trying to free myself from his grip, my shirt tearing. Matt walked up and punched me in the face.

Todd was distracted watching Matt and Nick torture me, so Alison searched the ground frantically until she found her purse spilled over nearby. She reached inside, yanked out her keys, and balled her fist around them so the blades poked out between her fingers. When Todd turned his attention back to her, she stood up and punched him, slicing his cheek. He staggered away with a hand over his cheek as blood dripped onto the concrete. Spencer grabbed Alison's wrist and twisted it until she dropped the keys, then he slung her back to the ground.

Backing away, Spencer glanced from side to side, checking to see if anyone was watching them. Matt and Nick stood over Alison, kicking her as she lay limp on the ground. I choked on phlegm and tears, fighting to get away from Nick. Finally, my shirt ripped, slackening Nick's grasp, so I spun around, dug my nails into his hairy arm, and clamped my teeth down until I tasted blood. He screamed and shoved me off, tossing me like a rag doll against the side of their car and knocking the breath out of me. My knees buckled and gave way.

As I hit the ground, my burning eyes glimpsed monstrous shadows swarming around Alison like vultures circling a carcass, their bloody beaks begging for another bite. I reached a quavering hand toward them, gritted my teeth and closed my hate-filled fingers around them—crushing them—fighting to form words to convey that I hated them, that I wanted them to stop. All that came out was a pitiful grunt.

"You guys, quit it!" Spencer said, his face riddled with fear. When they turned to him, his mouth hung open for a second. "We need to get out of here!"

"Freak!" Todd said before spitting on Alison. "Maybe now you'll start acting like a man."

They hurried back into Todd's car and squealed away, leaving skid marks on the pavement, leaving our blood on the pavement. Lying there, staring up into the lightless void, defeated, I wondered if they'd killed her, and begged god to kill me if they had. If only I could've conjured up a magical sword right then. But I'd only ever been a hero in my dreams. People like us never had power. In the real world, the monsters always won.

I staggered to my feet and limped to Alison's side. Dropping to my knees, I helped her into my arms, wiped a smear of blood off her chin, hugged her—she was breathing, alive. I was grateful. She held me for a minute, not saying anything, just clutching my arms and trembling like a frightened child. Then, she cried.