“My father threatened to arrest me. He’s a cop. You know how that is.”
He cocks an eyebrow. “I’m not a cop.”
“Well, you’re not a principal.”
He smiles and leans forward, a cat patiently waiting for the mouse to poke its head out from under the radiator. “I have a theory about you. Would you like to hear it?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I whisper, but my head is screaming, He knows. I can’t panic; I just have to remember what Dad told me to do. I look to the door. There aren’t any windows, so it’s my only option. I can beat him out of the room if I push his chair. He’ll roll back, and if I push hard enough, he’ll probably fall off.
“Here’s what I think: you got tired of being a pain in the butt.”
“What?”
He pushes off with his feet and rolls across the room to look at his monitors. “Being a screwup got boring. Plus, you knew if you had any chance of getting out of the Zone, it was probably college. So you turned yourself around. Good for you, but now, here’s the interesting thing about Lyric Walker. You still have the respect of your classmates. You’ve got friends that are black, Latino, and Asian. You mingle with the gangsta wannabes and the honor-roll kids. They like you. They count you as one of them. You’re a real chameleon, but it works for you. Today someone twice your size decided not to run you down when you told him to stop.”
“Actually, he did run me down.”
“I saw that kid. He went easy on you.” Doyle laughs, and it sounds real.
“Sounds like you’ve figured me out,” I say. I don’t think he knows. But I’m not about to let myself relax. I nudge my chair to have a better angle toward the door.
“I think so. I also think you could be a big help to me.”
“Help?”
“Lyric, in three months, ten more public schools are going to do exactly what we’re doing here at Hylan: four here in Coney Island, three in Gravesend, and three in Brighton Beach. A month after that, there will be fifty schools throughout Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. By the beginning of the next school year, there will be Alpha in schools all over the five boroughs.
“I was brought here to make it work, so we can get them off the beach in as peaceful a manner as possible. It’s good for the city and the nation. It’s good for the Alpha, too. This should have been the plan all along. Sending in those soldiers, God rest their souls, was shortsighted. It set us back years in our war with them, but now we have a plan that will work.”
“We’re at war with them?”
“Lyric, we’re at war with everyone who’s not like us,” he says as if I should already know that. “And do you know what our greatest weapon is, Lyric? It’s you, the American teenager. Your lifestyle is as powerful as a nuclear bomb, and it works everywhere we drop it. Your two-hundred-dollar sneakers, Twitter, hip-hop—boom! boom! boom! It worked in Russia, it’s working in China, and it’s even working in parts of the Middle East. Now it’s time we unleashed this weapon on the Alpha.”
“And that’s me?”
“Yes. You’re going to befriend one of them,” he says.
“No.” The word comes out faster than my mind has time to manufacture it, but it’s the right word. No. No. No. No. No.
Doyle frowns and laces his fingers together. He stretches his palms outward, and his knuckles pop like tiny machine guns.
“Hear me out, Lyric. What I want is not such a big deal. Just walk to class with him, help him with his homework, introduce him to things you like. The rest will do itself. You’re shaking your head. Give me one good reason why you won’t do this, Lyric.”
“Samuel Lir,” I say.
Doyle sighs.
“You know Samuel Lir, right?” I say. “He’s Mr. Lir’s son. Three years ago, when people found out what he was, they beat the crap out of him! They nearly killed him. My father was the one who found him, stuffed under the boardwalk with his skull and both eye sockets crushed, his spine so mangled that parts of it were no longer in his back. They put him in a wheelchair. He couldn’t feed or go to the bathroom by himself. He couldn’t speak. And no one was ever arrested.” Then he disappeared.
“Samuel was one of them. You are not,” he says.
If only he knew!
“Oh, then let’s talk about that kid they dragged from his car because he tried to raise money to buy the Alpha shoes, and the girl they set on fire for bringing them a box of canned food, or Kevin Folkes—”
“What if I promised you wouldn’t be hurt?”
“Then you would be lying to me.”
“Lyric, I’m trying to help you out here. That stunt you pulled in class earned you a trip to the Tombs. I can make that go away, but—”
I leap to my feet. “Then send me to the Tombs. Prison sounds a lot better than being dead.”
He shakes his head slowly, then waves his hands in the air like he’s swatting away a mosquito. My argument is a nuisance to him, a pest that, if ignored, will go away.
“Lyric, we all have to do our part to make this work. I’ll call your dad tonight. We’ll get this settled. You start tomorrow.”
“You aren’t listening to me.”
“We’ll get this settled,” he repeats. Arguing with him is pointless. Let him call my father so my dad can be the one to tell him to go to hell.