Breaking Temper
Breaking Temper
Arthur/Eames, background Cobb/Mal, implied Arthur/Mal and Eames/Robert. 22k. Arthur doesn't dare disturb the universe. Robert Fischer does. Based off the novel The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier. R for violence and institutional bullying. Spoilers for the novel.
Written for i_reversebang, with art by shiroi_ten.
:::
They were murdering the kid on the field.
Arthur tried to watch with vague detachment as the other players exploded against the scrawny freshman, like a dam bursting. In the end, he couldn't help wincing. This was why he hated organized sports. Why did that idiot keep getting back up, just to take more punishment? Arthur felt like screaming at him, stay down, stay down. Instead the kid faded back, cocked his arm, attempted a pass, and was caught from behind. Within seconds he was crushed to the ground. Smeared. The pass failed, of course. Unable to take anymore, Arthur looked away. He thought he could hear Eames grunting as the team peeled themselves off of the skinny new kid, but at this distance, all the sounds were the same. Animalistic, brutal. Indistinguishable.
"Damn it, Mal," Arthur said as he tapped his pen against his notebook and pushing his glasses up.
"Don't swear, chéri," Mal purred back. "We’ll have to wash your mouth out with soap."
Arthur sighed, frustrated. He was going to be late for work again, and Mal was putting on those fake French airs, calling him chéri, curling her r's in her mouth like a particularly solid piece of chocolate. She liked teasing him this way, sometimes adopting an accent when she was bored enough. If she kept this up, it was going to be his fourth time late two month, and his manager, a Trinity High alum himself, with a particular hatred for the current students, had threatened to fire him if he was late one more time.
It wasn't his fault, Arthur had wanted to argue. He was naturally fastidious about everything, but about time, especially. He could have had the best attendance in all of Trinity, in fact.
If it weren't for The Vigils.
"It's 5:38 already. I'll be late for my shift. Just one more name, Mal." God, but he was pleading now. He set his mouth in a line, determined not to rise to her prodding.
Mal clucked her tongue, then brushed back a dark brown curl of hair, tucking it behind one ear. Lounging back in the rafters, her pleated skirt floating in the wind, exposing her pale knees, she looked like someone's fantasy of a Catholic school girl. Whose, Arthur wasn't quite sure. Her face was too sharp, her eyes too cat-like, to be a wet-dream. "Maybe I should ask Dom to assign someone to the store and make life interesting for your boss," Mal said, still toying with her hair. "Make him forget about your punctuality."
Horrified, Arthur blurted out, "Jeez, no." That earned him a satisfied smile from Mal, who held out her hand. Mindlessly, Arthur reached into his pocket and pulled out a Hershey's Kiss. It was slightly squashed from his weight, but Mal took it without comment, popping it in her mouth without even looking down when she unwrapped it.
Arthur was officially the Point Man for The Vigils, but really he was nothing more than a glorified babysitter for Mal, the current Architect. They'd entered The Vigils together their freshmen year, and by second semester it was abundantly clear that she was being groomed to take over for Miles, who was Architect then. Arthur had been resigned to be one of the regular members. But then first semester of their sophomore year together, Cobb, the incoming president, a varsity boxer with mediocre grades and an unsubtle crush on Mal, had pulled Arthur aside one day and asked him for tips, on how to work with Mal. Arthur had told him the truth. You never worked with Mal; you only worked for her. The best way to get along was to make her happy. Keep your pockets full of chocolates, hold her schoolbag for her when she was rummaging through her locker for a tube of Chapstick or her algebra book, buy her ice cream in the winter, let her try all her awful mental tricks on you first, using you as a punching bag, a practice target.
"It's not hard," Arthur had said. "You just have to get used to it, that's all."
The next week Arthur got a note in his locker, Vigil fashion, with the letters cut out of magazines, telling him he would take point after the transition.
Now it was Mal's turn to sigh, dramatically and without an ounce of real feeling. "What do they think I am, a machine? Every week, it's always, 'One more commission, just one more.'" She had been absently rolling the Hershey's wrapper into a ball. Now she threw it at Arthur. The wind carried it off to one side, and it tumbled against the bleacher seats to Arthur's left. "You're not much help, Arthur."
"You're the one who always says my ideas are no good."
"Have I?" mused Mal. "Maybe we should try it again. See if you've made any improvement." She smiled at him. "Then you could be the Architect."
The problem with Mal was that you never knew what was she was going to do next. She moved with a subtle rhythm, one of a natural born dancer, though to Arthur's knowledge, she had never actually been one. Her actions were fluid but unexpected, often grotesque. She could be tender one minute and as crushingly callous as a football skirmish the next. Arthur knew that best of everybody, but he still found himself letting her play him, the way a kid might play with unappetizing food.
Like now. He only needed another name, just one more commission, and he could leave. Arthur knew that Mal had one in mind already. She always had at least three or four half-formed commissions in her head. Whenever he thought about the way Mal worked, Arthur always imagined an assembly line stretched out to infinity, effortless and inexhaustible. He could see it in the way she glanced at him that she was merely drawing it out, letting him stew in his own anxiety. Damn it, Mal, he thought again. But this was what he had meant when he told Cobb that the most important thing was to keep Mal happy. Mal could drag this on for hours, and would if he tried to rush her, and then where would Arthur be? Where would the Vigils be, without Mal and her commissions?
"Who's that new kid?" asked Mal, nodding towards the football team. "The one they just demolished?"
Arthur flipped to the front of his notebook, looking down the index until he found the right entry. His notebooks, always black and somewhat tattered at the edges and spine, were famous at Trinity. They were more complete than the school records, and were part of the reason why Mal was one of the best Architects in recent Vigil history, though Arthur never said as much. Neither did Mal, though for different reasons. "Some kid named Robert Fischer," Arthur said as he flipped to the f's. "Son of Maurice R. Their family's pretty well off. Dad owns a lot of different companies. A freshman. Just turned sixteen. His mother died last spring."
"Poor thing," said Mal, almost cooing. "Must be hard on him." She licked the last of the chocolate from her lips, then placed a casual hand on Arthur's elbow, drawing her nail along the creases of his blazer, so gently he barely felt it. "Do you know what he needs, Arthur?"
"What?"
"A distraction. To give him closure. Catharsis." Mal narrowed her eyes at the field, where the football team was starting to leave. Arthur followed her gaze and, out of habit, picked out Eames' number. Eames was thudding the Fischer kid on his back, too hard, it seemed, for the kid to handle. His knees almost buckled as he rubbed the tender spot of his ribs, where he'd been rammed by a helmet. To Arthur, he looked almost like he was trying to push something out from under his skin. The goal posts cast shadows on the emptying field, like crucifixes, slashes of smoky gray against Fischer's face. It unsettled Arthur, though he couldn't explain why.
"Leave the kid alone, Mal. His mom just died. He doesn't need catharsis." Arthur looked down to find that he had traced a circle so deep into the page of his notebook that it was starting to bleed through. He turned the page, smoothed it out, and said, "He needs therapy."
Mal narrowed her eyes. "We can be very therapeutic when we need to be."
That awful pronoun. We. It shattered all the gentleness from Mal's voice. As always, it came as a shock to Arthur just how powerful Mal could be, when she wanted. She could ruin Fischer, by simply commissioning some of the students to bully Fischer. Or she could do the opposite, make Fischer popular for a week, then, on a whim, make him invisible. All she needed was to say a handful of words, have Arthur write them down, and announce them to The Vigils and Cobb.
"Put down Shinji Kaneda," said Mal, her voice flat and devoid of her phony French accent. "For Mr. Nolan's room."
As Arthur wrote down Shinji's name, he kept seeing the scrawny shape of Robert Fischer clutching his knees, gazing at the goalposts. It was just Fischer's luck, to have his mother die, and now this, catching Mal's attention. Rotten luck. It might be Shinji's turn this time, but sooner or later, Mal would roll Fischer's number. Her interest might lie dormant, but it would always kill you in the end. Arthur looked back out at the football field. Fischer was gone now. The goalpost looked more than ever like-- what? Arthur had forgotten.
Anyway, he had more important things to worry about than a freshman nobody. Trying to get to work with only eight minutes left before his shift was just one of them.
:::
"This wheatgrass crap is foul," Eames said through a mouthful of smoothie.
"No one's making you drink it," snapped Arthur. "Go back to your sports drinks or whatever and give me back my smoothie."
They were sitting in the trunk of Eames' mother's SUV, feet dangling off the ground, the evening air start to cool around them. The weather was well into fall now, and more than ever, as he shivered in the breeze, Arthur resented the bright green short-sleeved polo shirt he wore for work. A mark of your enslavement by Jamba Juice, Mal liked to say whenever she visited during his shifts, laughing as he glared at her from behind the counter.
Eames, oblivious and insurmountably solid in his letter jacket, continued to slurp noisily. Through the straw, even, Arthur thought with disgust, and gave up his smoothie as a lost cause. "My sports drinks are delicious," Eames informed him, shaking a Powerade bottle under Arthur's nose. Arthur shoved it out of the way and went back to picking the almonds out of a bag of trail mix he had nabbed from Eames' backpack. "They taste like red and blue and sometimes orange. This," Eames said, gesturing with the smoothie, "tastes like getting faceplanted by a 300 pound lineman while playing at Reliant Stadium."
"I have no idea what that means."
"That, darling, is because you hate life. Which is why you never go to my games and also drink things that taste like lawn clippings."
It was an old argument for them. In retaliation, Arthur pegged Eames on the head with a cashew, and Eames reached behind him for one of his shoulder pads, which he threw at Arthur, hitting him squarely in the face. The smell of sweat was revoltingly fresh. Arthur thrust the shoulder pad back at Eames, almost painting the inside of the car with Arthur's smoothie when he bumped Eames' elbow.
"Watch it!" Eames shouted, hopping out of the car. Arthur threw the shoulder pad at him again, but Eames caught it easily with one hand, and Arthur settled for wrinkling his nose instead.
"I'm sorry that not all of us stink as prettily as Mal," sneered Eames. He stretched the vowel in Mal's name until it was nothing more than a mocking sound, Maaaaal, almost baaing like a sheep.
"Fuck off," Arthur sniped back, but without any real venom. He scooted to one side of the car to make room for Eames, who sat back down heavily, still drinking the last dredges of Arthur's smoothie despite his complaints. "Stop wasting time. What are you here about?"
Eames considered for a moment, his eyes closed. In the dark, Arthur could just make out his eyelashes, which were incongruously long for someone who spent most of his free time running headlong into other guys while wearing a mountain of foam pads. Shielded by the darkness, Arthur grinned at the contrast: the sharp, unmistakable lines of Eames' arms, the shadows of Eames' lashes against his cheeks, the funny, almost zen expression on Eames' face as he worried the straw between his teeth.
Eames had been one of those rare sophomore inductees into The Vigils. Cobb had invited Eames after meeting him at a party of some sort. Arthur never really figured out the details. Right after being inducted, though, Eames became obsessed with picking on and picking at Arthur. You're too uptight, he had told Arthur all through their first semester together. You need someone to teach you to relax. It didn't go well and soon escalated into a series of ugly pranks and fights, which amused Mal, who had long complained of the same in Arthur, and was therefore tolerated by Cobb. The week right after winter break, though, ended in a chicken run into a half-finished construction site a few miles away from the school, and that almost gotten them both expelled. Hostilities had calmed since then, out of self-preservation if nothing else, and they'd been friendly towards each other, though not actually friends.
They were never, Arthur thought, ever going to be friends. They were too different for that. Eames was a jock and had a reputation to maintain. Even if Arthur was the Point Man for The Vigils, he wasn't in the same social strata at Eames. Sure, they were in The Vigils together, but you couldn't go around school saying that. Eames was a varsity football player, a wide receiver, and Arthur was on the Science Olympiad team, for crying out loud. But ever since Arthur started his part-time job at Jamba Juice, Eames had taken to stopping in after shifts, and it wasn't unpleasant to spend an hour once a week or so just talking. If only to get blackmail material on the football team to round out Arthur's notebook.
Eames had always, and even now, struck Arthur as an odd choice for The Vigils. It wasn't that Eames didn't pull his weight as a member. It was just that Eames had from the beginning been uncomfortable with Vigil activities-- the commissions asked of the student body, the constant air of threat, the secrecy. That was the problem with recruits, especially late ones. Most Vigil members were kids who had always been in the Trinity system and had entered Trinity High determined to be a member. Cobb, for instance-- his older brother had been in The Vigils before him.
"Kaneda's going to need help with Nolan's room," said Eames, still chewing the straw of the smoothie cup.
Kaneda, the latest Vigil victim, was a spineless sophomore in maybe half of Arthur's classes. He was one of those kids who tended to blend into the background, the kind you would meet again at reunions and never remember. Mal's commission for him--"Mr. Nolan's room"-- turned out to be quite the thing: unscrewing all the screws in the classroom, from the desks to the chairs to even the blackboard behind the teacher's desk. Kaneda had stood in the dark of The Vigils meeting room, close to tears. He was just a pimply nobody, someone who only ever spoke up in class to help the teachers set up projectors and PowerPoint presentations, but even when The Vigils pulled in the athletes, the real hard-hitters -- Cobb's teammates on the boxing team, for instance -- it was still the same. They always had this look of utter helplessness, as if they knew there was no escape. As if The Vigils were all knowing, all powerful.
Arthur loved it. He didn't know what terrible, psychopathic part of him enjoyed it, but something in him did.
Eames continued, "Mal's idea is good, but even if Kaneda was fast with his hands--which we all know he isn't--it'll take him until morning to finish unscrewing all those desks and chairs."
Arthur hummed contemplatively, then glanced down at his watch. "Masks on at nine then? I think my dad has a toolbox stashed away in the garage somewhere." This was usually why Eames and him would meet after school. A little bit of dirty work for The Vigils. Not that work for The Vigils was ever anything but dirty.
Now it was Eames' turn to hesitate. He chucked the empty smoothie cup towards the parking lot, hitting a fairly new sports car that Arthur was delighted to recognize as his asshole manager’s. But Eames kept the straw, chewing on it methodically, like an old-timer in a movie. Arthur waited for Eames to respond, furtively checking his watch again. If they had to help out Kaneda, he'd need to eat dinner and make up some lie for his mother. If not, well, he had trigonometry homework, and he knew Eames did too, football practice or no.
Finally, Eames spat out the straw and said, "Has Mal told you yet? About the chocolates?"
Automatically, Arthur reached for a handful of Hershey's Kisses. But he was wearing his work slacks, and anyway, Mal wasn't anywhere near the Jamba Juice parking lot. He relaxed, trying to disguise his panicked groping by grabbing the neglected bag of trail mix. "What chocolates?"
"The sale ones. Saito's chocolates."
"You mean for the annual fundraising sale? What about them?"
"Mal went to see Saito last week. She didn't tell you?"
Arthur shrugged. "Not any details. I figured it was just typical administrator stuff, since Mr. Saito made interim principal last week. 'I know boys will be boys, I don't want trouble while the principal's ill,' blah blah blah."
"Well, all this is just rumor--" Arthur made an impatient gesture, and Eames hurried on, "but I heard that Saito asked for The Vigils help with the chocolate sale this year."
It was inconceivable. So inconceivable that Arthur almost laughed in Eames' face. He had never even heard a member of the faculty say the words "The Vigils" out loud. He couldn't, even in his wildest dreams, imagine Saito asking for them for help. "Who the hell did you hear that from?" demanded Arthur.
This, too, was an old argument between them. Eames shifted the weight from one thick thigh to another, shuffling before he settled on his habitual response. "Who do you get the information for your notebooks from then?"
Arthur glared. "This is different, and you know it. How did you get rumors on a private conversation between Mr. Saito and Mal?"
"You have your sources," Eames said, gesturing behind him at the crumpled pile of Arthur's jacket, which they both knew held Arthur's black notebook, complete with clipped pen. "I have mine. Look, Arthur, I didn't bring this up to argue with you about which members of the administration eavesdrop on whom--"
"And which members of the student body schmooze up to them to get the juicy details!" added Arthur, indignant.
"I brought it up because I think it's going to affect The Vigils," Eames finished doggedly. "Mal's taking on too much. She-- we shouldn't be backing the chocolate sale. But I don't think anyone's going to tell her that."
"Why are you telling it to me then?"
"Who else am I going to talk to?" Eames spat out the straw, then turned to Arthur, smirking. "Cobb?"
Arthur frowned. There was nothing to say when it came to Cobb, and Eames knew it as much as Arthur did. He turned his mind back to the chocolates, back to Mal. "It's just a stupid chocolate sale. What are you worried about?"
"Gut feeling," grunted Eames.
"Is this the point in our conversation where you tell me that I don't think enough with my instincts and too much with my head? Because if all this is over some vague--"
"Not just my gut though. Guess how many boxes of chocolates."
Arthur shrugged. "Last year? It was about... ten thousand."
"This year, it's double that."
"Twenty--?"
"Twenty thousand," Eames said, unable to keep from gloating.
"That's almost fifty boxes per student," Arthur said, stalling as he made his calculations. "Last year it was twenty-five. And we barely sold them then."
"Double the price, too."
They both fell silent, mulling it over. Arthur thought of Mal-- clever, clever Mal-- and wondered what she had been thinking, promising Saito their help. He could almost see her in the dusty sunlight of the dean's office, smiling serenely at Saito as he bored down at her with a discomfortingly steady gaze. Saito had a way of making you feel small, unprepared. Arthur had seen snappy guys, smart guys who usually always had a leg up on everyone else -- Yusuf, for instance, the current student body president -- taken down, ground into mental hamburger meat, when faced with Saito. Arthur took world history with Saito last semester, and it had been one of the most excruciating experiences of his life so far.
It wasn't that Saito was particularly strict. But once or twice a class Saito would let a student answer a question, wait a whole minute, sixty terrible, pregnant seconds, and then say, quite simply, "Is that what you really think?" And the student would collapse, even if his answer was right. Saito was just like that. He always seemed to have something up his sleeve. He was the kind of man that was almost worse on your side than on your enemy's.
But then again, Arthur mused, so did Mal. When it came to teachers, students never won, but if Arthur were to pick anyone to run circles around Saito, it'd have to be Mal.
The weight shifted beneath Arthur. Eames had jumped out of the trunk of the SUV. Now he stretched, back popping, and looked over his shoulder at Arthur. "Look, fuck Saito and fuck the chocolates," he said. "Your parents expect you back for dinner? You wanna get pizza?"
His voice was flat, cheery. To Arthur, it seemed to put Mal and Saito back in their places. Mr. Saito was just a teacher again; Mal, just a student. This wasn't any heroic struggle. Arthur was just being stupid.
"I have to get home." Arthur grabbed the strap of his backpack, slung it on almost apologetically. It was late. His mother would be angry already. Maybe today he'd have to climb down from the window again. He highly doubted she'd let him leave the house, this late, even if he did lie and say all his homework was done."I'll see you in a bit," he said, trying for nonchalant.
"Yeah," Eames said, flashing a grin. "Masks on at nine, Zorro."
"Shut your face," Arthur laughed, and scattered the trail mix as he threw the whole package at Eames.
:::
Arthur had to admit, Saito knew how to give a speech. It was Monday morning, they were sitting in the auditorium, and Saito was giving it to them, hot and ready, Academy Award caliber. He threw every emotional manipulation known to man, and the kitchen sink on top of it. Tradition, school spirit, the principal in his hospital bed, the need for funds to continue the machine that was Trinity High, even the recent string of lucky victories their sports teams had eked out at state competitions. Crap, of course, and unrelated to the sale at hand, but Saito had a way of making the impossible work for him. When Saito spoke, no one dared to guffaw, or fall asleep, or start playing paper football. Say what you wanted about the man (and when it came to high school students, everything was said), but he could command a room.
"Yes, the quota is doubled this year," Saito intoned, "but that's because we have more at stake than ever. Yes, each boy has to sell fifty boxes instead of twenty-five. But would I have taken on the task if I wasn't sure the students of Trinity could accomplish it?" He gestured at them, a hand outstretched, like a dictator, for crying out loud. "What, at Trinity, is our most resilient virtue?"
"Self- sacrifice," Arthur muttered, just as Saito thundered, "Self-sacrifice!" Beside him, Mal re-crossed her legs and hid a smile.
Talk, talk, talk. That's all school ever was. But the speech this year made Arthur a little nervous. It wasn't just Saito and the chocolates that were at stake this year -- The Vigils were too. And Saito was making it sound like the Crusades, and they were the Knights Templar, when it was just a crappy chocolate sale.
Those were Mal's words this morning, 'just a crappy chocolate sale.' She rarely used words like 'crap' or 'shit', and when she did, Arthur knew they were calculated to shock. It was how she had kept the group under control when she first started as the Architect. There were a few girls in The Vigils, but Trinity High itself was only recently converted from an all guy's school, and on average, girls only made up about a third of the population anyway. They tended to stay in their own cliques, and the ones who did venture out found themselves needing to be one of the boys to be taken seriously. It wasn't uncommon for each social circle to have only one girl at a time, the lone flower in a boy's club. Though, admittedly, it was a little different when the flower was Mal, and the boy's club was an adolescent's dream of a secret society brought to life.
There was an amusing little fleur du mal pun in that comparison. Arthur thought about sharing it with Mal, glancing at her serene profile at his side, but decided against it.
They had called a special meeting that morning, before Saito's auditorium speech, and there Mal had announced that The Vigils would be sponsoring the sale. She had undersold it, the way she undersold all her most dangerous ideas, and for a minute, in the silence that followed, Arthur had wondered if none of the others really understood what she had conscripted them into. Then, shockingly, Cobb had spoken up. "Mal," Cobb had said, a ripple of doubt in his voice, "you know we never get mixed up in this stuff."
"I don't see the problem," Mal had answered. "It's just a crappy chocolate sale." Her voice, so sweet, pronouncing the word 'crap' in her crisp way. Like a bomb exploding in the room.
"But getting involved with the administration," Cobb fretted. "It's just asking for trouble." A pause. "I really think you should have asked me first."
And that, Arthur had thought cynically, was why Cobb would only ever be a figurehead to Mal. Cobb had the unfortunate ability to undermine his own authority every time he opened his mouth. This was the kind of thing you said one on one, when the whole group wasn't watching. You never aired dirty laundry in front of a group like The Vigils, especially not when you were the nominal president. The other members fidgeted, suddenly uncomfortable, and Arthur, too, had found it difficult to look Cobb in the eye.
So: a slam dunk, overall, for Mal. And it had seemed obvious that supporting the chocolate sale was the right idea when she explained it that morning. They didn't even need to do anything at first, she had said. Just put their name behind the sale. The student body would be clamoring to sell the chocolates. We'll make selling chocolates the thing to do, she'd promised. "The sale will go off without a hitch, and Principal Saito will owe us a favor," she'd finished, with the air of a tightrope walker dismounting. She had flashed her eyes at Cobb, daring him to object, but Cobb had said nothing, and the meeting was shortly dismissed.
If you asked the student body, they'd tell you that Mal earned the job of Architect because she blew Miles once or twice in the boys' locker room. Anyone in The Vigils would tell you that Mal had earned the job of Architect because of her quick mind, her swift intelligence, her fertile imagination, her ability to see two moves ahead as if life was a giant checker or chess game.
But there was something more than that. Arthur could point to it, even though he couldn't give it a name. When he was younger, Arthur had watched Animal Crackers, that Marx Brothers film where they investigated thefts. In one scene, the brothers were looking for a stolen Beaugard painting. Chico said, "All you got to do is go to everybody in the house and ask 'em if they took it." And Groucho had asked, "Suppose nobody in the house took the painting?" Chico had said, "Go to the house next door." "Suppose there isn't any house next door?" Groucho had asked. "Then of course, we gotta build it," Chico had replied, and they immediately started to draw up plans for building the house.
Since joining The Vigils, Arthur found himself thinking of that scene almost every week. It was what Mal did-- build the house nobody could anticipate a need for. The house that was invisible to everyone else but her.
"Chéri," Mal whispered, startling Arthur out of his thoughts. "I want you to pay attention," she continued. "Watch Mr. Saito carefully."
Her hand was on his knee and she squeezed it, lightly. Mal used that move on boys all the time, to get them hard, to get them to imagine her hands elsewhere, to control them and make them forget she was smart, not just a pair of breasts. She'd told Arthur that before, laughing as she demonstrated on him. "Do you remember Howie Anderson's party?" she had said. "I spent the whole evening with my hand on Dom's thigh. He almost came in his pants."
"Can't girls touch guys without wanting to get something from them?" he had snapped back at her, and that was the great thing about Mal. You could say things to her that you couldn't say to anyone else, and she'd take you seriously, if you meant it.
Now, she tilted her head close to him, almost resting it on his shoulder. "Can you see it?" she murmured.
"See what?"
"He's running scared, Arthur. He has a lot riding on the chocolate sale, and he doesn't want us to know it." She pursed her lips, then grinned up at Arthur. "It’s nice to know, isn’t it, that we’re so dependable?”
She smelled of wind and cotton. As she leaned back in her chair, her hair touched his cheek. Her hand was still on his knee, but it was her profile that made him go cold. He examined their interim principal closely, trying to see what Mal saw, to divine the weakness that Mal could pick out like a scent in the wind. But what he saw instead was how similar they looked at that moment, Saito staring down the auditorium and Mal gazing back up at him. They were hunters, both of them, even if Saito was the one trying to make himself look bigger by stretching out his arms, while Mal was the one who, crouching, waited, hidden by brush and shadow.
A premonition hit him, and, for a minute, Arthur thought he could almost see the house Mal was building. There were the sketches of the foundation, the faintest blueprints of walls, in the way her face echoed Saito's. And he thought, without knowing why, of how they built the Great Wall by crushing the bones of the dead workers into the brick.
:::
Three weeks later, Arthur rounded the corner of the locker bay after school only to have Eames shove him back. "We have a problem," Eames said flatly. "It's about Robert."
"Fischer?"
"In more ways than one," muttered Eames as he dragged Arthur away from the lockers and towards the parking lot.
It had, in general, been a quiet three weeks. Mal had announced through Cobb that while the sale was going on, The Vigils would put commissions on hold. "So tell who you need to tell," Cobb had ordered them, and they did, but even with blessings from The Vigils, the sale was slow. They'd taken to getting updates on the numbers three times a week from Yusuf, whose class president duties involved the painful charge of monitoring fundraising sales and reporting them to Saito.
Arthur wouldn't want Yusuf's job for anything. Especially not this year, when the numbers were so bad. "There are the usual discrepancies," Yusuf had told them yesterday. "The students always wait until the last minute to turn in the money, but definitely lagging behind last year, which doesn't bode well, since the quota's double this year." Then he frowned. "Also, there's another thing."
"What?" Cobb had asked impatiently, earning a look from Mal, who usually enforced a strict ‘don't speak unless spoken to' rule when it came to Cobb.
Yusuf fished out a pen and a folded half sheet of paper from his pockets. He chewed on the pen as he spoke, shifting weight from one foot to another. "The reports Saito gives," Yusuf said. "Remember how he told all the homeroom teachers that the sales so far were at 4,582? It's wrong. We've sold exactly 3,961 and made returns on 2,871."
"Maybe Saito was trying to raise morale?" Arthur had suggested.
Yusuf shrugged. "If he is, he better hope it works, and quickly. At this rate, we'll never reach the total."
It was bad news. The sale was far from doomed, of course; there was at least a month before it was over. But Mal had looked grimmer than Arthur had ever seen her. For once, she looked vulnerable as she stood in the modified janitor's closet The Vigils used as a meeting place. Her arms were crossed against her chest, and she stared at Yusuf as if she could see straight through him, out into the hallway, down the length of the building, all the way to Saito's office. None of them, not even Arthur, said a word to her as they brushed past her to leave.
They made it all the way out to Eames' car before they spoke again. "No practice?" Arthur said as he climbed into the shotgun seat, throwing some empty plastic bottles and a dirty t-shirt into the backseat.
"No," Eames said tersely. He had turned on the engine, but didn't take off the brake, letting them stall. It was still relatively early in the afternoon, and they were in the after school parking lot rush hour. Arthur looked out the window for mutual acquaintances, gratified for Eames' sake more than his own that the glass was tinted. He shifted in his seat so that the back of his head was to the window anyway.
"So. Fischer?" he prompted.
"You know his father?"
"Not personally."
The look Eames threw his way said, more clearly than words, stop being a jackass. Arthur bit his lip and went back to using his feet to sort the papers collected on the ground into piles -- receipts, food wrappers, school handouts -- while he waited. A minute or two passed before Eames demanded, "Let me see that notebook of yours."
"Seriously, Eames, what is it?" Arthur asked, exasperated. "Just tell me."
"Fischer-Morrow. That's the company that distributes our fundraising chocolates."
"Okay," said Arthur, slowly. "And this is relevant because--"
"Because Robert hates his father," Eames finished. He was tugging almost comically at his hair now, and Arthur watched him with the dispassionate amusement of someone who couldn't quite understand a joke everyone else was laughing at.
Since the football tryouts, Arthur had run into Fischer occasionally, usually during passing periods, and once when he almost upturned Fischer's lunch tray when he turned to get an extra carton of milk. Fischer was small for someone on the football team, but other than that, he was unremarkable -- vaguely good looking, with startling blue eyes, but too scrawny, with the look of someone perpetually confused by his lot in life. He and Eames, though, had recently struck up a friendship that Arthur wrote off at first as a result of sportsmanlike camaraderie and had lately revised as brotherly overinvestment. The depths of Eames' present concern, all the same, surprised Arthur. "So, what, he's determined to sabotage the sales to stick one to his father?" Arthur joked.
"I know you think you're being funny," Eames sighed, "but that's exactly what Robert's doing." He paused, then added, wryly, "Unintentionally."
Arthur frowned, doubtful. He opened his mouth, but Eames held out his hands, palms up, as if trying to hold Arthur's irritation in place. "Robert's not selling the chocolates."
"What?" Arthur blurted out. "You can't not sell the chocolates. It's mandatory." Even Vigil members during other years had been selling theirs. Granted, when Arthur had been a freshman, part of his responsibility had been to sell chocolates for the older members. But the principle still held.
"It's not actually mandatory."
"Fine, it’s all but."
"I asked Yusuf for the individual list yesterday. It's true. He hasn't sold a single box. The only other guy who hasn't sold anything was John Cartier, and he's been in the hospital."
"With appendicitis. Right."
"Robert's in Saito's homeroom too. You know, Saito -- he does those irritating roll calls every morning, 'oh Santucci, how many chocolates did you sell, that's three less than this time last year, you can do better.'" Eames ended on a slightly lower note, his "mocking the administration" voice. Arthur nodded, amused despite the situation. He had been in Saito's homeroom last year. The roll calls, ceremonial in their solemnity, but slightly farcical for that exact reason, had eaten up their time if nothing else, and some mornings they meant an extra five minutes of sleep.
"Every morning, apparently, Saito will ask Robert if he'll sell the chocolates, and every morning, Robert will tell him no."
"The kid's crazy."
"That's what I told him."
"And?"
"And he said all his life he's done what his father's wanted. Come to Trinity High, play football, the rest. This is the one thing he can take back." Eames took a deep breath, let it out again. "Look, it's a little complicated. He'd been living with his mother, and she died, so he's had to transfer to a new place and everything. Not to mention Papa Fischer's pretty distant."
It was a marvel, really, how by the book Fischer's rebellion was. Arthur, too, had always been a good kid, the kind who would come home from grade school with report cards that said "gets along well with others" and "listens to directions." He had the dreams of every well-behaved kid, to tear it all up to shreds and really do something wild for once. But he had nothing to act out against. His parents were a genial, conventional couple, and together he and they lived a genial, conventional life. WASPish to the end, with a healthy liberal dose. More often than not, Arthur had felt himself suffocated by just how understanding his parents were. It took the sting out of acting out, and Fischer, with his rich, distant father, seemed to Arthur like something out of a movie.
Still, though. Arthur thought back to Mal in the half-dark, her arms crossed, listening to Yusuf read out the chocolate sales. All good and well that Fischer Junior was acting out his teenage kicks, but --
"Fine. One freshman doesn't sell the chocolates. So what?"
Eames turned to Arthur, a funny expression on his face, like he was torn between fondness for Arthur and thinking Arthur was the stupidest person in existence. Immediately defensive, Arthur began to fiddle with the radio dial, turning it on and playing with the channels. After a few minutes of jumbled music and weather, Eames brushed Arthur's fingers off the buttons. "There are all kinds of rumors going on. Nobody wants to sell the damn chocolates and it's turning into a kind of farce in some classes. They say Robert's leading a revolt against the school and Saito. But mostly, they're saying he's doing it to stick one to the Vigils."
"You're his friend," Arthur pointed out. "Why don't you tell him to sell the chocolates?"
Eames rubbed his face and said, with a derisive snort, "You think I haven't tried?" Arthur opened his mouth, ready to comment on Eames' powers of persuasion, when Eames raised a hand to stop him. "Anyway," he continued, "I'm beginning to think Robert's got the right idea not to sell them."
"You're kidding," said Arthur. His turn to be flat, brusque. Eames could pull jokes like that, had in fact done it often when they were still not yet not-friends and he was constantly trying to screw with Arthur's head. It didn't seem like the time for a joke, but Arthur would never put it pass Eames.
"No, I'm not," Eames said, and Arthur's heart sank. "Think about it. We pay tuition to go to Trinity, don't we? They sell us a bill of goods that Trinity is the best prep school for college you can find around here. There's a case full of trophies too -- football, debate, boxing. And what happens?" Eames pounded his palm against his steering wheel, accidentally hitting the horn and scaring some freshmen girls crossing the parking lot. He gave them a sheepish grin before turning back to Arthur. "They turn us into salesmen. If it's not soap, it's magazines. If it's not magazines, it's chocolate. And now some freshman, some kid, just says no. Something I've never thought of before. Just stop selling. This time, too, saying no directly to The Vigils." Eames furrowed his brow, tugged at his hair again. "It just doesn't feel right to get The Vigils involved. Frankly, it gives me the creeps. Like something out of Hitler Youth."
Arthur shook his head, more in amazement than in disagreement. Eames, clearly out of steam after his speech, leaned his cheek against the rim of his steering wheel, waiting. Arthur found himself thinking, not for the first time, how would Mal handle this? Stalling, he bent down, picking up the stray papers at his feet. He handed the stack of handouts to Eames, who received them mutely, before tucking the receipts into the glove compartment and finally dumping the food wrappers in his lap.
"I think you're worried for nothing." He was impressed with how confident his own voice sounded.
"Yeah?" asked Eames, clearly skeptical.
"Definitely." Arthur began to fold the food wrappers as he spoke. "You're giving Fischer too much credit. It's a correlation between him and the sales, not a causation. He's just a lousy freshman. No one pays attention to freshmen. And if they do, it's all the dramatics in Mr. Saito's homeroom. They'll get sick of it soon, and then no one will be talking about Fischer." The food wrappers were all neatly quartered and stacked, and he handed those, too, to Eames, who simply threw rolled down the window and tossed them into the parking lot.
"It's just a fad, Eames. It'll pass, and we'll be back to the daily grind. Back to self-sacrifice for good ol' Trinity. You'll see." Arthur smiled, and, after a minute, Eames smiled back.
It was, on the whole, a convincing theory.
Arthur almost believed it himself.
:::
The poster was badly made. It wasn't really even a poster, just a large piece of butcher's paper taped up to the wall. It wasn't even cut at the edges, merely ripped, and the words "SCREW THE VIGILS, SCREW THE CHOCOLATES" were scrawled across it in permanent marker. Arthur stared at the paper, biting the inside of his mouth, considering. The last couple of letters of 'chocolates' were squeezed together. Whoever had written it hadn't realized until midway through that he, or she, had written the letters too large, and was going to run out of room. Typical.
This was the third permutation of the poster Arthur had seen this week. The other two ("Robert Fischer for President" and "Big Brother Wants You to Sell Chocolates") were light-hearted, almost tongue in cheek affairs. Arthur hadn't thought much of those. He'd assumed they were like all the other unauthorized posters that were ripped down by the janitors-- stupid in-jokes, the result of dares by class clowns. The reference to Big Brother, especially, had to be work of the junior class, whose English class was just getting around to studying 1984.
This one, though. Something about seeing the words "The Vigils" was like a curse word etched in a bathroom stall. It seemed ominous, obscene. Belatedly, Arthur tasted blood in his mouth, and realized he had bitten his cheek too harshly. Without giving himself the opportunity to talk himself out of it, he peeled the tape holding the poster up and folded it as neatly as he could into quarters before tucking it into his class binder. He looked around furtively, then hated himself for caring. You have a coward's soul, Mal liked to say during her more arch moments. And maybe he did, but there was nothing wrong with being careful.
By chance, Arthur ran into Cobb during passing period between trigonometry and gym. He never liked talking to Cobb outside of meetings. Cobb kept in the company of guys that always seemed on the verge of busting out boxing shorts and pummeling Arthur into the ground if he said one word out of place. But Cobb himself was harmless, more likely to stare at you blankly than hurt you in any meaningful way. And desperate times, desperate measures.
"You think Fischer put it up?" Cobb asked as he unfolded the poster Arthur handed him, screwing up his forehead in contemplation.
"No. He's not the type. And anyway, Fischer's been saying screw The Vigils and screw the chocolates for weeks now. He doesn't need a poster to advertise for him."
"What do you think it means, then?"
Arthur hesitated, trying to recall what Eames had said before, when they were both in Eames' car. By now everyone, even Cobb, knew about Fischer's refusal to sell the chocolates. It was, far from a passing fad, the talk of the school. Arthur had seen students of all kinds slap Fischer on the ass, greet him while on the bus, buy him food without his consent. He was an unexpected folk hero. "I think it means the word is spreading. That other people think, if Fischer could just say no to us, so could they. They know we're behind the sale."
"Okay then," Cobb said, his voice coming out in a great sigh. "You have to talk to Mal," he said with an air of inevitably. "We have to ask her if we need to call a meeting."
For a brief, crazed moment, Arthur thought of telling Cobb, You call the meeting. You're the president. The moment passed, and Arthur felt only pity in its wake. Cobb had the put-upon expression of a man twice his age. Arthur could only imagine what it was like to be Cobb, just dumb enough to be used, but just smart enough to know when he was. He was exactly the wrong, and thus exactly the right, person to sit opposite Mal. Not, Arthur admitted as he watched Cobb trudge off to class, textbooks awkward in his boxer's arms, that he himself would be much better. Better than Cobb, but that wasn't better by much.
He slipped a note in Mal's locker, asking to meet in the gym after last period. Mal despised the gym, Arthur knew. She despised most things having to do with sports, including the athletes who participated in them, including Cobb, but it was raining, which rendered their usual meeting place, the football stadium, impractical. The gym, with its stench of wood polish and sweat and failing deodorant, was overwhelmingly claustrophobic the moment Arthur stepped in. But with the noisy sounds of a three-on-three game happening in the half court farthest away from them, nobody would eavesdrop, and Arthur knew that Mal liked, occasionally, to switch up her surroundings. There's nothing worse than stagnation. That was something he had learned from her.
Mal was sitting in the gym bleachers, a library paperback copy of Anne of Green Gables open in her lap, though she was watching the three-on-three game and not reading. When Arthur sat down next to her, she held out her hand expectantly, not even turning away from the basketball game. He gave her a Hershey's Kiss, but the hand remained, the fingers waggling. "What, not watching our weight, are we?" he joked, reaching in his pocket again, but she sniffed delicately, tilting her palm so as to let the chocolate drop from her hand.
"The poster," she said, still not looking at him. "Cobb said you found another one this morning."
"If he's just going to say everything I want to say, he should have this meeting with you instead of telling me to do it," complained Arthur, reaching into his bag for his binder.
"Don't be jealous," she remarked absently. "It's a bad look on you."
"I'm not," protested Arthur, but Mal was no longer listening. She had already turned her attention to the poster. You could always tell when Mal lost interest. It was like she was physically withdrawing, and you no longer existed to her, unless she chose to turn you back on.
While Mal examined the poster (for what, Arthur had no idea), Arthur watched the basketball game, and waited. To him, basketball was a far superior game to football. It was more straightforward, and quicker too. You could see the way each individual player worked themselves into position. And there was less of that brute violence, the headlong rushing into other sturdy, muscled masses. But even with basketball, Arthur's appreciation was purely academic. That was one of Eames' phrases, purely academic. "In the alternative sense of the word," Eames would explain, over and over. "As in, 'not of practical relevance. Of only theoretical interest.'"
"What are you thinking about?" Mal said, rolling the poster into a baton and lightly tapping Arthur with it.
Arthur shook his head. "Nothing important." When Mal said nothing more, he prompted, "Well?" and pointed at the poster baton in her hand. "Do we need to be concerned?"
Mal put her fingers to her lips, then smiled brightly. She handed the poster back to Arthur and went back to watching the game, examining it once again with baffling fervor. "What do you think?" she asked, tilting her head just slightly towards Arthur. "Does it worry you?"
"The whole sale worries me."
"Oui, Arthur, I know it does. But what about Fischer, specifically?"
Arthur considered it. Reconsidered it, really, trying to untangle Eames' concerns, his own, the sales numbers, Yusuf's increasingly desperate reports, the general air of unsettled, half-formed rebellion that seemed to have infected the school as of late. The threads of worry were inexorably tangled. They were, in the end, the same fear of failure. But the answer to her question was chillingly simple when it finally came. He had picked Mal for a reason. He knew why he was here with her, instead of with Eames, or Cobb, or even searching out Fischer.
"I don't care about Fischer's problems," Arthur said. "But he's defying the Vigils. No one defies The Vigils."
"...and gets away with it," Mal finished for him. Coquettishly, she twisted her body so she could lay her head on his shoulder. The paperback slid from her lap onto the gym floor with a loud clatter, but neither of them startled nor reached to pick it up. "Call a meeting," said Mal, her expression dreamy. "It's time The Vigils actually throw their weight behind the chocolate sale. We'll talk logistics. Afterwards, summon Fischer." A pause. "Perhaps then, Arthur, we can calm these inquiétudes of yours. And, I think, the inquiétudes of Eames and Mr. Saito also."
Despite himself, Arthur felt that familiar thrill of pleasure at watching Mal in action. The way she could hide such power in such gentleness, the way she seemed to know everything. He wondered if Eames had already told her about Fischer. Or maybe it had been Cobb, or one of the other sophomores that Mal kept like a vulture on a leash, to provide her with gossip and amusement. But it was just as likely, and in fact more, that she simply understood Eames and Saito. And of course, she knew Arthur particularly well.
She put her hand, again, on his knee. Soft, reassuring. Just as a lover might.
:::
(Part Two)
Arthur/Eames, background Cobb/Mal, implied Arthur/Mal and Eames/Robert. 22k. Arthur doesn't dare disturb the universe. Robert Fischer does. Based off the novel The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier. R for violence and institutional bullying. Spoilers for the novel.
Written for i_reversebang, with art by shiroi_ten.
:::
They were murdering the kid on the field.
Arthur tried to watch with vague detachment as the other players exploded against the scrawny freshman, like a dam bursting. In the end, he couldn't help wincing. This was why he hated organized sports. Why did that idiot keep getting back up, just to take more punishment? Arthur felt like screaming at him, stay down, stay down. Instead the kid faded back, cocked his arm, attempted a pass, and was caught from behind. Within seconds he was crushed to the ground. Smeared. The pass failed, of course. Unable to take anymore, Arthur looked away. He thought he could hear Eames grunting as the team peeled themselves off of the skinny new kid, but at this distance, all the sounds were the same. Animalistic, brutal. Indistinguishable.
"Damn it, Mal," Arthur said as he tapped his pen against his notebook and pushing his glasses up.
"Don't swear, chéri," Mal purred back. "We’ll have to wash your mouth out with soap."
Arthur sighed, frustrated. He was going to be late for work again, and Mal was putting on those fake French airs, calling him chéri, curling her r's in her mouth like a particularly solid piece of chocolate. She liked teasing him this way, sometimes adopting an accent when she was bored enough. If she kept this up, it was going to be his fourth time late two month, and his manager, a Trinity High alum himself, with a particular hatred for the current students, had threatened to fire him if he was late one more time.
It wasn't his fault, Arthur had wanted to argue. He was naturally fastidious about everything, but about time, especially. He could have had the best attendance in all of Trinity, in fact.
If it weren't for The Vigils.
"It's 5:38 already. I'll be late for my shift. Just one more name, Mal." God, but he was pleading now. He set his mouth in a line, determined not to rise to her prodding.
Mal clucked her tongue, then brushed back a dark brown curl of hair, tucking it behind one ear. Lounging back in the rafters, her pleated skirt floating in the wind, exposing her pale knees, she looked like someone's fantasy of a Catholic school girl. Whose, Arthur wasn't quite sure. Her face was too sharp, her eyes too cat-like, to be a wet-dream. "Maybe I should ask Dom to assign someone to the store and make life interesting for your boss," Mal said, still toying with her hair. "Make him forget about your punctuality."
Horrified, Arthur blurted out, "Jeez, no." That earned him a satisfied smile from Mal, who held out her hand. Mindlessly, Arthur reached into his pocket and pulled out a Hershey's Kiss. It was slightly squashed from his weight, but Mal took it without comment, popping it in her mouth without even looking down when she unwrapped it.
Arthur was officially the Point Man for The Vigils, but really he was nothing more than a glorified babysitter for Mal, the current Architect. They'd entered The Vigils together their freshmen year, and by second semester it was abundantly clear that she was being groomed to take over for Miles, who was Architect then. Arthur had been resigned to be one of the regular members. But then first semester of their sophomore year together, Cobb, the incoming president, a varsity boxer with mediocre grades and an unsubtle crush on Mal, had pulled Arthur aside one day and asked him for tips, on how to work with Mal. Arthur had told him the truth. You never worked with Mal; you only worked for her. The best way to get along was to make her happy. Keep your pockets full of chocolates, hold her schoolbag for her when she was rummaging through her locker for a tube of Chapstick or her algebra book, buy her ice cream in the winter, let her try all her awful mental tricks on you first, using you as a punching bag, a practice target.
"It's not hard," Arthur had said. "You just have to get used to it, that's all."
The next week Arthur got a note in his locker, Vigil fashion, with the letters cut out of magazines, telling him he would take point after the transition.
Now it was Mal's turn to sigh, dramatically and without an ounce of real feeling. "What do they think I am, a machine? Every week, it's always, 'One more commission, just one more.'" She had been absently rolling the Hershey's wrapper into a ball. Now she threw it at Arthur. The wind carried it off to one side, and it tumbled against the bleacher seats to Arthur's left. "You're not much help, Arthur."
"You're the one who always says my ideas are no good."
"Have I?" mused Mal. "Maybe we should try it again. See if you've made any improvement." She smiled at him. "Then you could be the Architect."
The problem with Mal was that you never knew what was she was going to do next. She moved with a subtle rhythm, one of a natural born dancer, though to Arthur's knowledge, she had never actually been one. Her actions were fluid but unexpected, often grotesque. She could be tender one minute and as crushingly callous as a football skirmish the next. Arthur knew that best of everybody, but he still found himself letting her play him, the way a kid might play with unappetizing food.
Like now. He only needed another name, just one more commission, and he could leave. Arthur knew that Mal had one in mind already. She always had at least three or four half-formed commissions in her head. Whenever he thought about the way Mal worked, Arthur always imagined an assembly line stretched out to infinity, effortless and inexhaustible. He could see it in the way she glanced at him that she was merely drawing it out, letting him stew in his own anxiety. Damn it, Mal, he thought again. But this was what he had meant when he told Cobb that the most important thing was to keep Mal happy. Mal could drag this on for hours, and would if he tried to rush her, and then where would Arthur be? Where would the Vigils be, without Mal and her commissions?
"Who's that new kid?" asked Mal, nodding towards the football team. "The one they just demolished?"
Arthur flipped to the front of his notebook, looking down the index until he found the right entry. His notebooks, always black and somewhat tattered at the edges and spine, were famous at Trinity. They were more complete than the school records, and were part of the reason why Mal was one of the best Architects in recent Vigil history, though Arthur never said as much. Neither did Mal, though for different reasons. "Some kid named Robert Fischer," Arthur said as he flipped to the f's. "Son of Maurice R. Their family's pretty well off. Dad owns a lot of different companies. A freshman. Just turned sixteen. His mother died last spring."
"Poor thing," said Mal, almost cooing. "Must be hard on him." She licked the last of the chocolate from her lips, then placed a casual hand on Arthur's elbow, drawing her nail along the creases of his blazer, so gently he barely felt it. "Do you know what he needs, Arthur?"
"What?"
"A distraction. To give him closure. Catharsis." Mal narrowed her eyes at the field, where the football team was starting to leave. Arthur followed her gaze and, out of habit, picked out Eames' number. Eames was thudding the Fischer kid on his back, too hard, it seemed, for the kid to handle. His knees almost buckled as he rubbed the tender spot of his ribs, where he'd been rammed by a helmet. To Arthur, he looked almost like he was trying to push something out from under his skin. The goal posts cast shadows on the emptying field, like crucifixes, slashes of smoky gray against Fischer's face. It unsettled Arthur, though he couldn't explain why.
"Leave the kid alone, Mal. His mom just died. He doesn't need catharsis." Arthur looked down to find that he had traced a circle so deep into the page of his notebook that it was starting to bleed through. He turned the page, smoothed it out, and said, "He needs therapy."
Mal narrowed her eyes. "We can be very therapeutic when we need to be."
That awful pronoun. We. It shattered all the gentleness from Mal's voice. As always, it came as a shock to Arthur just how powerful Mal could be, when she wanted. She could ruin Fischer, by simply commissioning some of the students to bully Fischer. Or she could do the opposite, make Fischer popular for a week, then, on a whim, make him invisible. All she needed was to say a handful of words, have Arthur write them down, and announce them to The Vigils and Cobb.
"Put down Shinji Kaneda," said Mal, her voice flat and devoid of her phony French accent. "For Mr. Nolan's room."
As Arthur wrote down Shinji's name, he kept seeing the scrawny shape of Robert Fischer clutching his knees, gazing at the goalposts. It was just Fischer's luck, to have his mother die, and now this, catching Mal's attention. Rotten luck. It might be Shinji's turn this time, but sooner or later, Mal would roll Fischer's number. Her interest might lie dormant, but it would always kill you in the end. Arthur looked back out at the football field. Fischer was gone now. The goalpost looked more than ever like-- what? Arthur had forgotten.
Anyway, he had more important things to worry about than a freshman nobody. Trying to get to work with only eight minutes left before his shift was just one of them.
:::
"This wheatgrass crap is foul," Eames said through a mouthful of smoothie.
"No one's making you drink it," snapped Arthur. "Go back to your sports drinks or whatever and give me back my smoothie."
They were sitting in the trunk of Eames' mother's SUV, feet dangling off the ground, the evening air start to cool around them. The weather was well into fall now, and more than ever, as he shivered in the breeze, Arthur resented the bright green short-sleeved polo shirt he wore for work. A mark of your enslavement by Jamba Juice, Mal liked to say whenever she visited during his shifts, laughing as he glared at her from behind the counter.
Eames, oblivious and insurmountably solid in his letter jacket, continued to slurp noisily. Through the straw, even, Arthur thought with disgust, and gave up his smoothie as a lost cause. "My sports drinks are delicious," Eames informed him, shaking a Powerade bottle under Arthur's nose. Arthur shoved it out of the way and went back to picking the almonds out of a bag of trail mix he had nabbed from Eames' backpack. "They taste like red and blue and sometimes orange. This," Eames said, gesturing with the smoothie, "tastes like getting faceplanted by a 300 pound lineman while playing at Reliant Stadium."
"I have no idea what that means."
"That, darling, is because you hate life. Which is why you never go to my games and also drink things that taste like lawn clippings."
It was an old argument for them. In retaliation, Arthur pegged Eames on the head with a cashew, and Eames reached behind him for one of his shoulder pads, which he threw at Arthur, hitting him squarely in the face. The smell of sweat was revoltingly fresh. Arthur thrust the shoulder pad back at Eames, almost painting the inside of the car with Arthur's smoothie when he bumped Eames' elbow.
"Watch it!" Eames shouted, hopping out of the car. Arthur threw the shoulder pad at him again, but Eames caught it easily with one hand, and Arthur settled for wrinkling his nose instead.
"I'm sorry that not all of us stink as prettily as Mal," sneered Eames. He stretched the vowel in Mal's name until it was nothing more than a mocking sound, Maaaaal, almost baaing like a sheep.
"Fuck off," Arthur sniped back, but without any real venom. He scooted to one side of the car to make room for Eames, who sat back down heavily, still drinking the last dredges of Arthur's smoothie despite his complaints. "Stop wasting time. What are you here about?"
Eames considered for a moment, his eyes closed. In the dark, Arthur could just make out his eyelashes, which were incongruously long for someone who spent most of his free time running headlong into other guys while wearing a mountain of foam pads. Shielded by the darkness, Arthur grinned at the contrast: the sharp, unmistakable lines of Eames' arms, the shadows of Eames' lashes against his cheeks, the funny, almost zen expression on Eames' face as he worried the straw between his teeth.
Eames had been one of those rare sophomore inductees into The Vigils. Cobb had invited Eames after meeting him at a party of some sort. Arthur never really figured out the details. Right after being inducted, though, Eames became obsessed with picking on and picking at Arthur. You're too uptight, he had told Arthur all through their first semester together. You need someone to teach you to relax. It didn't go well and soon escalated into a series of ugly pranks and fights, which amused Mal, who had long complained of the same in Arthur, and was therefore tolerated by Cobb. The week right after winter break, though, ended in a chicken run into a half-finished construction site a few miles away from the school, and that almost gotten them both expelled. Hostilities had calmed since then, out of self-preservation if nothing else, and they'd been friendly towards each other, though not actually friends.
They were never, Arthur thought, ever going to be friends. They were too different for that. Eames was a jock and had a reputation to maintain. Even if Arthur was the Point Man for The Vigils, he wasn't in the same social strata at Eames. Sure, they were in The Vigils together, but you couldn't go around school saying that. Eames was a varsity football player, a wide receiver, and Arthur was on the Science Olympiad team, for crying out loud. But ever since Arthur started his part-time job at Jamba Juice, Eames had taken to stopping in after shifts, and it wasn't unpleasant to spend an hour once a week or so just talking. If only to get blackmail material on the football team to round out Arthur's notebook.
Eames had always, and even now, struck Arthur as an odd choice for The Vigils. It wasn't that Eames didn't pull his weight as a member. It was just that Eames had from the beginning been uncomfortable with Vigil activities-- the commissions asked of the student body, the constant air of threat, the secrecy. That was the problem with recruits, especially late ones. Most Vigil members were kids who had always been in the Trinity system and had entered Trinity High determined to be a member. Cobb, for instance-- his older brother had been in The Vigils before him.
"Kaneda's going to need help with Nolan's room," said Eames, still chewing the straw of the smoothie cup.
Kaneda, the latest Vigil victim, was a spineless sophomore in maybe half of Arthur's classes. He was one of those kids who tended to blend into the background, the kind you would meet again at reunions and never remember. Mal's commission for him--"Mr. Nolan's room"-- turned out to be quite the thing: unscrewing all the screws in the classroom, from the desks to the chairs to even the blackboard behind the teacher's desk. Kaneda had stood in the dark of The Vigils meeting room, close to tears. He was just a pimply nobody, someone who only ever spoke up in class to help the teachers set up projectors and PowerPoint presentations, but even when The Vigils pulled in the athletes, the real hard-hitters -- Cobb's teammates on the boxing team, for instance -- it was still the same. They always had this look of utter helplessness, as if they knew there was no escape. As if The Vigils were all knowing, all powerful.
Arthur loved it. He didn't know what terrible, psychopathic part of him enjoyed it, but something in him did.
Eames continued, "Mal's idea is good, but even if Kaneda was fast with his hands--which we all know he isn't--it'll take him until morning to finish unscrewing all those desks and chairs."
Arthur hummed contemplatively, then glanced down at his watch. "Masks on at nine then? I think my dad has a toolbox stashed away in the garage somewhere." This was usually why Eames and him would meet after school. A little bit of dirty work for The Vigils. Not that work for The Vigils was ever anything but dirty.
Now it was Eames' turn to hesitate. He chucked the empty smoothie cup towards the parking lot, hitting a fairly new sports car that Arthur was delighted to recognize as his asshole manager’s. But Eames kept the straw, chewing on it methodically, like an old-timer in a movie. Arthur waited for Eames to respond, furtively checking his watch again. If they had to help out Kaneda, he'd need to eat dinner and make up some lie for his mother. If not, well, he had trigonometry homework, and he knew Eames did too, football practice or no.
Finally, Eames spat out the straw and said, "Has Mal told you yet? About the chocolates?"
Automatically, Arthur reached for a handful of Hershey's Kisses. But he was wearing his work slacks, and anyway, Mal wasn't anywhere near the Jamba Juice parking lot. He relaxed, trying to disguise his panicked groping by grabbing the neglected bag of trail mix. "What chocolates?"
"The sale ones. Saito's chocolates."
"You mean for the annual fundraising sale? What about them?"
"Mal went to see Saito last week. She didn't tell you?"
Arthur shrugged. "Not any details. I figured it was just typical administrator stuff, since Mr. Saito made interim principal last week. 'I know boys will be boys, I don't want trouble while the principal's ill,' blah blah blah."
"Well, all this is just rumor--" Arthur made an impatient gesture, and Eames hurried on, "but I heard that Saito asked for The Vigils help with the chocolate sale this year."
It was inconceivable. So inconceivable that Arthur almost laughed in Eames' face. He had never even heard a member of the faculty say the words "The Vigils" out loud. He couldn't, even in his wildest dreams, imagine Saito asking for them for help. "Who the hell did you hear that from?" demanded Arthur.
This, too, was an old argument between them. Eames shifted the weight from one thick thigh to another, shuffling before he settled on his habitual response. "Who do you get the information for your notebooks from then?"
Arthur glared. "This is different, and you know it. How did you get rumors on a private conversation between Mr. Saito and Mal?"
"You have your sources," Eames said, gesturing behind him at the crumpled pile of Arthur's jacket, which they both knew held Arthur's black notebook, complete with clipped pen. "I have mine. Look, Arthur, I didn't bring this up to argue with you about which members of the administration eavesdrop on whom--"
"And which members of the student body schmooze up to them to get the juicy details!" added Arthur, indignant.
"I brought it up because I think it's going to affect The Vigils," Eames finished doggedly. "Mal's taking on too much. She-- we shouldn't be backing the chocolate sale. But I don't think anyone's going to tell her that."
"Why are you telling it to me then?"
"Who else am I going to talk to?" Eames spat out the straw, then turned to Arthur, smirking. "Cobb?"
Arthur frowned. There was nothing to say when it came to Cobb, and Eames knew it as much as Arthur did. He turned his mind back to the chocolates, back to Mal. "It's just a stupid chocolate sale. What are you worried about?"
"Gut feeling," grunted Eames.
"Is this the point in our conversation where you tell me that I don't think enough with my instincts and too much with my head? Because if all this is over some vague--"
"Not just my gut though. Guess how many boxes of chocolates."
Arthur shrugged. "Last year? It was about... ten thousand."
"This year, it's double that."
"Twenty--?"
"Twenty thousand," Eames said, unable to keep from gloating.
"That's almost fifty boxes per student," Arthur said, stalling as he made his calculations. "Last year it was twenty-five. And we barely sold them then."
"Double the price, too."
They both fell silent, mulling it over. Arthur thought of Mal-- clever, clever Mal-- and wondered what she had been thinking, promising Saito their help. He could almost see her in the dusty sunlight of the dean's office, smiling serenely at Saito as he bored down at her with a discomfortingly steady gaze. Saito had a way of making you feel small, unprepared. Arthur had seen snappy guys, smart guys who usually always had a leg up on everyone else -- Yusuf, for instance, the current student body president -- taken down, ground into mental hamburger meat, when faced with Saito. Arthur took world history with Saito last semester, and it had been one of the most excruciating experiences of his life so far.
It wasn't that Saito was particularly strict. But once or twice a class Saito would let a student answer a question, wait a whole minute, sixty terrible, pregnant seconds, and then say, quite simply, "Is that what you really think?" And the student would collapse, even if his answer was right. Saito was just like that. He always seemed to have something up his sleeve. He was the kind of man that was almost worse on your side than on your enemy's.
But then again, Arthur mused, so did Mal. When it came to teachers, students never won, but if Arthur were to pick anyone to run circles around Saito, it'd have to be Mal.
The weight shifted beneath Arthur. Eames had jumped out of the trunk of the SUV. Now he stretched, back popping, and looked over his shoulder at Arthur. "Look, fuck Saito and fuck the chocolates," he said. "Your parents expect you back for dinner? You wanna get pizza?"
His voice was flat, cheery. To Arthur, it seemed to put Mal and Saito back in their places. Mr. Saito was just a teacher again; Mal, just a student. This wasn't any heroic struggle. Arthur was just being stupid.
"I have to get home." Arthur grabbed the strap of his backpack, slung it on almost apologetically. It was late. His mother would be angry already. Maybe today he'd have to climb down from the window again. He highly doubted she'd let him leave the house, this late, even if he did lie and say all his homework was done."I'll see you in a bit," he said, trying for nonchalant.
"Yeah," Eames said, flashing a grin. "Masks on at nine, Zorro."
"Shut your face," Arthur laughed, and scattered the trail mix as he threw the whole package at Eames.
:::
Arthur had to admit, Saito knew how to give a speech. It was Monday morning, they were sitting in the auditorium, and Saito was giving it to them, hot and ready, Academy Award caliber. He threw every emotional manipulation known to man, and the kitchen sink on top of it. Tradition, school spirit, the principal in his hospital bed, the need for funds to continue the machine that was Trinity High, even the recent string of lucky victories their sports teams had eked out at state competitions. Crap, of course, and unrelated to the sale at hand, but Saito had a way of making the impossible work for him. When Saito spoke, no one dared to guffaw, or fall asleep, or start playing paper football. Say what you wanted about the man (and when it came to high school students, everything was said), but he could command a room.
"Yes, the quota is doubled this year," Saito intoned, "but that's because we have more at stake than ever. Yes, each boy has to sell fifty boxes instead of twenty-five. But would I have taken on the task if I wasn't sure the students of Trinity could accomplish it?" He gestured at them, a hand outstretched, like a dictator, for crying out loud. "What, at Trinity, is our most resilient virtue?"
"Self- sacrifice," Arthur muttered, just as Saito thundered, "Self-sacrifice!" Beside him, Mal re-crossed her legs and hid a smile.
Talk, talk, talk. That's all school ever was. But the speech this year made Arthur a little nervous. It wasn't just Saito and the chocolates that were at stake this year -- The Vigils were too. And Saito was making it sound like the Crusades, and they were the Knights Templar, when it was just a crappy chocolate sale.
Those were Mal's words this morning, 'just a crappy chocolate sale.' She rarely used words like 'crap' or 'shit', and when she did, Arthur knew they were calculated to shock. It was how she had kept the group under control when she first started as the Architect. There were a few girls in The Vigils, but Trinity High itself was only recently converted from an all guy's school, and on average, girls only made up about a third of the population anyway. They tended to stay in their own cliques, and the ones who did venture out found themselves needing to be one of the boys to be taken seriously. It wasn't uncommon for each social circle to have only one girl at a time, the lone flower in a boy's club. Though, admittedly, it was a little different when the flower was Mal, and the boy's club was an adolescent's dream of a secret society brought to life.
There was an amusing little fleur du mal pun in that comparison. Arthur thought about sharing it with Mal, glancing at her serene profile at his side, but decided against it.
They had called a special meeting that morning, before Saito's auditorium speech, and there Mal had announced that The Vigils would be sponsoring the sale. She had undersold it, the way she undersold all her most dangerous ideas, and for a minute, in the silence that followed, Arthur had wondered if none of the others really understood what she had conscripted them into. Then, shockingly, Cobb had spoken up. "Mal," Cobb had said, a ripple of doubt in his voice, "you know we never get mixed up in this stuff."
"I don't see the problem," Mal had answered. "It's just a crappy chocolate sale." Her voice, so sweet, pronouncing the word 'crap' in her crisp way. Like a bomb exploding in the room.
"But getting involved with the administration," Cobb fretted. "It's just asking for trouble." A pause. "I really think you should have asked me first."
And that, Arthur had thought cynically, was why Cobb would only ever be a figurehead to Mal. Cobb had the unfortunate ability to undermine his own authority every time he opened his mouth. This was the kind of thing you said one on one, when the whole group wasn't watching. You never aired dirty laundry in front of a group like The Vigils, especially not when you were the nominal president. The other members fidgeted, suddenly uncomfortable, and Arthur, too, had found it difficult to look Cobb in the eye.
So: a slam dunk, overall, for Mal. And it had seemed obvious that supporting the chocolate sale was the right idea when she explained it that morning. They didn't even need to do anything at first, she had said. Just put their name behind the sale. The student body would be clamoring to sell the chocolates. We'll make selling chocolates the thing to do, she'd promised. "The sale will go off without a hitch, and Principal Saito will owe us a favor," she'd finished, with the air of a tightrope walker dismounting. She had flashed her eyes at Cobb, daring him to object, but Cobb had said nothing, and the meeting was shortly dismissed.
If you asked the student body, they'd tell you that Mal earned the job of Architect because she blew Miles once or twice in the boys' locker room. Anyone in The Vigils would tell you that Mal had earned the job of Architect because of her quick mind, her swift intelligence, her fertile imagination, her ability to see two moves ahead as if life was a giant checker or chess game.
But there was something more than that. Arthur could point to it, even though he couldn't give it a name. When he was younger, Arthur had watched Animal Crackers, that Marx Brothers film where they investigated thefts. In one scene, the brothers were looking for a stolen Beaugard painting. Chico said, "All you got to do is go to everybody in the house and ask 'em if they took it." And Groucho had asked, "Suppose nobody in the house took the painting?" Chico had said, "Go to the house next door." "Suppose there isn't any house next door?" Groucho had asked. "Then of course, we gotta build it," Chico had replied, and they immediately started to draw up plans for building the house.
Since joining The Vigils, Arthur found himself thinking of that scene almost every week. It was what Mal did-- build the house nobody could anticipate a need for. The house that was invisible to everyone else but her.
"Chéri," Mal whispered, startling Arthur out of his thoughts. "I want you to pay attention," she continued. "Watch Mr. Saito carefully."
Her hand was on his knee and she squeezed it, lightly. Mal used that move on boys all the time, to get them hard, to get them to imagine her hands elsewhere, to control them and make them forget she was smart, not just a pair of breasts. She'd told Arthur that before, laughing as she demonstrated on him. "Do you remember Howie Anderson's party?" she had said. "I spent the whole evening with my hand on Dom's thigh. He almost came in his pants."
"Can't girls touch guys without wanting to get something from them?" he had snapped back at her, and that was the great thing about Mal. You could say things to her that you couldn't say to anyone else, and she'd take you seriously, if you meant it.
Now, she tilted her head close to him, almost resting it on his shoulder. "Can you see it?" she murmured.
"See what?"
"He's running scared, Arthur. He has a lot riding on the chocolate sale, and he doesn't want us to know it." She pursed her lips, then grinned up at Arthur. "It’s nice to know, isn’t it, that we’re so dependable?”
She smelled of wind and cotton. As she leaned back in her chair, her hair touched his cheek. Her hand was still on his knee, but it was her profile that made him go cold. He examined their interim principal closely, trying to see what Mal saw, to divine the weakness that Mal could pick out like a scent in the wind. But what he saw instead was how similar they looked at that moment, Saito staring down the auditorium and Mal gazing back up at him. They were hunters, both of them, even if Saito was the one trying to make himself look bigger by stretching out his arms, while Mal was the one who, crouching, waited, hidden by brush and shadow.
A premonition hit him, and, for a minute, Arthur thought he could almost see the house Mal was building. There were the sketches of the foundation, the faintest blueprints of walls, in the way her face echoed Saito's. And he thought, without knowing why, of how they built the Great Wall by crushing the bones of the dead workers into the brick.
:::
Three weeks later, Arthur rounded the corner of the locker bay after school only to have Eames shove him back. "We have a problem," Eames said flatly. "It's about Robert."
"Fischer?"
"In more ways than one," muttered Eames as he dragged Arthur away from the lockers and towards the parking lot.
It had, in general, been a quiet three weeks. Mal had announced through Cobb that while the sale was going on, The Vigils would put commissions on hold. "So tell who you need to tell," Cobb had ordered them, and they did, but even with blessings from The Vigils, the sale was slow. They'd taken to getting updates on the numbers three times a week from Yusuf, whose class president duties involved the painful charge of monitoring fundraising sales and reporting them to Saito.
Arthur wouldn't want Yusuf's job for anything. Especially not this year, when the numbers were so bad. "There are the usual discrepancies," Yusuf had told them yesterday. "The students always wait until the last minute to turn in the money, but definitely lagging behind last year, which doesn't bode well, since the quota's double this year." Then he frowned. "Also, there's another thing."
"What?" Cobb had asked impatiently, earning a look from Mal, who usually enforced a strict ‘don't speak unless spoken to' rule when it came to Cobb.
Yusuf fished out a pen and a folded half sheet of paper from his pockets. He chewed on the pen as he spoke, shifting weight from one foot to another. "The reports Saito gives," Yusuf said. "Remember how he told all the homeroom teachers that the sales so far were at 4,582? It's wrong. We've sold exactly 3,961 and made returns on 2,871."
"Maybe Saito was trying to raise morale?" Arthur had suggested.
Yusuf shrugged. "If he is, he better hope it works, and quickly. At this rate, we'll never reach the total."
It was bad news. The sale was far from doomed, of course; there was at least a month before it was over. But Mal had looked grimmer than Arthur had ever seen her. For once, she looked vulnerable as she stood in the modified janitor's closet The Vigils used as a meeting place. Her arms were crossed against her chest, and she stared at Yusuf as if she could see straight through him, out into the hallway, down the length of the building, all the way to Saito's office. None of them, not even Arthur, said a word to her as they brushed past her to leave.
They made it all the way out to Eames' car before they spoke again. "No practice?" Arthur said as he climbed into the shotgun seat, throwing some empty plastic bottles and a dirty t-shirt into the backseat.
"No," Eames said tersely. He had turned on the engine, but didn't take off the brake, letting them stall. It was still relatively early in the afternoon, and they were in the after school parking lot rush hour. Arthur looked out the window for mutual acquaintances, gratified for Eames' sake more than his own that the glass was tinted. He shifted in his seat so that the back of his head was to the window anyway.
"So. Fischer?" he prompted.
"You know his father?"
"Not personally."
The look Eames threw his way said, more clearly than words, stop being a jackass. Arthur bit his lip and went back to using his feet to sort the papers collected on the ground into piles -- receipts, food wrappers, school handouts -- while he waited. A minute or two passed before Eames demanded, "Let me see that notebook of yours."
"Seriously, Eames, what is it?" Arthur asked, exasperated. "Just tell me."
"Fischer-Morrow. That's the company that distributes our fundraising chocolates."
"Okay," said Arthur, slowly. "And this is relevant because--"
"Because Robert hates his father," Eames finished. He was tugging almost comically at his hair now, and Arthur watched him with the dispassionate amusement of someone who couldn't quite understand a joke everyone else was laughing at.
Since the football tryouts, Arthur had run into Fischer occasionally, usually during passing periods, and once when he almost upturned Fischer's lunch tray when he turned to get an extra carton of milk. Fischer was small for someone on the football team, but other than that, he was unremarkable -- vaguely good looking, with startling blue eyes, but too scrawny, with the look of someone perpetually confused by his lot in life. He and Eames, though, had recently struck up a friendship that Arthur wrote off at first as a result of sportsmanlike camaraderie and had lately revised as brotherly overinvestment. The depths of Eames' present concern, all the same, surprised Arthur. "So, what, he's determined to sabotage the sales to stick one to his father?" Arthur joked.
"I know you think you're being funny," Eames sighed, "but that's exactly what Robert's doing." He paused, then added, wryly, "Unintentionally."
Arthur frowned, doubtful. He opened his mouth, but Eames held out his hands, palms up, as if trying to hold Arthur's irritation in place. "Robert's not selling the chocolates."
"What?" Arthur blurted out. "You can't not sell the chocolates. It's mandatory." Even Vigil members during other years had been selling theirs. Granted, when Arthur had been a freshman, part of his responsibility had been to sell chocolates for the older members. But the principle still held.
"It's not actually mandatory."
"Fine, it’s all but."
"I asked Yusuf for the individual list yesterday. It's true. He hasn't sold a single box. The only other guy who hasn't sold anything was John Cartier, and he's been in the hospital."
"With appendicitis. Right."
"Robert's in Saito's homeroom too. You know, Saito -- he does those irritating roll calls every morning, 'oh Santucci, how many chocolates did you sell, that's three less than this time last year, you can do better.'" Eames ended on a slightly lower note, his "mocking the administration" voice. Arthur nodded, amused despite the situation. He had been in Saito's homeroom last year. The roll calls, ceremonial in their solemnity, but slightly farcical for that exact reason, had eaten up their time if nothing else, and some mornings they meant an extra five minutes of sleep.
"Every morning, apparently, Saito will ask Robert if he'll sell the chocolates, and every morning, Robert will tell him no."
"The kid's crazy."
"That's what I told him."
"And?"
"And he said all his life he's done what his father's wanted. Come to Trinity High, play football, the rest. This is the one thing he can take back." Eames took a deep breath, let it out again. "Look, it's a little complicated. He'd been living with his mother, and she died, so he's had to transfer to a new place and everything. Not to mention Papa Fischer's pretty distant."
It was a marvel, really, how by the book Fischer's rebellion was. Arthur, too, had always been a good kid, the kind who would come home from grade school with report cards that said "gets along well with others" and "listens to directions." He had the dreams of every well-behaved kid, to tear it all up to shreds and really do something wild for once. But he had nothing to act out against. His parents were a genial, conventional couple, and together he and they lived a genial, conventional life. WASPish to the end, with a healthy liberal dose. More often than not, Arthur had felt himself suffocated by just how understanding his parents were. It took the sting out of acting out, and Fischer, with his rich, distant father, seemed to Arthur like something out of a movie.
Still, though. Arthur thought back to Mal in the half-dark, her arms crossed, listening to Yusuf read out the chocolate sales. All good and well that Fischer Junior was acting out his teenage kicks, but --
"Fine. One freshman doesn't sell the chocolates. So what?"
Eames turned to Arthur, a funny expression on his face, like he was torn between fondness for Arthur and thinking Arthur was the stupidest person in existence. Immediately defensive, Arthur began to fiddle with the radio dial, turning it on and playing with the channels. After a few minutes of jumbled music and weather, Eames brushed Arthur's fingers off the buttons. "There are all kinds of rumors going on. Nobody wants to sell the damn chocolates and it's turning into a kind of farce in some classes. They say Robert's leading a revolt against the school and Saito. But mostly, they're saying he's doing it to stick one to the Vigils."
"You're his friend," Arthur pointed out. "Why don't you tell him to sell the chocolates?"
Eames rubbed his face and said, with a derisive snort, "You think I haven't tried?" Arthur opened his mouth, ready to comment on Eames' powers of persuasion, when Eames raised a hand to stop him. "Anyway," he continued, "I'm beginning to think Robert's got the right idea not to sell them."
"You're kidding," said Arthur. His turn to be flat, brusque. Eames could pull jokes like that, had in fact done it often when they were still not yet not-friends and he was constantly trying to screw with Arthur's head. It didn't seem like the time for a joke, but Arthur would never put it pass Eames.
"No, I'm not," Eames said, and Arthur's heart sank. "Think about it. We pay tuition to go to Trinity, don't we? They sell us a bill of goods that Trinity is the best prep school for college you can find around here. There's a case full of trophies too -- football, debate, boxing. And what happens?" Eames pounded his palm against his steering wheel, accidentally hitting the horn and scaring some freshmen girls crossing the parking lot. He gave them a sheepish grin before turning back to Arthur. "They turn us into salesmen. If it's not soap, it's magazines. If it's not magazines, it's chocolate. And now some freshman, some kid, just says no. Something I've never thought of before. Just stop selling. This time, too, saying no directly to The Vigils." Eames furrowed his brow, tugged at his hair again. "It just doesn't feel right to get The Vigils involved. Frankly, it gives me the creeps. Like something out of Hitler Youth."
Arthur shook his head, more in amazement than in disagreement. Eames, clearly out of steam after his speech, leaned his cheek against the rim of his steering wheel, waiting. Arthur found himself thinking, not for the first time, how would Mal handle this? Stalling, he bent down, picking up the stray papers at his feet. He handed the stack of handouts to Eames, who received them mutely, before tucking the receipts into the glove compartment and finally dumping the food wrappers in his lap.
"I think you're worried for nothing." He was impressed with how confident his own voice sounded.
"Yeah?" asked Eames, clearly skeptical.
"Definitely." Arthur began to fold the food wrappers as he spoke. "You're giving Fischer too much credit. It's a correlation between him and the sales, not a causation. He's just a lousy freshman. No one pays attention to freshmen. And if they do, it's all the dramatics in Mr. Saito's homeroom. They'll get sick of it soon, and then no one will be talking about Fischer." The food wrappers were all neatly quartered and stacked, and he handed those, too, to Eames, who simply threw rolled down the window and tossed them into the parking lot.
"It's just a fad, Eames. It'll pass, and we'll be back to the daily grind. Back to self-sacrifice for good ol' Trinity. You'll see." Arthur smiled, and, after a minute, Eames smiled back.
It was, on the whole, a convincing theory.
Arthur almost believed it himself.
:::
The poster was badly made. It wasn't really even a poster, just a large piece of butcher's paper taped up to the wall. It wasn't even cut at the edges, merely ripped, and the words "SCREW THE VIGILS, SCREW THE CHOCOLATES" were scrawled across it in permanent marker. Arthur stared at the paper, biting the inside of his mouth, considering. The last couple of letters of 'chocolates' were squeezed together. Whoever had written it hadn't realized until midway through that he, or she, had written the letters too large, and was going to run out of room. Typical.
This was the third permutation of the poster Arthur had seen this week. The other two ("Robert Fischer for President" and "Big Brother Wants You to Sell Chocolates") were light-hearted, almost tongue in cheek affairs. Arthur hadn't thought much of those. He'd assumed they were like all the other unauthorized posters that were ripped down by the janitors-- stupid in-jokes, the result of dares by class clowns. The reference to Big Brother, especially, had to be work of the junior class, whose English class was just getting around to studying 1984.
This one, though. Something about seeing the words "The Vigils" was like a curse word etched in a bathroom stall. It seemed ominous, obscene. Belatedly, Arthur tasted blood in his mouth, and realized he had bitten his cheek too harshly. Without giving himself the opportunity to talk himself out of it, he peeled the tape holding the poster up and folded it as neatly as he could into quarters before tucking it into his class binder. He looked around furtively, then hated himself for caring. You have a coward's soul, Mal liked to say during her more arch moments. And maybe he did, but there was nothing wrong with being careful.
By chance, Arthur ran into Cobb during passing period between trigonometry and gym. He never liked talking to Cobb outside of meetings. Cobb kept in the company of guys that always seemed on the verge of busting out boxing shorts and pummeling Arthur into the ground if he said one word out of place. But Cobb himself was harmless, more likely to stare at you blankly than hurt you in any meaningful way. And desperate times, desperate measures.
"You think Fischer put it up?" Cobb asked as he unfolded the poster Arthur handed him, screwing up his forehead in contemplation.
"No. He's not the type. And anyway, Fischer's been saying screw The Vigils and screw the chocolates for weeks now. He doesn't need a poster to advertise for him."
"What do you think it means, then?"
Arthur hesitated, trying to recall what Eames had said before, when they were both in Eames' car. By now everyone, even Cobb, knew about Fischer's refusal to sell the chocolates. It was, far from a passing fad, the talk of the school. Arthur had seen students of all kinds slap Fischer on the ass, greet him while on the bus, buy him food without his consent. He was an unexpected folk hero. "I think it means the word is spreading. That other people think, if Fischer could just say no to us, so could they. They know we're behind the sale."
"Okay then," Cobb said, his voice coming out in a great sigh. "You have to talk to Mal," he said with an air of inevitably. "We have to ask her if we need to call a meeting."
For a brief, crazed moment, Arthur thought of telling Cobb, You call the meeting. You're the president. The moment passed, and Arthur felt only pity in its wake. Cobb had the put-upon expression of a man twice his age. Arthur could only imagine what it was like to be Cobb, just dumb enough to be used, but just smart enough to know when he was. He was exactly the wrong, and thus exactly the right, person to sit opposite Mal. Not, Arthur admitted as he watched Cobb trudge off to class, textbooks awkward in his boxer's arms, that he himself would be much better. Better than Cobb, but that wasn't better by much.
He slipped a note in Mal's locker, asking to meet in the gym after last period. Mal despised the gym, Arthur knew. She despised most things having to do with sports, including the athletes who participated in them, including Cobb, but it was raining, which rendered their usual meeting place, the football stadium, impractical. The gym, with its stench of wood polish and sweat and failing deodorant, was overwhelmingly claustrophobic the moment Arthur stepped in. But with the noisy sounds of a three-on-three game happening in the half court farthest away from them, nobody would eavesdrop, and Arthur knew that Mal liked, occasionally, to switch up her surroundings. There's nothing worse than stagnation. That was something he had learned from her.
Mal was sitting in the gym bleachers, a library paperback copy of Anne of Green Gables open in her lap, though she was watching the three-on-three game and not reading. When Arthur sat down next to her, she held out her hand expectantly, not even turning away from the basketball game. He gave her a Hershey's Kiss, but the hand remained, the fingers waggling. "What, not watching our weight, are we?" he joked, reaching in his pocket again, but she sniffed delicately, tilting her palm so as to let the chocolate drop from her hand.
"The poster," she said, still not looking at him. "Cobb said you found another one this morning."
"If he's just going to say everything I want to say, he should have this meeting with you instead of telling me to do it," complained Arthur, reaching into his bag for his binder.
"Don't be jealous," she remarked absently. "It's a bad look on you."
"I'm not," protested Arthur, but Mal was no longer listening. She had already turned her attention to the poster. You could always tell when Mal lost interest. It was like she was physically withdrawing, and you no longer existed to her, unless she chose to turn you back on.
While Mal examined the poster (for what, Arthur had no idea), Arthur watched the basketball game, and waited. To him, basketball was a far superior game to football. It was more straightforward, and quicker too. You could see the way each individual player worked themselves into position. And there was less of that brute violence, the headlong rushing into other sturdy, muscled masses. But even with basketball, Arthur's appreciation was purely academic. That was one of Eames' phrases, purely academic. "In the alternative sense of the word," Eames would explain, over and over. "As in, 'not of practical relevance. Of only theoretical interest.'"
"What are you thinking about?" Mal said, rolling the poster into a baton and lightly tapping Arthur with it.
Arthur shook his head. "Nothing important." When Mal said nothing more, he prompted, "Well?" and pointed at the poster baton in her hand. "Do we need to be concerned?"
Mal put her fingers to her lips, then smiled brightly. She handed the poster back to Arthur and went back to watching the game, examining it once again with baffling fervor. "What do you think?" she asked, tilting her head just slightly towards Arthur. "Does it worry you?"
"The whole sale worries me."
"Oui, Arthur, I know it does. But what about Fischer, specifically?"
Arthur considered it. Reconsidered it, really, trying to untangle Eames' concerns, his own, the sales numbers, Yusuf's increasingly desperate reports, the general air of unsettled, half-formed rebellion that seemed to have infected the school as of late. The threads of worry were inexorably tangled. They were, in the end, the same fear of failure. But the answer to her question was chillingly simple when it finally came. He had picked Mal for a reason. He knew why he was here with her, instead of with Eames, or Cobb, or even searching out Fischer.
"I don't care about Fischer's problems," Arthur said. "But he's defying the Vigils. No one defies The Vigils."
"...and gets away with it," Mal finished for him. Coquettishly, she twisted her body so she could lay her head on his shoulder. The paperback slid from her lap onto the gym floor with a loud clatter, but neither of them startled nor reached to pick it up. "Call a meeting," said Mal, her expression dreamy. "It's time The Vigils actually throw their weight behind the chocolate sale. We'll talk logistics. Afterwards, summon Fischer." A pause. "Perhaps then, Arthur, we can calm these inquiétudes of yours. And, I think, the inquiétudes of Eames and Mr. Saito also."
Despite himself, Arthur felt that familiar thrill of pleasure at watching Mal in action. The way she could hide such power in such gentleness, the way she seemed to know everything. He wondered if Eames had already told her about Fischer. Or maybe it had been Cobb, or one of the other sophomores that Mal kept like a vulture on a leash, to provide her with gossip and amusement. But it was just as likely, and in fact more, that she simply understood Eames and Saito. And of course, she knew Arthur particularly well.
She put her hand, again, on his knee. Soft, reassuring. Just as a lover might.
:::
(Part Two)