Read Online Boot Camp by Todd Strasser - Free Book Online Page B

must have hit the floor. My chest feels wet, and I realize I’m lying on the puddle of blood. A different kind of pain emanates from my ankle, where Joe is pressing down with the sole of his shoe.
    â€œDid I say you could fall down?”
    â€œNo … sir.”
    â€œGet up.”
    Still dizzy, my face wet with blood and my shirt sticking to my skin, I slowly rise to my feet. The only good news is that my nose finally seems to have stopped bleeding.
    â€œPick it up, stupid.”
    I look down at the smeared streaks and globs of reddish-brown blood coagulating on the floor. The wrapper isn’t there. Joe looks down and searches for it. Then he looks up and wrinkles his nose in disgust as he stares at my chest. The gum wrapper is stuck to my shirt with blood-red glue.
    I pick the wrapper off and hold it out to him. Joe jerks back as if I just offered him a fresh turd orsomething. He looks like he’s ready to barf.
    Something tells me to step toward him.
    He steps back. Strange how this is what Lake Harmony is all about: power and domination and fear. They take away our power and it makes us fear them. Why am I not allowed to speak or move without permission? It is a way of stripping away my power of self-expression. When they have all the strength and we have none, we fear them and do whatever they want. TI, the beatings, the humiliation—they’re all about leaving us naked and weak and forcing us into subservience.
    But oddly, my blood is power. Covered by it, I’m like some horror-movie ghoul. I take another step and feel the balance between Joe and me shift like a seesaw rising and falling.
    â€œStop!” he orders, his voice a notch higher than before. It’s almost as if we’re not at Lake Harmony anymore and I’m not a Level One with fewer human rights than a refugee from some third-world civil war. For a moment Lake Harmony’s ridiculously tyrannical system of rules and points doesn’t apply. Not that I could lose any points anyway, since I have none. I take another step.
    â€œYou’ll be so sorry,” Joe hisses. “You have no frickin’ idea what’s gonna happen to you.”
    I stop. “But what’s the point, sir? If you beat me until I’m a zombie like Jon and Ron, what does that prove?”
    Sensing I won’t come closer, Joe breathes a little more easily. “Parents send their kids here becausethey’ve lost control. Their kids are self-destructing, and they have no place else to turn. A lot of these kids would be in jail, or strung out, or dead if they weren’t here. We save lives, Garrett.”
    â€œSo Pauly’s gonna stay here until he makes the football team, sir?”
    â€œThat’s up to Pauly’s parents, not me,” Joe replies. “My job is to make sure Pauly’s parents get a kid who’ll try out for the football team if that’s what they want him to do.”
    We’ve reached a stalemate. Covered with blood like this I could probably back him all the way down the hall. At the same time I realize that that is most likely what he expects. Doing it will just reinforce what he already believes about us “completely out of control” kids with all our “anger issues” and “crap attitudes.”
    So instead I point down at the gummy red mess on the hallway floor. Damned if it doesn’t look like a murder scene. You can imagine one of those chalk police outlines where the body lay. “Shouldn’t I clean it up, sir?”
    Joe cocks an eyebrow suspiciously, as if this must be a trick. He walks a dozen feet, pulls a key ring off his belt, and unlocks some kind of janitor’s closet. Inside are mops and brooms, a bucket on wheels, and a sink. He holds the door open for me. “Get to work.”
    I nod subserviently and reach for the mop and bucket. “Yes, sir.”
    And suddenly we’re back at Lake Harmony.

TEN
    â€œYou will not criticize