Page 34 of The Staircase in the Woods

Nick: “What the fuck, Matty.”

Owen: “Matty, Matty—Matty.”

Lauren, loudest of them all, and with more than a little anger dosing her words: “Not how the Covenant works,bro.”

She was right.

20

A Brief History of the Covenant (1995–1998)

March 1995, ninth grade.

Hamish has a group of kids who bully him every day—metalheads, mostly, not the cool metalheads who listen to Metallica and Anthrax and Gumdropper, but the shitty heavyheavymetalheads who liked Cannibal Corpse and Slayer. There’s three of them, all seniors: Bryan Weems, Kenny Melzer, and Tom Szumelak. Weems is the leader, if he can be called that, and the other two are the lackeys who laugh at everything he does, who do everything he says. They target Hamish because he’s fat. He’s sweet. He’s kind of a hippie, even back then, even in ninth grade, and they fuck with him all the time.Allthe time. Mostly simple monkey shit, like calling him names and shoving him into one another, or into lockers. Sometimes they lift his shirt up over his head and tuck it under his chin, then slap his belly hard, leaving red marks that turn into dappled bruises.

It escalates one Monday in March.

Hamish uses a bathroom far away from his classes, and even though it makes him late, it usually means the bullies don’t find him. But they figure it out, and Weems—with his saggy old dog eyes and his big gums and his long rancid red hair—comes in flanked by Melzer and Szumelak. Melzer looks like a wad of chewed buttholes in a Pantera shirt, and Szumelak is skinny and gangly like a rain-soaked scarecrow. Hamish is pissing at the urinal, and they come up behind him, whip his pants down, and as he struggles to bend down to pull them back up, they slam his face into the urinal he just pissed in. Hechips a tooth. Splits a lip. The blood joins the piss on his face. They laugh and kick his exposed ass with their work boots, and then they’re gone. Hamish cries so hard he throws up.

The others aren’t there when the attack happens, but they’re there for him after, and it’s Matty who says, “They say you just gotta ignore a bully, but that’s wrong—you can’t ignore them or they keep getting worse. I say we take the fight to them.” And Nick, already smoking at the age of twelve, is like, “Matty’s right, guys—they mess with Ham, we mess withthem.”

They all agree.

And so they seek their revenge. It’s a multitiered plan. It starts that Friday. All five of them stay after for play practice because either they’re in the cast (Matty, Lauren) or working tech crew (Nick, Hamish, Owen). They find the lockers of Weems, Melzer, and Szumelak. They grate half-rotten apples and lumps of pork roll over their locker vents—easy as slicing cheese. They save the cans of tuna fish for Weems’s locker. Then that night, they go to each of their houses and dump gallons of milk on their lawns. Finally, they fuck with Weems’s car. He’s got a white 1990 IROC-Z Camaro. They let the air out of the tires. They cover the windshield in egg and hairspray. And then finally, the pièce de résistance—Weems leaves the window cracked, so they buy ten thousand crickets from the local Pets Pets Pets Emporium, and shove them all (or at least the ones that don’t hop away) through the open space, then duct-tape it shut.

It pays off. It pays fuckingdividends. Lauren lives five houses down from Szumelak, and she says even from her place, his house stinks—the milk has soaked in, gone rancid, and their front lawn smells like a diseased dairy farm. And at school on Monday, those three lockers are so foul, so besieged by fruit flies and houseflies and cockroaches that the school brings in freelance janitorial staff to help clean it out—bonus,the three bullies all get in trouble. Detention for weeks. It’s clear they wouldn’t have done this to themselves, but the principal doesn’t care—she just needs someone to blame, and they make it easy to blame them.

As for the car, well, they never see the result, but they still tell stories about how fucking awesome it had to be when Weems opened the car door that day and got pounced on by ten thousand starving crickets. And they saw the car in the school parking lot—the windshield never really looked clean again, and the smell of cooked egg and hairspray never really went away.

It’s a temporary victory.

The three bullies now have not one target, but five, and they go after them without mercy. They kick their asses—all but Lauren, who they just threaten to rape and kill. The attacks intensify, but that’s all right, they tell one another, because it means Hamish doesn’t have to suffer alone. It’s a day in late April when they give a name toit.

It’s Owen, actually, who names it. They’re watchingRaiders of the Lost Arkand Matty asks what a “covenant” is, and Owen explains it: “It’s like a promise, a rock-solid, die-hard, go-to-the-grave promise. A bond you can’t get out of. It’s like what we all have.” And that’s when they start calling it that. The Covenant. It’s how they’re there for one another. How they’ll do anything for one another. Get revenge. Take a beating. Do what needs doing.

The next day, it gives Hamish a little extra juice. When Weems comes at him first thing in the morning, Hamish punches him in the eye. Bursts the blood vessels there. Gives him a helluva shiner. Weems gets dizzy, goes down, the other two just run the fuck away. It’s amazing.

After that day, the three fuckos leave the five friends alone.

They chalk it up to Hamish giving Weems what-for right in the fucking eye, though that’s not really true. Only Nick knows the truth: That night, knowing full well Weems will want revenge, and the kind that might really, really get Hamish hurt, he leaves an envelope under Weems’s windshield to be found the next day before school. In it are two things—one, an index card, on which is written:

Take a good look, because you won’t see the next one coming.

P.S. Leave Hamish alone, you fuck.

It is unsigned.

The second thing in the envelope—and the thing that Weems is supposed to take a good look at—is a shiny brassy 7mm Remington Magnum rifle round.

—

June 1996, the end of tenth grade.

Nick is gonna fail his school year. He’s smart, he’s always been smart, but also, he’s fucking stupid, because he won’t ever play the game. Any assignment he doesn’t like, he just doesn’t do it. A teacher he doesn’t like, he won’t play by their rules, not once, not ever. He’s all sandpaper and tornadoes with anyone he doesn’t like, and he’s this way, he says, “on principle.” But usually,usually,he manages to scrape by, right? Not this year.

No, this year, of all the fucking classes to fail, he’s going to fail gym.

They have a new gym teacher this year, Mrs. Garsh, and Garsh—whom Nick calls “Garsha,” for no discernible reason other than it makes him laugh—runs her gym class from her golf cart. They run the mile, they play flag football, they do Frisbee golf, there she is, on her golf cart, chugging alongside. And Nick, again on what he considers “principle,” says, “That fat-ass has the nerve to ride alongside us and tellusto run faster whenshe’sthe one who needs a hard dose of physical education.” But Hamish points out she’s got a goofy knee, like it kinda bends weird? “Not her fault she’s got a bum knee,” Hamish says, but Nick doesn’t care, and then just takes to calling her “Gimpy Garsha” instead. And he still won’t go to class, so end of the year comes and now he’s failing.

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