Luke wasn’t about to admit defeat, though. Instead, he returned to his fighting crouch. Fine. I whipped the side of my foot into his cheekbone, and he flopped onto the bench.

Troy jumped forward but couldn’t get around his big dumb friend to reach me. Instead, he threw the helmets at me, one after the other, leaving dents in the lockers behind me as I easily dodged them.

Luke rose up again. What a dummy.

He stood on my side of the bench, while Troy crouched opposite us. Troy wore a tentative expression, like a confused ox. Luke looked pissed and uncorked a right hook. I leaned away from it, let it pass, and pivoted to smash his fist into the lockers. He howled, then tried to grab me with his other hand, but I stepped backward again. I had room to do that one more time before I was up against the wall.

Luke moved to get alongside me, and I didn’t want that to happen. I was tired of fighting this guy. I leaped forward and kicked, the top of my foot colliding with the side of his knee. He fell, screaming, his leg bending in the wrong direction.

I turned just as Troy lunged toward me, so I dropped down and punched him between his chest pads and his belt. He gasped, and as he grabbed his stomach, I threw an uppercut and felt and heard the crunch of his shattering jaw. He started making noises like a wounded large animal that needed to be put down.

I popped back up into ready stance, but there was no need.

“What the hell did they teach you over in the sick camp, Conners?” Coach Garner asked as he broke through the crowd. “Some kind of special-forces crap?”

I relaxed my muscles.

“He didn’t start it, sir,” Tico said over Luke’s shrieks and Troy’s moaning.

“No shit,” Coach Garner said through gritted teeth. “Who starts a fight in their boxers?”

“I broke Troy’s jaw,” I said, to myself as much as the coach. It was dawning on me that I was in deep shit. “And something tore in Luke’s knee, maybe his ACL.”

“Ya think, Conners? See, and I thought he was showing us a new yoga position.”

Coach Garner turned to Coach Winters. “Call an ambulance, if you can figure out how.”

He pivoted back to me: “In my office. Dressed. Now.”

CHAPTER 8

Maggie

WE HAD TO put Nerf down. The way he kept banging his face against the cage bars, he was going to destroy himself anyway. He just wouldn’t stop.

I’d lived in a vet’s office long enough to see dozens of animals put to sleep. But keeping it together for Nerf was tough.

I threw some treats out to him in the backyard, and as he nibbled at them, Mom slipped a catchpole, with a loop of cord at one end, over his head and pinned him to the ground. While he thrashed around, I held the syringe and looked for an opening. I had to move quickly as I injected him with a sedative and backed away. This potent medicine calmed him down enough to let us finish the job, with Mom handing me the catchpole as she applied a syringe of pentobarbital.