The Fort (Aric Davis)

School system. The majority of kids who attended those schools were suburban children of baby boomers, but there were kids from two other trailer parks too, along with those from a pair of cheap apartment complexes.
    The division between these less-well-off children and their better-heeled fellows in the suburbs was less marked than one would have expected in their quiet North Kent County school district. Luke had thought about that a few times, not that he’d ever mentioned it to Tim or Scott. His theory was that while there were some kids at Northview whose families had money, real money , there were very few of them. And because there were so few, it was almost more awkward for those kids than for the poor kids. A couple years earlier, Luke had gone to an acquaintance’s to hang out, a boy named Jeff Baker. Luke didn’t realize just how well-off Jeff was until they arrived at his house. It was huge! Pool, indoor hot tub, all the kids had their own rooms and bathrooms—it was easily the nicest house Luke had ever been in. Even still, what he remembered most from the visit was Jeff asking him, almost begging him, not to tell anyone else about the house. After that, Luke just figured that different was different, and no kid wants to be the weird one, no matter what the reason is.
    Lately, Luke had felt a bit like the weird kid, even if he wasn’t sharing that with his best friends. His mom, even though he loved her very much, seemed to be spiraling out of control. She was smoking more than ever, and drinking too, sometimes in the morning and at night. She had trouble keeping a job for more than a few months at a time, and the family they’d been before she kicked Luke’s dad out was a lot different than it was now. Back when he worked at Case, they were always one step from making it. Now they were always just a few feet from the gutter.
    Luke never told anyone about his plans for the future, not his mom, not his friends, and certainly not that annoying guidance counselor at school. His friends loved all the cool war stuff he was always reading about and sharing with them, but what they didn’t know was why he read it in the first place. Luke planned to enlist on his eighteenth birthday, rain or shine. He figured it was as good a way out as any, and a hell of a lot more to count on than to hope for a scholarship. He wanted out of the park, out of his mother’s house, even away from his annoying little sisters. As for them, Luke felt that Ashley and Alisha were inevitably destined to appear on one of those trashy daytime talk shows his mom watched sometimes, where they showed kids and people who had made royal fuck-jobs of their lives. Granted, the twins were only eleven, but both already had a reputation, and those tended to grow as one got older, and usually were pretty accurate.
    The Tigers game let him ignore his sisters bickering in their room, his mom blabbing on the phone with a Camel hanging out of her mouth, and all the other nonsense around him. Anyone looking at him would have thought that the kid he or she saw was entranced by the shellacking the Tigers were putting on the Milwaukee Brewers, 10–0 in the bottom of the fifth. He or she never would have known that, while Luke may have been there, in his mind he was crawling through a rice paddy, readying himself to make a thousand-yard shot on a female sniper known as Apache, who had been torturing captured US soldiers. The story played out in his mind as he finally dragged himself off of the couch, brushed his teeth, and went to his room. His mom was still on the phone and his sisters still arguing as Luke lay in bed, trying his best to ignore them all, and to make his one shot count.

6
    Tim woke in his bed, sure that he was still dreaming. The hall lights were turned on, and there was shouting coming from the living room. He could hear Becca and both of his parents. Home late , thought Tim devilishly, and then he looked at his clock and saw that it was only 11:38. Still Monday night. Curious, and unable to help himself, he leapt from his bed and began plodding from his room toward the noise. He caught only snippets of conversation, and was able to understand none of it, until he made the hall. Then quite clearly, he heard his dad say, “I’m going to fucking kill him,” just as he walked in.
    They stopped talking. Becca had makeup running down her face, way more than their mom ever would have approved of, and she was wearing clothing he