All The Glory (8 page)

I didn’t mean to be minimizing the seriousness of what had happened to the dude in my head, but this whole situation just felt horrifically, terribly wrong. I knew for a fact that these guys used to call Jason their brother, for shit’s sake.

“Come on, man, you’re wasting your time,” one of them said to the small guy. “She ain’t worth it and neither is he.”

But the small guy was not so easily dissuaded.
 
He walked up to me and stopped when he was way too close. Putting his finger into my face, he leaned down so we were just inches apart. “You watch your mouth, bitch, or you’ll end up sorry, I can promise you that.”

I smacked his finger out of the way, my voice no longer all goofy. Something inside me took over and helped me sound all badass. I think I was channeling Zena the warrior princess.

“Get your dirty finger out of my face, asshole. God knows where that thing’s been. I don’t want to catch anything nasty.”

He turned partway around. “You saw her hit me, right? You all saw that. That’s assault and battery.”

“Yeah, we saw it,” said one of his friends. “Let’s go talk to Principal Lindberg.”

I started laughing, forced to bend over to the side a little to save my stomach muscles and not bump into the guy’s massive chest. I think it was the adrenaline that was pumping through my heart and veins that made the wrong emotion start emoting. When I should have been quaking in my Converse and crying, I was giggling like a loon.

“Yeah, go ahead, dick cheese. Tattle on me.” I stood up with a big old smile and waved all of them off with one big sweeping gesture of my arm. “Big bad fucking athletes?
Pffff
, right. Bunch of children is what you are. Good luck making it to State without Jason.” I shook my head, so ashamed of them. “Assholes.”

Bobby grabbed my backpack at that point and pulled me away from the group. “Iiiii think we’re done here,” he said under his breath. “Come on, sweetie pie. Off to class now.” He pushed me around the group of kids who’d gathered to watch the show, but I stared the players down the entire way past them.

“Fucking
cowards
,” I spat out, flipping them off at the same time.

The little guy leapt towards me like he was going to tackle me, but his friends held him back.

My responding laugh was fueled purely by the energy boost that surviving that mess gave me, because I was back to sweating bullets and shaking all over.

When we reached the school and stepped inside, Bobby grabbed me by the backpack, spun me around, and slapped me right across the face.

I stood there pressing my hand to my stinging cheek in stunned silence, all the fight in me fleeing for parts unknown. I could hear my heart beating in my ears. It was very possible I was smelling something not very nice from my armpit area too. Suffice to say, I was not in a good place.

“Don’t you
ever
do that again, do you hear me?!” Bobby’s voice had gone up to levels that I was pretty sure could damage a dog’s sensitive ears. He was crying too, obviously nearing the edge of a full-on panic attack. “You almost got yourself killed!” He grabbed me by the arm and dragged me down the hallway as the double-doors behind us opened and students started coming in.

“I had to say
something
,” I whined, my feet slapping on the linoleum as I unsuccessfully tried to slow him down.

“No, you didn’t. At least not
that
.” We turned several corners until we were in a back hallway not often frequented by anyone but smokers trying to hide from teachers.

“It was fine,” I said, trying to reassure him and myself at the same time. “I’m fine, see?” I held up my hands and let him assess my totally unscathed body parts. I was only trembling a little by then. He probably didn’t even notice.

Bobby folded his arms across his scrawny chest. “Listen … I get it that you have some sort of bond with Jason or that you feel some sort of responsibility, okay? I get that.” His arms came apart and his hands started flying all around his head next. “What I
don’t
get is the death wish. Do you think that you’ll somehow start a fight, get arrested, and be able to share a cell with him or something?”

“No. Don’t be ridiculous.” The very idea made my face burn red. Would people really think that about me? That I could be that stupid and naive? How humiliating.

“Okay then.
Think
. Think about what you’re doing before you do it.” He started tapping his toe then, hands on hips.

“You heard what they were saying, Bobby. I couldn’t just let it go.”

“Of course you can. It’s just
talk
.” He grabbed me by the upper arms and shook me a couple times. “You make me so
crazy
sometimes! Assholes like that talk all the time. Talk means
nothing
. But letting yourself get kicked out of school or worse
is
something. Something bad.
Very
bad.” He finally quit shaking me, which was a good thing because I was starting to get a headache. “Do you think your parents will let you visit Jason if you’re suspended? Or expelled?”

I dropped my gaze to the floor, fully chagrined and feeling about as smart as a kindergartner. “They don’t know I’m visiting, so maybe it wouldn’t matter.”

“If you get yourself kicked out of school, I’ll tell them. I totally will.”

I lifted my head in a hurry at that. “What? Are you serious?”

“Yes, I’m serious. I will tattle and tattle and
tattle
. ’Til my tongue falls out, I will tattle like a tattling mofo b-word.”

“Why would you do that?” The loyalty argument was rising to my lips as he answered.

“Because I love you. And when you see someone you care about making bad decisions, when they need you, you intervene, even when it means you can get hurt in the process and they might even hate you for it.”

I could not stay mad at him after that little speech. It was like the sun burst out from behind some dark clouds and shined warm rays right onto my cold face, thawing me out. He made total sense in a world I was starting to think would never make sense again.

Instead of arguing like I’d planned to, I turned him sideways, laced my arm through his, and guided him back to the main part of school. “I agree with you completely.” It felt so good to say that. To know that one other person and I were on the same wavelength. “And now when anyone asks me why I’m standing by Jason during this debacle I’ll have the perfect answer.”

He eyed me suspiciously. “So you’ll stop trying to take on the football team single-handedly?”

“Yes. I think.” I shook my head, ridding it of my vigilante visions. “No, I know I will. I’ll stop, I promise.”

“And you’ll stop looking for trouble when none of that crap matters?”

“Yes. And thank you for putting things into perspective for me.”

He smiled big and the bounce came back into his step. “Wow. That was way easier than I thought it would be. And you’re very welcome, by the way. I’ll send you my bill later. Lucky for you I’m running a special on perspective re-calibration this week, otherwise I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t be able to afford me.”

“I look forward to getting it.” I was trying not to laugh at the way Bobby was swishing again. At the very least, I could always count on him for entertainment, but today, he’d shown me he was worth his weight in gold. Friends like Bobby are really hard to come by, and as much as I didn’t really like what he was saying, I knew he was right.

If I was going to be helpful to Jason, it wouldn’t be by fighting wars that had no good outcome. It would be by just
being
there
. Being a friend like Bobby always was to me. Maybe the best I’d be able to do would be that, and I’d just have to pray that it would be good enough. What everybody else thought didn’t matter. If they were the type to turn their backs on a friend when he needed them most, they weren’t worth my time anyway.

I floated to my first class of the day, hanging on the arm of my BFF. The euphoria didn’t last that long, though. Unfortunately, my newfound perspective did
not
come with an automatic erasure of what I’d started out in the parking lot. I had one good period of classes before the foo doo really hit the fan.
 

Chapter Fourteen

I WAS WALKING DOWN THE hall to my Algebra II class when something hit me really hard in the middle of my back, sending me flying.

It was not pretty. One minute I was upright, the next I was bent in half backwards, my head whiplashing in reverse and my pelvis charging forward.

My knees hit the linoleum first and the rest of me went down like a really bad version of a break-dancing worm. My backpack was the last to succumb to gravity, landing on my neck, the full force of thirty pounds of books denting my spine.

There were several gasps of surprised horror and then some evil laughs. Once I could breathe again, I rolled over to find Brittney standing behind me.

“God, you’re clumsy, aren’t you?” Standing on one side of her was her evil twin Tiffany and on the other was one of the football players I saw her with earlier.

I was overwhelmed by a mixture of both extreme humiliation and a fury I’d never known in my seventeen years of life. For just a moment, I pictured myself leaping up and choking the life out of Brittney, and it was very satisfying for the nanosecond my brain forgot that murder is wrong.

It took me a while to get on my feet. Everything ached. Bobby’s wise words echoed in my brain and cooled my fury just enough to take the edge off.

“You did that,” I said once I was steady.

Yes, master of the obvious, that’s me.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. A little friendly advice, though? Watch your back.”

“Literally,” I said, my sense of humor overriding my ability to come up with tough, witty comebacks.

“What?” She scrunched up her face and pulled her chin back into her neck.

“I mean, you just punched me in the back, so … yeah …” I waited for her to catch up, but it just seemed to frustrate her more that I had nothing else to say.

You might think I was taking the high road here, following Bobby’s sage advice to turn the other cheek or whatever, but in reality I was just so stunned from being physically attacked by a deranged Barbie-ho that I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Whatever. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing,” she said, practically spitting out the words. “So pitiful.”

“Ooookay …” I wasn’t sure what she was getting at, but had a strong feeling I wasn’t going to like it. I started chanting in my head silently to keep from bitch-slapping her with all these witnesses around.
Be like Bobby. Be like Bobby. Be like Bobby…

“You can’t get a real guy to like you so you bottom fish at prison, trying to hook up with murderers.”

Tiffany looked a little uncomfortable at that, but the footballer laughed. “Yo, that’s cold,” he said, making ridiculous snorting sounds as the humor overtook him.

I had so many things to say, so many little factoids to drop on Brittney’s head at that moment, I didn’t know where to start. I opened my mouth to let her have it, starting first with her complete lack of loyalty, when a heavy hand landed on my shoulder and everyone’s expressions went slack.

“Are we having a problem here?” asked a female voice behind me. An adult one.

“No, ma’am,” said the footballer, taking a few steps back and then turning around. “Gotta go, late to class.”

“Good idea,” said the teacher, one I hadn’t had for classes before but knew to be in a freshman civics classroom across the hall from where we were standing. “You too, Tiffany … Brittney … get to class.”

Brittney glared at me for a second before turning on her hundred-watt smile for the teacher. “Sure, no problem.” She and her evil twin disappeared into the crowd of students moving past us, leaving a cloud of perfumed lotion in their wake.

I turned around to face my fate.

The teacher was staring at me like she expected an explanation, one of her eyebrows arched up high into her forehead.

“What? I didn’t do anything,” I said. “She punched me and I fell.”

“She punched you?” The teacher raised her gaze, trying to see over the sea of students between us and Brittney.

“Never mind,” I said, regretting saying anything. “Just let it go. I have to get to class.”

I tried to move away, but she grabbed me by the arm. “Not so fast. Come into my classroom. I want to talk to you.”

I looked at my watch, trying to be really obvious. “Okay but …”

“I know you have class. If you’re going to be late, I’ll write you a note.”

I had no idea what a freshman civics teacher would want with me other than to scold me, but if it got me out of part of my math class, that was fine with me. Scold away. Just don’t make me do any word problems.

The classroom was empty. All of the teachers had some periods where they were supposed to work on grading papers and stuff. I guess it was just my luck that I got my ass kicked right outside her door during her free period.

Aaaand the shit just keeps getting better and better.

Bobby would say this was karma kicking my butt right now and I should just sit here and take it, so that’s what I did.

“Take a seat,” she said, gesturing to an empty desk in the front row.

Chapter Fifteen

I DROPPED MY BACKPACK TO the floor and slid into the seat as the teacher perched one butt-cheek on her desk directly in front of me. I noted how her butt fat pushed out and strained the polyester material of her pants and felt sorry for her. She probably got mocked hard behind her back for her choice in clothing. Her blouse was of the same material and had a big bow at the neck. There were way too many flowers on that shirt, reminding me of my now-dead grandmother’s sofa material.

“You’re Katy Guckenberger,” she said.

I blinked a few times, trying to bite back the smartass comments that quickly leapt to mind.

“Yeah,” I said, proud that I’d been able to control myself.

“Do you know who I am?”

I shrugged, letting my gaze roam the room a bit. I took in a poster of the U.S. Constitution, some pictures of some presidents, and a model of a large boat in the corner of the room.