Blood Brothers (10 page)

But the worst was yet to come.

Kelly Monroe, in all her lovely grace, hid
her face behind her hand. Her eyes turned up at the sides, that
something special sparkled within them, and it didn’t take two
shakes of a cat’s tail for Michael to realize its cause was the
very same thing that had infected the rest of his classmates:
laughter. Her pretty face was no longer kind, but hateful and
awful. Like an angel thrown from Heaven into the lakes of Hell, her
face was a demonic thing now with nothing sweet or light.

The horror of his predicament suddenly
brought Michael to a point of no return. He swallowed hard, his
Adam’s apple feeling like a huge boulder being dragged through a
tunnel of sand. He bolted then. Fast as he could run. Thankfully
the door was open and he didn’t have to stop. Outside the class the
halls were lined with coat hooks, but this time of year there was
no need to wear a jacket so the only things hanging were a few
scattered backpacks. The hall was empty and as he ran, ran for his
very life, the hanging backpacks rippled in the wind he created as
he pumped his legs, his knees rising higher and higher. He reached
the end of the hall, the exit doors were the heavy metal ones
without windows, the ones you had to press the long bar down on in
order to get out. He slammed into the door, pushing the bar down,
and exploded out into the April sunshine.

He didn’t stop there. He had never run so
hard in his entire life. Not even when he was being chased by Jerry
or Bobby or any other bully. They were just kids, and all he had to
do was stay out of their clutches. This time he ran from something
he couldn’t escape. Inside his head the echoes of the classroom
laughter did not die away, but grew louder, threatening to take
over his mind.

Michael Cole ran and ran, under the blaring
sun of a Mississippi noon, the ghost of cruelty on top of him, and
he wanted nothing more than to run clean off the planet.

The very next day, Michael was back at
school. It had taken close to two hours to get home. He didn’t run
near as far as he wished he could. No big surprise there. The most
exercise he got, in any routine way, was biking his way up and down
the street, from home to a few stores, and that little exertion had
not made him a marathon runner. He lived a good piece from the
school and after he’d finally stopped running, even walking was
hard. He’d had to stop a few times, the stitch in his side almost
unbearable.

And then he got home. Both his parents were
there, as they usually were. Jobs were hard to come by and at the
moment, neither his mother nor father had work. Well, his mom
worked a few hours down at the pawn shop, but that really didn’t
add up to much.

Arriving home a full hour ahead of schedule,
Martin, Mike’s father, was convinced that his oozing sore of a
loser son had messed up again. While it was perfectly acceptable
for Martin to have bad days—more like expected—he held Michael to a
“higher standard.” And when that “higher standard” was not met,
things were not good for Mike, painful even.

As he walked through the front doors of the
school Mike’s limp was no better than when he had walked to the bus
stop, almost forty-five minutes earlier. With hot red welts up and
down his back and scraped across his legs, both walking and
sitting, heck, even standing still, was uncomfortable. The limp was
due more to an overall soreness of his entire body than a specific
leg injury. And sore he was. Oh, how sore! Martin Cole was a big
man. Not fat like his son, but certainly beefy, and when he
punched, it was all a grown man could do to take it. And Michael
was not a grown man. Unfortunately, bare hands were not the only
tools he used to keep Michael up to snuff. There was a length of
extension cord that he kept handy. A ten foot section that he
chopped off a much longer roll when he worked for the City
Department was his tool of choice for the “raising and rearing” of
his son. The thickly insulated cord would have been bad enough by
itself. But to add distaste to displeasure, Martin’s self-made whip
was also equipped with the electrical plug at one end. The plug not
only welted the skin horribly, it also left a nasty bruise.

It had been a long night for Michael Cole.
And his mother had not helped. Not even a little. When Martin had
started, Anita Cole simply took her cigarette case and, wearing her
stained pink housecoat, sulked into the master bedroom to watch TV.
When Michael was finally allowed to go to bed, he cried out all the
tears he thought he could ever make.

Martin Cole had never even asked his son why
he was home early.

Michael was doing pretty well, though. He’d
showered with lukewarm water. Anything hotter would have caused
severe stinging. The shower helped, quite a bit actually. Dressing
quickly, he was out of the house before either Martin or Anita
stirred. His stomach rumbled as he came up on his homeroom.
Breakfast had been out of the question if he wanted a fast getaway,
and he had. That had seemed like the right thing at the time. Now
he wasn’t so sure.

Five feet from the doorway of Mrs. Wegmann’s
room, Kelly Monroe stopped him cold as she moved in front of him
like a very pretty, and ultimately effective roadblock.

The Grand Canyon couldn’t have stopped him
more completely. Only inches from the object of his desire this
entire school year, Michael felt a colony of butterflies burst from
their cocoons and take flight inside his stomach.

“Mikey?” she started. Only his mother called
him that, with anything close to affection, that is. Syrup dripped
from her voice.

“Y-Yeah?”

Kelly looked nervous. He couldn’t imagine
why. It was him that felt like a volcano on the verge of eruption.
“I just wanted to say…I’m real sorry about yesterday.” She had her
hair pulled back in a ponytail.

The beating had been harsh enough to make
yesterday’s fiasco less than his top priority. Now, at the mention
of the whole ordeal, the memory came flooding back with amazing
clarity. “Stuff like that happens,” he said, not finishing with,
“with me, it always does.”

“Still, I felt bad.”

“It’s okay. Really.” Pity was the last thing
he wanted. He might look pitiful, and that in itself was worse than
being the butt of anyone’s joke. After all, his pride was all he
really had.

The last bell rang. Students filed by them on
their way this way and that. Some actually stopped and stared, as
if they were watching an elementary school version of Beauty and
the Beast.

“You know, I ride bus fifty-five. Miss
Phillips is the driver.”

“Miss Snuff, herself, huh?”

“Yeah.” Kelly smiled when he said this. It
was no small secret that Ms. Phillips, the only lady bus driver at
the school, dipped snuff just about as often as she breathed air.
“Anyway, I don’t really want to ride the bus home this
afternoon.”

Expectation sparked, but Michael fought it
down quickly.

“And?” he prompted.

“And I was kind of thinking…maybe…you could
walk me home.”

“What?” he blurted before he could stop
himself. Apparently the word came out a bit too strong because
Kelly flinched at the sound of his voice.

“It’s…it’s okay if you don’t want to.”

She looked hurt and Michael didn’t like that
at all. “No, no, I just wanted to make sure I heard you right.”
This seemed to smooth things over.

“After the last bell, then? On the
playground?”

“Sure.” What happened next was the highlight
of Mike’s entire life. Up to this point, at least. She reached out,
took his pudgy hand in her delicate one, like a flower holding a
water balloon.

“I’ll see you later, Mikey.”

And then she was gone, off into the room. For
a moment Michael just stood there, dumbly. The mind is a funny
thing. He actually doubted if she’d ever really been there at all.
But that was nonsense, and he knew it.

Still…

When he entered the classroom everyone else
was seated, as they should be. Jerry, Casey, Ricky, Cliff and all
the other devils that had tortured him so. But there was Kelly,
right there in her seat, the silver lining to his dark cloud.

Taking his seat before Mrs. Wegmann could
prepare an attack because of his tardiness, he settled in and
plopped open his book and notebook.

There was a large black metal clock on the
wall, centered directly above the blackboard. Michael made out the
second hand as it swept its way around.

Oh, how slowly it moved.

Would the day ever end?

Through some sort of miracle, the day did
pass, even if it went by at a snail’s pace. Morning gave way to
midday, and midday surrendered to the glorious promise of freedom
that afternoon.

The day hadn’t been all that bad for Mike.
Not great, of course. He’d taken a spit-wad to the back of the
head—an especially moist one—during math and he’d stayed close to
the monitor during recess just in case Ricky thought he’d follow up
the tripping with a second act. But all in all, it was decent. A
decent day was good enough to Michael, though. Just the thought of
walking Kelly home kept him motivated to move forward from one
subject to the next, and he found himself excited at school—a
completely new sensation for him.

But such a prospect had its problems as well.
After yesterday’s performance he couldn’t stomach the possibility
of looking like a fool again. What would he talk to her about?
Would he be able to think of something cool and neat? Heck, would
he be able to talk at all? He decided to play it by ear.

Luckily, his soreness had eased a lot and the
limp was just about gone. His clothes, as well, were appropriate
for such an event. This morning he had tried to be quiet as
possible, for obvious reasons, so he’d decided not to go all the
way down to the laundry area which was past the kitchen and right
next to his parents’ bedroom. Instead, he’d chosen an outfit from
his closet. A long sleeved white shirt that had all its buttons and
even though it wasn’t ironed, it didn’t have a single wrinkle. He
had one good pair of jeans that were actually the right color—nope,
no octopus puke here. They fit him pretty well, too. He never
tucked his shirt in; that was just something he didn’t do. But, at
the last break before school let out, he did just that. He checked
himself out in the mirror and had to admit that he looked pretty
good, at least with his stomach sucked in a little. Still, he
wetted his unruly blond hair down and primped for a minute. When a
couple of kids walked in, he smoothly made his way out.

It was a stunning early summer afternoon. The
sunshine was golden, warm. The faintest of breezes blew and felt
like a million small kisses on Mike’s face. If ever there was a day
to walk beside the love of his life, a day to really fall in love,
this was it. The buses were parked ahead and to the right about
fifty yards. Kids from all the different grades were already filing
out. What had been a deserted lot, except for the aging Blue Bird
buses, was now crammed with kids of every race and color—of which
Benedict only had three: black, white, and a few Hispanic families,
known in those days as simply “Mexican.”

Michael walked towards the buses just as he
always did, lost in the crowd. But he didn’t walk to his bus.
Instead he veered away from the general path and slipped into the
staff parking area. Making sure no one was watching he slunk down
low, using the vehicles as cover. Michael followed the parking lot
a little north to the edge of the elementary building, then he
dashed west into the playground.

This route was complicated. It would have
been much easier to simply take a left out of Mrs. Wegmann’s
hallway, follow the corridor until it ended, push through the doors
and voila, there you go. Unfortunately, if the teachers hadn’t
stopped him from heading that way, another staff member would
have.

From the corner of the yard, Michael dashed
past the merry-go-round and down a small hill, past the swings.
Now, the school building blocked him from the parking lot and he
stopped for a breath. This was pretty cool. He was sneaking, not to
get away from bullies who would like nothing more than to hold him
down and spit loogies on his forehead, but to actually meet-up with
Kelly.

Speaking of Kelly…Michael glanced around the
deserted recess area. There was something a tad spooky about the
huge area filled with monkey bars, swing sets, see saws, but
completely empty of children. It just looked wrong. Now, that was
neither here nor there. But one thing was wrong.

Kelly was nowhere to be seen.

There were countless reasons—not all of them
having to do with Mike, but that didn’t keep his heart from
dropping into his stomach. Sure, she could have changed her mind.
Maybe she’d thought about it and just didn’t want to be seen with
him—it wasn’t that far-fetched. Or maybe she was kept after class.
Even though Michael hadn’t noticed Mrs. Wegmann say anything about
it to her, and she hadn’t gotten in trouble for anything, that
option was still possible. Or maybe, just maybe, she was making her
way to the playground at this very moment and she would get here
any second.

So Michael waited. And waited.

And waited some more.

He listened as the school buses, now filled
with their charges, geared up and drove away. Michael took a deep
breath. He was committed to this. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t
get on the bus now. They were leaving. In a moment they would all
be gone.

Rejection and abandonment are never easy
things to take. Even to Mike, who had been treated like a mistake
by both his parents for as far back as he could remember, and was
the dog crap the other kids got on their shoes and tried to wipe
away, he never got used to the feelings. You can be cut by a sharp
knife every single day of your life. The blade, always sharp, but
not too sharp, the way it hurts, kind of drags across the soft
skin, splitting it apart as the blood oozes up from it. Still, each
day the cutting hurts just as much as it did the day before, and
the day before that. As a matter of fact, it hurt worse. When you
experience such a pain over and over again, just thinking about the
next time begins to get to you. You start expecting the physical
pain, but you also start to dread it, dread it and the thought of
the pain you can do nothing to stop.