Shine - Lauren Myracle [52]
“That’s why what?”
She shook her head.
“Bailee-Ann. I know something went on that night, something more than getting high and petting trees. Just tell me.”
“Who said anything about petting trees? I didn’t pet no trees. You think I’m so starved for love I’d pet a dang tree?”
“Why was Beef mad? Was there a fight?”
Seven or eight years ago, some older boys went at one another up into the forest, and things went south fast. One guy had a knife. The other had broken beer bottle, its edges jagged and sharp.
Bailee-Ann stared deliberately past me, but her eyes defied her, sliding to mine for one quick second.
My heart gave a peculiar double beat. Bailee-Ann was scared. That’s why she was keeping mum.
“You can tell me, Bailee-Ann. I swear.”
She leaned forward and got back her piece of yarn, winding it tightly around her index finger. I watched her fingertip go from red to white. “Tommy and Patrick had something they wanted to . . . discuss with Beef. Your brother was in on it, too.”
“In on what?”
“But Beef wouldn’t listen. He felt ganged up on, I guess. He wanted them to lay off, but they wouldn’t, and finally Beef lost it. He told Tommy and Christian to go play with their vaginas, though he didn’t use that word, and he called Patrick a fucking pansy. Nice, huh?”
“Wait. Beef called Patrick . . .” I shook my head. “Wait. In front of everyone, Beef called him that?”
Bailee-Ann cocked her head, and my mouth went dry. Beef was Patrick’s champion. Beef was every underdog’s champion.
Disoriented, I sat back down on the sofa. Different explanations vied for a toehold: Bailee-Ann was lying. It was Tommy who called Patrick that, not Beef. Or maybe Tommy said something worse and Beef lashed out without thinking, his words meant to hurt everyone in the redneck posse, not just Patrick.
There had to be more to the incident than Bailee-Ann was telling me. Everyone knew how stressed Beef was; whatever the guys wanted to discuss with him must have made him even more so.
“It’s probably losing his wrestling scholarship,” I whispered.
“You think?” Bailee-Ann said sarcastically. “Do you know the full story of that, by the way?”
“The full story of Beef losing his wrestling scholarship? I think so. He got a knee injury. I don’t know how, or what kind of knee injury, only that it’s in his . . .”
“. . . knee,” Bailee-Ann filled in, making me feel like a baby. “But it wouldn’t have happened if he’d had his head on straight.”
My own head was muzzy. All I could think was, Beef called Patrick a pansy? Beef did that?
Then, for Patrick to be attacked only hours later . . .
I understood why Christian was being so close-mouthed about it. Means, motive, and opportunity—I knew those terms from various mysteries I’d read over the years, and Beef could be seen as having all three.
I now understood Beef’s hostility at Huskers, too. It wasn’t hostility. It was fear and guilt and self-loathing, all smashed together and coming out as hostility. Because, God, how terrible. It was like a kid lashing out at his daddy for something dumb like not getting to have an ice-cream cone. Like if the kid said, “I wish you were dead,” and then, the very next second, the daddy collapsed from a heart attack.
Bailee-Ann was talking, using wrestling terms and gesturing with her hands. I did my best to tune in.
“. . . could have pinned him right then,” she said. “It was a done deal. But no, he let him back up in order to humiliate him some more.”
I’d missed a big chunk of the story, but I didn’t want to let on if I could help it.
“So Beef took him down again,” Bailee-Ann said, unwrapping the yarn from her index finger and moving on to the next. “He put the legs on him, like maybe he was planning a guillotine. Only he never got the chance to lock it down because the guy from Woodward grabbed hold of Beef’s foot and cranked it.”
Bailee-Ann said “the guy from Woodward,” and Woodward was in Asheville, so now I knew where the other wrestler was from. I didn’t know what “putting