Shine - Lauren Myracle [53]
“Is that bad?” I asked. “Grabbing someone’s foot?”
“Not if you do it legal. But if you pull back on it until you break the other guy’s ligament, then yeah. That’s bad.”
I went over it in my mind. Beef had his opponent almost pinned. He let him up just to take him down again. To humiliate him. Only it backfired, and Beef ended up with a blown knee.
“Why didn’t the ref step in?” I asked.
“He was on the wrong side of the mat,” Bailee-Ann said. “He couldn’t see what was going on till it was too late.”
“Oh. And why did Beef want to humiliate the Woodward guy again?”
Her expression was incredulous.
“I know, I know,” I apologized. “Just explain it one more time?”
“What’s to explain? He called Beef a crotch-sniffing faggot.”
I winced.
“Then when they were facing off, he wiggled his fingers and said, ‘Come on, sweetheart.’ And he made smoochy noises.”
“That’s so stupid.”
“You think?” she said. She was silent for several seconds.
“There’d been jokes,” she filled in. “Stupid jokes, like you said, about him and Patrick being friends.”
“That’s nothing new. Beef’s never let it get to him before.” She shrugged.
“Did Beef even know the guy from Asheville?”
“Does it matter? He didn’t like being called sweetheart.”
It made me think. As Patrick’s defender, Beef had been on the receiving end of plenty of stupid comments over the years. Patrick got it ten times worse, yet I wondered, for a guy, which was worse: to be called a fag when you were one or when you weren’t.
For the first time, I also wondered if Beef ever got sick of standing up for Patrick, sick of being sprayed by mud just because he was standing in the wrong place. Maybe that was why he lost it at Suicide Rock. Maybe he slipped, like we all did at times, his anger lowering him to the level of guys like that Asheville jerk.
“Anyway, that’s how he hurt his knee, and that’s why he lost his scholarship,” Bailee-Ann said. “It’s sad. It’s extremely sad. But how long is he allowed to punish everyone else because of it?”
“Good point.”
“One day, everything’s great—Whoo-hoo! I love life! Let’s party, girl!—and then there’s one little wrinkle in his universe and, suddenly, everything sucks.”
I started to reply, then stopped. Then did anyway. “Pretty big wrinkle.”
“I know,” she said, like she didn’t need me explaining it to her. “And then he has to go and be all sweet, washing my truck for me or bringing me one of those cookies I like from the sandwich shop. Those butterscotch ones. You ever had one?”
I shook my head.
She leaned back into the sofa, looking bone tired. I knew she’d said all she was going to say about Beef.
We were pretty much done after that. Only later did I realize that she never did tell me exactly what happened at Suicide Rock. She said Tommy and my brother and Patrick wanted to “discuss” something with Beef, but she never told me what that something was.
I STEPPED INTO THE PITCH-BLACK COUNTRY NIGHT. Certain parts of town had streetlights, but not in this neck of the woods. I thought about how Christian would disapprove of my being out here alone, and to tell the truth it was spooky. Then someone said my name, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.
“Robert, what the heck?” I said, peering into the shadows to see his weaselly face. Weaselly wasn’t a nice word to describe him, but it was accurate. Robert was an eleven-year-old trapped in a body that was scrawny by nine-year-old standards, and what he lacked in size, he made up for in hyperness. I felt bad for him, because it wasn’t his fault. His mama drank too much when he was in the womb. These things happened.
But there he was, scrawny and hyper, and just because he wasn’t to blame didn’t mean people forgave him for it.
“Ha-ha, got you good,” Robert said, practically dancing around me. “I saw your bike, and I sat here and waited. Passed the time by throwing pinecones at that there tree”—he jerked his chin at a dark blob among other dark blobs—“and I woulda