Keeping Promise Rock (5 page)

Crick frowned, processing. “I don’t understand.” Jon sat up and looked at him from under a blond waterfall of hair and then shook his head. “If you think he stayed here to make sure his little brother didn’t get in trouble, you’ve sadly underestimated how much that guy loves you, Crick. That’s all I’m saying.” It was a good line for silence, and Crick obliged, but as the two of them watched the sun set—and watched Deacon and Amy have an Keeping Promise Rock

unbearably private moment from as much distance as they could give—he mulled it over.

He kept mulling it over, too, for the following months, because it gave him a sort of hope that he he’d never dared have before. Hope was an awful thing, Crick had learned. The Christmas when he was ten, he’d hoped that he’d actually get something besides jeans from his mother, or that step-Bob would have even a word of thanks for him for getting Benny, Missy, and Crystal ready in the mornings and feeding them dinner most evenings. He had been sorely disappointed in that hope—but Deacon and Parish had given him a new saddle and a cowboy hat that fit. He’d been stunned and warm all over and had told them so. He learned that hope could betray you—but if you had no hope, life could actually surprise you in the best of ways.

He hated the hope. It made him fear the betrayal.

But the spring of his freshman year in school, he got another reason to hope, and he still didn’t know what to do with it.

Oddly enough, it started with a mild concussion—the result of getting his head beat into the pavement by three other guys—and a visit from the local EMTs.

It would figure that Deacon had actually started riding in the ambulance that month.

“Keeerrrristtt, Crick!” Deacon growled while shining a light in his eyes. One of the other EMTs gave Crick some ice for his head and a cloth for the blood coming from his broken nose and then patted Deacon crisply on the shoulder and went outside to treat the three other guys. (Two broken wrists and some lost teeth—no one could say Crick was easy.)

“What in the hell made you do it?”

Crick avoided Deacon’s all-too-perceptive green eyes. “Dey starbed ib!” he protested, and Deacon lowered the hand with the light and held up both hands in the same way he’d gentle a horse.

“Do you want me to set it now? Or do you want to go home with a broken nose and no way to breathe?”

Crick shrugged, trying to hide the fear. Yes, it had hurt like a rabid motherfucker, why-do-you-ask, and now he was going to feel it again?

Deacon placed his hands on either side of Crick’s nose and made a sudden thrusting movement with his thumbs.

Crick’s body jerked, and he whimpered. Deacon pulled Crick’s head in against his chest soothingly. “Yeah—I know—hurts like a fucking jackhammer, doesn’t it?”

Crick nodded and tried to think past the aching explosion on the front of his head.

“Now give it a minute,” Deacon murmured, pushing him back a little to check out his eyes again. Crick took a deep breath, and Deacon smiled as soon as his eyes widened. Yup—hurt like a motherfucker, but the results were worth it.

“Thanks, Deacon.”

Deacon grinned in that tight, knife-edged way and ruffled Crick’s hair, prompting another groan as his hand hit some of the bumps and abrasions on Crick’s scalp. The grin went away, and some of his bravado went away with it. He looked really worried, and Crick felt like hell for putting that on him.

“You gonna tell me why?” Deacon asked after a moment.

Crick shrugged again and considered lying and then remembered that this was Deacon. They were inside the ambulance, and the fluorescent light washed out the faint freckles under Deacon’s eyes and along his nose, but Crick knew they were there anyway. He’d let his hair grow long on top but still cut it short at the sides, and the result was… appealing.

Crick brought his attention back to what he was saying, but it hadn’t gotten any easier to tell.

“They… they called names.” Well, coming from a high school student, it sounded a little stupid, now didn’t it?

But Deacon didn’t treat him like he was stupid. He laid that firm hand on Crick’s shoulder and asked, “What names?” as though he knew the answer.

Crick looked away.

“C’mon, Crick—it’s only got power over you if you give it power.

Tell me what they called you.”

“It wasn’t just me,” Crick mumbled, not meeting his eyes.

“Who else?” Deacon asked softly—but he knew.

“It was us… you, me, Jon….”

“What’d they call us?”

Crick looked away and muttered, and Deacon shook him a little. He met Deacon’s eyes and said, “Faggot.”

Deacon nodded. “And what does that mean?”

Crick blushed. “You know what it means!”

Deacon raised an eyebrow, and Crick blushed some more. “Say it, man—you’ve got to say it.”

“It’s someone who likes guys… you know….” Crick was starting to think a broken nose and a nuclear headache weren’t so bad compared to this particular conversation, but Deacon, who had always expected the truth from him, was looking at him as though he hadn’t ponied up yet.

“To… um… sleep with.” Okay. There. All done.

Then Deacon threw him a sucker punch. “And is that wrong?” Crick flinched. “Christ yes! It ain’t natural… that’s what the…

um….” Oh, and now wasn’t
this
a little bit of hypocrisy he hadn’t counted on? “Um… the church says. And, um… those guys.”

“The ones trying to dent the pavement with your head in three-to-one odds? And who lost? Those guys?”

A tiny grin fought its way out of Crick’s grasp. “Did they really lose?”

Deacon shrugged. “They won’t be forgetting you—but now they’ll have casts, so you won’t want to provoke them into hitting you either.” Crick’s grin got all the way free, and Deacon rolled his eyes.

“Down, boy. Carrick, the first day you wandered into The Pulpit,

you were cutting church. The one time you’re going to listen to what they have to say in church and it’s something like
this?
”

Crick’s grin disappeared. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Crick,” Deacon’s voice dropped to
totally and completely serious
,

“I really loved Amy—does it make you care any less about what happens to me?”

Crick’s eyes shifted. Deacon had mourned her—that had been the truth. He’d lost weight, grown pensive, and more than once, Crick had seen him reaching for the phone to remember that she wasn’t at her parents’ house anymore. “No.”

“Would you care any less about what happened to me if I was breaking my heart over Jon instead?”

Crick looked up, a little panicked. Jon would be a threat. It sounded stupid—and it was—but it felt smart, and he couldn’t change that. “Hell no!” he responded to disguise the fact that he was freaking out about it.

Deacon’s mild expression told him that he knew
exactly
what Crick was thinking, but he also smiled, his eyebrows arching companionably over his green eyes.

“Do you think I care any less about you because you ‘like guys’?” Deacon finally asked, and Crick thanked God that Deacon had led him to the answer, because it was a question he’d been afraid to ask. It took a minute for Crick to speak, though, because Deacon’s hard, capable hand was on Crick’s thigh, and Crick had to remember how to breathe around his bleeding nose before he could answer.

“No,” he gasped, conscious of the stillness and intimacy of the ambulance.

Deacon’s grin cut through the tightness around Crick’s chest.

“Damned straight.” He leaned back then and made some notations on his clipboard and started to ask Crick if there was someone at home who could make sure he didn’t sleep until morning and make sure he took it easy.

Crick shook his head. “No—Benny and Missy get home at three, and I’m already late to pick up Crystal. I was supposed to mow the lawn today….” His vision doubled at the thought of that, and Deacon nodded.

“No worries—we’ll get your sisters and take ’em home. Patrick or Dad can watch you, and that way you can nap a little tonight, because they’ll be there to wake you up.”

The relief at not having to go to the tiny little house with the brown lawn and baby-shit yellow paint job made Crick dizzy. Since the marijuana incident in the sixth grade, he’d taken to spending Saturday nights in Parish’s spare room, and, in the silence of his own mind, calling that place home.

He was just about to say “thanks” when the ambulance door opened and Principal Arreguin was there, squat face all stern and glasses steaming with authority.

“We need the boy’s parents to come in before he leaves,” the man said, giving Crick a scathing glance. Crick was too dizzy to even roll his eyes, and his body was starting to feel like he’d used a street-sweeper to scratch his back.

“I’m on his emergency card,” Deacon said with deceptive mildness.

He and Parish had been filling those out since the weed incident. As Parish said, Crick couldn’t work the horses when his back was too cut up with a belt for him to move.

Mr. Arrequin narrowed his little gray eyes. “I was not aware of that,” he said stiffly. “Well, we need to talk about his suspension.” Few things really surprised Deacon—but this one did. “A kid is jumped by three other kids, and
he
is the one getting suspended?” He looked sternly at Crick, as though to ask if there were anything he should know about. Crick shrugged, wondering if it was the head injury but pretty sure it wasn’t his fault.

“They pushed me,” he said muzzily, trying to look at the principals… both of them. “I was cutting through hallway outside the gym to get to algebra, and they came out of the locker rooms and called me a”—he flushed and looked at Deacon for moral support—“a faggot, and asked me where my faggoty friends were, and then they”—he swallowed, because he hadn’t said this part—“called Deacon a horsefucker and knocked me into the wall.”

Deacon’s jaw tightened. “And that’s when you hit them?” he prompted.

Crick shook his head. “There were three of them, Deacon—that’s when I tried to get to the quad where there were witnesses. Eddy”—he jerked his chin towards the outside, where the kid with the wide, low forehead and dark buzzcut was probably laughing at his cast and trying to break it over Tomas and Brandon’s thick heads—“he tackled me. I managed to get up, but….” He shrugged, pretending he didn’t remember the taste of blood in his mouth from where he’d bit his cheek and the jarring of the concrete walkway under his chest and chin. He’d had a terrible moment of panic—there were three of them, and they could kill him. He could have died there, in that nasty little hallway that smelled like gym socks and wet metal.

“I was just defending myself,” he finished weakly, and Deacon turned towards the principal with a
Well?
expression on his face.

Arreguin shook his head. “You provoke them,” he said sharply.

“You do—you know that.”

Deacon’s eyebrows hit his hairline. “He provoked getting jumped three to one?”

Arreguin scowled. “Look at him—the way he dresses, his hair, the people at his lunch table….”

Deacon looked at Crick with a surprised blink, and Crick hoped his head would explode and he’d die. There were cliques, and cliques had looks. Crick’s jeans had become pipe-cleaner skinny, and his T-shirt was tight, baby blue, and cleared his navel. When he wasn’t on the ranch, he wore loafers—no socks—and his hair was cut in long bangs. It was the

“Alt rock” clique on the outside—Crick and his friends knew what they talked about in their tight knot at lunch.

But Deacon’s expression didn’t grow dark with disgust, and his brow didn’t furrow with disapproval. Instead, he turned a fierce, angry face to his formal principal—the man who had waxed lyrical about what a fine, upstanding American boy Deacon was not eight months before.

“Sir, I do believe you’re talking discrimination. I’d hate to think you discriminate against students because of their hair or their clothes, wouldn’t you?”

Not even Arrogant Arreguin could mistake the threat in that tone.

Arreguin blinked and backed out of the back of the ambulance a little. “He’s trying very hard not to fit in,” he said stiffly.

“Last I heard, ‘fitting in’ wasn’t a state requirement,” Deacon replied, his jaw hard. “And getting beaten for ‘not fitting in’ was considered a hate crime, with required prison time—am I right?” Crick made a sound of surprise, and his principal flushed. Deacon looked over his shoulder and rolled his eyes at Crick. “You have to learn more on this job than how to stock band-aids,” he said with a little smirk, and then he turned back to the man who had the potential to make Crick’s life a living hell for the next three years, three months, and two days.

“So, sir—can I take Crick to where he can get some rest and some medical attention, or am I going to have to call the sheriff and report a hate crime?”

Arreguin glowered at the both of them with terrible distaste. “I never would have thought you were the type to ‘not fit in’ yourself, Mr.

Winters,” he said snidely, and Deacon gave one of those fierce, tight grins—this one with no humor in it at all.

“Being a ‘type’ is a kid’s game, sir—I thought that little ceremony last year was about how we get past all that. Now if you’ll excuse me, Crick’s about to toss his breakfast.”

Which Crick did, as Deacon wrapped an arm around his shoulder and held the emesis bucket for his puke.

By the next evening, Crick’s dizziness had (mostly) cleared—but his seething anger had not.

His sisters had spent the first evening with them, and Crick had enjoyed watching Parish deal with the three rambunctious little girls. It was a lot funnier when their chaperone/entertainer/chef/bath attendant was someone other than Crick.

When the three of them had finally been put down in Deacon’s bed—he would be on shift ’til the wee hours of the morning—Parish woke him up and sat him up, then flopped next to him on the couch. They watched television for a bit so Parish could see that Crick wasn’t going to pass out, and then he carefully set the alarm clock on the end table for the next hour.

“Don’t know how you do it, son—that’s a whole lot of busy for a boy with as much on his plate as you got.” Crick blinked. “I just… I don’t know… I have to. They needed me.” Parish laughed and slapped Crick’s thigh—gently; Crick looked like hell. “Well, they adore you, you know? All night it was ‘Crick’s hurt!’ and