Blood Brothers (9 page)

Damn. Michael thought he was going to explode
right then and there. As quickly as it had gone, her mouth was back
on him, attacking him.

And again, she pulled away. How could he not
go mad? This teasing, this awful, delicious teasing?

Trista brought her hand up, something small
held between the pad of her thumb and her index finger. Something
incredibly small, like a light-colored mini M&M. She offered it
to him; he found his lips opening automatically. She placed the
small thing—a tablet, maybe?—on his tongue.

A twist of uncertainty began to churn. There
was no real way to know what he was taking. Speed, ecstasy,
anything. He could cheek it, hold it, and spit it out at another
time. But what Trista did next sealed the deal.

She leaned into him, her exotic aura taking
his body up another degree. His internal heat built. Now, on the
night air he caught a vague scent of cinnamon. He could only
imagine how this woman would taste. He yearned to know. “If you’re
ready for the ride of your life…swallow it.”

If Trista had been a Bible thumping
televangelist Michael would have completely emptied his bank
account on a nine hundred number to please her and reserve his
place in her heaven. He swallowed the offered substance, no longer
caring about the composition or contents.

“Very, very good. Now…let’s…go…make some
love.”

When Trista broke their connection this time,
the warm velvet of her hand pressed against his cheek.

When Michael found his voice, the sound of it
was strange, alien. “I thought you’d never ask.”

The room smelled of Elmer’s Glue and crayons,
of chalk and pencil shavings. Michael sat in the third row from the
front, about midway between the door on one side and the wall with
the long, narrow windows on the other. Schools, or at least this
school, had odd windows, Michael often thought. Not like home.
These windows were large, sure, clean and sparkling. But that
wasn’t the thing. He’d seen his mother spruce up their place, even
dousing the windows with warm soapy water. They sparkled just the
same. These, however, were different and he didn’t know if he liked
it.

The windows of the Cole trailer were much
smaller, almost square, and instead of one solid piece of glass,
there were four even-sized louvers that you opened and closed with
a small metal crank. You could crank them suckers all the way out
and there would be no possible way to slip through the four
openings. Knowing that the window in his bedroom wouldn’t slide up
all the way, like the ones at school, to let anyone get in or out,
made Michael feel pretty safe. He, of course, didn’t have the words
to articulate the sense of security against an unlikely threat, but
it existed just the same.

Mrs. Wegmann stood at the front of the class,
writing in her crazy, loopy script on the blackboard with a small,
almost invisible, sliver of chalk. Mrs. Wegmann was nice enough,
but her face looked too much like a weasel to call her pretty. And
just who would call a teacher pretty, anyway? Michael wondered.
Mrs. Wegmann was surely the youngest teacher at the school, but
like anyone could tell you, young doesn’t mean squat when a school
is full of kids. To Michael and probably everyone else, Mrs.
Wegmann might as well be as old as old Mr. Oaks, way up in the high
school. They called him a janitor, but Michael thought that old man
Oaks just slinked through the halls of the school waiting for a kid
to be found alone and helpless, and then he would drag him away,
with his scrawny old hand over his mouth, and take the kid to his
secret hideout somewhere in the school. In this hideout—and this
was common knowledge—old man Oaks would get his jollies by covering
the poor young boy or girl in glue and, while it dries he gives
Indian sunburns to different parts of the body with a big handheld
eraser—probably in places that weren’t to be discussed in polite
company—or so his grandmother was fond of saying.

Mrs. Wegmann was discussing why it was
important for the class to learn cursive writing. Michael didn’t
understand why, in the two years of school, he’d had to learn how
to write one way and now all that had to go out the window and a
whole new way of doing things had to be accepted. It didn’t make a
lot of sense. But Michael was not one to rock the boat. As a matter
of fact, he didn’t have too much of an opinion either way. Michael
Cole had much more important things on his mind than mere windows
and the style of making letters.

Kelly Monroe.

Oh, she was more than just pretty. More than
beautiful, even. She was gorgeous. Kelly wore her light brown hair,
hair that sparkled under the bright classroom lights, long and in a
ponytail. She had a cute little nose, delicate ears, and eyes that
always shone with kindness, and just a little bit of something
else. It was that something else that made Michael stumble when he
thought about Kelly, made his breath come just a little bit faster,
made his heart beat against the inside of his chest like a wild
animal beating against the bars of its cage. And she smelled nice,
too.

She sat right next to Mike, just one row over
to the right. If he reached out he could touch her. He’d thought
about it plenty. Time and time again, he’d lost himself in a
daydream as the teacher talked on and on about one thing or the
next. In reality, he would never do it. But in his mind, his true
playground, he reached over and took her hand. She’d drop her
pencil (Kelly was left-handed and Michael thought that was about
the coolest thing) and she would grip his hand tighter and they
would stand up together and he would whoosh her away from this
place, away from the classroom, away from the school, away from
this town. And she would be so very, very happy. She would
appreciate him taking her away so much that she would never leave
him, and always be at his side and they would…kiss.

Yep, Michael just about loved Kelly
Monroe.

She dressed really nice, too. Under her denim
jacket she wore a bright yellow top with sparkling stones that
wrapped around the neck. Her jeans had the cool washed out look and
she wore a macramé belt around her tiny waist. A necklace of
different sized and different colored beads hung on her neck.

She was just like a fashion model.

And way out of his league. Yeah, he knew it.
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out. But hey, a
guy could dream, couldn’t he? Still, one never knew. Maybe Kelly
was the type of girl that could look past the outside and into the
inside. Michael could only hope. But when she smiled that sweet
smile and the whole world brightened up like a gigantic light
switch had just been flipped on, he knew she had to be a person who
looked at another person from a different point of view.

“Would anyone care to come to the board and
demonstrate the first five letters of the alphabet for me, in
cursive?” Mrs. Wegmann asked. Naturally, the air did not suddenly
fill with hands. Michael looked down at his notebook, the spiral
kind that when you tore a page out the little squiggles always
stayed behind to irritate you.

Mike’s face reddened and he began to feel a
bit queasy. It was a completely irrational reaction. With
twenty-seven other kids in the class, the chances of Mrs. Wegmann
calling on him were slim. While she occasionally did call on the
class, it was usually no more than once or twice a day. Michael had
never bothered to do the math, but the odds were good he was safe.
And so what if she did call on him? Would it be that bad? Surely
not. Of course, going all the way up to the blackboard and actually
using the chalk was way worse than simply giving an answer from the
safety of his desk. But he’d live, wouldn’t he?

“Mr. Cole, how about you?” Mrs. Wegmann’s
words were calm, nonthreatening. But she might as well have had
sentenced Michael to the guillotine. He continued staring down at
his desk. If he had the eye beams of Superman, a thin red laser
would have cut through not only his five subject notebook by now,
but the cheap chipboard of the public school desk as well. But if
Michael did have any such skill, walking to the front of class
wouldn’t be anywhere near as tough as it was right now.

“Mike, Michael Cole. I am speaking to you.”
Her tone rose just a tad, in the way that only grade school
teachers and nuns could ever successfully master.

Finally, he looked up. Really, did he really
have a choice in the matter? No, not really. In the world of
school, teachers were the predators and the students like Michael
were the prey.

“Ma’am?” By dragging this out, Michael hoped
that Mrs. Wegmann would get tired of harassing him and move on to
someone else, anyone else actually.

“Please come to the board.” Apparently, Mrs.
Wegmann was not about to release her grip on Michael so easily.

“Yes, ma’am.” Whether she was condemning him
to a fate worse than death or not, he still tried to be polite.
Perhaps his good conduct would win him some points, because he was
sure his penmanship wouldn’t.

Michael pushed himself away from the desk. At
his school the chair and desk were two separate pieces. The top of
the desk lifted up and your books and belongings were stored
inside. At the top of the desk was a little dip for your pencil and
a raised piece of wood just in case the pencil jumped out and tried
to roll away. When he was scooting his chair back from the desk,
the legs of the chair scraped hard across the floor and it sounded
like a very rude breaking of wind. The kids all around him laughed,
laughed like their lives depended on it, and Michael felt his knees
start to get weak.

Michael was just a bit overweight for his
age. Okay, to be truthful, he made at least two of most of the
other boys in the room. He was wearing a cut-off flannel shirt that
had been made a year or so before his birth, and the jeans he wore
were once dark blue—the normal color of jeans—but they had faded
and his mother, in all her motherly wisdom, had used dye to bring
back the color. The result looked more like an octopus had puked on
them than making them look anywhere near normal. And the pant legs
had been too long—he had to wear a much longer pant because even
the Huskies were too small for his considerable milk gut—and the
threads had frayed, making fringe around the bottom cuffs. His
boots, fancy cowboy boots that had been bought new for him, were
the best things he wore. His thighs chaffed together as he started
up the aisle.

He had to twist sideways to clear the last
row of desks and just as he tried to side-step Ricky Pume, a string
bean of a fellow who could throw a football like a pro, stuck out a
gangly long leg. Michael didn’t see it in time. As a matter of
fact, he didn’t see it at all. But his ankle felt it, just a moment
too late for him to stop himself from toppling over. Never a
graceful young man, it took an excruciatingly long second for to
complete the fall. Michael thrashed, as if waving his arms like
windmills could stop or even slow his fall. Captain Ahab would have
been extremely pleased with Mike’s whale-like movements as his body
yielded to the laws of physics and gravity took him down—hard.

If Michael had thought the class was laughing
before, he had been wrong. Now, they laughed, hee-hawed, guffawed,
cackled, snorted, and just about everything else you could think
of. Michael hit the floor face first, smacking his right cheek
against the cold, unforgiving tile. For just for a moment he laid
still, like a dead man waiting for the cops to draw his chalk
outline. Then, embarrassment spurred him to action.

Using his hands, he pushed his way up to his
knees. He reached out and put a hand on Mrs. Wegmann’s desk to get
his balance, and then tried to get on his feet. He did it, alright,
but with horrendous consequences.

There was a loud ripping noise.

The entire classroom fell into a tomb-like
silence—the vacuum of outer space couldn’t have been more
silent.

But it didn’t last for long.

The horrible ripping sound was the crotch of
Mike’s octopus puke, bluer-than-blue jeans giving way. Since he was
standing with his front to the board and his rear to the rest of
the room, the entire student body of Mrs. Wegmann’s third grade
class got more than a peek at his “Dukes of Hazzard” briefs.

Everyone howled. There was no laughing,
nothing as simple as that. Behind Mike’s back a deafening mix of
hooting and hollering erupted. Looking to Mrs. Wegmann for some
kind of sympathy or help, Michael saw nothing but amusement on her
face. That’s probably what hurt him the worst. Here was this
teacher, the leader of civilized society inside the walls of this
school, the lifeguard in the great churning sea of childhood, and
she was no better than the cretins in her custody. There was a fine
line between the keeper and the kept, between jailer and jailed,
but Mrs. Wegmann had crossed that line.

Michael turned, thinking—hoping—he would just
die. That his heart would stop and the world would fade to black.
He had no such luck.

Ricky Pume was pointing, jumping up and down
in his seat, tears streaming from his eyes, tears of pure joy at
his great accomplishment.

Jerry Tims, who he could see in the very back
row, one of his true tormentors since the very first day of school,
has having a laughing fit. His jowls were shaking in this moment of
sheer happiness at the sight of his pitiful victim in the hands of
pure cruelty.

There were others. Casey Black, a short funny
kid who was most times, the class clown, had, at least temporarily,
handed the torch over to Mike, or Ricky Pume, however you want to
see it. Cliff Watkins was screaming like a girl, and pointing the
fingers of both his hands to the sides of the room as if the Red
Sea had just parted right in front of him. The look on his face
showed that much astonishment.