“Lindsay texted me to say you weren’t feeling well. So I was going to see if you were okay. Well, I guess you’re real okay. Don’t let me interrupt.”
“Stop it,” Rhiannon says.
“Stop what, you bitch?” he asks. He’s on us now.
“Justin,” I say.
He turns to me. “You’re not even allowed to speak, bro.”
I’m about to say something else, but he’s already punching me. His fist crashes right against the bridge of my nose. I’m knocked down to the ground.
Rhiannon screams and moves to help me up. Justin pulls at her arm.
“I always knew you were a slut,” Justin says.
“Stop it!” Rhiannon cries out.
Justin lets go of her and comes back over to me. He starts kicking my body.
“This your new boyfriend?” Justin yells. “You love him?”
“I don’t love him!” Rhiannon yells back. “But I don’t love you, either.”
The next time he kicks, I grab his leg and pull him down. He crashes onto the gym floor. I think this will stop him, but he jabs his boot out again and gets me in the chin. My teeth rattle.
At this point, some whistle must blow outside, because within thirty seconds, girls from softball are streaming into the gym. When they see the carnage, they cluck and gasp. One girl runs over to Rhiannon to make sure she’s okay.
Justin gets up and kicks me again, just so everyone can see it. It barely grazes me, and I use the momentum of dodging the blow to stand up. I wa
nt to hit him, hurt him, but I honestly don’t know how.
Plus, I have to leave. It will be easy enough to discover that I don’t go to this school. And even though I’m the clear loser of this fight, they can still call the police on me for trespassing and brawling in the first place.
I teeter over to Rhiannon. Her friend makes a move to shield her from me, but Rhiannon gestures her off.
“I have to go,” I tell her. “Meet me at the Starbucks where we first met. When you can.”
I feel a hand on my shoulder. Justin, pulling me around. He won’t hit me with my back turned.
I know I should face him. Hit him if I can. But instead I duck out of his grip and run. He’s not going to follow me. He will bask instead in the victory of seeing me run.
It is not my intention to leave Rhiannon crying, but that is exactly what I do.
I make my way back to the bus stop, then use a nearby phone booth to call a cab. Nearly fifty dollars later, I am at the Starbucks. If before I was a big, hairy, sweaty guy in a Metallica T-shirt, now I am a big, hairy, sweaty guy in a Metallica T-shirt who’s beaten, bruised, and bleeding. I order a venti black coffee and leave twenty dollars in the tip jar. Now they’ll let me stay as long as I want, no matter how scary I look.
I clean myself up some in the bathroom. Then I sit down and wait.
And wait.
And wait.
She doesn’t arrive until a little after six.
She doesn’t apologize. She doesn’t explain why it took her so long. She doesn’t even come to my table right away. She stops at the counter and gets a coffee first.
“I really need this,” she says as she sits down. I know she’s talking about the coffee, not anything else.
I’m on my fourth coffee and second scone.