“Is that when you started drinking? To get rid of the extra energy or whatever?”
“No,” I said shaking my head and scowling. “I might have a beer or something, but I never really drank after a fight.”
“When did you start to drink more?”
I looked over to her and knew this was exactly what she was waiting for, and she wasn’t going to let me out of it until I gave her some answers or fucking gagged her. I did want to gag her, but not quite in that way. I know – I’m fucking depraved.
“I didn’t start really drinking until after my last fight.”
“Did you lose?”
“I never lost,” I snorted. Losers didn’t walk away from a fight.
“Tell me about it,” she insisted.
“Finish eating and let me clean this shit up first,” I said with a sigh.
My mood fell a bit, and we ate in silence until neither of us could eat any more. I let us both drink
a little more water than usual since we had enough for now, and the proteins in the fish would take more water to digest. I thought about taking a few of the bigger pieces of flesh from the Black Jack and cutting them into strips so they could dry, but I doubted we would have enough water left to eat them after a day or so anyway, so it all got pitched over the side. Raine helped me clean off the top of the canopy where we cleaned and ate the fish, wash out the towels, and get the canopy back in its track so it would offer us sun protection come morning.
Once we were back under the canopy and settled in, I sighed and looked over to her. She was barely illuminated by the little solar powered battery light at the top of the raft canopy. The light would only last a couple more hours, and I wondered how long it would take me to tell her all of this.
Part of me was glad – looking forward to it, even. I’d never told anyone how it all happened. Most of me was about as scared as I had ever been because I didn’t want her to know all of this about me. I took a long, deep breath and decided to just get on with it.
“I’m going to tell you a bunch of shit that’s totally illegal,” I said to Raine, looking her in the eye. “On the off chance we live through this, you can never tell anyone about it. If you do, someone’s likely to track you down and kill you.”
“If you’d kill me for knowing, why tell me?”
“It wouldn’t be me tracking you down,” I said. “Understand?”
She nodded and agreed not to repeat anything I was about to tell her. I didn’t know if I could trust her or not, but I was going to tell her anyway.
“The first time I sent someone to the hospital from a fight was third grade.” I waited for her gasp and wasn’t disappointed. “Yeah, I was a dick then, too. He only needed a couple of stitches, but still – I started early. I had a lot of energy and a lot of tension, and I didn’t know what to do with it. I always had problems with my temper, and anytime I got pissed off about something, I usually talked with my fists. No one ever really tried to get me to channel all the energy and anger somewhere else until Landon, and I was nearly an adult, then. If I remember right, I already told you the deal with my real parents.”
“You said they abandoned you,” Raine confirmed.
“Yeah, I guess so. I was three when the owner of some hole in the wall bar in Chicago’s Southside found me crawling around underneath a pool table after the place was closed. He had never seen me before, so he called the cops and I became a ward of the state or whatever. At least, that’s what one of my foster mothers told me. I don’t remember that far back.”
“I was in eleven different foster homes from then until I was fourteen. That’s when the kid I put in the hospital needed a lot more than a couple stitches. I ended up in a juvenile detention facility for a few months. The foster parents said they didn’t want me back, so I got put in a group home.”
“I think I was in that one for about eighteen months. I beat the shit out of anyone who came anywhere near me, so most people didn’t. I had a pretty decent reputation when this girl was brought in. See, the group homes were really kind of a campus with a boys’ side, and a girls’ side, and a big building in the middle where everyone ate and had school classes and shit. The first day I remember seeing her, we were sitting down to eat, and some dick walked behind her and groped her. She went fucking ballistic, screaming and crying. They ended up having to sedate her to haul her out.”
“I didn’t think anything about it – that kind of shit happened all the time – but a couple days later she came up to me in the yard and sat down about three feet away from me. I just glared at her and asked her what the fuck she wanted because I’m a dick. That’s when she made me a deal that no hormonal teenage boy would ever pass up.”
I looked over to Raine and saw she was staring at me intently, just waiting for me to go on. I wondered what she would think of me when all of this was over. I wondered if I should even tell this part of the story.
“Those homes were…well, brutal. All kinds of nasty shit happened there because there were too many kids and not enough staff or money or whatever it was. People didn’t fuck with me because I’d cracked someone’s skull open the second day I was there, but there were plenty of opportunities for guys to…”
My mouth shut and I didn’t want to go on. I hadn’t thought about any of this shit in so long, and at the time, none of it had really even bothered me. The fact that it didn’t bother me then was really bothering me now.
“Go on,” Raine said softly.
“Shit,” I mumbled, then just spit it out. “Chicks got raped all the time because there was no one there to stop them. This chick wanted me to act as a…bodyguard, really. She didn’t like people touching her when she wasn’t expecting it and wanted me to stick around her and keep any of the other guys from fucking with her. She snuck over to the boys’ dorm every night and sucked me off for protection. It was totally fucked up, but she begged me to do it, so I did.”
“What was her name?”
I realized I was rocking back and forth and made myself stop. I could feel all the extra energy building up inside of me again, with nowhere to go. Maybe the decent meal, such as it was, gave me more energy than I was going to be able to handle in this little raft. That could be bad.