I grinned and clapped his shoulder as we headed to class. If he and I are an odd couple, his father, the priest, and I are even more so. He’d talked me into playing chess with him since I was fifteen or thereabouts, which he claims helps calm the mind. I know Lance would never share a secret, not mine anyway, but I sometimes catch his dad looking at me with the same look the son wears as if he’s trying to peer into my soul. No doubt he’s trying to save it.
“Who can tell me the square root of seventy?” I know this fuck is gonna call on me. It didn’t matter how many hands went up; he always gravitated towards me. He was hoping to catch me slipping. He has some kind of hard-on for my dad because they’d gone to school together or some shit, and who knows what the fuck Pop had done to him back then to make him rabid. I always come out on top in these little dick-measuring games of his. That doesn’t stop him from trying, though.
“Russo!”
Asshole, “eight-point three-six-six... you want me to go on?” He looked down at his notes, and his lips puckered like a petrified asshole. I sat through the rest of his class without incident, and soon it was lunchtime. I only hung around the cafeteria long enough to make sure my sisters were settled down with their little squad of tittering females before leaving.
This is the only real-time I have to think and plot. At home, there’s always some shit going on, too much noise, too much traffic. But I’d found a place here where I could hide myself away from the masses for an hour each day and have been doing it for the last two years, give or take. I’m sure others knew I went there, but no one dared follow thus far.
I have a bit of a reputation. Not for being a bullying, blustering asshole like some, far from it. It’s because the few times I lost my shit in the past, each event was a spectacular cluster fuck of chaos and mayhem. I don’t talk much, but when I do, it’s usually with my hands, though you have to push really hard to get me there, which I guess is what makes my explosions seem more volatile. Most of the time, it’s been in defense of Lancelot.
So, others have learned to stay out of my way unless some brave soul gets it into his or her head to approach me with their shit. The females I’m gentler with unless they become pushy, then all bets are off. The boys don’t even try. I have a friend group of one, and everybody knows that shit, so they’ve given up trying. Had I not known Lancelot before learning the truth of what I am, he and I may not be the brothers we are today either. No point in forming attachments that won't last. I'm not long for this world.
That’s why today, I was shocked to see someone else in my space. It was a group of girls, in fact, who didn’t seem to notice my approach. But it wasn’t just their presence that brought me up short and had me stopping in my tracks. It’s the way the sun seemed to bounce off of this one girl’s hair. The bright rays brought out the hints of blue and red in the jet-black tresses that flowed down her back and shoulders.
I couldn’t see her face as her head was down, but it captivated me, her hair that shone like the pelt of an exotic animal. So mesmerized was I that I didn’t quite grasp the scene I’d walked up on. She stood in the midst of a circle of girls, a folder clutched tightly to her chest and her head almost meeting it there. She looked small, defenseless, and for a split second, my mind went to my mother.
I felt a weird clutch in my chest, and emotions I have no name for and no experience with engulfed me. Once my mind cleared, the words they were saying became clear. They were jeering at her, calling her names.
The ringleader was getting way too close, and then she pushed her. I know rage; I’ve felt it enough and spent enough time fighting it back, taming it into something more easily contained.
But until that moment, I’d never felt it quite like that, and never for anyone other than my blood. This was worst. “What the fuck are you doing?” I moved into the half-circle, standing between her and them. They stepped back either from the anger in my tone or the murderous look on my face.
I recognized some of them, they were a year behind me in school if I remember correctly, and more than a few of them had thrown themselves in my path a time or two. I looked from the main instigator back to the bent head and did something I’ve never done before. “Come!” I held out my hand to her, and she raised her eyes to mine. “Damn!”