Dying for Rain (The Rain Trilog - BB Easton Page 0,77

backpack behind me with my foot.

The skinhead immediately grasped the metal latch on the locker beside mine and gave the lower left corner of the door a swift kick, causing the fucker to pop right open, no code necessary. I shuddered involuntarily as my mind conjured images of that same boot landing square in the back of a scared little skater boy just a few hours earlier.

Afraid that he could smell my fear, I quickly hid my face behind the metal door of my own locker, busying myself by arranging my books and notebooks by size, color, the Dewey fucking decimal system, anything. Then, something occurred to me. Before I knew it, my stupid mouth was moving.

“Shouldn’t you be suspended?”

I felt my face blush crimson as the blond with the buzzcut slammed his locker shut and asked, point blank, “Why?”

Was he teasing me? We both knew what the fuck he had done.

“That, that fight. Today. In the church parking lot,” I said into my locker.

Thinking about that … attack had my blood pumping into my extremities and my mind screaming for me to run. I turned and went back to my organizing, hoping to conceal the terror and embarrassment that I was sure my big, dumb doe eyes were doing a shit job of concealing. My face always snitched on me, broadcasting my every thought. My every feeling.

My thin metal makeshift shield vibrated as he spoke, “I didn’t get suspended for the same reason you’re not sitting in detention right now for smoking. That shit happened off-campus.”

“Is he okay?”

God! My fucking mouth! Filter, BB. Filter!

“Who? That little pussy wipe from the parking lot? He’ll be pissing blood for a week, but he’ll live.”

Slowly, the door I had been cowering behind began to close. Moving out of the way so that the metal wouldn’t graze my face, I reluctantly turned toward the boy with the cadaverous eyes, who was deliberately pushing my locker shut. Once the door was firmly closed and I had nowhere left to hide, Zombie Eyes leaned toward me and reached around my body with his left hand. I squeezed my eyelids shut and braced myself for something violent and potentially bloody to happen.

With his voice lowered so that only I could hear, he said, “If you hit a fucker in the kidney hard enough … right here”—I suddenly felt a thick finger jam directly into one side of my lower back—“he’ll piss blood.”

My eyes shot open, and I immediately wished that they hadn’t. That gray-blue gaze was way too close, too intense. His finger lingered way too long, and there was a crackle in the air that had my senses on high alert.

Danger! Danger! Skinhead Boy is fucking touching you! He could kill you with that finger, BB! Kill you and eat your brains!

But those zombie eyes wouldn’t let me move. Up close, they were so clear. Like two crystal balls that I wished would give me a glimpse into this twisted creature’s soul. In my curious state of hypnosis, again, words tumbled unbidden from my mouth.

“Why’d you hit him?”

After a pause long enough to let me hope that maybe I hadn’t actually asked my question out loud, he answered, “Because he called your little boyfriend a faggot.”

About three million follow-up questions slammed into my throat at once:

A) Why would a Neo-Nazi looking motherfucker beat someone up that he doesn’t even know for calling some other dude he doesn’t know a faggot?

B) Shouldn’t he have given the kid a high five instead?

C) Why would he call Lance my boyfriend? Lance is NOT my boyfriend. I mean, I want him to be my boyfriend. Jesus, I want to ride him like a pony everywhere I go and have all of his babies, but he’s not my boyfriend.

D) Why would anyone think Lance was gay in the first place? He’s sooo dreamy.

But the only thing I could squeak out was, “You were defending Lance?”

I never knew an eye roll could be so terrifying. Shit. I’d done it. I’d finally pissed him off with all my stupid fucking questions. Why did I always have to talk to the scary ones?

My mom still loved to tell people about the time I’d picked up my Happy Meal and sat down with a group of leather-clad bikers at McDonald’s when I was three just so that I could ask the gnarliest-looking one why he had a ponytail. According to her, my exact words were, “Only girls are ’apposed to have ponytails.”

My curiosity was