to this kind of attention.
She is, of course, immediately suspicious.
“Oh, God,” she says. “What?”
Coyne leaps up, beaming. He starts to move in for a hug but she recoils as if he’s coming at her with a pair of gory stumps instead of hands. He retreats, but the beaming doesn’t quit.
“It’s the Get-Shit-Done Girl,” Coyne says. An eager, excited little clap follows.
“The who?” she asks, incredulous. “The hell does that mean?”
“I told him what you did for me,” Shane says.
“And we all know what you did before that,” Coyne says, laying it out there bold and bright as day, putting it on the table the way someone might drop a microphone and walk off stage. As if she doesn’t understand, he goes above and beyond to clarify: “The thing you did to your step-father.”
Ugh. Was that the story that was going around? Step-father? Jesus.
“It wasn’t my—“ she begins but then says, “You know what, fuck this. I gotta go.”
But before she again turns to escape this situation, Shane is exhorting her to stay and begging Coyne to lift his shirt and “show her, show her what you showed me.”
Coyne takes a deep breath and turns around. He undoes his black-knit sweater vest, and then begins to unbutton his shirt which is an orange so bright she wonders if he’s going hunting later in some kind of gay nature preserve.
When he lets the shirt fall, her breath catches.
Dotting up from his lower back and trailing up his spine are a series of small circular wounds. Burns, she thinks. Each the size of a pencil eraser. They’re still crusty and enflamed. One weeps clear fluid as the scab cracks. The burns go up to the base of his neck—around the point of his collar—but not beyond. Like the attacker didn’t want to show off his handiwork. Like it was a message just for Chris Coyne.
“Cigarette burns,” Coyne says over his shoulder. “They’re particularly, ahh, pesky given the ingredients list in your average cigarette. They don’t heal easy. Did you know in England they call cigarettes fags? Here I am: a fag burned by a fag. Go figure, huh?” His words are glib, brave, but his tone doesn’t match: his voice shakes a little. He’s trying to cork that bottle, keep the fear from coming out.
It’s a familiar feeling.
He puts his shirt back on. “They went further. They took my pants off. Shoved a bunch of hot peppers up my butt, spackled it over with peanut butter so it held the peppers up in there. Sounds funny, I know, and if it didn’t happen to me I’d laugh, too.”
Atlanta’s not laughing. She says as much. In fact, she’s pretty horrified.
“I pooped blood for a week,” Coyne says, matter-of-factly. Now she sees it: the tears at the edges of his eyes, glistening, filling up, but never falling down his cheeks. He blinks them back, and massages underneath his eyes for some reason. “When they did it, they said… they said that this will teach me that it’s an exit, not an entrance. Ironic given that they were sticking things in my ass, but I don’t suspect that any of these fine upstanding citizens are in line for the Nobel this year.”
“There was more than one, then,” she says.
He nods. “Four of them.”
“And you know who they are?”
Another nod.
“And what is it you want me to do about this, exactly? Against four pissed off gay basher bullies?”
“You took down three bullies the other day.”
Shane grins. “She did. You did. It was pretty sweet.”
“You want me to scare them? Hurt them? Get revenge? That what this is about? Revenge?”
“Maybe,” Chris says. “Yes. I don’t know. What I really want is I want them not to do it again. They told me they would. If I didn’t ‘stop being gay.’ As if that was an option I could select on the menu.” He stares off at a distant point. “Even if they don’t hurt me again they’ll hurt somebody.”
She’s chewing on her lip. This is a bad idea. No good can come of this. Is this who she is? Is this who people think she is, now, or who she should be? Still. Coyne’s face is back to his untouchable, unfazed façade—any sign of tears are long gone. But his hands are still shaking.
Her hands shake too, sometimes.
“I’ll give you five hundred dollars,” he says, finally.
Wow.
She lets that pickle.
She owes Guy $100. The other four would be nice to have.
“Fine. Meet me at my house. Today. After school.”
*