A half-full soda can flew past my face, sticky droplets landing in my hair. They didn’t let up, not even when I was off school grounds, running down the sidewalk towards Cross. He was leaning against his bike, smoking a cigarette, looking bored. Until he saw me running. Until he saw the look on my face. Until he saw the kids who were chasing me, and heard what they were saying.
Those kids were rich, their lives were clean, and they were as cruel as could be. They never let me forget that I wasn’t like them, that I’d never be like them. That my blood was a different color than theirs. They were high-class, and I was trash.
“Skank!”
“Dick-lover!”
“Ugly-ass, slutty-ass, grease ball!”
“Biker trash!”
Yeah, they were cruel. But they were also stupid. Because they should have realized the big guy with the bike wasn’t just standing around for kicks. It didn’t matter that Cross was twice their size. He stubbed his cigarette out on the ground and walked towards me, his hands in fists, his face steady as a rock, eyes flashing like blue fire.
I spun around as he passed me, and would have burst out laughing it wasn’t for the fact that I needed to catch my breath. The way those kids stopped mid-stride, like cartoon characters realizing they’d run straight off the cliff. The way their faces contorted, from awful glee to abject horror. The girls – two of them – actually started screeching, and ran for the trees. The boys, though, they were still trying to act tough. After all, there were three of them, and only one of him.
You could almost pity them.
The minute Cross was in reaching distance, he had two of their heads in his massive hands, knocking them together, their bodies going shock still before giving out, one crumpling straight on his knees and the other swaying backwards onto his ass. The third boy was catching flies in his mouth, too dumb to run before Cross could punch him in the gut.
“Fuckin’ rich-ass, snotty-ass, weak-ass little bitches,” Cross spat. He could have destroyed them. He could have kept going until they were jelly on the sidewalk. But he didn’t need to, and he had too much pride to waste his time and energy on them. Already, the boy who’d fallen on his ass was shedding tears, and the gut-punched boy was fetal on the pavement. Cross crouched down, still towering over them, his shadow spreading over them like a shroud.
“You little pissants know what’ll happen to you if I ever see you near Bex Carter again? If she ever tells me you were causing her trouble? If ever even feel like you have a nasty look on your face when you see her passing by?”
The boys didn’t respond.
“You’ll be pissin’ out of catheters and shittin’ into plastic bags,” he said, answering his own question. “And that’s just what I’ll do to the lower half of you. As for your faces…”
He reached forward, causing the boys to shrink and shrivel and try to crawl away. But he just grabbed one of their noses and pretended to steal it, the way you do with a baby.
“Well, you get the picture, right?”
“F-fu-fuck you, man!” One of the boys spat. I could see the way the other boys looked at him, like they wished he was dead for putting them all at risk. “I’m callin’ the c-c-cops!”
“Good,” Cross spat. “I got friends in juvie. And out of juvie too, if you catch my drift.”
“You’re gonna get kicked out of school, you fuckin’ biker trash,” the brave kid kept going, his friends two inches from killing him themselves.
“You gonna tell your mommy and daddy? Go ahead. Tell ‘em Cross DuFrane served you your own ass on a platter. And tell them he’ll do it again unless they teach you how to talk to a girl. You ought to consider yourselves lucky if Bex Carter graces you with a fuckin’ smile. Now get the fuck out of here, before I lose what patience I have left.”
The mouthy kid looked like he was about to say something else, but one of his friends clapped his mouth shut while the other yanked him up by his arm. They took off running. The girls, who’d been hiding behind the trees but watching the whole thing with their jaws open, watched them run, then looked at Cross again.
That was the best, to be honest. The way they looked at him, and then at me. With his blue eyes and his shaved head and his stubble and his leather jacket, he was a teenage dream, and he was throwing his arm around my shoulders, and pulling me onto the back of his bike. I gave them a triumphant smile as we blazed past them on the street.
We went straight to my favorite place in the whole wide world: Michelangelo’s. Home of the best eggplant parm this side of the Missouri river. Cross helped me off his bike and held the door open for me. One minute he was beating the shit out of bullies, and the next he was the perfect gentleman. Even paid for our take out with his fighting money.
“You know they’re just jealous little assholes,” he said while we waited.
“Jealous?” I crinkled my nose. “Of what? They have everything…”
“The girls are jealous they don’t look like you, and the boys are jealous that their girlfriends don’t look like you,” Cross said with a shrug, as matter-of-fact as a weatherman. I blushed hard enough to rival a fire hydrant.
“Shut up,” I said, pushing him on the shoulder. I’d known Cross since almost before I was born. We were best friends. If he thought I was pretty, it was just because we were friends, and friends always think the best of their friends.
“You don’t believe me?” Cross said, and suddenly grabbed my shoulders. He pulled me, squirming and giggling, towards a table, where he grabbed a napkin dispenser, using its reflective side as a mirror. “Look at yourself, girl. Those eyes? Shit. Those freckles? Double shit. Cute as fuck.”
“I have a pimple,” I murmured, drawing my eyes down, unable to hide my smile.
“Everyone has pimples,” Cross said, putting down the napkin dispenser and going back to the counter as our order number was called. “Even your pimples are cute. C’mon. We’ll be late for the movie.”
We snuck the eggplant parm and garlic knots into the movie theater on 3rd, an old dump that showed two-dollar movies on Wednesdays. They played old releases, so Cross and I were always living two years behind the rest of the world when it came to movies.
By the time we were halfway through The Others, I was too freaked out to think about my high school tormentors. We snuck into Legally Blonde afterwards and I pretended I didn’t love it. I suspect Cross was pretending, too. Cross got us popcorn and bought tickets to O Brother, Where Art Thou; we didn’t bother pretending not to love that one.
By the time we got to the late night showing of Donnie Darko, my eyes were too tired to stay open, my head too heavy to keep lifted. I fell asleep on his shoulder, woke up with his arm wrapped around my shoulder. I pretended I was asleep a little while longer, just so I could keep feeling his arm around me.
By the time I woke up, the memory fresh in my mind, playing like one of those movies we’d watched in the darkness of the theater, we were only three hours from Cutter, and I was sicker than ever. Cross always stood up for me. H
e’d always been my savior.
And here I was, on my way to be his Judas.
Cross
I spotted my pops smoking a cigarette outside the clubhouse, a renovated two-story shotgun that had been in the Dead Crusader's possession since the club's inception sixty years ago. I was headed to the bar across the street, stopping by the club first to check in with Blade. There was plenty of free drink in the clubhouse, but a lot of our guys liked to take it across the street, where the owner was friendly to us, just for a change of scenery once in a while. I'd heard through the grapevine that tonight would be one of those nights.
When my pops opened his mouth to smile at me, smoke drifted out from his missing tooth, a casualty of some beat down or another. Old man had taken his share of hits in his time as Sergeant-at-Arms. Sometimes, it felt like lookin' at him was like lookin' at my own future. But I could hope to preserve my pretty face a little better.
I'd sure done well protecting it that day. That guy who stiffed us on the hard-core movies we sold him? He learned not to ever – ever – try that shit again. He did a whole lot of bitching and moaning about how it was just a mistake, but it wasn't my job to play judge and jury. When I was working for the club, I was just a pair of fists.
But now that my job was done, I wondered for the millionth time why we still dealt in physical goods when it came to the porn. Sure, our shit was hard-core. Real hard-core. Almost too damn hard-core for me, sometimes. Girls with snot runnin' down their noses, mixin' with blood, cryin'. Make-up done to look like they'd been beaten damn good beforehand.
We treated those girls well, by the way. It was all an act, and they were freaks, all of 'em, loved it. Anyway, it wasn't my taste, but I knew there was a market for it online. And we wouldn't have to deal with bullshit middlemen. We could set up our own website, get our own traffic going. There was the dark web, if we wanted to fly under the radar. I'd read all about it. But it wasn't my job to make those kinds of suggestions. Not yet, anyway. I was still too green. But someday...