Hot Shot

shook it off. 'You shouldn't pay too much attention to what the other kids think.'

He could see that his response mystified her, and he remembered that she was a cheerleader-part of a group that was dedicated to conformity. His uneasiness grew.

'Don't you think they'll like me?' Anxiety had crumpled her brow.

'Of course they will.'

The American flag cracked in the morning breeze as, hand in hand, they walked into the school. They were in different homerooms, and he had promised to stay with her until second bell. As they walked down the main hallway, he was lulled by the joy of entering Clearbrook High with Candy Fuller at his side, and so he wasn't prepared when he rounded the corner by the sophomore lockers and the taunts began.

'Here's Mi-chull,' the boys clucked, imitating his aunts. 'Mi-chull, Mi- chull.' There were five of them leaning against the metal locker doors, five scrubbed-up would-be rebels made omnipotent by banding together.

'Who's that you got there, Mi-chull? Hey, baby, come on over here and meet some real men.'

Candy looked first at the boys and then at Mitch. She was bewildered by their behavior. None of the boys was as good-looking at Mitch, none as tall and well-built. Why were they taunting him?

Mitch tried to appear tolerant, as if they were children and he was a world-weary adult. 'Why don't you guys grow up?'

They hooted with laughter and catcalls, pounded their fists in merriment against the locker at his absurd attempt to defy them.

Candy grew more befuddled. She gazed at him, accusation and betrayal beginning to form in her eyes. She had thought he was one of the special, one of Clearbrook's chosen. Now she realized that wasn't true. She had somehow managed to ally herself with an outcast.

He felt her fingers slackening in his and panic filled him. She wanted to get away from him, to distance herself. In those few seconds, everything changed. Without knowing any of the facts, without understanding a single detail of his past, she understood that he was a social pariah and that she should not have let herself be seen with him. He was going to lose Candy Fuller, and with that knowledge came the certainty that he didn't want to live anymore. If he couldn't be Mitch the Brave with Candy Fuller at his side, he didn't want to be anyone.

The girls had gathered around the boys, and they were laughing, too. Their amusement was easy and untroubled. Mitch had been the target of their jokes for so long that their attacks upon him were inspired more by habit than venom. They even felt a distant sort of fondness for the boy who had been the source of so much amusement over the years.

Candy was pulling at his hand now, trying desperately to get away from him, to take the small steps that would transport her from the land of the untouchable to the arena of the acceptable.

'Mi-chull, Mi-chull, 'Charlie Shields called out in a high, good-humored falsetto. 'Come here and get your diapers changed.'

A blue-black vortex of rage and pain consumed him. The rage caught him in its grasp and sank its talons through his flesh. A cry built inside him as he let that small, sweet hand go, a roar of outrage at this loss of his fresh new manhood. And with that roar, years of dilligent self-control gave way inside him.

He launched himself at the boys. They were five and he was one, but he didn't care. It was a suicide attack, a kamikaze mission with no hope for personal survival, but only a distant yearning for some posthumous dignity of the spirit. They laughed as he came toward them. They catcalled at the hilarity of Mitchell Blaine attacking them. But then they saw the expression on his face and their mockery died.

He began to throw wild, vicious punches. The girls screamed and a crowd gathered in response to the invisible radar that instantly detected a hallway fight.

Charlie Shields shrieked in pain as Mitch's fist snapped the cartilage in his nose and sent blood spurting out. Artie Tarpey gave a grunt of agony as he felt a rib crack. Mitch was indiscriminate with his violence, propelled by a rage that had been building inside him for nearly a decade. He hit anything he could touch, and barely felt the blows he suffered in return. Two of the boys were finally able to pin him long enough to slam him into a locker. He smashed the thin metal door with his body and then hurled himself back at them.

The boys had fought among themselves since they were children, and there were unwritten rules of conduct they all followed. But Mitch hadn't been part of their fights, and he didn't know their rules. Now the boys found themselves the targets of a vicious, single-minded attack that was outside their realm of experience. Mitch brought Herb McGill down with a flying tackle and pinned him to the tiled floor. Charlie, holding his broken nose and whimpering with pain, tried to rescue Herb, but Mitch shook him away.

It took three male teachers to put an end to the violence, and even then Mitch didn't give up easily. As the men dragged him away to the principal's office, he refused to meet the eyes of Candy Fuller.

The aunts were summoned. They cried when they saw him slumped forward on the office bench with his bruised elbows propped on his thighs, bloody hands dangling between his splayed knees. His white starched shirt was torn and gore-spattered, his eye swollen closed. He looked up at their frail, birdlike frames and saw their fear for him.

Aunt Theodora recovered before her sister and advanced like a brigadier general upon the principal. 'Explain this outrage at once, Jordan Featherstone. How could you allow something like this to happen to our Mitchell?'

' Your Mitchell just sent three of his classmates to the emergency room at the hospital,' Mr. Featherstone replied sharply. 'He's suspended for the next two weeks.'

The aunts listened in horror to the details of their nephew's hallway brawl. They gazed at Mitch, first with bewilderment and then condemnation. Amity's eyes grew fierce behind her wire-rimmed spectacles. 'You will come home with us at once, Mitchell,' she ordered. 'We will deal with this in private.'

'We are extremely disappointed in you,' Theodora exclaimed. 'Extremely!'

He could see them conjuring up their most terrible punishment. A stern lecture, a hundred sentences instead of fifty. His heart contracted with love for them and regret at the distress he had inflicted. 'Go on home,' he said gently. 'I'll be there in a little while.'

Flabbergasted, they repeated their commands. He shook his head sadly. When they saw that they couldn't sway him, Amity tried to tidy the torn shoulder seam of his shirt, and Theodora told Jordan Featherstone that his school was full of hooligans.

Mr. Featherstone began to lecture him, but Mitch had something else to do. He apologized politely to the three adults. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I don't mean to be rude, but there's something I have to do.'

He walked out of the school and made his way on foot to the emergency room at Clearbrook Memorial Hospital.

There he found Artie Tarpey, Herb McGill, and Charlie Shields, who was holding an ice pack to his nose. Mitch sat quietly with them while they waited their turn to get patched up. They talked about the Warrior's football team and whether they had a shot at division finals. They talked about the sophomore teachers and the tunes on the Top Forty. None of them mentioned the fight.

That fall Mitch broke forever his aunts' gentle domination. He landed a part-time job at a local television repair shop and fell in love with the relentlessly masculine world of electronics. When his school suspension was over, he patiently endured all of their duckings and twitterings, then kissed them affectionately on their papery cheeks and went out to train with the football team. Although the squad had already been chosen, his dogged persistence won him the admiration of the coaches, and by the end of the season he was playing.

In the next two years Mitch Blaine re-created football at Clearbrook High. No one had ever seen a boy play the game like he did. He wasn't the fastest wide receiver in the state, but he was so strong, so ferocious in his concentration, so single-minded in his race for the goal line, that it was almost impossible to stop him. The college scouts began sending him love letters.

Off the playing fields, Mitch was still the most well-behaved boy in Clearbrook, Ohio-quiet, polite, conservatively dressed, academically brilliant. The girls who had once laughed at him left notes in his locker and fought with each other for the right to ask him to a turnabout dance. One of those who fought for his attention was Candy Fuller. He was consistently courteous to her and relentlessly unforgiving.

In a cabin on the shores of Lake Hope, he and Penny Baker lost their virginities together. The experience was better than anything he had ever imagined, and he determined to repeat it as often as possible.

'Would you raise your seat back, Mr. Blaine? We're getting ready to land.'