Finally, he turned to the forth. His smile waned for a moment before vanishing completely, staring down at the crude sketch on the floor. His arms had been made too long, and he almost appeared to be holding hands with the previous figure. He sighed, leaning forward onto his palms again until he was almost exactly the same position he’d been in when he started, staring down at his work. He swished saliva back and forth through his mouth as he thought, then raised his eyes to the small window near the ceiling of his cell. The air outside was thick with fog, some of it swirling in and dancing with him before turning into nothing in the air-conditioned room.
“Not over.” He smiled, letting himself lean back as the sweat rolled off of him into a puddle on the floor.
“Mike, honey, are you okay?” Cathy asked her boyfriend, using her ‘prying’ voice. He had described it once as combining a pouting lip, soulful eyes, a sad voice and the slightest tip of her head, adding all these ingredients to a jar, and mixing well.
He stared blankly for a moment, his eyes solemnly focused on the road ahead. He began to pick up speed slightly, forcing Cathy to speed up as well to keep up with him.
“Mike, talk to me,” she said, tripping over a rock and skipping for two steps to keep from falling onto the cold hard pavement. “Please.”
He turned around and looked at her for a moment. There was anger in his eyes at first, but it quickly twisted to frustration under her influence, then finally to calmness. Her face always did that to him. No matter how angry he was, the second he looked at her eyes, her hair, her lips... it was like his heart melted inside his chest. “There’s nothing to talk about.”
“Bull. You’ve been acting like this for weeks, Mike. You’re angry like I’ve never seen you angry before.” The grimness of the situation rang true in her beautiful voice. Her eyes stared deep into his, cutting through the barriers he had erected and into his very soul. “This isn’t like you.”
He broke, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t mad. “Why do you do it?” he asked with a raised voice. He cleared his throat, then started again with a calmer tone. “Why do you do it?”
Cathy’s eyes opened wide. Her eyes went from one corner of her eye to the next, as if she was searching for an answer. “Do what?”
“‘Do what?’ What do you think? Why do you defend those two creeps, Tommy and Sud? Do you realize what they did? What they helped Grendel do to you?”
Cathy started to tear up almost instantly. Ever since it had happened, she spent nearly every waking moment trying not to think about what had been done to her. Whenever someone else brought it up, she had no defense against the memories that came flooding back. It was like the pinprick that broke the dam. Every dream she had since that night was a nightmare reliving what Grendel had done to her.
“It wasn’t like it was some random thing. The guys say that the three of them had been planning it. They convinced everyone at the party that Xander was the killer so they’d take care of him. Tommy and Sud attacked me, damn near fractured my fucking skull when I saw what was happening inside and then Grendel... he... well, I think you know what he did, even if you won’t say it.”
Her make-up was running down her cheeks and onto her blouse now. Her eyes were red and puffy.
Mike sighed. “I can understand that it might be hard for you to talk about what happened, but that doesn’t mean that you should just... forget about it. Y’know? You shouldn’t let them get away with the shit they pull all the time, the things they call you. You’re better than they are. You shouldn’t have to take it.”
“Well, what exactly do you think I should do?” she stammered, wiping her eyes.
“You shouldn’t have to do anything,” he said, squinting and shaking his head as though that were obvious. “Don’t you get that? You shouldn’t have to lift a finger against creeps like them. Nobody should. All I’m asking is that you let me handle it when- -”
He stopped in mid sentence when she slapped him across the arm, her face curled into bitter contempt for a moment. “I do not need you to save me, Mike, so you can give up the damn hero act because I’m getting sick of it. Sick. Everyone’s lining up to choose everything for me. Tommy and Sud think I’m a slut, you and Xander think I’m a saint... and the only thing all four of you have in common is that not one of you asks me what I think I am.”
He let out a puff of air, turning away from her angrily. His lower lip curled up as her words swarmed around in his mind, forcing him to look at his encounter with Tommy a different way even though he didn’t want to. Like a gear being forced to turn in the wrong direction, his train of thought came to a screeching halt, then slowly started to chug along its new path.
Slowly, her face lost its intensity as she watched him be at war with himself, knowing how much her words must have been cutting into him. She reached out
