Read Online Be Mine by Rick Mofina - Free Book Online Page B

were big
farm boys who were defensive tackles on the football team. Kyle and Amy had
been going steady for two years ...
    “... before you showed up.” Kyle jabbed his forefinger in Bleeder’s
chest. “What the hell do you think you’re doing with Amy, huh?” The insides of
Kyle’s forearms were scarred from a late summer of hoisting hay bales onto a
conveyor. “She’s my girl, shit-head.”
    “No, she’s with me.”
    “She used you and you know it.”
    Used? Jesus. He didn’t want to hear that. But the giggles. The
stares. The way Amy always grabbed his hand on cue when Kyle was near. No. She
wouldn’t use him like that. It couldn’t be true.
    “Stay the hell away from her.” Kyle’s forefinger jabbed him again.
    “Don’t do that,” Bleeder said.
    “Oh yeah?” Kyle stepped closer. His breath smelled of beer.
    “You heard him,” Rowley said, his muscles stretching the tanned skin
of his upper arms. “Stay away from Amy.”
    “Go to hell.”
    “Say that again?” Kyle laughed. Rowley, too.
    Bleeder didn’t care. Used. Jesus. Why? He just didn’t care.
    “Go to hell, Kyle, and take dick-brain with you.”
    Bleeder blocked Kyle’s first punch, slowed his second, but Rowley
doubled him with a pile driver to his gut, so powerful it winded him and he
puked. Then Kyle dropped him with a direct hit to the head. Bleeder fell to his
knees in a starry stupor, unsure whose boot plowed into his kidney, not feeling
the flurry of head blows that sent him to the rock-hard earth of the worn path.
He writhed in liquidy islands of undigested ham, lettuce, Swiss cheese, and
peanut butter cookies from the lunch his mother had made him. His face was wet
with blood, snot, and drool.
    “Got it now, shit-head?” Kyle stood over him. “She used you to piss
me off.”
    “Look at him. He sure is a bleeder,” Rowley said.
    Kyle chuckled. “Hey, bleeder, you learned your lesson?”
    Bleeder.
    He didn’t speak. He didn’t cry. He rolled onto his back and through
the bloody web of his humiliation blinked at the sky, staying that way long
after Kyle and Rowley walked away, long after the echoes of their laughter
faded. He drifted in and out of consciousness as the stars emerged.
    “She used you to piss me off.”
    Lying there, he heard a distant hammering against the sky, then felt
the earth tremor. She used you. An approaching maelstrom of steel-on-steel grew
with a trumpet that emerged into the scream of the sixty-car freight train that
thundered by him, pounding into the night, leaving him in silence with nothing.
Except the truth.
    She used you.
    He heard it over and over as his ears rang. His brain throbbed. He
smelled something electric in the air. His head pounded. He tasted copper on
his tongue. Something bad was happening. His skull hummed and he gripped his
head until a surreal calmness fell over him. Then Bleeder spoke to him for the
first time in a voice as clear as if a new person were standing before him. But
he was inside. In his head.
    Don’t worry, sport. It’s not over. I’ll take care of it.
    Who was that?
    He prodded his head before scrambling to his feet, navigating the
dark to his house, where he crawled into bed and scared his mother to death.
They said he fell into a coma state, or something, that lasted for just over three
days. After he got out of the hospital, he’d refused to tell his mother, his
father, the doctors, the school people, not even the sheriff’s deputy with the
squeaky leather holster, what had happened.
    “I don’t know what happened. I never saw them.”
    Amy never called him. None of the kids called him. When he went back
to school the chess club boys said the white bandage on his head made him look
like a Civil War soldier home from battle. Amy ignored him. Acted like she
didn’t even know him as she walked to classes with Kyle, his big farm boy arm
around her. Once Kyle made a show of snarling over his shoulder, “You following
us, Bleeder?”
    “Bleeder?” Amy