Silver and Salt(2)

I let her take my hand again as she said solemnly, “You know.”

We all wanted something we weren’t going to get. This was Tessa’s year for disappointment. The one thing she wanted and the one thing she’d never get. Feeling more guiltythan I wanted to, I said, “You want to get a milkshake before we go home?”

Of course she did, and we went to the drug store. They had an old fashioned malt shop there. I didn’t much know or care what an old-fashioned malt shop, like the sign said, was, but they served milkshakes and that was enough for me. I had chocolate, she had strawberry and things were fine until Jed walked in. His parents had named him Jedidiah and he had a punch for anyone who called him that. It was supposed to be Biblical. I guessed it didn’t take.

I slid him a careful sideways look. Cold blue eyes stared back, then he gave a half snarl, half hateful grin. Jed was fourteen, big, and a bully. Christmas might suck, but so did bullies.

And Jed was of the worst kind. The worst in the school, that’s for sure. He picked on kids who were smaller and younger. He thought that made him a badass. It didn’t. It just made him a coward. He hadn’t messed with me yet, but it was only a matter of time. I was close to his size, but not close enough for him to pass over me. Not by a good three inches. I was husky for my age, but a little short. Yeah, he was working his way up to me. He was a coward, but he was stupid too. It wouldn’t be long before he’d get over being careful of someone almost as heavy as him if not as tall. Between mean and stupid, stupid wins every time.

Tessa and I slurped up the last of our shakes and we left. She used both hands to try and peel the plastic off her candy cane. “You’re smart,” she announced.

“Oh yeah? What makes you think that?” The sidewalk was clear of snow, shoveled clean.

“That mean guy doesn’t bother you.” She popped the top loop of the cane in her mouth. “Wi-ly.” She’d just learned the word when I’d been practicing for my spelling test and loved using it although half the time she didn’t know what it meant.

Wily? Nah. I was about as wily as a Pop-tart. This was just luck. And luck?

It only lasts so long.



*



“Nicky, are you paying attention or are you shooting for extra homework?”

I looked up from the history book I was only pretending to read. I was hungry. I didn’t concentrate so well when I was hungry. My stomach growled as I lied, “Yes, Mrs. Gibbs, I’m paying attention.”

She didn’t believe me, but the bell rang saving me and my stomach. I bolted for the cafeteria. It was burger day. Most of the kids were all about pizza day, but not me. I liked burgers and I paid for three meals to get three of them. When Mom had handed me my lunch money for the week, she’d ruffled my hair and said I was a growing boy. I might be three inches short of Jed, but I had shot up two inches in the past month. The boys in my family might hit their growth spurts late, but when we hit them, we hit them.

I was thinking that when he slammed his tray across from mine on the cafeteria table, his shaggy silver blond hair hanging in his eyes. “I hear you’re in the Russian club, geek.”

I was, not that I cared much about it, but Dad insisted. Our grandparents had come from Russia. Roots and all that crap. Nicky was short for Nikolai and I made damn sure no one in school knew that.

“Yeah, so?” I started on my first burger.

“That makes you a geek. A loser.” Those eyes, pale as a snow-filled sky, stared at me. They were like the eyes of a husky, a wild one used to living on its own. Catching its own food. Killing because it could. Jeb was twisted inside, wrong. The teachers didn’t see it. They just saw parents who didn’t care, maybe some sort of learning disorder, they didn’t see what he really was, because they didn’t want to. But I saw.

He was a monster. He was just a kid now maybe, but you could bet he was some kind of serial killer just waiting to grow up. But wouldn’t that be a lot of paperwork for the guidance counselor? Why not just pass him on? Let him be someone else’s problem.

“I don’t like geeks.” He leaned forward and bared teeth too big for his mouth. “And I definitely don’t like losers.” He reached over and took one of my burgers, daring me to do something about it.

But I didn’t. Not there. Dad had taught me to fight, because everyone needed to be able to take care of himself. But he’d also taught me to never do it in public where you can get in trouble and to never hit first, at least not anyone smaller. It wouldn’t be fair and it wouldn’t be honorable. My dad believed in honor, pounded into me from the time I could crawl. You can protect yourself, you can fight—that’s the way the world was—but only the ones bigger than you.

Honor was a pain in the ass sometimes, but Jed was bigger than I was. I wasn’t forgetting that. Still, there was the whole not getting into trouble thing…

Taking my burger back and smacking the son of a bitch over the head with his tray would definitely get me in trouble. So I ate my second burger and ignored him. He couldn’t start anything either. Not at school. And I knew ways home to avoid him. I’d gotten to know the woods that stretched behind the school pretty good. Gotten detention once for skipping class to explore them more than once. I deserved a lot more punishment than I’d gotten, but Principal Johnson took it easy on me, no matter what he thought about my smart-ass ways and foul mouth.