Another Lifetime - 4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

In the morning, after Kyle had taken a shower, he looked at himself in the mirror. He looked like hell. His bruised eye had started to turn a sickly yellowish green color, and Kyle just thought it looked gross.

Kyle once again didn’t get a good night’s sleep, which became very apparent in his English class. He’d already nodded off twice, and his teacher, Mr Bright, was getting fed up with it.

“Kyle Omara!” he said loudly from right in front of Kyle’s desk. Kyle jerked awake, knocking his book to the floor in the process. The other students erupted in laughter, and Kyle’s face burned brightly.

“Welcome back to the discussion,” said Mr Bright. “See me after class.”

Kyle groaned inwardly. He rubbed his eyes, and went back to listening to the teacher drone on about verbs and adverbs, and their correct usage. Kyle was usually very good in English, but this teacher was just horribly boring.

Kyle’s eyes drifted over to the empty desk to his immediate left. Leo’s desk. Kyle sighed and thought of all the fun he and Leo could be having passing dirty notes back and forth to each other. They’d done it in all of the classes they’d shared before, and it was a great way to pass the time. Sometimes Kyle would draw a funny picture on the note, usually involving a penis and the teacher, and Leo would struggle to contain his giggles.

“Mr Omara, I believe I’m teaching in the front of the class, not the side,” Mr Bright said, and the class laughed at Kyle again. The way he’d said it, suggested that he knew it would cause the other students to laugh at him again. He deliberately tried to embarrass him.

Kyle seethed with anger. For the rest of the class, he glared hatefully at Mr Bright. He might as well have been sleeping, though, because Kyle didn’t take in a word he said from that moment on. All he saw was red, all he heard was the jabbering of some jackass.

The bell finally rang, signaling the end of class. Kyle was the first one out of his seat and marched pointedly to the teacher’s desk.

“You wanted to see me,” Kyle growled at him.

“Yes,” Mr Bright said. “We need to discuss why it is you felt the need to not pay attention in my classroom.”

Kyle took a deep breath, and silently counted to ten before answering. He felt a lot of his anger dissipate, and when he was reasonably calm, he looked his teacher in the eye.

“I know I was wrong not to pay attention in class,” he said. “But that doesn’t give you the right to deliberately embarrass me in front of the whole class.”

Mr Bright frowned at that, but said nothing.

“You got your point across the first time, when you woke me up,” Kyle said. “The second time was out of line.”

“I really don’t care what you think was out of line or not. Maybe if you could stay awake long enough, you’d understand that. I’m the teacher, not you.” Mr Bright said condescendingly. “Detention for the next two weeks.”

“My best friend is fighting for his life in a hospital bed!” Kyle said in shock. “I need to be there for him! I promised!”

“You should have thought about that when you decided to disrupt my class,” Mr Bright said, turning away from him.

Without another word, Kyle left the room and proceeded to his next class. The next class was his “advanced art techniques” class, and when he walked in the teacher paused and looked at him.

“Got a pass?” Mrs Johnson asked him.

Kyle smiled and shrugged. Mrs Johnson laughed and shook her head. She’d known full well that he wouldn’t have a pass, but let it slide anyway. He was her best student, and he had more than enough art pieces turned in to pass the class even though it was only the fourth week of school.

Kyle went to his table, pulled out his painting of Leo that he’d been working on, and got to work.

As usually happens when he was being creative, he lost himself in the painting. He was a bit of a perfectionist when it came to his own work, so he moved the brush as slowly as possible, making only the tiniest of movements.

He was meticulous. His brow furrowed in concentration, a few beads of sweat broken out on his forehead. His tongue poked out of the corner of his mouth when he was moving the brush, and pulled back in when he stopped to survey the work he’d just done. Leo had loved to watch him work, saying that it was incredibly fascinating.

Kyle sighed at the memory, and stopped painting. He put the brush in his small cup of water, sat back, and closed his eyes.

He was so focused on not letting the tears escape, he hadn't realized he was being watched.

“Why’d you stop?” said Stanley Marshall, another boy in the class.

Kyle’s eyes, red and moist, popped open.

“Huh?” he said eloquently.

“I just asked you why you stopped,” Stanley said with a puzzled expression on his face. “Are you alright?”

“Y-yeah,” Kyle said in a tiny, shaking voice. He cleared his throat and repeated it, more loudly this time.

“What happened to your eye?” Stanley asked gently.

“It’s a long story, and I don’t really want to talk about it,” Kyle said uneasily. Stanley shrugged and nodded.

“So… Why did you stop?” Stanley asked. “You were making good progress.”

To be honest, Kyle was a little weirded out. This kid who’d not spoken more than a word or two to him had been watching his every move in secret. Well, if Kyle had only looked up, he would’ve seen Stanley watching him, so it wasn’t exactly in secret.

Kyle had known that Stanley was in journalism, and wrote for the school paper. He wasn’t exactly sure what he wrote, as he’d only read about half an issue. Was he looking for some kind of story? Why would he be interested in him? Kyle couldn’t know for sure.

Still, it weirded him out quite a bit.

“I j-just…” Kyle began, deciding to give Stanley the benefit of the doubt and hear him out. He was silent for a few moments as he tried to put his thoughts in line. “I get lost sometimes when I paint. If I don’t stop after a while, I’m afraid I wont find my way back.”

“Oh,” Stanley said. He looked at Kyle’s painting. “That really is amazing. Are you doing that by memory?”

“Well, yeah,” Kyle said. “He’s like, my best friend. I’m painting it for him.”

Stanley smiled.

“That’s awesome,” he said. “I wish I had a talented friend or two.”

Kyle laughed, and put out his hand.

“I’m Kyle,” he said as Stanley shook his hand.

“I know, silly. We’ve been in this class together since the beginning of the semester,” Stanley said with a laugh. Stanley noted to himself that Kyle’s hand was really soft, like the skin of a baby. The only way he could think of to describe it was “girlish”, but it wasn’t exactly like he’d felt too many girl’s hands to compare it to.

“Well, we’ve never been formally introduced,” Kyle said reasonably. “Do you go by Stan?”

“Nope,” Stanley said. “I like to be different, so I use my full name.”

“That’s cool,” Kyle said. “Different, but cool.”

“So how’s Leo doing?” Stanley asked. “I heard he’s in the hospital, but that’s about all I know.”

Kyle looked away. He blinked back a tear, and gathered his thoughts.

“Well, we really don’t know at this point,” Kyle said. “He was hurt pretty severely, and he’s been in a coma. He isn’t doing any better or worse, and the doctor’s aren't sure if he’ll ever wake up.”

Kyle lost the fight, and a tear slipped out of his eye.

“This has to be so hard on you,” Stanley said, placing his hand on Kyle’s shoulder. “Especially with all the rumors about him.”

Kyle’s head snapped over to look Stanley in the eye so fast his neck popped.

“What are you talking about?” he demanded.

Stanley looked confused.

“You haven’t heard the rumors?” he asked, clearly shocked. “It’s all over the school, you must have heard something.”

“Stanley, what are they,” Kyle asked impatiently.

“Well, the most popular rumor is…” he paused, and a squeamish look crossed his face. He hated being the bearer of bad news. “That he was gay, and was a whore to the football team.”

Kyle looked as if he’d been slapped. As quickly as that look appeared, it vanished, replaced by furious anger.

“That’s fucking ridiculous!” Kyle exclaimed, and everyone within earshot turned to look at him. Stanley shushed him quietly, and when everyone stopped staring, Kyle said, “Who the fuck started this shit? Leo wasn’t a whore!”

It did not go unnoticed by Stanley that Kyle did not, in fact, say Leo wasn’t gay. He didn’t press the issue though, because to anyone with eyes and a fraction of a brain it was obvious that Leo was gay. There was just something about him that just screamed homosexual.

Again, the squeamish look crossed Stanley’s face.

“I overheard it from someone who said they’d overheard one of the football players’ girlfriends talking about it,” he explained. “She apparently said she heard it from Renée Borden.”

If it were possible for Kyle to look more pissed, it happened then. He looked at Stanley and knew without a shadow of a doubt who’d started the rumor.

“Ethan Hartman,” he said icily. Stanley kind of shrugged and nodded, a gesture of general assent.

“Yeah, I thought so too,” he said. “He always seemed like a pompous ass to me.”

“You have no idea,” Kyle said.

Kyle resolved to spend every free moment he had on trying to prove that it had been Ethan that had hurt Leo. It wouldn’t be easy, not by a long shot. There was, of course, the overwhelming lack of evidence. Leo’s body hadn't yielded anything in terms of DNA evidence, even though he’d been raped. There weren’t even traces of sperm. Ethan apparently made sure that nothing could link him to this.

Kyle looked at his painting of Leo, and in his mind’s eye, he compared the painting of the beautiful Leo that he knew and loved, to the broken Leo that was fighting for his life. The differences were so drastic, so horrific, it was painful to even think about. He had to look away.

Stanley gasped. Kyle’s strange behavior made something click in his mind.

“Ethan did this to Leo, didn’t he?” he asked, even though he knew he was right. The look in Kyle’s eye’s just confirmed his suspicion.

“I can’t prove it,” Kyle said, his shoulders slumping. “God, Leo might die, and I cant even do this one thing for him! One little thing! Ethan’s eighteen, he needs to be in jail!”

“Federal ‘Pound-Me-in-the-Ass’ Prison is more like it,” Stanley said with venom in his voice. Kyle smiled at that, and seeing the sincere look on his face, Kyle knew Stanley meant it.

“He’s just covered his tracks too well,” Kyle said, then he explained the whole situation to him. He glossed over anything that might unintentionally out Leo, thinking that Stanley must have thought it was just a rumor.

“Let me see what I can find out,” Stanley said with a wink. “I’m connected.”

“What could you do?” Kyle asked him, doubt evident in his voice.

Stanley reached into his backpack, fished around for a few moments, and pulled out the latest copy of the school newspaper. He flipped through the pager, found the page he was looking for, and passed it over to Kyle.

“News and Gossip from Stanley ‘the Fly’ Fletcher?” Kyle asked, reading the title of the article.

“As in ‘fly on the wall’,” he said with a radiant grin. “Look here, where it has a few outrageous facts about some students, then it says that Coach Stewart was seen leaving well after the school closes with Mrs Butler? That one is true. The way I worded it, it looks as if it’s just part of the overall joke, and the journalism teacher thinks nothing of it. But the Coach and Mrs Butler know it’s true.”

Kyle smiled broadly.

“You’re good,” he said. “That way, they cant say anything, or else it’ll prove the rumor was true. Very clever.”

Stanley continued to tell Kyle about writing the mock gossip column for the school paper. As much as he possibly could, he tried to include real, hard facts, but the teacher of the journalism class cut anything that was too risqué. A lot of times, he had to result to using cheap jokes and made up facts. It was supposed to just be a funny article for everyone to enjoy reading.

But Stanley really was a good investigative reporter. He was the top of his class, and if he smelled a juicy story, he did his best to get every last detail. He had contacts in all of the school’s social cliques, knew which teachers were most likely to tell him whatever they’d overheard, and if all that failed, he could conduct an interrogation that would make a seasoned veteran cop proud.

“If he’s slipped up, mentioned anything to anybody, I’ll find it out,” Stanley said with confidence. “If he’s so much as sneezed wrong in the last year, I’ll know.”

Kyle actually felt quite a bit better about everything. He felt as if there was finally something going to be done, and Leo would finally get some justice. After all he’d been through, he deserved it more than anyone. Kyle was so grateful he wanted to leap across the table and strangle Stanley in a huge hug.

“Thank you so much for doing this,” he said instead. The hug would have looked weird, and he’d already had enough embarrassment for one day. And of course there was the fact that he didn’t want to have to explain himself just yet.

“Don’t thank me just yet,” Stanley said, his hands raised in a disarming gesture. “I haven't even started looking into it yet, so give me at least a few days.”

Almost on cue, the bell rang, and Kyle stood up, ready for lunch. They said their goodbyes, and Kyle went to his locker to deposit all his books. He grabbed his brown paper bag lunch, and made his way to the cafeteria.

He entered the room, and the smell of mystery meat hit his nose. Did anyone actually like that? He thought to himself. He looked over at a crowded table, and seeing four people with a plate of it, decided the entire world was insane. That seemed to make more sense.

He found an empty table off to the side of the room, and sat. he pulled out the various items in his lunch, not really paying too much attention to what was going on around him.

He was caught off guard when the vacant seat across from him was filled suddenly.

Ethan Hartman smiled sadistically at him when Kyle’s shocked eyes met his.

“Heard you’ve been talking shit about me,” Ethan said nonchalantly.

Kyle, as much as he hated Ethan, had gone pale with fright. He was literally shaking, and he had to put his hands in his lap so it wouldn’t be so noticeable. Ethan was enormous. There was no kidding himself here. If Ethan wanted to hurt Kyle, all Kyle would be able to do is take it.

“W-where d-did you hear that?” Kyle stammered.

“Doesn’t matter where I heard it,” Ethan snapped. The vein in his forehead stood out, and Kyle could tell he was really angry. Kyle had to struggle not to wet himself. “What matters is I know it’s true.”

Kyle was speechless. He stared numbly at Ethan, wishing he would just go away and leave him alone.

“You better watch yourself from now on, sweetheart,” Ethan said, dripping with venom, and with a predatory smile. “See you later.”

With that, Ethan got up, and waked out of the room, leaving Kyle in a daze. He’d all but forgotten about his lunch, and didn’t have much of an appetite anyway.

A minute or two later, Stanley sat down in the same seat Ethan had vacated.

“Just talked to one of my sources,” he began. “Looks like Ethan has a friend in our art class, so he might be on to us.”

Kyle looked at Stanley, and nodded.

“This just keeps getting better and better,” he said with a sigh.