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“Get away from him,” I seethed, bending down so that I practically spat in Derrick’s ear. He let go immediately whirling around as if he’d just been spoken to by a ghost.
“Fine, he’s all yours,” he muttered, backing away with his hands up. “Bitch.”
He nodded to Tommy, and the two of them shouldered their way through the crowd and out of sight. As soon as our audience realized the fight was over, they turned away as if it never happened, and by the time I reached for Pierre the crowd had thinned out almost completely. Fucking jerks.
Of course, everyone wanted to be a part of the action as long as they weren’t actually involved.
One person.
One person is all it could’ve taken, someone to stand up for Pierre. The same happened back in high school. The rest of the world would stop and stare for however long it took for something interesting to end, but not one person would do something. Except for me.
I was the only one to stick up for anyone but myself.
Bending over Pierre, I searched his bloodied, bruised face, my hands shaking as they hovered over his skin, as if to protect him from even more blows. Just as I was about to look up to call for help, I caught his gaze in mine. I expected to see tears, but to my disturbance, he was smiling.
It was my own tears that were blurring my vision, dripping onto his shirt.
“How’d you … do that?” he asked, sounding way more excited than he should have. “That was fucking … ” He let out a long cough, “ … amazing.”
I didn’t have the brain capacity to respond. Instead, I stood up and whipped out my phone just as a group of campus security guards can rushing toward us with a stretcher. My mind only registered the sound of an ambulance as it came veering to a stop seconds away from hitting us. The security guards scooped Pierre up onto the stretcher and the ambulance doors busted open.
“I’m okay, I’m fine,” I heard Pierre moan as they loaded him into the van. “Let me down. I’m fine, I swear. Kat!”
Shaking my head, I turned away to wipe the tears from my cheeks. His question echoed over and over in my head, because I didn’t know the answer myself. No, I did.
Because it wasn’t Derrick, or Tommy, or whoever the fuck who I was punching. It wasn’t them I’d wanted to tear to shreds.
It was Elliot.
It was the anger I’d holed up in myself for years. And it made me want to vomit.
“Excuse me, miss,” someone said. After giving my eyes a good rub, I turned around to find a middle-aged woman dressed in a uniform. Campus police. “I’m going to need to ask you a few questions about what just happened here.”
Nodding, I took in a deep breath and explained what happened. But even as I spoke, the words spilling out of my mouth felt like glue and I couldn’t hear my own voice. I didn’t want to speak to anyone except Pierre.
I was numb.
A few minutes passed by before the officer left me to join her group to flag down some other students to question.
Fuck them.
I just wanted to go home.
“Hey,” said a soft voice. I pretended not to hear it. Keeping my eyes down, I went to walk back toward the perimeter of the campus so that I could get a ride home. Taking in a deep breath, I tried to think about what the officer had told me.She said I could see Pierre at the university health center in a couple of hours. For some reason, Pierre’s voice floated through my head, and I couldn’t help but giggle at the thought.
Shame, he’d say. We didn’t even get to see the library.
Yup. That was Pierre, my boy.
“Hey,” the voice said again, and it became obvious to me that whoever was speaking was trying to get my attention, not someone else’s. I looked up. There was a girl standing to the side of me, holding a stack of books under one arm while holding out a tissue with the other. She smiled. “Here,” she said, offering it to me.
I detected a faint accent—Irish, maybe Scottish. She was pretty, a sweet kind of pretty, more Tara than Vivian. That made me accept the tissue with a smile back.
“Thanks,” I said, pressing it to my nose. After blowing into it, I crumpled up the tissue and stuffed it into my coat pocket. The girl was still standing there, and didn’t seem like she was planning on walking away. I nodded to her. “Are you a student here?”
“Yeah. This is my first year.” She held out her hand to me, not seeming to care that I’d just used both my hands to cradle Pierre’s bloody face and then blow my nose. “I’m Cassidy.”
I reached out my arm and shook her hand anyway. “Kat.”