Текст книги "The 9th Girl"

Автор книги: Tami Hoag

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“The kid who works the counter nights at my local convenience store has a tat of a snake wrapped around his throat,” Kovac said. “Apparently, his personal journey took a detour through hell.”

“Possibly,” Elwood said seriously.

“The girl I work out with at the gym has a leprechaun on her stomach,” Liska said. “She’s twenty-two and you could bounce quarters off her abs. She thinks it’s cute. I wonder how cute she’ll think it is after she’s had a couple of kids and the thing has morphed into Larry the Cable Guy.”

“Not everyone gives their choice as much consideration as they should,” Elwood conceded. “Each of my tattoos has a deep personal meaning.”

Kovac made a face. “Please don’t tell us where they are on your person.”

“I want to know how the artist negotiated all the body hair,” Tippen said.

Liska wrinkled her nose. “Eeeww.”

“I waxed first,” Elwood said nobly, making everyone moan in unison.

“Speed has that whole sleeve on one arm,” Liska said. “And I get what it means, what it represents for him. The struggle between good and evil; the juxtaposition of himself as the avenging angel or the devil. And, of course, he wants to look badass at the gym. But he’s allegedly a grown man, so if he wants to illustrate himself, that’s his choice. Kyle is fifteen. Should a fifteen-year-old permanently etch something into his body?”

“That depends on what it is,” Elwood said.

“He’s into comic books and samurai warriors. When he’s an adult and working as an attorney, is he going to thank me for letting him get a giant tattoo of Spider-Man?”

“What’s more disturbing is that you’d let your kid become a lawyer,” Tippen said. “And you think I’m sick?”

Kovac brought them back on topic. “So the question here is: If by law minors can’t get a tattoo in this state, and our victim is only fifteen or sixteen, does that mean she came from out of state? Or did she just have a good fake ID? Or are there tattoo artists around town who just don’t give a shit what the law says?”

“You’re not exactly talking about a group of straight-arrow conformists,” Tippen said.

“No,” Elwood agreed, “but the majority are very defensive of both their art form and their integrity as businesspeople. The artists I know were glad for the law restricting minors. They want their work to be respected and meaningful, not some idiotic drunk-ass whim.”

“Sonya tells us this particular tat is about acceptance and tolerance,” Tippen said. “Racial tolerance, religious tolerance, tolerance of sexual preference. It’s a statement, part of a social movement. Given the gravity of the meaning, I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine there could be an artist or two willing to bend the rules to put it on younger kids in order to further the message.”

“How many tattoo parlors are we talking about?” Kovac asked.

“About twenty close in on Minneapolis proper,” Elwood said. “Plus St. Paul, plus the outer burbs. And we’re not taking into account that artists will freelance outside the studios. There’s our likely culprit for tattooing underage kids—some young artist trying to make a few extra bucks on the side. This is a simple, straightforward design requiring minimal skill and minimal equipment.”

“Meaning this is going to be a long process,” Liska said. “Quicker if we just post a photo of the tattoo and get it to the media and ask if anyone is missing a daughter with this tattoo.”

“Assuming all parents know whether or not their kid has an illegal tattoo,” Tippen said.

Liska conceded the point. “Okay. Is anyone missing a best friend, a sister, a teammate, a girlfriend . . .”

“And this is where Sonya comes in,” Tippen said. “She’ll reach that peer group.”

“In the meantime, we have to reach out to the schools,” Kovac said. “I want lists of absentees from every school we can hit in the metro area. Girls, fourteen to eighteen, just to cover as many bases as possible.”

“What kind of manpower are we getting?” Elwood asked.

“Remains to be seen,” Kovac said. “Kasselmann is meeting with the brass assholes as we speak. He’s not happy, but he’ll get over it. Or not. Whatever.

“For now, we’re it,” he said. “My gut feeling is we won’t get a full-on task force, which is fine with me. I don’t want to lose time with all the front-end bullshit and red tape of a multi-agency thing. I’m hoping we keep it in-house but pull in a couple of detectives from Sex Crimes or somewhere else.

“In the meantime, we just have to get on it. Hopefully, we’ll end up with enough manpower to revisit the first two Doc Holiday cases, but our priority for now is to get an ID on our new girl.”

All eyes went to the horror-movie still of Zombie Doe’s face taped to the wall as the centerpiece of a macabre montage.

“God help us,” Tinks muttered.

“He’d better,” Kovac said. “He already missed his chance with her.”

12

Gerald Fitzgerald never missed the news if he could help it. It was a Minnesota thing. Minnesotans, from childhood, watch the news daily. He had not realized there was anything unusual in that until he heard Garrison Keillor make jokes about it on A Prairie Home Companion. He still didn’t get why people thought that was funny.

Some of his earliest memories were of sitting on the living room floor watching Walter Cronkite while his mother banged pots and pans together in the kitchen, making supper. As an adult, the first thing he did upon waking up was turn on the TV to catch the news. Lunch and dinner happened in front of the television, watching the local news. The day officially ended with the ten o’clock news.

The news was the scale of the day, the place to find out if society was in balance or out of whack. People trusted the news, and they trusted the people who delivered the news. News was truth. At least it had been in Cronkite’s day.

Nowadays, you couldn’t trust the news. Used to be you went to the news to get the facts. Now you had to fact-check everything that came over the airwaves yourself. News personalities seemed to have no compunction lying outright to slant things in the favor of whomever they worked for. Cronkite had to be rolling over in his grave. It was disgraceful.

The headline on the screen caught his attention first.

ZOMBIE MURDER.

He grabbed the remote off the nightstand and jacked up the volume. The perky blonde seemed to look right at him as she spoke.

“Sources close to the investigation of a New Year’s Eve homicide in Minneapolis say this murder may be the work of a serial killer law enforcement agencies have dubbed ‘Doc Holiday.’

“The partially nude body of an unidentified female fell from the trunk of a vehicle New Year’s Eve in the Loring Park area. The gruesome condition of the disfigured corpse led one witness to describe the deceased woman as a zombie!”

Film footage showed the New Year’s Eve scene. A giant white Hummer sitting crosswise in the road. Emergency vehicles with strobe lights rolling. Uniformed officers walking around.

“No official statement has been made by the Minneapolis Police Department regarding the victim or the possibility of a serial killer in the metro area. The detective in charge of this most recent case would neither confirm nor deny any possible connection to several similar crimes committed over the course of the last year with the bodies of victims being discovered on holidays.”

He spotted the detective. Kovac. He knew him. He had met him, had spoken with him. Decent guy, Kovac. A straight shooter, an old-school cop. Appropriately suspicious, thorough. But, like all cops, he was not an original thinker. He put one foot in front of the other and plodded along.

And there was his partner, the little blonde. Liska. She was a pistol. He liked the look of her, but she was too old for his tastes, and he had no doubt that messing with her would be like grabbing a wildcat by the tail. Way too much trouble. He didn’t mind a little sporting fight in his girls, but one that could seriously mess him up? No, thanks. Maybe when she was eighteen or nineteen . . .

The blonde giving the news was more his speed—wide-eyed, young, idealistic. He could easily picture her in his control. He could see those wide eyes even wider and filled with terror. He could feel the blood start to heat in his veins. She could be one for Doc Holiday.

Doc Holiday. He liked the name, the play on words.

Growing up, he had been a big fan of Westerns—Gunsmoke and Bonanza on television, and all the old Western movies. Gunfight at the O.K. Corral had always been a favorite when he was a kid. Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. He owned the DVDs of the two movies made in the nineties—Wyatt Earp and Tombstone. He preferred Tombstone’s Kurt Russell over Kevin Costner as Wyatt Earp, but he thought Dennis Quaid should have won the freaking Oscar as Doc Holliday in the Costner film. Val Kilmer’s portrayal of the dentist/gunslinger had been way too gay for his taste.

Not that the historical Doc Holliday had anything to do with the Doc Holiday who left dead girls on the side of the road.

That was his doing.

Doc Holiday. Gerald Fitzgerald.

He hadn’t gotten nearly the publicity he could have for his exploits. He was much more prolific than anyone would ever give him credit for. But that was the trade-off. He could be careful and successful, or careless and caught.

He had no intention of getting caught. Not by anyone. Not ever. He was very skilled. He was very smart. He thought of himself as a professional. He didn’t make mistakes. The risks he took were calculated. He always had a plan.

He had one now.

13

“What time did you last eat?” Liska asked.

The forensic artist was a short, doughy, twentysomething young man named Nam Pham, whose actual job was as a computer nerd in the business technology unit.

As in most police departments, there was no salaried position for a forensic artist in the MPD. City budgets didn’t allow for that kind of extravagance. There wasn’t enough work to warrant a full-time artist here. In fact, there were only a handful of salaried, full-time positions for forensic artists in the entire country. It was standard op—and far cheaper—to make use of someone with artistic talent who was already getting paid for doing something else within the department.

Pham had been a poli sci major and an art minor in college. The department had footed the bill for a couple of seminars in forensic art. He had paid out of pocket for additional training, just to get the opportunity to do the job. He had been doing suspect composite drawings for the last eight or nine months in addition to his regular duties.

He looked at Liska with confusion.

“When did you last eat?” she asked again.

“About an hour ago,” he said, apprehension dawning. “Why do you ask?”

Liska didn’t answer. She would have worried about the contents of her own stomach this morning, considering the hangover, but she was feeling too mean to get sick, aggravated by the situation of the case. She hated the politics that manipulated a high-profile investigation. There should have been no place for it, and yet they had to play that game just to get what they needed in order to do their jobs. It sucked.

They followed Möller down the hall toward the room where Jane Doe 09-11 lay waiting. Pham glanced around, trying not to look as uncomfortable as he was to be at the county morgue.

“Have you ever seen a dead body?” Liska asked skeptically. Everything about Nam Pham was annoying her now. His hair was too thin. His shirt was too green. He looked clammy.

“Yes,” he said defensively.

“And I don’t mean your grandmother in a casket.”

“Um, then, no.”

“Great,” she muttered.

“I can work from photographs,” Pham said. “I mean, really, I need to work from photographs. It takes time to get it right. I need to study the angles. You could have just brought me the photographs. It really isn’t necessary for me to see the actual body.”

Liska grabbed a packaged gown off the service cart parked in the hall and hit him in the stomach with it like a quarterback handing off a football.

“Put this on, and try not to puke in your mask.”

The room Möller took them into was cold and smelled strongly of burned flesh and a terrifying death, a smell that hit like a fist and forced its way down a person’s throat. Liska scowled as if she might frighten it away. Nam Pham turned green.

Möller, already in scrubs, getting an early start on the day’s autopsies, shrugged and apologized as he waited for them to gown up.

“A house fire in Whittier,” he said, waving a hand at the charred remains of what had once been a human being, now lying on a gurney like some strange, grotesque, twisted driftwood sculpture. “Someone cooking meth for New Year’s supper.”

“Meth cooked the cook,” Liska remarked. “That’s a crispy critter if ever I’ve seen one. Man, I’d rather roll around in week-old, maggot-infested roadkill than smell that smell. I couldn’t have your job, Doc.”

“What smell is that, Sergeant?” Möller asked. ME humor. “Barbecue?”

Nam Pham pressed his mask to his mouth and muffled a gag.

“Any leads yet on our Jane Doe?” Möller asked, moving on toward another door.

“Nothing,” Liska said. “If she’s going to be missed by someone, I would think that someone would be pretty worried by today. We can only hope if she has loved ones, they live in the area.

“We’ve got to get this sketch done and out there on the Internet, on TV, in the newspapers,” she said.

Möller led the way into a cold-storage room where several bodies lay covered on steel tables. He looked at Pham.

“Have you done reconstruction work, Mr. Pham?”

“I took a course,” Pham said weakly, his eyes fixed on the draped human form the ME stood beside.

Möller arched a brow as he picked up the corner of the sheet. “You’re about to take another.”

Even the green drained from Nam Pham’s complexion as he got his first look at their Jane Doe.

Liska counted half under her breath. “Three . . . two . . . one . . .”

Pham’s knees started to buckle. He yanked down his mask, turned, and grabbed on to a laundry cart and threw up into it.

Möller sighed. Liska rolled her eyes.

“I think perhaps your artist is a bit overfaced,” Möller said. “No pun intended.”

Liska stepped over and cuffed Pham hard on the shoulder. “Suck it up, nerd boy. You’re all I’ve got. And you’re all she’s got, too.”

She curled a hand into the collar of his shirt and pulled him back to the table like a recalcitrant third grader. “Do you understand now why I insisted you come here and see her in the flesh?”

“To make me puke?” he said miserably. He was staring just to the left of the victim’s head, concentrating on not seeing her.

“This isn’t about you. It’s about her. Look at her,” Liska ordered, yanking on his collar like she was pulling on the leash of a dog. “Look at her!”

Pham took a breath as if he were about to put his head underwater and looked straight at the disfigured mess that was their victim.

“If I just showed you a photograph of this girl’s face, what would you see?” Liska asked. “You’d see a monster. You’d see a character from The Walking Dead. You’d see something that your brain would tell you wasn’t real.

“But she is real. This girl is real,” she said. “She’s not a zombie. She’s not a movie prop. This was a living, breathing young woman. You need to get that. She had a life and someone took it away from her.

“I need you to give it back to her, Nam,” she said. “I need a drawing of a real live girl. Do you understand me?”

“How?” he asked, shrugging away from her. “How am I supposed to do that? Half her face is missing! She doesn’t even have a nose!”

Liska had made the same argument to Kovac. A bad sketch could be worse than no sketch at all. But they had so little to go on, they had to grab on to something, to start somewhere.

“You’ll have to concentrate on what she does have, not what’s missing,” she said. “Get the jawline from the good side, get the one good eye and make two. Get the hair right. She had piercings. Draw them with jewelry in place.”

“If I give you a drawing and it doesn’t resemble what the victim looked like in real life, won’t that be doing more harm than good?” Pham asked. “Her family won’t recognize her.”

“I have to trust that you’re gifted, Nam. I have to hope that someone recognizes her haircut or the arch of her eyebrow,” Liska said. “I have to hope that someone will find enough similarities in the features, add that to the tattoo on her shoulder, and come up with a name.”

“No results with her fingerprints?” Möller asked.

Liska shook her head.

“The whole face needs to be reconstructed,” Pham argued. “What I come up with is going to be a guess. You need to reconstruct her skull.”

“That can be done,” Möller said. “I can disarticulate the head from the body. We can soak the skull in acid to clean the flesh from the bone. Of course, there is a considerable amount of damage to the skull itself, and the flesh is all that’s keeping it together in places. But then it’s like a jigsaw puzzle. We glue it back together.”

“And when we find her family, I get to explain why we decapitated their loved one and dissolved what was left of her face in acid,” Liska said.

“If no one can identify her, there is no family which needs an explanation,” Möller pointed out.

Liska tried playing that line through her mind in an imaginary conversation with Captain Kasselmann. Even in her imagination he wasn’t receptive.

“You need a forensic sculptor,” Nam Pham said.

“Yeah?” Liska said. “Well, I don’t have one. I have you. And I need a drawing. Today.”

•   •   •

NAM PHAM TOOK his own photographs of Jane Doe. Liska had to give him credit. As squeamish as he was, and as horrific as Jane Doe’s face was, he stood in there and took pictures from every possible angle. And Möller, as busy a man as he was, assisted, positioning the battered skull, arranging the dead girl’s hair with the gentle hand of a man who had daughters of his own.

This was what it would take, she knew. This was what they would have to do. They had to become this girl’s family. They didn’t know her name or the circumstances of her life or her death, but they had to become her family. They had to be the first line to keep her connected to the world of the living, or else she simply ceased to exist and the universe closed the tiny void left by her light going out, and it would be as if she never mattered. No one should ever die as if his or her life never mattered. Until they found a family to mourn her, the people dealing with her case would be her family.

When Liska had first come into Homicide, Kovac had drilled into her that the person they worked for wasn’t their immediate boss, wasn’t their chief, wasn’t the collective population of the city of Minneapolis. The person they worked for was the victim. They had to become the voice for the voiceless, the avengers for those who couldn’t avenge themselves. That truth was no truer than when their victim had no name.

Avenger sounded so much more dramatic and grandiose than cop. Avenger was a word to describe a comic book hero, not a civil servant. Like the character Kyle had created for his comic book stories, Ultor. Avengers had names like Ultor, not Sam or Nikki. They looked like gladiatorial gods and wielded superhuman powers.

Liska would have settled for the power to see the past, to see who this girl had been and what had happened to her. But she had no such power. She would have to use the tools she had, the most prominent being tenacity and determination. She would have to leave the comic book heroes to her son.

14

R U OK?

Kyle typed the words into his phone, then stared hard at the recipient of his text message. She sat two tables down in the next row, facing him, pretending to read her history book. Brittany Lawler: blond, pretty, popular, with big blue eyes that were like lakes on a cloudless summer day.

They were in the library. No talking allowed. No phones either, but everyone brought them anyway, turned them to silent mode and spent the study hour texting or on Facebook or Twitter. The librarians didn’t care as long as there wasn’t any noise.

He could tell by the way her eyebrows pulled together that she had gotten his message. She frowned. She knew exactly where he was sitting, but she didn’t look his way.

I C U, he typed and sent.

She frowned harder. Her thumbs worked the keyboard.

His phone vibrated in his hand.

Quit stalking me

Not stalking, he typed. Caring

Quit caring then

Trying 2 help

Don’t need ur help

O right. Cuz u have such good friends. Not.

She held up her phone so he could see it, turned it off, and put it facedown on the table. She picked up her history book and made a show of pretending to read it.

Kyle sighed and turned his attention back to his sketch pad. His fictional world made so much more sense to him. His alter ego, Ultor, was decisive and in control. He saw a problem; he took care of the problem. He identified a victim and became that person’s champion. Ultor was wanted, needed, appreciated. Only the bad guys fought with him—and they always lost. There was always a struggle, a fight, and Ultor did not always come out unscathed, but he always came out of the fight victorious. He was a hero and people loved him for it.

In real life—in high school, at least—people didn’t always want to be helped. Real life was more complicated.

Kyle worked his pencil over the paper, patiently adding detail to the scene. Ultor was muscular and angular, with broad shoulders and narrow hips. His arms and legs were sculpted. His belly was flat and cut, the six-pack showing through the skintight T-shirt he wore. His brow was low, his eyes narrow, his jaw wide and shadowed.

In this scene Ultor was putting himself between the girl he was protecting and the villain’s henchman. One arm reached back, putting the victim behind him. One arm stretched forward, directing the forceful beam of energy from the palm of his hand into the face of the attacker. Ultor was the center of the scene, the source of power. Everything else was pushed away from him by that power. Through the strength of the lines of Ultor’s body, Kyle had captured that sense of power and the tension that resulted from that power.

He was pleased with the look of the drawing. He paused for a moment to study it closely, and it dawned on him what it really said about his hero: that through his strength he protected the weak and fended off evil, but in doing so he isolated himself. Ultimately, Ultor was alone in his act of heroism.

The thought gave Kyle an empty feeling in the pit of his stomach. Was that the price of heroism? By definition a hero went above and beyond what an ordinary person would do. In doing so the hero separated himself from others in order to save them. He set himself apart. And while he might gain the admiration and adoration of those he saved, at the same time he distinguished himself as being different from them.

Kyle knew what that felt like without being a hero. He didn’t fit in. Unlike Brittany, he didn’t want to fit in. The clique she so desperately clung to was all about popularity, appearance, affectation. As lonely as it was to be an outsider, Kyle knew he would feel so much more alone and empty trying to exist within that phony social structure. Brittany was finding that out firsthand, and yet she didn’t want any part of him reaching out to her. She treated him like he was the enemy, while it was her so-called friends turning on her.

He refocused on his drawing, his eye going to the girl Ultor was attempting to save. She was pretty, blond. If he were to color this, she would have eyes the blue of lakes on a cloudless summer day.

With a couple of deft strokes of the pencil he changed her expression from one of relief at being saved to something more like resentment. Leaving Ultor standing truly alone, a hero to an ideal.

The bell rang. Kyle stuffed his phone in the pouch of his hooded sweatshirt, closed his sketch pad, and gathered his things. Brittany fumbled with her phone, dropped it on the floor, spilled half the stuff out of her purse. Her cheeks flushed red as she scrambled to grab everything up and get out of the library. Kyle waited and held the door open for her like a gentleman. She didn’t thank him.

“What was it Christina tweeted about you again?” he asked as they started down the hall.

Brittany refused to look at him. “She was joking.”

“Yeah. Lesbian slut. That’s funny,” he said flatly.

“You don’t understand.”

“I understand with a friend like that you don’t need an enemy.”

She huffed a sigh and rolled her eyes. “Kyle, just butt out. You’re not helping.”

“I thought you didn’t need help,” Kyle said. “You don’t want my help because I’m a freak. I’m a loser because I don’t think it’s funny to bully people and call girls whores on Twitter. You’d rather have friends who treat you like shit. That’s fucked-up, Britt.”

She hugged her books and her purse tight to her chest, her shoulders hunched with tension as they negotiated the mob in the hall. “Why can’t you just leave me alone?”

“Because I know you’re not like Christina. You’re so much better than her and the rest of them. You deserve better.”

She heaved a sigh as they turned with a flow of other students and started up the stairs like salmon bucking up a stream. She didn’t answer him. Kyle wasn’t sure if she didn’t believe she deserved better or if she didn’t believe she wasn’t like Christina Warner.

Christina was the bitch queen of the popular crowd. Girls wanted to be like her, wanted to be around her, wanted to be included in her inner circle of friends. She was the president of the sophomore class and belonged to all the right clubs. Teachers loved her. The people she liked saw her as successful and clever, always stylish. The people she didn’t like saw a different side of her.

“Have you heard from Gray?” he asked as they turned at the top of the stairs and started down the sophomore hall. Brittany stopped at her locker and focused on dialing her combination.

“No. Why would I hear from her? She hates me. That’s the last thing she said to me before she left. That she hated me and couldn’t wait to get out of here and never see anyone from here again.”

“Yeah, well, who could blame her?” Kyle said, leaning a shoulder against the next locker.

Christina Warner’s laugh drifted down the hall. Kyle could see them coming: Christina; her BFF, Jessie Cook; and her guard dog / boyfriend, Aaron Fogelman. Fogelman had a fat lip that gave Kyle a feeling of great satisfaction to see since he had made that happen.

Fogelman was over six feet tall and already beefy, like he was on steroids or had been held back five years or something. Despite the fact that he was a good enough student to attend PSI—or that his parents were rich enough to buy his way in—he struck Kyle as being as dumb as an ox. All the girls thought he was good-looking, but his eyes were a little too small and mean, and his mouth was always a little bit open. He was certainly stupid when it came to Christina. He followed her around like a big dog, willing to do whatever she told him. Kyle had given him the nickname the Henchman, though he didn’t call him that out loud. Calling people names was against his personal principles.

Brittany heard them coming too. She huffed another impatient sigh and gave Kyle a nasty look from the corner of her eye. “Would you just leave me alone?”

“You worried they’ll think you’re consorting with the enemy again?” he asked. “What’s Christina gonna put on Twitter this time? Last week you were a lesbian slut. Now you’ll just be a regular slut?”

She narrowed her eyes, trying her best to look mean. “There’s a reason people don’t like you, Kyle.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Because I tell the truth.”

“Hey, Brittany,” Aaron Fogelman said. “Is this runt bothering you?”

Kyle pushed away from the locker and stood with his feet shoulder-width apart, his books held low in front of him with both hands. He could be quick to drop them straight to the floor and move forward out of a fighting stance. Fogelman had taken the first swing of their last fight, but because Kyle tried always to be aware and ready, as Bruce Lee had taught, he had been able to move quickly, and Fogelman’s knuckles had only grazed his cheekbone.

“You’re calling me a runt, and I kicked your ass,” Kyle said. “What does that make you, Fogelman?”

“You didn’t kick my ass, Hatcher,” Fogelman said, irritated. “You must have a concussion.”

“From what?”

The truth was his body still hurt. Fogelman had fists the size of bricks, and he used them with what they called in the fight world “bad intentions.” He didn’t hit just to connect; he hit to hurt, to do damage. But Kyle would never show that Aaron Fogelman had hurt him. Fogelman might have been able to break him physically, but Kyle would always beat him when it came to gameness and psychological warfare.

Christina Warner held up her phone and took a picture of Kyle’s battered face. “This is what a loser looks like,” she said, tapping the keyboard. “Hashtag ‘Loser’ at XtinaW.”

She flipped her long white-blond hair back and gave Brittany a look, her perfect red lips turning down at the corners, her dark eyes filled with disapproval. “What are you doing with him, Brittany?”

“I’m not with him,” Brittany protested. “He won’t leave me alone.”

“You’re like a booger on a finger, Hatcher,” Fogelman said.

“I guess you’d know about that,” Kyle said.

Fogelman’s ears started turning red. It pissed him off no end that Kyle was more quick-witted than he was. He went for the cheap insult. “Why are you following a girl, anyway? Everyone knows you’re gay.”

Kyle narrowed his eyes, resisting the urge to punch Fogelman in the mouth, which was what he wanted to do. Not because he was a homophobe but because Fogelman was one, and thought that made him superior. Kyle thought of his hero, Georges St-Pierre, and what GSP said about dealing with bullies. Stand up straight; look your bully in the eye; do not retaliate with violence; be confident and tell the truth.

“Name-calling is the last resort of an ignorant mind,” he said.

Fogelman took a step in close, looming over Kyle, his expression dark. Kyle held his ground, never taking his eyes from the other boy’s. His heart started to beat a little harder. His ribs hurt as he tried to draw a deep breath, reminding him of the weight of this kid’s punches.