Chapter 22

I still think everything might have just blown over fairly quickly, if Karen had only kept her mouth shut. I hadn't told anybody about anything. Denise hadn't told anybody what it was that had made her so unhappy on Monday, other than saying it only concerned her and me. Because of what I'd said to Doris Gindello earlier, about me going with Karen, everyone had assumed that this was what had Denise so upset.

On Wednesday, Karen returned to school. By lunchtime, everyone in school knew what Karen and I had been caught doing. I'm not sure why, but she talked about it to just about everyone that would listen to her. She talked about our private experiences practically non-stop from the minute she stepped onto the school grounds. I guess she figured the information would probably get out anyway. The only other thing I could think of for her doing that was that she wanted to make me a pariah at school. If that was what she expected to happen, she must have been disappointed with what actually started happening.

I took some teasing from the guys, but the girls reacted far differently. In every class I had, for the next two or three weeks, girls started paying me more attention. Whenever I looked up, some girl would be staring at me. In the hallway, between classes, girls would bump into me. These were all kinds of girls too, good-looking ones, and the not-so-good-looking ones. It wasn't safe for me to walk the halls. I got bumped into even on the stairs, once so hard, that I lost my balance, and dropped all of my books and folders. Two different girls apologized for bumping into me, and both of them stopped to help me pick up my things. In English class, about a week later, Harriet Simonson handed me a piece of paper with her address and phone number on it, telling me to either call her or else stop by her house sometime. She didn't even try to do it without everyone else knowing about it either. I heard several girls giggling about how brazen she was being.

The worst thing was that it gave Bill an excuse for him and me to get into another fight. It turned out the same way as the other one had, but at least I had the satisfaction of getting in some hits of my own this time. We were in gym class, and Bill was talking to some other boys, while we all stood around, waiting for the gym teacher to get done with some paperwork in his office. I was standing off to the side, by myself, when Ken Tremont yelled over to me, asking me if Karen's ass looked as nice naked, as it always looked when he saw her with her clothes on. I had heard things like this before, and I'd always ignored them. I was going to do the same this time until Bill piped in with some comment about Karen.

I think what he said was she must really have been desperate to have screwed me. It was something like that. I didn't like seeing Bill getting in on the teasing like that, but I wasn't going to say anything to him about it.

"Hey Larry, was Karen better than Eileen?" Bill yelled that out loudly, so there was no way I could pretend to have missed it, by making believe I hadn't heard him. Probably only he and I knew that the Eileen he was referring to was his own first cousin. Somehow, Bill had decided in his own mind that Eileen and I had screwed each other too. The way he brought Eileen's name into this kind of a discussion pissed me off. He had no right to say anything like that.

"You'd have to tell me how good Eileen is first, Bill." I still just wanted to make him stop. I thought if I turned the focus strictly on Eileen, and off of Karen, he'd see what a mistake it had been, bringing her name into this. I sure wasn't trying to pick a fight with him.

"She's all right, Larry, but Kate is a lot better at screwing." Half the guys in our gym class knew that my sister's name was Kate. It got pretty quiet. Then, Ken Tremont jumped back in, trying to keep the pot stirring.

"That's rank, Terry, that's his own sister that you're talking about."

"Stay out of this, Ken. You haven't heard him saying anything about how I'm lying, have you?"

"I don't know whether you're lying about your cousin, Bill, but you're definitely lying about Kate."

"Don't feel bad, Larry, someone was bound to screw her. She was so hot for it." Bill said that as he was walking towards me. I wasn't absolutely sure if he was talking about Kate, it might have also been Karen or Eileen. It didn't matter to me who he was talking about, because it was obvious that his intention was to make me mad enough to fight him.

If that was his intention, he had succeeded. I hit Bill in the face, before he could hit me. He quickly tackled me and got me down, but a few other guys jumped on him and pulled him off of me. We fought a bit more after that, but, even though I hit him several times, he beat me handily once again. The fight lasted at least a whole minute this time. Bill stopped hitting me only when the gym teacher came out of his office and blew his whistle. He came over and asked everyone what had happened. No one said anything, so, when the first bell rang, he let us go take our showers. My face was red from being hit, and I had some swelling under my right eye, but it wasn't really that bad. The fact that I'd hit Bill a few times made me feel better about it.

That night, I had a talk with Kate. I told her what Bill had said about her in the gym class. She didn't hesitate an instant, saying that he was lying. I asked her why Bill would make up something like that, and Kate said she didn't know why. She swore she hadn't spoken to him even one time since our first fight, several weeks before. Kate said she would be glad to call Bill just to prove it to me. I told her she didn't need to prove anything, but she insisted that she wanted to. I went into the kitchen while Kate dialed from the phone in the hallway. As soon as it started ringing, Kate yelled for me to pick up the extension in the kitchen. I picked it up and heard the ringing.

Jane answered, and Kate asked to speak with Bill. When Bill came on the line, Kate started yelling at him, asking what he meant by telling her brother those lies about her. Bill denied saying it until Kate threatened him by saying she'd get my parents involved with talking to his parents, in order to find out exactly who was lying, and who was telling the truth. Bill finally admitted that he said it, but then told Kate he meant a different Kate. It was all pretty pathetic, and Kate finally just hung up on him.

She asked me not to mention anything about her name being brought up as being a cause of the fight. She said this for when our parents asked me about my face. It was obvious from my face that I'd been in another fight. It was too bad I couldn't fight better. Every time I got into a fight, I brought the evidence home on my face.

"You didn't believe what he said, did you Larry?"

"No. I hit him because he said it, not because I thought it was true. I'm getting tired of him beating my ass though. Next time, I'll challenge him to a tango contest." That got me a little giggle. Kate knew that I didn't like to fight, and that I didn't fight very well when I did. I went into the bathroom after we talked, and soaked my face with a washcloth and cold water. You could still tell that I'd been fighting, but it didn't look as bad as it had before. When my parents got home that evening, I told them I'd gotten into a small scuffle with another boy in gym class. I told them the teacher had broken it up, and neither of us had gotten into any trouble. Me not getting into any trouble seemed to calm them down a little.

During all this time, from the time we got caught until the fight with Bill, I kept seeing Karen all around the school, but I didn't try to speak with her. It was the same thing with Denise, I'd see her, but we weren't speaking at all. About the only girl I was still speaking to, at least the only one that I wanted to speak with was Clara. She knew what had happened, because Kate filled her in on everything, but she didn't act upset with me about it. I guess she figured that with what she was doing with Kate, she had little room for complaining about anything that I might have done with anyone else at all.

The next day, the one after that fight, both Denise and Karen are waiting for me about two blocks from my school. It was out of the way for both of them to be there, so I assumed they must have decided that they wanted to yell at me. I walked up to them, and Karen asked me how my eye felt. I told her it looked worse than it felt.

"Larry I'm sorry for telling everyone about what happened. I was mad at you and at my parents. I guess I was mad at myself too. I just wanted to tell you I'm sorry. I didn't want to wait so long to apologize to you this time."