Chapter 7

Brock did his best to ignore the constant pounding on his front door but finally gave up and answered.

“Well, I knew it would be one of you,” he said when he saw Leslie standing outside. “I had a bet with myself as to who it would be. My left side lost and has to do the dishes tonight.”

Leslie didn’t laugh even though Brock thought he was hilarious.

“Jenny has been in her room crying for the last three hours,” Leslie said. “I’d like for you to come and talk to her.”

“No.”

“No, what?” Leslie asked.

“No, ma’am?” Brock asked.

“That’s not what I meant,” she told him. “I meant why not.”

Because I don’t give a flying fuck if she feels bad, Brock thought. It was a good thought, he decided.

“Because I don’t give a flying fig if she feels bad,” he said, editing himself slightly for content. “She should feel badly. I hope she’s miserable. Because that’s how she made me feel. And not just this afternoon.

“I don’t care if she’s unhappy. I don’t care what she wants and I don’t care what she might need. I think I said everything I care to say when I left this afternoon. If you must, you can tell her that I said there is no need to apologize and there is no need to feel badly. Your daughter is a very intelligent young woman. But she’s a common sense retard.

“Somewhere along the way you’ve forgotten to introduce her to the concept of consequences. I saved her from one of her bad choices the other night and she escaped the ramifications of her actions. That is as far as I’m willing to go and I’m unwilling to let her off the hook again. I have enough to deal with right now without having to worry about your spoiled bitch of a child. That’s your job, not mine.”

He closed the door in Leslie’s face. She suddenly realized, after all he’d been through and despite the fact he’d been forced to grow up quickly, Brock was still just a teenaged boy. She’d lost sight of that somehow, she supposed.

School was exactly as Brock had suspected it would be: half the kids believed the worst and viewed his as some sort of monster; the other half believed the best and viewed him as some sort of hero. But everyone treated him differently than they had a week before. He wasn’t imagining that.

One group couldn’t make up its mind. There were five or six girls in front of the school when he arrived on Tuesday morning protesting his very presence--they carried very pithy placards that they obviously had spent a good portion of the night working on, Brock thought. One read: “No means no; Miller must go!”

Brock guessed someone had clued the group in on the facts during the morning because by lunch time the same girls were carrying hand-drawn posters decrying his “unlawful detainment” and the sorry state of the American criminal justice system in general.

The leader of the posse didn’t smile when Brock mentioned he was happy that he’d given them a purpose.

“Right or wrong doesn’t seem to matter,” he told her. “As long as you have a reason to be pissed off you’re happy as hell.”

He also mentioned that her group should have kept the nice-looking signs they’d used in the morning since he suspected there would be an active sexual assault investigation beginning soon against another student. Of course the leader of the small group was a member of the girls’ soccer team so she didn’t find him all that amusing. Oh well.

Wes Mansfield was conspicuous by his absence, but only Brock seemed to realize that Jenny wasn’t at school either. He remembered the look on Wes’s face the day before and Brock slipped outside after homeroom and dialed the Miles’s residence. Leslie picked up the phone and Brock let out a sigh of relief.

“I just wanted to let you know that Wes didn’t come to school today,” he told Jenny’s mother. “I got a little worried when Jen was absent, too. I, I was just calling to make sure she wasn’t in any danger.”

Brock could almost hear Leslie’s smile.

“She’s fine,” Leslie said. “She didn’t sleep much last night so I’m keeping her home today. Can I tell her when she wakes up that you called to check on her?”

“Yeah,” Brock said. “I was a little rough last evening. But she’s hurt me pretty badly with her words and actions the last few weeks. I’ll stop over after practice assuming I survive the circus at school. I don’t know what Jen has in mind, but it’s going to be a while before I’m comfortable being her friend again. I hope you and she both realize that.”

Leslie let the last part of the statement go and focused on the first.

“Has it been bad at school?” she asked. “Maybe you should come home, too. I worry about you, too, you know.”

Brock chuckled.

“That’s one thing about being a convicted murderer,” he said. “People tend to watch what they say and do around you. I’ll be OK.”

True to his word Brock stopped by the Miles house for a few minutes to fill them in on his day. Jenny only said a few words to him and she could barely look him in the eye when she spoke.

Leslie left the two alone for a few minutes of silence. Brock didn’t have anything to say that wouldn’t have sounded patronizing and Jenny had nothing to say at all.

School was more of the same the next day. Jenny sat beside him in the classes she had with him and again at lunch but she kept the conversation to trivialities. Outside of Jenny most of the rest of the students pretty much treated him as they had the day before.

It was football practice when things started to get strange. Brock was still pissed that some of his teammates had started the rumor mill before they’d even left the parking lot on Monday and he didn’t mince words with the ones who been the most active callers.

“I don’t give a fuck if you talk about me,” he told one sophomore. “But if you’re going to chat like a little girl at least get the facts straight. I’ve seen you hanging around with Wes at parties. I figure if you weren’t so fat and lazy you’d be playing soccer because you’re such a pussy when it comes to contact, but if you’re going to tell half the story it’s probably best if you keep your mouth shut entirely.”

The boy tried to stammer something out but Bill Jacobs who finally stepped in.

“I think it’s probably best if we keep the conversations about our teammates to a minimum, ladies,” he said loudly enough for the whole locker room to hear. “I think we’ve got bigger things to focus on than what Brock did or didn’t do two years ago.”

Coach Jefferson had wondered what he could do to move practice back into form and he was glad Bill had spoken up. He wished it had been one of the seniors but most of them stayed as far away from leadership as they could possibly get.

“If I find out someone has been spreading false rumors,” the coach told the boys, “things are going to get rough for everyone. If anyone wants to watch his teammates run steps, that is the quickest way to accomplish it. Am I clear?”

It seems everyone got the message but a few of the boys that had tried hard to be Brock’s friend a couple of weeks earlier avoided him like the plague. He was used to such treatment, so it didn’t bother him--much.

The first-round playoff game was a comedy of errors. Corbly seemed to do whatever it could to give the game to its opposition but the opponent seemed just as ready to hand it back.

The game wasn’t decided until Bill took a punt back 55 yards for the game-winning touchdown with less than 3 minutes to play. Of course Lafayette also managed to win its playoff game so the scene was set for Brock’s infamous homecoming to Wilkins.

Brock’s life was entirely different than it had been a week before. There were no invitations to parties and only Bill and Jenny seemed to go out of their way to speak to him. Brock had done his best to avoid Jenny since the afternoon the week before.