"You can touch my chest if you want," she whispered.
He couldn't believe he'd heard her right. For several seconds he did nothing, and then he gingerly slid his hand between their bodies. The well-worn fabric of her blouse was soft beneath his palm. When she didn't stop him, he let his hand creep upward, still staying outside her blouse. He felt the bump that marked the bottom edge of her bra and waited in agony for her to push him away.
But she didn't move. He slid his fingers higher until he touched the slope of her breast. Through the fabric of her blouse and the sponginess of her padded bra, his hand closed over her. He groaned and held the soft mound as if it were a fragile baseball. They kissed and he gently kneaded it. The Fuller's back porch light snapped on and they sprang apart.
Her eyes were misty with the depth of her feelings for him. "I never let a boy do that to me," she whispered. "Don't tell anybody."
He shook his head and silently pledged to keep the precious gift she had given him their secret forever.
At seven-thirty the next morning, she met him on her front porch. He could see that she was embarrassed about what had happened between them the night before, and he was overwhelmed by her fragility. She was so vulnerable, so needful of his protection. As he watched the tip of her tongue flick nervously over her lips, he determined to shield her from all the spiteful demons at Clearbrook High.
"Do I look all right?" she asked, as if her entire future depended on his response.
He took in her white blouse with its gold circle pin on the collar and her pleated green plaid skirt. "You'll be the prettiest girl in the sophomore class," he replied earnestly.
They walked to school hand in hand, her small fingers curled through his bigger ones. He felt the morning sun warming his face, and shortened his strides so she could keep up. His shoulders drew back. A slight swagger appeared in his walk. With Candy Fuller walking at his side, he was no longer Mitchell Blaine. He was Mitch. Mitch the Indestructible. Mitch the Mighty. Mitch the Manliest of the Manly.
"Do you think the other kids will like me?" she asked.
An uneasiness passed through him, a vague foreboding. But he was Mitch the Fearless, Mitch the Brave, and he shook it off. "You shouldn't pay too much attention to what the other kids think."
He could see that his response mystified her, and he remembered that she was a cheerleader-part of a group that was dedicated to conformity. His uneasiness grew.
"Don't you think they'll like me?" Anxiety had crumpled her brow.
"Of course they will."
The American flag cracked in the morning breeze as, hand in hand, they walked into the school. They were in different homerooms, and he had promised to stay with her until second bell. As they walked down the main hallway, he was lulled by the joy of entering Clearbrook High with Candy Fuller at his side, and so he wasn't prepared when he rounded the corner by the sophomore lockers and the taunts began.
"Here's Mi-chull," the boys clucked, imitating his aunts. "Mi-chull, Mi-chull." There were five of them leaning against the metal locker doors, five scrubbed-up would-be rebels made omnipotent by banding together.
"Who's that you got there, Mi-chull? Hey, baby, come on over here and meet some real men."
Candy looked first at the boys and then at Mitch. She was bewildered by their behavior. None of the boys was as good-looking at Mitch, none as tall and well-built. Why were they taunting him?
Mitch tried to appear tolerant, as if they were children and he was a world-weary adult. "Why don't you guys grow up?"
They hooted with laughter and catcalls, pounded their fists in merriment against the locker at his absurd attempt to defy them.
Candy grew more befuddled. She gazed at him, accusation and betrayal beginning to form in her eyes. She had thought he was one of the special, one of Clearbrook's chosen. Now she realized that wasn't true. She had somehow managed to ally herself with an outcast.
He felt her fingers slackening in his and panic filled him. She wanted to get away from him, to distance herself. In those few seconds, everything changed. Without knowing any of the facts, without understanding a single detail of his past, she understood that he was a social pariah and that she should not have let herself be seen with him. He was going to lose Candy Fuller, and with that knowledge came the certainty that he didn't want to live anymore. If he couldn't be Mitch the Brave with Candy Fuller at his side, he didn't want to be anyone.
The girls had gathered around the boys, and they were laughing, too. Their amusement was easy and untroubled. Mitch had been the target of their jokes for so long that their attacks upon him were inspired more by habit than venom. They even felt a distant sort of fondness for the boy who had been the source of so much amusement over the years.
Candy was pulling at his hand now, trying desperately to get away from him, to take the small steps that would transport her from the land of the untouchable to the arena of the acceptable.
"Mi-chull, Mi-chull, "Charlie Shields called out in a high, good-humored falsetto. "Come here and get your diapers changed."
A blue-black vortex of rage and pain consumed him. The rage caught him in its grasp and sank its talons through his flesh. A cry built inside him as he let that small, sweet hand go, a roar of outrage at this loss of his fresh new manhood. And with that roar, years of dilligent self-control gave way inside him.
He launched himself at the boys. They were five and he was one, but he didn't care. It was a suicide attack, a kamikaze mission with no hope for personal survival, but only a distant yearning for some posthumous dignity of the spirit. They laughed as he came toward them. They catcalled at the hilarity of Mitchell Blaine attacking them. But then they saw the expression on his face and their mockery died.
He began to throw wild, vicious punches. The girls screamed and a crowd gathered in response to the invisible radar that instantly detected a hallway fight.
Charlie Shields shrieked in pain as Mitch's fist snapped the cartilage in his nose and sent blood spurting out. Artie Tarpey gave a grunt of agony as he felt a rib crack. Mitch was indiscriminate with his violence, propelled by a rage that had been building inside him for nearly a decade. He hit anything he could touch, and barely felt the blows he suffered in return. Two of the boys were finally able to pin him long enough to slam him into a locker. He smashed the thin metal door with his body and then hurled himself back at them.
The boys had fought among themselves since they were children, and there were unwritten rules of conduct they all followed. But Mitch hadn't been part of their fights, and he didn't know their rules. Now the boys found themselves the targets of a vicious, single-minded attack that was outside their realm of experience. Mitch brought Herb McGill down with a flying tackle and pinned him to the tiled floor. Charlie, holding his broken nose and whimpering with pain, tried to rescue Herb, but Mitch shook him away.
It took three male teachers to put an end to the violence, and even then Mitch didn't give up easily. As the men dragged him away to the principal's office, he refused to meet the eyes of Candy Fuller.
The aunts were summoned. They cried when they saw him slumped forward on the office bench with his bruised elbows propped on his thighs, bloody hands dangling between his splayed knees. His white starched shirt was torn and gore-spattered, his eye swollen closed. He looked up at their frail, birdlike frames and saw their fear for him.
Aunt Theodora recovered before her sister and advanced like a brigadier general upon the principal. "Explain this outrage at once, Jordan Featherstone. How could you allow something like this to happen to our Mitchell?"