Free Mick by Chris Lynch

brow. I looked down the block and saw the policeman walking our way. Which certainly explained Terry’s shyness.
    “I’m fine, officer,” the woman said. “I was being harassed by some hoodlum in a truck, but fortunately this decent young gentleman happened by.”
    Decent young gentleman? I hadn’t exactly been swimming in that stuff lately. This I could like. And she didn’t even know I was in the truck with Terry.
    “Good work, son,” the cop said, then looked quizzical. He leaned a little closer to sniff me.
    I pulled away, turned my face from him. The last thing I needed was for the officer to smell what really made the hero brave. So much for basking in my new goodness. “You okay now?” I asked the woman, and when she said she was I took off. “Can’t be late for school,” I said in a rushed voice, like I cared.
    I was very late for school, which earned me detention, so I could be very late after school too. But I felt good. I had done something okay. My brother wasn’t going to slit my throat for another nine hours or so, so that was cool. This was already a good day by recent standards.
    But there was nobody to tell it to. I was at school.
    Well, there was one somebody I’d have loved to tell, except she’d never listen. Her name was Evelyn. Evelyn was special. She was in the avant garde of hating me, having hated me long before I was on TV. I asked her to go to a dance with me one time and she ripped three buttons off my shirt without even saying no. She was so cold to me, it was thrilling.
    And if there was an opposite of me, an anti-me, it would be Evelyn. She was a poet. She was Cuban. She also said she was part Narragansett Indian and part Russian. She had long silky black hair that came down to her waist some days and disappeared completely under a hat on other days. Nobody ever knew how much of what she said was true, because in fact she was weird like you’d figure a poet would be. But some days she did look like a real Indian, and some days like a real Russian. What she always managed, though, was to look like nobody else in this brain-dead school. Being so different meant she was largely considered to be out of her mind, thus she had almost as many friends around here as I did. So now and then I figured I had a shot with her.
    Evelyn was in detention with me that day because instead of the essay on Oscar Wilde she was supposed to do, she handed in a poem: “All in the gutter/some look at stars/while others try to lure/students into their cars.” As usual nobody knew what she meant, but the English teacher, Mr. Wolman, seemed to take it rather personally, getting all red-faced and tearing the paper into fifty million pieces.
    So Evelyn was down there in the gutter with me, sitting right next to me, and I was feeling a little bit of okay with myself, enough to give her a try.
    I pulled my mini magnetic backgammon set out of my inside jacket pocket. “Wanna play?” I asked.
    She turned a fish eye on me. “Roses are red/violets are blue/... screw,” she said.
    “Why are you so mean to me?” I asked.
    “Because you’re a pig.”
    “I am not a pig.”
    “Yes you are. Stop talkin’ to her.” The voice came from the other side of the room.
    “What’s your problem, man?” I asked.
    “Just leave her alone or I’m gonna kick your ass.”
    Here we go round the goddamn mulberry bush. Again. “Eat shit,” I said, but I didn’t enjoy saying it as much as I used to. I was getting like one of them oldies acts that sing the same songs, do the same dances a million times until it’s all meaningless. You know the tune by now.
    “Oh ya?”
    “Ya.”
    “Lick my pinga.”
    “Lick your...? Well, lick mine too.”
    “Outside?”
    “Damn right outside.”
    And it was a date. Evelyn showed up to watch, bless her frigid soul. So did four of the eight other detainees. And, of course, me and Ruben Cruz.
    “Your breath stinks, you Irish mick stupid drunk bastard.”
    It was probably true,