Free Wallflower by William Bayer

school. I wrote her, but she didn't answer. So okay, I figured when college started up again, we'd see each other and have a chance to talk. But come September she had a whole new attitude. Now all she wanted was to fence. She had ambitions, wanted to become an Olympic competitor. Her Italian coach had told her she had the potential for it but she'd have to give it everything she had. 'That's what I want,' she told me. 'I want to go all the way. I don't want to waste my energy anymore dating people I don't care about or smoking pot and playing games with your chums.' 'Well, okay,' I said, 'that's fine. I'll go along with that. Let's start over, just the two of us.' But that didn't interest her either.
    We had a big fight. She told me she didn't care if she ever saw me again. She called me all kinds of stuff. 'Shallow.' 'Spoiled.' 'No backbone.' 'No integrity.' 'User.' 'Pimp.' And she was right. Maybe that's why it hurt so much. She saw through me clearer than anyone ever had. She saw me for what I really am, which is just what you're looking at now, Janek. Yeah, I think you see me pretty much the way she did. As a jerk. A zero." And with that he gave out with a forlorn little whelp and then a droopy self-pitying smile.
    A nicely executed mea culpa, Janek thought, but he still had to be sure Gale hadn't gone after Jess in revenge.
    "Okay, Greg. Pick yourself up. No law says you gotta be slime. That's a choice you don't have to make."
    As Gale peered at him, searched his eyes for sympathy, suddenly Janek was sick of him. He was tired of people who made their confessions, then looked to him for solutions to their lives.
    What had he said to Monika that night in Venice? That he did what he did to gain wisdom, to comprehend the numerous varieties of human evil. But Greg Gale wasn't evil, at least not to a degree that mattered. He was smalltime-fucked up-rich kid-spoiled, and who gave a shit anyway? But somehow, some way this kid's life had touched Jess's, so no matter how sickening Janek found him, he still had to play out the string.
    "You see yourself as decadent, but underneath you're pretty soft."
    In return, as he expected, Gale gave him the warm, grateful, amazed look—the one Janek always got at this point in an interrogation—the look that said: " Thank you for understanding me so well."
    "So you were hurt by her. She was a great kid, but she was capable of hurting. You don't decide to become an Olympic-class fencer if you haven't got some pretty hard stuff inside. In my experience women are tougher than men. Easy to forget that when they cry. But they can ream you out and backwards when they feel like it. Isn't that the truth?"
    Still caught up by Janek's magical insights, Gale nodded solemnly.
    "You were angry. It's okay, Greg. Admit it."
    "Well, sure. Those things she said—"
    "Made you feel like a worm. Pretty hard to take a beating like that without getting mad about it, wanting to hit the girl back."
    Gale shrugged. "I didn't want to hit her. All I wanted was for us to, you know, hold each other."
    "She rejected you, made you feel awful."
    "Yeah. . . ." The spell was still holding; Gale was in a kind of dazed, suspended state.
    "If she wouldn't go out with you, who would she go out with? You were jealous of what she did with the group. How about people you didn't know, sex you wouldn't be able to watch?"
    "I didn't want to think about that."
    "Of course not. You'd go crazy if you did. But how could you be sure? Unless there was some way to . . . close her off. Prevent anyone else from getting what you couldn't get. That's when you thought of it, right?"
    He looked into Gale's eyes, but all he could see there was confusion. No anger, no rage, no word forming to come out or being throttled so it wouldn't. This boy didn't know anything about glue; of that Janek now was certain. Greg Gale hadn't stabbed Jess, and he hadn't mutilated her. He was lost in a reverie of his inadequacy as man, not in a fantasy of