Free The More You Ignore Me by Travis Nichols Page A

her life was simply a screen for his true lustful urges.
    But no one could, it seemed, so he nearly pulled off his plot to enslave Rachil sexually, but enter a sad Percival who blithely lurched along the campus paths, his own heart honking the same sad tune.
    No, dear readers, not me!
    Don’t be silly!
    It was, yes, Corn’s lumbering, wayward childhood chum, who we will for legal reasons here call “Rico.”
    Rico disrupted Corn’s penetrating line!
    Rico would, on these very same nights, drag his bootheels along the leaf-strewn paths of the campus, humming tuneless tunes, thinking of Jesus.
    How do I know these things?
    Patience, dear readers, patience—all will be revealed in due time.
    But perhaps a true novel would present something of its narrator at this point?
    Should we have had a preface or a prologue, something indicating that this “I” construct existed somewhere first as pure thought, as a formal “Point X”?
    But then that this “I” was slowly pinched into the world, unborn from reality into this farce?
    I remember darkness, shadows, fingers, and hands.
    When I was a child I was treated as a child, and so I left that child behind.
    Even before I left, I was no longer there.

CHAPTER 2
    Night.
    Summer.
    Corn and Rachil were at the dark biker bar where they had begun spending their after-hours, “alone together” to borrow a phrase.
    The biker bar was Corn’s idea, a futile attempt to prove to Rachil that he was a “stud,” though he was secretly terrified some leather-bound pituitary case would test his manhood by running a swarthy hand over Rachil’s supple body, his lust-crazed eyes daring Corn to “do something” as his fingers probed and pinched.
    Corn worried, too, that perhaps secretly Rachil would enjoy such pinches and would rut with a biker on the pool table in front of everyone while he stood impotently by.
    On this particular fateful night, in the midst of these puerile thoughts, he watched Rachil skip off to fetch more beer at the bar, leaving Corn by himself in the shabby booth where, alone for more than a minute with his paranoid thoughts, he became restless.
    There was a swarthy fellow near the pinball machine.
    Would he be the one?
    Damnit! Where had Rachil gone? Where was his beer?
    Not only was he paranoid, but he required service!
    Corn made a sour face and turned toward the bar, and there—oh there at the nicked and worn bar of the Boiler Room—he saw her.
    What was this!?!?
    He saw his Rachil, his point B, shamelessly flirting with some hulk with his back turned!
    The hulk sported an incongruous floral-print shirt and a tattered cowboy hat.
    Who was this usurper at the bar who caused Corn’s love to laugh uproariously at some joke?
    She placed a hand on the floral-print chest and gave a playful push.
    An unexpectedly powerful horn crept slowly up Corn’s spine, engulfing his skull and blaring out through his eyes RAAAAACHHHHILLLLL!!!!!
    He gritted his teeth.
    He got up.
    â€œYou!” Rachil said, peering around the hulk as Corn approached, laughing, hugging Corn, her bare arms sliding behind his neck with a strange supple grace.
    She kissed Corn’s cheek.
    That had never happened before.
    â€œLook who’s here!” she said, waving a bangled arm toward the hulk, who turned.
    Corn shuddered as his eyes met the gaze of the other.
    It was, yes, his former “best bud” Rico, who had become so different in only a semester.
    Some background about their childhood friendship: it was always thus, Corn the domineering little Caesar to Rico’s doughy centurion.
    But here at the University, after they had drifted apart in their respective premajors, Rico had finally managed to wriggle out from under his “friend”’s thumb after what were no doubt awkward high school years, a time we need not account for in detail because it is all the same for boys.
    Lust.
    Shame.
    Some