Mystic River Read Online Free PDF Page B

all about it and be your friends next year.
    Dave would nod and wonder if there was something about him—some mark on his face that he couldn’t see—which made everyone want to hurt him. Like those guys in the car. Why had they picked him? How had they known he’d climb in that car, and that Jimmy and Sean wouldn’t? Looking back, that’s how it seemed to Dave. Those men (and he knew their names, or at least the names they’d called each other, but he couldn’t bring himself to use them) had known Sean and Jimmy wouldn’t have gotten into that car without a fight. Sean would have run for his house, screaming, probably, and Jimmy—they’d have had to knock Jimmy cold to get him inside. The Big Wolf had even said it a few hours into their drive: “You see that kid in the white T-shirt? Way he looked at me, no real fear, no nothing? Kid’s gonna fuck someone up someday, not lose a night of sleep over it.”
    His partner, the Greasy Wolf, had smiled. “I like a little fight.”
    Big Wolf shook his head. “He’d bite your thumb off just pulling him into the car. Clean off, the little fucker.”
    It helped to give them dopey names: Big Wolf and Greasy Wolf. It helped Dave to see them as creatures, wolves hidden under costumes of human skin, and Dave himself as a character in a story: the Boy Taken by Wolves. The Boy Who Escaped and made his way through the damp woods to an Esso station. The Boy Who’d Remained Calm and Crafty, always looking for a way out.
    In school, though, he was just the Boy Who Got Stolen, and everyone let their imaginations run as to what had happened during those four lost days. In the bathroom one morning, a seventh-grader named Junior McCaffery sidled up to the urinal beside Dave and said, “Did they make yousuck it?” and all his seventh-grader friends had started laughing and making kissing noises.
    Dave zipped his fly with trembling fingers, his face red, and turned to face Junior McCaffery. He tried to put a mean look in his eyes, and Junior frowned and slapped him across the face.
    You could hear the sound of it echo in the bathroom. One seventh-grader gasped like a girl.
    Junior said, “You got something to say, queer? Huh? You want me to hit you again, faggot?”
    “He’s crying,” someone said.
    “He is ,” Junior McCaffery shrieked, and Dave’s tears fell harder. He felt the numbness in his face turn into a sting, but it wasn’t the pain that bothered him. Pain had never bothered him all that much, and he’d never cried from it, not even when he’d crashed his bike and sliced his ankle open on the pedal as he fell, and that had taken seven stitches to close. It was the range of emotions he could feel pouring from the boys in the bathroom that cut into him. Hate, disgust, anger, contempt. All directed at him. He didn’t understand why. He’d never bothered anyone his whole life. Yet they hated him. And the hate made him feel orphaned. It made him feel putrid and guilty and tiny, and he wept because he didn’t want to feel that way.
    They all laughed at his tears. Junior danced around for a moment, his face twisted up in rubbery contortions as he aped Dave’s blubbering. When Dave finally got it under control, reduced it to a few sniffles, Junior slapped him again, the same place, just as hard.
    “Look at me,” Junior said as Dave felt a fresh burst of tears explode from his eye sockets. “Look at me.”
    Dave looked up at Junior, hoping to see compassion or humanity or even pity—he’d take pity—in his face, but all he saw was an angry, laughing glare.
    “Yeah,” Junior said, “you sucked it.”
    He feinted another slap at Dave and Dave dropped hishead and cringed, but Junior was walking away with his friends, all of them laughing as they left the bathroom.
    Dave remembered something Mr. Peters, a friend of his mother’s who slept over occasionally, once said to him: “Two things you never take from a man—his spit or his slap. They’re both worse than