Read Bullettime for Free Online Page B

his days in a soporific stupor, too blitzed to notice even when Malik holds out a big meaty arm for Dave to walk into, sending him to the floor. Malik laughs, then yawps when his laugh doesn’t compel a sufficient number of girls to turn around. Then he walks on. There’s no rhyme or reason for these attacks, and that’s what they are, Dave decides. There isn’t some group of students who are bullies or gang members or “acting out,” however people put it—attacks and assaults come in waves. It’s information, abstract, that occasionally finds a medium of expression in someone next to Dave.
    A chop to the throat, light but painful enough, then some big brown eyes in his face, demanding this or that admission of joy in taking it up the ass like a fag, or in being a white dick-eating bastard. Dave mutters some response, and the mouth under the eyes says, “Excuse me?” But it’s not arrogant, or threatening, or a simmering response to a perceived challenge, the kid—whatever his name was, James something—really just said, “Excuse me?” the way his mother must have taught him to do at age three whenever he didn’t hear something completely.
    Erin walks by, a magazine folded over in her left hand, her eyes squinting (Dave finds the hint of crow’s feet attractive, a flaw that makes her accessible) and Dave shouts in the hope that she’ll turn around. “I said fuck you! You’re the faggot!”
    Dave’s nose crunches under a fist, Erin turns a corner, blood wells up in the undersides of Dave’s eyes. The pain feels like it’s four feet away, and to the left.
    James (his name was James) is suspended for a week and no more because Dave shouted and that means it was a fight between kids and not a random assault, and besides, as James explained, yeah he threw the fist but it was Dave’s nose that broke and he had no idea such a thing could happen because his punch was more of a tap. Dave’s week is spent with Ann discovering the injury anew every morning—“Are your eyes
still
red? When are the bandages coming off again?”—and Jeremy just frowns and asks whatever happened to those Tae Kwon Do lessons Dave had two summers in a row when he was eight and nine.
    And Erin walks by. Erin hops the turnstile at the PATH station and flips off the shouting janitor, while Dave stands at the top of the escalators, staring till he gets an elbow to his back. Erin walks by while Dave eats a Philly cheese steak in the food court at the mall (he’s waiting for his movie to start; he goes in the afternoon because it’s cheaper and he can go alone with a minimum of hassles), and she’s the only female he sees that isn’t clutching at least two heavy-looking bags of boring mall store clothing. Erin walks by in dreams and in dreams Dave has some witty line to share but the floor warps and collapses into the Ylem and I flail into the darkness—but how it really happened involved the one time Erin didn’t just walk by.
    Erin walks into Dave’s room while he sits playing some flash game on the computer and she says, “Hi!” like a friendly eight-year-old making a new friend on the playground. Dave yelps and jerks around, his chair teetering. They hadn’t said a word to one another since the day he saw her working at the diner. Dave hadn’t even been to the city since then.
    “Your mother let me in. I told her that we’re studying together.” Erin smiles. “I even told her that it was for the Health class unit on Human Sexuality, and I brought a visual aid.” She shrugs her backpack off her shoulder, reaches into it and withdraws a diapered five-pound bag of flour. Hefting it in her palm, her lips pursed from the tiny strain, she says, “Catch,” and lobs it underhanded to Dave, who grunts and nearly fumbles as the flour thumps hard against his chest and hiccups a puff of white powder.
    “You’re the worst father ever!” Erin shrieks, her hands clawing her hair. Dave twitches and more flour spills as Erin