“This is not a matter for levity,” he said. “No amount of it will save your life.”
“You grossly underestimate the power of laughter,” I said. “But if there’s some kind of violent altercation between students, any janitor in the world would find it his honor-bound duty to report it to the administration.”
Coach Pete made a growling sound.
“Go ahead,” I said. “Let your kids loose on him. I saw how they behaved in their classrooms. They’re problem cases. Irwin’s obviously a brilliant student and a good kid. When the administration finds out the three of them were involved in a fight, what do you think happens to the Troublemaker Twins? This is a private school. Out they go. Irwin is protected—and I won’t have to lift a finger to interfere.”
Coach Pete rolled up the magazine and tapped it against his leg a couple of times. Then he relaxed, and a small smile appeared upon his lips. “You are correct, of course, except for one thing.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“They will not be exiled. Their parents donate more funds to the school than any ten other families—and a great deal more than Irwin’s mother could ever afford.” He gave me a very small, very Gallic shrug. “This is a private school. The boys’ parents paid for the cafeteria within which we stand.”
I found myself gritting my teeth. “First of all, you have got to get over this fetish for grammatically correct prepositions. It makes you sound like a prissy twit. And second of all, money isn’t everything.”
“Money is power,” he replied.
“Power isn’t everything.”
“No,” he said, and his smile became smug. “It is the only thing.”
I looked back out into the hallway through the open glass wall separating it from the cafeteria. The Bully Brothers were standing in the hall, staring at Irwin the way hungry lions stare at gazelles.
Coach Pete nodded pleasantly to me and returned to his original place by the wall, unrolling his magazine and opening it again.
“Dammit,” I whispered. The svartalf might well be right. At an upper-class institution such as this, money and politics would have a ridiculous amount of influence. Whether aristocracies were hereditary or economic, they’d been successfully buying their children out of trouble for centuries. The Bully Brothers might well come out of this squeaky clean, and they’d be able to continue to persecute Bigfoot Irwin.
Maybe this would turn out to be a slugfest after all.
I swept my way over to Irwin’s table and came to a stop. Then I sat down across from him.
He looked up from his page of scrawled sentences, and his face was pale. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“How you doing, kid?” I asked him. When I spoke, he actually flinched a little.
“Fine,” he mumbled.
Hell’s bells. He was afraid of me. “Irwin,” I said, keeping my voice gentle, “relax. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Okay,” he said, without relaxing a bit.
“They’ve been doing this for a while now, haven’t they?” I asked him.
“Um,” he said.
“The Bully Brothers. The ones staring at you right now.”
Irwin shivered and glanced aside without actually turning his head toward the window. “It’s not a big deal.”
“It kind of is,” I said. “They’ve been giving you grief for a long time, haven’t they? Only lately it’s been getting worse. They’ve been scarier. More violent. Bothering you more and more often.”
He said nothing, but something in his lack of reaction told me that
I’d hit the nail on the head.
I sighed. “Irwin, my name is Harry Dresden. Your father sent me to help you.”
That made his eyes snap up to me, and his mouth opened. “M-my … my dad?”
“Yeah,” I said. “He can’t be here to help you. So he asked me to do it for him.”
“My dad,” Irwin said, and I heard the ache in his voice, so poignant that my own chest tightened in empathy. I’d never known my mother, and my father died before I started going to school. I knew what it was like to have holes in my life in the shape of people who should have been there.
His eyes flicked toward the Bully Brothers again, though he didn’t turn his head. “Sometimes,” he said quietly, “if I ignore them, they go away.” He stared down at his paper. “My dad … I mean, I never … You met him?”
“Yeah.”
His voice was very small. “Is … is he nice?”
“Seems to be,” I said gently.
“And … and he knows about me?”
“Yeah,” I said. “He wants to be here for you. But he can’t.”
“Why not?” Irwin asked.
“It’s complicated.”
Irwin nodded and looked down. “Every Christmas there’s a present from him. But I think maybe Mom is just writing his name on the tag.”
“Maybe not,” I said quietly. “He sent me. And I’m way more expensive than a present.”
Irwin frowned at that and said, “What are you going to do?”
“That isn’t the question you should be asking,” I said.
“What is, then?”
I put my elbows on the table and leaned toward him. “The question, Irwin, is what are you going to do?”
“Get beat up, probably,” he said.
“You can’t keep hoping they’ll just go away, kid,” I said. “There are people out there who enjoy hurting and scaring others. They’re going to keep doing it until you make them stop.”
“I’m not going to fight anyone,” Irwin all but whispered. “I’m not going to hurt anyone. I … I can’t. And besides, if they’re picking on me, they’re not picking on anyone else.”
I leaned back and took a deep breath, studying his hunched shoulders, his bowed head. The kid was frightened, the kind of fear that is planted and nurtured and which grows over the course of months and years. But there was also a kind of gentle, immovable resolve in the boy’s skinny body. He wasn’t afraid of facing the Bully Brothers. He just dreaded going through the pain that the encounter would bring.
Courage, like fear, comes in multiple varieties.
“Damn,” I said quietly. “You got some heart, kiddo.”
“Can you stay with me?” he asked. “If … if you’re here, maybe they’ll leave me alone.”
“Today,” I said quietly. “What about tomorrow?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Are you going away?”
“Can’t stay here forever,” I replied. “Sooner or later you’re going to be on your own.”
“I won’t fight,” he said. A droplet of water fell from his bowed head to smear part of a sentence on his paper. “I won’t be like them.”
“Irwin,” I said. “Look at me.”
He lifted his eyes. They were full. He was blinking to keep more tears from falling.
“Fighting isn’t always a bad thing.”
“That’s not what the school says.”
I smiled briefly. “The school has liability to worry about. I only have to worry about you.”
He frowned, his expression intent, pensive. “When isn’t it a bad thing?”
“When you’re protecting yourself, or someone else, from harm,” I said. “When someone wants to hurt you or someone who can’t defend themselves—and when the rightful authority can’t or won’t protect you.”
“But you have to hurt people to win a fight. And that isn’t right.”
“No,” I said. “It isn’t. But sometimes it is necessary.”
“It isn’t necessary right now,” he said. “I’ll be fine. It’ll hurt, but I’ll be fine.”
“Maybe you will,” I said. “But what about when they’re done with you? What happens when they decide that it was so much fun to hurt you, they go pick on someone else, too?”
“Do you think they’ll do that?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s how bullies work. They keep hurting people until someone makes them stop.”
He fiddled with the pencil in his fingers. “I don’t like fighting. I don’t even like playing Street Fighter.”
“This isn’t really about fighting,” I said. “It’s about communication.”
He frowned. “Huh?”
“They’re doing something wrong,” I said. “You need to communicate with them. Tell them that what they’re doing isn’t acceptable, and that they need to stop doing it.”
“I’ve said that,” he said. “I tried that a long time ago. It didn’t work.”
“You talked to them,” I said. “It didn’t get through. You need to find another way to get your message through. You have to show them.”