Page 91 of Close Quarters

“You sound like some of my teachers.”

“What do you mean?”

I shrugged with one shoulder, considering I was using the other to lean over and adjust the fire. “I used to get a lot of shit in school. I mean, for the stuff you’d expect, like not being able to sit still, talking too much, getting into trouble over my ‘good ideas,’ stuff like that.”

“Yeah, not struggling to picture that,” he said with a chuckle.

I handed him the lighter. “Light the starter block, ya fucking comedian.”

“Fine,” he said with a roll of his eyes, leaning over to do it. “So why else did you get in trouble?”

“Because I was always asking them questions. Drove my teachers nuts.”

“Aren’t you supposed to want to understand shit? Most of my teachers would have probably shit their pants if I ever asked a question in class instead of glaring at the walls.”

Much like he wasn’t surprised by my antics as a kid, it wasn’t difficult for me to picture a teenage Reno sullenly glaring at random objects. “I don’t know, there were some good teachers. But most of them just got pissy if I had questions. Mrs. Duna, my freshman year, gave me detention because she kept insisting we were totally on the right side of things when it came to the war with Mexico over Texas and shit. I pointed out that we did some fucked up shit, and they had every right to be pissed about land, but she wasn’t having it.”

“God, that’s…bitchy.”

“Yeah, pissed me off. I mean, shit, I was actually paying attention and reading shit, that should have thrilled her. But nope, just gave me detention. So I kept going over everything in the textbook just in case she said some stupid shit to correct her on.”

“Okay, that’s either brilliant or petty as fuck.”

“I’ll take both as an acceptable answer. I got transferred out of her class halfway through the year because of it. The next teacher was some boring dude who just had us read the stuff then do assignments, barely lectured, so I got bored again.”

“The Texas education system is thriving.”

“Hey, there were some great ones, some good ones, and ones that…well, they were average, I guess,” I said as the flames grew and the logs started catching. “Most of the teachers I had were average or better. There were just some shitheads.”

Reno leaned back and watched as the fire steadily grew, lighting the area around us and warming it. “I don’t remember most of my teachers. They’re all just…blurs as far as I was concerned. By the time I got to high school, I had a reputation anyway. So whenever a teacher got me, they just hoped nothing happened. Except Mrs. Mutz.”

“Mutz? Really? Now there’s a name.”

“She was a grade-A bitch, let me tell you. That was my last year in school before I dropped out.”

“Was she…part of the reason?”

“Eh, she didn’t help. It just…it didn’t matter what I did. She was always out to get me. She was always…poking at me. Making me sit next to people who’d tried to start shit with me, calling on me, and then getting pissed when I didn’t know the answer. I’d get detention for the stupidest shit, like not having a pencil, but she’d say I was being disruptive. She’d write me up every chance she got, and I stopped even half-ass doing shit in class when she’d always mark everything as badly as she could.”

“Jesus, what the fuck was her problem?” I asked. “I mean, I get that you probably had a reputation, but?—”

“Oh, I definitely had one,” he said with a snort. “I wasn’t the only one she went after, but she focused pretty hard on me. I never gave her the satisfaction of being able to set me off. But I knew one day I was going to lose my shit, so…well, the idea of leaving school just kept sounding better and better.”

“Still, no reason to treat someone like that. Especially if you didn’t do a damn thing in her class.”

“Maybe she thought it was going to happen one way or another, and she just wanted me out. Or maybe she was just a giant bitch who saw someone she thought she could easily get a reaction out of.”

Without the presence of anyone but Coyote and Cheyenne nearby and incapable of tattling on us, I slid over and sat beside him. He eyed me with faint amusement but didn’t tense or pull away. Even when I reached to wrap my arm around his waist, he stayed where he was, staring past the flames. Sometimes, I wondered if it was the past he was getting lost in or just his thoughts. I hoped it was just his thoughts because if his previously disrupted sleep was any indication, his past wasn’t a place I wanted him to get lost in too often.

“Are you going to get your GED when you get out of here?” I asked after a few minutes of silence, save for the gentle wind and the crackling of the fire.

“I probably should,” he said after a moment, eyes still off in the distance. “I can’t go back to what I was doing before.”

“What were you doing before…before you got arrested,” I said, careful not to draw too much attention to that particular gap in his history. I only knew that he had badly hurt a couple of people, bad enough to warrant felony charges and a hefty prison sentence. He had always given…well, I couldn’t say hints because he didn’t do hints, and I didn’t catch onto hints very well. So, it was a lot more accurate to say he had made it clear he did not want me to pry into that particular part of his past.

“Odd jobs,” he said with a shrug, lips thinning. “Dead-end burger flipping. Random construction jobs where I was the guy who carried shit around. Sometimes I’d sell shit, weed, and sometimes coke for the people who could afford it. Tried to make people charge me for watching their kids, but that was fucking stupid.”

“Why? I’d be charging hazard pay if people made me watch kids…probably because leaving me in charge of kids would be a terrible fucking idea.”

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