Cowgirls Don't Cry

CHAPTER SIXTEEN - JESSE

It hurt me more than anything I'd ever felt before to see Katie so broken and disarmed at the hands of those messed-up bullies. Seeing Tristan, a tall guy at nearly sixteen, push over a slight fourteen-year-old girl had filled me with a rage so thick I couldn't think, and I wanted nothing more than to break his nose and then some. Never, in any situation under the sun, would he have been justified to shove Katie like that, leaving her bleeding and broken. I'd known something was going on with Marina and Zamirah, but I never could have predicted this fallout, nor the involvement of a whole group.

I was still burning with anger as a pale and almost hysterical Marina pulled her boyfriend away from the back of the science block, and the two other girls left, snickering. I knelt beside Katie and pulled her into my arms, holding her close like the afternoon of her fall, when she'd openly cried for the first time in a long while.

Katie hardly ever cried; if she fell she got right up again, and she could hold her own against almost anything, human, animal or otherwise, on the farm. She'd grown up with me and my brothers, so rough play and reckless dares were nothing new to her, and so there was nothing physical that could scare her; only the weight of other people's words.

As I wrapped my arms around her, she seemed a million miles away, her gaze lost in the distance and her breath ragged and catching with each sob. The tears flowed freely down her cheeks, making a damp smudge on my shirt as she rested her head on my chest. I didn't bother getting her to talk while she was this distant, but my chest tightened with equal parts worry and rage as I held her, each shaky breath she took tightening the knot around my heart and making it hard to breathe. I wanted, needed, to know exactly what was going on, as it was obviously far more serious than she'd let anyone see, and I wondered what else was happening that she was hiding from me.

Did her parents know? Her friends? Did anyone? Had this happened before, was it a regular occurrence or a once-off? Why were they targeting her like this? These questions dug out a deep chasm between us, driving my best friend, the girl I'd known quite literally since she was born, further and further away from me with every passing minute. My head was so taken up with all this that I barely heard her whisper my name a few minutes later.

"Jesse?"

"Yeah?" I replied softly, as Katie sat up and hugged her knees to her chest beside me.

"Do you always fight like that?"

"I don't really fight, but that guy - Tristan - he deserved anything he got," I replied evenly. "It wasn't a real fight, anyway. I didn't even hit him,"

"He hit you, though," Katie countered, and I ran my fingers over the cut on my bottom lip, where Tristan's fist had connected with my jaw. It was nothing compared to all the rodeo injuries we'd seen and experienced first-hand, and I wondered why Katie was so shaken by it.

"It's my fault, I'm sorry, Jess. I got you involved in this stupid mess," she dropped her gaze and I shook my head in surprise.

"No way is this your fault, Katie Morgan," I assured her, unsettled by the girl that sat beside me, and how different she was to my best friend of nearly fifteen years. "Those idiots were hurting you, and I would have gotten involved whether you wanted me to or not. I want- I need to know what's going on, Katie,"

"It's nothing, I told you," she said stubbornly and I sighed.

"No, it's clearly not nothing," I retorted. "People don't just randomly beat other people up,"

"Psychopaths do," Katie pointed out, her voice like glass, shattered and broken and hollow.

"Besides them," I countered, pushing my hands through my hair in frustration. "Would I be correct in guessing that Marina and Zamirah are mad at you for something that happened in gym a few weeks ago, and then have since decided they don't like you?"