Charligirl's still the best beta ever.

Chapter 4

"Check out my faggot brother, Ace," Eyeball said, pinning Chris's arm behind his back and twisting. "How long do you think he can go without screaming?"
"I dunno, Eyeball," Ace replied, smirking. "Give it a try."
Eyeball yanked on the twisted arm. Hard. Chris gasped with pain but didn't make a sound.
"Hey!" Gordie cried indignantly, ignoring Chris's frantic gestures to be quiet. "You can't do that!"
"And why the hell not?"
Chris was squirming in Eyeball's iron grip, trying intensely to shut Gordie up, but the dark haired boy missed all the signals.
"Because! He's your brother! I-"
"This kid talks too much, Eyeball," Ace interrupted gruffly. "We're gonna have to shut him up."
"Go for it," Eyeball acknowledged, throwing his brother to the floor with a thud. "I sure as hell don't want to hear all that bullshit."
Ace backhanded Gordie across the face swiftly. Gordie, who hadn't been expecting to be actually hit, fell like a sack of potatoes. The last thing Gordie saw was the steel tip of Ace's boot six inches from his face and then everything went black.

When Gordie awoke, it was to Ace and Eyeball in his line of vision, blocking his sight of everything else in the room. Both of them smelled of whiskey- Gordie wondered why he hadn't smelled it before.
"He's up," Eyeball reported, completely unnecessarily.
"I can see that, fuckface," Ace retorted impatiently.
Gordie found that he couldn't speak. He didn't know whether it was from damage to his vocal cord or pure fear. He craned his neck around the two of them to see Chris lying face down on the floor ten feet away. He didn't move and his chest wasn't rising with breath.
"Did you. . . did you kill him?" Gordie squeaked hysterically. Eyeball and Ace laughed.
"Hell no. He's not worth our time. We're taking you home, kid, and if you say one goddamned word, I swear to God we'll kill you," Ace said softly. Eyeball nodded in the background.
Gordie nodded numbly, realizing that every time he moved his head, it hurt more. He reached up to touch his face and brought his hand back to look at it; the hand that had touched his cheek was covered in blood.
"Good boy," Ace said coldly, and picked Gordie up to sling him over his shoulders. Eyeball followed- to pick him up and put his skull back together if he fell, Gordie reasoned vaguely.
Gordie recognized familiar landmarks from his odd position over Ace's shoulder, but he missed all of the weird looks people were giving them. He registered only one thing: they were going home. To his house.
Ace walked up the stairs to the front door and knocked. After a while, Gordie's mother came to the door.
"Can I help you?" she asked, her nose wrinkled, and then realized what Ace was carrying over his shoulder.
"Oh my God!" she shrieked. "Oh God! What happened?"
"We found him behind Quidacioluo's, Mrs. Lachance. I guess some punks beat him up."
Eyeball sighed heavily. "They did the same thing to my brother, ma'am. I just don't understand who would do this."
Mrs. Lachance wrung her hands. "Richard!" she screamed. "Richard, come here, quick!"
"What is it, Dorothy?" Mr. Lachance grumbled, coming down the stairs, but his eyes widened when he saw Eyeball and Ace laying his son on the couch. He quickened his pace and sprinted to his wife. "What the hell happened here?"
"These boys found Gordie behind the grocery store," Mrs. Lachance explained tearfully. "They brought him here."
"You're the Chambers boy, aren't you?" Mr. Lachance asked with narrowed eyes. Eyeball nodded uncertainly.
"Mrs. Lachance, would you like us to call a doctor?" Ace asked sweetly.
"No, that's quite all right, Mr. Merrill. But thank you. Thank you so much," Mrs. Lachance replied, wiping tears from her eyes.
"All right," Ace said sympathetically, and gestured for Eyeball to follow him. "We'd better be going, then. . . my mother doesn't know where we are. . . she'll be worried, you see. . . "
"Of course," Mrs. Lachance said, smiling at them through her tears. "Thank you boys. Richard?"
Mr. Lachance dug into his pocket and found two crisp, clean, ten dollar bills. He pressed them into each boy's palms, saying, "Boys like you are people all the kids should look up to."
"We try," Ace said seriously, and left, shutting the door quietly.
"Who would do something like this?" Mrs. Lachance asked her husband desperately. "Gordie doesn't have any enemies, does he?"
"I don't know," Mr. Lachance replied indifferently, and shrugged. "Dorothy, holler if the boy wakes up. I've got to go, the ball game's on."
Mrs. Lachance looked at her husband disgustedly. "You're going to leave him, totally unconscious, to watch a ball game?" she cried shrilly, but he'd already left to go into the living room.
She sighed and sat down on the couch next to her son. "Poor Gordie," she whispered, stroking hair away from his forehead, damp with sweat. "Poor, poor Gordie."

Mrs. Lachance doted on her son incessantly for the next three days. The conversation they had was always the same.
"Gordie," Mrs. Lachance would sigh, looking at him sadly, "who did this to you?"
Gordie would pause, and look out the window distantly. Finally, he'd clear his throat and mutter, "I don't know, mom. I didn't see him."
Gordie stuck to that story for the rest of his life. No one ever found out that he had an all too clear picture of who it was that had done this to him. And he didn't care so much about himself- he had healed and was practically back to normal, save for a huge bruise over his left eye and a stiff left ankle.
It was Chris he was worried about. Mrs. Lachance hadn't let her son out of the house in days, and Chris hadn't come to visit. It made Gordie wonder if he was all right. On the third day, Gordie was driven so insane with worry that he'd almost have preferred to see Chris dead than keep having to wonder how he was doing.
"Please, mom, let me go out."
"No." His mother hardly looked up from her needlework.
"Why?!"
"Because. You aren't well."
"I'm fine!"
"You're not. You still walk with a limp."
"Dad walks with a limp!"
"Your dad's not normal."
Gordie sighed. Every day started with this nagging argument now. He could tell right now that he wasn't going to win this one, either.
He trudged upstairs, resigned to another day alone, when suddenly a knock came at the door.
"Aaah! I'll get it!" Gordie cried at the top of his voice, and jumped down the stairs. It would have been cool looking had he not fallen over.
"Gordie, you spaz," Mrs. Lachance reprimanded, crossing the living room to the front door. "Oh, hi, Chris," Gordie heard his mother say from the door.
"Chris!" Gordie cried ecstatically, overjoyed at hearing his best friend's voice. "Gordie? Where are you?" "I'm here!" Gordie cried, raising his hand above his head.
Chris ducked away from Gordie's mother to look at Gordie, sprawled on the ground by the stairs.
"Gordie, what the hell are you doing there? Oops, sorry, Mrs. Lachance," he added to Mrs. Lachance's disapproving stare.
"I fell! Is that so wrong?"
Chris shook his head. "How have you made it fifteen years without killing yourself, Gordie?"
Gordie smiled up at him from the floor. "It's a mystery."
Mrs. Lachance put an arm around her son's best friend. "Chris, I never did get the chance to thank your brother properly. Will you tell him thank you for me?"
"For what?" Chris asked, confusion evident in his voice.
"Why, for saving Gordie, of course."
"But he didn't-" Chris stopped short, noticing Gordie flailing his arms wildly behind his mother. "I mean, he didn't think it was any trouble," he said slowly.
"You've got such a nice brother, Chris," Mrs. Lachance commented. "You're very lucky to have him." She smiled and left.
"What the fuck was that?" Chris demanded angrily, once they'd reached Gordie's room and locked the door behind them. "You didn't go along with Eyeball's story, did you?"
"Well, it was kind of hard not to, seeing as how I wasn't awake at the time!"
"You could have told her after you woke up!"
"Yeah, and be hunted by Ace for the rest of my life!"
Chris exhaled. "I never took my brother and his jackass friends into account when I. . . you know. . . " he said helplessly, by way of apology. "I talked to Justi the other night, and she says that it's all over town. Everyone knows."
"About us getting beat up?"
"Well, yeah. . . and about why."
"Ugh," Gordie groaned, his heart sinking.
"Yeah. Ugh. In short, we're hated."
"By everyone?"
"Just about."
"Oh no."
"Hey, it's nothing new for me," Chris said, and shrugged. "People hate me all the time. But you're not used to being hated, are you?"
"I've got friends like Teddy, don't I?"
Chris scoffed angrily, snapping into the father mode that Gordie hated so much. "Don't get smart with me, dammit. I'm looking out for you."
"I know," Gordie said, fidgeting under Chris's intense gaze.
"Gordie, don't hate me."
"I don't hate you."
"Don't ever hate me."
"I'll hate you if you keep saying stupid stuff."
"If I shut up, do you promise not to hate me?"
Gordie grinned. "Yeah."
Chris allowed himself a small smile, but it quickly disappeared. "Did my brother give you that?" he asked softly, pointing at Gordie's black eye.
Gordie shrugged. "Yeah, but it looks like they got you a lot worse than they got me," he returned, taking in Chris's eyes, both darker than his own, and his crooked nose and cut lip.
"Nah. I've had worse."
Gordie put his hands in his lap and sat down on the bed. "Chris," he started. "Maybe. . . maybe the world isn't ready for this yet."
"What are you saying?" Chris's eyes grew a little panicked.
"I'm saying that maybe we should. . . we should keep this secret."
"How long?"
Gordie sighed. "I dunno. A day. Forever. We'll have to just take it one day at a time."
"But Justi says the whole world knows, Gord. How do we get out of that one little problem?"
"Do you really think," Gordie asked, smiling, "that we'll have trouble convincing the whole town that we got drunk that night?"
Chris grinned now too.
"We'll get Teddy and Vern to lie for us," Gordie continued. "We'll get them to tell whoever asks that we all got drunk and that you and me went back to your house. We kissed when we were drunk. No one's going to argue that- the fucking Mayor kissed a guy when he was drunk on New Years, and no one cares now, do they? All we need to do is ask Teddy and Vern, and- --"
Chris frowned. "Oh yeah," he said, as if remembering something he'd forgotten a long time ago. "Teddy and Vern. Have you talked to them lately?"
Gordie shook his head.
"How do you think they'll take it?"
"I don't think we'll have any trouble with Vern. Teddy's a little harder, but he doesn't have any friends other than us. If he leaves us, he's screwed."
"Not if he and Vern both leave."
"Vern won't leave," Gordie said confidently. "You've done too much for him."
It was true. Vern, with a lot of help from Chris, had transformed over the years from a short, fat, homely whiny kid to a tall, slender, handsome whiny kid.
"Get Justi to talk to him," Gordie persisted. Everyone knew by now about Vern's unbelievably hopeless crush on Justi. "If he listens to any one of us, it'll be her."
"Gordie, I'm starting to think that there's no one better to be gay with than you if you don't want anyone to know."
"You don't have a choice, Chambers," Gordie teased, pulling Chris toward him by the collar and kissing him. "You're stuck with me."
"I don't mind."

End of Chapter 4