Chapter IV - Nicole Baylor, Present Day

Testimonial from Michaela's childhood best friend.

Nicole Baylor - Present Day

I can't really tell you why I was so mad at Mickey, or why I blamed her for what happened to King.  I guess I just did.

I didn't quite feel that way until I saw my brother lying there in that hospital bed.  I saw Mickey really quick, when they were bringing her to a room.  Her face was bruised, and she cried out when they lifted her to the bed.  I wanted to go in but they shut the door.  So when I was going in to see my brother, I thought I was prepared.  I thought that it would only be a little worse than Mickey, but it was a lot worse.  They had broken his jaw, his nose and some other bones in his face.  There was a bandage on his left eye, and the other had blood in the whites.  His left arm was in a cast, his jaw wired shut.  Internal injuries were certain to require surgery.

My mother and I just held each other and cried, afraid to reach out and touch him.  When King held his right hand out, I thought it was to touch one of us, but he was reaching for something that wasn't there.  He pantomimed writing until we caught on.

My mother got a pad and pencil from the nurse's station.

"Mick?", he managed to scribble.

I think that was what really did it.  There he was, lying in a bed of pain and it burned my f*****g a*s that he was more concerned with Mickey than with himself.  I was pissed.  So when I got back home and Anthony took the blame on himself I kind of snapped.  They never would have been out there that night if it wasn't for Mickey and her damn nighttime strolls around town.  Who does that, anyway?

Then came the day a few weeks later when I found out that Mickey wasn't cooperating with the police and, well, that was it.  I wanted justice for my brother.  I wanted the boys who did that to him punished, and she was standing in the way. 

I marched over to Auntie J's side of the duplex and went to the back bedroom; I busted in without knocking.

"You f*****g b***h!"

Mickey looked up from whatever she was reading, silent and wide eyed.  Oh yeah, that was the other thing.  She wasn't just not talking to the police, she was barely talking at all.  By the time I busted in on her she had said nothing but "Yes, please" and "No, thank You" in four days, and only to Auntie J.  Unless she was talking to King, no one could figure that out.  He was in there for as long as Auntie let him each day, scribbling endless pages for Mickey to read.  No one ever heard her answer him, but then what the hell was he writing about?

"I said, you a f*****g b***h, Mickey!"  I stood glaring at her, mad enough to hit.  But that girl, all she did was stare up at me with those blue f*****g eyes of hers, starting again with the tears.  Her crying was as endless as the pages that King devoted to her each day.  Pages that were burned nightly, from what my mother had told me.

"You know what happened to my brother!  You know and you'd better start talking about who did it, I swear to god, or I will make what they did to you look like f*****g child's play!"

She was going to tell me.  I know she was, she had even parted her lips to speak.  I saw her swallow painfully which drew my eyes to the bruises on her neck.  The sight of those greenish bruises, fading now, on such tender, delicate flesh gave me a feeling like being punched dead in the gut.  Something deep inside me began to soften, began to remember this girl as my friend, the closest thing I had to a sister. 

Before that softness could reach my face, or even my eyes, Auntie J came bustling in the door wanting to know who was swearing to god in her house and the spell was broken.  The tears that had been threatening in Mickey's eyes began to fall and when Auntie J got a look at my face she thought she knew exactly what was going on.  

I was out of there with a door shut in my face before I knew what hit me.  

I stood in the hallway for a few moments, and I think about those few moments a lot these days, what with Auntie J passing on and Mickey coming back.  In those moments I wondered at that softening, wondered if it was what was right calling me back.  Wasn't it Mickey who, when still stuck in junior high, always unquestioningly let me pick up with her as if nothing had happened even when I'd ignored her for my new high school friends for weeks at a time?  Mickey wasn't just my friend, she had been my first friend other than King.  Hadn't Mickey been just as hurt, if not in some ways more, as King?

It was the thought of King though, that brought me back from softness.  King, who wasn't like a friend at all but more like the other half of my soul.  King, who had a fitting for a glass eye coming up and who's pain was so great that he was eating Codeine like candy.  King, my brother, who would never see justice for what was done to him if Mickey wouldn't talk.