Last Dance. David Russell W.

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      “I’m serious,” she insisted.

      “Me too, especially about that cute cop you’re going to send me as a bodyguard.”

      “I said she had potential, I didn’t say she was there yet. Besides, the captain wouldn’t spring for any cash. Seems the VPD doesn’t consider you particularly worth protecting from a good beating. So you’re getting the real McCoy for the evening.”

      “Oh no,” I protested.

      She turned from me and headed towards the exit. “I’ll be there in a couple of hours. Try to stay alive until then and order in some decent food. I’ll be hungry protecting your ass.” Defeated, I turned and headed back to Tim’s room, the still-puzzled police officer still holding my old business card and not bothering to slow my access to his protected patient.

      Inside the bleak, cream-coloured room, Tim was surrounded by a woman I assumed to be his mother and by none other than his high-school-aged, uncertified legal advocate, Sara. Both looked glum. Tim, who had wakened earlier in the day, was trying to cheer up his two visitors. “Look who’s here,” he declared to the room. “Can’t a guy get a break from school even in the hospital?”

      “Mr. Patrick,” Sara exclaimed. “Can you believe this?”

      “No. I really can’t.” Turning to Tim’s mother, I attempted to introduce myself, to no avail. If she heard me, she made no notice of it and instead stood staring out the window. “How are you feeling?” I asked Tim.

      “It only hurts when I laugh.”

      “There’s little danger of that if his jokes are as good here as they are at school,” Sara said. At least her sense of humour was recovering.

      “Tim,” I said softly, “I can’t tell you how sorry I am about what’s happened.”

      “Mr. Patrick,” he protested, “don’t you apologize. You didn’t beat the shit out of me and tie me to a goalpost.”

      “I know, but still, I just feel like this whole thing with the legal action and …”

      “That’s crap. This happened because people are homophobic and couldn’t get into the twenty-first century like the rest of us. For Christ’s sake, I could get married to my boyfriend, but I can’t bring him to the dance? This is not your fault. This was our decision to do this. Not yours.” He paused for a moment and tried to reach for the cup of ice water on the bedside. Sara beat him to it and held it up to her friend’s lips. Tim smiled and the remnants of his sip dribbled out the corner of his mouth, where his lower lip was so swollen, he probably had no feeling of the liquid escaping. “If anything, it’s her fault,” he said, nodding slightly at Sara.

      His mother finally spoke up. “Tim, that’s a terrible thing to say.”

      “She knows I’m kidding. Look, you guys. I feel physically like shit, but the truth is, I’m almost kind of glad this happened.”

      “How so?” I asked.

      “Because now it’s out there. It wasn’t exactly a secret, and I know people talked about me, but hell, now everyone knows. It’s like a burden’s been lifted.” I nodded my understanding though I couldn’t possibly have understood.

      “I’m just glad you’re okay. I’m sure you just want to put this whole thing behind you. I know I do.”

      “I wish it were that easy,” Mrs. Morgan said to me.

      “Mom,” Tim began to protest.

      “Be quiet!” I couldn’t tell if she was angry, frustrated, scared, or all three. “Tim insists he’s going ahead with this.”

      “This what?”

      “The lawsuit,” Sara interjected. “Tim says he’s going to keep fighting the school over bringing Van to the grad prom.” I looked at Tim lying bandaged in bed, slim, light, and looking as vulnerable as I’d ever seen any kid. Yet the spark in his eye was bright. I may not have been looking, but up until then I had never seen it.

      “Are you sure want to do this? After all you’ve been through?”

      He smiled at me with puffy lips. “Now more than ever.” From her side of the bed, Tim’s mother let out a groan.

      Chapter Eight

      It’s difficult to imagine my day could have gotten much worse than it already was. Not to be whiny, mind you; I recognized Tim’s day was probably much more agonizing than mine. Still, when I got home I was greeted by Polish Sausage as I stepped off the elevator into the foyer. I was hoping that my weekend would be less stressful than my violent week, but the sight of our building’s limping strata chair thumping towards me was not a good omen. I was ready to abandon my mailbox in order to avoid the inevitable complaint, but before I could back onto the elevator again, the door slid shut and I was trapped between Canada Post’s euphemistically described “super boxes” and the aforementioned walking pork product.

      “Oh, Winston,” he began, as though he had unexpectedly come across me as opposed to staking out the lobby waiting for whichever resident he could annoy on any given afternoon.

      “Hello, Andrew.” Still couldn’t get up the nerve to call him Polish Sausage to his face. In my battles between maturity and bravado, somehow maturity always wins. Or being a big chicken.

      “I wanted to talk to you about something.”

      “That seems a given every time I see you.”

      “Yes, well, I’ve been trying to reach you all day.” I had no response to that, so I said nothing. Sausage couldn’t take the silence more than a few seconds. “I haven’t been able to reach you.”

      “I know.” He looked confused, and this time I couldn’t take the silence for long. “See, if you had reached me already, I’m sure I would have remembered.”

      The silence was uncomfortable enough for both of us, so I decided to leave. It didn’t work. Despite Sausage’s alleged infirmity, he was able to poke his way around our building — his kingdom — at speeds that made subtle avoidance of him impossible. Nothing short of breaking out into an all-out run was going to keep him from keeping up with me. Of course, if he ran after me, that could settle the nagging question of the validity of his disability once and for all. Before I could reach a decision, Sausage had followed me onto the elevator. “What is it you wanted, Andrew?”

      “Your measurements,” he replied matter-of-factly.

      “That’s a bit personal. Shouldn’t you at least buy me dinner first?” It was clear that Sausage got my joke, but he didn’t laugh. I was convinced Poland must be a very dull place.

      “For one with such an upbringing, you certainly are crude,” he informed me.

      “Indeed.”

      “We need to have the measurements of your living room area for the drywall contractor.”

      “It’s about twenty-by-fourteen,” I told him as the elevator door opened to the third floor.

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