Chemistry by Jodi Lamm

wouldn’t have touched her.” He waits to see whether I’ll calm down before he continues. I’m far from calm, but I manage to fake it. “Anyway,” he says, “she’s not so helpless as you think.”
    “What do you mean by that?”
    “I mean she’s a wasp. She’s got a stinger she carries around with her at all times.”
    “A stinger?”
    “A knife.”
    I glare at him. He’s been at her, and now I know it. Because why else would she have shown him her knife? And while I should be questioning my own conclusion—that Peter would put effort into getting anything from a girl, that anyone would ever need to attack him in order to quell his enthusiasm—I’m not. My mind has stopped processing reality. It’s running on pure fantasy now.
    Peter backs away from me and almost runs into the trophy cabinet behind him. “Look, I know you’re disappointed in me. I know I’ve let you down after all you’ve done for me, and I’m sorry. But for God’s sake, Claude, I’m not a saint! No one is. And I swear I didn’t break any laws. How could I after what happened to Valentine? I wouldn’t do something like that.”
    He completely misunderstands the situation. He thinks I’m angry with him for getting himself into trouble. The old me would have been. “Peter.” I take a step back and show him my hands. “Just finish your story, please.”
    He shakes his head. “Why am I so scared of you right now? You look like a tiger.” Then he sighs. “Well, it turns out she wasn’t heading to her home or any place I would have wanted to go had I known. Following her led me straight to the Court of Miracles.”
    The Court of Miracles. I am aghast when I hear those words. At first, I don’t believe it, but then, this is Peter. Peter doesn’t lie. The Court of Miracles, I should probably explain, is where the high school dropouts or soon-to-be dropouts gather together to experience their preferred chemical high. Dealers, buyers, addicts of all shapes and colors. And it’s never in the same place twice. It moves through town like a monstrous snail, leaving a trail of garbage and hypodermic needles in its wake. If Esmeralda was there…
    I take Peter by the shoulders. “What was she doing there?”
    He shrugs out of my grasp. “She’s got friends who live there. Homeless people. People like…” He pauses and turns a brilliant shade. “People like me. She’s not like they say she is, Claude. She’s not an exchange student or anything like that. She just moves around a lot. She grew up in Spain and then moved to France. Now she lives here, in a cheap studio apartment downtown. Everywhere she goes she befriends the worst of us. She’s the jewel of the nobodies, a Madonna to the broken…”
    “Stop talking like a poet and tell me what happened.” I only half mean this. I could listen to him praise the virtues of Esmeralda forever. I so need them to be true.
    He clears his throat. “Things didn’t go so well once they spotted me.” He starts to unbutton his shirt, and I wish I had the courage to tell him to stop. I half know what he’s going to show me. I’m sure I don’t want to see it. “They called me a faggot among other things.” He drops his shirt to the floor, and I shudder at the sight of the welts on his body. Peter’s been beaten, badly.
    “Damn them to hell,” I say, and I mean it. I really do. “Who did this?”
    “Rym and Kevin and some others. Sidney Clopin was there, but he pretended not to know me.”
    For a moment, my diseased mind clears and I can only think of one question to ask him—one question that has nothing to do with either Esmeralda or Valentine. It’s the question I should have been asking all along. “Peter,” I look him in the eyes, though I’m afraid to hear his answer, “was my brother there?”
    Peter’s relief is apparent. This is the Claude he knows, after all. He smiles and pulls his shirt back over his shoulders. “I didn’t see him. I don’t think he’s