Pretty Bad Things

by C. J. Skuse

  “I didn’t quite catch …”

  “I DID. I SHOT HIM!” I shouted, and thrust my hands out farther.

  She smiled. “They can go.”

  Beau was helping Dad to his feet. Dad had one hand pressed against his shoulder, and blood was seeping out between his fingers.

  “No, Paisley.”

  “There’s no other way, Dad.”

  Beau appeared by my side, his good hand clasping my arm. “Paisley?”

  “She’ll kill Dad if I don’t, Beau. You know she will. I can handle it. It’s my turn. I always said I needed locking up anyway.”

  “No, no way,” he said. “No way, Paisley. I can’t leave you with her.”

  “You’ll be better off,” I sniffed through my tears. “Look what I did.” We both looked at Dad. “I have to go. You go get a doctor.” My voice dropped to a whisper. “Tell ’em it was me. They’ll come looking for me.”

  An engine started, a door slammed, tires screeched. Matt was getting out of there, ducking behind the steering wheel.

  KA-BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! Skank fired at the truck, cracking the windshield, smashing a taillight, running after him, but Matt drove on, drove away. Left her.

  “You bastard! You lying bastard!” she screamed after him.

  Everything changed in a heartbeat.

  “Quick!” said Beau. I helped him put Dad into the backseat of the car and propped him up. I climbed in beside Dad and scraped away my tears with the back of my hand. I looked at him. His head was back and he was sweating. I looked at his chest. I felt over it. His shirt was soaked in blood. My hand got to his shoulder and he winced in complete agony. I snapped my hand away.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

  Beau struggled into the driver’s seat, straining with his right arm to shut the door. Once inside, he jammed down the lock, and I reached over to do the same on the passenger side.

  “Does he have an exit wound?” Beau asked, turning to me but keeping an eye on the Skank through the windshield.

  “What?”

  “An exit wound, does he have an exit wound?” he asked again. I couldn’t fuse the two words together in my brain, and before I understood what he meant, he reached awkwardly through the seats to check it himself, pulling Dad forward with his good arm and looking at his back. Dad howled.

  “Yeah, it came out,” said Beau. “That’s good.” He twisted back around in the driver’s seat, ouching and aarghing as his cast knocked against the steering wheel.

  “How is that good?” I asked him.

  “The bullet came out. Means we can patch him up ourselves.”

  “But he needs a doctor, Beau. Look at him.”

  “She’s coming back!” Beau yelled.

  From the backseat, I looked past my brother to see a totally unhinged Skank tottering toward the hood of the Trans Am.

  “Keep applying pressure to his shoulder, Pais. Use one of your socks or something, turn it inside out.”

  “Okay,” I said, taking off my boot. The stack of Wonder Twins stickers dropped into the foot well.

  BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

  I leaped on Dad and pushed him down. He cried out in pain. Beau was huddled down in front, his head between the seats. He was okay. Dad was okay.

  BANG. A bullet plinked off the metalwork. Glass tinkled at the window. Shattered pieces fell on my legs. I didn’t dare move.

  “How many more does she have left?” Dad whispered.

  “I don’t know,” I said, my head hard against his.

  The driver’s door slammed.

  Me and Dad both jolted. I looked up. Beau was making his way slowly, slightly limping, around to the front of the car where our grandmother was now standing, pointing the gun at us. We watched as he walked right up to her, took her gun with his good hand, and threw it to one side. He then grabbed her by the throat with the same hand. Beau had one arm in a sling, but he grabbed our grandmother by the throat. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

  He talked the talk, too. “What you got now, Grandma, huh? What you got for me now?!” He looked her hard in the eye. She was shaking, pawing away at him, but he held on, and he pushed her down. She pleaded. She begged. Beau had her begging. He had her on her knees. He was a fucking superhero!

  The Skank stumbled and twisted in his grasp, wide-eyed and helpless. He seemed taller. She seemed older.

  “Beau, there’s no need for this, please.” She writhed, scratching at his grip with her fake nails. “Oh God, let … please, you’re hurting me!”

  “You come near my family again, I won’t need a gun. I will kill you with one hand.”

  And he shoved her onto the rough pavement of the parking lot and limped back around to the driver’s door. He stopped. He opened it and got in.

  He started the engine and rolled down the window.

  “If you don’t move, I’m gonna fucking run you over!”

  Our grandmother scurried away like a frightened mouse looking for a hole in the sand. My brother, my little wuss of a brother, shifted into drive with his good hand, his broken one propped in its cast on the open window. We drove out of the parking lot and back onto the road.

  Nothing else happened for several minutes, nothing but the sounds of my breathing, Dad’s breathing. The lull of the engine. Glass tinkling at the window. Beau said nothing, and he didn’t look back at us. I couldn’t find the right words, either, so I just stayed quiet and held my bleeding dad in my arms. Aside from pressing my soaked-red sock against his shoulder, I didn’t have a clue what to do.

  “You knew she didn’t have any bullets left, didn’t you?” I said eventually.

  My brother looked back at me through the rearview mirror. He smiled. I smiled. We started laughing, but it was a weird laughing. Beau couldn’t stop himself. He laughed until he had wet eyes; I could see them in the mirror. Nothing was funny. I guess it was just relief. But it didn’t last long.

  “We need to get Dad to a hospital,” I said. “I can’t stop the bleeding.”

  “We just came from a hospital.”

  “Another hospital, then.”

  “No, we don’t, I’m okay,” Dad piped up, trying to act the martyr, but all the while I could see in his eyes that he was scared. And in so much pain. “The blood would be darker if we had anything to worry about.”

  Beau looked at him in the rearview. “You been shot before, Dad?”

  “No, just watched a lotta movies.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yeah. We’ll go to a rest stop or something. Buy some gauze bandages, rubbing alcohol. Patch me up.”

  “No,” I said, “you have to see a doctor, it might get infect—”

  Beau looked back at me, his right hand steady on the wheel. “You can’t just go into a hospital with a gunshot wound and get treatment, Paisley. The doctors have to report it. The cops’ll be onto us in a heartbeat. We gotta keep on driving.”

  “Keep on driving where?” I said, folding the sock over and pressing it down again on Dad’s shoulder. I looked at Beau in the mirror.

  He shrugged. “I didn’t plan on being alive for this part, so your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Don’t say that, Beau.” I couldn’t believe what he was saying. Me and him had totally switched places.

  “It’s true. I could have taken my chances with Matt and Virginia, but I chose to jump off that truck. I never thought I’d make it.”

  “But you did make it. And so did Dad. And so did I. We can go anywhere we want now. We’re a family.”

  “No, we can’t,” said Dad.

  “Why not?”

  “Because we’re outlaws now, Paisley,” said Beau. “And outlaws gotta watch themselves. We make ourselves known, they’ll send you and me to juvie, they’ll send Dad back to jail, and that will be that for another ten years. At least. Face it, Paisley. We gotta keep running.”

  I nodded. He was right, and I hated it.

  I looked at Dad next to me. His eyes were scrunched up like he was trying to think
really hard, trying to concentrate on something other than the pain. The pain I’d caused him.

  “I’m sorry, Dad,” I said. “I just wanted to find you. Beau was right, I shouldn’t have taken her gun in the first place. I shouldn’t have done a lot of things; then maybe this wouldn’t be happening to you. It’s all my fault. I’m sorry.”

  He opened his eyes and looked up at me. He smiled and the pain disappeared from his face. “It’s all right, Paisley. I’m gonna be all right. I got my Wonder Twins back.” He raised his other arm to my face and brushed back my hair with his fingers.

  I would never, ever touch a gun again.

  It was then that I caught sight of the stickers in the foot well. I reached down, grabbed them, and threw them out the shattered window. They fluttered behind us onto the empty road.

  I looked in the mirror at Beau again. He caught my eye. If he could sense my anxiety, he didn’t show it. His face was unmoved.

  “So what do we do now, Beau?” I asked him.

  “Try to get some sleep, okay?” he said as we rolled along through the rocky desert. “We got a long drive.”

  THE END …?

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Barry Cunningham and everyone at Chicken House.

  My mum for always believing in me even when I don’t. My big sister Penny Skuse for showing me Platoon when I was eight and for teaching me to always swim against the tide. Nan. Auntie Maggie and Uncle Roy. My big brother Jamie, Angie, Alex, Josie, Joshua. Matthew and Emily Snead, for all the years I spent at your mansion while mine was being decorated. Karen and Danny for letting me burn their house down.

  Wendy Griffin at Yew Trees Nursery for keeping my job open throughout my studies.

  Julia Green and all the Creative Writing staff at Bath Spa University. Dawn, Diana, Titania, Lila, Eden, Roy, and my fellow witches Fliss Crentsil and Ali Killeen.

  Gill and John McLay, Barry Timms, Owain Gillard, and Jo Baker, for their advice.

  My Chemical Romance, Linkin Park, Blind Melon, The Killers, All Angels, Limp Bizkit, Slipknot, Feeder, Kings of Leon, Paramore, and Foo Fighters, for always unlocking the block when I needed it.

  Gerard Way, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Bonnie and Clyde, Brothers Grimm, Grant Morrison, Jack Nicholson, Anthony Perkins, Al Pacino, Quentin Tarantino. Whether you know it or not, you’ve all helped in some way to make my dustland fairytale come true. Thank you.

  About the Author

  C.J. SKUSE loves graphic novels, ’80s a sitcoms, Gummi Bears, and malamutes. a She hates omelettes, carnivals, and coughs. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University in England. Pretty Bad Things is her debut novel; Rockoholic, her second book, will be published in 2012.

  Copyright

  Text copyright © 2011 by C. J. Skuse

  All rights reserved. Published by Chicken House, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. CHICKEN HOUSE, SCHOLASTIC, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  www.scholastic.com

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2010 by Chicken House, 2 Palmer Street, Frome, Somerset BA11 1DS.

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  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

  “Everlong” lyrics by Dave Grohl (© 1997). Produced by Foo Fighters and Gil Norton, and released by Foo Fighters in August 1997 as the second single from their album The Colour and the Shape (© Roswell/Capitol Records, 1997).

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Skuse, C. J.

  Pretty bad things / by C. J. Skuse. — 1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When they were six years old, twins Beau and Paisley were famous for surviving on their own after their mother died of a drug overdose, and now, at sixteen, they escape from their abusive grandmother to look for their father, who is out of prison and, unbeknownst to them, has been writing them letters since he was put away.

  ISBN 978-0-545-28973-3

  [1. Twins—Fiction. 2. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 3. Family problems—Fiction. 4. Missing persons—Fiction. 5. Fathers—Fiction. 6. Criminals—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.S43748Pr 2011

  [Fic]—dc22

  2010015640

  First American edition, July 2011

  Cover Art and Design by Whitney Lyle

  CREATED FROM THE FOLLOWING SOURCES:

  © 2011 MICHAEL FROST, © BRAND X PICTURES (RF)/GETTY IMAGES,

  © IMAGE SOURCE (RF)/ GETTY IMAGES, © PATRICK SHEANDELL O’CARROLL

  (RF)/ GETTY IMAGES, © TIM STREET-PORTER/BEATEWORKS/CORBIS

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  eISBN: 978-0-545-38902-0