Done Dirt Cheap

by Sarah Nicole Lemon

  “They did,” he said with a nod, turning to follow. “But you don’t.”

  Shit. Virginia blinked in panic. She’d forgotten about her money, still sitting under the empty beer mug. She tried not to look at it, storming after the two Wardens as they followed Tourmaline. “What did you do? That was my money she was playing with. Wait,” she called, pushing out the door after them. The wind snatched her breath away and the three figures walking ahead didn’t look back.

  Doubling her speed, she caught up to Tourmaline as the two Wardens headed for their bikes on the opposite end of the lot.

  “Get on home,” the older one yelled.

  Tourmaline glared into the dark and flounced toward the truck.

  Rage boiled under Virginia’s skull, and with two long strides in the slippery gravel, she shoved all her weight into Tourmaline’s shoulders. “Some of us fucking work for a living,” she yelled as Tourmaline and her frothy dress went sprawling into the dirt.

  Tourmaline scrambled up, mouth open. “Why did you do that?”

  “Because you hustled me.”

  Tourmaline snarled and shoved back. They grappled for a minute, words lost in pushing and scuffing. Tourmaline twisted Virginia’s arm back.

  Virginia screeched and kicked at the other girl’s shins.

  “I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry, okay?” Tourmaline yelled, but at the same time she threw a punch.

  Virginia ducked. “Oh, yeah, I can really tell.”

  “No. Wait.” Tourmaline skidded backward and tucked her arms into her sides, looking like she was about to cry.

  Virginia stopped, chest heaving.

  The Wardens still sat across the lot. Close, but not close enough.

  “I’m really sorry,” Tourmaline said as she dropped her hands to her thighs and bent to catch her breath. “For the whole thing.”

  “Oh, you think?” Virginia threw back. “Which part? The part where you made a deal and lied to me? Or the part where you ditched me when ordered by your little guard dog over there.”

  “He’s not.” Tourmaline straightened and wiped her eyes. “Look. I’m sorry. I’ll pay you back, okay? I promise.”

  Virginia clenched her jaw, glaring at her. “Right.” Her stomach churned. It was like her first pageant all over again. Where there was so much more on the line than whether or not she did what she was asked. Where the sum of her worth was back up for consideration. It shouldn’t be; she’d proven herself again and again. But in her bones, she felt it. Sensed the change.

  The wind gusted, swirling dust into their eyes, and when Virginia bent her head against the sting, she felt tired. Drained.

  “His name is Jason,” Tourmaline said in a half whimper. “I didn’t think it’d be him. Usually it’s Pickup who hangs out here. He wouldn’t tell my dad—he thinks it’s funny. But Jason will tell.”

  Virginia’s gaze flickered up. Who?

  “He’s sergeant at arms, but don’t tell a soul I said that.”

  “What?”

  “Jason. Is sergeant at arms.”

  Virginia raised her eyebrow, a sudden shot of adrenaline rushing up her spine. She wanted to turn and look at him, sitting across the lot on his bike, but she didn’t. “Oh.”

  “We good now?”

  “No,” Virginia retorted.

  “What do you want?”

  Virginia took a deep breath. She wanted whatever was so precious it had been hidden behind this elaborate ruse.

  Behind her, a bike roared to life and Virginia jumped. A second started; their engines drowned even the wind as they passed by. Virginia dug her keys out of her pocket, heart racing. “Ready? I’ve got other things to do.” She jumped in and turned the key.

  Tourmaline got in.

  Virginia pulled out of the lot, turning after the rapidly disappearing bikes.

  Tourmaline clutched the dashboard as they whipped out of the bar parking lot. “Wrong way.”

  Virginia ignored her.

  “It’s the other way, Virginia,” Tourmaline snapped. Her phone buzzed from the center console, where she’d dropped it. Probably another text from Anna May or Allen, asking whether she was okay, whether she’d made it home. She’d told them she was sick, but Anna May had already texted asking whether that was Virginia Campbell’s truck she’d left in, so there was sure to be a reckoning. It didn’t matter, though. Anna May, Dalton, and Allen were all excused from Wayne’s game, and at this point Tourmaline didn’t care what happened to Virginia.

  The moon crawled out of the tree line. Virginia kept on behind Jason and the conscript, passing by several places where she could have turned around. As if following them.

  “What are we doing?” Tourmaline demanded. “I need to get home. I’ll take care of the money tomorrow.”

  Virginia’s jaw tightened and she glanced in the rearview. “I think someone is following us.”

  Tourmaline’s heartbeat dove. Wayne. Mouth dry, she twisted in the seat and squinted out the back window. High beams blinded her. “Are you sure?” She tried to sound as skeptical as possible. Not afraid.

  “I’m pretty sure they followed us out of the bar. Watch.” Virginia went faster.

  The headlights behind them sagged for a brief moment before surging forward. Catching up. Pursuing. Tourmaline’s chin hit the back of the seat. Shit. What now?

  “You’re paranoid,” she said firmly, turning forward.

  Virginia stopped at a four-way intersection and glanced back. “But what if I’m not paranoid?”

  Frozen there, at a crossroads under a June moon above the Roanoke Valley, Tourmaline pinched the bridge of her nose and tried to think. She just needed to shake Wayne and get home. To safety. Was Dad even home? Shit. He wasn’t. It was Saturday night. He was at the clubhouse.

  A car pulled out of the black from the intersecting road and sped ahead of them, heading in the direction Jason and the conscript had disappeared.

  It took a slow second. Tourmaline blinked, Wayne forgotten. Her stomach clenched as she stared at the license plate disappearing into the dark like a roach scuttling out of a tiny hole in a wall she’d long patched. This could not be happening. Was he following Jason and Cash? Following Wardens? “Keep up with that car,” she seethed.

  “What car? Ahead of us?”

  Tourmaline waved. “Just go. Come on.”

  Virginia obeyed.

  Tourmaline took a deep breath, steadying the heartbeat throbbing in her head. For a second she could smell the Old Spice and French fries of the interior. She remembered the view from the backseat. The chattering radio she strained to decipher. Virginia was going to get her show, after all.

  “Who is that?” Virginia asked tightly.

  “No one you’d know.”

  “I’m not asking to be polite.”

  “Yeah, well, if you won’t know, why does it matter?”

  Virginia straightened and looked in the rearview again. Shadows pinched worried lines across her forehead. “Screw you and your bullshit.” The truck slowed.

  “Don’t you fucking dare.” Tourmaline yanked Virginia’s arm off the steering wheel, making the truck swerve wildly and Virginia slap at her hands. “You want a look into the Wardens? This is it. This is the shit I don’t want anyone to know.” They had to keep going. Jason wouldn’t recognize who was behind him, and the Wardens had to know.

  “Who’s in the car, Harris?” Virginia yelled.

  Tourmaline spoke through clenched teeth. “It was a state detective’s car.”

  Virginia slammed on the brakes, hurtling Tourmaline into the dashboard. “What the hell are we doing following a state detective?” she screeched. “I can’t do this.”

  “He’s following Jason,” Tourmaline yelled. “And Jason needs to know. That’s what we’re doing.”

  Virginia twisted over her shoulder, looking away from the road. “I can’t. I can’t,” she said in something startlingly close to a whine.

  “Just keep driving,” Tourmaline pleaded. “I have to kno
w if it’s him. This isn’t a coincidence.”

  State Detective Alvarez had found out she’d been at the scene, met her at school one day before the trial, and told her he could help her mother. She’d gone with him because she hadn’t known better. She’d done exactly what he wanted, telling someone she thought cared about her mom—burning down everything and everyone she loved in a wide swath of destruction. And she hadn’t realized she’d been played—that it’d been wrong—until it was too late. The creature on Tourmaline’s shoulders came sharply into focus, snickering in her ear as its wet, sulfur-tinged smell tickled her memories and delighted in her agony. She had done this. She had caused this. “My mom is in a maximum-security prison for fifteen years because of . . . him. He’s not here to make sure we’re all holding up. He wants something.”

  Virginia looked in the rearview again, for so long that Tourmaline wanted to tell her to look at the road before they wrecked. “Shit,” Virginia breathed, gaze finally flicking forward.

  The surge that pinned Tourmaline against the seat seemed as good as words.

  The road twisted into a series of switchbacks. With no dump points, they were all stuck in a slow, winding descent.

  “He’s hanging back from the bikes,” Virginia said softly as they spun. “Maybe it’s just the same car. Not the same person.”

  “No. He’s hanging back because he knows where they’re going.”

  Virginia kept one eye on the rearview as she spun the truck along behind the others—one link in the loose chain of disaster floating down the mountain. “What’s the plan here, Harris?”

  Tourmaline hit the button for the window and leaned against the door, dragging in deep breaths of the lush night air to combat the tightness in her chest. “Let’s pretend there’s someone following us. Can you lose them if I tell you where to drive?”

  Virginia snorted and sat straighter in the seat. “We’ll find out.”

  “There’s an old logging road up here,” Tourmaline said. “Get out of sight before you make the turn.” She took another deep breath, pulling hair out of her mouth as it thrashed in the wind.

  Virginia slammed on the brakes, the tires screeched. She laughed, wild and unearthly, mid-wrestle with the truck as the frame shuddered, eager to spin. “Who knew I’d be doing this with you?” Virginia hollered, hair whipping in the fierce wind.

  “I should have put on my seat belt!” Tourmaline yelled back, bracing herself between the door and dash.

  The truck slid nearly to a stop on the road.

  “Yes,” Virginia said primly. “You should have.”

  Tourmaline yanked the seat belt across her lap.

  Virginia slammed it into second gear and hit the gas, engine roaring. They sped around the curve.

  “Right there. Right there.” Tourmaline jabbed her finger into the dark. “You’re going to miss it. Turn, dammit.”

  The truck bounced up into the brush with a terrible grinding sound, plowing through pitch-black, branches scraping the paint. The headlights washed over a rocky dirt road and the tires caught in the gravel, pulling them out of the hold of the trees.

  “Cut the lights!” Tourmaline yelled just as Virginia killed them.

  “Watch behind us!” Virginia leaned out the window, fighting the ruts in the road. “I can’t see shit.”

  Tourmaline twisted. The truck bed kicked. But the only thing behind them was the night. “I think we’re good.”

  The road stayed dim, but Virginia kept the truck moving.

  A text from Allen lit on the phone Tourmaline had dumped in the center console when Virginia picked her up. Want to come over?

  She picked up the phone. The truck bumped and dipped. Her knuckles brushed the wilted cotton of her dress and she closed her eyes, fingers frozen against the weight of her past. Allen was for the girl she could not be right now. Tourmaline dropped the phone and gathered her hair off her shoulders with sticky palms, scanning the woods around them.

  “You sure that detective was following them?” Virginia asked, still half outside the window. “I mean. Since they’re just law-abiding citizens and all.”

  Tourmaline ignored the sarcasm and snapped a rubber band over her ponytail. “Pull off up here. We’ll cut through the woods to my dad.”

  Virginia parked, and Tourmaline led them into the woods, clinging tight to a deer path through the tangle of creeper vines and blackberry bushes.

  “What else do you do for fun?” Virginia grumbled in a whisper as Tourmaline let another blackberry branch smack behind her.

  “Hilarious,” Tourmaline hissed.

  “Still confused as to why you’re wearing a dress.”

  “You picked me up from a date.”

  “A date?” Virginia snorted. “With who?”

  “Allen Baker.”

  “A.B.? You had a date with A.B.?”

  Tourmaline glared behind her. “Don’t do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Pretend like you’re shocked. I’m not one of your little plebeians.”

  Virginia was silent. Sticks snapped. Then, “He does have a thing for blondes.”

  “It’s not a thing. We’re friends. He goes to my church.”

  Virginia snorted again.

  “Sometimes,” Tourmaline amended.

  “Hey, while we’re on the subject: Tim Flemming? True or . . .”

  Tourmaline groaned. Her yearlong relationship with Tim Flemming in eighth grade had ended the way all eighth-grade romances end—with a text. Except that Tim had alluded to a long conversation with her dad, and the rumor spread that Tim had literally pissed himself when her father threatened to end his life. The actual breakup and the subsequent rumor had left her gun-shy about the whole endeavor of dating, especially when it involved her dad. “Of course it’s not true.”

  Virginia laughed. “Oh, poor Tim.”

  Tourmaline crouched and half crawled, half waddled as the path dipped under a thicket of mountain laurels. Fuck Tim Flemming. Tim wasn’t the one with a dad suddenly faced with the panic of a teenage daughter and the concept of payback. “Well, thanks for your care. I’ve managed.”

  Behind her Virginia whisper-yelled, “You aren’t helping your credibility, you know. You’re full of shit. About your dad. About your life. You’ve worked really hard to make people think otherwise, but—” Virginia grunted; more sticks broke behind Tourmaline. “But it’s just a hustle. Like in the bar back there, where you play all-innocent girl in a pretty dress in order to get by. I don’t know what you are, Harris. But I know you’re not innocent.”

  Tourmaline stopped and craned her neck against the thicket to stare at the dark mass that was Virginia. “Go piss up a rope,” she whispered, furious that Virginia had the nerve to say it and suddenly terrified it might be true. “I know what the Wardens are. What I am. I don’t need to prove it to you. Why can’t you believe anything but lies?”

  Virginia didn’t move. Or answer.

  Tourmaline bit her cheeks tight and turned back to crawling. They were almost back to the road. She’d have to be careful they didn’t get turned around in the dark and come out right above Alvarez’s old hiding spot.

  Standing again on the path, she wiped the sweat and dirt off her forehead as Virginia crawled out. Too late, she remembered she needed Virginia’s help to get things to her mom until she could go back and do it herself. That it had been the whole point of Virginia being there in the first place. “Sorry.” For the truth.

  “Nothing to apologize for,” Virginia said, briskly brushing off her jeans. But her voice was tight.

  The wind rushed high in the treetops—a dull roar hardly touching them under the deep tangle of vines and canopy as the hillside sloped steeper. After a few more minutes, the lights and the sounds of the clubhouse appeared and the hill fell out from underneath their feet.

  Tourmaline paused to catch her breath, leaning against a thick oak.

  The clubhouse stood in a clearing below, tucked along a rushing, spring-fed moun
tain brook. Under white pines stood hemlocks, and black cherry trees that bloomed thick and white in the spring. It was an old building, sided with rough-cut planks. A soft stream of bass and guitar slipped through the cracks and carried on the wind.

  Tourmaline hadn’t seen it like this in so long; she’d forgotten what it used to feel like. Safe. As if there would always be a place she belonged. When she was in middle school and things were falling apart with her mother, she imagined running away to live in its attic, where she had often stretched out on a rag rug and played Candy Land by herself while the rain pattered on the roof. Looking back, she realized she’d only been there when her mother couldn’t care for her—first because of the pain, and then because of the drugs—and she was forced underfoot at her dad’s, like a puppy in the way. But she hadn’t known she was an intruder then. It’d felt like home.

  She closed her eyes and listened to the water. To the whisper of the wind. To the music that was always in the background of her life. It was all coming back now. Her throat ached with longing for that home and that mother—even a mother who’d abandoned Tourmaline in places a girl wasn’t supposed to be.

  A stick snapped as Virginia stepped beside her.

  Tourmaline put a hand out. “Careful, there’s an edge. It’s steep.”

  Virginia nodded, a mixture of moonlight and the security lights outside the clubhouse casting shadows on her face. “They party here?”

  Tourmaline nodded back. The lights swam, liquid and soft. The way you wanted romance to be—a little dark, a little mysterious, enticing you into some kind of lush, hidden world with a bottom rhythm of music and a sky as high as the stars. Unbidden, the conscript appeared in her thoughts. She shook her head to rid herself of the enchantment and lifted her chin. “They’re my dad’s friends. Do you want to hang out with your dad’s friends?”

  “My old man is dead.”

  Tourmaline bit her lips. Shit. She’d forgotten. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.” The night and shadows and moonlight mixed in Virginia’s hair, seeming to pour out of her body as if she were emitting the night itself.

  “Let’s find a way down and get my dad.” Tourmaline hitched her skirt higher on her thighs and started picking her way along the edge of the ridge. Hayes’s warning echoed in her head again. Like an alarm, it kept going off. You have to start paying attention to what’s around you. You can’t claim you didn’t know and expect to get by.