Done Dirt Cheap

by Sarah Nicole Lemon

  When Hazard left, she said her good-byes and walked up the street.

  He waited for her by his SUV. The wind whipped the bloodred pants against his boots. The streetlight cast a long shadow on his face in the night.

  She walked straight and sure. She had dressed carefully—a skintight, sleeveless black jersey dress with strappy, flat sandals, good hair, fresh makeup, and a single (fake) diamond necklace, one Hazard had given her for winning Miss Teen Virginia. Sleek silver hoops hung from her ears and she’d dabbed her mother’s old perfume on her wrists even though it made her gag and feel the ghost of her father’s hands.

  “Good evening, Miss V,” he said, tone neutral.

  “I’ve got what you asked for,” she said, pulling out her phone and shaking it. “I emailed you the pictures.” She’d staged them to buy herself some time—some receipts he’d have to zoom in on, court papers, and personal correspondence her mother’s roommate had in his room. Just enough time to find out for certain what was happening.

  His smile emerged from the shadows. “My girl.”

  She leaned languidly against the hood, hating that the streetlight illuminated her every flicker and curve, but kept him in the dark. “As always,” she sang cheerily, pageant smile fixed to her face.

  “Want some dinner?” He opened the passenger door. “I was just about to grab some food.”

  “Only if you’re buying.”

  “Some steak? Wine?” He held the door wider and swept his hand for invitation. “Is that good enough for a queen?”

  “It’ll do.” Virginia straightened, fussing with her dress as she climbed inside.

  Her heartbeat quickened and the smell of new car made her head hurt, but as Hazard walked around the front of the car the light caught his self-satisfied smile. Virginia’s stomach twisted, but she kept her body in perfect submission to her will.

  “It’s been a good day. We can celebrate. I got something for you,” he said, starting up the SUV and pulling out of the parking lot. “A gift, if you will. Take a look below.”

  “Below? As in . . . ?” He had a secret compartment under the center console, but she wasn’t sure she was even supposed to know about it.

  “I know you’re sharp. That’s the kind of woman I like. Go on, look.”

  Virginia took a deep, silent breath and scooted over in her seat to pull up the center console and the floorboard below. It was just a dark space where the flickers of passing streetlights didn’t reach. She pulled out her phone and leaned over, half afraid it was a trap of some kind. As if she might lean over and fall into nothing, an empty prison she would never escape from in the center console of his SUV.

  But all that rested below were several paper-wrapped and taped rectangles. She frowned.

  “Like that?” Hazard asked.

  Like what? Weed? She poked at one and it was firm. Dense. Not weed. Not . . . “Holy shit,” she breathed.

  “Fifty bricks of heroin,” he said. “Welcome to the future, V.”

  She stared a moment longer. Counting. She could only see twelve. How had he fit fifty into this truck? Worried she was looking too long, she forced herself to replace the floor and move the console back. “Yeah, all right. That’s not what I expected.”

  He chuckled. “That’s why I needed you to do this with the Wardens. I don’t worry about the police, okay? I worry about the Wardens. Police have to work within the law. I can play that game. The Wardens move outside of it. It’s important they don’t know anything about this until it’s already happening. If they know about it, they’ll stop it. And you are such a lovely distraction and spy.” He reached over, gripping the back of her neck in his big hand, thumb sliding over her skin. “I told you I’ma take care of you.”

  She tried not to panic. This was it, then—this was what had changed. She was not a child, and her body was still what held the most value. This was just a new way to use her body. A new way to use her ability to think fast and toss her hair. And what she’d always thought was hers and hers alone, he’d always used for his benefit.

  “You smell like an old woman,” he said with a soft laugh. “Is that yours?”

  “No,” she managed. “My mom’s.”

  Hazard’s thumb rubbed a hole in her skin and she focused on the fence posts rushing past in the headlights. “I’ll buy you something better,” he said. “Not roses. You’re too fresh. Nothing floral, that’s too sweet for you. You’re too different. Something with orange and sandalwood, I think,” he continued, thumb still sliding back and forth along the curve of her neck.

  Her throat was too tight to answer. She didn’t know where she was or where she was going. But she knew one, definite, absolute truth.

  Virginia Campbell, Hazard’s pageant queen, was finished.

  Virginia found Tourmaline in her empty kitchen, crying as she scrubbed gravel out of long, angry-looking scrapes on her legs and arms. Her phone lay on the floor across the room with a cracked screen, as if she’d thrown it.

  There was no need to say that everything had changed and the world had gone to shit. They both knew it without talking, somehow. Virginia sank beside her on the kitchen floor and began organizing the first aid scattered on the linoleum. “You’re falling apart on me, Harris.”

  “My mom was high.” Tourmaline’s chin quivered. “She called me and I could just tell.”

  Virginia didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say. The only thing she could offer was to exist in the same world and look it all in the face beside her.

  Tourmaline scrubbed her arm harder, sobbing.

  “You’re going to rip off any skin that’s left,” Virginia said, swatting Tourmaline’s hand away.

  Tourmaline dropped the rag and looked at it. Tears still streaming down her face. “I’m not banned.”

  “I thought they banned you for the socks?”

  “I called because I hadn’t gotten any paperwork. They didn’t have any record of it. When I asked, my mom said she hadn’t gotten anything, either. She said Hayes just told her I’d forgotten something and had to leave. That’d I’d be back soon.” She sobbed again. “Hayes didn’t file anything on it. She was nice to me. I can try again, with your help.”

  Virginia looked at her hands. “We’ll make a plan.”

  The seconds ticked by loudly in the thick silence of the warm kitchen.

  “How’s the landscaping business?” Virginia asked quietly.

  Tourmaline dipped her rag back into the iodine water and her eyes flickered over the length of Virginia, as if looking for Virginia’s wounds. But she didn’t ask why or what had happened; she just sniffed and wrung out the rag. “You have to mow in a straight line, Campbell.”

  Virginia held up the box of Band-Aids. “You’re going to have to use like one hundred and thirty-five of these, you know that, right?”

  Tourmaline hiccuped a laugh and threw the Neosporin at Virginia’s forehead. “Fuck you.”

  They clung to each other like cats stuffed into one skin. Virginia pulled weeds and pushed a mower in brutal sunshine, crisscrossing her lines with Tourmaline’s. They fell into an easy rhythm—Tourmaline as much adrift as Virginia, keeping her own trajectory, parallel, and hardly intersecting with her dad’s life. After a few days, Virginia stopped worrying about running into Jason, though she wasn’t dumb enough to assume he didn’t know she was working with Tourmaline.

  A week into it, she stopped going home—afraid she’d just find one of Hazard’s guys waiting and her mom subdued with a fresh bottle of tequila. Or worse. She slept in her truck deep in the woods and spent the days wandering around finishing deals she’d already had set up. Along the way, the whispers started churning. A low rumble in the ground, warning of an oncoming disaster.

  Hazard was looking for her.

  The threat hung in the heat. Lurid in the shimmering waves on blacktop at full sun. Grim in the darkness as she fell asleep listening for the sounds of sticks breaking outside her truck.

  A week turned into
two. Two stretched toward three. One day of mowing turned into a few more days. She hung on, caught in a world made of hazy, droning summer afternoons and nothing else. Virginia kept telling herself that she was going to be fine. She could just walk away. She didn’t really owe Hazard anything. He didn’t need her; she was just a girl. He could find those anywhere. But deep down she waited for whatever had begun to just hurry up and finish with her. It didn’t matter that she escape her fate; it mattered that she had a say in it.

  A languid haze settled over the mountains for the Fourth of July. Even the shade was so thick with humidity it created its own atmosphere, brewing purple thunderstorms deep in the malachite forest. Virginia parked at Tourmaline’s, relieved to have arrived safely for another day, and headed for the open garage door.

  As usual, there was no sign of anyone else. Just Tourmaline sitting inside the garage, her back to the driveway as if she had no need to be looking behind her.

  Virginia put her sunglasses on her head and stepped inside. “’Sup, Girl Scout?”

  Tourmaline didn’t look up from the video playing on her lap. Her white sundress was tucked around her thighs, wedges hung up in the rungs of the shop stool, and she had her chin inside her hand, staring. “Trying to figure out what the hell I’m doing.”

  “With what?”

  Tourmaline held up the screen. An old guy with a giant mustache held up a piece of something—a car part or something—and said things Virginia didn’t understand. “Um.”

  Tourmaline paused the video and swished her long ponytail over her shoulder. “I was looking for how to fix the start on this bike.”

  Virginia climbed into the seat of a mower and put her legs up. They were supposed to be heading to some Fourth of July thing the Wardens were doing. Family Day, Tourmaline had said. Virginia hadn’t known it would be as fancy as Tourmaline’s white dress implied; and Virginia now frowned at her shorts and airy blue tank top.

  “Anyway. I couldn’t find how to do that, so that was pointless. But then I got distracted by videos about other shit I didn’t know about. Like, I’m watching this one about taking off the header—”

  “What’s a header?”

  “Uhhh . . .” Tourmaline lifted her head, a chagrined expression on her face. “I don’t know.”

  She was, as usual, in way over her head. Virginia slid down on the seat. “Girl, I don’t know how to tell you this but . . .”

  “No. Okay. I sort of know. I know this . . . Look.” Tourmaline clambered over another mower to the bike in the back of the garage, carefully keeping her dress out of reach of any of the equipment. “This part here.” She waved her hands in demonstration over the exhaust pipes shooting out along the side toward the back, looking more like a showroom model than someone talking about fixing up the bike. “These are the pipes, but they don’t always say pipes so I think it’s, like, the whole exhaust system? Maybe?” She sighed and stepped back, hands on her hips. “Or maybe where the pipes meet the muffler? Do they meet? And, like, that’s maybe more up into the engine. Here? More?” She pointed to where the exhaust pipes disappeared into the side of the bike. “Maybe?”

  Virginia shook her head and took a deep breath of the smell of the heat on the tar paper under the metal roof.

  “Honestly, though, how does anyone learn this shit? I mean . . . ,” Tourmaline muttered, sitting back down on the stool and pushing start on the video again.

  “Where is everyone?” Virginia asked casually.

  “Oh, they’re at the dealership already. I’m dragging my feet. Can’t do this stuff when my dad’s around.”

  “You don’t want the old man knowing you’re fixing his bike?”

  “Not until I can make it my bike.”

  “Aren’t you going away to school?”

  “UVA is close enough for weekends. I could come home.” Her cheeks pinked and she tucked her head to study the screen.

  Virginia frowned, feeling something was off. “So, you’re going to rebuild it?”

  Setting the screen on the workbench, Tourmaline picked up her purse and stood, looking at the bike stuffed into a dark corner. “I don’t know.” She looked to Virginia, smoothing down her ponytail. “I’m scared to say yes.”

  “Scared of what?” Virginia glanced at the bike. It looked dusty.

  “I’m afraid I won’t be able to do it. That if I say I’m going to do it, I’ll just face-plant in front of fifty men waiting to laugh.”

  “What are you going to school for, again?”

  “Early childhood education.”

  Virginia barked a laugh. That did not dovetail into motorcycles. “That’s right. You want to be a kindergarten teacher.”

  “I never said kindergarten. I’d really like third grade. Third grade is perfect. You’re young enough to do crafts and old enough to really get into cool books and science.”

  And suddenly, Virginia felt like she could see Tourmaline’s whole life ahead of her—this easy, interesting little life tucked into southern summers and back to school in the warm fall and her little collection of motorcycles and motorcycle babies. “God, I can see that. Like. Yeah. You’ve got your sweet little teacher job and then you come home and are, like, Oh I need a bigger head.” Virginia laughed and moved her legs out of the way of Tourmaline’s swatting. But inside, her chest ached so much she had to put her fist into her breastbone to try and ease off the pressure.

  “Let’s go. I made us late.” Tourmaline huffed. “You want to drive?”

  Virginia rubbed the bone harder, but it didn’t erase the ache. She swung off the tractor. “Sounds good.”

  Apparently the broiling heat was just the sort of weather in which a large percentage of men wore leather vests, revved hot engines over hotter asphalt, and ate barbecued pit beef.

  Sighing, Virginia put her hands on her waist and spread her elbows wide. The grass cowered dead and shimmering pale in the stretch between the edge of the asphalt and the fenced ribbon of interstate concrete. A semi blasted past, but the grass barely moved. Each car that passed made her feel more exposed. More certain that Hazard would spot her. But she pressed her lips tighter and refused to falter.

  “That’s a Screaming Eagle mod kit thing,” Tourmaline said beside her as if Virginia were listening.

  Tourmaline managed to look like unmelted margarine in her aviators and swinging ponytail. She ate pit beef on a sweet roll while talking about the difference in busting out the baffle in your pipes versus different custom pipes versus made-in-your-genius-cousin’s-garage pipes—apparently one thing she did know about.

  Jason probably did have some secret deep love for her. Any one of these men might, with her talking that shit in between big bites of her sandwich in that white dress. She could be as dumb as a box of rocks with a wrench trying to fix up that old bike and they’d all forgive her and kiss her on the forehead when they tucked her into bed.

  Where were the drinks? Virginia needed to be drunk. Instead, she swallowed and eyed the bike Tourmaline pointed out behind her sunglasses.

  It wasn’t chrome, but flat black. Low-slung and thick. Mean. It made her think of Jason, but Jason was standing next to some blindingly shiny thing she assumed was his.

  Tourmaline didn’t say anything right away, and when Virginia glanced at her, she was just standing there with this shit-eating grin plastered on her face.

  Oh. Cash’s bike. “Cash got your tongue?”

  “Stop,” Tourmaline hissed.

  “Someone’s got a crush,” Virginia sang teasingly.

  “This isn’t—it’d be . . .” Tourmaline stopped her huffing and stepped close to Virginia’s ear, suddenly sharp and cold. “No one can know; otherwise he’ll be kicked out. So quit your little teasing-Tourmaline game and shut the hell up.”

  Virginia adjusted her sunglasses as she scanned the crowd, smiling despite herself, because she did so like to be reminded that Tourmaline wasn’t as butter on bread as she seemed. “Fiiine. But I’m offended you haven’t told me about t
his.”

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “Just let me go at my own pace.”

  “I didn’t know you even had a pace.” Another semi blasted a puff of hot air. Virginia scanned the crowd, watching so it wouldn’t take her by surprise. “Come on,” she said, hooking her arm into Tourmaline’s. “While you’re pining away for a full-course meal in secret, let’s go find me something that comes in a to-go box.”

  “Are you talking food or guys?”

  “Both, honey,” Virginia said.

  Tourmaline smiled as Virginia pulled her along, all effervescent and girlish giddiness in her step. She was thinking of Cash. Dreaming. Her day stretched ahead hot and damp in all the right ways. In that pretty white dress and the dreamy sense of distraction. Virginia hated her and envied her and loved her all in one terrible crush of annoying aching, while she couldn’t stop herself from scanning the crowd for anyone who might be waiting with ready hands.

  “Oh, here, you have to see Jason’s bike,” Tourmaline said, making a hard right and tugging Virginia along.

  No, she did not. Pulling out of Tourmaline’s grip, Virginia stopped.

  But Tourmaline was already there.

  Virginia followed, slowly.

  With Jason having his vest and T-shirt on, it was easy to forget the horrible scars and just see the pretty face. Frowning, she glanced his way, curious to finally see the patches Tourmaline had talked about.

  On the front of Jason’s leather vest, the array of patches came into focus. Colorful, small birds in flight. An ace of spades right over his heart. Skull and crossbones on the side of his scars. But at the top, two small rectangles in black and white caught her eye.

  DISABLED VETERAN on the left. COMBAT VETERAN on the right.

  Virginia froze. If that wasn’t clear enough, there was a crimson-and-orange globe and eagle on the hem. Beside it, a round, tan patch with a blocky country map circled in words: BEEN TO IRAQ, AIN’T GOING BACK.