Rage popped her gum in my ear, and I bit my lip to the point of almost drawing blood. “It smells like sweat in here,” she complained, turning all the air conditioning vents toward herself.
Trust, I reminded myself.
After all, it wasn’t like it was going to be that long.
I mean, it couldn’t be that long because Bear was going to get out soon and everything would be okay.
I started saying it over and over again. By the time we breezed into Jessep it almost sounded believable.
Almost.
CHAPTER NINE
Thia
It was another lifetime ago when I was last in Jessep. At least that’s how it seemed, although in reality it hadn’t been very long at all.
Yet the stench of rotting oranges was more pungent than I remembered, so strong that Rage covered her mouth too just as we passed the WELCOME TO JESSEP sign. If possible, the dirt roads had gotten even harder to navigate, as evidenced by the truck bouncing from side to side as I tried—and failed—to dodge crater-like potholes and large rocks.
Home.
Is that still what this place was?
It didn’t feel that way.
We passed the small cross on the side of the road marking where Kevin Little rolled his John Deer, trapping himself under the shallow water of a retention ditch. I never knew Kevin, but I knew his family. The cross had been there for as long as I could remember. Wilted wild flowers were piled up on the ground around it. Limp balloons tangled with each other, the strings were probably the only thing holding the warped wood upright.
That cross used to be the first sign that I was coming home. It was the first thing to give me that warm and fuzzy feeling of familiarity whenever I turned off the main road and onto the first dirt road that lead into Jessep.
Coming into town this time was different.
It seemed familiar, but it no longer felt like home.
I don’t know when that happened. Was it when my parents died and I skipped town? Was it before that and I just hadn’t noticed?
In Jessep, the children of farmers either became farmers themselves or married farmers. I’d known from very early on that it would fall on me to take over Andrews Grove. It was all I knew. It wasn’t that I liked the idea. I never really even thought about it as a like or dislike. It wasn’t a choice. It was just what was going to happen. There were no plans for my college education. The closest thing to college I would ever hope to get was a few nighttime business classes and certification courses held every few months in the cafeteria of the combined elementary/middle school.
But then my parents checked out, and I was running the grove before I could even sign up for the courses. I tried my best with the knowledge I knew from growing up in the grove to save it, but it all went to shit so fast, it was like I blinked and it was all over.
I’d failed.
* * *
“I don’t want to go in there,” I said, staring at the front porch.
“I had the power turned back on,” King said, misunderstanding my reasoning’s for not wanting to go into the little house of horrors of my past. Rage on the other hand skipped up the steps and kicked open the front door, disappearing inside.
“It smells in here,” she shouted, making a long and loud gagging noise.
“Is she really the one you guys wanted to watch out for me?” I asked King. “I mean, I know you said she blew up a building but are you sure she wasn’t just trying to deodorize the place or something? She seems to have a thing about smells.”
“Don’t let the pink fool you,” he said, his voice deep and hard. “That tiny psycho germaphobe in there is the deadliest fucking person, well, maybe second deadliest, I’ve ever known and it’s because she doesn’t take sides. She has no conscience. It’s good that we got to her before Chop did or you’d be meeting a whole other side to Rage. One that ends up with you not breathing.”
“Oh,” I muttered, not sure if I should be happy or sad about Bear choosing to leave me in the care of Rambo, prom queen edition. King strode up to the porch and shouted something to Rage who appeared again in the doorway, twirling the end of her ponytail.
“Ray or I will call to check on you,” King stated as he walked right past me and got back into the truck. Within seconds he’d already backed out of the driveway and disappeared down the road. I couldn’t see the truck but I could make out the dust billowing behind his truck and over the trees as King made his way out of Jessep.
I glanced up at Rage who pressed her lips together and frowned. I couldn’t help but wish I was still in that truck with him.
I shuffled up to the house but stopped just short of the broken down deteriorating steps.
“You shoot?” Rage asked, holding up one of my first place blue ribbons.
“Yeah. A bit.”
“Wanna have a little competition?” she asked with a mischievous smile, pulling two guns from her duffle bag.
Rage may be able to blow up buildings and if what King said was true, a lot more than that. But in a shooting competition I had a strong doubt that she could beat me and maybe a little distraction from reality was what I needed. After all, I had no idea how much time we had on our hands.
“Okay,” I said, pointing behind her. “There’s a fence on the back of the property. Might still be some of my old targets out there—”
“Nope. Not exactly what I had in mind,” Rage interrupted, checking her reflection in the chrome of one of her guns. She tossed me the other which I thankfully caught. “Come on,” she said, heading back up into the house.
“I can’t,” I said, twisting Bear’s ring in my hand.
Rage narrowed her eyes at me, “I figured that when I saw the look on your face when we first pulled up, but I have an idea. At least come up the steps.”
Reluctantly, I took the steps slowly, one by one, cringing with each familiar creak. I stopped “What bothers you most about this place?” Rage asked from the other side of the screen.
“Everything,” I admitted.
“Be more specific,” Rage said, letting out an exasperated sigh. “I already know that it holds some bad memories, yada yada, killed your parents here, yada yada.”
“Something tells me the last one wasn’t exactly a guess.”
Rage smiled sheepishly. “I know everything about everything.”
“Good to know.”
“So tell me what you hate about it. You know, besides the obvious, being-a-shit-hole, reason.”
“Well,” I started. “I hate that this is where my brother died, but I was young, so what I really hate is that my mother never changed his room or got rid of any of his stuff. It was like a ghost lived with us, one she liked better than me or my dad.”
“Keep going,” Rage said. “Close your eyes.” I did as she said and the images of all that was wrong with that place flooded my mind. I heard the squeak of the screen door open and started to open my eyes again. “Keep them shut,” she ordered.
I took a deep breath. “I hate the family portrait in the living room because my mom had it painted by one of her friends years after my brother died and instead of it being of the three of us my mom had my brother painted in. I loved my brother, and we had lots of pictures of him all around the house and I loved them all, but I felt like it was a slap in the face to me and my dad. We were alive, yet she treated us like we were the ones who were dead.”
“Good,” Rage said, tugging on my arm, making me take a step forward. “More.”
“I hate the rocking chair in my brother’s room where she was sitting when I realized she killed my dad. I hate that I know the exact place in my parents’ room where my father died. I hate the table in the kitchen where we had Sunday dinner and would all smile and talk about our days like there was nothing wrong. Those weren’t dinners. Those were lies.”
I felt another tug and took another step. “Okay, good. Now open your eyes.” I did.
“Wow,” I said. I was standing in the middle of the living roo
m. “How did you do that?” I asked, noticing the panicked feeling was gone.
Rage replied with, “Because recently someone taught me how to overcome a fear, and I thought maybe I could pass that along to you.”
“Yeah, but how?”
“Easy peasy,” Rage said. Turning suddenly she aimed her gun at the family portrait hanging above the mantle of the little fireplace in the living room and fired, shattering the glass, sending it raining down to the floor, leaving a dusty rectangular mark on the wall where it had hung. She turned back around. “You take the power back.”
It was like suddenly something inside of me broke and without thinking I took a step past Rage, walking around the broken portrait in the living room in complete and total awe. “Yes,” I said, looking back up to Rage. “Let’s do it.”
Rage and I spent the rest of the afternoon making a competition of setting up vases, photos, stuffed animals, plates, and other objects of my hatred, taking turns obliterating each and every one of them.
Neither one of us missed a single shot.
“Have you ever missed?” Rage asked from her perch on the counter, as she watched me sweep glass into a dust pan.
“Yes,” I admitted, remembering the park and how I almost got Bear and I killed because I hit Mono’s shoulder instead of his chest. “Once, maybe twice.”
Only when shooting at people.
“You?”
Rage swung her legs back and forth and scrunched up her little nose. “Just once, although I’m starting to think I did it on purpose.”
We were both quiet after that as I cleaned up the mess, and Rage cleaned her guns. She’d been right. In order to overcome my fear I had to take the power back, which meant I couldn’t just sit around and do nothing when it came to my fear of losing Bear.
I had to do something.
Unfortunately, in order to do something I had to wait for Barbarian Barbie to turn her back.
At least long enough for me to borrow one of her guns.
Which I realized very quickly was going to be hard when she didn’t leave my side. When I showered, she sat on the toilet with the lid down and filed her nails. When I cleaned out the freezer, she did a bizarre series of stretches in the middle of the kitchen. When I went outside to throw away the trash, she kept pace beside me and complained about the heat.
That first night when I went to sleep in my little twin bed in my old room, Rage surprised me by getting in right beside me. “What’s going to happen to this house?” she asked without a trace of tiredness in her voice.
“Bank will probably take it back soon.” I said, yawning.
“Good. That means we can blow it up when we leave,” she said, sitting up and hopping up and down on her butt and clapping like she’d just been crowned prom queen, which she most certainly could’ve been with her blonde hair and tanned skin. However, I had the nagging inkling that Rage’s past was more colorful then prom court and pep rallies.
“Deal,” I agreed, enjoying the idea of watching the place go up in an explosion of flames. “But do you really have to sleep in here? You can sleep in my brother’s old room. Or on the couch. It pulls out. The extra linens should be in the hall closet.” I didn’t mention anything about my parents’ room, preferring instead to pretend like the room where I’d found my father’s bloodied body didn’t exist.
Rage ignored me, her silence telling me all I needed to know about her plans for going to find another place to sleep.
“Is what King said true?” I asked. “You don’t sleep?”
“No, I don’t. Not really. Not for a long time, anyway,” she said, staring up at the ceiling.
“How do you survive?”
“I don’t really know,” she answered with an audible sigh, although she seemed like she was talking about more than just her lack of sleep.
“I have to help Bear,” I admitted. Testing the waters to see if there was any way I could get her to help me instead of hindering me.
“You can’t help him,” Rage said, taking me by surprise.
“Why the hell not?” I asked, turning on my side to face her. Rage did the same. Her blue eyes sparkled but were lacking something which I soon realized was what King had been talking about when he’d dropped us off.
“Because you can’t leave the house. Those are my orders.”
“But why?”
“All I know is that I’m here to make sure you don’t try anything stupid.”
“How are you going to stop me?” I asked, growing bold.
Rage giggled like a schoolgirl with a secret, she rolled onto her back, again turning her attentions to the ceiling. “That, Thia, is entirely up to you.”
CHAPTER TEN
Thia
I had a dog.
Well, sort of.
I sort of had a dog.
I first spotted it one night when I was sitting out on the porch in my grandmother’s old rocking chair. Rage, who I was supposed to believe was a killer, unabomber, babysitter of sorts, spent the afternoon baking muffins. Really good muffins as far as I could tell from the one bite I’d had. But before I could grab it off the plate again, which I’d set on top of the old wooden toolbox, it ran away in a flash of teeth and brown fur. I stood up an looked out over the railing at the tiny thing who was barely out of the puppy stage, happily munching on my muffin. He was all skin, ribs, and bones. The second he took his last swallow, he hightailed it between the trees and into the grove.
The very next night I left out some food again, this time on purpose and this time it was a few pieces of breakfast sausage. I sat in the same spot, watching and waiting. Sure enough, he crept from his hiding spot in the trees and stole my food all over again.
Night after night it played out the same way, except I’d switched to feeding him actual dog food that Rage had delivered from the feed store. Everything else we needed was magically stock piled in the refrigerator and pantry, even the deep freezer in the garage. We weren’t just hiding out. We were all set for the zombie apocalypse.
“You should name that thing,” Rage said, taking a seat on the top step. You spend enough time with it.
It’s not like there is much else to do.
“I should just name him Muffin since that’s what he took from me the first time.,” I said.
Rage turned up her nose. “Nah, if you’re gonna name him a breakfast food then name him something good at least, like Pancakes, or Waffles, or something like that.”
Pancakes.
I fed Pancakes for weeks. Every morning and every night, I put out a bowl of dog food and another with water and stand back and watch him suck it all down, keeping a distrustful eye on me the entire time. And without fail, each night after he’d finished, he’d scurry away again. Eventually I started standing a little closer while he ate and finally instead of running away, he began to linger for a few minutes after his meal.
One night I didn’t wait for him. I just set out his food and went back inside.
I was in a bad mood, unable to shake thoughts of Bear never coming home, and the hope of doing anything to help him faded away minute by minute as I sat there being utterly useless.
I didn’t wonder where Rage was. She was always close by. I stopped talking to myself out loud because even though I didn’t see her all the time, she was usually close enough to answer me back. The first few times it scared the crap out of me, once I fell off the porch.
I really wish that bitch slept.
By the time I reached my room I thought that Pancakes would be long gone.
I was wrong.
Not only did Pancakes not wander back off into the wild, but he followed me into the house, and when I plopped down face first onto my bed, the mattress dipped slightly and a wet snout came to rest across the back of my knee. I lifted my head and there he was, looking up at me with big, yellowish-colored eyes like his behavior was perfectly normal. After a few seconds of staring at one another, he fell asleep, like he’d never been afraid of me at all.
> “I guess I have a dog, now,” I muttered into the pillow, drifting into my own nap as Pancakes’ warm doggy breath tickled the backs of my legs.
He was a poor substitute for Bear.
Too hairy.
Too skinny.
No tattoos.
But he would have to do.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Thia
Six months.
Six loooooong fucking months with no end in sight. Not a word from Bear. What was worse was that each time Rage’s phone rang, my stomach lurched and my heart dropped. The world around me stopped spinning until she gave me the, “It isn’t that call” look and I could breathe again.
At least until the next call.
I felt nauseated at least three hundred times a day.
I became jumpy. Paranoid. My hands shook whenever Rage mentioned Bear’s name.
I couldn’t eat, and just like Rage, I couldn’t’ sleep. Afraid that at any moment I would lose the one thing in my life that ever brought me real happiness, I became someone I was really starting to hate.
Bear could have asked me anything else. Anything at all, and I would have done it. Rob a bank, become a flying trapeze artist, learn Japanese. At that point I would have gone to the MC and put a bullet in Chop myself if it meant that I could take a breath again without wanting to pull my own hair out strand by pink strand and DO NOTHING.
But no. He asked me the worst thing he could possibly ask me.
He asked me to WAIT.
He might as well have asked me to sit while someone removed my fingernails one by one with tweezers because waiting was a torture in and of itself.
“How many of them went in there?” I heard Rage ask in a whisper. I stopped in the hallway and pressed my ear to the door of my room. “Four? Shit, do you know anyone on the inside who can protect him? I know that one guy but anyone else? Yes, it is my fucking business, because I’m here babysitting his old lady in little house on the motherfucking prairie out here, so if you want me to protect her, you will tell me what the fuck is going on.” There was a pause. “Really? Well, that’s something I didn’t know. No, of course I won’t tell her. She’s going to be fucking pissed though. Yes. Okay, fine I got it.” She ended the call and I leapt into the kitchen. With my heart in my throat, I threw open the little cabinet above the refrigerator and searched through my mother’s prescription bottles until I found the one I was looking for. I poured two glasses of soda and when Rage came back out I was leaning over the counter, pretending to be interested in the cookbook I’d just opened. I handed her one of the glasses.
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