by Chuck Wendig
Somebody went and dumped in a diaper. Or maybe put some dog crap in there. Then wadded it up, broke into her locker, and left her a present.
They do know.
Huh.
Again that dark thought hits Atlanta: Serves you right. She’s not much for spiritual beliefs—at least, not any she understands in a Ten Commandments sort of way. But karma, that’s something she can get behind. What you do comes back at you, like a whip biting you on your own chin, or a boomerang circling through the air. That’s one of those phrases she has written in her notebook, actually. Something from Chaucer. Translated and paraphrased away from his old-timey way of writing: And often the curse returns again to him that curseth, as a bird returns again to his own nest. Chickens, home, roost.
Bee doesn’t cry.
But she does turn around and see Atlanta watching her. She gives Atlanta a plaintive look. See what they did? Now I’m just like you. Or maybe Atlanta’s reading too much into it.
Both of them turn away and go in opposite directions.
Day’s over. Atlanta heads out to the school parking lot. She feels alert and aware. A change from the last couple weeks, where it’s felt like she’s just been drifting—floating like an old fast-food cup down a flooded gutter.
A football corkscrews through the air over her head. The smell of car exhaust fills her nose. A rumble from a nearby muscle car. A dull booming bass from some jumped-up Honda. Everybody’s laughing or making out or just horsing around—some are yelling, some are arguing. Others still are posturing and preening.
Some folks say hi to her now. It surprises her even still, though it probably shouldn’t. They’ve seen the video. They heard the stories. She’s not the poison pill she was at the end of last year. But it still doesn’t feel real.
(Or maybe it’s that it doesn’t feel earned. If that even matters.)
No real engagement, yet—nobody’s asking her how her day went or saying they wanna hang out after class. But a lifted chin. A hey here and there. A guy from the wrestling team, Wes Newman, a guy she doesn’t even know, walks by her and gives her a set of fingerguns and says, “’Sup, Atlanta.” First she thinks, How’s he even know my name, but then she remembers: Everybody knows my name.
She’s not sure if she likes it or if it freaks her out. Maybe both.
Far end of the lot is Shane’s car. He always parks on the fringes, always at the very edge—“I don’t want anybody opening their door and dinging the paint,” he says, and every time he says it, she just shakes her head. A little dinged paint, so dang what. Life is all about dinged paint.
But as she’s walking, she sees a familiar car. Orange hatchback. Bee’s in the driver’s seat. Just sitting there, hands on the wheel, car engine idling.
Atlanta thinks, Well, okay, whatever, and keeps on walking. But then she catches it.
Someone’s keyed a message into the side of Bee’s car.
PREG MEANS YOU PUT OUT
Nearby, she hears laughing. It’s all too familiar: Mitchell Erickson’s smooth, car-salesman laugh. He stands there at the back end of his sports car, watching Bee’s hatchback like a hungry vulture. Next to him stands Russo and Lanky—two more of his baseball buddies—and Samantha Gwynn-Rudin. They’re all having a blast, smirking like mean little kids, chuckling and sharing looks and elbowing each other like, har har, haw haw, ain’t we a clever batch of assholes.
And then it all falls apart. All the bad feelings Atlanta has built up for Bee—this is the knife that cuts that knot clean in half. If Bee’s on the receiving end of misery from these chuckledicks, well, that puts them, by extension, on the same side of things. Atlanta pulls her bag high on her shoulder. She feels naked without any weapons—they got metal detectors at the school, so it’s not like she can bring in a knife or a can of bear mace or anything—but she thinks, I got my words, and right now that’s all I need. She starts to march toward them.
Mitchell looks over, sees her coming. His smile falls away like the last shingle blown off an old roof. His face twists. The others follow his gaze.
Then comes the revving of an engine.
Bee’s engine.
The hatchback suddenly guns it—wheels spinning, spraying up gravel in every direction before suddenly lurching backward like a drunken horse. It bolts in reverse toward the gathered chuckledicks. Mitchell yelps, and the other three cry out and hurry away—
—just as Bee’s hatchback slams the ass-end of Mitchell Erickson’s red Lexus.
Metal crunches against metal.
Mitchell stares, gaping in horror. “You whore!” he screams.
Bee rolls down her window, and something pelts him right in the chest.
A diaper. A full-on, shit-brimming diaper.
It leaves a little brown mark on Mitchell’s Abercrombie shirt. Samantha Gwynn-Rudin cracks up.
Bee peels away in another cloud of gravel and exhaust. As her little car speeds off, the bumper from the Lexus groans—
—then drops off into the stones with a crunch-clunk.
Atlanta laughs so hard she almost cries.
When she gets home, she calls Bee, leaves her a voice mail: “I’m in. Tomorrow’s Saturday, so meet me at my house around the crack of noon.”
CHAPTER SIX
They walk along the tree line out back of Atlanta’s house. Sometimes the trees break and they can see the plumes of smoke or steam coming off one of the PP&L power plants. Atlanta keeps her eyes up—wary, like a wolf, she tells herself. (Though a small part of her thinks: Scared, like a deer.) Bee keeps her head down, kicking at stones and dandelions. Any stone or flower she kicks, Whitey goes after it and eats it. Just gobbles it down like the whole world is kibble.
“I want a cigarette so damn bad,” Bee says. “I don’t even smoke. Just, like, at parties sometimes. But man, now that I’m all . . . stuffed up with this baby, I just want things. Things I can’t even explain. Yesterday, I wanted a Tastykake—a Butterscotch Krimpet—soooo fucking hard. I just couldn’t shake it. Couldn’t get it out of my head.”
Atlanta glances over. “You get one?”
“I did.” Bee hesitates, then smiles all guilty-like. “I got a whole bag.”
“A whole bag? Dang. You sure that’s a baby in there and not some kind of starving wolverine?”
She shrugs. “After eating that many I think this baby’s turned into a Butterscotch Krimpet. I’ll give birth and eat it right up.” She pats her belly. “Sorry, baby.” Then she says: “I miss this. You and me talking like this. I couldn’t say weird stuff like that to the other girls. They’d stare at me like I had a second head growing out of the middle of my chest.”
“Don’t,” Atlanta says. “Don’t do that. Don’t try to lather my ass up. I’m here for the job, not anything else.” She hears the meanness coming out of her, lashing like a stingray’s tail. “You gonna take care of that thing?”
Bee stops walking. “What?”
“Take care of it. Go to a doctor and—you know, the baby vacuum.”
“An abortion?”
“That is what they call it, yeah.”
“No.” She stands, aghast. A wind kicks up. “Atlanta, I go to church.”
“So?”
“They don’t . . . we don’t agree with that.”
“You’re having this baby, then.”
“Damn right I am.”
“Oh. I just figured . . .” Her words get lost coming out of her mouth. Instead she asks: “How’d everyone know?”
“That I’m preggo? Susie and Petra. Had to be them.” She sighs and scowls. “I went to the appointment with my mom and then after I called Susie bawling. I told Petra the next day and then the two of them told . . . well, whoever. Probably Samantha. Nobody keeps a secret from her.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
Gossip at school is like a disease. It’s in the air. You can’t help catching it and sharing it.
They keep on in silence for a little while. Whitey chases, and eats, a few flitting cabbage moths.
Then, just inside the trees—a couch. Old white leather, like something out of the eighties or nineties. The couch has lost most of its definition: a sagging blob now, which Atlanta thinks of as an old stripper’s boob. But it’s still comfy, even if it smells like the mold of a long damp. She steps through a bit of briar, twigs snapping underneath her feet. Then she plops down.
Bee walks over, plops down, too. “Been a while since I’ve sat here.”
“Yeah.” Atlanta doesn’t want another trip on the Nostalgia Choo-Choo, so she changes the subject back to the one at hand: “I don’t know why you need my help. I’m not some kind of baby wizard—I’m not Obi-Gyn Kenobi, I don’t have Jedi powers to help you figure out which guy you slept with stuck a proper acorn into your dirt. Get a paternity test. Call Maury, get on his show. Why do you need me?”
Bee leans forward on the couch, hands on the sides of her head. Her thumbs run along her jawline, up to her temples, massaging circles. She breathes in, out, in, out, like she’s having contractions—but while Atlanta is no baby doctor, she’s pretty sure it’s hella early to be having those.
“Sorry,” Bee says. “Feeling a little queasy.”
“Oh. Morning sickness, right?”
A half shrug from Bee. “Sorta.”
“What is it, then?”
“I don’t . . .” She blinks back tears. “I don’t know who the father is because I don’t know who had sex with me.”
Bee sits back, stares at Atlanta. A hard, unblinking, unswerving stare. A look that says, This is how it is, this is how I gotta get through this, like she’s rooting down and pressing on the accelerator even though she knows she’s about to drive off a cliff.
“Bee, are you telling me—”
“I went to a party. End of summer. And everything was going good. But I got drunk. Real drunk, I guess. I . . . blacked out and . . .”
“Oh, Bee. Jesus.”
“Yeah. Jesus.” She sniffs. Pulls out a tissue, wipes her nose. All dainty. Bee could be like that. She could hang with Atlanta and they could make funny, horrible jokes. And they could smoke weed and listen to eighties hair metal or Kanye (Bee wouldn’t listen to country), but always in there was the good church girl. Just a hint of being proper. A rusty pickup with a shiny chrome bumper.
“Did you . . . talk to the cops?”
“Why?”
“Last I checked, rape is illegal.”
“I dunno that it was . . . rape.”
“It’s rape. You get drunk, somebody sticks it in you without your sober and enthusiastic say-so, that’s called rape.”
Bee stiffens. “I don’t like calling it that.”
Atlanta feels her own heart going like the leg of an itchy rabbit. She hears a high-pitched whine. A smell hits her. The smell. The sharp, skunky tang of expended gunpowder. She hears the bang right in her ears, like a gun going off just inches from her head. She visibly flinches. Whitey senses it. Comes over, nuzzles her knee, and puts his chin on her thigh, staring up at her with that one soulful eye. It’s enough. She goes from feeling like a boat lost in a storm-churned sea to dropping an anchor—the ocean is still crashing against her, but at least she can stay in one place and not get swept away.
“You call it what you like,” she mutters. “I’ll help you.”
“What’s the cost?”
“A thousand.” She just makes that number up. Then she adds something she’s heard in detective stories: “And expenses.”
Bee nods. “I got the money.”
“Good.”
“Where will you start?”
A long sigh. She doesn’t really know because, again, this isn’t her bag of tricks, is it? Protecting someone from a bully is easy enough. You stand between the human monster and their target, and you put some rebar in your spine and plant your damn feet as deep in the dirt as you can. Then you put your gun up—metaphorically or literally—and you say, This far, no further. But solving mysteries like she’s part of the Scooby gang—it feels uncomfortable. Unlikely.
Maybe even impossible.
Still. She said she’d do it, and so she’ll do it.
“The party,” she says. “Guess I need to know about that.”
As she walks, the barns and fields she passes become houses—at first, just a few ranches, or a couple small developments tucked away in areas once all green or all trees, but then the houses get nicer and nicer. The road gets steeper, too, and Atlanta thinks: This is what it’s like to go to Rich Person Heaven. Climb higher and the trees get prettier, the barns become decorative, houses with brown siding become houses made of old stone. And those houses give way to bigger and bigger ones until they’re up in the minimansions: houses with whole extra wings, with swimming pools and balconies and lawns sculpted by teams of ill-paid immigrants. Until there, up on a hill all its own, is Samantha’s house.
Samantha Gwynn-Rudin lives, of course, up on Gallows Hill. At its very peak. Moneyland. Richie-rich-ville. Her father’s a lawyer, her mother a self-help “guru,” whatever that is. Atlanta figures anybody who calls themselves a guru is a know-nothing no-how con artist who just wants to make money pretending to be an expert. When she was in Emerald Lakes, some of the counselors seemed keen to get the girls to read self-help books, but those books always seemed too wispy, too hippy-dippy, to make sense to Atlanta. Eat more kale, they say, except who wants to eat an ugly ornamental plant? Meditate and do yoga, except nothing’s more stressful than trying to twist your body up into a knotty shoelace. One book just said, Love yourself, as if that’s the easiest thing in the world. Just love yourself. Just do it. As if the reason you don’t love yourself is your own darn fault—gosh, if only you’d flip the Happy Little Light Switch inside your brain, you’d feel better.
Idiots.
Of course, the other side of it is that they drug-bomb you into bliss or unconsciousness. Try to medicate your demons back into their cage. That doesn’t work much, either. It’s like the bodies that serial killers try to hide in lakes and rivers—they always float back up. You can’t just hide the bad feelings or forget about them. Most of the kids Atlanta knows at school are on some pill or another. Then half of them sell their pills to each other—or back to a dude like Guy, who then resells for a profit.
Anyway. Samantha’s house isn’t a regular house so much as it is the White House. It really looks like that. The columns out front. The big white toothy face—the door the mouth, the windows the eyes—with wings on both sides of it. Roses along each end. A mix of pink and red, like the colors of skin and blood.
A garage sits off to the side—a garage with four bay doors, all closed. One car sits parked outside: a lemon-chiffon Mercedes convertible.
Must be nice, she thinks. Same thing she always thinks when she sees how the other half lives—though, not really the other half so much as the other tiny fraction of humanity. Whatever.
Atlanta pulls her bag over her shoulder, heads to the front door.
Ding-dong. It’s literally one of those doorbells that goes ding-dong.
The door opens. A little Latina woman stands there in a blue blouse and jeans. Ruby-red lips and eyes pinched behind wrinkled pockets of skin. Her lips are puckered up like a too-tight coin purse. “Yes?”
“Uh. Hi.”
The woman gives Atlanta an up-and-down look, then visibly dismisses her. “We don’t want any. Thank you.” She starts to backpedal and close the door—
Atlanta sticks her foot in. “Whoa, hey, hold on. I’m looking for Samantha.”
“Miss Samantha is in the back. Are you one of her friends?”
“Let’s say yes?”
A moment of hesitation before a curt nod. “Come.”
She waves Atlanta on, then heads into the house. The woman moves like a tiny locomotive: legs pistoning into an aggressive shuffle, arms like the wheels running along parallel tracks. Every step looks like she’s thinking, I think I can, I think I can, chugga chugga woo-woo.
Steam should be coming out her ears.
; Atlanta has to hurry to keep up.
The house is—well, if the outside is mostly white, the inside is mostly peach. Or almost peach—the floors are white marble shot through with threads of blush. Pink roses on a nearby table. A mirror framed in warm gold. A family portrait hangs opposite: a mother with severe bangs so sharp and so black they look cut with the devil’s own straight razor; a mustached father gone bald on top, a big goofy grin on his face like he’s got a steady marquee of dad jokes running through his head at all times; a little sister with puffy cheeks and braces; and finally, Samantha. Looking like murder is on her mind, like the family photo is so miserable she’d rather be sipping on a cup of cat pee.
(The Latina woman is not in the photo.)
They go through the house, through the kitchen, to the back door—which opens onto a huge stone patio the color of dirty snow. It’s so big that Atlanta’s pretty sure there’s more square footage out here than in her own house. Got a grill built in. Tables. Umbrellas. Automated awnings.
And a pool shaped like a long stick of gum.
Samantha sits out back in a cherry-red two-piece. Sunglasses with white frames that almost wash out against her porcelain-pale face. She’s got a cell phone in her hand turned sideways, the phone resting on the flat of her tummy. Her thumbs move fast on the keyboard, twitching like the antennae on an irritated ant.
“Miss Samantha,” the woman announces, “you have a guest.”
The thumbs stop typing. Samantha cranes her head back.
She lifts her sunglasses and a big smile crosses her face.
“Atlanta. Wow. You. Here. Huh.”
Atlanta just shrugs. “Wonders never cease, I guess.”
“Yeah, no kidding.” To the woman, Samantha says: “Delfina, you can go now. Go on. TTFN.”
“Yes, Miss Samantha.”
Delfina turns, and Samantha calls after her: “Don’t forget. I need socks. And if you’re going out later and my parents aren’t coming home for dinner, I want Thai food. So get me Thai food. But not from the close place. The other place. With the good noodles.”