by Chuck Wendig
“I am so confused,” Atlanta says.
“Wait,” Shane says. “Did you just come out?”
Josie, still covering her mouth, gives a small nod.
Atlanta feels it. Oh. Oh. Whoa-dang.
“You ever told anyone else?” she asks Josie.
“No,” Josie says, quiet as a mouse fart. Then, louder: “It just . . . happened.”
Atlanta holds up her hand: “I think now is the time for the high five.”
Josie laughs—a mad sound, an uncontrolled noise, a combination between a giggle and a cackle—and then gives a helluva high five. Atlanta’s palm is left stinging from the slap. They recirculate the bottle back to Josie and she takes a long celebratory glug-glug-glug.
She’s inside looking through her mother’s secret, not-secret liquor stash (seriously, it’s just an unlocked cabinet in the downstairs bathroom), picking out another bottle of too-cheap, too-sweet wine.
A floorboard creaks behind her.
Her blood pressure shoots up—all parts of her clench.
Then Steven clears his throat noisily. “It’s just me. Just me.”
“You have got to learn to stop sneaking up on people. And by people, I mean me. I about brained you with one of these bottles.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s fine, what is it?”
But he doesn’t say anything. In the half-light bleeding in from the kitchen, she can see the look of eagerness on his face. Like a man summoning courage. Like maybe he’s gonna jump off a cliff or try to make love to a grizzly bear or something, or maybe like—
Oh, no.
“Last time we found ourselves here, we made out,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“And you were thinking of maybe trying out that move again.”
“Worth a shot?” He quickly hurries more words out of his big-teethed mouth: “But, but, but—really, what I wanted was to ask you a question.”
“Shoot.”
“You wanna go to Homecoming? It’s, uhh, it’s next week and—”
“I do not,” she says without hesitation. “Not with you. Not without you.” Even just the thought of going to a dance makes her skin crawl like it’s covered in breakdancing roaches. Being close to so many people. All of them swaying like zombies to music that sucks so hard it could pull a baby through a garden hose. All in the half dark, with hands and heat and—a lurch of nausea derails that train of thought. It’s the wine, in part: she’s feeling fuzzy and strange, still high off Josie trusting them all enough to share what she shared. But it’s sitting sickly-sweet in her stomach now, too. “Sorry, no dance.”
“Well, um, maybe we—”
“Maybe we could be friends.”
“But we kissed.”
“And like I said then: it was a big step. Huge! I didn’t hate it. It didn’t make me throw up. That sounds like an insult but it isn’t. It’s a compliment of the highest order, dude. But we’re not a thing. Not gonna happen. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“And you’ll drop it? Because I’m asking you to drop it.”
He mimes dropping something, like a brick. “Dropped.”
She holds out her hand, pinky thrust out like a knife. “Pinky-swear?”
They pinky-wrestle, and he agrees.
And that’s when Shane starts screaming her name from the outside.
It’s Ecky. Joey Eckhart.
One half of her face is swollen and black, like a gone-rotten pumpkin. The firelight highlights the rime of crusted blood around her nose, the split lip, the one eye forced halfway closed by swelling. Joey’s been crying but isn’t now, and she has this faraway look in her eye. A look of cold, dead iron.
She came walking down the driveway like the stumbling undead, according to Shane. Just shuffling along, beaten to hell and back.
Didn’t take long to get out of her who did this. Because it’s not much of a surprise. Hank Crayley. Jumped Joey about a mile away from the Sheetz gas station—Joey was taking a walk down there to buy some snacks and one of those machine-made cappuccinos, and then a junker pickup pulled up, and they just held her against the tailgate and beat her ass good. Joey lifts up her shirt and man, all those bruises. Like wine soaking into a white carpet.
All Joey says is, “At least they didn’t kill me.” But her lip is fat and so it comes out, Least dey diddit gill bee. Then she sits down at the fire and asks if she can just hang out for a while.
But Atlanta, she’s got her blood tumbling in her ears, pounding at her temples like war drums. A heat comes off her. She’s mad, too mad, scary mad—part of it is the wine washing away any second thoughts she might have, the way waves pull sand away from the beach and strip it bare.
“You need the hospital?” she asks Joey. Even in that simple, innocuous question she hears the serrated edge in her voice.
Joey shakes her head. “No. Just wanna sit here. Can I have some wine?”
Shane passes Joey the wine.
Atlanta says, “Okay. You guys stay here.” She picks up the shotgun and a handful of .410 shells that she shoves into her jacket pocket. “Steven, you and me, c’mon. Let’s take a ride on your quad.”
They wait in the darkness of the junkyard. Heaps and mounds of rusted, forgotten things making a maze out there in the darkness. Cars and washing machines and scrap piles of corrugated tin and copper. It’s junk, but it’s worth money, too, which is why you get kids and junkies hitting up houses under construction and pulling out the pipes and wires to sell. Atlanta figures that explains the tall fence and loops of razor wire surrounding it all.
A few lights on around the perimeter, but it’s easy enough to hide in a patch of tall grass and weeds. Steven said that sometimes Crayley and his boys come here to hang out, drink, smoke, shoot that bow and arrow of his at makeshift targets—targets that sometimes include cats, he says.
Right now, it’s dark, and comes a point where her blood starts to cool and the wine buzz starts to wear down like a worn pencil eraser—she thinks, Well, screw it, let’s just head back, but then: headlights cut through the night.
A pickup truck. Hank Crayley’s pickup: a pitted, pocked thing. Loud and grumbling, the muffler hanging low like a dingleberry off its ass. It drives up to the front gate and waits a few seconds, the truck idling with an occasional bang, some kinda death metal coming out of the open windows. Then the gate buzzes and clicks. The chain-link rattles, and the whole thing turns out to be mechanized—triggered, she guesses, by a control inside his truck. It groans and squeaks and opens slowly, dragging a furrow across the ground, scattering stones.
“Stay here,” she whispers to Steven. “Anybody comes? You run.”
“Wait,” he says, but she’s already off like a shot because time is ticking.
The pickup is already in the junkyard—and the gate starts to close behind it. She hurries sideways just as it rattle-clacks shut.
Atlanta sneaks up alongside a two-stack of refrigerators lying on their sides. She ducks down, out of the range of light coming off the truck and from the bulb dangling loose from a telephone pole not far from what must be the junkyard’s “office.” The truck’s engine finally cuts, and Crayley hops out.
The red cherry from a cigarette glows. Smoke above his head like a hovering ghost. “Dad!” he calls. “Yo! Dad.” No answer. Mumbles: “Asshole.”
He pulls a set of keys, then heads over to a nearby wrecker parked not far from the office, in the shadow of a stack of cars smashed flat like apple fritters. Pops the door. She thinks: This is my chance. Again her blood boils. She thinks about Ecky and those cuts, those bruises. Hank’s alone.
Doesn’t get any better than this.
She keeps her head low as she pops the breach and thumbs a shell into it. She tells herself she doesn’t know what she’s gonna do here, and that’s true to a point: but it’s hard not to think about the power she has in her hands.
The cold trigger. The long barrel. The bead at the end that tells you where your enemy stan
ds.
Atlanta runs across the open space, gun up at her shoulder. She gets near, starts to slow—and the scuff of her heel is enough.
Crayley turns. “Dad, goddamnit—” Then he sees. “You.”
“Me.”
The look on his face is clear. He’s got no friends here. No father. He’s alone in the dark with a girl who made a promise. A promise to end him if he went and messed with one of her friends again. Now that debt has come due.
“We didn’t hurt him too bad,” Crayley says and shrugs. “Doesn’t seem right. A dude who wants to be a chick. I don’t get it. It’s not natural.”
“Doesn’t seem your place to judge.” Her jaw, set. Teeth grinding against teeth. The pain of it goes all the way up into her skull. “Seems like she’s not hurting you any, but you sure are hurting her. Or him. Whatever. That’s not the way it ought to be.”
“We were just having some fun. He’s—she’s fine.”
“She’s not fine. She’s beat to hell. It’s not the marks on her face that matter. It’s the ones down deep. A far worse infection will find its way into her heart because of people like you. And years from now, or maybe months, or maybe even weeks, when she swallows a load of pills or steps out into traffic and kills herself, it might just be you that ends up as her last living thought.”
He’s nervous, shifting from foot to foot. Looking left, right, for any way out of this. No exit, though, for him. “Yeah, I . . . I don’t want that. I just thought maybe he—she!—she was tougher. People gotta be tough. It’s a hard life out there. We’re just . . . toughening her up.”
“It’s hard out there because of people like you.”
She hugs the gun close to her shoulder.
Her finger flirts with the trigger.
There’s a moment where she knows what’s coming next.
And the only scary thing is how little it scares her.
Crayley’s eyes flit to just behind her. Over her shoulder. The realization hits her far too late: Somebody else is here. Then something hard, metal hard, presses against the middle of her back—there’s a click that follows a half step later. “Put that gun down,” someone growls.
“No,” she says, the tendons in her neck pulled taut like hanging ropes.
“You pull your trigger, I pull mine.”
Shit.
She stoops low, sets the gun down.
A big boot steps on the stock of the gun, swipes it out of reach. Fear climbs through her like spiders on a web. She feels suddenly, woefully powerless. The worst thing. Being subject to other people. Other men. They could do anything they want, now. Crayley says: “Thanks, Dad.”
His father answers: “Shut the hell up. You dumb-ass. What is this? What did you do?”
“He hurt someone,” Atlanta says, but then the man behind her pushes forward with the gun again. Hard enough against her spine that it hurts.
She risks a look up, sees a scruffy older man with mussed-up hair—long at the sides, half-bald on top. Looks like he just woke up. He says as much, then: “Hank, you turd, this is what I wake to find?”
In the distance, sirens.
Oh no.
Hank says, “Did you call the police?”
“Damn right I did,” his father answers. “Better hope they don’t find some reason to haul you in, too, because I won’t bail your mummy ass out.”
Red and blue lights wipe away the darkness.
Two cop cars come up to the fence, and Hank’s father tells his son to get off his ass and go open it.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Sometime near morning, a cop comes and gets her out of what must be the drunk tank at the Maker’s Bell police station. A place that haunts her—walking through its halls, the gray carpet, the bleachy too-clean smell, all of it reminds her of the day that Petry shot Whitey in the head. The day that dog almost died.
“You made bail,” the cop—a sludgy, jowly blob of a man—says. “But first, you gotta visit the principal’s office.” That, he says with a chuckle.
He leads her into Detective Holger’s office.
Ah, hell.
Holger sits, stone-faced, at her desk.
The cop closes the door behind her.
“Sit,” Holger says.
But Atlanta doesn’t sit, not yet. “How much trouble am I in?”
“None. Mostly.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I’m in my late thirties, so I remember playing the unholy heck out of Super Mario Bros. when I was a kid. And the best things in that game were those 1Up mushrooms, because they made sure you got another life. Another chance. Well, this is that. This is your 1Up mushroom, and I don’t know that there are any after it. We like you here, Atlanta. We do. You shut down a dog-fighting ring that we couldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. You’ve been through hard times. Your dog got shot by one of our own right here in this building. You’ve built up some credit. But that credit is now spent.”
“So what happened?”
“Sit, first.”
“I kinda wanna stand.”
“Sit, or I’ll have Officer Dale put you back in that cage.”
Atlanta sighs, nods, sits.
“The slate is clean,” Holger says. “The ledgers are zeroed out.”
“For me.”
“For everybody.”
“Including Hank Crayley?”
“Including him.”
Atlanta’s hands form fists. “But he did something bad. He needs to pay.”
“The law doesn’t think so. Nobody’s pressing charges against him. Same as how his father, Henry, isn’t going to press charges against you for trespassing on his private property.”
“But Hank hurt somebody.”
“That somebody being Joey Eckhart.” Atlanta’s silent, because she doesn’t necessarily want to throw Joey into this. “Joey won’t confirm. Won’t press charges. This is just how it is, Atlanta.”
“That bully needs justice.”
“What you’re talking about isn’t justice. It’s something much meaner.”
“Maybe the law and justice don’t agree. You ever think of that?”
Holger shrugs. “It’s true. They don’t shake hands as often as I’d like. But life rarely presents clean solutions and—” Here Atlanta’s about to file yet another protest, but Holger interrupts her sharply: “Hey. Hey. You need to think real hard about what went down last night. Seems to me you might’ve been planning to use that gun on Hank. Maybe to injure him. Maybe something worse. This is you at the edge, Atlanta. Standing right at it, the ground crumbling underneath the toes of your shoes. Stop staring down. Start looking ahead.”
She grumbles: “I don’t know what that means.”
“You do, too. And there comes a point when if you keep ignoring the warning signs and the flashing lights and you drive through all the barricades people have put up—you’re gonna head off into oblivion. You’re seventeen years old. At eighteen, they can bring the adult judgments down on you. Right now, though, you’re still a kid . . . so, I’m going to issue you one punishment, just one, and it’s barely punitive and is good common sense.”
Atlanta likes common sense. Her own version, not anybody else’s.
“Oh, crap, what?”
Holger slides a piece of paper across the table. It’s a form—some kind of police equipment requisition form by the look of it. But that’s not how the detective is using it. On it, she’s written in permanent marker using big words:
HUNTER SAFETY COURSE MANDATED!!!
“The heck is this?” Atlanta asks.
“Just what it says. You are to take a hunter safety course, immediately. You wanna use a gun, you’re going to learn to respect it. It’s a six-hour class spread out over three weeks. You do that, I’ll give you back that shotgun of yours. Oh, and you will need an adult to accompany you.”
“Well, who the heck is that gonna be?”
“Maybe the person who paid your bail.” Holger looks up at the wire-mesh window behind Atlan
ta’s chair. Atlanta follows her gaze.
There at the window stands Paul. Her mother’s boyfriend.
He waves.
“What’s he doing here?” Atlanta asks.
“Mister Miller paid your bail, which to his knowledge was five hundred bucks but I have reduced to nothing. Still means he’s here to pick you up. And given that he is a licensed hunter, I’m saying he’s the one who should accompany you on your hunter safety training.”
“Dangit, no, no, I’ll find someone else—”
“You won’t. It’s him. Have a nice day, Atlanta. And stay out of trouble.”
She’s buckled up in the Silverado and not saying much. Paul seems to be taking a long way back to the house. Instead of cutting clean through town he goes up and around, by the old mill, the collier, past that old quarry where kids sometimes swim but they also tell stories of some lake monster that lives down in the watery dark. The day is gray, rain spitting against the windshield.
Finally, Paul speaks. “You could say thank you,” he says.
“Why?”
“Oh, come on, now. For coming to bail you out.”
“You spent literally no money because they dropped the charges.” She leans her head against the window with a thunk. Stares out at the passing trees and fields of corn, the corn already being cut down in places, mashed flat like a giant came down from his beanstalk and started stepping on everything. “So, thanks.”
“I was going to spend money. My mom, rest in peace, always said that it was the thought that counted.” He leans across, and as a conspiratorial aside says: “I handmade a lot of my gifts. And, hand to God, I’m not very good at it. I remember I made this mug in ceramics class in junior high, and it didn’t look like a mug so much as a glazed-over cow pie with a handle—”
“That’s a cute story, Paul.”
He sighs, sounding exasperated. She feels kinda bad about it, but kinda happy about it, too.
“Fine,” he says. “Then thank me for not telling your mother about this.”