Counterargument: That she was hesitating at all was her goddamn hesitation. She’d never been one for thoughtful consideration of action and consequence, had been a headfirst, why-the-hell-not kind of a girl, and if anything made her pause even a little, well, fuck, that seemed suddenly enough to make her pause a lot.
Time ticked by.
She opened her eyes. The rope dropped out of sight and into the darkness below her. It stretched out of sight above her. She’d stopped swinging ages ago. Everything was pointless. She closed her eyes again, frustrated.
She had to do something. She couldn’t just hang there.
Okay, just playing devil’s advocate one more time: What if the whole thing is a setup? What if the whole point of this is to stop me in my fucking tracks? What if it all only feels wrong just to make me hang here, immobile and useless, until it’s too late and the whole shebang is finished and I’ve fucked up the whole operation?
Counterargument: Fine. Fuck it.
She opened her eyes. The opening looked as real as it ever had. She swung her legs back and forth to get some momentum and then grabbed, finally, hold of the ledge. It felt as real as it had just five minutes ago. So far so good. She let go of the rope with her other hand and grabbed fully on to the ledge. And then everything she was looking at, everything she was holding on to, flickered like a hinky picture on a shitty cell phone, and then it was gone and she was holding on to the smooth, purchaseless side of the ventilation shaft, or, rather, not holding on to it, not holding on to anything, and she fell.
6.
The wind from the truck window caught hold of Rose’s hair, pulling it out of Henry’s truck. Henry wasn’t doing much talking and she didn’t feel like talking much, either. She watched the landscape pass by, familiar and dull, and only half listened to whatever was on the radio in the background.
“Those your friends?” Henry asked.
She had been biding her time, she realized. The last few weeks of summer, these first few weeks of school, sure, but even before that. These past few years. Maybe her whole life. Biding her time. She understood that now, and that here, even in Henry’s truck, she was still biding her time.
“Not really, no,” she said.
How was what she had been doing different from what Gina and Patty had been doing with their lives? she wondered.
They were biding their time, too. They just didn’t know it. That was what was different. They would finish out high school, Gina still a virgin, Rose was sure of it, and then each go off to college, with maybe a stop-off at the junior college for a couple of years first, and then, degrees in hand or not, they would wind their way back to this dump of a town, their eyes set on Randall Thomas (Gina) or Clem Buchanan (Patty), or boys of their ilk, inheritors of their daddies’ body repair shops or small-town construction firms. They might work for a couple of years, teaching kindergarten or managing one of the antique shops on the square, and then quit working once it was time to start pushing kids out of their nethers. It was an oppressive and frightening thought, picturing the two of them not much different from their bitter, hard-smoking mothers. But it was a thought she kept close to the surface, a reminder, a sort of anti-goal she’d set for herself, alongside, Don’t wind up stuck here like your loser parents did, or, more simply, Don’t turn into your loser parents, her dad a shiftless asshole who hadn’t worked an honest day in his life (according to her mother), her mother a nagging, thickheaded harpy who couldn’t see a man’s potential, couldn’t see past the tip of her blunted nose (according to her dad).
Henry turned the truck into the Stop-N-Go and she came out of her head.
“What are we doing here?”
Henry smiled his strange, uncomfortable smile. “I need to get some gas, remember?”
“Oh. Right.”
“Won’t take a sec.”
She opened her door and slid out of the truck. “Since we’re here,” she said casually, tossing the words over her shoulder as she crossed the parking lot.
“Hey, wait,” Henry said, but she wasn’t listening.
She might as well get something good out of this shitty day.
Ian Honsinger had told her he’d be working the Stop-N-Go, and if she came by and she was nice to him, he’d get her some cigarettes. Whatever being nice meant. That she had wound up here, by fate or accident, made her feel better about heading out with Henry. Plus she could use a cigarette.
Honsinger was at the counter, like he’d said he’d be, but seeing him, and his leering smile, and his cheap haircut, she wasn’t sure the cigarettes were worth the effort it would take to flirt with him.
“Hi, Rosie,” he said, stretching out the “e.” Then he looked past her and at Henry, and his eyes squinted and his mouth turned. “Who’s that you’re with?”
She looked casually over her shoulder, even though she knew Henry was the only other person at the gas pump. “Some guy. Henry, I guess.”
Ian stepped out from behind the counter and there was something puffed up and threatening about him now. She noticed, then, how he hadn’t stopped giving Henry the stink eye. “I don’t know him.” He looked down at her for a second. “I’ve never seen him before.”
She wanted to get a pack of cigarettes and a Coke and then get back into Henry’s truck, or maybe not that, either, maybe just the cigarettes and the drink and out of this gas station, which smelled strongly of Ian’s body spray now that he’d started moving around, casting the scent of himself into the farthest corners of this tiny little place.
Why was everything in this fucking town so damn tiny?
“Whatever,” she said. “Like you know everyone.” Then she poked him in the chest. “You gonna get me those cigarettes like you promised or what?”
He stopped staring down Henry, who hadn’t noticed anyway, and looked at Rose, then grabbed her poking finger in that thick palm of his. “I don’t know,” he said, smiling his stupid smile again. “What are you going to give me for them?”
She smiled up at him, sweetly, innocently, then leaned in real close, and he leaned in close and draped his arms over her shoulders, and she could picture him at a school dance, homecoming or prom, maybe, his heavy arms weighing her down, his splotchy face too close to her eyes, and then she shook her head and almost laughed as she stuffed a five-dollar bill in his shirt pocket.
She’d been practicing this.
She’d seen something like it in a movie but was surprised she’d had an opportunity to actually try it out. She almost said, “How’s this for your troubles, loverboy?” But she changed her mind and backed off instead.
Just in case.
“That,” she said. “I’ll give you that.”
He threw the cigarettes on the counter without asking which ones she wanted. She thought she’d heard him say something when he pulled the wallet out of his back pocket, slid the five dollars inside it. Tease, maybe. Or cock-tease. But she couldn’t see his lips when he said it, and it could have been her imagination.
She ignored him, anyway. “Thanks, Ian,” she said, singsongy and sweet again.
He looked at her and then back at Henry, waiting in the truck now, tapping his hands to some song playing on his stereo. Then he looked back at Rose and said, “Better be careful the kind of folk you run around with, Rosie.” He leered at her. “Strange man like that might look at a little girl like you and try to take advantage.”
She rolled her eyes. She backed herself into the door and pushed it open with her backside and said, “Fuck off, Honsinger,” and then did her best to flounce herself to Henry’s truck, and when she saw Ian was still staring at her, or at the truck, or at Henry, even though he couldn’t see Henry through her, she rolled her window down and flipped him off, and then they were gone.
7.
At least she wasn’t just hanging there anymore, hanging in the middle of a ventilation shaft, pointless and bored.
There was that.
At least there was that.
Rose hip-checked the side of the shaft, tumbled ass over head and into the other side of the shaft. She scrambled to grab hold of the rope but had kicked it swinging and she couldn’t find it in the near dark. Her headlamp swung the light hither and yon, but she was still too high up to see any semblance of a bottom.
Assuming, of course, there was a bottom. Colleen had jokingly told her to be careful down that ventilation shaft, that she’d heard the woman who’d founded the Regional Office had magicks enough to have conjured a bottomless pit that enemies of the Regional Office were thrown into. What better place to hide a bottomless pit than in a ventilation shaft, right?
Hardy-fucking-har-har, Colleen.
Fucking fuck.
The impact. Assuming there would be an impact, she was worried about the impact, but only because it would hurt like a motherfucker. But besides that, she’d survive the fall, and whatever parts of her didn’t immediately survive would start to stitch themselves back together soon enough.
Getting out. She was worried about what would happen after she was dropped at the bottom of a shaft that was well over a mile belowground, but not so worried about this, either, because, well, she’d find some way out, by stealth or by force. She knew she would.
But the mission. God, those assholes had drilled it into her good. The fucking mission, she was worried about that, about missing out. That’s what had her scrambling so hard to find the rope.
She closed her eyes and reached out blindly and grabbed hold of air and then grabbed hold of air again, and thought maybe she should just give up this plan, and then something glanced against her wrist, and she grabbed again and caught hold of the rope and held tight, for a second, for less than, jerked to a bounding halt, before her shoulder gave out as it jarred up against gravity, and she let go again, but flung herself this time, whipped herself with some small deliberation so she could land hard against the side of the shaft, so she might slide down it, maybe catch hold of a different ledge, first with her forehead and her chin and then, when that slipped off, her elbow, which didn’t hold on much better, until finally her knee and calf and shin and ankle and then her boot caught, thank God for that fucking boot with its zippers and straps, its nooks and crannies, and then she held, for long enough, anyway, to pull herself up and in, and once she was in, she collapsed.
Now what, newbie? Henry, fucking Henry, pestering her inside her head.
You don’t know where you are or how to get to the director’s office, so, now what?
She’d figure it out, okay? Jesus.
But now what? Henry asked again, smug asshole. He knew the answer, of course, always knew the answer. Why else would he ask the fucking questions?
Just give a girl one goddamn minute, okay, a fucking minute to pull herself together, to take a fucking break, Christ.
She took a breath. She closed her eyes. Then she passed out, was out cold for at least fifteen minutes.
8.
Back in Henry’s truck, she offered him a cigarette, which he took even though she could tell by the way he held it that he didn’t smoke.
The lighter popped out of the dashboard. Rose took it and pressed her cigarette into it and then took a deep drag from it and then held the lighter out for him. He had been holding the cigarette in his left hand and took the lighter in his right, trying to manage some rigmarole with his elbows on the steering wheel so he could light his cigarette, but the road began to twist and bump, and he startled, swerved a bit, and managed to drop the cigarette into his lap and the lighter onto the floor.
“Christ in a basket,” he said, glancing down and up and down and up, one-handing the steering wheel while he scrambled, hunched over, for the lighter.
“No wonder you almost hit me,” Rose said. Then she said, “Here, relax.” She placed her hand high up on his thigh and bent down, her body twisting just enough to give her scrunching room below the gearshift on the steering column. She could feel her tank top riding up her back and wondered at the peep show she was giving Henry, and hung down there a second longer than she needed to, and then she sat back up, the lighter held in front of her as if it were a diamond or some other gem she’d just pulled out of the earth. Then she said, “Here, gimme that,” and she reached into his lap and grabbed the cigarette, which had fallen in between his legs. She brushed the zipper of his jeans lightly and he jumped in his seat, sending the truck to the left before pulling it hard back to the right.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Jesus, Henry,” she said, laughing. “Settle down, will you?”
Then she tipped the cigarette between her lips and lit it and then she took a drag off it, her own still lit in her left hand. She blew the smoke out of the side of her mouth and then leaned over and said, “Open,” and then put it in his mouth, where he held it for a moment, not smoking, but breathing out of his nose and the side of his mouth, until he remembered his hands on the steering wheel, one of which he freed to pull the cigarette out of his mouth and hold out the open window.
“So. Which store am I taking you to?” he asked.
“I lied,” she said. “I don’t need to go to the store.”
Then she took a breath and looked at him and said, “It’s been kind of a weird day.”
“Where are we going, then?” he said.
“I don’t know. Home, I guess?”
He looked at her. He’d dropped the cigarette out of the window. “So, weird, huh?”
“A little, yeah.” She didn’t know why but she felt her voice hitch. Voice hitching wasn’t a normal thing for her. Her sister, sure. That girl’s voice hitched at the drop of a pin. At the first sign of trouble—the house was out of milk, their mother’s cat had been sleeping on the kitchen table, Rose had borrowed her favorite sweater—you could count on that one for a tremble of the lip, a hitch of the voice. But Rose liked to think she was made of stronger stuff than her sister, and sure, she’d seen some strange look in Tyler Akard’s eyes when he came chasing after her, and sure, the sight of that squirrel might’ve troubled her a touch, and maybe almost getting hit by a truck earlier in the day, etc., but Jesus Christ.
Pull yourself together.
“How old are you?” he asked again, catching her off guard, pulling her out of her head.
“Sixteen,” she said, forgetting she’d wanted to keep that a secret from him. “Well, next week. I turn sixteen next week.”
He sighed and in that sigh she thought she heard him mutter, “Too young,” but she couldn’t be sure. Then he didn’t say anything and neither did she and then he turned onto Church Street and turned to look at Rose and smiled at her and said, “Just about there.”
Only later—too late, in fact—would she realize how strange it was, what he said, when he said it.
Just about there.
They were, though. They were only a couple of blocks from her momma’s house, and so she didn’t think about it too much at the time, didn’t let it register that she’d never told him where she lived, hadn’t given him directions or an address. And then later still she would think how strange it was that he would have said that at all, said anything, in fact, to tip her off, to let her get her guard up, even if she hadn’t.
Gotten her guard up, that is.
They pulled up to her house. She tried to open the truck door but it wouldn’t open. “Hey,” she said, just as he was reaching across her, maybe a little uncomfortably so, to fiddle with the lock, the handle, saying, “Sorry about that, it gets funny.” He couldn’t open it and something inside her hitched again. Then he opened his own and got out and she turned herself to climb over and he said, “No, no, stay there, I’ll get it,” and he closed his door and trotted around the other side and opened her door from the outside.
“I need to get that fixed,” he said when he held out his hand to
help her down from the truck.
“Yeah,” she said. “Well, thanks, anyway, for the ride.” She tried to let go of his hand.
“Here,” he said, the flat of his other hand resting lightly against her back between her shoulder blades. “Let me walk you to the door, make sure someone’s home for you.”
She didn’t say, There’s no one home, which there wasn’t, or that she had a key, which she did, or that it wouldn’t matter on account of how her mother never locked the door anyway. Her chest fluttered but in no good kind of way and her palms started to sweat, and little unwelcome shivers shot out of her skin where his hand was pressed against her.
Well, hell, she thought.
What she would do would be simple enough, Henry behind her or not. Shove the door open, just enough to slip inside, and then shove it shut and lock it behind her.
Which she did, in one smooth motion, as much of a surprise to her as it was to Henry just how well that had worked. Henry yelled after her, “Hey, wait.” He pounded on the door and she shook her head and thought, Fucking creep. And then she turned and stepped into the house and was ambushed.
9.
When Rose came to, she didn’t know how far behind schedule she was. It took a second or two to figure out that she had made it across the shaft and into the next set of tubing.
The fall had shattered her piece-of-shit shatterproof watch, and don’t think Henry wasn’t going to get an earful from her about being such a cheap-ass on accessories.
She was enough behind schedule anyway (she could just feel it) that she said, Fuck it. Fuck the pain, fuck her weak legs, fuck her torn arm, and she jumped across the ventilation shaft to an opening just across from and above the opening she’d landed in. Don’t think there wasn’t a shitload of scrambling for some kind of hold, a lot of embarrassing kicking with her feet and grunting as she became frightened and then desperate to push through all that pain from the fall and grabbing the rope so she could pull herself up, because there was. That, and a heavy desire to go right back into unconsciousness that she almost didn’t resist. But then she pushed her way blindly out of the shaft into what turned out to be an office, dark and unoccupied. She kicked the computer onto the floor while scrambling onto the desk from the ceiling, and then she hopped down after it.
The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel Page 3