by Bryan Smith
She didn’t want to be shunned forever.
Didn’t want to die alone and unloved.
She wiped at her eyes and frowned at the moisture glistening on her fingertips. She hadn’t known she was on the verge of crying. She turned her face away from Lee and stared out at the green blur that was the passing countryside.
“Hey.” He touched her shoulder. “Are you okay?”
Her head snapped in his direction. “No, Lee, I am fucking not okay.” She softened her tone when she saw him wince. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to snap. But the bitch in me gets stirred up when I feel pressured. And trust me, Lee, I’ve never felt so fucking pressured in my life.”
He nodded and stared out at the road ahead. “I get that. Totally. You don’t have to apologize.”
She scowled at him. “There you go with that shit again. Fuck, Lee, if you and I did get together in a serious way, you’d let me walk all over you. You’d be my little lapdog.”
“I’m just trying to be sensitive.”
She sighed. “I know. And it’s even sort of sweet. And normally I’m all about exploiting a guy’s weaknesses. But right now weakness is a negative. So don’t fucking coddle me, okay?”
“Okay.”
Her mind drifted back to the subject of Summer.
“There’s no other explanation for what that girl told me. Regular people don’t just vanish into thin air. The only person I’ve ever seen do that is the devil. I’m not dumb, Lee. I can put two and two together pretty easily.”
Lee coughed. “I don’t mean to dwell on this, but last night you told me she was your best friend. You told me--”
“I told you some shit is what I told you. First time I ever saw Summer was yesterday afternoon when I ran into her outside the elevators at Matheson Hall.”
“Okay. Let’s go over this again. You said she rode up in the elevator with you and got off at the eighth floor.”
“Yeah.”
“Wouldn’t she have to show ID to gain that kind of access in the first place?”
Kayla shrugged. “I guess. Unless the security guys are used to seeing you and know you’re a resident.”
“So…doesn’t that mean she’s probably a student after all and not some minion of the devil?
“No. It means she’s a person who can appear and disappear at will. We’ve covered that.”
“About that…you did say the girl who told you about Summer’s disappearing act is a heavy drug user.”
“Yeah.”
“So it could have been a hallucination.”
Kayla shook her head. “But it wasn’t. I don’t buy that at all. Looking back, it’s so obvious. A girl like that stands out, but somehow that was the first time all semester I noticed her? No. Not possible, Lee.”
“Okay. Fine. Say she works for the devil. That doesn’t mean she’s any kind of threat to you. She’s probably just keeping tabs on you, like the Ripper.”
“That doesn’t make me feel any better.” She slouched down in the seat and braced her feet up on the dash. “The real reason I’m so upset is I felt a connection with her. At least I thought I did. I liked her. I feel like I’ve been tricked. Like I’ve been made to feel something that was just an illusion.” She stamped one of her high-heeled boots against the dash, gouging its weathered surface. “It pisses me off.”
“I see that.”
A full mile passed in silence before Kayla tilted her head back and closed her eyes. “By the way, I dropped your ticket off in the outgoing mail today. So you’re in the clear there.”
“Thanks. I really appreciate that.”
“You better.”
Lee turned on the Corolla’s radio, which was a factory original with a slot for playing cassettes. Which made Kayla want to laugh. Who even owned cassettes anymore, much less actually listened to them? A classic rock song by some band she didn’t know emanated from the Corolla’s tinny speakers at low volume.
“You okay with this or you want to hear something else?”
“Put it on scan, see what comes up.”
“This radio doesn’t have a scan function.”
Kayla opened her eyes. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Shit. Your car has a new name, Lee. It is now the Lamemobile. This is how we will refer to it from now until the end of time. Understand?”
“Understood.”
Kayla reached for the dial.
“Let’s find something that’s not a million years old.”
She turned the dial, encountered static, then a clear signal locked in and a pounding heavy metal beat rattled the pitiful speakers.
She turned the dial again.
“Let’s also find something the devil probably wouldn’t rock out to.”
30.
Lee’s friend lived in a dumpy little one-floor house in a bad neighborhood. Chain-link fencing ringed the tiny front and back yards. The windows had bars over them and a metal sign nailed to a post in the front yard said BEWARE OF DOG.
Lee pulled into the short unpaved driveway and parked behind a decrepit Honda Civic. The Civic was older than Lee’s Corolla by several years at least and had a badly dented blue door on the passenger side. The rest of the car was painted a faded shade of maroon.
Kayla nodded at the BEWARE OF DOG sign. “That for real? I didn’t come all the way out to Jackson just to get my throat ripped out by Cujo, you know.”
“The sign’s for effect, to scare off burglars. I think.”
“You think?”
“Yeah.”
“I hope you’re right.
Lee looked at her. “You ready for this?”
Kayla stared at the sad little house. Everything about it screamed intractable downward spiral. The patchy grass was littered with broken bottle shards, presumably tossed into the yard by passing bums. This neighborhood would have lots of bums passing by on a regular basis. The chain-link fencing was sagging in several places. Boxes overflowing with worthless junk were piled in haphazard stacks at one end of the porch. She assumed the items were worthless because this looked like it was the kind of place where junkies would steal anything not nailed down and yet no one was bothering with any of this crap.
She tried to imagine living in a place like this.
And failed.
She was accustomed to the finer things in life. Nice cars. Luxuries. Pristine streets in gleaming, immaculately maintained neighborhoods populated by perpetually smiling rich people. Kayla knew she came from a background of unusual privilege and a tiny part of her thought maybe she should feel some small bit of guilt for that. But she did not. At all. Living here, even for a short while, would have crushed her spirit. She wouldn’t be the person she was today. And good or bad, she liked being who she was.
She looked at Lee, seeing him in a new light. “You told me you grew up poor, but..”
She trailed off, not knowing what to say.
“I did, yeah, but I didn’t grow up here, Kayla. Neither did Brett. And poor is relative. We didn’t starve or live in squalor. This…” He indicated the surrounding urban blight with a sweep of his hand. “…This isn’t just a poor neighborhood. It’s a disaster area.”
“So how did Brett wind up here?”
“Cheapest place he could rent, probably. He barely works and his mother quit giving him money a few months ago.”
Kayla took it all in again. “This shit is depressing.”
“Yeah.”
Kayla reached for the door handle. “Let’s get on with this. The sooner it’s done, the sooner we can get the fuck out of this hellhole.”
They got out of the car and approached the drab little house. A glance at the Honda as they walked by it showed an interior with rotting, shredded upholstery. The dash space formerly occupied by a radio was empty. The ashtray overflowed with crumpled cigarette butts. A cassette tape by a band called the Misfits sat in the space below the overloaded ashtray. That was almost funny, even in the midst of all this squalor. A tape in
a car without a radio. That was just wrong. The car’s windows were down, so Kayla reached in and plucked out the tape.
Lee frowned. “What are you doing?”
Kayla opened her purse and dropped the tape inside. “Stealing your friend’s tape.”
“Oh. Okay.”
They were at the porch now.
“It’s a cassette, you see. We can listen to it on the way back. Won’t that be novel? Actually listening to a cassette on your cassette player?”
Lee glanced over his shoulder at her as he climbed the steps. “You’re kind of weird, Kayla. Anyone ever tell you that?”
“Shut up. Don’t call me weird, weirdo.”
Lee laughed. “Whatever.”
Kayla worked hard to hold back a smile. The banter with Lee was becoming more comfortable. And from this angle, she couldn’t help noticing that he had kind of a nice butt. Funny how she’d never noticed that before. Maybe he’d started working out or something recently. The smile gave way to a deep frown as she abruptly faced a disturbing revelation--she was starting to warm to Lee Stanley. In kind of a big and unexpected way. Which she did not like. A stop had to be put to this nonsense before it spiraled out of control and she wound up fucking him again. If the shunning spell could be reversed, a reputation as a geek-fucker would be undesirable. Right?
Maybe. Then again…maybe not.
Lee banged on the door with the base of a fist.
They waited.
And waited.
Lee banged on the door again, harder this time. “Brett! It’s Lee. Open up!”
Another silent moment passed and then they heard a crash from somewhere inside the house. Breaking glass and a rattle of empty beer cans, from the sound of it. This was followed by the sound of feet thumping toward the door. The door creaked open and Lee’s friend blinked blearily at them. “Lee. The fuck you doing here?”
“You don’t remember? I called you, told you about my friend here.” He indicated Kayla with a tilt of his head. “You agreed we could come by and discuss things.”
Brett stared blankly at him for a moment, then a level of awareness penetrated. “Oh. That. Thought I dreamed that shit.”
Lee shook his head. “No, man. That was real.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. Can we come in?”
The guy grimaced and scratched the side of his head, which was completely shorn and covered in tattoos of things that might have been demons. The other side of his head was also shorn and heavily inked. He did have hair on his scalp, a strip of tall but limp spikes dyed a bright shade of green. The Mohawk looked like something out of a documentary about punk rock in the 1970’s. The punk rocker lost in time look didn’t end there. He had more metal on his body than a robot, an array of piercings protruding from every feasible piece of flesh. His eyebrows. His nose. His ears. His tongue. His nipples. His cheeks. The patch of flesh below his bottom lip. His fucking belly button, which was a thing she’d assumed only chicks did. Black disks distended and enlarged his earlobes in a way that made her queasy. There were more tattoos, lots of them, all over his arms and torso, as well as a few on his legs.
He had tiny horns protruding from his forehead.
Some kind of weird implants.
Kayla was grateful he was wearing boxers, because she was certain there were still more piercings in places she didn’t ever want to see them.
Brett squinted at her. “Tell your friend to stop staring at me.”
Lee glanced at her. “Could you, uh…”
She forced a smile. “Sorry. I didn’t mean--”
“You think I’m a freak, don’t you?”
Absolutely.
Emphatic shake of her head. “No. Of course not.”
“Whatever. I don’t care what your bitch thinks, Lee.” He turned away from them and wandered back into the house, calling out to them over his shoulder. “Come on in.”
Lee glanced at her again. His expression was pained. “Sorry about that.”
She touched his arm. “Not your fault. Let’s go in.”
The interior of the dumpy old house was another study in urban decay. The names of punk bands (at least she assumed they were punk bands) were spray-painted all over the mustard-yellow walls, as were various leftist political slogans. Kayla cared couldn’t give a shit about politics. Her parents and the parents of most of her friends were all stalwart right wingers for some reason. She wasn’t anything. Not yet, anyway. Still, she thought it might be a good idea to share as few details about her background with Lee’s friend as possible.
The furniture was all secondhand junk, including a ragged blue couch that was missing one cushion and had huge rips in the fabric on the side visible to Kayla. A heavily stained beige recliner looked even less inviting. The surface of a long coffee table was almost completely obscured by empty beer and liquor bottles, beer cans, and piles of junk mail. Two metal folding chairs flanking the sides of the decrepit couch looked like the best bet for non-ick seating. The grubby little living room was adjacent to a cramped kitchen, which Kayla could only partially see. She supposed a bedroom had to be accessible back through there somewhere, but she didn’t much care to find out. The prospect of seeing where this guy slept promised horrors equal to anything the devil might show her.
Brett flopped onto his back on the sofa. “Dude…” Addressing Lee, Kayla quickly deduced. “I’m sorry, man, but I am so fucking hungover. I think I got whatever you really told me all mixed up with some crazy booze dreams.”
Lee grabbed the folding chairs and set them down opposite the couch, inviting Kayla to sit with a flick of his hand. “Well, you might be surprised. What do you remember?”
“You said this chick you were fucking, this one I’m guessing, made some kind of deal with the devil.”
Kayla glared at Lee. “You told him you fucked me?”
Lee’s face flushed red. “Um…”
Brett glanced at her. “Well, did you fuck him?”
“Whether I fucked him or not isn’t the issue.”
Brett grinned, displaying a mouth missing a few teeth. “You fucked him.”
Kayla punched Lee in the shoulder. Hard. “You bastard.”
Lee winced and rubbed his shoulder. “I’m sorry. Really. But…did you seriously expect me to keep that to myself?”
Kayla folded her arms and pouted.
Motherfucker had a point, loathe as she was to admit it. Hell, the guy had just lost his virginity. Not only that, he’d lost it to a girl so far out of his league it had be some kind of nerd world record. Keeping it to himself had never been a real option, not that she would ever verbally acknowledge that.
“You tell anyone else and it’ll be your head I take to the devil. Got it?”
“Got it.” A pause. “Would you really do that?”
Kayla just smirked.
Brett groaned and shifted to a sitting position. He eyed each of them in turn, actual interest displacing hangover-induced nonchalance. “Is this devil business code for something else? It’s gotta be, right?”
Lee and Kayla glanced at each other. They both knew convincing Brett of the reality of certain particulars of Kayla’s story wouldn’t be easy. When she’d told it to Lee, there had been one big factor working in favor of her credibility--his own related brush with the inexplicable. He had firsthand, verifiable knowledge that something strange was happening, whereas to Brett it would all be one fanciful and highly unbelievable tall tale.
Brett grunted. “One of you just spit it out, okay?”
Lee shrugged. “It all started a few days ago when Kayla met a man who turned out to be the devil.” He frowned. “Actually, it started years earlier, with a girl named Rebecca. But let’s start with that meeting…”
And from there Lee related the tale in a manner nearly identical to the way Kayla had told it, using many of her own phrases and expressions. When he reached the story’s conclusion, Lee sat back in his chair and looked right at his friend. “So what do you think?”
Kayla, sensing they were being dismissed, panicked a little. “It’s the truth! Every word. I swear.”
“Chill, okay? Just hold on a minute.”
He staggered over to an audio system wedged into a wobbly old stereo cabinet in a corner of the living room, squatted in front of it, and punched some buttons. A loud, dissonant, and sludgy form of heavy music made the speakers throb. He lowered the volume some, got to his feet again, and wandered off to the kitchen.
Kayla’s expression turned sour. “What the hell is he doing?”
Lee frowned. “He’s…honestly, I don’t know what he’s doing. He does really random shit sometimes.”
Kayla didn’t know what to say to that, so she kept quiet.
Brett emerged from the kitchen a few minutes later. He was carrying an elaborately designed glass bong that looked like a stoner’s idea of an interstellar starship. A giant pot leaf was painted on the base. He sat on the couch again and set the bong on the floor. “Figured before we go any further, I should get as high as you guys.”
Kayla shook her head. “We’re not high. At all.”
“Not even a little?”
“No.”
“Huh.”
Brett opened a cabinet beneath the coffee table. He pulled out a cigar box, made some space by knocking some cans to the floor, and set the box on the table. He then flipped the lid open and removed a fat baggie packed with what looked like many hundreds of dollars worth of weed.
Lee cleared his throat. “I’m not sure if getting fucked up is the right move here.”
Brett grinned. “Getting fucked up is always the right move.”
He pinched out some weed, packed the bowl, and fired up, the bong water bubbling as he inhaled deeply. After several seconds, he took his mouth off the bong, sat back, and blew out a stream of aromatic smoke. He then titled his chin at Lee. “Have a hit.”