The Tenth Girl

by Aarons, Carrie

  Getting up, I start to walk toward a patch of trees about half a mile in front of me. And as I get closer, I can make out the flicker of flames between the trunks and leaves.

  And then I’m at the tree line, an outsider, a peeping Tom, to a party. Teens, dozens of them, maybe even a hundred, all crowded around a giant bonfire, pickup trucks backed up to it with girls and boys sitting in the beds. One truck is rigged with a giant stereo system in the back, a song by Luke Bryan booming out of the speakers. There are more than a couple of pairs making out, and drunken laughter rings out. Many of the girls are dancing, shaking their long legs and bare shoulders for attention.

  They must be on another property, because just knowing my grandmother, she’d never allow trespassers. Especially ones who were participating in underage drinking.

  “Do you always sneak up on places you don’t belong?”

  His voice makes me jump, and dammit how is this guy always an observer to my observing?

  “Technically, I’m still on my property. You are the ones partying in the woods where the cops can’t find you,” I scoff.

  Cain chuckles. “Trust me, darling, the cops don’t care what we do.”

  I didn’t doubt that. No way would they mark up their perfect athlete’s record with an intoxication charge.

  It’s dark, but it doesn’t mean I can’t see the outline of his abs and biceps in the gray T-shirt he wears. Simple blue khaki shorts stretch over his thighs, and his hair is messy with its long black strands on the top of his head.

  “You weren’t at my game last night.” His statement surprises, and I have to dig my nails into the palms of my hands to keep from reaching out and touching a muscled arm.

  His game. Like he owned the football team and league. And that tone, accusatory. As if how dare I miss his spectacle?

  “How would you know that I wasn’t there?” I throw back.

  “I’m a quarterback, observation is the name of my game. Plus, if you’d seen me play, you would be draped all over me right now. Chicks dig my moves. On the field, and in the bedroom.” Cain winks, and while my insides go molten, I hold my position.

  My arms are still crossed over my chest, and I scowl. “You’re a pig, you know that, right?”

  His smile, those straight pearly whites glistening at me, is downright panty-dropping. “I know, but pigs like to get down and dirty. Want to get dirty with me, Harper?”

  “I thought it was laughable for you to want to, what did you say? Fuck me?” I take a few steps back, feeling out of place.

  “Aw, shucks, sweetheart … I also told you I know how to tease.” He hooks me with that southern twang and I take another involuntary step forward.

  He’s mesmerizing. A magician of a young girl’s emotions … I don’t even like him and yet I’m looking at his lips.

  I just convinced myself, mere hours ago, that I had to stay away from him. That he was a threat to my promise to wait.

  Yet here I am, inches away from his mouth, alone with him in the woods, those hypnotizing green eyes baiting me.

  “I told you to leave me alone.” Why I’ve encountered him so many times in one week can only be billed to fate.

  And fate can be one hell of a sarcastic bitch.

  “And I think you’re a liar.”

  His hand raises, hovering at the corner of my jaw, not touching me, but just floating there. I can feel the heat from his fingers, smell the alcohol on his breath. It’s like he’s breathing fire and igniting everything inside of me.

  But I fight against the allure. “The only liar standing here is you. Everything about you is a lie.”

  I’m not sure how I know this, only having met this boy less than a week ago, but I do. Cain Kent is a fraud. He shows one picture to the world and is another work of art entirely.

  “An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.”

  His whispered words ring somewhere in my head.

  It’s not until he’s walked off that I realize what, or who, they’re from. Cain is holding up a beer and saluting everyone at the party, who in turn cheer back at him. Mr. Haven and his court of subjects.

  He quoted Aldous Huxley.

  Cain Kent, jock extraordinaire, knows literary passages enough to quote them.

  I lift my hand and cup my own jaw where he hadn’t even touched me, and marveled.

  Chapter Ten

  Cain

  The Sons of America Nursing Home sits on old horse ranch land, the large red barn still standing and used as storage for the facility.

  “Hi, Nanette.” I wave as I walk in, not bothering to sign my name in the visitor’s guest log.

  They know me. Know I’ll be here every Monday, rain or shine.

  “Cain! How you doing, sweetheart? Great game on Friday, but you need to ice those ribs, that hit looked brutal!” The middle-aged receptionist with bleach blond hair puffier than sleeves in the 80s made a concerned face.

  She wasn’t wrong. My ribs were black and blue just three days after Friday night’s game, but we got the W so it was all worth it.

  “I’ll take that to mind, ma’am.” I smile.

  She blushes. “Now, boy, how many times do I have to tell you? Don’t call me ma’am. It makes me feel old.”

  I shrug and smile again, and walk down the hall. A left at the end, a right past the cafeteria, and then about thirty steps to the fourth door on the right.

  “Cain, my boy!” The booming voice echoes out from the doorway as soon as I step in front of it.

  He looks tired today. The smell of chemicals and medicine permeate the air in here, like a sterile cologne. The khaki, boring clothing hangs from his slim frame, and I can remember a time when his strong, athletic build inspired me to be a better player.

  “Gramps, good to see you.” I walk in and shake his hand, the sound of September baseball scratching in and out from the AM radio that was always at his bedside.

  Every Monday I visit him, it’s our time together and I look forward to it as much as he does. But I knew for him, this was what kept him going. These visits, talking strategy and game play.

  “Great game last Friday, but you let those D linemen get the best of you at some points. Don’t pay attention to anything else but those two hands holding the ball, and the receiver you’re aiming at. Fuck those bullies trying to intimidate you across the line. Don’t let ’em spook you.”

  He wastes no time getting down to brass tacks, and I know he’s been foaming at the mouth to give me his Monday morning, or afternoon in this case, quarterback speech. No pun intended.

  I always take his advice as gospel, because he’s been there. Gramps knows what he’s talking about. “Says the former defensive lineman. You calling yourself a bully.”

  He winks. “The best bully of ’em all.”

  My grandfather played in the biggest league of them all, the one that every young football player strives to make it to. But a diagnosis of Parkinson’s ended his career at thirty, and had him in a nursing home by the time he was sixty. Now, he’s confined to a wheelchair, barely has the use of his hands, and the left side of his body constantly shakes while the right side is almost rigid and statue-like.

  While he still has the ability to talk and chew, his quality of life is declining. I try to put on a brave face for him, try not to stare at his jerky body movements. I hold my breath when his aides have to get him in bed or onto the toilet, and I always feed him when he asks. This disease is a horrible one, but I hope that I make Gramps’ days just a little better. He’s part of the reason I play so hard, want to win so badly. So that he can get some joy from it.

  We talk football for a little while longer, and then he asks about school. Gramps gets it, he was in my shoes. Football is life, and everything else comes second.

  But he also knows what it’s like to be in love. He married my grandmother when he was twenty and was with her up until she passed ten years ago. And he also knows that you have to have a backup plan if this career path fails. Luck
ily, he’d played enough years on his inflated contract to save and not have to worry about money.

  Gramps could’ve gone to any of the top facilities in Texas, but he chose to stay at this decent one in Haven because it’s his hometown too, and it’s closer to me.

  “I bet you have all of those girls in a tizzy.” He laughs, wheezing at the end of his fit.

  “I learned from the best.” I pat his hand.

  “You didn’t learn that from me. I loved Adeline from the time I was fifteen until the day she died. There is something to be said about a fun time, but there is something so much more fulfilling in loving a good woman. And your grandmother, she was a good woman.”

  He starts to get teary and I have to look away. I’ll never understand that kind of love, because I’ve never had it. While I have a good dad and a good grandfather, the love of a woman is something I missed. My grandmother was always too preoccupied with Gramps and his Parkinson’s, and my mother left before I even knew her.

  I’d never understand what the big deal was when it came to falling in love with a girl.

  “Oh, come on, Cain. Isn’t there any pretty gal at school that peaks your interest?” He smiles like the naïve Gramps that he is.

  Why oh why, when he says that, does the damn fawn of a girl come into my head?

  I’d quoted Huxley to her, like some kind of romantic nerd. That wasn’t what I was trying to do. I was trying to have sex with her, though neither she nor anyone else knew that.

  How had I decided so quickly that I wanted in Harper Posy’s pants? And why, after she’d spoken to me like I was a gross pervert, was I still trying to strategize my plan of attack?

  It made me curl my fist, because I wasn’t keeping score but if I was, she had a leg up on me. And being down is something I never settle for.

  I let it simmer in my veins, put it on the back burner for the rest of my visit with Gramps.

  But it was still there lurking, and I knew that sooner or later, I was going to come out on top.

  Chapter Eleven

  Harper

  “I have a date.”

  Mom claps her hands excitedly as she sits on her bed, all of her makeup laid out in front of her.

  I was wondering how long it would take. Apparently, two weeks is the answer.

  After another week of school, which passed by uneventfully to my delight; we’ve settled into Haven pretty well. I’ve been excelling in my classes, and it was refreshing to have honors courses where the students actually competed against one another. Healthy competition made me work harder, and because my brain was firing on all cylinders, I was like a writing machine.

  I’d finished another three chapters of two thousand words each in my book. A young adult suspense novel, it was coming together piece by piece. I’d plotted, mapped out chapters, and begun work on it almost a year and a half ago. I thought I was writing too slowly, but I tried to be kind to my mind and creativity because I wanted to produce the best book possible for my debut.

  Mom found a job at one of the local elementary schools, a position filling in for another teacher out on maternity leave. It wasn’t permanent, but it paid, and there was hope for future employment.

  She and Grandma had been getting along. Or well … coexisting, I should say. They pretty much ignored each other, but it hadn’t led to any blowups, so I was happy about that.

  “Who is it with?” I ask reluctantly, because I’m too used to this.

  She smiles a mega-watt grin and slicks mascara over her lashes. “This gorgeous guy I went to high school with. We never dated, but I always thought he was so cute. And then I bumped into him at the coffee shop two days ago, and he asked me out. Can you believe it?”

  Of course I could, my mother was gorgeous. And vivacious. While I thought I was pretty myself, I looked almost nothing like her. Where I was fair and blond and almost a plain kind of pretty, my mother was dark features and tumbling hair and a waistline that most would kill for. I inherited a lot of my looks from my father. Except for the oversized breasts and blue eyes, those I got from Mom.

  “That’s … great.” Even I hear the lack of enthusiasm in my voice.

  “You think it’s a bad idea.” My mother’s mood is spoiled like a child on Halloween who didn’t get their favorite candy.

  I sit on her bed, the same one she slept in when she was a teenager. “I just … remember why we had to move here? Do you think it’s the best idea to date someone from Haven. Especially given that you’re from Haven?”

  We hadn’t talked much about how weird it was for her to back in her hometown. But I could only imagine.

  From the way Mom tells stories, Haven is where her glory days took place. Even though she had strict, farmer parents, she was the ultimate, popular Southern belle. She won homecoming and prom queen multiple years in a row. Was captain of the cheer squad. Thinking about that made me shudder thinking of Annabelle Mills. Anyway, this was where Mom spent years with friends and crushes, drank in the woods and tubed down the lake.

  She’d talk to me as a child about her hometown like it was some kind of euphoric suburbia, and now that I was here, I had yet to think about how strange it must be for her to be back.

  Mom picks my hand up off the bed. “Harper … this makes me feel good. Going on dates. You may think I’m ditzy or just some silly romantic. But … for me to keep believing that love is out there? I need to date. I need to get dressed up and have the attention of a man on me. For someone to tell me I’m pretty and look at me with that look, even if it’s just for one night. I need to keep hoping that it’s out there, that I didn’t lose the only love that will ever be sent my way.”

  I know she’s talking about my father, even though she doesn’t say it. She rarely talks about him, I know it hurts her too much.

  Clearing my throat so as not to give away the emotion in my voice, I nod. “Okay, then. I hope your date is fantastic.”

  She smiles and pats my knee before I rise. I stop in the kitchen and grab my laptop, and head for the back porch to write for the night. No sitting in the fields for me on weekend nights anymore. I knew I would be able to hear the sounds of my peers, and that meant Cain was somewhere out there. He and the woods were haunting my dreams enough.

  Sometime a little later, I hear tires crunch up the gravel drive, and my mom calls out goodbye before the sound of the screen door slamming echoes through the house.

  I don’t want to see boyfriend number whatever, because most likely, he’s a jerk. But I’ll support my mom however she wants.

  My fingers clack away at the keyboard, my main character just having found a mysterious key in her basement, along with a map to a secret buried somewhere in the forest in town. I’m so wrapped up in the story that I don’t hear my grandmother come out.

  “I brought you some sweet tea, you looked like you could use a little.” She sits in the rocker next to mine.

  Looking up, I see two frosty glasses of brown liquid on the table between us. “Thank you.”

  She nods, looking off into the distance, over every piece of her land. “Haven, Texas has the most beautiful sunsets around. Can’t beat ’em. You should put that in your book there.”

  It’s the first time she’s tried to make conversation with me about anything other than chores or work.

  “How did you know I was writing a book?”

  Her eyes crinkle, and her gray strands blow in the wind. “I may not know much about computers, but I do know how to look over people’s shoulders. Especially little girls who are, how do they say it? Screen-locked?”

  My mouth falls open. “You have been spying on me? Wow, Grandma. I don’t know what to say.”

  “You could tell me a little about it.” She finally looks at me, the same eyes that my mother and I have staring back into my own.

  I kick off, rocking a bit as the sun slips behind one of the rolling hills. I can make out the outline of horses in the distance. “You really want to know about my writing?”

  So
mething in her eyes looks sad. “Now, don’t go telling your mother this, ya hear?”

  I nod, not sure where this is going. It seems to placate her and she goes on.

  “When she was young … I wasn’t the most supportive of mothers. I didn’t know anything about having dreams, I grew up in a family you weren’t allowed to have them in. Maybe if I had listened to her more, she wouldn’t have run off right after graduation. Maybe I would have been in her life. In your life. These are the things you look back on when you’re a crotchety old woman like me. So yes, I’d like to hear about your book.”

  Two times in one night, the only two women I know as family have opened up to reveal something deeply personal to me. I’m not sure what’s happening. Maybe it’s the pink and purple sunset descending on the old ranch.

  So I tell her. I explain the plot, the genre, how I found out about publishing my own novel without having to go the traditional route. How I was going to meticulously edit it myself, because I didn’t have the money to hire someone. How I’d taught myself Photoshop and had already made a simple, but eye-catching cover. Again, because I couldn’t afford to pay someone else to do it. I tell my grandmother about the community I’d found and how social media could help immensely when you had no marketing budget.

  By the end, she was staring at me like I had just told her aliens existed. “And you did all of this … on your own?”

  I shrug, embarrassed by her astonishment. “I didn’t really have a lot of friends in Florida. And well, I’ve loved books my entire life.”

  Grandma takes a sip of her sweet tea and turns out to the sky again, which is now almost dark. “I like a woman with drive. You and only you can take care of yourself. If you never forget that, you’ll always succeed.”

  I think I am going to have to put that kernel of wisdom in my book.

  Chapter Twelve

  Cain

  Somewhere, I’m bleeding.