The elevator doors opened. I stepped inside, and he leaped forward to join me.
“What I said at the library . . .” he said. “The name I called you . . .”
I stared at the indicator lights for the different floors. There were only three of them. Come on, come on, I silently chanted. “I owe you an apology,” he said stiffly. “Great,” I said. It didn’t escape me that an actual apology failed to come.
“Look, here’s my number and my email addy,” he said, fumbling in his pocket. He pulled out a pen and a crumpled receipt and started scribbling. “I’ll tell you if I find out anything, and you can do the same.” He gave me the scrap of paper.
I stared at it. His name was Jason. Jason Connor.
“Now you,” he said, and I glanced up to see him holding his phone, ready to punch in my info.
I folded the scrap of paper and shoved it into my pocket. “Don’t have a cell. Sorry.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Nope. No cell.”
“How can you not have a cell phone? Everyone has a—“He broke off, and I saw that he’d figured it out. White trash kids don’t get the same toys as rich kids.
“Yup,” I said, adopting Daddy’s countriest twang. “It’s a dang shame, but all my money goes to moonshine and dirt.”
The elevator doors slid open, and I quick-walked out, my heart beating fast.
“Wait,” he called. “I don’t even know your name!”
“Bye, Jason,” I said, tossing the words over my shoulder. “Have a nice life.”
AUNTY TILDY HAD MY FAVORITE MEAL WAITING for me when I got home: chicken and dumplings. She knew I’d gone to the hospital, and I guess she was worried I’d be upset when I got back home. I would have found more comfort in a hug, or a few simple questions about how the visit had gone, but no. That was what the chicken and dumplings were for.
Though I didn’t have much of an appetite, I cleaned my plate to please her. I sensed Christian watching me as I ate. I kept my eyes cast down.
I was frustrated, because I seemed to be gaining more questions than answers. Who was Patrick’s boyfriend? How on earth did Patrick get to be friends with a Toomsboro snob like Jason? And on a whole different level, the Wally/meth mess, with Beef, Dupree, and Tommy mixed smack up in it. Tommy and Dupree, I could buy. But Beef? I couldn’t wrap my head around it, even though he admitted he used to be involved. Even though I’d seen the possibility of continued involvement in his eyes.
I hadn’t learned much from Wally other than that he’d trapped poor Ridings McAllister in his spiderweb. Tommy was the only one of “Wally’s boys” I hadn’t spoken to, aside from our brief exchange at church. But I couldn’t face him. Not yet. That left the one tagalong member of the redneck posse: Beef’s girlfriend, Bailee-Ann.
After dinner, I dragged a brush through my hair, pulled it into a ponytail, and headed out of the house. Bailee-Ann and I used to be tight. Patrick was my true best friend—my kindred spirit—but Bailee-Ann was my best female friend.
Our friendship fizzled out in high school, just another smoldering by-product of my amazing disappearing girl act. But Bailee-Ann never treated me with spite, because she wasn’t like that. She was more . . . more like a fawn, with creamy, freckled skin and big brown eyes and a gentleness that made people not want to hurt her.
Well, made me not want to hurt her. Sometimes I worried about Bailee-Ann, because what one person saw as tenderness, another might perceive as an opportunity to get in and do some damage. But with Beef looking after her, Bailee-Ann would be okay. I wondered if she knew that Beef had worked for Wally? I’d have to talk carefully, in case she didn’t. But maybe I could get her to tell me what happened the night of Patrick’s attack.
Twilight had come and gone by the time I grabbed my bike from the side of the house. The stars weren’t out yet, but the sky was bluish-purple. It would be dark soon.
When Christian saw me throw my leg over my bike, he called out, “Hey, where do you think you’re going?”
Aunt Tildy followed him out on the porch, and he turned to her. “I don’t want her going out again.”
“Well, too bad you don’t have any say in it,” I said.
“You two, stop fussing,” Aunt Tildy said.
“She’s been out too much already,” Christian insisted. “She needs to stay put.”
“Needs to stay put?” I echoed. “What am I, a dog?”
“It’s late. You shouldn’t be out when it’s dark.”
Christian had been a warm body to stand by at Wally’s, and I appreciated it. But this big brother protective act of his was making me nervous. It opened up old wounds.
I rolled my eyes and said, “It’s hardly late. I’ll be back in, like, an hour. All right, Aunt Tildy?”
“I already said no,” Christian said.
“And just when did you become the boss of me?”
“You’re sticking your nose where it don’t belong,” he accused.
“Sticking my . . . ?” I gave Aunt Tildy a baffled look. “I just want to go to Bailee-Ann’s. It’s Saturday night, and I thought it would be nice to see her.” I shrugged. “I miss her.”
“Bullshit,” Christian said, making Aunt Tildy inhale. I glanced at her with wide eyes to say I didn’t know what had gotten into him, either.
Christian’s nostrils flared. “It’s because of Patrick. She’s going around asking questions about Patrick, and she needs to stop.”
“I don’t know what he’s talking about,” I told Aunt Tildy.
I turned to my brother. “Honestly, I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I kept my tone the same, but the look Christian got said, If you’d answer my questions yourself, I wouldn’t have to.
A flush worked its way up his face.
“Anyway, you go to your friends’ houses all the time, so why can’t I?” I said.
“Because you don’t have any friends, that’s why!”
Aunt Tildy whapped him with her dishcloth.
“Ow,” he complained.
“That’s enough,” Aunt Tildy said. “Now, Cat. There is no reason for you to be”—she pursed her lips—“getting involved with what happened to Patrick.”
I pulled my eyebrows together. “But, Aunt Tildy—“
“However, I know you’re smarter than that, and I’m glad to see you getting back with sweet Bailee-Ann. You been keeping to yourself for too long. So yes, you may go to her house.”
It was Christian’s turn to protest. “But, Aunt Tildy—“
Aunt Tildy whapped him again. “Nossir. You leave your sister alone.”
“Yeah,” I said. I smirked, as smirking felt called for, but in truth my emotions were more complicated. I felt choked by them, as if someone’s thumb was pressing into the hollow of my throat.
Maybe he’s changed, I thought. Maybe he’s stronger now. Maybe he will be there if I need him.
But what a dangerous game to play. He would always be my big brother. I would always be his little sister. There would always be a part of me that ached to believe in him the way I used to . . . but it was a temptation I couldn’t afford to give in to.
So I biked along the dirt road to Bailee-Ann’s house, which was closer to town and nicer than ours. It wasn’t fancy, but her daddy kept it up as best he could, with a fresh paint job and a newly mown lawn and a split-rail fence around his wife’s flower garden. Wildflowers were what Bailee-Ann’s mom liked: larkspur and violets and lady’s slippers, which Mama Sweetie called moccasin flowers.
Bailee-Ann welcomed me with a hug, which caught me off guard.
She pulled back. “You okay?” she said, her blue eyes full of concern. Most people, when they looked at me, didn’t really see me, but Bailee-Ann did.
She led me to a purple sofa patched with duct tape, which someone—probably herself—had colored with a purple marker in an attempt to make it match. On the sofa, as well as the coffee table in front of the sofa, were knitting supplies: balls of pink and blue yarn, needles, and wh
at looked like the beginning of a leg warmer.
“It’s Patrick, isn’t it?” Bailee-Ann said. “That’s why you’re here?”
I moved a skein of yarn and sat beside her, amazed we’d gotten to the heart of the matter so quickly. My eyes teared up, and I nodded.
“You two always were close,” she said. “Have you gone to visit him?”
“No,” I said. “I tried, but they wouldn’t let me. His condition has to be more stable or something.”
“Well, my mama just knows he’s gonna be okay,” Bailee-Ann said. Her mama worked for the hospital cleaning crew. “She says the doctors are taking good care of him, and the nurses, too.”
“They think he’ll regain consciousness?” I said. “For real?”
Bailee-Ann put her hand on my knee. “Yes. It’s something about his brain waves looking good, that’s what the nurses are saying. I wish I could grow up to be a nurse, don’t you? And we could wear those cute shirts with the little teddy bears on ’em?”
“Scrubs,” I said, still drinking in the news about Patrick. Hope fluttered in my chest for the first time in days.
“Huh?”
“Scrubs. That’s what the nurses’ outfits are called.” I paused. “Or that might be just the doctors.”
“Oh my God,” she said. She picked up her knitting project and hooked a loop of yarn with one needle. “I am so marrying a doctor, and when we have our first baby, we won’t need the free hat.” She held up what she was working on. “I’ll have already made it!”
“That’s a baby hat?” I said.
“Not yet, but it will be.” She pushed up on one knee, reached behind the sofa, and came back with a plastic bin. “Like these, which I’ll get Mama to take to the hospital next week. See?”
Inside the bin were five tiny hats: three blue ones and two pink ones. They had pom-poms on top and were utterly, absolutely adorable.
“You made these?” I marveled. I picked up a blue one. “You’re good, Bailee-Ann. Like, really good.”
She was pleased, but tried to play it off. “Oh, hats are easy. Anyway, the hospital gives me the yarn.”
“And then the hats go to little babies? That’s so cool.”
“I think so, too. That’s why I said yes when the head of the volunteer program asked me to do it. I want to be a better person, you know?”
“That’s awesome,” I said. “But you’re already a good person.”
She got busy with her needles. “But I could be better. I could work harder at school and not do bad things.”
“Bad things?” I said. I returned the hat to the bin.
“I want to be, like, the best me ever, and then maybe I could grow up to marry a doctor. I’ll give him babies, and he’ll give me drugs.” She giggled. “Kidding! He’d only give me the legal kind, and only if I needed them. I might need them a lot is all.”
I saw her for just a moment, the real her, just as she’d seen through to the real me. I saw her weariness, which she tried to hide with sparkly eye shadow and berry-colored lip gloss. I also saw that she’d been pulling out her eyelashes again. Back when we hung out, she pulled out her eyelashes when she was nervous.
What was she nervous about now? And I wasn’t going to ask again, but what sort of bad things was she no longer going to do?
“There’s no reason you couldn’t marry a doctor,” I told her. “You could be a doctor, even. Or a nurse.”
She smiled. Not bitterly, because Bailee-Ann didn’t do bitter. It was more just a hat-knitting smile that said I didn’t need to lie.
“But, Bailee-Ann, why would you want your doctor husband to give you drugs?”
“Um, because they’re fun?” She looked up from her work. “Not street drugs. God, I would never. But Beef knows this guy, and sometimes he gets Vicodin from him. Beef had his own prescription once, from when he blew out his knee, but it ran out.”
“Oh.”
“And actually, I’m trying to quit. That’s one of the ways I want to make amends. But have you ever tried it?”
“Vicodin? No, I don’t do that stuff.”
“Riiight,” she said. “You’re better than that. I forgot.”
Something shifted. It happened as quick as the click of her needles, and it made my skin tingle.
“No, I just don’t like feeling out of control,” I said.
“Oh. O-kay.” She hooked another loop of yarn. “So that’s why you dropped all of your friends, including Patrick. Including me. It wasn’t because you’re so much better than us. It was because you felt out of control, like maybe you’d accidentally catch a case of the stupids from us. Thanks for explaining. Now I totally understand.”
Whoa. Apparently Bailee-Ann was capable of doing bitter.
“Bailee-Ann . . .” I said.
She glanced at me. Her eyes held pain, but also a sliver of hope.
“I . . . I never . . .” I never thought you were stupid, I wanted to say. I never stopped liking you.
“Son of a goddang,” she cussed, looking back at the little hat. “Missed a stitch. Gonna have to do the whole row over.”
I felt awful. She’d let herself wish, and I failed her, and so, all right. Back to normal Bailee-Ann, who would take her disappointment and pretend it had to do with the dropped stitch instead of the dropped friendship.
My heart felt like lead, but what was done was done. I needed to regroup.
“Did Dupree give you Vicodin last Saturday?” I asked. “When y’all were at Suicide Rock?”
“I wish,” she said. Then she closed her eyes and gave herself a moment. She opened them, saying, “No, I don’t, because I’m quitting. I truly am. But anyway, all Dupree had was some herbal something-or-other. We put it under our tongues.”
There were old-timers all over the mountain earning a meager existence by selling herbal “remedies.” Aunt Tildy warned me and Christian to stay away. “If you can’t buy it at the store, don’t buy it at all,” she said. “Who knows what goes into their tinctures and potions?”
“You should be careful about that stuff,” I said.
“I know, I know. It didn’t do nothing but make us loopy, anyway.” She put down the little hat, balancing the needles on top of it. It was so small. I was that small once, and the thought blew my mind. I was that small, and so was Bailee-Ann, and so was Patrick. So was Patrick’s attacker.
“You wanna watch TV?” Bailee-Ann said. “Never mind. Set’s broke. Duh.”
I bit my lower lip. “Bailee-Ann, don’t take this the wrong way . . . but you don’t do meth, do you?”
She cut her eyes at me. “No, Cat, I don’t do meth,” she said, enunciating her words as if addressing someone very stupid who was also hard of hearing. “Meth eats your brain. Haven’t you seen those commercials?”
“Well . . . good. But some kids are using it. Here in our own town.”
“Kids are doing meth in every town in the country, Cat. Dang. Get your head out of your butt.”
“Do you know when it started? Um, people in Black Creek doing meth?” Beef doing meth?
“I don’t know,” she said. “When the paper mill shut down and all those folks lost their jobs, I guess. That’s when my mama started seeing more tweakers showing up in the ER. She said the Mexicans were running it through Atlanta, and from Atlanta to here.”
“The Mexicans?” We didn’t have any Mexicans living in Black Creek. I didn’t know that I’d even seen a Mexican, period.
“I don’t want to talk about it. It’s depressing,” Bailee-Ann said.
“I know. It’s just—“
“And anything I do know, I know from my mama.” She looked at me hard.
I nodded. “Of course. Yeah.”
“Well, I guess what they were selling was crap, and then the dealers in Black Creek—down-and-out mill workers, what have you—they got the stuff from Atlanta and watered it down even more. Not watered it down, but you know.”
Yeah, I knew. They’d stepped on it by adding baby powder or s
omething. Destiny had taught me well.
Bailee-Ann found a stray piece of yarn and pulled it repeatedly through her fingers. “It wasn’t good business, so eventually people in Black Creek learned to cook it themselves.”
“Wally,” I supplied.
Her face registered slight surprise. “Among others. Apparently, it isn’t that hard.”
“Until you blow yourself up.”
“Yeah. But until then, it’s easy money.”
“And that’s why people got into it,” I filled in. “People from here. People we might even know.”
The yarn in Bailee-Ann’s fingers grew taut. “Maybe. But like I said, this is all secondhand.”
“Must be a lot of gossip at the hospital, huh?”
“Almost as much as at church,” she said.
I laughed. It broke the tension. “I sure wish you’d come back to church, speaking of.” She rarely came these days, because her mama had Sundays off and wanted to sleep in. “Without you, I don’t have anyone to pass notes with.”
She half-smiled, perhaps remembering all the scribbling we used to do on the church bulletins. It perked her up, and she said, “Hey. Wanna go to Tommy’s and catch a movie on his flat-screen?”
I shifted. “Um, thanks for the offer, but movies aren’t really my thing.”
Her half-smile turned into something worse: a false smile. “Of course they aren’t,” she said. “Silly me, whatever was I thinking?” She wound the piece of yarn into a neat bundle, placed it on the coffee table, and said, “Well, it was nice chatting. Thanks for stopping by.”
I felt my cheeks heat up. I got awkwardly to my feet.
“Why did you stop by?”
“To talk about Patrick.”
She raised her eyebrows, wanting more.
“I’m trying to make sense of it, that’s all. And I guess I was just wondering . . .”
“Spit it out, Cat,” she said dryly. “I promise I won’t take it the wrong way.”
I splayed my feet so that my weight was on their outside edges. I stared down at them and said, “Beef said he drove y’all home. On Saturday night.”
“And?”
“He said he dropped Tommy off first, with Dupree. Is that true?”
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