Nothing ends.
Not here. Not in Payton. I knew that the moment I came back. The moment I arrived I felt that I’d never leave again. Somehow, without even trying to, I’ve become one of the townsfolk. I’m one of ‘those guys’ who used to make cracks about Route 89, but it won’t be long before I’m regaling stories of what it’s like on the outside with neighbors or co-workers or friends. Only over time, those stories will become embellished, watered down—incomplete. Over time, I’ll forget I ever left, and I’ll be here, just like everyone else, until the day I finally get out by being buried six feet down.
“Come on,” I say, tapping the car again. The sun slips behind some clouds, and when I look up, the sky is hinting at rain again. I draw a breath and look her in the eye. “I’ll take you to see your sister.”
The color drains from her face. So does any trace of good humor. Her eyes get dark, the distance between us not enough to hide what she’s suddenly feeling. “What did you just say?”
“Unlock the door,” I answer. I have a bad headache, and if we’re going to do this, then I’d just as soon get it over with.
She holds out her remote key, presses a button, and something behind the passenger door clicks, allowing me entry. She returns to the car and takes the wheel, but she doesn’t start the engine right away. She just sits there, still for a moment, gathering her thoughts.
“That way,” I say, pointing forward.
Kristie glares at me. “Are you telling me you know where she is?” she asks. “You’ve known all along?”
“No.” I shake my head. “Like I said before, it’s been coming back in bits and pieces.”
“But now you suddenly, conveniently, remember?”
“There’s nothing convenient about it.”
“But now you know?”
“Yes.”
“You son of a bitch.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Did you kill my sister?”
I consider going into detail, but there aren’t many details to draw from that are relevant. The puzzle pieces are all there, but the picture image just won’t focus.
“Did you kill my sister?”
“Start the engine, Kristine.”
She stares at me for a long moment before turning the key, throwing into reverse and peeling out. “Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
“I can’t read your mind. You tell me to drive, but you—”
“Turn left.”
And just like that, we’re on our way, heading straight into the worst day of the rest of my life.
Twenty-Two
Yesterday
Ritchie is sitting on the top of someone’s car, whittling a stick, sharpening its tip. From his vantage point, he has a good view of Payton High and particularly the baseball field. Today isn’t a game day, but even if it was, he wouldn’t be pitching anyway. Not now. Not ever again. Ritchie’s done with Payton High. Actually, Payton High is done with Ritchie. He was expelled for fighting, and without a scholarship, his grades aren’t good enough for a community college let alone a university. He’ll never get accepted anywhere, not even a school with a baseball program. Just like that, Ritchie Hudson has gone from someone to no one.
Our friendship is a mess, but knowing him the way I do, he’s either forgotten about our little argument and moved on, or he’s waiting for the right moment to knock my lights out. I can’t just pretend I didn’t see him, because if I walk by without stopping, he’ll draw new conclusions regardless of what they had been only twenty seconds earlier. Then he’ll come after me.
I at least have to say goodbye.
I cross the lot and stop beside the car he’s perched atop. He keeps right on whittling while I try to come up with something casual to say. Nothing comes to mind, so I hop up on the car beside him. It’s been four days since the brawl at Pirate Stadium. His face is still bruised, but his eyes are sharp.
“You okay?” I ask.
“I shouldna lost my temper,” he mumbles.
“No, you shouldn’t have. It was a game, Rich. You lost your cool over a stupid game. You were one lousy out away from something really special, but you had to go all psycho and flip out. And for what? For a girl?”
“It wasn’t her. It was him.”
“I’m telling you, you need to let that go.”
“I wanted to kill him,” he mutters.
“Yeah, I know you wanted to kill him. I also know that you’ve been saying things like that an awful lot lately.”
“Things like what?”
“Like how you want to kill him or your dad…or me.”
Ritchie just frowns as he whittles with more urgency. “They kicked me outta school.”
Expelled is more like it.
“I heard.”
“How was graduation?” he asks.
I shrug. “Like you’d expect. You didn’t miss much. It was actually kind of lame.”
He nods, still whittling, large chunks breaking from the stick and sliding down the windshield of the car we’re sitting on. “No more baseball,” he mutters. “Didn’t even get to finish out the season. That means it’s over. No colleges will look at me now. My life’s ruined. All cuzza him.”
“He didn’t even do anything.”
He glares at me.
“You know what?” I say, hopping down off the car. “I stopped to say goodbye, but it’s still just the same ol’ shit with you, isn’t it? You are obsessed with her, and it’s gotten to the point of disturbing. But you go ahead and make excuses for why you’re not going to be playing ball somewhere next spring. I got better things to do with my time. I gotta go. See ya.”
“Where you goin’?”
“Piss off.”
I hear him jump off the car and land clumsily before his footsteps loom up behind me. I fully expect him to sock me in the back, but instead, he only smacks me upside the head. “What do you mean you stopped to say goodbye?”
“It means I’m leaving.”
“Where you goin’?”
“I’m on the midnight express out of town. We talked about this.”
“That’s tonight?”
“For the umpteenth time, yes, that’s tonight.”
“Well, that ain’t much of a goodbye. Is that how you say goodbye to your best friend?”
“You didn’t give me much of a choice.”
“So, where you goin’ now?”
“To say goodbye to my girlfriend.”
Ritchie stops, and when I turn to him, he looks like a wet puppy. “You’re really goin’?”
I put my hands on hips, wondering how to navigate this situation without making things worse.
“Fine,” he says. “Then go. See if I care.”
“Look, Kristie and I already have plans for tonight. It’s my last night, and I need to spend what little time I have left with her. I have to. She’s a chick, and she’s totally PMSing over this.”
Ritchie just stands there, and for a big guy, he looks awfully small.
“Tell you what,” I say. “I’m planning to leave her place at around ten, grab my shit back at the house and head for the bus station. You want to meet me?”
“You want me to walk you to the bus station? Like a little girl?”
“I’m doing my best, Rich. My mom’s car won’t start, and she can’t walk that far, so I’m saying goodbye to her at the house. And Kristie won’t go with me. She refuses to.”
He kicks at a stone. “So, you want me to walk you to the bus station…”
“What better send off than one last midnight walk downtown with my best buddy?”
“You’re just demon…demonstrating me…”
“It’s dismissing, stupid, and no I’m not. You’ve been my best friend since we were eight years old.”
“Best friends don’t abandon one another.” The fire is gone from his eyes, and that youthful, curiously innocent young man looks older. He’s stopped walking, and I think he’s waiting for me to continue on so
he can turn his back.
“Well,” I say, sounding almost apologetic. “You know where I’ll be, and I’d like you to be there too. But it’s your call.”
Ritchie’s says nothing. He just stands there.
“Are you game?” I ask.
Nothing. He looks right through me like I mean nothing to him.
“I’ll see you then,” I say, though I doubt I’ll see him at all. I turn away, my heart thundering in my chest, afraid he’ll sense the lie I just told. Now that I’m going, and given what’s happened, I’d just as soon slip out of Payton unnoticed—a Spielberg ending to a small town drama. It’s time to go, and the sooner the better. Better to go now than wait for the pieces to fall and bury me beneath the weight of my own guilt.
Part II
I make my way through town, through the fields and over the Beaver toward Lawton. I’m all torn up inside, skittish—jumping at every little sound. Paranoia has me second guessing how I handled things with Ritchie. Paranoia has me wondering if he’s following. Paranoia also has me wondering what he’ll do if he is. That sense of something ‘bad’ feels like a storm settling right over the top of Payton and threatening to rip us to pieces before scattering us to the wind like leaves. But the sun is out. There is no storm. And there’s Kristie. She’s greeting me with a big warm smile and open arms, and instantly I forget all about Ritchie.
“You okay?” she asks.
“I’m fine.”
“Thinking about tonight?”
“Are you?”
She bites her lip, looks away and lets go of me, turning for the stairs leaving up to the porch. “Come on. We’re all inside.”
“We?”
“Travis and Joanne.”
I hesitate, quietly disappointed that it’s not going to be just the two of us like we’d planned, but I cover well, don a phony smile and follow her up the steps, through the screen door and into the living room where Joanne and Travis are seated on the couch. Kristie curls up in the big chair, taking the whole thing by tucking her feet up under her. I stand there feeling like a lump. There’s another chair, but it’s on the other side of the end table, and that kind of defeats the point. It also means she’s doing this on purpose—creating a barrier so as to make me feel guilty.
“Is there room for me?” I ask, but she says nothing. No one says anything. They won’t even look at me. “Or should I just go?”
This time Kristie does lift her eyes before sighing heavily and swinging her legs out to make room for two. I sit down and wrap my arm around her. I even kiss the back of her neck, but she’s rigid—cold. Pretending not to notice, I look around at what everyone’s up to. By the looks of things, Joanne’s trying to teach Travis sign-language.
“Cute,” I murmur.
“What?” she asks.
I shrug. “I don’t know. It just seems a little soon for learning Sign is all.”
Kristie frowns. “Are you jealous?”
“Don’t you take that tone with me, young lady,” I murmur, nudging her playfully. She smirks, elbows me right back before getting up and heading into the kitchen.
Joanne looks great—too good for Travis anyway. No, I’m not jealous, but I am a bit curious what makes him so damn special. His hand is on her thigh, and while I barely know him, I know enough to know I’m starting to understand what’s been eating at Ritchie, and there’s a piece of me that agrees. Travis doesn’t care about learning sign language. He wants to get laid. He’s acting innocently stupid—intentionally messing up—so she’ll grant him a pity fuck. Of course, his ignorance has limits. Just when she shows even the slightest bit of impatience, he signs the word ‘beautiful’ before pointing at her. She settles down, gets all gooey and snuggles up to him.
Kristie reemerges from the kitchen, a glass of ice water in each hand. She hands me one. “Let’s help,” she says before sitting in that empty chair on the other side of the end table. She’d didn’t sit with me. She chose the empty chair.
“This’ll be fun,” she says.
Fun.
I know her well enough to know she used the glass of water as an excuse to get up, and now she’s sitting in another chair just to make a point. She’s pissed. She’s a good liar though, because she’s acting relaxed, and she’s smiling, and she’s giggling as Joanne signs something she finds particularly funny.
Travis looks at me with a frown. “Any idea what’s she saying?”
I do, though I know enough to realize that I shouldn’t say so. I know my place, and my place is to shrug and play dumb, but I can’t. I’m irritated by Kristie’s attitude, and I’m disgusted with Travis. Maybe it’s because I don’t trust him, and my lack of trust seems the easiest way to expose him as a fraud even if it embarrasses the girls. Besides, I’m on my way out of town anyway, so what difference does it make?
“She said she thinks you’re cute,” I grumble.
Joanne’s mouth drops open in horror.
Kristie shoots me an angry glare before reaching across the end table between us and smacking my arm with the back of her hand. “Why’d you do that?”
“Because he asked.”
“Since when did you get good at Sign?”
“I know more than I let on.”
“So, you’re some kind of sign language prodigy?”
“Not really.” I lock eyes with Travis and smile. “It means I’m a guy. It means I learned how to sign the important words so I can use them at times like this.”
Travis stares back.
“It also means if we play our cards right,” I continue, “we might get a hand job, but if we’re good enough liars, we might even get laid.”
He glares at me, and I can tell he wants to fight. We face off, separated by a coffee table littered with a number of Country Living magazines, but neither of us move.
“For the record,” he says, keeping his tone light. “I’m okay with being cute. I’d rather be handsome, but I’ll take cute.”
The two girls giggle, and Travis is all grins, because he’s Mr. Perfect. He even smiles at me, but his eyes give him away. He’s not happy with me. In fact, I think I just made an enemy. But fuck him and everything he stands for. I’m sure he’s super-duper and all that, and all I have to do is keep my mouth shut and we’ll be friends, but I don’t want to be friends. I don’t like him, and I don’t want to like him. He’s pretending to be interested in a deaf girl when it’s obvious that scoring is his only goal.
“Focus,” Joanne says as she casts a stern look my way. “You’re not paying attention.”
“What?” I ask.
Everyone laughs. Apparently, I made an ironic funny.
“Now, tell me what color my hair is.”
“Blond,” I answer.
“In Sign, you dummy,” she smirks.
I know the answer. I can actually do this, but it seems like we’re all lying, so I keep it going by putting on my own show of innocent and cute. I look to Travis for help, but he just shrugs. He’s the best actor of the bunch, so I pick up a yellow pillow and point at it. “Blond.”
Kristie sneers. “Cheater.”
“But am I wrong?”
“No, you’re an idiot,” Kristie says.
“I resemble that remark,” I grin. “Go ahead. Challenge me.”
“Fine,” Joanne answers, looking me in the eye, “But this one’s gonna hurt.”
“Ooooh,” I say, rubbing my hands together. “Naughty.”
Once again, Kristie reaches across the vast divide between us, nearly topples, and slugs me.
“You really think you can stump me?” I ask.
“I don’t think it,” Joanne answers in that weird accent of hers. “I know it.”
“Give it your best shot, sweetheart,” I say with a growl. “I’m ready.”
Travis smiles.
Joanne squints.
It’s another one of those good old-fashioned Mexican standoffs—sans pan flute and tumbleweed, of course, and I can’t help but marvel how much she looks lik
e Kristie when she’s not speaking. “Tell me what the weather’s like,” she says before wagging a warning finger. “Without cheating.”
I sit back, trying for a debonair look as if I know what debonair is supposed to look like. Finally, I get creative, hold up my arms and make a large circle over my head.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Kristie asks with a laugh.
“The sun,” I answer. “It’s sunny outside, right? I was making a sun.”
“That’s not sign-language. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen.”
I look to Travis for help. “What do you think?”
He busts up laughing. “I gotta be honest, I thought it was some kind of weird Celtic dance.”
“Okay, genius, then you tell them in sign-language what the weather’s like,” I snap, but he’s already laughing, and so are they. Hook, line and sinker. Once again, I’m the funny guy. Funnier than him anyway, and that’s what matters as far as I’m concerned. “I’m glad you’re all enjoying yourselves at my expense,” I mumble, though this time it’s an act.
“You’re so adorable when you’re frustrated,” Kristie murmurs, getting out of her chair and coming over to sit with me.
“I’ll take cute over adorable any day,” Travis says.
“Yeah, well ‘adorable’ got me a girl in my lap. How’s ‘cute’ working out for ya?”
Joanne snuggles up to her ‘man’ and makes a spectacle out of it.
“Game on,” he says with a sinister smile.
Everyone else finds this particularly hilarious, and they’re suddenly howling with laughter. Kristie is having a good ol’ time, and Joanne is laughing in a way I rarely see. She looks truly happy for once. As much as that douchebag makes me squirm, I do my best to pretend everything’s okay. I even smile, but I don’t mean it. This is supposed to be one of those good moments between young couples feeling each other out, but I don’t trust him.
Slowly, the forced smile slips from my lips, and I’m on the verge of saying something I probably shouldn’t when I feel something press up against my shoulder. I turn to find Kristie snuggling up to me, her hair brushing my neck and cascading over my shoulder, and it makes me wonder why I’m pissed at Travis. I shouldn’t care who she dates. I’ve got Kristie.
Payton Hidden Away Page 23
