by Chuck Wendig
“Yes, Miss Samantha.”
Then the woman is gone, back inside the house.
Samantha says, “Delfina’s our house manager. Which is a fancy shorthand way of saying nanny, maid, personal assistant, blah blah blah. I love her. I do. But she’s like a robot you program. She’s only as good as the instructions you give her. And her name means dolphin, which, y’know. Bitch, please. Dolphins are long and lean and beautiful. She’s short and squat, like a fire hydrant. What’s Cuban for ‘fire hydrant’?”
“I sure don’t know.”
Samantha shrugs. “Welcome to my casa. There’s some Spanish for you.”
“Thanks.”
“Sit down.”
Atlanta thinks, No, I’ll stand, but that feels somehow more awkward. She hates that she feels awkward at all. But it’s hard not to. Samantha’s got bank in the accounts and junk in the trunk. She’s thin where she needs to be, thick in the other places, sharp at the edges. Skin so pale it might as well be a saucer of grass-fed milk. Atlanta feels dumpy in her presence. Her hair, too wild. Her freckles, too strange. Hips thick, arms think, skin soft, too soft, like a kangaroo pouch.
Ugly and poor. That’s how she feels.
She hates Samantha for that. More than a little.
Still, she takes a seat on a lounge chair. Leans forward. Can’t get comfortable in part because everything about this situation makes her feel uncomfortable. She starts to say something, but Samantha interrupts:
“You wanna get high?” From the far side of her lounge chair she grabs a bong. Tall glass stem—hot pink glass. The bottom of it a round bulb filled with water. “This is super primo stuff. Hydroponic. This stuff is called . . .” She pulls out a little baggie and scrutinizes the printed label. “Eternal Sunshine. Ugh, who names these things?”
“I’m good,” Atlanta says, staring at the door, suddenly nervous. “Delfina doesn’t know that you have that out here, right?”
“She knows. She doesn’t care. It’s my dad we have to worry about. He hates that I smoke this stuff. He’s such a dong.”
“And your mom?”
Shrug. “God, I get the stuff from her dealer. She’s cool with it. Believes it’s all part of the psychic repair process.” She snorts. “It’s bullcrap. For me it’s just part of the getting really freaking high process.” Samantha, looking disappointed, sets the bong down. “So. What’s up? Why are you here, exactly?”
“You had a party.”
“I have had lots of parties.”
“I’m interested in one in particular.”
“Oh?” Then she sits forward, suddenly. “Ohhh. You’re here on official business. This is a Very Special Atlanta Burns visit, isn’t it?”
“You make it sound kinda douchey when you say it like that.”
“It’s a gift. What party?”
“End of summer.”
Samantha nods. “I remember it. So?”
“Well, I was talking to—”
Delfina pops the sliding door again. “Miss Samantha?”
“God, what?” Samantha says, sneering.
“A man is here to see you. He says he’s your teacher?”
Atlanta frowns. “Teacher?”
But the look on Samantha’s face changes. Her confident, take-no-shit veneer shows cracks—and panic comes shining through. She shoots Atlanta a look: “Hey. What time is it?”
“I dunno. I got here around five, I think.”
“God.” To Delfina: “Two minutes. Then bring him back.”
“Okay, Miss Samantha.” Then the woman is gone.
Atlanta starts to say, “Why would a teacher—”
“It’s not a fuckin’ teacher. You need to go.”
“Now?”
“I don’t mean later. Don’t go through the house. Go around the front.” She waggles an impatient finger toward the gate at the far end of the patio. “Gate’s unlocked, just go out that way.”
“I still need to know about that party.”
“Now’s not a good time!”
Atlanta stands, hikes her bag over her shoulder. “When is?”
“Later.”
Something scratches at the back of Atlanta’s mind like a raccoon pawing at a trashcan, hoping to knock it over. For now, she nods, doesn’t bother saying good-bye, and heads out the back gate like she’s told.
She starts to round the house—alongside another run of roses, these as white as a unicorn’s innocence—but then she stops.
Her way of doing things and getting stuff done isn’t about just letting stones sit there. Atlanta likes to turn them over. One time she was poking through the woods with her daddy and she found an old piece of plywood rotting into the ground. She started to lift it up, and her father warned her, said she might get splinters, might not like what she found underneath. She did it anyway. Found the usual suspects: pill bugs, earthworms, ants.
And a cat skeleton. Skin draped over it like a blanket that had gone stiff and brittle.
She got a couple splinters, like Daddy warned. Didn’t matter. She hasn’t learned since. (And truth be told, finding a cat skeleton was kinda cool.)
So, now, she thinks: I don’t get things done by taking other people’s advice. She wants to know what’s going on, that means getting her hands dirty and splintered and seeing what hides underneath.
From the back patio: voices. Samantha. And an older man.
Atlanta heads back in through the gate. “Hey,” she starts to say, “I think I forgot my—”
There stands Samantha, arms crossed, almost like she’s cold even though the day is warm. A man stands across from her. Atlanta doesn’t recognize him. Pink polo shirt. Nice khakis. White sneakers like you’d see on some golf asshole.
He’s got a beard, but it’s cut so short and his hair is so blond that it almost looks like part of his tanned face. He turns toward Atlanta. Looks, what, late forties, maybe? He smiles big and broad, slides his hands into his pockets. Atlanta can feel his gaze going up and down her like he’s measuring her for something.
“Well, hey, now,” he says, not taking his eyes off Atlanta. “Who’s this, Samantha? Friend of yours?”
“I guess,” Samantha answers. The way she says it—face scrunched up like a wadded-up Kleenex—says how much she believes it. “Atlanta was just leaving.”
“I forgot something,” Atlanta says, improvising. “I think I maybe left my phone here or something.”
Samantha narrows her eyes. “I don’t see it. Sorry. Bye.”
“Hold on, hold on,” the man says. To Samantha: “Is she cool?” Then to Atlanta: “Are you cool?”
Atlanta shrugs. “I’m all right, I guess.”
He laughs. But again he returns his gaze to her. It’s a dissecting stare—like she’s a crab claw and he’s looking for the meat.
“She’s not cool,” Samantha says. “And like I said, she was just—”
But the guy, he reaches forward. He’s got a card in his hand. Like a business card. No name on it, just a phone number printed there.
“You ever want work,” he says, “call me.”
Atlanta stares at the card like he’s handing her a turd. But then she conjures a fake smile and an empty stare and takes it. “What kind of work?”
“Sammy here will fill you in.”
“Sweet. Looking forward to that, Sammy.”
Samantha says: “Uh-huh. Now, time for you to go.”
“Uh-huh,” the man says. “Run along now. But keep that number close.”
Atlanta holds up the card and shakes it at him like it’s a winning Lotto ticket. “You bet I will, mister. You bet I will.”
“You got an admirer,” Mama says when she comes in the door. Mama, who’s pinballing around the kitchen, pulling toast out of the toaster and popping it in her mouth, leaving crumbs everywhere. There, on the kitchen nook table, is a big bouquet of flowers. Red roses. Little white flowers, too—baby’s breath.
“Who’re they from?” she asks as Whitey comes up, sits so cl
ose he can lean his head against her lip. She scratches him behind his one ear.
“I don’t know, sugarbear,” Mama says, whirling about—grabbing car keys, taking a bite of toast. Around a mouthful of food she adds: “I might’ve peeked. Like the kids say, I don’t want to spoiler it for you.”
Atlanta cocks an eyebrow. “Pretty sure the kids don’t say that. Hey, where are you headed, anyway?”
“Off to work. Evening shift.”
“You didn’t tell me about this job before.”
“Oh. Well. You’ve been so . . . busy.” And that last word hangs there funny, like a painting dangling cockeyed from its last nail on the wall. It’s a word with a lot of weight to it, a sponge soaked through and made heavy. Mama knows. She knows what Atlanta’s been up to, maybe. Hasn’t said a word about it. Which both thrills and hurts Atlanta at the same time. Thrills her because, yeah, stay out of my dang business, lady. But it hurts her, too, because, shouldn’t she care? Shouldn’t she actually play the I’m-Your-Mother card and at least try to stop Atlanta from putting herself in danger? Suddenly, it hurts more than it thrills.
“You didn’t tell me about Paul, either.”
“I didn’t want to . . . surprise you with it.”
“And yet, that’s exactly what you did.” She leans in, squints. “You were trying to hide Mister Fireman, weren’t you?”
“’Lanta, I gotta go.”
“Yeah. Okay. Go, then.”
Mama Arlene scoots by, gives Atlanta a little kiss on the cheek, and tornadoes her way out the door.
The flowers, then.
Atlanta fishes through them, sees the card, reaches for it—
A thorn pokes the tip of her pointer. She recoils. A bead of blood swells up like a bubble at the end of her finger, and she pops it in her mouth to suck on it. She grabs the card with her other hand.
Atalanta—
Wanted to say sorry for bein a creeper.
Wanna go to homecoming?
—Damon
Go to Homecoming? With him?
“Learn to spell my name first, jerkwad,” she says. She flicks the card in the trash. Then dumps the roses in there, too.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Fire crackles. Embers pop and whirl.
“Pull!” Atlanta yells. Chomp-Chomp (oops, Steven) hauls back with the clay thrower, which is this flexible plastic rod that holds a clay pigeon in its grip. Atlanta doesn’t know why the heck they call it a clay pigeon, because it doesn’t look like a pigeon at all: it’s just a round disc, like a small and brittle Frisbee.
He lets it fly. The disc spins through the dark. It’s bright enough that she can see it in the night—she whips the shotgun up and doesn’t bother doing much aiming. Not enough time to think about it. You overthink it? You miss. Instead, she kind of lets her mind go blank. Like she’s just an extension of the gun tucked tight against her shoulder, and so she sucks in a breath and leads the front bead at the end of the Winchester ahead of the disc and—
Bang.
The little .410 bucks against her.
The journey of the clay pigeon is interrupted—the orange disc jerks in midair like someone tugged on it with an invisible wire. Bits fall away. All of it tumbles into darkness out over the corn.
“I got a piece of it,” she says.
Some half-assed applause from behind her, from the usual crowd of miscreants: Shane, Kyle, Josie Dunderchek. Eddie’s out—got some sorta stomach bug, said he just wants to sit on the couch all night and binge-watch Arrow. (Atlanta asked what that was, and Eddie just said: “Two words: Stephen Amell. Two more words: salmon ladder.” None of that made any sense, so she thought it a good time to end the call.) No Damita (she reminds herself again to ask Shane about that). No Guy, either—he’s working, he said.
Josie hops up from her chair by the fire, and she picks up a stick Whitey had been slobbering on earlier. She pitches it into the darkness. The dog takes after it fast—he’s a ghostly streak.
“Kinda dog is this?” Josie asks.
“A Dogo Argentino,” Atlanta says, breaking the barrel. Wisps of gunsmoke drift up as she plucks the shell out and tosses it into the grass. It clatters against the dozen others there. The smell still brings that night back to her, the night she first learned what power this weapon had—or, maybe, what power she had. But she presses on. Can’t let the memory control her. “Argentine Mastiff. People think they’re fighting dogs, but that ain’t quite right.”
Josie pitches the stick. “Seems like a sweetheart to me. What the heck happened to his head?”
It’s Shane who speaks up: “You really don’t know?”
“What? Uh-uh, no,” Josie says.
He starts to go into it: “Dog got shot in the head. By a cop. This guy named Petry—oh, man, I should start at the beginning—”
Atlanta plunks down by the fire. “No, you shouldn’t. I don’t wanna talk about . . . any of that.” Doesn’t want to think about it, either. The fear hits her when she goes to sleep and when she wakes—wondering suddenly if Whitey is okay. Did she forget to bring him inside, and is he out dead on the road somewhere, or shot by some hunter, or strung up by Petry and cut into like he’s a slab of beef made for steaks? She thinks: is Mama okay? Is Shane? And then the worst thought of them all: is Chris okay? And that answer, always and forever, is no, no he is not. Chris is dead and gone. That, thanks to Petry.
Maybe thanks to her, too.
She reaches down, grabs the bottle of cheap pink wine from underneath her chair—stuff is supposed to taste like strawberries, but mostly it tastes like Kool-Aid mixed with some stripper’s perfume. Still, it’s fuzzed up the edges and softened the sharp corners of all her ugly thoughts. Drinking is good sometimes for putting corks on the ends of forks. So she’s less likely to poke out her own damn eye.
“Sorry,” Shane says.
“Question I wanna ask,” she says to Shane, “is where’s Damita?”
He just shrugs.
Steven says: “Uh-oh.”
“I dunno where she is,” Shane says, staring into the fire.
“They broke up!” Kyle offers, because that’s Kyle. Most folks have a bouncer at the door between their brain and their mouth, someone to make sure that all the thoughts inside don’t make it into the air where actual human beings can hear them. Kyle doesn’t have that. He just says stuff. Some folks say he’s got Asperger’s. Either way, Atlanta likes him. He’s a good old-fashioned dorkus.
“Spill it,” Atlanta says. She passes the wine bottle around the fire. Everyone takes a sip, the pink not-quite-wine sloshing around.
“She wanted to . . .” He clears his throat. “Make love.”
“Oh, so she was DTF,” Josie says.
“I don’t get it,” Steven says. “What’s the prob?”
“The prob is,” Shane snaps, “I’m not ready.”
Atlanta leans forward, elbows on her knees. “For real? Most teen boys I meet are pretty much ready all the time. You dudes are like shook-up pop cans. It’s kinda why most of you suck, actually. It’s like you can’t just be people, you gotta be these jumped-up hormone tornadoes.”
Josie offers a high five for that. Atlanta’s not sure what she’s high-fiving, exactly, but she’s not one to reject a proper high-five opportunity. They slap hands. Pow.
“Okay, okay,” Shane says. “I’m ready. I’m just not ready. Like, I want it to be special. Dinner. Dancing. Roses.”
“Uck, roses,” Atlanta says.
He gives her a quizzical look but keeps talking: “I just want it to be right.”
“You want to make love, not just . . . y’know. Bang,” Steven says, with some almost surprising insight. He makes grabby hands and Kyle passes the wine over. He plugs the bottle to his lips, glurk, glurk, glurk. “I totally get it, dude.”
Josie says: “I say, hell with all that. Just go over there. Bring your suave little-man self, and lay her down and—” She pounds her fist into her palm. “You nail her to the floor like she’s carpet.
”
“That’s very . . . aggressive,” Atlanta says.
“Yeah, wow,” Shane says. “I just want her back. You think it’ll work?”
Josie shrugs, takes the bottle. “Sometimes the ladies want dudes who are . . . forward. They want someone who’s confident. They want to be wanted.”
“Yeah,” Atlanta says, “not me. That’s creepy to me. I mean, it sounds good on paper and all, but most guys are too dipshitty to figure out where the line is between asking for what they want and just . . . taking it. Besides, what do you know? You like girls. You’re a lezzie, right?”
Everyone goes silent. Firelight flickering in all the eyes that turn toward Atlanta. Jaws go slack. Nobody blinks. Uh-oh.
“Can I not say that?” Atlanta asks. “I just thought . . .”
“Who told you that?” Josie asks, suddenly gruff. She stands up, maybe a little tipsy. “I’m not gay.”
“I just heard—”
“Heard what?”
“That you were?”
“From who?”
“From whom,” Shane corrects, and Josie flicks him in the ear. He yelps.
“I dunno who I heard it from,” Atlanta says. She stands, too, holding up both hands as if in surrender. “You just hear things. Rumor and whatnot.”
“Oh, good. Believe rumor. I thought you were better than that.”
“Well, that, and you kinda seem gay. Maybe a little butch?”
“You seem gay, too. You ever think about that? You with your . . . fuckin’ damn Army jacket and your big hips and carrying a gun. Shit, do you wear makeup? Do you even own a makeup brush or know what concealer does? I rock makeup, man. My lips are red like dynamite. You know how much time it takes to make my eyelashes look longer and thicker than they are? God, I own an eyelash comb.”
“I didn’t even know those existed,” Atlanta says. She chews on the inside of her cheek as Josie stands there, her fists relaxing back into hands as her chest rises and falls. “So, you’re not gay, then.”
“Ugh,” Shane says. “Atlanta, let it go already—”
“I am,” Josie says, suddenly, eyes wide. A sharp gasp comes out of her mouth, and this look crosses her face: something between exhilaration and fear. “I am a lesbian.” Another gasp. She covers her own mouth as if to stop words from coming out.
