The Hunt

by Chuck Wendig

  Tuesday is Tacky Tuesday.

  Haw haw haw haw, wear your tackiest clothing, they say. Mismatched colors and funny wigs and clowny bow ties.

  Atlanta feels like an alien.

  And Shane still isn’t talking to her.

  Her feet are tired from walking to and from school.

  Wednesday is Disney Day, except of course they can’t just call it that. No, some yahoo had the idea of calling it WeDisneyDay, probably thinking they were clever. And that clever, not-clever person probably had a gaggle of social servants and sycophants orbiting them like pieces of trash around an ugly planet, and they probably said, Yes, yes, you’re so clever, and so the name was born.

  Atlanta never really understood the Disney thing all that much. Even now some girls her age are chest-deep in it. They sing Frozen songs in the hallway. They wear Mickey Mouse backpacks like they’re still eight years old.

  One of the theater chicks, Mara Darrow, wears a Tinker Bell costume today.

  A sexy Tinker Bell costume, because apparently that’s a thing.

  Shane’s at lunch. He’s polite. She’s polite. It’s tense. Everybody else seems tense, too. It’s weird.

  Whatever.

  She still feels like an alien.

  Thursday? That’s Spirit Day. Because at night is the game, and midday, just after lunch, is the pep rally.

  The pep rally (Atlanta’s own little mental joke about it is, Pep, Really?) is a thing to behold, as long as you don’t mind beholding really awkward, clumsy things. The sports situation here at William Mason High is backward from how it was at her last school: there, football was king. Here, it’s kind of a half-breed kissing cousin. They acknowledge it. They have a team (though no field of their own). But the football players are routinely terrible. You go out for football because you’re a half-assed athlete. You want real sports, you either join:

  (a) wrestling

  or

  (b) baseball.

  Football being what it is (a limping game-leg of a sport here) means the pep rally is almost perfectly mediocre. (Another little mental joke: instead of pep rally it’s a poop rally, because that’s about how much energy is going on here.)

  The cheerleaders are a sad thing. It’s not that they’re not all slim supermodels—frankly, Atlanta likes that this squad runs the gamut of body types, from short to tall to thin to plump. It’s that they have the gymnastic ability of a headless chicken and all the pep of a sleeping cow. They come out with some bass-banging club hit, but it’s like watching a pack of grandmas dance.

  Atlanta sits with Josie at the pep rally. It’s the one happy moment she has in the week. The two of them snark and laugh and—without pointing and being total douches about it—have a pretty good time. Atlanta says her Pep, Really and Poop Rally jokes, and Josie chimes in with her own zingers, too: “Looks like that one’s having a seizure,” or, “This is like watching a dump truck crash into a busload of orphans, I mean, it’s just sad,” and they have a good laugh. And Atlanta then tells the cheesiest cheerleader joke she knows:

  Q: Why did the ghost become a cheerleader?

  A: Because she wanted to show off her school spirit!

  Har, har, har. It’s not funny, not at all, but that’s what makes it funny, and in that theme, Josie then goes ahead and tells an antijoke:

  Q: What did the cheerleader say when she answered the phone?

  A: Hello, I am a cheerleader.

  And it’s funny because it’s not funny, because it’s dumb as paint, stupid as a cardboard box, and it makes them laugh so hard they’re almost crying.

  In front of them is sitting this pig-nosed kid, this junior named Keith Scarborough. He turns around, red-cheeked and beaming, eyes pinched like cat hineys, and he tells his own cheerleader joke:

  Q: What do you call a cheerleader with pigtails?

  And they don’t ask what, they just stare at him like, Who invited you to this party, skid mark?

  But he doesn’t give a hot wet fart about who invited him, so he answers his own question and goes for the punch line anyway:

  A: A blowjob with handlebars.

  And he guffaws like it’s the best thing anybody has ever said ever.

  Josie raps him hard on the top of his head with her knuckles. Not hard enough to, like, be really violent, but hard enough to make him yelp and rub his skull. He asks her why she did that and she says, “Because you’re being gross and fuck you, that’s why.”

  He turns around, grousing like a guttering engine.

  “Boys suck sometimes,” Josie says.

  Atlanta and Josie slap hands.

  Another high five. It seems to be their thing.

  It’s toward the end of the day, and Atlanta’s still feeling so good from hanging out with Josie that she accidentally bumps into someone in the hallway. A boy: blond hair with a conservative part, blue button-down shirt, a plain face. She’d think he was some kind of Jehovah’s Witness or something, except that the sides of his head are shaved and—

  “Hey, Atlanta,” he says, and she recognizes that voice.

  “Ecky,” she says, then quickly corrects herself. “Joey! Joey.”

  He gives her a small, curt nod, then keeps on walking.

  She catches him by the elbow. He flinches at being grabbed—she knows that flinch so well she instantly feels bad for touching him like that. Atlanta holds up both palms in surrender. “Hey. You . . .” She swallows hard. “You look different.”

  He—she?—shrugs. “This is me, now.”

  “No makeup. No anything?”

  “I’m done with all of that. It was dumb.” But the way he says it, there’s this haunted look in his eye. As if his brain is a broken toy and now he’s the child trying to hide what happened, pretending it’s all okay, don’t worry about it. “I’m a boy. Like everyone says.”

  She’s about to say more, but then he pulls away, keeps walking. A fish joining the school in the stream.

  She walks home. Past the little cluster of Mennonite houses where they build the sheds. Past the closed-down bait shop. Past the fields of soybeans and corn and down the road toward home. The sky is gray and thunder threatens the edges of the world, but even with the promise of rain for the game tonight and even for all the things there are to see, her mind wanders. To Joey Eckhart and to the way he looks now. Part of her thinks, He was just putting on makeup and girly clothes sometimes because he was acting out, like some kinda defense mechanism. But then she thinks, No, that wasn’t it at all, was it? Now he’s putting on an outfit, now he’s hiding it all.

  How long will he be able to take it? The abuse. And the non-abuse, the almost-abuse, too. The side looks, the whispers, the laughs and sniggers, the general disgust. She gets it. Atlanta’s felt those things. First day back to school from Emerald Lakes almost killed her.

  And that’s her question for people like Joey: how long will it take before something pushes him over the edge? How long before he either becomes so comfortable with who he is that he’s bulletproof to it forever, or—more likely—how long before he just decides to end it all?

  Atlanta realizes then:

  Sometimes, suicide doesn’t mean you have a gun in your mouth or a bottle of pills dissolving in your belly.

  Sometimes suicide is killing who you are to become someone you’re not.

  The rain never comes. The thunder lingers at the margins, like a lion kept in its cage. Close, but not too close. All the while, Atlanta sits around the house. She checks her shoe box, thinks about cleaning her squirrel gun but then remembers she doesn’t have the gun because Holger has the gun—and oh yeah, the hunter safety course starts this weekend, too. Though before that happens she has to go to the dance and Samantha’s party tomorrow night, ugh, ugh, ugh.

  She throws the stick for Whitey.

  Eats cold SpaghettiOs out of a can.

  Looks at her Ambien and thinks, Maybe I’ll pop one now and just take an early trip to snooze-land. Like an old person. Maybe she should watch Jeopardy or W
heel of Fortune first just to make the transition complete.

  Thoughts of Joey stick with her like a ghost, or a bad smell.

  Shane, too.

  Shane.

  Shoot.

  Atlanta looks at the clock. Sees the game is gonna start soon. Out the window: evening is bleeding in like an oil leak, and still no rain, still no storm.

  Shane said he’d be there, at the game.

  Atlanta grabs her bag, her jacket, gives Whitey a kiss—

  Then she calls Josie to come pick her ass up.

  Truth is, she’s never watched a football game. Basketball’s pretty all right and she loves fishing and thinks pro wrestling is aces, but football has never really caught on with her. She doesn’t understand it, for one thing. Basketball’s easy: take the round bouncy thing and get it in the other team’s receptacle. Fishing makes sense, too: hook, bait, wait, fish. Football makes fishing look like NASCAR, and she doesn’t much care for NASCAR either (oh, hey, look, a bunch of white dudes driving left for about a thousand hours). She watches football and it makes no sense: two teams slowly pushing against each other. One of Mama’s boyfriends was a superfan and said, “It’s like watching war.” And she said, “War is boring.” Then he threw M&Ms at her head because he was a motherfucker.

  So now, the William Mason High Cockbirds—apparently somebody thought that was a good name for a team (at least the baseball team is called the Meteors)—are out there on the gridiron of another team’s field, battling the North County Whitetails in a clumsy, muddy match to see who can solicit the most yawns. Atlanta and Josie wander the chain-link fence by the field as the folks in the bleachers and along the sides hoot and cheer and shake their pennants in the nighttime air—air that has gone surprisingly cool given the heat of the day.

  Josie points: “There.”

  Sure enough: Shane stands over toward the snack bar. He’s with Kyle, Steven, and another of their yearbook crew, Shelly Bogner (whose dad runs the weird little produce place in the middle of town). They’re not looking at the game. Atlanta makes a beeline toward them, Josie following after. When she gets closer, she sees what they have in their hands—other kids might be passing around a phone with some YouTube video on it, or a joint, or some porn. Shane and the other two are passing around Magic: The Gathering cards. She catches a glimpse of a dragon and some kinda swamp-man before they see her.

  “Atlanta,” Shane says, half-surprised, half-disappointed. “You’re here.”

  “Damn right I’m here.” She hears the anger in her voice—and knows it’s real, but also knows it’s not what he thinks. She’s angry at herself. At this situation.

  “We were just leaving,” Shane says.

  “No we weren’t,” Kyle blurts, incredulous.

  Atlanta grabs Shane by the elbow. “Hey, c’mere. We need to talk.”

  “Ow,” he says.

  “Sorry.” But she doesn’t let go, and drags him behind the snack bar. Near a trashcan that smells like old milk and a stack of empty cardboard boxes from a local restaurant supply place.

  He starts to say something, but she boops his nose.

  “No. Shh. Me talky first.”

  “Oh . . . okay.”

  Deep breath. “I am a big giant assy-faced butt-mouthed shit-heel,” she says. “I was mad. Am mad. At you. For no good reason at all. It’s like: oh, man, this sucks to admit, but I got nothing. Nothing at all. No future. Nothing much to look forward to. No plans, no dreams, not lickety-shit. And soon, that future I can’t see and don’t have is gonna be right up on me like a tractor trailer tailgating my ass, and won’t be any way I can avoid it. When that time comes, you’ll be gone. Because you have a future. And you should. You’re a smart dude and the world is your enchilada.”

  “I think that’s racist?”

  She boops his nose again, harder this time. “Hey, shut up! I’m trying to spill my guts here. You going away scares me, because once you’re gone, it’s me and my dog. And . . . that’s it. And then with you wanting to do things like go to football games and Homecoming dances . . .” She puffs out her cheeks, exhales. “It’s like you’re already leaving. Earlier than scheduled. It sucks when all your friends wanna do something you don’t wanna do. It makes you feel alone. It makes me feel alone. But that’s dumb. I’m dumb. I should be happy for where you’re going and should want to try new things with you instead of being . . . scared. Because you’re my best friend and I know I treat you like you’re my sidekick—”

  He flings his arms around her. She makes a sound—grrk. “You’re my best friend, too. And I am your sidekick. I’m totally cool with that.”

  “No, you’re not—ow, you know, you’re stronger than you look—” She feels her blood pressure rise. Has to tell herself: This is Shane. He’s hugging you. This is what affection feels like. Calm down.

  But it’s like he can read her mind. “Sorry.” He lets go. “My turn.”

  “Your turn what?”

  “To confess.”

  “Oh, that doesn’t sound good.”

  “I’m pretty jelly.”

  “Jelly? I don’t know what that means, jelly.”

  “Jealous.”

  She squints. “Then just say jealous, not jelly. You’re a big boy, smart as a whip, you can use actual words, not made-up words.”

  “Jelly isn’t a made-up word. You put it on your toast.”

  “Yeah, I know. Never mind, can we get to the confession, please?”

  “I’m jealous.” He enunciates that word. “Of Bee. And Josie.”

  “Josie I maybe get. She’s part of the crowd. Part of us. But Bee?” She snerks. “Bee? Really?”

  “She’s back in your life. You guys were superclose.”

  “Were. That’s the important part of that sentence. Then when I needed her most, she disappeared. Used me like a stepladder to more popular friends.”

  He kicks a stone. “I just figure we don’t have much time left—like you said, this is our last year, and I didn’t want anybody messing that up.”

  “She’s not gonna mess it up. Neither’s Josie.”

  “Promise?”

  “Of course.”

  She hugs him, this time. It feels better. Because she controls it.

  He says suddenly: “Does this mean you’re going to the dance tomorrow?”

  “Oh, god,” she says. A sound rises in the back of her throat—the sound of an angry dog. It feels a bit like jumping out of a plane but: “Yeah, fine.”

  “Woo hoo!” he says. “You’re awesome.”

  “You’re my little tamale.”

  “You’re also still kinda a little bit racist.”

  She holds up her thumb and forefinger about an inch apart. “Just a little. By the way, thanks for shaving that thing off your lip.”

  “It was not impressive.”

  “Nope.”

  “Turquoise taffeta swing dress,” Josie says.

  Atlanta stares at someone else looking back at her in the mirror. When she moves her hips, the stranger in the mirror does, too—and the sea-green dress sways and swishes with her.

  Her hair, blown out and given shape—it swooshes and swoops.

  Nails painted green.

  Lips a kind of . . . she doesn’t know what kind of yellow that is. It’s metallic, but not quite gold. Bronze, almost. The whole package is . . .

  “What’s that word?” Atlanta asks. “When you get an antique with, like, this blue-green color on it. Like mold, but not mold.”

  “Oh!” Josie snaps her fingers. “Uhh. Uhh. Patina! Is it pa-tin-uh, or pa-teen-uh?”

  “Jeez, I sure don’t know,” Atlanta says. “But that’s it. I feel like that.”

  “Ergh,” Josie says. “Sorry.”

  “No!” Atlanta protests. “No. I . . . kinda like it. This dress is a bit of all right.”

  Yesterday, in the car ride home after the game, Josie asked Atlanta if she was really going to the dance. When Atlanta said, Ugh, yeah, Josie asked if she had a dress to wear. An
d, of course she didn’t. Atlanta hasn’t worn a dress since that junior high choral concert she was forced to attend. (She sang in that concert, just a small voice amidst the chorus singing words she mostly forgot. Her mother was supposed to make it to that show but didn’t. Was on a date with the coke dealer dude from Virginia.) So: no to the dress.

  Josie offered to help. And so, here they are.

  “You like it, then?”

  “I don’t feel like myself.”

  “That sounds like a bad thing.”

  Atlanta smiles. “No, no, it’s actually pretty dang cool.”

  That, it turns out, is the theme of the night.

  She and Josie walk in through the front door, and immediately the throng of people takes her breath away. And not in a good way. All those bodies in the half dark as shitty music from ten years ago plays. Her immediate feeling is to do what comes natural: be a wallflower. Cling to the wall like an ant trying not to drown in a water glass he wandered into. Stay at the margins and do her time and nobody can say she wasn’t brave. Except, that isn’t brave, is it? She’ll go up against a barn full of neo-Nazis or stroll into a dog fight like she’s the biggest, baddest pit bull on the farm, but a school dance is dang near making her pee.

  She tells herself: Be brave.

  And then it hits her: You don’t have to be you.

  You can pretend to be someone else.

  Just for now. Just for tonight.

  Not like Joey Eckhart. Not like someone pressured into it. But like someone at a costume ball—way a kid gains power over monsters by dressing like one.

  Deep breath.

  Hold it. And—

  Jump.

  Right over the edge.

  Josie pulls her into the crowd and she doesn’t resist. It’s like a hard dive into a cold swimming pool—it hits her, takes the air right out of her lungs, but then suddenly the water is warm, and besides, this isn’t happening to her. It’s happening to a girl with big teased-up hair in a patina-colored rockabilly dress.