by Chuck Wendig
Maybe I can be a normal girl, Atlanta thinks. Just once. Just for a little while. Go to school. Dick around with her friends. Eat a bad lunch. Skip her homework. Complain about what Mrs. So-and-So said, or how Mr. Whoozit doesn’t actually read the papers he grades. Bitch about her mother. Talk about a party someone went to. Or about getting a driver’s license. Go home. Run around. Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter. Text her, him, that other her, that other him. Emojis. Reality television. Stay up late. Sleep hard. Get up late. Lather, rinse, repeat.
But then Bee comes into the cafeteria that day with her arm in a sling and her face half-shadowed with a wine-dark bruise.
And Atlanta is reminded:
Normal isn’t on the agenda.
It was a car accident, Bee tells her.
The two of them sit in the far corner of the caf, not at a table but on one of the ledges of the big windows looking out toward the parking lot.
“A real accident,” Atlanta asks, “or an on-purpose accident?”
Bee hesitates.
That answers that.
“Who did this?” Atlanta asks.
“I . . . I don’t know,” Bee says, eyes watering. “It was yesterday morning and I was driving to school and, and . . . a white van, like a cargo van, came out of nowhere when I was crossing over Old Mill from Danville Pike, and soon as I got across he whipped up alongside me and pushed me off the road. Car skidded down the embankment. I hit a tree. Blacked out. When I awoke—” She sniffs, then fishes something out of her pocket. She slaps it down on the table, then smooths it out. It’s a crumpled-up note that reads: NO MORE QUESTIONS. “This was under my wiper blade. Against the busted windshield.”
“You okay?”
“Yes. No. I dunno.” She looks down at the note. “My arm’s broken. My face got . . . punched by the stupid air bag.”
“How about the, uhh. The—” She points to Bee’s stomach.
“The baby is fine.”
“Oh. Good. I was worried, because . . .” But she doesn’t know how to finish that, so she just lets the words go away like air out of an untied balloon.
“Are you okay? You don’t . . . look so hot.”
“I haven’t slept.”
“In how long?”
“Too long.” She sighs. “Hour here, hour there, maybe.” Atlanta knows it shows on her face. The lack of sleep is almost a living thing now. A sparking wire dancing across a cracked and blasted road. Doesn’t help that, to compensate, she’s gone back on the Adderall—helps her keep on keepin’ on. She grabs Bee’s hand—the one not stuck in a cast. “Come on. Let’s get you home.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. No way you can be fine. I’m not fine.” Nobody our age is fine. Especially in this town. “Besides, we need to talk.”
Bee eyes her. “Okay.”
“Let’s go.”
They leave the caf and they’re about to head out to the parking lot when someone clears his throat behind them.
Wilson. The vice principal.
“Where are you ladies going?”
Atlanta turns. Feels herself teetering on an edge. “I don’t see any ladies around here.”
“Where are you supposed to be?” he asks.
“Anywhere but here,” Atlanta answers.
“Atlanta, you’re on thin ice.”
“And yet, somehow I keep standing. You wanna come over here and crack the ice beneath my feet, be my guest. Meanwhile, let me read you today’s news. This girl? Bee? Take a long look. See anything strange? Maybe the cast or the beat-up face? Girl was in a car accident, Mister Vice Principal, sir, and she is not feeling well. As such, I have decided I’m going to take her home. Unless you want her driving? That what you want? She gets into another accident, you think that’ll sit well on your conscience? I reckon not. So, we’re gonna go now. If you’re fixin’ to make an example of me for that, or you wanna suspend me or whatever, then more power to you. I could not give any less of a damn.”
Bee gasps. The girl knows that’s not a word Atlanta likes to say. She’ll drop whatever f-bomb, c-word, b-word, s-h-i-t-word, but something about that one, damn, has never felt right coming off her tongue. But there it is.
Wilson doesn’t say much else. All he mumbles is, “Go on, then.”
So they go on, then.
In the parking lot, Bee says, “I didn’t actually drive to school today.”
Atlanta sighs. “You maybe could’ve told me that before we came out here. And before I did all that big, dramatic speechifying.”
“Sorry.”
“You want me to call somebody or are you okay to walk?”
“We can walk, if we take it slow.”
They walk.
Atlanta lays it out.
“I know who . . .” She kicks a stone. “I know who knocked you up.”
Bee stops walking. “Wh . . . what?”
“I found him.”
A wind whistles. Autumn coming in. Shaking the trees.
“How? When?”
“This past weekend. I . . . got a lead on someone. A not-very-nice someone. This particular individual, he, ahh, he was the one who drove you. Away from Samantha’s house and to . . .” Gosh, this is hard. So she just blurts it out: “It was Ty Carrizo.”
Bee’s eyes glisten. “I don’t even know who that is.”
Of course she doesn’t. Shit.
“You know the new kid? Damon? It’s his father. He runs or is a high muckity-muck at some fracking company just north of here.”
Bee looks struck. Like she’s just now stepping out of the wrecked car. She staggers over to the side of the road and sits down on the shoulder.
Atlanta hovers. Then sits with her.
“He’s older, then,” Bee says.
“Mm-hmm, yeah. Old enough to be our dad.”
“Jesus. Jesus.” Bee suddenly stabs out with a heel. Kicks her shoe down again and again on the road, grunting in rage as she does so. Her sneaker pops off, spins into the road. Atlanta hops up, grabs it, hands it back. Bee starts to put it on but then freaks out once more, and cries out as she wings it across the road into the bushes. “God! Damnit! What the fuck was I thinking? Why did I let this happen? This is all me. I asked for this. I went to Samantha. I made this happen and now here I am asking questions—” And she pauses her angry tears, the realization sinking deep like a knife in her gut. “That’s it. That’s why someone ran into me. I had you ask questions and now . . .”
She buries her face in her hands.
Atlanta pulls her close. Bee burrows into her side, sobbing.
Back at Bee’s house, Atlanta says: “This isn’t your fault.”
“It is. It has to be. I opened the door. I let this in.”
Gone now are the tears. Bee speaks and it’s a cold monotone. Her words and emotions are no longer a thunderous storm but a steady, pissing rain.
“I thought the same thing—that it was my fault. But it’s not.”
“No, I invited it. It’s different.”
“It’s not. You’re a kid. This guy is an adult. He’s the one who should know better.”
“Yeah. Well.”
They stand outside her house for a while. The air’s got a real bite to it. October’s rolling in tomorrow, and if the chill around them is any indication it’s gonna be a month with sharp teeth and a jack-o’-lantern grin.
“So,” Atlanta asks, “what do you want to do about it?”
“About what?”
“All of this. You said you wanted to know, and now you know. Ty Carrizo’s your man. Time to figure out our next move.”
Bee bites at a thumbnail. “There is no next move. This is it.”
“Gotta be a next move. These people . . . they can’t just get away with it. You said you might want to get money from him and we can try that—”
“They can get away with it, and they will, because that’s how the world works. I don’t have to be a grown-up to figure that out. The deck is stacked, Atlanta. Some peop
le get a better deal than the rest of us. I’m not you. I can’t fight this fight. I thought maybe it was just some guy and I could . . . make him be the father in more ways than just what he did to me. But this is different.”
“Oh.” She blinks. “You could go to the cops—”
“I can’t tell my parents all this stuff. I can’t drag them into it. It’ll kill them.” She stares down at her feet. “I’m gonna let this one go.”
“But—”
“Please.”
“All right. Yeah.”
“You’ll let it go?” Bee asks.
“I’ll let it go.”
“You promise you’ll let this go.”
“Pinky-swear.” She sticks out her pinky. They twist their littlest digits together and give a quick shake.
PART THREE:
LIKE A HOUSE ON FIRE
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Fear and anger are two cats tussling inside Atlanta’s heart. Fear that Owen Mahoney is still out there, that he’s going to come for her—and that he may have been the one who ran Bee off the road. But then, anger comes in all spitting and hissing, mean claws swiping—because what happened to Bee makes her mad. Mad enough to burn away any of the last resentment she had for her old friend.
Thing is, it doesn’t matter which one wins out.
Fear or anger.
Because she made a promise. She pinky-swore not to follow this road any further. So she’s going to have to just sit here. And let it go. Let fear and anger keep circling and biting one another.
She tells herself: I’m a girl of my word.
Promise is a promise.
That’s what she tells herself, anyway.
That night, two sets of pills:
Ambien.
Adderall.
One for sleep. The other for its opposite. Which one to take?
Ambien, Adderall, Ambien, Adderall.
Hit the brakes, or press the gas.
Adderall will keep her alert, but she’s already lying down at the edge of the cliff, the ground crumbling beneath her, the stone gone to scree. She’s jittery but sleepy. Hyperaware but confused, too. It’s hard to remember the right words, almost like she’s drunk, or so far beyond drunk it doesn’t even matter anymore.
No, Ambien will give her what she needs.
But that could come at a cost.
In the end, she just wants to sleep.
She tells Whitey: “I’m taking one of these. Don’t let me leave this room. I start to get up and do anything funny, you wake me up.”
The dog whines.
“Anybody comes in here, you kill ’em.”
The dog pants.
“Good boy.”
She pops the pill.
The Ambien is opposite of the Adderall, but this time, the result is just as clean: morning comes and what she experiences is less like waking up than it is just detaching one thing from the other. Like unclipping a backpack from around your waist, like popping off one shoe by using the toe of the other. One minute, everything is dark and nonexistent. The next: she’s up and alive.
Rising from the dead.
Thankfully, in her own dang room.
Whitey snores as morning light pours in.
That one night of sleep wasn’t quite enough to get her back to speed, and during classes she still feels sticky and gummy, like a piece of candy spit out onto the floor. But she’s better, and she doesn’t fall asleep, and she doesn’t need Adderall to get through the day. So there’s that.
Toward the end of the day, she sees Damon Carrizo in her precalc class.
She stares bullet holes through the back of his head.
Once the bell rings, he hurries down the hall, but she rushes after him. He gets stuck behind a crowd of jocks bouncing a ball—and some teacher who is yelling at them not to bounce the ball, so that now it’s a whole plug in the hallway, an arterial clot. She comes up behind him. Puts a hand on his neck.
“Hey, Damon.”
He startles. “Christ. Atlanta. Hey.”
“You been avoiding me?” she asks.
“No. I’m just—I’m just busy.”
The baller jocks part, and Damon starts to step through the gap. But Atlanta isn’t keen to throw this fish back yet. She jukes ahead of him, blocks his way.
“Your father’s a real sonofabitch.”
“No,” he says. He sounds defensive but won’t look her in the eyes.
“Do you know what he’s been up to? His little side project?”
He sets his jaw. “You don’t know him. He’s a good guy. Most kids our age, they hate their parents. But I actually like mine. Okay? So I don’t want to hear whatever you have to say. Just—just leave it.”
Damon goes to move past her, and as he does, she hisses at him: “You tell him that I know.”
He freezes. His head slowly turns. He’s like a frog caught in a flashlight beam, eyes wide. “That you know what?”
“He knows what.”
It’s a bluff and not a bluff all at the same time. She has part of the story, but not all of it. You see one cockroach running across the floor, there’s bound to be a whole metric roach-load of them behind the drywall, skittering around. Having cockroach babies.
“I’ll . . . tell him.”
“You do that.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, and it comes across as an earnest plea. Desperate, even, like he’s hungry for her to believe him.
But then he’s gone again, ducking back through the crowd.
She wonders. Maybe she shouldn’t be doing this. Stirring up the mud. Bee asked her to leave it alone. But then Atlanta tells herself she’s not stirring anything. His father probably doesn’t care what she thinks. Damon definitely doesn’t care. Everything’s fine.
Night two with the Ambien. Just to get caught up.
She figures, best to be clean and clear.
Which means time to get some sleep. More sleep.
She feels so tired.
Darkness takes her.
When she comes home from school the next day, Whitey’s outside waiting for her like always. Shane pulls up to drop her off.
“Whose car is that?” he asks.
There’s a white BMW in the driveway. Dirty, though. Tires are muddy, grungy. A black spray like wet, crumbled asphalt streaks the cream-white paint of the otherwise impeccable car.
“I dunno.”
“You want me to wait here? Or come in with you?”
She chuckles. “My little hero.”
“Oh, man, shut up.”
Atlanta pinches his blushing cheeks. “Thanks, Captain America, but I’m good. I can handle my business. And Whitey here has a pair of jaws that could pop a kickball.”
“I’ll wait here for a few minutes just in case.”
She sighs. “Thanks.”
Up to the front door. She peeks inside the window—
Her heart stops in her chest like a rock-smashed wristwatch.
Sitting at the kitchen nook table is Ty Carrizo. Across from him is Arlene.
Atlanta tries to shake off the nerves. Even though it feels like she’s going too fast down a steep hill in someone else’s car, she wills herself to open the door.
“Atlanta, hey,” Mama says. “Mister Carrizo, you remember—”
“Miss Burns,” he says, standing up and offering his hand.
Atlanta looks at it like it’s a shark’s mouth.
“Atlanta,” Mama protests, then tries to laugh it off. Atlanta reluctantly takes his hand and he gives hers a deceptively hard squeeze. Her knuckles grind together. It hurts but she tries not to show it.
Whitey growls. Ty winces, lets go.
Mama says, “Sorry. She’s not very well civilized, this one. Like I was at her age—a little wild, maybe.”
“My son’s the same way,” he says, smiling warmly. He sits back down. “But he’s becoming his own man. It’s a helluva thing to see.”
“Atlanta,” Mama says, “Mister Carrizo—”
“
Ty, please.”
Mama laughs a little. “Ty is here to offer me a job.”
“That’s right,” he says, clapping his hands together. “Your mama is going to join VLS next week doing some . . . general around-the-office duties. Filing and answering phones and whatnot. One of our ladies went on maternity leave, then came back for a month before she decided she just couldn’t stay away from that sweet little baby of hers. So, a vacancy is open.”
“It’s going to be a big help,” Mama says, beaming.
Atlanta shifts uncomfortably. “Oh. I bet.”
She goes upstairs and nearly throws up.
Ty Carrizo. What is this? Some kinda threat, she wagers. Seems like there were little codes hidden in what he was saying, too—that thing about maternity leave and a sweet little baby. A reference to Bee? To his own child? Or just a random one-off thing?
Maybe none of it was a threat. Maybe it was . . . a legitimate job offer. Something engineered by Paul?
Atlanta’s head spins.
When she finally hears his car door pop shut and she looks out the window to see him taking off—driving past Shane, who she completely forgot was out there, so she quick-texts him evrythng cool go home thx—she hurries downstairs.
“Mama,” she says. “Do not take that job.”
“What do you mean? It’s a good thing,” Arlene says, whisking around the kitchen, doing an odd spot of cleaning up. “It’s money, honey. Real money.”
“He’s not a good dude. Something about him . . .”
“He’s just fine. You’re being paranoid.”
Atlanta drops the hammer. “You really think you’re a good judge of men?”
Arlene turns. Face sober. Sad or shocked, too, Atlanta can’t tell. “Honey, I . . . we need this money. We’re trapped. That mortgage of ours is going to go up, up, up, like an out-of-control hot-air balloon and we can’t catch it. We’ll lose this place, and then I don’t know what happens.”
