by Dan Jolley
But the vehicle that rounded the bend and bore swiftly down on her was not Brett’s battered Camaro. It was a gloss-black Ford, and the sun’s rays bursting off its windshield made it look less like an automobile than like something from outer space. She stood still and watched it come and let the music pulse over her.
The Ford blew past her without even slowing down and disappeared around another curve.
Julie let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding and giggled. What was she thinking? Some handsome stranger would come along, pick her up, rescue her from her heartache?
She laughed a little more and started walking again—but heard the music, faintly, coming back. The song grew louder, and the Ford reappeared from around a curve.
It passed her again, did a lazy U-turn and pulled abreast of her. The music clicked off. Julie stood there, paralyzed.
Every lesson she’d been taught, every Alabama School Board educational video she’d ever seen, all of them pounded into her head the dangers of talking to strange men. But as she neared the unfamiliar car, the memory of Brett’s cologne seemed to choke her, and her face throbbed, and all the anger inside her distilled. Julie Worley decided to choose her own path for once, and to hell with what everybody else said.
Her determination doubled when she got a good look at the driver.
He was young, maybe a year or two older than she was, extremely pale and dressed completely in black. High-top sneakers, jeans, belt, T-shirt, and three-hundred-dollar sunglasses, all as black as his car, as his thick combed-back hair. He faced her, smoothly took off the shades—and she found herself staring openly. As he turned his head, she noticed a small earring dangling from his left ear: a skeleton key. He smiled at her, a little shyly.
“Hi,” he said, his voice like ocean air. “You all right? Need a lift?”
It took a fraction of a second. Maybe less than that. “Sure.” Julie smiled her best bedroom smile, felt a little slutty and a little dangerous and reveled in it. He reached over, opened the door for her. She said, “My name’s Julie. What’s yours?”
His smile got even better. “Simon.” He slipped the shades back on and put the car in gear as she buckled in. “Where can I take you?”
* * *
Earlier that afternoon and several hundred miles away, the bell signaling the approach of the next period rang, and Nathan Pittman walked into his American History class and set his books down on his desk. Paige had already sat down in the desk in front of his, her back to him, talking to Drew Watkins. He was pretty sure she’d seen him come in, but she didn’t turn around.
Nathan smoothed his dyed-red hair so that it all hung down on the left side, leaving the shaved part of his scalp uncovered, and out of reflex tried to adjust his nose ring. Of course it wasn’t there. Piercings were against school rules. He sat down and tried to regulate his breathing. Paige continued chatting with Drew, and gave no hint of turning around to talk to him.
Even when he couldn’t see her face, Nathan found Paige tremendously appealing. She was short, maybe five-two, with curly brown hair, enormous green eyes, a curvaceous figure, and a smile that made his insides spin.
From the first day of class eight days before, Paige had spoken to him every day, freely, and shown none of the reluctance that everyone else at the school seemed to. On the fourth day of class Nathan finally overcame the worst of his suspicions and started talking openly to her.
Nathan Pittman was seventeen, rake-thin, and utterly out of place.
At his old school he was one of the crowd; he hung out with his own group of friends and no one gave him a second glance. Then his mother’s boss handed her the choice of taking a raise and moving to a new city or losing her job, and Nathan had two weeks to say his goodbyes to his friends and his hometown.
“You’ll thank me later,” his mother had said. “I’m making enough money now, we can get you into a good school. A private school.”
Attending classes his first day at Grover Cleveland Academy seemed very much like stepping into an alternate dimension. He’d jotted down a few possible names toward the end of the day: The Uptight Zone. Top Forty World. Planet Button-down. Every single person he passed in the halls, teachers and custodians included, stared at him as though he were actually a member of some alien species on an inter-dimensional exchange program. He wondered how much worse it would’ve been if they’d seen him with all his piercings and in his normal wardrobe, instead of the bland-as-white-bread clothes he had to wear to follow the dress code.
But Paige was different. As soon as he sat down in History, she greeted him with, “Hi! I’m Paige. What’s your name?” And it went from there.
Each day became tolerable because he could look forward to talking to Paige. When no one sat with him at lunch, and no one spoke to him in the halls, and he got picked dead last every day for the football games in P.E. like some nine-year-old fat kid, he could think about talking to Paige before and after History class. When the starting quarterback and three of his buddies trashed Nathan’s car, he thought about Paige. When Charlie Greene, a trust fund baby encased in a solid block of entitlement, walked past him in the hall and casually slammed his head into a locker, he thought about Paige. When Jimmy Tullo wrapped his fist around a roll of pennies and rammed it into Nathan’s shoulder so hard it knocked him off his feet, turned to his friends and said, “Hey, that does work,” Nathan thought about Paige, even as three teachers pulled him off of Jimmy Tullo. And with the thought of her he’d made it through each day of the preceding week of hell.
So yesterday, after the end-of-class bell sounded, Nathan leaned slightly forward over his desk and said, “Um, hey Paige, I was wondering if you’d maybe like to go out, maybe this weekend? I’m sort of broke, but I was thinking we could watch a movie, maybe, or something?”
His words stopped her dead, and she regarded him with wide eyes for a long moment before answering. He knew what the look meant, or at least he was pretty sure he did, but he hoped he’d misread her.
Paige said, “Well. Why don’t you let me think about it?”
Of course he said sure, sure, no problem, sure.
And today she would give him her decision, yes or no. When Nathan felt reasonably confident that his voice wouldn’t shake, he said to Paige’s back, “Hey, Paige.”
She turned around, and her decision was as obvious as if she’d been wearing a mask with the word NO printed across the forehead. He sucked in his breath and waited anyway.
“Yes?”
And that was it. That was her response. All of it.
Nathan let out the breath and took in another, stunned. Not, Hi, Nathan, listen, I’ve thought about it, and I’m flattered, but I don’t think so. Certainly not, Nathan, I’d love to go out with you! Instead...nothing. As if he hadn’t said anything.
“Uh, I was wondering if you’d maybe reached a decision, about what I asked you about yesterday. About maybe going out with me. This weekend.” He wanted to crawl under his desk.
Paige smiled, but it was the kind of smile you’d give a moron.
“I don’t think it’d be a good idea,” she said, and turned back around to talk to Drew again.
“But...uh...Paige. Paige? ...Hey, Paige?”
She ignored him.
Nathan lowered his head and stared at the top of his desk for the rest of the period.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Creep. Bastard. Bastard.”
Simon watched as Julie hugged herself and stared out at the parking lot. Her cheek had begun to darken where Brett struck her, and she had a small knot on her head where it smacked against the car window. She ignored the menu on the table in front of her.
Simon Grove cleared his throat nervously and said again, “Would you prefer, um, Supreme or Super Supreme?” He took a sip of his iced tea and tried to make eye contact with her. She may have felt him looking; she fin
ally turned her head and smiled softly.
“Oh, Simon, I’m sorry. I ought to be paying a lot more attention to you. Instead of thinking about him.”
Simon shook his head. “It’s okay! It’s okay, really. I mean, you just had sort of a personal trauma, right? It’s only natural for you to be upset.”
Julie put her elbows on the table and leaned forward, watched him intently. Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Y’know...I just met you. Not two hours ago. How come I feel like I can tell you anything?” Her smile still hovered about her lips, which were thin but well-shaped. Simon cleared his throat and squirmed in his seat.
“I...feel sort of...connected to you, too,” he said quietly. “‘Cause you don’t know me. You don’t have any preconceived ideas of me. It’s nice.” He touched his clothes, his earring. “All this stuff is sort of new, actually. I’m kind of going through a change of image.”
“I like it.” She stretched, and her shirt pulled tight across her ample chest. Simon tried his best not to stare, or at least not to look as if he were staring. Several seconds later it occurred to him that she might have wanted him to stare, and he couldn’t decide whether that pleased him or scared him.
“Y’know, if anyone had asked me this morning if I’d accept a ride from a total stranger and let him buy me dinner, I wouldn’t even have bothered to answer. But here we are.”
“I don’t know that I’d call this dinner. It’s just pizza.”
“Hey, around here this is as good as it gets for a date.”
They both fell silent, and the word “date” bounced around in Simon’s mind among all the uncertainty. He only had to think back a few days to remind himself why he was on the road. But Julie was ... different? Was that the word? Or maybe it wasn’t Julie that was different. Maybe it was the new surroundings. Maybe it was him.
“So you’re headed east? Got a destination, or’re you just driving?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, truthfully. “I knew I needed some time away, but I didn’t know where I wanted to go. But something clicked in my head, sort of, and now I think I’m going to Atlanta.”
She smiled a little. “Mmmm...never been there. I’d like to go sometime.” Julie tilted her head slightly to one side. “So Simon...what’s your secret?”
He flinched, and saw her eyes widen, and forced his smile back into place.
“Are you okay?” Julie asked, all concerned and caring, all sweet and sugary like frosting.
Abruptly another name came to him, another face. Another girl who’d also acted concerned and caring. Julie Worley began to seem ever so slightly...
...fake.
“I didn’t mean to pry. I mean, you just said you could be yourself ’cause you were here with me...on neutral ground, right? Like starting over? I’d just like to know more about you. Like, y’know, your last name and stuff. If that’s okay with you.”
He shut his eyes, thought of his mother. People said she stayed so beautiful because of exercise, and diet, and genetics. Simon knew better. He knew full well the connection between himself and his mother. Not that she’d ever admit it. Not after what had happened. What he’d done.
“My last name is Brown,” he said.
“Simon Brown. Well. I’d really love to know how you got to be in Crawford Shoals. But, y’know, only if you want to tell me.” She smiled again, and he returned it, at least on the surface.
Fake. She was fake. So obvious. He resisted the urge to look around the restaurant, try to spot her friends, no doubt watching him from a far table. Had someone known he was coming? Known what road he was on, and put this girl there for him to find?
But Simon surprised himself with how well he hid his suspicions. The two of them talked freely and easily; their food arrived, but didn’t hinder the conversation, and they stayed long after they’d both finished.
Simon spun the Alabama schoolgirl a tale of a rich grandfather and an inheritance which, coupled with a long-standing desire to see the world, had led to his purchase of the Ford. “I wanted a Porsche,” he said, gnawing on the end of his straw. “But, y’know, just ’cause I have some money, doesn’t mean I need to spend it all on a car with only two seats.”
Julie listened more than she talked, but she seemed comfortable enough to relate the high points of growing up in a tiny, far-removed Alabama town, dealing with a distant, loveless mother and a well-meaning but spineless father.
Simon thought perhaps that sounded a bit too pat, a bit too Lifetime Channel, but he decided to let it pass. For now.
Equally difficult, she said, were the boys she had to choose from. “Pickings are slim. Most of the guys around here are just dumb rednecks, and the few that aren’t...” Her eyes unfocused, slightly, and she slumped a little. “Really, I guess, all the guys around here are sort of like that.” She straightened her shoulders again, gave him a small, coy smile. “I guess I’ll have to look for a guy from somewhere else.”
Simon finished his tea, set down the glass. Watched her. Her with her blonde hair and pretty eyes and big tits. Miss Popularity, no doubt. Trapped in a small town. What a tragedy. He said, “How would you like to take a spin? Just drive around for a while?”
* * *
“You’re sure, now? This is the place?” Simon steadied himself in the dark, one hand on her upper arm.
“I’m the one who grew up here, right? I know where I’m going.”
Full dark had come, and Julie led the way down a narrow path choked with Bermuda grass and wild blackberry bushes, their only illumination a penlight she carried in her pocketbook.
Not that Simon really needed the light.
More than once he pricked himself on one of the long, sharp blackberry thorns, and the first time he nearly screamed. He stopped short in the darkness and held up his hand, and Julie rushed back to him, sugary sweet, and he examined it in the penlight’s weak beam. A small, ragged hole had punched into the fleshy part of his left palm and torn slightly, so that a tiny red ribbon of blood seeped out of a teardrop-shaped wound.
As he stared, the bleeding slowed and stopped, and the blood reversed course, retreated into the wound. He turned his hand away so she couldn’t see the skin start to close.
“Did it get you real bad?” There was that concern again, so thick and treacly. If she hadn’t had the light near his face he would have sneered.
“No, no, I’m okay.”
Julie pulled him further into the darkness. “Come on. It’ll be worth it, I swear.”
After several more minutes of tripping over roots they came out of the trees and onto the shore of a lake. Simon leaned against the trunk of a pine and stared.
“Wow,” he breathed out, solemnly.
“Glad I brought you here now?”
Simon wavered. It was so beautiful. Michelle...Michelle wouldn’t ever have brought him to a place like this. Maybe Julie wasn’t trying to trick him after all. Maybe she really did want to be here, just with him, just for him.
He felt so confused now, he didn’t know...
He reached out, took Julie’s arm and pulled her gently to him. She nestled against him, her back to his chest, and the two of them gazed out over the water. She made a small, pleased sound, and he twined his arms around her waist.
The half-moon rested on its side in the sky like a shining cradle. The water’s surface rippled with tiny, breeze-driven wavelets, and the moon’s radiance infused them, so that the water itself seemed liquid silver. After a few moments Julie moved away from Simon, but took his hand again and led him to the water’s edge, farther away from the trees.
“You can see the stars better from here,” she said, and when she tilted her head up to look, Simon kissed her. Her hand glided up his arm to rest on the nape of his neck, while the other pressed into the small of his back.
Could he have been so wrong about her? Could this be something real?
The grass was soft on the dark earth of the lakeside, and he laid her gently down on it, and stretched out beside her. She kissed his lips, his cheeks, his eyelids, his neck. She nipped the skin just to the side of his Adam’s apple—
—and he felt it begin.
No. No! Not here, not now!
Just a touch, just a tingle. But a part of his mind already knew: though Julie’s lips and body felt so sweet, so perfect, though he was already hard and straining for her, nothing she could possibly give him compared with what he could take.
He discovered her unbuttoning his shirt, and her light kisses covered each exposed portion of skin. Simon stared at the top of her head in the moonlight and ran his fingers delicately through her hair.
He felt it coming. And on a level just above his subconscious, he wanted it to.
But, damn it, he could talk to this girl! How many other girls had he ever been able to talk to? How many other girls had ever gotten past what their parents had told them about him? Maybe…maybe he could stop it, keep it down, control it, take Julie in his arms and make love to her. He could take her away, away from here, from her dried-up little town. Keep her with him. Protect her.
She looked up, and the moonlight reflected in her eyes, made them sparkle and shine like the eyes of some mythical woodland creature, a dryad come to life just for him. At that moment she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. Her hand trailed down, lower, and she touched him lightly, just with her fingertips.
But that pushed it over the edge, and with a self-hatred blacker than coal Simon welcomed it.
Julie’s eyes reflected the change even as it happened, and she would have screamed, but twisting white coils entwined her head and filled her open mouth.
* * *
As the next day dawned on Crawford Shoals, Robert Worley fumbled with his necktie and hurried toward the door. He had a habit of showing up for work five minutes late, almost every day, even when he didn’t have a good reason for it. This morning he promised his reflection in the hallway mirror that he’d make it to work on time, no matter what. He miss-tied his tie for the third time, and pulled it off in disgust.
