by JL Bryan
The whole “Ashleigh ticket” won the election in a landslide.
CHAPTER SIX
The Saturday morning after the election, Ashleigh and friends were back at school for cheer practice while the football team scrimmaged in their practice jerseys. It was Labor Day weekend. The day was hot and sticky under the scorching blue sky.
As they drove away from practice, a light drizzle began to fall. Ashleigh was riding with Seth in his convertible, and she had been looking forward to letting the hot day blow dry her hair, shirt and shorts. She sighed as Seth put up the roof. He needed a blow dry himself. Dirt and grass stained his practice uniform, and his strawberry blonde hair was damp and reeked of sweat from hours inside his helmet.
Up ahead, Cassie and Neesha rode with Everett and Dedrick in Everett’s red Ranger with the stupid yellow-flame decals. The plan was to drop the girls at Ashleigh’s so they could clean up, change into bathing suits, and fill Ashleigh’s picnic basket with sandwiches and snacks. The boys would change out of their pads, possibly shower (one could hope) and round up some beer and pot for the night. Then they were meeting everybody at Barrett Pond, the town reservoir. The afternoon and night would be all about swimming and getting totally hammered.
But right now, while they were alone, Ashleigh needed to talk with Seth.
“What are you doing about your SAT?” she asked him.
“What?” Seth asked back, without turning his head from the road. An obvious delaying tactic. He played his stupid Mos Def CD at ear-splitting volume.
“Are you practicing for the SAT yet?” Ashleigh shouted, letting a little shrillness creep into her voice as she turned down the stereo. “You don’t have much time left!”
“Oh, that,” Seth said. “Yeah, totally. I’m starting on that next week.”
“You should have been doing it all summer,” Ashleigh snapped. “I kept telling you—”
“I said I’m going to work on it!”
“You’d better,” she said. “You’re not getting into Georgetown with your scores from last year.”
“Not everybody can get a perfect SAT score like you, Ashleigh.”
“Maybe not, but your score has to come up. It just takes practice, like football.”
“Yeah.” He watched the road quietly for a minute. “What if I don’t get into Georgetown?”
“Then we go to NYU,” Ashleigh said. “I have to be in the center of things, where the action is. How many times do I have to tell you--”
“And if I don’t get into NYU, can we just go to Clemson instead?”
“Clemson? I know you’re kidding. Tell me you’re kidding, Seth.”
Seth shrugged. “My dad went there. Turned out okay for him.”
“Okay? Seth, just running your family’s little toy bank in this shitbox little town is not okay. My life is going to be about way more than what’s okay. I am not spending my life at the Eldrid Country Club, drinking mimosas and spitting out babies.” This was a direct swipe at Ashleigh’s own mother and her friends.
“I know, Ashleigh. But my parents spend a lot of time in Florida, too. They’ve got a boat. That wouldn’t be so bad, would it?”
Ashleigh gripped the armrest, her knuckles whitening as her frustration mounted into fury.
“I am going to Georgetown for undergrad,” she said. “And you are coming with me. Do you understand?”
“Hey, I know, believe me,” he said. “Maybe there’s a short-bus school for me near there. We can still get a place together or something.”
“No. I need you by my side, shaking people’s hands. It’s all about who you meet in those schools.” Ashleigh reeled in the anger and put on her sweetest smile. She rubbed his thigh through the grass-stained practice pants. “I just want what’s best for us. I know you can go far if you just try. I have faith in you.”
“I am trying.” Seth stomped the accelerator, obviously wanting to cut this conversation as short as possible. Soon they tailgated the red Ranger. Everett apparently took this as a challenge or an accusation of being a slowpoke, and the truck surged ahead, drifting into the other lane at the next tight curve.
“Okay, we talked, and you’re going to do it this week.” Ashleigh gave him another big, winning smile. “Now, let’s not worry any more tonight. I just want to get wasted.”
“That’s my girl.” Seth put one sweaty, muscular arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. His speedometer needle sailed past ninety as they rocketed down the empty country road.
The same Saturday, Jenny sat alone at the spot she’d cleared on the dining room table. She was poking her new sculpture with the sharp end of a toothpick, trying to imitate Rocky’s speckled fur pattern. The sculpture was about a foot tall at the head, and maybe eighteen inches long, with the tail curled alongside his body, since she couldn’t figure out how to make it stick out behind him without falling off. She’d made his three legs and the stump leg, his head, his body, but it needed a ton of detail work, especially around the face and paws.
Though it was getting to be afternoon, she could hear her dad snoring back in his room. She’d eased his door most of the way closed, but hadn’t closed it all the way for fear the click against the jamb might wake him. He’d gotten into a bad whiskey drunk last night, crying and rambling about Jenny’s mother, as he sometimes did. Jenny preferred to let him sleep it all off, because he got difficult when he was drunk. Or hung over.
Finally Jenny grew tired of the silence—she preferred to play her mother’s old vinyl records when she worked with clay. Jenny stood and stretched her back and arms. She’d been hunching forward for too long.
She wiped the clay smudges from her hands and changed into her most lightweight shorts and tank top, since it was another scorching day out. She bound her hair into a ponytail and put on her favorite broken-down sneakers.
Outside, she saw Rocky dozing in the shade of a big, gnarly old oak shaggy with moss. She whistled and he jumped awake, up on his feet, wagging his tail.
“Hey, Rocky,” she said. “Want to go for a run?”
He dashed to their usual starting place at the trailhead, his tail swishing vigorously, and bounded away before Jenny got there. She stretched her legs a couple of times and started jogging.
Her senior year was two weeks down, forty to go, or thirty-seven if you subtracted winter and spring breaks. Ashleigh was class president, of course, after a speech where she pretended to be some kind of victim. As if anyone ever dared to pick on Ashleigh Goodling. And when Ashleigh told people to be nice to Wendy Baker, Jenny had seethed. Ashleigh was probably behind Wendy Baker’s sudden meltdown. It was her style, and it cleared the way for her friend Neesha. It was all so petty. Who cared about student council, of all the ridiculous things to care about?
As Jenny warmed up, she put on speed. Despite all the cool green shade surrounding her, humidity had already soaked her in sweat. Rocky bounded in and out of sight while she traveled deeper into the woods.
Jenny tried to make herself feel better by telling herself she’d done the best she could, under the circumstances. Between taking care of her dad and getting all the way through school, she’d done okay. She hadn’t given anyone else Jenny pox since Ashleigh in the first grade, which represented a huge achievement, though one that nobody but her dad knew or cared about.
The cheering up did not happen. She’d been alone all her life, would be alone all her life, and the best she could hope for was to not accidentally kill anybody along the way.
Jenny was thinking about suicide again. Such thoughts rolled in a few times a week like storm clouds, casting darkness over everything in her life. A cold, lonely existence didn’t seem worth the fight of staying alive. All her hopes were negative. She hoped she didn’t infect anyone. She hoped nobody harassed her too much at school. She hoped her dad didn’t die anytime soon—he was nearly fifty, drank and smoked a ton, and spent more and more time looking at old photographs of Jenny’s mother. His will to live didn’t seem very strong. It w
as ironic, in a way, because the only thing that kept Jenny from killing herself was knowing how much it would hurt her dad. They both kept themselves alive and miserable for each other’s sake.
Light rain began to fall through the treetops, sprinkling cool water on her. It invigorated her, and instead of turning back toward the shelter of her house, Jenny pressed onward and ran harder.
Rocky bayed and howled somewhere off to her side. She saw him charging through the woods like a dog on a mission. Ahead of her, a plump wild rabbit emerged and zigzagged across the foot path. Rocky broke out of the underbrush in hot pursuit and chased the rabbit into the woods on the other side of the path.
“Leave him alone, Rocky!” Jenny called without breaking her stride. Being mostly bluetick hound, Rocky obsessed over anything that was furry and roughly the size of a raccoon. Jenny was glad he could occasionally feed himself this way, but today, she was in no mood to see the chubby little rabbit torn apart. But then, Rocky’s chances of actually catching the rabbit were slim. With his missing leg, he wasn’t really a great hunter, which was why he’d been starving when Jenny found him.
Jenny pushed herself harder, hoping to burn away the burgeoning depression that wanted to suck her down. The rain grew heavier, pattering on thousands of leaves overhead. The rabbit crossed the path again, heading in the opposite direction now, with Rocky only a couple yards behind.
“Rocky, come on!” Jenny gasped for air, her legs muscles burning. “Leave him alone!”
Rocky had no interest in her opinion. Rabbit and dog rushed on through the woods.
Jenny crested another of the rolling hills, wishing it would rain harder, not just this teaser rain. Only a few drops actually made it all the way through the canopy to tantalize her skin.
Up ahead, past the next hill, she could see a big gap in the trees. That would be a meadow, where she could do a couple of laps while the cold rainwater soaked her. If Rocky flushed the rabbit out into that meadow, the rabbit might even lose the chase.
Then she crested the hill and realized she’d gotten turned around while running. The gap ahead wasn’t the meadow she was thinking about. This gap marked where the foot path intersected Esther Bridge Road.
Rocky loped right towards the paved road, his face cracking through underbrush. The rabbit spurted from the underbrush and onto the widening path. It sprinted towards the road with Rocky close behind.
“Rocky, no!” Jenny yelled. She didn’t hear any cars coming, but people drove fast on Esther Bridge. “Rocky, stop! Stay, Rocky, stay, stay!”
But Rocky had a nose full of rabbit and no ears for her. Jenny reached her top running speed as she pounded down the hill after them, leaning into the sprinkling rain, burning up the last reserve of energy in her scrawny body.
She had no idea what she would do if she caught up to Rocky. She hadn’t brought any gloves, and couldn’t touch him without giving him Jenny pox. Still, she ran hard after him, calling his name.
The rabbit scrabbled out onto the blacktop, hopped halfway across it and paused for two seconds. Then it hopped the rest of the way across and dove into a ditch on the far side of the road. Rocky’s claws clattered on the blacktop as he ran into the road.
Jenny recognized the truck, the red Ranger with blazing yellow stripes. Everett Lawson. He was streaking along at about a hundred miles per hour.
She reached the edge of the road just as the front grill smacked into Rocky. The dog gave a sickening, heart-wrenching yelp as the impact knocked him off his feet. He did a three hundred and sixty degree spin in the air, and then landed with a whump on the side of the road a few feet from Jenny.
“No!” Jenny screamed as she ran to him. “Rocky!”
Everett’s truck raced around the next curve and out of sight, not even slowing to see what he had hit.
Jenny knelt in the dirt next to the pavement, her heart whamming against her ribs. Rocky lay on his side, not moving. Along his side, blood seeped out into his fur in three different places. He wasn’t dead, not yet, but he was hyperventilating and gasping out bloody, foamy saliva onto the pavement. His lower jaw looked loose and badly angled, as if one of the hinge joints had been shattered. His body lay in the roadside weeds, but his head was still on the pavement, where another car could come at any time.
Jenny tried to look in his eyes, but they’d rolled back into his head.
“Rocky!” she screamed. She waved her hands uselessly in the air above him. She couldn’t do anything, not even move him back from the road. No gloves, not even any sleeves to pull over her hands. Even her shirt was too small and thin, with too many little moth holes, to be of any use.
Stupid, she thought. She should always carry gloves in case Rocky needed her. Why had she never thought of that? She seized big handfuls of her hair and pulled, screaming her anguish and her frustration.
“Oh, no, Rocky,” she said. “Oh, no, please, Rocky, I love you, please don’t…
The dog’s breathing slowed. He puked some foamy, pink liquid out his broken jaw.
“No, Rocky, please, I love you so much, please don’t…”
The engine of another car approached and Jenny felt a tiny, irrational ray of hope. Someone with a car was coming, someone who could touch Rocky without killing him, someone who could take him to the veterinarian.
Then she saw the blue Audi convertible, its top closed against the rain, and her heart sank. Nobody was less likely to help than Ashleigh and Seth. Still, she jumped up and down and waved her arms overhead. If they helped Rocky, she didn’t care what they did to her the rest of the year. She needed her dog.
The Audi passed her by, slowing only when it approached the curve ahead. She felt sick.
Then the car slowed even more. It pulled off on the side of the road and parked. The driver’s door opened and Seth Barrett stepped out. Ashleigh did not.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” Seth asked Jenny.
What Jenny meant to say was thank you for stopping, my dog is hurt bad, please take him to the vet and I will do anything for you. Instead, what came out was:
“Your stupid redneck friend Everett just ran over my dog!”
“Oh, wow!” Seth slammed his car door and jogged across the street towards her. Jenny watched his approach warily, not sure whether to feel hopeful or more afraid. She looked towards the Audi’s passenger door, but as far as she could tell, it wasn’t opening, Ashleigh wasn’t getting out.
When Seth reached her, Jenny became sharply aware of how exposed she was, bare legs, bare shoulders, bare arms and hands, a thousand places Seth could brush against her. He was only wearing a short-sleeved t-shirt and football pants that came down to his knees. Jenny folded her arms and stepped back.
“It’s Rocky,” she said, choking back sobs. “Can you take him to the vet in your car? I don’t have a car.”
“I don’t think he would make it to the vet.” Seth dropped to one knee by the dying dog. One of Rocky’s paws kicked out and clawed up dirt in a wild spasm, and then it was still.
“Wow, he’s really hurt,” Seth said. He seemed genuinely concerned, but Jenny didn’t trust that for a second. She kept glancing at the car, waiting for Ashleigh to come out and somehow make it all worse. Ashleigh was probably laughing at Jenny’s suffering right now.
“Hey, Rocky.” Seth poked his fingertips at Rocky’s speckled, bloody mess of a belly. Rocky let out a small, high-pitched, gurgly sound, which might have been a yelp if he’d had the strength.
“He doesn’t like to be touched,” Jenny said.
“Oh, he doesn’t like to be touched, huh?” Seth lay his hands on Rocky’s side. “Let’s see!”
Then Seth pressed down hard on Rocky’s broken ribs with both hands.
“Stop!” Jenny screamed. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Her hands clutched at the air. Only a lifetime of deeply ingrained avoidance kept her from grabbing Seth’s hands, or more likely, punching him in the nose as hard as she could. There was also that small, evil voi
ce in her head, the one that said this was probably best for Rocky, it was probably best his suffering end quickly. Hot tears were rushing down her face, dripping from her chin, and she couldn’t stop them.
Seth leaned forward and bore down with all his weight on the dog. Jenny thought she heard something pop deep inside of Rocky. The dog let out a strangled whimper, and then blood mixed with bile gushed out of his mouth.
Jenny couldn’t watch, couldn’t look away, couldn’t move. It was all too shocking. She could almost hear Ashleigh’s wicked laughter from inside the Audi. Of course Ashleigh was here, on the worst day of Jenny’s life, to drive the knife extra deep and give it a twist. What were the odds of them showing up right now? Jenny would never win the lottery, but she’d probably get struck by lightning.
As much as she’d hated them, Jenny would never have believed that Ashleigh and Seth were so sadistic and full of hate for stupid little Jenny Mittens that they would even punish her dog. They were sick, warped people.
Then something clicked in Jenny’s mind. She was going to kill them all. Rocky first, to end his pain. Then Seth. Then she’d walk over to the Audi, smash the window if need be, and kill Ashleigh Goodling. A calm clarity fell over her. Jenny imagined a swarm of black flies crawling inside her hands, willing it to be the deadliest, fastest-killing strain of Jenny pox that she could muster.
Jenny raised her bare hands. They felt sweaty, and prickly, and highly contagious. Inside herself, Jenny felt very cold.
Seth pushed his hand up along Rocky’s body, applying pressure the whole way. He lifted Rocky’s battered head, forced the dog to close his broken jaw, then clamped his hand around it, squeezing hard, as if trying to choke Rocky on his own tongue. Rocky gave a weak, wheezing snort through his big black nose.
Jenny knelt by Rocky and extended her hands towards him. She took a deep breath.
