Shine (28 page)

“I, um . . . yeah,” Tommy said. He ducked his head. “I’m sorry for treating you like that, and I shoulda told you before. And your brother was right to blow up my motorcycle. I deserved it.”

I couldn’t absorb this, Tommy’s regret. Daddy’s pistol was digging into my spine, so I pulled it out and held it in my lap.

“You got a
gun
?” Bailee-Ann said. “What you got a gun for?”

“Aw, hell,” Tommy said. “You ain’t gonna
shoot
me, are you?”

“You shot Ridings’s cow,” I said numbly.

Tommy stared at me as if I was a mad dog that might bite at any moment. “I didn’t mean to. It was an accident.”

“You shot his cow and somehow persuaded him it was lightning,” I said stubbornly. “That is
low
, Tommy Lawson, shooting a man’s cow and not even owning up to it.”

“I
did
own up to it!” he said, agitated. He glanced at the gun and lowered his voice. “Maybe not to the whole world, but me and Ridings, we worked things out.”

“That’s not how Ridings sees it. Why didn’t you give him money for a new cow?”

“He
did
,” Bailee-Ann said. “He paid to have Rosie butchered—it was heartbreaking, I know—and he gave Ridings money for a new cow. But Ridings spent all the money without even knowing it. It went to Wally, that’s my guess.”

I frowned, because as guesses went, hers was a decent one. I didn’t like that version of the story, however. I lifted my chin, waiting for more.

“They were out in the woods, Tommy and Beef and Dupree,” Bailee-Ann said. “They were high.” Her tone grew disapproving. “Dupree had scored some crystal, and they were lit out of their minds.”

“Shut up,” Tommy grumbled. “And I wasn’t aiming for Ridings’s cow. I was
aiming
for the bell around her damn neck.”

“Of course you were,” I said.

“He was showing off is what he was doing,” Bailee-Ann scolded. “Bragged about how he could hit any dang thing, any dang thing at all, so Dupree said, ‘Prove it. Ring old Rosie’s bell.’”

“But you missed,” I said to Tommy.

“Yes. I missed.” He stared at his hands, which were splayed on his thighs. “I got her in the lungs.”

I grimaced, knowing how bad it would have been. I’d been around cows and horses in pain, and I could see it in my mind: Rosie on her side, bellowing and rolling her white-walled eyes, blood foaming out of her mouth.

“Tommy put her out of her misery,” Bailee-Ann said. “He did it even though he was high, and something like that can mess with you big-time.”

“I had to climb through a barbed wire fence to get to her. My shirt got caught, so I left it behind,” Tommy said. “Smart, huh?”

“It was his football training jersey,” Bailee-Ann said, as if I kept track of Tommy’s wardrobe. “It was real nice, with his name on it and everything.”

“How tragic,” I said.

“I would have fessed up, regardless,” Tommy said.

“Uh-huh.”

“And I gave Ridings seven hundred dollars. I had to borrow part from Roy—“

“
You
had to borrow from
Roy
?” I said.

“But I paid him back.” His Adam’s apple jerked. “I suggested to Ridings that it would be better if he didn’t mention it. I’d, uh, appreciate it if you did the same.”

I said neither yes nor no to that request. I felt off balance. I’d waited a long time to have it out with Tommy, and now, when I finally was, the conversation kept going down paths I
never saw coming. They all led to Tommy being sorry, and his regret threatened everything I’d built the last three years of my life on.

Bailee-Ann put her hand on my upper back, and when I didn’t resist, she rubbed small circles between my shoulder blades.

“There is nothing okay about what he did to you,” she said. She didn’t glance at Tommy or use his name. This was between the two of us as girls, and also because we used to be best friends. “But a long time’s passed since then.”

“Yeah,” Tommy said. “I’m not that guy.”

“Like hell, you aren’t!” I cried, my anger flaming up again.

“No. You’re misunderstanding. I
was
that guy, but . . .” His hands didn’t know what to do. They fluttered up and then down, an almost feminine gesture. “I don’t want to be that guy. I didn’t want to even when I was. And I’m not anymore. That’s what I’m saying.” His hands fell to his lap. “I sure do wish you’d believe me.”

I scowled. I could resist it all I wanted, but I did understand what he trying to explain. How sometimes the pieces of who you thought you were didn’t add up to who you really were, like with me not standing up for Patrick when he wore those pants. Like Jason calling me such a hateful name at the library, when in reality he was as sweet as sunshine.

It hurt to realize that Tommy was human and not a
total
monster after all. It hurt so much that my hands clenched, and I realized, with shock, that I was squeezing the trigger of
Daddy’s pistol. It didn’t budge. It was rusted in place. It was useless.

Bailee-Ann was still rubbing my back, like the way I rubbed ointment into my daddy’s cracked feet. I twitched my shoulder to shake her off me. I studied Tommy’s face, noticing that the bruise around his eye had darkened since I’d arrived.

“You are nothing but an egg-sucking dog,” I told him. “You tormented Patrick all through high school. You stole
his pants
, for God’s sake, and left him practically naked in the bathroom. Why?”

Tommy didn’t have the guts to answer.

“That was a long time ago, too,” Bailee-Ann said.

“Not long enough,” I said.

Candypants is having his coming-out party, so step on up and take a look
, Tommy had said.
He don’t mind. Fags like being looked at, don’t they, Patrick? And I’ll be damned—here’s his girlfriend, right here in the flesh! Get on over here, Cat.”

I’d frozen in the hall. Tommy said,
Whassat? No? Awww, she’s shy
. Then the final nail in the coffin:
Hey. Cat. Catch. You ain’t gonna get in his pants any other way
.

In Tommy’s living room, I breathed hard. Tears pressed to get out, but no and no and no.

I faced Tommy dead on and finally just came out with it. “Did you attack Patrick at the Come ‘n’ Go? Are you the one who did it?”

“No,”
he said. His face was red, but he answered my question as straightforwardly as I’d asked it.

“Do you know who did?”

His eyes flicked to Bailee-Ann. I tried to catch what passed between them, but too quickly, he brought his focus back to me.

“I don’t,” he said.

“We care, too, you know,” Bailee-Ann said. She gestured at the coffee table, and I glanced down to see today’s newspaper open to an article on page three titled, “NCBI Explores Leads in Local Hate Crime Investigation.”

Patrick wasn’t even front page material anymore.

Disgusted, I stood up, dislodging Bailee-Ann.

She righted herself and asked, “Are you leaving?”

“Yep,” I said. I tossed Daddy’s Spanish pistol on the Lawsons’ coffee table, and it made a fairly satisfying
thunk
that I hoped woke up his mama.

“You’re not taking that?” Tommy said.

“Nope.”

“But . . . why?” Bailee-Ann said.

“Because it’s good for nothing,” I said, keeping my eyes on Tommy. “Because one worthless piece of shit deserves another.”

I strode out of the house, ignoring Bailee-Ann’s cries of “But where are you
going
? What are you going to do?”

I biked for a half mile or so and pulled off the road, just to think a little.

My encounter with Tommy had sucked me dry.

Maybe a person—like me—could tell myself I was fine on my own. Maybe I could even believe it, for a while. But it was like building a wall of ice around myself. I looked out at the world through all that frozen water, and everything appeared pretty much the same, with only a few wavy spots here and there.
Air bubbles
, I told myself.
No big deal
.

Only, it was cold. I was cold. I said to myself,
So
?
You’re tough. You can take it
.

But the cold didn’t go away. It just got colder. And eventually, one of two things happened: Either the cold settled inside you and turned your heart to ice, or something happened to make you start to thaw.

Only the thawing hurt, too.

I heard a rush and a rumble, and I came out of my thoughts to see Bailee-Ann zoom past me in her truck. Then she slowed down. Then she stopped. Why? Did she see me?

Her taillights turned from red to white. She was coming back.

SHE DROVE IN REVERSE TO REACH ME, HER RIGHT arm stretched over the passenger seat and her neck craned so she could see behind her. She killed the engine and hopped out, wiping her palms down the front of her shorts.

“Hi,” she said.

“Um . . . hi,” I said.

“Why are you just sitting here?”

“I don’t know. I just am,” I said.

But she wasn’t listening. She glanced down the road toward Tommy’s house and bit her lip. She pulled her gaze to me and said, “Listen, about Patrick . . .”

She let the sentence hang, waiting for me to fill in the blank.
But Patrick was in the hospital, and Tommy said he didn’t do it. What did she want me to say?

She checked the road again. Then she reached into her front pocket and pulled out a pack of matches. “I found these in Beef’s jacket.” She tossed them to me. “Here.”

They were from a restaurant, or maybe a bar, called Billy the Kid’s. The front flap boasted a line drawing of a shirtless cowboy twirling a lasso, and beneath the picture was the address.
Asheville, North Carolina
, it said. I looked at Bailee-Ann.

“I wanted to show you,” she said.

“But not in front of Tommy? How come?”

“It’s . . . complicated.”

I snorted, because what wasn’t?

She shoved her hands in her pockets. “He’s not in a good place, you know?”

“Tommy?”

“No, Beef. Tommy wants me to break up with him . . . and I
will
. . . but it feels wrong to do it now.”

She rehashed how strange Beef had been acting since losing his scholarship, hot one day and cold the next.

“He doesn’t sleep for days. And then when he does, he’s out so hard, I can’t even wake him up,” she said. “One time, Robert
stepped
on him, and he didn’t wake up. I mean, that’s
weird
, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “And?”

She pulled her eyebrows together like she didn’t understand my impatience.

“Is he still doing meth, Bailee-Ann? Is that what you want me to know?”

She protested feebly, and I fluttered my fingers. “Just forget it. Don’t bother.”

“Don’t
bother
?” she huffed. “I thought you liked Beef. I thought you cared, even though you work so hard to pretend you don’t.”

“Thanks for the guilt trip,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure cheating on him’s a worse offense, Bailee-Ann.”

Pain filled her eyes. She spun on her heel and headed for her truck.

“Ah, crap,” I muttered. I rose awkwardly to my feet and went after her. “So what do you want to tell me? Why’d you give me the matches?”

Her hand stilled on the door handle. Her lower lip quivered in a way I remembered.

“I
do
care about Beef,” I said. “I just said that to pay you back.”

“Pay me back? For
what
?”

“I don’t know, because I feel bad for him,” I said, exasperated. “I mean, when you’re in the dark, and then you
find
out you’ve been in the dark . . .”

I came to the end of that line of reasoning. Sighing, I said, “Or maybe I’m just a crappy friend and wanted to make you feel bad.”

She twisted her bowed head so that she was gazing at me sideways. “Are we even friends?”

I felt strange in my own skin. A breeze lifted my hair, whispering against my neck. “We used to be.”

One tear, shiny as a dewdrop, rolled down her cheek and plopped onto her foot, washing the dust of the day from that one spot. Her flip-flops were pink with white polka dots, and now one of the polka dots was brighter than the others.

She turned around, resting her weight against her truck. Sounding worn-out, she said, “You should know that your brother was never a user. Tommy and I were, but we quit. We wanted Beef to quit, too.” She hugged her ribs. “That’s why Beef got so mad that night at Suicide Rock.”

“Oh,”
I said. Finally, the missing piece. It clicked into place, and it fit. “That’s what the guys ‘discussed’ with him? His meth use?”

“It was an intervention,” she said heavily. “He didn’t take it so well.”

“You think?” He’d called Patrick a fucking pansy, and he’d told Tommy and my brother to go play with their vaginas, though as Bailee-Ann said, he didn’t use that word.

“Was it Patrick’s idea, the intervention?” I asked. That would explain why Patrick didn’t want Robert along. Maybe he knew it would get ugly.

“Patrick was all for it, but no. It was Tommy’s idea.”

My eyebrows shot up. “
Tommy
set up an intervention for Beef? No way. No frickin’ way.”

She looked at me from under a swoop of hair as if she were so, so tired. “Tommy knew firsthand how messed up meth made you. Like with the cow?”