Shine (3 page)

“But . . . I don’t want it to be like that,” I whispered.

“You think that matters, what you want?” she said. “Where’d you get that fool idea?”

Though her words stung, she wasn’t trying to be cruel.

“No one ever said the world’s an easy place, ’specially for a girl,” she went on. “’Specially for a
pretty
girl, and that’s just the way of it, too. If you’re a pretty girl, you’re gonna get . . .”

She pressed her lips together. She couldn’t say it, not without scraping off a layer of fresh paint.

“Some things ain’t worth dwelling on,” she said crisply. “Now help me get the laundry off the line before the rain comes on.”

Today, there wasn’t a rain cloud in sight. Today, all I saw was an endless blue sky shimmering above the trees at the edge of
Patrick’s yard. I pressed the back of my head against the house. My fingers found the grass, and at its roots, the cool soil. I would have been content to sit here for hours, but I needed to get up. I needed to bike on over to church, where Aunt Tildy would be waiting, saving me a seat in a pew and craning her neck to look for me.

Not yet
, my body said, heavy with the desire for things to be like they once were.

But that was impossible.

I was sixteen now, no longer that girl full of light and life. No longer Patrick’s kindred spirit. If I was like anyone, it was my aunt Tildy with her dogged blindness, because eventually I had adopted her approach to dealing with all things ugly. Blindness, at the time, seemed like my best chance at survival.

So I’d stabbed needles into my eyes and pretended not to see certain things. Bad things. Only by turning my back on certain bad things, I ended up turning my back on my dearest friend, a betrayal I never intended.

Or so I told myself. That was a problem with lying to yourself. Sometimes you got too good at it.

A chill moved down me as I realized how stupid I’d been. By turning a blind eye to the badness, I allowed it to grow. And when it needed more to feed on—
Oh Jesus
—it spread to Patrick.

I should have seen it coming. I would have, if only I’d had my eyes open.

So open them
, I commanded myself. I did, literally, and
black spots swam across my vision, making me feel as dizzy as if I was swaying at the edge of a cliff. I’d never been good with heights. I blinked, and the sensation faded. I blinked again, and the trees bordering Patrick’s yard faded as well. I looked past them and squarely into Patrick’s pain.

I pictured him alone at the Come ‘n’ Go, my onetime best friend who didn’t care for the dark. It would have been pitch-black outside. No one would have been around for miles except pitiful, messed-up Ridings McAllister, who lived in a trailer on the side of the highway. But Ridings would have been asleep, and even if he wasn’t, he couldn’t save himself from danger, much less someone else. Patrick would have known that. He would have known exactly how helpless he was when whoever attacked him roared into the dirt pull-off outside the store.

Except most likely Patrick didn’t feel helpless, not at first. He wouldn’t have seen the wolf in redneck’s clothing.

I wasn’t there that night, but I could imagine how things played out. The shadowed woods surrounding the store. The flickering bulb by the single gas pump. The too-bright lighting within the store, illuminating Patrick as he went about his work.

Then what? A truck engine abruptly cut off? The slamming of doors layered over boisterous, drunk laughter? A male voice—one Patrick knew, if my suspicions were correct—calling, “Patrick. Bro. Get your butt out here!”

And Patrick would have shaken his head and grinned as he pushed through the store’s door. He wouldn’t have realized how
wrong things were until he spotted the baseball bat bouncing against someone’s palm.

Then
the fear would have kicked in. Too late, he would have grasped what he was up against: a predator, or a pack of predators, there to do what predators do.

Angrily, I curled my hand into a fist and slammed it backward against Patrick’s house. The pain helped, but not enough.

I leaned over, flipped the hook-and-eye latch on the door to the crawl space, and jerked it open. I squinted into the gaping hole. It took my eyes a moment to adjust, but then I made out the milk crates, the candles, the tufts of pink insulation drooping from the floor joists.

It was a postcard from our childhood, and it made me ache. Because Patrick wasn’t a child anymore, but he wasn’t yet a man. Because someone beat him up and jammed a gas nozzle down his throat. Because on top of everything he’d already lost, he was seventeen years old and more alone than I’d ever been, trapped in the deep sleep of a coma.

It enraged me.

But I’d lost out, too, and the realization fed my rage. I lost the strength to face the world head on. I lost my friends, I lost my brother, and I lost Patrick, which was like dying, since losing Patrick was nearly the same as losing myself. And what if Patrick never woke up? What if I’d lost him for good?

My fury sizzled and popped until I wasn’t just mad, but crazy mad, as if I’d struck a match and lit myself on fire. What happened to Patrick was wrong. What happened to me was
wrong. Every single thing was wrong, and when that great blaze of wrongness reached my core, my heart swelled and roared and cast it back out, leaving behind a white-hot clarity like nothing I’d ever experienced.

What I knew was this: Once upon a time, everything changed. Now things had to change again. Someone needed to track down whoever went after Patrick, and that someone was me.

It had been a week since Patrick was attacked, and Sheriff Doyle hadn’t done squat. He claimed he was looking into every lead, but I felt certain he’d buried those leads instead. Slogging around in the muck of our godforsaken town would only bring Sheriff Doyle trouble, especially if I was right about what happened that night.

He would draw out the investigation a little longer for show, but eventually he’d pin the crime on drunk college boys from out of town. That was my guess. “We might never find out who done it,” he’d say, shaking his head. “I can tell you this, though. Nobody from Black Creek woulda stooped so low.”

But I’d seen things in the week since Patrick’s attack that didn’t add up, like my brother talking urgently to Beef, only to go dead silent when I approached. Like Bailee-Ann sitting by herself at the sandwich shop, her expression troubled as she chewed on a strand of her hair. Like cocky Tommy Lawson straddling his piss yellow motorcycle at the intersection of Main Street and Shields, thinking so hard on something that he didn’t notice the light turn green. Normally, he’d accelerate
hard and fast, showing off the power of his BMW’s engine, but on that day, an old lady had to tap the horn of her Buick to rouse him from his trance.

I closed the crawl space door. I got to my feet and brushed myself off. My chest was tight, but I looked at the blue sky, clear and pale above the tree line, and said out loud, “Fine, I’ll do it.”
I
would speak for Patrick. I’d look straight into the ugliness and find out who hurt him, and when I did, I’d yell it from the mountaintop.

“Do you hear that, God?” I said. “Do you see me now?”

A moment passed. Sweat trickled down the base of my spine. Then, out of nowhere, a breeze lifted my hair and jangled Mama Sweetie’s wind chimes, which she’d made by hanging mismatched forks and spoons from the lid of a tin can.

It scared me, to tell the truth. It also fanned the flames of my rage.

I lifted my chin and said, “Good.”

IF YOU LIVED IN BLACK CREEK AND YOU WERE a good girl, like me, you put on your best skirt and blouse and went to church on Sunday mornings, and sometimes on Wednesday evenings, too. Daddy didn’t come, and neither did my brother—so much for Christian being a Christian—but they weren’t girls, so they could get away with it.

Last Sunday, Aunt Tildy let me stay home because I was such a wreck after hearing about Patrick. But this Sunday, I rode my bike from Patrick’s house to the Holiness Church of God in time for the “moment of silence,” which kicked off every service. That and the singing were the parts I liked best.

I’d always liked singing, and in the days of hanging out with Patrick and Mama Sweetie, the three of us would belt
out songs for no reason. Mama Sweetie said you didn’t
need
a reason to sing. She said if everyone started off the day singing, just think how happy they’d be. We’d sing hymns from church and songs we’d learned at Vacation Bible School and silly songs Mama Sweetie knew from teaching preschoolers, including a goofy one about a wee-wee tot sitting on his wee-wee pot. Another of our favorites was “This Little Light of Mine,” because of how catchy it was. Often, even after biking home from Patrick’s, I’d find myself singing it under my breath, until Christian would grab my shoulders and say, “Could you
please
stop singing that dang song! I’m
begging
you!”

Now I just sang in church. After today’s service, I filed into the fellowship hall with Aunt Tildy. Then we went our separate ways. She had a Bible study to attend, while I planned on doing some good old-fashioned eavesdropping.

I went to the refreshment table and got myself a doughnut. I even took a nibble or two, so that anyone looking would think,
Oh, there’s Cat, eating a doughnut and keeping to herself like always
. Hopefully, no one would try to talk to me, as I had nothing to say. I just hovered on the fringes and listened. In Black Creek, church was as much about gossip as worship, and Patrick’s attack was the juiciest thing going.

“I heard from Eunice that he’s bound to have brain damage, bless his heart,” a church lady named Tammy said to her friend. “Eunice’s cousin’s a nurse in the pediatric wing, you know.”

“They put him in the pediatric unit?” the friend said. “Ain’t
he too old to be with those kids?” She lowered her voice. “What if he . . .
you know
?”

The flame inside me wanted to burn her up.
What if he turned those kids into faggots
? That was what she meant. Forget that he was in a coma. Forget that his body was beaten to a pulp. Forget that he might have
brain damage
, if Eunice’s nurse cousin had access to the truth.

“Naw, they didn’t stick him with them sick kids,” Tammy said. “He’s got a room all to hisself. Got all kinds of tubes and wires and machines sticking out of him.”

Machines sticking out of him
? I thought.
Really, Tammy
? Tammy worked at the paper mill until it was bought by some Japanese crook who shut it down and sold it for parts. But before that happened, Tammy got full-out scalped when she leaned over too close to the paper rollers. She didn’t have her hair pinned up like she was supposed to. To everyone’s surprise, her hair had grown back, and now it was just as sparse and stringy as ever, not that she let that stop her from teasing it high and shellacking it till it was as hard as a beetle’s shell. I reckoned she was the one with brain damage,
bless her heart
.

I moved on from Tammy and her friend. By the choir room, the choir members were taking off their white robes and hanging them up. I caught the words
wickedness
and
ungodly
, and I turned right around, already knowing where that conversation was going.

I paused in the hallway, my interest piqued by the sight of a timid young woman named Hannah speaking with a plump
woman everyone called Zippy. Hannah was new to the church, having lived most of her life in a high-up mountain town called Coonesville. That was where she met her husband, who moved there for a job. But her husband’s mama lived in Black Creek, and now she was ailing, so they’d come to be with her.

Hannah had a cute baby I’d taken care of in the church nursery a couple of times. Hannah herself seemed nice enough, and—a big point in her favor—she wasn’t from these parts.

I edged closer and fiddled with my shoe, which was, in truth, giving me grief. Dress shoes were expensive, and I’d had these for over a year. They were black with tiny heels, and my toes were wedged in like Vienna sausages.

“. . . was a nice boy,” Hannah was saying. Her tone was troubled, as if she was looking for reassurance.

“He was,” Zippy said. “
Is
, I should say. Ain’t dead yet, after all.” She barked out an uncomfortable laugh.

“But if he’s nice and all, why are folks talking the way they are?” Hannah asked. “It’s as if they think he
asked
for what happened to him. I just don’t understand it, not one bit.”

Zippy eyed her. “Oh, I think you do. I ain’t sayin’ it’s right, mind you. But I’ve been to Coonesville. I reckon it’s not that different from Black Creek now, is it?”

“I couldn’t say,” Hannah murmured. I snuck a sideways glance at her and saw that she was frowning. “There was one gal I knew—a single gal—and I can’t stop thinking about her. Can’t stop wondering what
she
would say about this mess.”

“She go to your church?”

“No. She didn’t go to church.”

Zippy tugged at her skirt to adjust it within her rolls of fat. Her expression was disapproving as she waited for Hannah to continue.