Gun Shy(15)

What did she ever see in him? Oh, yeah. The face. The eyes. Guy’s a catch. Until you catch him and realize you’re stuck with the sorry bastard. Thanks, Mom.

I take a deep breath of winter air, the cold burning my lungs. It feels good. I start to walk into the diner when I see a familiar face staring at me from a piece-of-shit Honda three slots down from where Damon pulled in.

I don’t know whether to smile or run, so I do neither. Instead, I head toward the car before nerves can send me scurrying in the opposite direction.

The eyes that were staring at me don’t look away, but they change. Withdraw. Guess he wasn’t expecting me to come over to his car, after all.

“Pike,” I say. “You still live here?”

It’s Pike, Leo’s oldest little brother. Irish twins, their mom called them because of how close their birthdays are - ten and a half months, to be exact. Leo’s mom didn’t mess around back in the day. She was born in Gun Creek, had half a dozen more kids after Leo was born on her sixteenth birthday, and she’ll probably die in her double-wide one day when she smokes too much meth and blows a crater in the middle of her trailer. Most of her older children have scattered, buckshot as far and wide from Gun Creek as possible. The little ones are still with her, as far as I know. The woman might have started having kids almost thirty years ago when she birthed Leo, but she certainly hasn’t stopped.

Pike flicks his long fringe out of his eyes. He’s a pale, goth version of Leo, night and day but unmistakably brothers.

“Nah. I moved to Reno a while back. I’m just working a job.”

Oh. He’s dealing. I spy a battered Nike backpack on the passenger seat. There’s an excellent chance it’s full of drugs. I don’t judge him. His mom, sure. She’s fucking deplorable. All these kids and she never could take care of them. But Pike? He’s just doing what he has to do to get by. When you start life in this place, your options are limited.

“Have you heard from Leo?” My throat constricts as I push the words out into existence; it almost aches to mention his name. Leo. It’s a name your mouth really has to work for. It’s not easy, like Pike or Cassie. With Leo, you have to use your tongue, your teeth, your lips, your cheeks.

Pike shifts in his seat; I notice he’s not dressed properly for the cold. Like, at all. He’s wearing jeans slung loosely over his skinny hips, a t-shirt (in this weather?), a thin cotton zip-up hoodie you’d wear on a cool summer night.

“Aren’t you cold, Pike? Jesus. It’s barely freezing out.”

Pike looks me up and down from behind his black fringe, tossing it out of his view again. Just cut the damn thing, I want to tell him. But I don’t. He wants to be the seventh member of Panic! at the Disco, I’m hardly going to stop him.

“Sheriff told me not to talk to you about Leo,” Pike mutters at my midsection. Something sharp pierces my chest and burrows its way in. I feel like I’ve had the air sucked out of my lungs. “What? What do you mean?”

Pike’s face looks stricken. “Whatever, Cassie, I gotta go. Mom’s waiting for me.”

“Oh, well, you wouldn’t want to keep your momma waiting, would you?”

He goes to roll his window up and I catch his sleeve. He stares at my hand like it’s a cockroach before he shrugs me off angrily. “You think you’re the only one affected by what happened?” he hisses. “Leo’s the one person in our family who had a fucking job, Cassie. The only one who had his shit together. So yeah, Mom’s waiting for me to bring her fucking groceries for her fucking kids because she spent all her money on dope. Nice seeing you.”

I feel the color drain from my face. “I’m sorry-” I start, but he cuts me off.

“They’re gonna cut her power off next week if I don’t find some money. So unless you want to pay me to call Leo and ask how he’s been, don’t interrupt me.”

I would pay him if I had any money. I would.

He rolls the window up and starts the car, looking anywhere but at me.

I curl my hands up by my sides, the violence simmering at my fingertips something I can barely keep a lid on, wanting nothing more than to slam my fists into the hood of his car until he relents and tells me something about Leo. Anything. Does he ask for me? Does he think about me? Does he still love me, even though I’m unlovable, even though I’ve become the worst human being I could possibly be?

I don’t ask him anything, though. I don’t scream or use my fists or beg. Because there’s nobody in the world that could answer the questions in my head. Will I ever see him again?

The judge gave him nineteen years, so - I doubt it.

I turn and trudge across grey sludge snow to the front doors of the diner. Everything I do is on autopilot these days.

I go into the staff bathrooms and make myself throw up stale coffee and cereal before I pull my hair into a more respectable topknot, my skin pallid under the bare bulb overhead, the whites of my eyes tinged yellow. And the veins. Jesus, I look stoned. A map of tiny burst blood vessels that traces the map of my terrible diet and my affection for alcohol.

I linger in the bathroom longer than I normally would, chewing mints to mask my vomit breath because today is going to be a shit show. I already know it, and positive thinking isn’t going to help me out of this bind.

The holidays are not kind to people like me who never made it out of town. They’re ripe for unwelcome reminders of what could have been, of the pack rats crawling back into the sewer, back to the nest they’ve long since fled. They bring with them husbands and wives and fat babies that smell of sweet milk and diaper cream.