Gun Shy(26)

“How is she?” I ask, hungering for something. Some crumb of news, of intel on the girl I still love so much, it’s killing me inside.

Pike shrugs. “She’s different,” he says. “We’re all different since you went away.”

Well, I don’t know what to say to that.

Pike goes off to the store; I think he’s relieved more than anything to have someone else take charge. I pile my little brothers into the bath — Hannah used the seven minutes of hot water our system heats at a time, so I have to boil three saucepans full of water to get them a reasonably warm bath. After, I find them each a change of clothes without holes. I use Mom’s hairdryer to dry Hannah’s long hair, and when Pike finally gets back with the ingredients and a quarter to spare, I make her take three of the big oval-shaped vitamins with a glass of the milk. Even though it’s technically a week early, I cook Thanksgiving dinner for my siblings, trailer style, and Mom doesn’t come back for days.



* * *



Once everyone is finally taken care of — clean, dressed, warm, fed — I leave them in the trailer and trudge through dirty snow down to my room. The place is trashed. I spend hours getting everything back in order. Even though it’s freezing outside I open up the door and the little makeshift window to air the place out, get new sheets and turn the mattress over. I sit in the middle of the bed in my warmest jacket and smoke half a pack of cigarettes to try and paint over the other smells in here, the ones that don’t belong to me, and finally, it starts to feel like my room again. My house. This is my place in the world and I’ve reclaimed it. Nobody else can have it. Tomorrow I’ll get a new padlock for the door and hide the key.



* * *



Before I turn in for the night I go down to the well. I can still taste Karen if I close my eyes, and now I don’t even have alcohol to dull the edges. In prison, I had four walls and three cellmates to keep me company. Now, here, in the frozen dark, it’s just me and the ghost of the girl I found dead all those years ago.

The well has a new cover. It looks sturdy, and it’s locked. I pull at the shiny padlock to test its strength. It’s not opening without some serious bolt cutters, and that brings me some relief. I smoke a bunch of cigarettes and stare at Karen’s final resting place, hopeful that her ghost stays trapped in the well and unable to come visit me like it used to every night when I closed my eyes.

When I can’t feel my toes anymore, and my cigarette packet is empty, I go back to my room.

At first, I think I’m seeing things. That I was wrong. That Karen’s ghost is still here, sitting on my newly made bed waiting to pick up where we left off in my nightmares.

But the girl on my bed is not a ghost. She is real. Alive. Made from flesh and bone and shiny strawberry lip gloss.

“Jennifer,” I say, leaning against the doorframe and waiting for her to speak, to offer some explanation as to why she’s here.

“Leo,” she replies.





CHAPTER NINE





LEO





Nobody says anything for a beat.

“It’s cold,” Jennifer says. “You should shut the door.”

I step inside and I shut the door. I don’t think about Karen. I don’t think about Cassie. All I can think about is what I’d like to do to the sixteen-year-old girl sitting on the edge of my bed.

“What do you want?” I ask her. She smiles. Shrugs her narrow shoulders. Parts her knees ever-so-slightly. I notice everything, every movement, every facial expression. I’ve been starved for eight years. I am hungry. She needs to leave, now.

“Do I have to want something?” she asks. “Can’t a girl just drop in?”

I scrub my hand across my chin. It’s sharp with new growth; I need to shave. “Does your father know you’re here?”

She laughs, sliding off the bed and stepping toward me. The sound of her laughter fills up the room until it feels like it might explode. She’s too bright, too shiny.

“My father’s on a business trip,” she whispers. She’s so close, I could reach out and wrap my hands around her throat.

She reaches out and traces my bottom lip with her index finger, and I almost come in my jeans just at her flesh touching mine. Bad, bad Leo. I’m twenty-five. This girl is sixteen. I used to babysit her.

She’s touching me, so I figure it’s only fair if I touch her back. I place my hand at the base of her throat, just above the spot where her tits press together inside her shirt, my thumb against the hollow in her neck. “What do you want?” I repeat slowly.

She motions for me to come closer. I bend down so she can whisper into my ear. Her breath tickles as she tells me all the things she can’t look me in the eye and say aloud.



I visit Jennifer every evening at the diner; she seems to like the attention, and I could use the distraction. I make sure to turn up just before her shift ends, and she gives me a ride home every night. The first night she came over we ended up talking for hours. My mouth hurt by the end, every sense on high alert. I was a gentleman. I didn’t lay a hand on her again, not after she started to talk. She’s in trouble. A lot of trouble. I think it eased her mind to be able to confess to somebody who pretty much wrote the book on trouble in this town.