All the Inside Howling (Hollow Folk #2)(3)
“Great people here. Just amazing.”
“They’re not all like that,” Austin said.
“This place, this whole town is such a joke.” I kissed him again, just a half-second kiss, and trotted towards the door.
“I’ll give you a ride,” he said, coming after me.
With a shrug, I accepted the offer. In Austin’s Charger, with the perfect grumble of its engine keeping us company, the distance from Vehpese High School to Bighorn Burger took less than a minute. Austin looped around the parking lot, stopped the car, and slid his hand down my leg.
“I’ll talk to Sara,” he said, squeezing my thigh, and the rumble in his voice matched the Charger’s growl. “You don’t even have to go inside.”
Part of me thought that was a good idea, a very good idea, and as his hand moved along my leg, that part of me was starting to crowd out anything else. But suddenly I remembered all those people staring, and the car was too small, and the air was too thin, and Mr. Big Empty, Mr. Big Empty, Mr. Big Empty was coming. Missing you. Struggling to draw a breath, I slid away from his touch.
“Vie, what’s going on? You look—”
“I’m fucking late for work, that’s what. Some of us have to have a job.” The words came out harsher than I’d intended, and the surge of anger behind them surprised even me. Trying to soften my voice, I added, “I’ll call you on my break.”
He pulled back, his hands wrapping around the steering wheel, and his whole body angled away from me. His eyes stayed on me, though, big and blue-green. “What’s wrong with you? Sit down and talk to me.”
“Thanks for the ride,” I mumbled, and I crawled out of the car and into Bighorn Burger, because if I stayed, he’d see the truth, and I couldn’t risk that.
The dinner rush at Bighorn Burger kept everyone on their feet: in the front, Becca and Angel and Kimmy, and in the back, Miguel and Joel and I. Sara, who was in her forties, maybe her fifties, and whose head floated in a frazzled cloud of bleached tips, always knew exactly where to be: sometimes in front, sometimes in back, running us like a Formula 1 pit crew. Today, though, something was off.
At odd moments, Bighorn Burger would get quiet—five minutes here and there—and Miguel and Joel and I would scramble to straighten up or get the next batch of fries in the oil or whatever we needed to do next. The brothers were thin and short and each was trying to grow a mustache and failing miserably. They always spoke Spanish to each other, but tonight something was different. Whenever Sara turned her back, they put their heads together like they were planning a coup, to the point that I started straining to listen even though I didn’t understand a word. The worst part, though, was how they looked at me from time to time. Miguel first, until he noticed me noticing him, and then he’d drop his head to confer with Joel in another rapid burst of Spanish. Then, later, it would be Joel watching me. Once I crossed the kitchen, hoping they’d tell me what was going on, but the brothers split in opposite directions like they’d just knocked over a bank.
What the hell was going on?
It was almost eight o’clock before I got a break, and I took a box of chicken strips and a cola to the tables in the front. At first I watched TV—cable news, just a constant stream of awful updates about the world—until I noticed that, here too, something was strange. I thought I’d cleared the air with Becca. For the first few weeks, she’d had a crush on me, and things had gotten strange when I’d told her I was gay. We’d made up, but now she was watching me, chewing one lip, and her face set in an expression that could only be generously called neutral. Kimmy and Angel, in contrast, were showing downright hostility: Kimmy flashing her braces like she meant to take a bite out of me, and Angel set like a mountain that meant to fall over and crush me, and anything in her way be damned.
The air in the restaurant had turned to lead, pressing down on me until I finally kicked my chair into place and went back to the kitchen. Becca’s, Kimmy’s, and Angel’s eyes followed me. As I passed through the swinging door, Miguel came at me with a knife, and I backstepped until I hit the tiled wall. Joel, pinned to his brother’s shoulder, shouted a stream of Spanish at me.
Finally, out of the blurred words, I caught something I recognized. “Austin?” I said. “Is this about Austin?”
Miguel made a disgusted noise in his throat and swiped lazily at me with the knife. Joel, for his part, launched into another tirade that I couldn’t understand. The last bit, though, sounded particularly nasty, and when he’d finished he turned on his heel and marched back to the prep table. Miguel gave me a disappointed shake of his head, pointed the knife at me, and said, “You a real fucker.”
“Geez,” I said, massaging my chest as he lowered the knife and stalked away. “Thanks.”
The world had gone crazy. Cuckoo. I took a tentative step towards the prep table, but before I could go any farther, Becca swept into the kitchen. She had peroxide blond hair and silver eyeshadow and right then she looked like some ancient war goddess, Minerva maybe, striking like an eagle. With one easy movement, she caught me by the ear and dragged me towards the back door. A moment later we burst out into the dry chill of the October night.
Aside from the overflowing Dumpster and the smell of the deep fryer and a scattering of moths fluttering in the light of a sodium lamp, we were alone. I twisted away from Becca, and she let go of me reluctantly.