-- DAN
CHAPTER 6
A little more than sixteen hours after Kaveyah Wilson called the police, a 1981 red-and-primer Camaro squealed its way down a narrow road in central Alabama, chrome flashing in the afternoon sun.
“You son of a bitch! Did you think I wouldn’t find out? Did you think nobody’d tell me?”
Tracy Worley felt her face turning red, felt the tears start in her eyes, and hated herself for showing so much. Brett said nothing. He just kept staring out the windshield. Tracy could only tell he was upset by how fast he took the turns.
“Did you? Did you think I’d never know?”
Brett still didn’t reply.
Tracy Worley, a senior in high school, went out with Brett Griggs for the first time on her sixteenth birthday, almost two years ago. He was her first real date, her first real kiss. On her seventeenth birthday, their one year anniversary, he became her first lover.
She wished him dead.
Slumped back in her seat, eyes on the passing trees, she said, “I can’t believe this. I cannot believe it. How long’ve you been doing her? A month? Six months, a year, what?” Brett only tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “Well? How long?”
He rolled his eyes. “First time was at my dad’s lake house, about two weeks after I popped your cherry.” His knuckles whitened on the wheel. “Happy now? That what you wanted to hear?”
Tracy stared at him open-mouthed, and as the tears spilled out she screamed and attacked him, punched and clawed, and tried her best to rip off as much skin as she could. Brett shouted and fought her away. The car swerved all over the road, and the passenger-side mirror clipped itself off against a DEER CROSSING sign. Brett tramped on the brake pedal and, when Tracy didn’t let up, slammed his elbow into the side of her face.
Her head bounced off the window and her fists fell into her lap.
Stunned, she sat for a few brief seconds of silence, then began to cry again. Brett curled his lip and pulled the car over to the side of the road, almost into the trees. He shoved it into PARK, reached across Tracy, pushed her arm out of the way, and popped the door open.
“Out.”
Tracy looked him in the eyes, her makeup leaving faint brown tracks down her cheeks, and tried to say, “What?” but Brett cut her off and said, “Out! Get out, get outta my car!” He unbuckled her seat belt.
“Out here? You’re just gonna leave me here?” Brett winced, and she immediately regretted sounding whiny.
“Just get the hell out of my car!” he shouted, and Tracy jerked back away from him. When she showed no sign of doing it herself, he put both hands and one foot on her and shoved her out the door. She caught herself on the doorframe and, when she got both feet on the ground, made as though to get back in. Brett hurriedly shoved the car into gear and gunned the engine.
The Camaro sprayed Tracy with gravel as it jumped away from her. Her books, which she'd forgotten on the floorboard, came flying out of the sunroof.
She stood and watched him go, and couldn’t believe it was happening.
Couldn’t believe it was ending like this.
But her cheek began to throb where Brett had elbowed her, and she felt the tears start again when she touched her face. Tracy sank to her knees in the grass and for a few moments tried to think. When that didn’t work, she settled for trying not to panic.
She stayed there, on her knees, for a quarter of an hour. No cars came down the road. She wasn’t surprised, since not many people lived out toward her house, and those that did wouldn’t be getting off their jobs for another hour and a half. She checked her watch: three thirty-six.
A breeze blew, lifted her hair. A mockingbird started singing. She waited. More minutes ticked past, and she had to try even harder not to lose control of herself.
Brett really wasn’t coming back.
Tracy straightened her shoulders, wiped her face as best she could on the tail of her shirt, then stood and went about gathering up her schoolwork and textbooks. The idea of being stranded here didn’t bother her all that much, really. Maybe in a big city, maybe in Birmingham, yeah, that’d be bad. But here, relatively close to her home and in the middle of the day, no problem. Besides... concentrating on getting home ought to keep her mind off Brett. At least for a while. Ought to.
It didn’t work out as she’d hoped. She hadn’t been walking long when the reality of her situation hit her: she and Brett were over. Finished. She wondered how many people had known about it all along, how many people had laughed at her when she couldn’t hear them.
Brett had been such a huge part of her life for so long, she realized with a sudden ache, that she didn’t know how to behave anymore, what to do or where to go.
No more movies together, with his arm around her in the theater.
No more dances.
No more of his mother’s cooking. No more trading music.
No more kisses. No more nights together.
Tracy gritted her teeth. She’d have to figure out how to spend Friday and Saturday nights again, and she’d have to face everybody in home room the next morning—and she’d have to explain it to her father, who’d convinced himself that Brett was a great guy, and told her on a regular basis how lucky she was to have caught him.
Well... She ground her teeth together as she walked. Screw ’em all. Screw ’em all.
Maybe she’d cry in the next few days, but damn it, it’d be for some other reason, because she wouldn’t cry for Brett. Not anymore.
Bastard.
Son-of-a-bitch.
In the middle of a thought Tracy heard something and stopped to look behind her. It grew swiftly louder, and closer, and became a song, one she recognized, one Brett’s older brother Chad liked to listen to. Maybe...maybe Brett, coming back for her...?
Her heart leaped in her chest with a desperate hope, and she hated herself for it.
But the vehicle that rounded the corner and bore swiftly down on her was not Brett’s battered Camaro. It was a gloss-black Ford, and the sun’s rays bursting off its windshield made it look less like an automobile than like something from outer space. She stood still and watched it come and let the music pulse over her.
The Ford blew past her without even slowing down and disappeared around another curve.
Tracy let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding and giggled a little. What was she thinking? Some handsome stranger would come along, pick her up, rescue her from her heartache?
She laughed a little more and started walking again—but then heard the music, faintly, coming back. The song grew louder, and the Ford reappeared from around the curve.
It passed her again, did a lazy U-turn and pulled abreast of her. The music clicked off.
Tracy stood there, paralyzed.
Every lesson she’d been taught, every Alabama School Board educational film she’d ever seen, all of them pounded into her head the dangers of talking to strange men. But as she neared the unfamiliar car, the memory of Brett’s cologne suddenly seemed to choke her, and her face throbbed, and all the anger inside her distilled into a decision.
To hell with what everybody else said.
Her determination doubled when she got a good look at the driver.
He was young, maybe a year or two older than she was, extremely pale and dressed completely in black. Sneakers, jeans, belt, T-shirt, and three-hundred-dollar Oakley sunglasses, all as black as his car, as his thick combed-back hair. He faced her, smoothly took off the shades—and she found herself staring openly. As he turned his head, she noticed a small earring dangling from his left ear: a skeleton key. He smiled at her, actually a little shyly.
“Hi,” he said, his voice like ocean air. “Need a lift?”
It took a fraction of a second. Maybe less than that. “Sure.” Tracy smiled her best bedroom smile, felt a little slutty and a little dangerous and reveled in it. “I’d love one.” He reached over, opened the door for her.
“My name’s Tracy. What’s yours?”
His smile got even better. “Simon.” He slipped the shades back on as she buckled in. “Where can I take you?”
# # #
Earlier that afternoon and several hundred miles away, the bell signaling the approach of the next period rang, and Nathan Pittman walked into his American History class and set his books down on his desk. Paige had already sat down in the desk in front of his, her back to him, talking to Drew Watkins. He was pretty sure she’d seen him come in, but she didn’t turn around.
Nathan smoothed his dyed-red hair so that it all hung down on the left side, leaving the shaved part of his scalp uncovered, and adjusted his gold hoop nose ring so that the small black ball rested directly below his septum, just above his upper lip. He sat down and tried to regulate his breathing. Paige continued chatting with Drew, and gave no hint of turning around to talk to him.
Nathan’s heart beat faster when he merely thought about Paige. In person it was bad enough to affect his breathing.
She was short, maybe five-two, with curly brown hair and enormous green eyes, and a smile that made his insides spin. An oxford shirt tucked into a denim skirt set off her curvaceous figure to good effect. She always dressed very stylishly, which had made him initially suspicious since she’d been so friendly.
From the first day of class eight days before, Paige had spoken to him every day, freely, and shown none of the reluctance that everyone else at the school seemed to. She didn’t seem to mind his hair or his piercings or his clothes, which hardly looked like the Gap outfits most of the other students wore. On the fourth day of class Nathan finally overcame the worst of his suspicions and started talking openly to her.
Nathan Pittman was seventeen, rake-thin, and utterly out of place.
At his old school he was one of the crowd; he hung out with his own group of friends and no one gave him a second glance. Then his mother’s boss handed her the choice of moving to a new city or losing her job, and suddenly Nathan had two weeks to say his goodbyes to his friends and his hometown.
Attending classes his first day at Grover Cleveland High School seemed very much like stepping into an alternate dimension. He’d jotted down a few possible names toward the end of the day: The Prep Zone. Top Forty World. Planet Button-down. Every single person he passed in the halls, teachers and custodians included, stared at him as though he were a member of some alien species on an inter-dimensional exchange program.
Everyone except Paige. As soon as he sat down in History, Paige greeted him with, “Hi! I’m Paige. What’s your name?” And it went from there.
Each day became tolerable because he could look forward to talking to Paige. When no one sat with him at lunch, and no one spoke to him in the halls, and he got picked dead last every day for the touch football games in P.E. like some nine-year-old fat kid, he could think about talking to Paige before and after History class. When the starting quarterback and three of his buddies trashed Nathan’s car, he thought about Paige. When Carlos Greene, a stoner with greasy blonde hair and chipped teeth who’d been held back twice already, walked past him in the hall and casually slammed his head into a locker, he thought about Paige. When Jimmy Tullo wrapped his fist around a roll of pennies and rammed it into Nathan’s shoulder so hard it knocked him off his feet, then turned to his friends and said, “Hey, that does work,” Nathan thought about Paige, even as three teachers pulled him off of Jimmy Tullo. And with the thought of her he’d made it through each day of the preceding week of hell.
So yesterday, after the end-of-class bell sounded, Nathan leaned slightly forward over his desk and said, “Um, hey Paige, I was wondering if you’d maybe like to go out with me, maybe this weekend? I’m sort of broke, but I was thinking we could rent a movie, maybe, or something?”
His words stopped her dead, and she regarded him with wide eyes for a long moment before answering. He knew what the look meant, or at least he was pretty sure he did, but he hoped he’d misread her.
Paige said, “Well. Why don’t you let me think about it?”
Of course he said sure, sure, no problem, sure.
And today she would give him her decision, yes or no. When Nathan felt confident that his voice wouldn’t shake, he said to Paige’s back, “Hey, Paige.”
She turned around. “Yes?”
And that was it. That was her response. All of it.
Nathan let out a breath and took in another, stunned. Not, Hi, Nathan, listen, I’ve thought about it, and I don’t really want to. Certainly not, Nathan, I’d love to go out with you! Instead...nothing.
She was pretending he hadn’t said anything. He couldn’t believe it.
“Uh, I was wondering if you’d maybe reached a decision, about what I asked you about yesterday. About maybe going out with me. This weekend.” He wanted to crawl under his desk.
Paige smiled, but it was the kind of smile you’d give a moron.
“I don’t think it’d be a good idea,” she said, and turned back around to talk to Drew again.
“But...uh...Paige. Paige? ...Hey, Paige?”
She ignored him.
Nathan lowered his head and stared at the top of his desk for the rest of the period.
AUTHOR'S NOTES FOLLOW IN THE COMMENT SECTION.
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After a project that was originally supposed to be a manga series starring a young boy morphed into a prose novel series starring an eighteen-year-old girl, I suddenly found that I’d become a Young Adult author. No one was more surprised by this turn events than I was, but I was even more shocked to discover that, apparently, I’m really good at writing fiction aimed at teen girls. I don’t even know what to make of that, honestly, but you can read my ALEX UNLIMITED books and see if you agree. (My wife says that my inner child seems to be a thirteen-year-old girl.)
Anyway, the roots of some of that are apparent here in the character of Tracy Worley. I’m not entirely happy with her scene; I think it could flow a little better, and there’s something about her dialogue that doesn’t sit right. I’m trying to identify it. I’m hoping that when I revise this, I can bring to bear some of this mysterious insight I seem to have into the minds of teenage girls.
If only I had had that insight when I was a teenager.
Which brings me to Nathan Pittman. I’m uncertain about his physical appearance, and about a few of the clothing choices mentioned with the other students in his new school. What I’m afraid of is that this scene was written by a guy in his twenties, in the mid-90’s, recalling his own experiences in high school in the 80’s, and that the whole thing is just painfully dated now. It might be the wisest choice to avoid issues of fashion and style altogether, since they WILL go out of style sooner or later. I don’t know.
I am pretty happy with Paige’s rejection, though, because (aside from the fact that I bore very very little resemblance to Nathan) that rejection actually happened to me in high school.
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