Only, it was cold. I was cold. I said to myself, So? You’re tough. You can take it.
But the cold didn’t go away. It just got colder. And eventually, one of two things happened: Either the cold settled inside you and turned your heart to ice, or something happened to make you start to thaw.
Only the thawing hurt, too.
I heard a rush and a rumble, and I came out of my thoughts to see Bailee-Ann zoom past me in her truck. Then she slowed down. Then she stopped. Why? Did she see me?
Her taillights turned from red to white. She was coming back.
SHE DROVE IN REVERSE TO REACH ME, HER RIGHT arm stretched over the passenger seat and her neck craned so she could see behind her. She killed the engine and hopped out, wiping her palms down the front of her shorts.
“Hi,” she said.
“Um . . . hi,” I said.
“Why are you just sitting here?”
“I don’t know. I just am,” I said.
But she wasn’t listening. She glanced down the road toward Tommy’s house and bit her lip. She pulled her gaze to me and said, “Listen, about Patrick . . .”
She let the sentence hang, waiting for me to fill in the blank. But Patrick was in the hospital, and Tommy said he didn’t do it. What did she want me to say?
She checked the road again. Then she reached into her front pocket and pulled out a pack of matches. “I found these in Beef’s jacket.” She tossed them to me. “Here.”
They were from a restaurant, or maybe a bar, called Billy the Kid’s. The front flap boasted a line drawing of a shirtless cowboy twirling a lasso, and beneath the picture was the address. Asheville, North Carolina, it said. I looked at Bailee-Ann.
“I wanted to show you,” she said.
“But not in front of Tommy? How come?”
“It’s . . . complicated.”
I snorted, because what wasn’t?
She shoved her hands in her pockets. “He’s not in a good place, you know?”
“Tommy?”
“No, Beef. Tommy wants me to break up with him . . . and I will . . . but it feels wrong to do it now.”
She rehashed how strange Beef had been acting since losing his scholarship, hot one day and cold the next.
“He doesn’t sleep for days. And then when he does, he’s out so hard, I can’t even wake him up,” she said. “One time, Robert stepped on him, and he didn’t wake up. I mean, that’s weird, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “And?”
She pulled her eyebrows together like she didn’t understand my impatience.
“Is he still doing meth, Bailee-Ann? Is that what you want me to know?”
She protested feebly, and I fluttered my fingers. “Just forget it. Don’t bother.”
“Don’t bother?” she huffed. “I thought you liked Beef. I thought you cared, even though you work so hard to pretend you don’t.”
“Thanks for the guilt trip,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure cheating on him’s a worse offense, Bailee-Ann.”
Pain filled her eyes. She spun on her heel and headed for her truck.
“Ah, crap,” I muttered. I rose awkwardly to my feet and went after her. “So what do you want to tell me? Why’d you give me the matches?”
Her hand stilled on the door handle. Her lower lip quivered in a way I remembered.
“I do care about Beef,” I said. “I just said that to pay you back.”
“Pay me back? For what?”
“I don’t know, because I feel bad for him,” I said, exasperated. “I mean, when you’re in the dark, and then you find out you’ve been in the dark . . .”
I came to the end of that line of reasoning. Sighing, I said, “Or maybe I’m just a crappy friend and wanted to make you feel bad.”
She twisted her bowed head so that she was gazing at me sideways. “Are we even friends?”
I felt strange in my own skin. A breeze lifted my hair, whispering against my neck. “We used to be.”
One tear, shiny as a dewdrop, rolled down her cheek and plopped onto her foot, washing the dust of the day from that one spot. Her flip-flops were pink with white polka dots, and now one of the polka dots was brighter than the others.
She turned around, resting her weight against her truck. Sounding worn-out, she said, “You should know that your brother was never a user. Tommy and I were, but we quit. We wanted Beef to quit, too.” She hugged her ribs. “That’s why Beef got so mad that night at Suicide Rock.”
“Oh,” I said. Finally, the missing piece. It clicked into place, and it fit. “That’s what the guys ‘discussed’ with him? His meth use?”
“It was an intervention,” she said heavily. “He didn’t take it so well.”
“You think?” He’d called Patrick a fucking pansy, and he’d told Tommy and my brother to go play with their vaginas, though as Bailee-Ann said, he didn’t use that word.
“Was it Patrick’s idea, the intervention?” I asked. That would explain why Patrick didn’t want Robert along. Maybe he knew it would get ugly.
“Patrick was all for it, but no. It was Tommy’s idea.”
My eyebrows shot up. “Tommy set up an intervention for Beef? No way. No frickin’ way.”
She looked at me from under a swoop of hair as if she were so, so tired. “Tommy knew firsthand how messed up meth made you. Like with the cow?”
“Wait,” I said, remembering what she’d said at her house about how running meth was easy money, and how certain folks found themselves new jobs when the local meth cookers sprang up. “Did Tommy get Beef into all that in the first place?”
She didn’t answer. Well, that’s not true. She did, by saying stiffly, “That’s why he wanted to get him out. He wanted to make up for his sins.”
“Fine,” I said. “So Tommy, Patrick, and Christian talked to Beef. Beef got pissed. Where was Dupree during all this?”
“Dupree is Dupree,” she said.
I nodded. True enough.
“Back to these,” I said, lifting the pack of matches. “Do you think Beef knows something about Patrick getting hurt? Do you think this place is somehow connected?”
“What I think is that Patrick has a boyfriend,” Bailee-Ann said.
I straightened my spine. “He does! Yes!”
My reaction startled her. I tried to tone it down. “Do you know who he is?”
“No, Patrick never would tell me.”
I wiggled the matches. “And Billy the Kid’s?”
“I think he works there. The boyfriend.” She cleared her throat. “I think it’s, um, a gay place.”
Wow, really? I thought.
“They were in Beef’s jacket,” I said. “So has Beef been there? Does he know Patrick’s boyfriend?” I said.
“I’m pretty sure,” Bailee-Ann said. “I’m pretty sure he doesn’t like him, either.”
“What makes you say that?”
“That’s just kind of the impression I get.” She twined her foot around her opposite leg, hooking it behind her calf. “Like, I heard Beef and Patrick arguing one time. Beef was saying how Patrick was an idiot if he thought people could change, and that a rotten egg is a rotten egg. That kind of thing.”
She wrapped her arms around herself. “Then I came into the room, and they shut up. I asked what they were talking about, and . . .”
“And?”
She shivered. “Beef can be . . . mean sometimes. Like, he has this thing where he makes fun of homos, even though Patrick is one. You know?”
“Usually he stands up for Patrick,” I argued.
“But not always. Anyway, when they saw me, Beef went into this spiel about how Patrick was mad at his boyfwiend and wasn’t that just so tewwible. He said it in a baby voice, like that, and he swished around and stuff.”
She cocked a hip and flipped her wrist, searching my expression. When I scowled, she dropped the position. “That’s all I know, but it made me think maybe Patrick’s boyfriend is like that. Swishy.”
I absorbed what
she’d said. I tried out a scenario in which Patrick’s boyfriend drew attention to himself in a dangerous way—by acting swishy—and Patrick defended him, because Patrick would. Or what if Patrick met up with his boyfriend at the Come ‘n’ Go after hours? What if they had plans to meet that Saturday night, and that’s why Patrick insisted on going back to the store after everything went sour at Suicide Rock? And then, later, what if someone saw Patrick and his boyfriend together?
“So I need to go to Billy the Kid’s,” I said. That’s what it came to.
Bailee-Ann looked worried, but she didn’t tell me not to. Her truck was right behind us, but she also didn’t offer to give me a ride.
“Do you think a person would go to hell just for stepping into a place like that?” Bailee-Ann asked.
“No way,” I said, though I had no idea. I trusted my gut, though. “I don’t think people go to hell for being gay, either, because if they did, that would mean Patrick would, too. And I just don’t believe God would do that.”
“What if there’s different kinds of gay?” she said. “Like, good gay and nasty gay?”
“Um . . . I’m not sure.”
Bailee-Ann fiddled with the keys to her truck.
“Did Beef tell the police about Patrick’s boyfriend?” I asked.
“He, um, didn’t want to get involved. Because of other reasons.”
“Such as?”
She shook her head, and I thought, meth. Beef and this gay bar in Asheville were connected, and not just because of Patrick’s boyfriend working there. And if Beef thought Patrick’s boyfriend was a “rotten egg,” as Bailee-Ann put it . . .
Was it possible that Patrick’s boyfriend used meth? God, was Beef his supplier or whatever?
“What are you going to do?” Bailee-Ann asked.
“Well, I have to go to Asheville, like I said. To Billy the Kid’s, to find Patrick’s boyfriend.”
“How will you get there?”
She hadn’t volunteered to drive me there the first time I threw the idea out, and she sure wasn’t volunteering now. Perhaps she’d maxed out her bravery simply by telling me all this.
“I guess I’ll get a friend to drive me,” I said.
“A friend?” she said dubiously.
I told her about Jason. Not a lot, but enough.
“Oh, okay,” she said, sounding relieved. “Good.” She stood there, and the sun beat down on us, until at last she said, “So, are you going to?”
“What?”
She gave me a funny look. “Call him. Jason.”
“Well, not right this second,” I said. She waited for an explanation, so I added, “I don’t have a phone.” Plus, maybe it was a dumb idea. He said he wanted to help, but now I felt nervous about asking.
She reached into the truck and grabbed hers from the dashboard. It was a cheapie, but she handed it to me and said not to worry about how many minutes I used.
Well, here goes nothing, I thought. I angled my body for privacy and dialed his number.
Afterward, when I gave Bailee-Ann her phone back, she gave me a tentative half-smile. I didn’t know why, and then I realized that I was smiling. Because of Jason.
“You like him, don’t you?” she said.
“Patrick?” I said, deliberately misunderstanding. “Of course. Why would I go to so much trouble for someone I didn’t like?”
She shook her head and climbed into her truck. From out the window, she gave me a parting piece of advice. “Hey, Cat. Watch yourself, okay?”
“I will,” I said, knowing what she was getting at. Patrick’s boyfriend might have brought danger to Patrick in any number of ways, or the danger could be one step less removed. The danger could be the boyfriend himself.
I WAS POSSIBLY IN LOVE WITH JASON, JUST A LITTLE. Not in love in love. It was too soon for that. But ready to be in love with everything again, or everything good, anyway. That’s what I thought about as I gazed out the window of Jason’s car, watching the many shades of green dance and cast shadows as we drove along the twisty mountain road. Also I loved my brother, and Bailee-Ann, and even squirmy Robert, just for being a kid and liking ice cream.
I loved everyone who said yes to the world and tried to make it better instead of worse, because so much in the world was ugly—and just about all the ugly parts were due to humans. I counted myself among those pitiful ranks. I didn’t slam meth or get stinking drunk or go off and molest anyone, but that didn’t let me off the hook. I hid in the shadows, but hiding had the power to hurt, too.
I hurt Patrick and Bailee-Ann by not being there for them. I hurt Christian by thinking coward in my mind and scowling at him like he wasn’t worthy of respect. I hurt everyone I came into contact with, because what I was sending out wasn’t a yes to the world but a no.
So I was going to stop that.
Jason and I were silent as we reached the outskirts of Asheville, but it was a comfortable silence. We’d talked for much of the hour-long drive, and now we were taking a break. Gearing up for whatever lay ahead.
We started to see fewer trees and more houses, and Jason watched for street signs, occasionally glancing at the map he printed out before coming to get me.
Jason was going to go inside with me when we got to Billy the Kid’s, assuming the place was open at noon. “It’s either that, or no ride,” he’d said after learning of my early morning visit to Tommy. He hadn’t been pleased when I told him I’d gone there, and all he knew about was the tongue, not the other stuff. Maybe one day I’d tell him all of it—the fire, the motorcycle, my brother’s burning courage—but not now.
Jason’s concern was sweet, but unnecessary. I was almost 100 percent convinced that Tommy hadn’t put the tongue on my pillow, and anyway, nothing had happened at Tommy’s house. Here I was, safe and sound.
“Yeah, but we’re no longer talking about Tommy,” Jason said. He glanced at me. “This boyfriend of Patrick’s, we don’t know anything about him. We may not even find him, you know.”
“Eyes on the road, buddy,” I told him, and not for the first time.
He grumbled, but the highway to Asheville was steep and twisty, and it didn’t help that Jason’s car was a twenty-five-year-old Chevy Malibu that used to belong to his grammy. The tires were cracked with dry rot. The shocks were shot, so we rebounded hard whenever we hit a pothole. The passenger side floorboard had been eaten out by rust, and if I looked down, I could see the asphalt moving beneath us.
On top of that, the Malibu’s engine was so gunked up that it could barely pull the car up the mountain. On steep stretches, Jason has to shift all the way into first gear, and our speed dropped to fifteen miles an hour, tops. Every so often, a local got right on top of us, laying on his horn as if Jason was going slower than honey on purpose. As soon as there was a hint of an open stretch, the driver behind us would roar past, honking some more and making unfriendly gestures out the window.
It was actually kind of funny. “I’m going as fast as I can!” Jason would say. “Just pass me, dammit!”
“You’re supposed to pull off and let them pass you,” I told him. I pointed to a stretch of dirt on the side of the road. “See that? That’s called a pull-off spot. It’s called that ’cause that’s where the slowpokes pull off.”
“Thank you, yes, I know what a pull-off is. But if we pull off, we’ll never get going again.”
“Ah,” I said.
He flicked my shoulder for being a smarty-pants, and I said, “Hey, hands on the wheel.”
He looked at me in disbelief.
“Hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. Two very important principles of safety.”
“You do remember I’m the one giving you a ride, right?” he said.
I laughed, and it pleased him. I could tell by his lopsided smile, which pleased me. We grinned goofily at each other.
Later, our conversation shifted to more serious things. I told him about my theory about Beef dealing meth to Patrick’s boyfriend. That got Jason going. He talked about
addiction and how it ruined everything. He said his father gave him his first drink when he was four years old. It was whiskey, and Jason’s daddy thought it would be funny to give it to his little boy.
“I remember how warm I felt after it went down,” Jason said. “I can call back that feeling exactly, all these years later.”
He told me about his slow realization that when one person in a family was sick, the whole family was sick. In Jason’s case, the sick person was his father, who was nice enough when he was sober, but mean as a snake when he was drunk.
He’d hit Jason and then act all self-righteous, as if the hitting had been Jason’s fault. He’d throw his hand out at Jason’s little sister, Christy, and say, “How you feel knowing she had to see that, boy?”
Other times, if Jason didn’t jump fast enough or high enough or whatever, Jason’s daddy would shake his head and say, “Going after you don’t seem to make no difference, so what am I to do? Do you want me to hit Christy? Is that what it’s gonna take to bring you in line? ’Cause sure seems like that’s the only thing that’ll stop you.”
Christy, his sister, was eleven, the same age as Robert. Jason’s plan was to get his degree, get a job, and find a place to live somewhere far away from Hangtree. “Me and Mama and Christy, we’ll all go and live there,” he said. “And my daddy can just sit in his own shit.”
Hearing Jason talk about Christy reminded me of Beef and Gwennie. Roy used to hit Beef an awful lot. He stopped when Beef got big enough to punch him back, but Beef would always have scars to remind him of his daddy’s love.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone what was going on?” I asked Jason. “Like a teacher, or someone at church?”
His jaw twitched, and I felt like I’d let him down. After all, I was no stranger to sad-sack sob stories. Heck, I had one of my own, and did I tell anyone? When your life was messed up, you didn’t want anyone to know.
“Never mind,” I said. “Sorry.”
He was quiet for a bit, and then he said, “Sometimes he’d break stuff around the house. One time, he punched the microwave, and glass shattered everywhere. You’d think they’d make the doors out of safety glass, wouldn’t you?”