Shine - Lauren Myracle [81]
“No,” he said. His face was red, but he answered my question as straightforwardly as I’d asked it.
“Do you know who did?”
His eyes flicked to Bailee-Ann. I tried to catch what passed between them, but too quickly, he brought his focus back to me.
“I don’t,” he said.
“We care, too, you know,” Bailee-Ann said. She gestured at the coffee table, and I glanced down to see today’s newspaper open to an article on page three titled, “NCBI Explores Leads in Local Hate Crime Investigation.”
Patrick wasn’t even front page material anymore.
Disgusted, I stood up, dislodging Bailee-Ann.
She righted herself and asked, “Are you leaving?”
“Yep,” I said. I tossed Daddy’s Spanish pistol on the Lawsons’ coffee table, and it made a fairly satisfying thunk that I hoped woke up his mama.
“You’re not taking that?” Tommy said.
“Nope.”
“But . . . why?” Bailee-Ann said.
“Because it’s good for nothing,” I said, keeping my eyes on Tommy. “Because one worthless piece of shit deserves another.”
I strode out of the house, ignoring Bailee-Ann’s cries of “But where are you going? What are you going to do?”
I biked for a half mile or so and pulled off the road, just to think a little.
My encounter with Tommy had sucked me dry.
Maybe a person—like me—could tell myself I was fine on my own. Maybe I could even believe it, for a while. But it was like building a wall of ice around myself. I looked out at the world through all that frozen water, and everything appeared pretty much the same, with only a few wavy spots here and there. Air bubbles, I told myself. No big deal.
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