The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [107]
“Is there anyone else in here?” Ava asked him, and Travis said no.
“When are you going to be on America’s Next Top Model?” He leaned back against the clay shelf that was built into the wall. “I’ve been watching it every week.”
Was that all he cared about? She leaned against the shelf next to him. She told him she wasn’t interested in being on that show anymore.
“Good,” he said. “It’s really lame.”
That made her feel better. “You didn’t come to support group yesterday.”
He shrugged, lifting his tricorne back off his forehead. There was a slight indentation in his forehead and Ava longed to touch it the way the boys had longed to touch the swords.
“I don’t need to go to that group,” he said. “I don’t have Asperger’s.”
“What do you have, then?”
“You mean like what disorder? I don’t know and I don’t care. I’m just going to live my life. Screw all that disorder and syndrome shit.”
“Tough talk,” Ava said. She knew she would think of herself as someone with Asperger’s syndrome for the rest of her life, and it felt like a huge, unfair burden. If she ever voiced this sentiment, someone would point out that everyone had burdens of one kind or another. That was the Christian way to look at it, but she wasn’t a Christian, so did she have to look at it that way? It sucked. Period. But at least she could read about Asperger’s and make sense of herself, and how many people could say that?
“Did you just come here to yell at me for not coming to group?” Travis said. “I didn’t think you’d care.”
“I’m not yelling. I care.”
“That’s good,” Travis said, and they both leaned in awkward silence. Ava kicked the toe of her flip-flop in the red clay floor. Outside there was the sound of birds, a rooster crowing, and the boys somewhere yelling and whooping.
“I wish I could just stay in the seventeenth century,” Travis said.
“Why?”
“My mom. She’s always in a bad mood. Either drunk or trying not to drink or has a hangover. Do you drink?”
Ava shook her head. “I mean, I have a couple of times.” That was a lie. She’d tasted wine once and hated it. In high school she’d never been invited to the parties where kids drank. Her few friends in high school had been the uncool supersmart girls, now gone off to good colleges across the country, who’d had slumber parties where they watched Gilmore Girls.
Travis straightened up, turned around, reached up and removed one of the rifles from the wall.
What was he going to do with a gun? “Is that real?” Ava asked him.
“Of course,” he said. “We’re not supposed to let visitors hold them, but do you want to?”
Ava shook her head.
He took aim at something outside the front door. “We keep our gunpowder kegs in a room back there, if you want to see.”
“No, thank you,” Ava said, and then asked him if he knew about Buff and Suzi, and when he said no, she told him what had happened, and she told him how her mother had confronted Buff at church and that he’d denied doing anything, and how her father had beaten Buff to a pulp and how Buff had threatened to press charges, and how that didn’t sound good, even if she wasn’t sure exactly what it meant, and how her parents had reported Buff’s abuse of Suzi to the police and he’d denied everything to them, too, and how Suzi had just been crying in her room and going to counseling appointments, and her mother had been crying, too, and her dad had either been angry and yelling or not speaking to anyone.
Travis had lowered the rifle and was frowning at her. “Why are you telling me all this?”
“Since he’s your uncle, I thought you’d want to know. Bob’s your uncle!” she couldn’t help adding.
“Buff’s my uncle. He’d never do anything like that. He’s a minister!”
Ava couldn’t believe that he was standing up for Buff. She’d thought he’d be on her side, on Suzi’s side. “You don’t believe Suzi? You think she’s lying? She’s not a liar.”
Travis lifted the long gun to his shoulder again, sighting an imaginary target across the room, and Ava felt