• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“I can’t tell you.”

“You’ve got to tell me. This can’t go on.”

“That’s why I’m telling you. I guess I don’t want it to go on. I do and I don’t. It all started because of Ava. It’s her fault. I just offered myself as a replacement for her. Since she wouldn’t. His daughter told me that’s what he wanted, since he likes to look at pictures of young girls on the Internet. I felt sorry for him ’cause Ava was being such a jerk to him. She could’ve said no nicely.”

“Who is it, Suzi?”

Suzi was sobbing now, and it look a long time before she could speak his name.

* * *

That night Suzi went to sleep in Marylou’s bed, with Buster. Marylou skipped the potluck and sat on her screen porch in the dark. She had to figure out what to do, who to talk to, which of the emotions swirling inside her to express, and to whom.

Mostly she felt terrible for Suzi, because she knew, from her own experience with a nasty uncle, that this event would affect her the rest of her life. This sort of thing happened to a lot of girls, but that fact didn’t lessen the pain of it, not one iota. She also felt terrible for Paula and Rusty and Angel, but not as bad as she felt for Suzi. It was awful, not being able to take away what had happened to Suzi.

Suzi had begged Marylou not to tell, not yet, and Marylou had promised; but of course she had no intention of keeping this promise. If Suzi wouldn’t tell, she would. But who should she tell first, and how should she tell them? For some reason she found herself wanting to tell Wilson, the only person around who would listen and remain calm(ish) and help her come up with a plan. But, no, that was ridiculous. She couldn’t tell Adolf. Should she tell Caroline? The police? Buff’s wife? Buff himself? She’d always thought there was something slick and shifty about Buff—a proper nickname for a grown man? So why was she so surprised? But a thirteen-year-old girl? That was different from fornicating with lusty choir women. Reverend Coffey was depraved. She wanted to run over and pound on Buff’s door, and she just might do it.

All those people must be told. She hated to be the one to tell, the one to start a chain reaction of events that would hurt lots of people and would draw attention to her in a way she wanted to avoid, seeing as most people she knew here didn’t know her real name or why she’d come to Tallahassee in the first place. But she could deal with all that. What was worse was the paralyzing guilt, worse than she’d ever experienced before; and she couldn’t argue herself out of it, the way she’d learned to do when she started berating herself about the radioactive cocktails.

Because this whole thing was her fault. It was her fault. She had taken Suzi to that church for her own devious purposes and delivered her into the clutches of that creep. Could she ever stop ruining the lives of innocent people? First her own daughter and now Suzi. The Radioactive Lady, it seemed, was just as destructive as the nasty shit she’d swallowed.

She could be sitting anywhere, on any screened porch in August, the heat cradling her, the cicadas in the live oak trees doing their metallic buzzing that sounded like hot, hot, hot, she could be in Memphis or Tallahassee or Little Rock and it didn’t matter because only her internal landscape counted at the moment, and it was a familiar landscape, a place she’d found herself many times, a safe, cool numbing place she might call Freeze. Freeze wasn’t like the Stop in Go-Stop, Go-Stop, behavior that Teddy had always teased her about. Freeze was more like: I’m checking into the Econo Lodge and I’ll see you later. She’d spent time in Freeze after her parents had hopped into their Studebaker and driven away from her grandmother’s house, and for a time after Uncle Pat molested her. She’d lived in Freeze for years after Helen died.

She sat there in her teak patio chair for she didn’t know how long, deep in the land of Freeze, not able to move, or think, or feel. Then she heard a rustle outside. Sometimes when she was sitting