the dangers, and know how to use it. “The sites are fixed,” Dunk went on. “All you have to do is line up the one in the front to the one in the back and pull the trigger. If you do pull the trigger, exhale before or just hold your breath. If you breathe while shooting, the movement can screw with your aim.” He pointed at the bottom of the gun. “This here is the trigger guard. Always keep your finger on the trigger guard until you’re ready to shoot. If you put your finger on the trigger, there’s a chance you might fire the gun by accident and shoot yourself in the foot or something.”
Dunk held the gun out to me, barrel down. “Put it in your pocket and don’t take it out unless you think you’ll need to use it. Pop always says you can’t pull a gun unless you’re ready to kill someone. Once you reveal a gun, there’s no going back. You ready?”
I reached out and took the gun from him. It was heavier than I remembered—it didn’t have bullets when we were practicing. I was shaking, but Dunk didn’t say anything about that. I slipped the gun into my jacket pocket.
Dunk smoothed out the leather, then ruffled the jacket back up. “Are you sure you don’t want us there?”
Willy should have been there by now, but he was running late. Earlier that summer, he started a job at Magic Mike’s Car Wash on Valladium Drive, and on days like today they tended to keep everyone for overtime.
I shook my head. “They’ll know.”
I still had nightmares about last year.
The roar of the engine.
The impact.
We told Auntie Jo someone stole my bike from school. I bought Willy’s old one, a black BMX with silver stripes. Not quite as cool as Dunk’s but way better than the one I had. I could have bought a new one. The envelopes arrived every month, and I had over sixteen thousand dollars hidden away, but I didn’t. Willy’s old bike suited me just fine.
So, on Tuesday, August 8, 1989, I rode my new used bike through the evening heat, up the road at the cemetery gate, and left it sitting in the grass beside the mausoleums, then walked over to the bench and took a seat, my chest, back, and arms covered in sweat under the thick leather jacket with the gun in the pocket. I sat there and waited. When six o’clock rolled around, I waited longer. When seven came and went, I began to think Dunk and Willy had followed me and were hiding in the trees, somehow frightened Stella and the others off, but when I turned and looked, I didn’t see anyone. By eight o’clock, I had only seen two other people, an older couple a few hundred feet away, down the hill, placing flowers at a grave. With the approach of nine, and the loss of the sun, now gone more than thirty minutes, I stood from the bench, retrieved my bike, and rode home where Willy and Dunk waited impatiently, and had waited the entire time.
2
1990 saw the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, the arrival of the Furby, and the discovery of the most completed T. Rex skeleton in South Dakota. Paleontologists named it Sue. My days were filled with thoughts of Stella. I filled sketchbook after sketchbook with Stella, finding drawing to be the only way to erase her from my mind, if only for a little while. My nights brought the dream more times than I could count, and I became obsessed with the box my father handed to Auntie Jo. I tore our apartment to pieces looking for it. I even asked Auntie Jo about it once, and she said, and I quote, “Your father was such a selfish prick, he wouldn’t have given me a cold. I don’t know nothing about no box.”
Stella didn’t come to the cemetery that year, either. I decided I’d leave the gun at home next time. Maybe they somehow knew about the gun.
With 1991 came the death of Freddy Mercury, the start of Operation Desert Storm with the invasion of Kuwait, and Boris Yeltsin became the first elected President of Russia. Something called “the Internet” arrived—it would change the world, we were told. Auntie Jo said it would just be a new way for the pervs to find their porn.
No Stella that year, either.
I wouldn’t see Stella Nettleton again until August 1992.
PART 2
“In a word,