Bait Dog An Atlanta Burns Novel - By Chuck Wendig Page 0,19

spine bowing so hard she feels it might snap—

And then there’s a sound like a Champagne cork blasting off the bottle, and before Atlanta knows what’s happening the Skank is staggering backward, her arm across the chest of her ratty t-shirt—she pulls the arm away and it’s sticky with blood, and the shirt’s torn open and so is the girl’s chest.

The air stinks of gunsmoke. It burns Atlanta’s eyes.

“You shot my tits off,” Skank says, her voice quiet and bemused. “Shot ‘em right off. What man’s ever going to want to suck on them again? Oh, God. How am I ever going to have babies? How am I ever going to feed them with these ruined tits?”

Skank makes a cry like a cat being kicked.

The blood flows hot, fresh, over the girl’s hands.

And then Atlanta wakes up.

* * *

She pissed the bed.

That’s what she thinks at first, but then she thinks: it’s just sweat. No way she could piss that much. It’s up and down the length. Even the top-sheet is soaked through.

Doesn’t smell like piss, either. Thank the Lord for small comforts.

First thing she does is feel around the floor for the Adderall and pop one.

No more sleep. Sleep can eat a bag of dicks is what it can do.

* * *

The next week goes by without event. She sees her old best friend Bee in the hall, and sees that Bee is hanging out with a new crew. Not the popular crowd but the second rung on the ladder—the B-Team to the popular crowd’s A-Team. Soccer players, theater junkies, rich kids, smart kids. She gets Bee to look at her, though. Atlanta smiles at her because she’s having a good week. Bee smiles back—or, a ghost of a smile, at least—and then it’s gone, and Atlanta figures, that’s all I’m ever going to get.

Even still, it doesn’t do much to damage her mood. Things are good. She feels strong. In control.

The Adderall certainly helps. She even sits down to write that paper. Housman’s poem. “To An Athlete Dying Young.” She doesn’t need Shane’s Google-fu to get to the point: sometimes it’s better to go out at the top of your game, the poem’s saying. The poetic version of live fast, die young, leave a pretty-looking corpse. All with a lot of extra hoity-poopy fol-de-rol thrown into the mix.

Chris sees she’s doing the paper. He tells her that Housman was gay. She doesn’t know what to make of that in terms of the poem, only that, hey, maybe he liked looking at boy athletes. No harm in that.

But then she wonders: maybe the poem is about someone. Some boy who died. And maybe Housman loved this boy. And used the poem to justify it, to find peace and meaning in death.

“You’re probably just making shit up,” Chris tells her.

She shrugs. “Ain’t that poetry?”

“True that, sister.”

* * *

Later, they’re hanging out at Chris’ house. Just her and him. Shane says he doesn’t like to go by Chris’ house. Got caught in the cross-fire of some rant by Bill Coyne, Chris’ father, about how at the factory where he works the “Mexicans” came in and took a bunch of the jobs, and worse, now they sent a bunch of jobs to Mexico as if that weren’t enough, and y’know, whatever.

They go into the house through the garage—the house isn’t much to look at, certainly doesn’t match Chris Coyne’s own fireworks dazzle and winky panache—and it’s there that Atlanta meets Bill Coyne. She almost runs bodily into him as he comes out into the garage, overalls gunked up with motor oil stains.

He sees her and smiles. His eyes flash. This isn’t lust. She knows the lust look. This is something else.

“Chris,” he says, not taking his eyes off her. “Aren’t you going to introduce your friend?”

And then she gets it. That look is hope. He thinks she might be a girlfriend. Or at least a heterosexual experiment. She’s not really sure how much Bill Coyne knows—Chris doesn’t like to talk about it—but it’s not like the boy’s homosexuality is particularly repressed. Two days ago he got detention for making out with Danny Corley outside the math wing.

Even still, hope springs eternal.

Chris introduces her. He says nothing more than “This is Atlanta Burns,” but it’s got that sullen teen sub-layer, that hidden text of, God, Dad, shut up, no, she’s not my girlfriend, so don’t even ask.

Bill Coyne’s mental antenna clearly doesn’t receive teenage sub-text. He just keeps smiling. Shaking her hand too