Bait Dog An Atlanta Burns Novel - By Chuck Wendig Page 0,36

Texts and emails and chasing her down in the halls. But she always got away and eventually he stopped trying. She told herself it was best: he deserved better friends. Friends that wouldn’t get him hurt.

* * *

People look at her now. Like, they actually look at her. Atlanta makes her way past lockers and the library and the administration office and out the front door toward the soccer field and, all the while, people meet her gaze. Some even wave or say goodbye. Eddie Peters tells her to have a good summer. Damita Martinez asks her to sign her yearbook. Kyle Clemons gives her a running high-five without saying anything.

Takes her a little while to figure it out, but figure it out, she does. Eddie is one of the La Cozy Nostra. Damita’s… well, Atlanta wants to say Mexican because that’s how all the white people around here see immigrants, but she’s probably Guatemalan. Or Venezuelan like Shane. Kyle is a gawky zit-sprung spaz in a Doctor Who t-shirt and checkered Converse All-Stars. A nice spaz, but definitely… spazzy.

These are her people, now. The downtrodden and disaffected. The beaten and bullied, the used and abused. The jocks don’t talk to her. The pretty girls won’t say “boo.” The party kids and Student Council jerks and the rich pricks still won’t give her a passing glance. But those beneath—the subterranean social dwellers, the mutants, the weirdos, the exiles—meet her eyes and, holy shit, actually talk to her.

But it isn’t long before she’s reminded how small this tribe of freaks really is.

She catches a whiff of weed, a skunky perfume plume that’s gone when the wind turns.

Words rise from the other side of the bleachers:

“Dude,” one of the voices, a boy’s voice, says. “God hates fags.”

Another voice: “…all should fuckin’ off themselves.”

Her bowels cinch like a too-tight belt. Sweat streaks the lines of her palms.

Keep walking, she thinks. Go home.

But even as she’s picturing herself walking back home down the back roads and through the cornfields, her boots are already taking her the other way. Toward the bleachers. Toward the voices.

Two shapes stand there. Underneath the stands. Passing a joint back and forth in a gray-green haze illuminated by vertical lines of afternoon sun. She knows the one: thick little nub that he is, catcher for the baseball team. Charlie Russo. The other—lankier, ropier—plays on the team too though she doesn’t know his name or position and doesn’t much care. Both are friends with Mitchell Erickson. Mitchell: son to Orly. And one of Chris Coyne’s original tormentors. T

The two boys continue talking—

“I’d kill myself if I were gay,” the lanky one says. “Especially that gay. Might as well be a fuckin’ girl, man.”

Russo laugh-coughs, a hacking blast as he exhales. “You got it all—“ More coughing. “You got it all wrong. They’re not tryin’ to kill themselves, they just think the gun barrel is a dude’s dick!”

Then he mimics a slobbery blowjob where his brains come blasting out the back of his head. He passes the joint back.

“Dude, awesome, right,” Russo says. They high-five: slap. “Hey, you comin’ to the fights later this—“

Atlanta comes up underneath the bleachers. Doesn’t bother trying to hide her presence. The two guys do however try to hide the joint—but when they see who it is, Lanky brings it back out from behind his back.

“Yo, baby, you want a hit?” Lanky says, sticking the weed down by his crotch level and tweaking his two fingers so the joint waggles back and forth. Ash falls. He laughs. Hurr hurr hurr.

Normally Atlanta would be into some banter, maybe saying something about “my what a tiny dong you have,” but she’s mad and her patience is like a camping hatchet dangling by a single horsehair.

Instead she just kicks him in the nuts. Hard.

Embers from the joint swirl. The air goes out of him. Lanky tumbles sideways. Russo’s fast with his fists but it doesn’t matter, because Atlanta was ready. She has a new knife—a small lockback with a rubberized orange handle and a fat little three-inch blade. A jerk of the wrist and the blade pops, clicks, glints in the sun.

A few swishes of the blade through the air and Russo knows not to test her. By now they should all know not to test her.

A voice inside her screams and yells and throws objects around the romper room that is her mind, telling her to go home, leave it alone—stop throwing rocks at beehives. But she stands her