Bait Dog An Atlanta Burns Novel - By Chuck Wendig Page 0,5
backdrop, or different voices, or different character names.
Here faces shift. Blood on the carpet. Her head shoved face down in a pile of comforters that for some reason smell like the cat lady next door. A thumb wetted by a long, too-long tongue and pressed against her cheek to wipe off a smudge. Again the shotgun goes off. Again the wicked stink of discharged powder. Again she awakens. Wet not from the shower but from her own sweat. Drenched, actually.
After school tomorrow she resolves to go see Guy on the other side of town.
* * *
What’s that they say about Pennsylvania? Philadelphia on one end, Pittsburgh on the other, and Kentucky in the middle? Way Atlanta sees it, that’s about right. She’s from North Carolina and comes from a town where half the floor of the nearest gas station mini-mart is dirt, and even still, this part of Pennsylvania—stretched across the belly band that is I-80, sitting smack in the middle of it, not far from the town of Centralia, a town whose bowels forever burn thanks to a mine fire that won’t go out—is pretty damn red in the neck.
William Mason High School isn’t straight-up Hicksville, and it has its rich kids and its poor kids, it has blacks and Latinos and a handful of Chinese kids, it has one Arab girl and two billionaire kids (twins). But for every kid that drives a Lexus you get three who can drive a tractor. For every kid that cares about the poetry of e.e. cummings you get five who give way more of a shit about NASCAR.
For every black kid, Latino kid, Chinese kid, Arab kid, you get a dozen white kids.
So it goes. None of them know her anyway. Some of them do. Or did. And all of them watch her as she walks down the halls past bands of lockers painted bright. She’s only been back a week now and it’s like she’s a ghost that everyone can see. Like she’s a poisonous toad or toxic jellyfish—interesting to look at, but for God’s sake, do not touch.
* * *
Once in a while she catches glimpses of old friends. Like Petra Bright. Or Dosie Schwartz. Or her once-best friend, Becky Bartosiewicz (pronounced, Bart-o-savage), aka, “Bee.”
Most times, they don’t look at her or say much to her. Petra will sometimes be polite. Say hi as she passes. Even offer a, don’t forget, we have homework in bio-chem, as if Atlanta’s going to have anything to do with homework for the rest of the year. Susie will meet her eyes and it’s always a sad look, like the look you probably get when you watch one of those Humane Society commercials with the crusty-eyed dogs and the Sarah McLachlan music. You feel bad for 30 seconds. Then you don’t do shit and go about your day.
Bee, though, Bee pretends Atlanta isn’t even there. If she ever looks in Atlanta’s direction, it’s like the girl’s eyes slide off Atlanta’s frame, like Atlanta’s body is covered in bacon grease and all glances slip to the margins. They used to be so close. Being a transplant, it wasn’t like Atlanta was really a big part of the ecosystem to begin with. Now she’s at the periphery of the pond. On the shore. Dry when everybody else is wet.
Even the tadpoles and snails and water-skeeters don’t want shit to do with her.
* * *
After English class, Mrs. Lewis pulls her aside. Hands Atlanta a paper. Atlanta’s own paper, by the looks of it. A one-page paper on the subject of A.E. Housman’s “To An Athlete Dying Young.”
“What is this?” Mrs. Lewis asks. The woman’s got some mean eyebrows. Like dark fuzzy caterpillars, two star-crossed lovers ever straining to reach one another but never allowed, always apart. Now those brows are scrunched up tight.
“Huh?”
“You heard me.”
“It’s my paper,” Atlanta says with some authority. Because, duh, it is.
“It’s one page.”
“Thank you. Yes.”
“I asked for a seven page paper.”
Atlanta blinks. “Yeah. I know. And mine’s one page.”
“Do you remember how you ended the paper?” Mrs. Lewis asks. “Do you remember how you reached the conclusion that resolves your thesis?”
Atlanta does remember. But she just shrugs instead, lets the teacher talk through it.
“This one sentence just… trails off, and is replaced by, blah blah blah.”
“I thought it was a nice commentary on the futility of collecting information and, uhh, synthesizing, ummm. Thought patterns.” Atlanta nods, having settled that. “Yeah. Synthesizing thought patterns.”