Bait Dog An Atlanta Burns Novel - By Chuck Wendig Page 0,6
mouth goes from a tight line to a steadily melting downward into a mean scowl.
“Well. I don’t mean to.”
“I need you to rewrite this. Today’s Tuesday. I want it by Friday. All seven pages.”
Atlanta laughs. It’s not funny, but she can’t help it. “You’re shitting me. Okay. Listen. Mrs. Lewis. I’m sorry. Maybe you didn’t know or realize it but I… went through some stuff recently? It was in the news, as I hear it. I was gone. For three months. And we’ve only got two months left of school. The other teachers—“
“The other teachers what?”
“They’re just giving me a straight B+. Across the board. Just to get me through.”
It’s the teacher’s turn to laugh, but Atlanta can tell she doesn’t think any of this is funny.
“Miss Burns, is that what you want? To just… get through?”
She thinks about it, then nods. “Well. Yeah.” She doesn’t add that she thinks school is basically bullshit. That whatever they learn here isn’t relevant to what’s going on outside these walls. That all they’re doing is teaching to the test and watching stats and oh, case in point, they just want to give her a B+ to shut her up and move her along with the rest of the mooing herd.
This cynicism is fairly fresh, she realizes. Not worth looking too close (no kicking over logs now, remember), but there it is.
“That’s not going to happen, Miss Burns. Let me tell you something. All we are is the measure of our work. You don’t do the work, you’re not worth the measure. You’re a junior. You want to stay a junior, then keep treating my class like it’s a blow-off. A paper like this won’t fly with me. A paper like this gets an F. You fail this class you and I’ll probably see you again next year. Are we clear?”
Atlanta feels rage in her heart and tries to bring that up like a bucket full of bile from a well filled with hot vomit, and she spits out, “I went through some bad shit, Mrs. Lewis, some shit a lot worse than you’ve ever seen or had done to you so why don’t you wipe the sand out of your crusty vagina and put on a nice smile and learn how to be a human being for once in your wretched life?”
For a moment, the teacher says nothing. Finally, she says:
“Tornadoes in the heartland. Child soldiers in Somalia. Homeless people on the streets worldwide. Everybody’s got problems. Everybody knows tragedy. Life is short and hard. Do the work. Don’t make me fail you. Have a good day, Miss Burns.”
And then, most galling of all, she waves Atlanta off like she’s the fucking maid.
* * *
Atlanta only sees one of the three thugs from the attack the other day. Chomp-Chomp. She sees him in the cafeteria picking at a plate of taco meat with a plastic fork. He sees her, then, too. Then he gets up and almost knocks his chair over and hurries out of the room so fast you’d think he was being chased by a cloud of yellow jackets.
* * *
She’s still pissed when she walks to Guillermo’s after school. Every stone or can in the road, she kicks it into the corn or the soy or whatever sits in the fields as she walks. It’s coming up on late April and she can’t tell what little shoots are sticking up out of the mud and she doesn’t much care, either.
Guy’s got a little slice of farmland north of town, a parcel of land with dead fields and a gutted, burned husk of a farmhouse next to a red barn that’s got a deep drunken lean to it. Guy doesn’t live in the farmhouse: place burned down a handful of years ago when a nest of squirrels got to chewing the old knob-and-tube wiring in the attic. Killed the older couple that lived there, and from what Atlanta heard, they found their two charred bodies still in bed like they didn’t even know to get up.
No, Guy’s got a double-wide trailer out back of the farmhouse. She finds him this time just past the trailer, taking potshots at cans and bottles on a fence-rail with a little .22 pistol.
Pop, pop, pop, pop. A soup can jumps like it was bit in the ass. A bottle neck shatters. Two other shots miss, go off into the field or the trees beyond.
He drops the magazine out of a lean, black, snazzy-looking shooter,