Bait Dog An Atlanta Burns Novel - By Chuck Wendig Page 0,86
kitchen would be a good idea? I hate to be touched, Steven. Hate it. Because it makes me think of—“ She can’t finish the statement. Won’t. Doesn’t want to. Whatever. Suddenly she feels a blanket of shame settle over her. Hot and smothering. She hates this. Makes her feel weak and woozy. Like she’s a victim—or worse, like she wants to be a victim, like this is the costume she wears. It’s real. It’s not fake. It’s no costume. But that doesn’t change how she feels. Steven keeps apologizing but she can’t even hear him.
Her body resists. Every part of her wants to run the other way. Feels like she’s stepping toward the ledge of a building and is about to step off. As she reaches for Steven, vertigo overwhelms her but she pushes past it.
She pulls him close and kisses him back.
Again their teeth clash. Lips mash. Her tongue finds his and it’s like he doesn’t know if this is really happening—but then his body settles into it and he leans closer. It’s awful and wonderful at the same time. A thousand synapses fire in her head like a missile battery—voosh voosh voosh voosh—and she has no idea how she can feel liberated and imprisoned in all the same moment. Maybe it’s the Ritalin. Maybe it’s just the memories. Maybe it’s what’s coming tomorrow and her defiance of that. But this is happening.
It happens for a while. One minute, then two, then five. Then ten.
Eventually she pulls away, face red, lips chafed.
“Guh,” Steven says.
“Yeah,” she answers. She feels like a sparking wire jumping on the ground.
“I thought…”
“Don’t talk,” she says. “Let me talk. I don’t like you—wait! No, I mean, I don’t like you like that. You’re just—you and me—we can’t. And I don’t want anybody right now. But this was good. This was nice. I needed this. I still feel like—I mean, I think I want to throw up? In a good way. In a real good way.”
Steven blinks. Like he doesn’t know what to do with what she just said.
Instead she just kisses him on the cheek and says, “Thanks.”
Then she hurries back outside.
* * *
The night accelerates toward morning like a hard-driving truck with wonky headlights.
Atlanta drinks.
The Ritalin sets her up; the alcohol knocks her down.
Whitey chases her as she chases fireflies into and out of the corn.
She talks about how she doesn’t understand comic books with Kyle, and Kyle tells her she’s just not reading the right ones, the ones about girls and women doing kick-ass girl-and-women things.
She goes to the house to bring back chips for real this time and then Steven’s gone but Shane and Damita are making out—Damita’s got her big booty in his lap and she’s taller than he is so it makes Atlanta have to stifle a giggle jag as the two of them mix spit and clash tongues.
At 1AM she teaches Eddie to shoot.
At 2AM Eddie teaches her how to pirouette—he’s a dancer, you see, trained in ballet and apparently quite good (though being drunk and high, fast and slow, clear and confused, does not make Atlanta a discerning fan as yet). They spin together and laugh and at one point he whispers to her how he misses Chris and though they never dated they would’ve been good together.
By 3AM Steven still hasn’t come back and so she and Guy do some shooting as Eddie dances behind them and Damita and Shane go off into the house. Guy’s got a little .22 target pistol—a Ruger—and they set up cans and bottles and some of Mama’s magazines and they shoot in the dark and sometimes hear the rewarding krish of a bottle breaking or the metallic clung of a can jumping off a fence-rail and hitting the ground.
At 3:30AM, Atlanta thinks she sees Chris standing there in the corn. Watching her and waving. But it’s just a shadow, a trick of the moonlight playing, and then he’s gone because he was never really there.
At 4AM, Atlanta passes out in one of the patio chairs.
* * *
“It’s time.”
Guy wakes her.
She blinks. Her mouth tastes like fireplace ash. Wisps of smoke drift from the logs in the fire. Her skin crawls.
Atlanta lurches over the side of the patio chair and pukes. The chair has shit for balance, though, and as she throws up the chair tilts left and she damn near falls in her own sick, just barely managing to roll out of the way.