up ignores it. It makes all the other shit going on so much more interesting, diminishing the pain by removing its bite. That night, she doesn’t sleep because she doesn’t have to. She cleans her room. She takes a walk down the driveway under the midnight moon, notices the windows of light still coming from the cat lady’s house next door, she goes back inside and writes that seven-page paper demanded by that hag, Mrs. Lewis. (Of course, it’s a seven-paged hate-fueled screed written in bold strokes with permanent marker.)
Atlanta even cleans the shotgun. She doesn’t have gun oil so she uses WD-40 and olive oil. She doesn’t have a barrel brush, but she does have a wire clothing hanger that she bends and breaks and corkscrews into a wad of paper towel.
She even pulls back the hammer and goes to clean it, but next thing she knows her heart feels like a jar of moths and it’s like she’s standing on the edge of a building teetering on the balls of her feet—the vertigo threatens to overwhelm her, to eat her the way a bullfrog eats a mayfly.
The shotgun has to go. She slides it under her bed.
For the rest of the night she lays above it, staring at her ceiling with wide open eyes, willing her heart to stop flipping and fluttering.
* * *
“Psst!”
Whatever that is, Atlanta assumes it has nothing to do with her.
She’s got her locker open and going through the motions—pulling books down off the shelf and letting them tumble into her bag even though at class-time she’ll instead just sit in the back and read her Stephen King novel du jour (today it’s The Stand), collecting that sweet B+—and she’s thinking too about how she didn’t sleep one wink last night and doesn’t feel tired. Sure, the Adderall’s blissful ignorance failed her eventually, but really, that was her fault. C’mon. Getting out the shotgun? It’d be like juggling a couple of hornet’s nests and wondering how you got stung.
Then: “Psst! Tsst! Fsst!”
Again, ignorance is bliss.
She slams her locker shut, takes a long slurp from a Diet Coke.
Motion catches her attention at the corner of her eye.
“Atlanta! Hey!”
It’s Shane Lafluco. That squat little tamale. Shit, is that racist? Dang. Whatever. Shane’s well put together again: Polo shirt, khakis, wingtips, not a hair out of place (so much so it calls to mind the plastic hair-helmets you snap onto LEGO figures, she thinks). He’s hiding behind the water fountain which nobody uses because the water tastes like weed-killer. He waves her over and then ducks into the alcove behind him.
Yeah, no. She walks the other way.
But it isn’t long before she hears the clop-clop-clop of his feet behind her, his little legs pinwheeling to catch up. “Wait. Wait.”
She spins. “Dude. C’mon. Just trying to go to class here.”
“I need your help.”
“Oh,” she says. “Here.” Then she musses up his hair. “High school makeover, complete. Now you don’t look like some kind of rocket scientist golf champion. We’ll call that one a freebie. See you.”
She turns, but he steps in front of her, desperately trying to put his hair back in its well-ordered place.
“No,” he says, rolling his eyes. “I need you for something else.”
“Because me helping you the other day wasn’t good enough?”
“You’ll get paid,” he says.
Through her teeth, she hisses: “What is it you think I’ll do for money, exactly? Just because—“
“Oh! No. No.” A genuine look of panic hits his face like a bucket of ice water. Flustered, he holds up both hands and looks embarrassed. “I wouldn’t—I don’t—no, no, that’s not what I mean—“
“Calm down,” she says, voice low. Others are starting to look as Shane continues babbling. She says it louder: “I said, calm down. Just go. I’ll follow. I said, go!”
* * *
She recognizes the boy waiting for her at the alcove’s end, sitting there on the lip of a planter where a plastic tree “grows.” Chris Coyne. One of the school’s self-proclaimed “Gay Mafia.” Each of them gayer and more fabulous than the last. She knows a few of them—or, knew them once, since nobody seems all that inclined to talk to her anymore—and they seemed nice enough, though gossipy.
Coyne’s got his legs crossed. His hands steepled in front of him. His chin is up like he don’t give a fuck.
But when he sees her, that veneer of disaffected pomposity vanishes in a powder flash. His face lights up when she enters the alcove, trailed by Shane. Atlanta’s not used