for distractions. Strange obsessions. Sweet girls on the other end of the phone.
So he shoved those thoughts away.
But four hours later he was still thinking about her.
Layla.
ANNIE
In the dream, I was leading a crew of detasselers. Teenagers mostly, only a few years younger than me, but somehow they seemed so much younger. Childish with their summer jobs and packed lunches, the early hours making them grumble. One girl, despite being told to wear long-sleeved shirts and pants because corn rash was a bitch, stood there in cutoffs and a bikini top.
“You are going to get corn rash. And corn rash hurts,” I said, lifting my Del Monte cap and setting it back on my head over and over again. A nervous tic.
The girl glanced sideways at a boy who had his paper-bag lunch over the front of his jeans and was pretending so hard, so painfully hard, not to notice Bikini-girl’s attention that the corn could practically detassel itself, under the power of his discomfort and lust.
“I’ll be fine,” the girl said, flashing the boy the coyest of smiles.
“Stop saying that!” I yelled, startling everyone. I didn’t yell, as a rule. A rule I’d learned the hard way. I swore like a sailor, but I didn’t yell.
I took my clipboard with all the crew lists and the leaders and the fields they’d be going to and I started to smash the clipboard against the hood of my truck.
Stop. Smack. Fucking. Smack. Saying. Smack. That.
You will not be fine.
None of us will be fine!
I woke up, the tension reverberating up my arms, my hands clenched in painful fists. My heart pounded in my throat.
Did I yell? I waited, agonized, for the creak of the bed when Hoyt turned over. But he wasn’t there. His side of the bed was empty.
Where is he? Did I oversleep?
Quickly, I put it all together: the surprisingly great mattress, the sunlight through the beige curtains, the smell of Febreze.
The trailer.
Hoyt’s not here.
More importantly, I wasn’t there.
I could have wept.
There was a sudden pounding on the door and it felt like the top of my head might explode. That was the banging from the dream, someone at my door. Carefully, I pulled out the top drawer of the small bedside table between the bed and the wall of the trailer.
The black rubber grip of the .22 felt awful in my hand. Awkward. Cold, and both too big and too small.
“Annie McKay?” a voice asked, a Southern drawl coloring it.
It took me a second, freaking out as I was, but I finally recognized the voice. We don’t truck with no nonsense. That’s what that voice outside had said to me. It was Kevin, the guy in the office, knocking on the trailer door.
Adrenaline and relief made me dizzy.
And the fact that I hadn’t been sleeping or eating in days kept me dizzy.
The world was spinning.
“You don’t have a phone number for me to call,” he said, still talking through the weak metal door with the shitty lock. “And it’s half past nine. You said you were going to start work at eight.”
“Oh no,” I said, scrambling up. I’d slept in my clothes, despite the heat, ready to run if I had to. I wasn’t sure if that was still necessary, but I couldn’t quite convince myself not to do it. I put the gun back in the drawer and pushed my feet into my shoes. “Just a second!” I yelled.
I brushed my teeth too hard, too rushed, and I split my lip again.
“Shit,” I hissed, pressing cheap toilet paper to it.
“You coming, or what?”
“Sorry!” I yelled.
The toilet paper stuck to the cut and I left it there, looking like a guy who’d nicked his face shaving for church. In the mirror, my bruises seemed to be greener than they were yesterday. I put the scarf back on, despite how stupid it looked with my tee shirt and cutoffs, and then I put on my big movie-star sunglasses.
Could I be any more obvious? I wondered, carefully peeling the toilet paper from my lip.
But the thought of not wearing the scarf and the glasses made me feel naked.
So obvious won.
—
Kevin was a big man. Tall, wide, big stomach, big shoulders. His belly peeked out beneath his giant red tee shirt, already sweaty in the August North Carolina heat. He had big feet wedged into Adidas shower flip-flops that looked like they’d been welded on at some point. He wore his gray-black hair in a long ponytail down his back, with