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He took a seat at the table, and crossing his arms across his chest, fixed his eyes on Tiffany. “Stopped by her house and was told you came here instead.”
“We changed our minds,” Tiffany said, irritation thickening her words. “Haley needed to talk and wanted to get out of the house. Her mother’s still in a bad way.”
Charles looked at Haley and his expression softened. “Your mother still having a tough time?”
She nodded. It was true. Her mother had been grieving ever since the accident, and it hadn't lessened. The woman, who was once brimming with life, an eternal optimist, was now silent and much too thin. She lay in her bed night and day, detached from the world.
The part that wasn’t true was the original plan to stay at her house. She wasn’t sure what lies Tiffany had told him and didn’t want to get involved. Her friend lied too much and Haley wasn’t in the business of keeping track.
“If there’s anything I can do to help out, let me know, okay?” Charles said.
“Thanks.”
Haley studied the crowd and saw Troy, an old family friend, standing in the distance. “Excuse me,” she said, relieved to have found an excuse to get up. Any excuse. “I see someone I should go and say hi to.”
A moment later she was across the room, and Troy was beaming down at her. “Look at you. Growin’ like a weed, mon cher!” His smiling lips gave way to tobacco-stained teeth. His face was ruddy and sagged with years of alcohol and too much Louisiana sun. “Ol’ Sudley sure did make one pretty youngster,” he gushed.
No, she wasn’t pretty, she thought. She was plain and hopelessly unmemorable. Tiffany. She was the pretty one.
Troy stood too close and had sour breath. He was one of her daddy’s childhood friends from Weston. Haley’s father had become a math professor at Cavelier de La Salle Community College, the college the kids from Chester, Truro, Weston, and Grand Trespass usually went to after high school before they dropped out and started their own families. The four towns were in spitting distance of each other and were all so pathetically small one could set foot in all four within the span of twenty minutes. Troy had become a mechanic and had moved to Truro.
Though jovial and a pleasant person, Troy was one of the last people she wanted to be around right now because he was just another painful reminder that her daddy was dead.
He took a long swig of his beer, and Haley glanced past him at her friends. Charles was leaning across the table. Tiffany’s face was drawn. She twirled the necklace over her thumb and shook her head.
“I never woulda thought I’d outlive ol’ Sudley,” Troy said, slurring his words. “No sir. He was always the responsible one. Level-headed. Always did what was safe. We used to make fun of him as kids, ‘cuz he never seemed like he was one, you know? An old soul that one was.” He wavered and held both hands in front of him to steady himself. “Whoa there.”
“You okay?” she asked.
“Depends on yore definition of it, I reckon,” Troy replied, and let out a big-chested laugh before taking another swig.
She watched Tiffany march out the back door. Charles got up and followed her.
“Folks just don’t look right at their funerals.” Troy said, his eyes glazed from the alcohol. “Hardly look like themselves. Such a shame. It’s a good thing that yore daddy had a closed casket. I’ve been to funerals where folks looked plain different than they had in—” He stopped abruptly and his ruddy cheeks grew red. “Sorry, cher. So, how’s yore mama? She doin’ all right these days?”
Haley took a step backward. “Excuse me,” she said. She hadn’t heard anyone say her father’s name in seven months, much less talk about him dead in his casket. She hurried to the bathroom.
After splashing cool water on her face, she locked herself in one of the stalls and leaned against the rusted out avocado-colored door. She knew she shouldn’t have gone out, but Tiffany begged her. Now she was fighting with Charles in the parking lot, and who knew how long they’d be? She took deep breaths through her mouth and focused on the wall in front of her, because if she closed her eyes she knew her mind would take her places she was too afraid to go.
Chapter 2
HE WAS A liar. Lying was what kept him safe, alive, and relatively sane when he was little and his mother would crawl into his bed. When he became older and she continued to crawl in.
He lied about everything and to everyone: his wearisome, red-faced manager at the Wi
He was sure that people liked him because of the person he pretended to be, and that if they knew who he really was, they’d be terrified. They’d fear for their lives. They’d hurt him. The thought unsettled him almost as much as the terror trapped inside his head.
Some people thought they were close to him. They weren’t. He made sure of it. If. . . they only knew.
It was dark now in the woods. Very still. A sharp contrast to what was transpiring inside his head. A slew of horrid, dangerous thoughts like fireworks, exploding, overcrowding his skull.
He felt far from at peace and always had. But something about this summer in particular had stirred him. His mind was a pressure cooker that desperately needed release. Screaming at the pond wasn’t enough anymore. They’d begun to scream back.
Brushing away a low-slung limb, he trudged forward. A pair of yellow eyes studied him from within the tall grass and his heart skipped a beat.
It was the sickly stray cat that he’d named Ian. It followed him everywhere these days: to the pond, through the woods. Its heinous face even peered through his tiny bedroom window at the worst of moments. Over the months, Ian’s eyes had turned evil and he wanted nothing to do with the revolting animal. “Leave me the fuck alone, Ian,” he seethed. But the cat didn’t budge. It just stood there, intimidating him. “Fuck off, I said!” He lunged at it. It shrieked and shot into the darkness.
He headed back to the small house he shared with his sister. But he knew he wouldn’t be able to stay there for long. He avoided it as much as possible. It’d been hers, his mother’s. Inside it, he was still a terrified, angry little boy.
Outside of it, he could usually fake who he was and become almost normal. The lies were his salvation. But not in the house, a place that would remain a cruel part of his life until his sister graduated high school. Either then, or until he was forced to destroy her.
But when he neared the house, he couldn’t bear to go in. The light in his sister’s room was switched off, which could only mean that she was out. But she wasn’t the only one he had to worry about. Some nights his dead mother’s presence just felt too strong.
He decided to take a drive.
Chapter 3
FIFTEEN, MAYBE TWENTY, minutes passed before Haley left the bathroom at Provost’s. She glanced around the bar. Tiffany and Charles hadn’t returned. The cheese sticks and sodas were still on the table, untouched. She left a five dollar bill and headed to the back door.
She swung it open and stepped out into the warm, sticky night. The putrid odor of Trespass Bayou hung in the air. “Tiff?” she shouted into the parking lot. “Charles?” She waited. No one answered. She walked deeper into the lot and swatted at a cloud of gnats that darted toward her from a flickering light post.