Shine (4 page)

“She had herself a lady revolver, and she made sure everyone knew it,” Hannah said.

“That so,” Zippy said, less a question than a bland acknowledgment.

“I asked her once—her name’s Julia, and she’s real pretty, not at all what you’d expect—and one day I asked if she was scared of panthers or bears, if that’s why she kept a gun. She told me she could handle a panther just fine. What scared her was the thought of a truckful of rednecks paying her a visit.”

Hannah kept her wide, anxious eyes on Zippy, which was lucky for me, as a girl could fool with her shoes for only so long. I straightened up and pretended to admire a quilt hanging on the wall.

“She have a man in her life?” Zippy asked, meaning Julia-who-had-a-lady-revolver.

A flush worked its way up Hannah’s face. “She was a single gal, like I said. Only . . . not exactly.”

“Not exactly a gal?” Zippy said. “Or not exactly single?”

“She was real nice,” Hannah said helplessly. “She was a good friend to me.”

Zippy snorted. “Oh, I’m
sure
she was.”

I didn’t stick around for more. I’d been a fool to think I’d gain anything from church gossip, and I was ready to head home.
Unfortunately, I was waylaid by Verleen Cox, who played the church organ and was the worst gossip of all.

“Oh,
Cat
,” she said, ambushing me with a hug. She pulled back and regarded me sorrowfully. Her makeup was caked in her many wrinkles, and her wiry gray hair was held back in a ponytail. “I am torn to bits about Patrick. Just torn to bits, and I know you must be, too.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said uncomfortably. Verleen had talked to
The Pulse
. She said that Patrick was sexually broken.

“I know how close you two are,” she continued. “I always did hope he’d take a shine to you, if you know what I mean. Pretty girl like you could turn any boy’s head.”

I said nothing.

Verleen clutched my arm. “The gas fumes should have killed him, that’s what they’re saying.” Her color was high with the thrill of talking about it. “They’re saying he may never wake up.”

“He will,” I said. I listened to her yap some more about how upset she was. She just liked tragedy, that’s what I thought.

When she swooshed off to find another ear to bend, I went and sat at a tucked-away window nook overlooking the parking lot.

I didn’t want to run into another soul on the way to my bicycle, not before I’d had time to collect myself.

When Patrick and I were kids, we didn’t have
sexuality
, not that we knew of. We were just kids, running around and catching crawdads and breaking ivy for Aunt Tildy and Mama Sweetie. They used the ivy to make wreaths, which they sold to
fancy ladies in Toomsboro. In the winter, Mama Sweetie added holly berries to hers, as well as those pointy holly leaves. Then they were Christmas wreaths.

Patrick and me preferred to use the holly leaves as pretend needles. We’d play doctor, but not like you think. We didn’t take our clothes off. We said, “Time for your shot. Be brave so you can get your lollipop.” Our lollipops were pretend, too.

Once, in early April, we were out collecting ivy and we got lost in a laurel thicket. Laurel branches grew twisty and gnarled, and if you got stuck in a patch, the overgrowth was so thick you couldn’t see the sky. We knew we’d blunder out eventually, but for then, all we could see were laurel branches behind us and in front of us and above us. It was like we’d been spirited into a fairyland—the elf kind of fairies, not the other.

We sat for a bit. There were so many shades of green, it made my head spin. Even without direct sunlight, the green shone down on us and filled us with the promise of spring. I felt as if we were part of the forest, as if the real world no longer existed. Or, if it did still exist, that it no longer mattered.

Maybe Patrick felt the same way. Maybe that’s what gave him the courage to open up to me.

We were in the seventh grade. I had a chigger bite on my ankle, and while Patrick talked, I dug at my flesh with dirty fingernails.

He told me he’d been at Tommy Lawson’s house the other weekend with some other guys. No girls, just guys. Tommy’s
daddy was at work, and they’d snuck into his home office, where the computer was.

“Check this out,” Tommy said, smirking. Patrick didn’t say Tommy had smirked, but I was sure he did.

Tommy sat at his dad’s desk, tapped at the keyboard, and pulled up a porn site that showed people doing nasty things without their clothes on.

When Patrick got to that part, my jaw dropped open, and I probably laid off my obsessive scratching. Nudie pictures? Tommy? Tommy was a ninth grader like my brother, and he was the handsomest boy I’d ever seen. He had blue eyes and sun-streaked blond hair, a shade my aunt called towheaded. He wore nice clothes. He smelled good, a novelty among the boys I knew. He smiled easily and with confidence, and though he made mean jokes sometimes, I didn’t realize they were mean. Like, he’d say I was fat and pinch the spot above my hip that on all girls is pinchable, unless they’re anorexic.

“Shut up, I’m not fat,” I’d say, flustered by his touch.

“I’m just messing with you,” he’d say. He’d tickle me again to make me squirm. “Just means there’s more of you to love, that’s all.”

In the laurel thicket, where no one could see or hear us, I widened my eyes and whispered, “Omigosh, Patrick. Did you look? Were the girls pretty? Did they have big—you knows?”

Aunt Tildy called them bubbies. My brother, Christian, called them a word that rhymed with “bits.” I didn’t call them
anything, not boobs or breasts or bosoms or hooters. Patrick didn’t call them anything, either.

“There were guys, too,” he said. “In the pictures.”

“Gross,”
I said, delighted. “Could you see their . . . ?” This time I didn’t say “you knows.” I just lifted my eyebrows.

The skin of Patrick’s neck grew red, and then all the way up his face and out to the tips of his ears. I assumed he didn’t like talking about boy parts any more than I liked talking about girl parts. Although actually, I did like talking about them, just not labeling them. And actually, Patrick did, too.

I didn’t yet realize that Patrick was as handsome as Tommy, just in a different way. I didn’t see it because Patrick wasn’t a
boy
. He was my best friend.

Plus, Tommy and Patrick were totally different. Tommy was cocksure of himself, while Patrick was shy, with a habit of ducking his head and looking up slantwise as if he wasn’t sure he was supposed to be there. Where Tommy’s eyes were blue, Patrick’s were green. Not the swampy green of the swimming hole, but a startling bottle-glass green, like a 7UP bottle shot through with light.

“If I tell you something, will you promise not to tell?” he asked me in the laurel thicket.

“Sure,” I said. It was delicious telling secrets in the hushed privacy of the forest, where not even the sunlight could cut a path to the leaf-covered ground.

“
Really
promise,” he pressed. “You can’t tell Gwennie or Bailee-Ann or anyone.”

I nodded. Did seeing all those pretty girls do something to Patrick? Was he going to confess a secret crush? Or maybe one of the other guys had confessed which girl he had a crush on. What if Patrick was going to tell me something about Tommy?

Patrick swallowed. “Seeing those naked pictures . . .”

I waited. Above us a bluebird whistled
tur-a-lee, tur-a-lee
.

“I didn’t like looking at the girls,” he said in a rush.

“Oh,” I said. That wasn’t what I had expected, but . . .
oh
. “Well, that’s fine. In fact that’s nice of you, Patrick. That means you weren’t being sinful.”

“No, I was.”

“Nuh-uh, ’cause you didn’t pull up the dirty pictures,” I argued. Patrick was always hard on himself. He cared about God, and he cared about Mama Sweetie, and he worried about disappointing them. It was my job to assure him he didn’t.

“Tommy brought y’all in and showed you, so if anyone was sinful, it’s him,” I said. “And like you said, you didn’t even like looking.”

“Except I did,” Patrick mumbled.

“What’s that?”

He tucked his chin to his chest. “I did like looking. Just . . . not at the girls.”

“Oh.”
This time the processing took longer, but not by much.

Later, when I mulled it over, I realized I’d already known. I just hadn’t
known
I’d known.

I told myself it wasn’t a big deal. Patrick liking boys was part of who he was, but it was hardly the whole picture.

I WASN’T SURE HOW LONG I SAT IN THE WINDOW nook. When I came back to my body, I found myself gazing at the windowpane, but not actually seeing anything. I blinked to wake up—and then
bam
, I was awake all right. My brother, Christian, hadn’t attended this morning’s service, which was no big surprise. But there in the dirt parking lot was his Yamaha, and parked alongside it were Beef’s Suzuki and Tommy’s bright yellow BMW.

Where were the owners? If their motorcycles were here, then they were, too. A panicked scan told me they weren’t in the fellowship hall, so where
were
they?

I located Christian leaning against the church’s brick exterior, over near the kids’ playground with its rusty bobbing duck
and a red plastic slide. He was alone. I pressed my lips together, strode to the side door, and pushed into the midday heat.

I checked to make sure Christian was by himself and marched over.

“What are you doing here?” I demanded. My talking skills may have been rusty with the general population, but not with Christian. “You can’t just come for the doughnuts, you know. You only get doughnuts if you sit through the actual service.”

“I’m not here for doughnuts,” Christian said. “Jesus, Cat.”

I put my hands on my hips. “That’s right:
Jesus
. Jesus is why you’re
supposed
to be here. Good for you for learning your Bible lesson.”

He gazed at me. He had circles under his eyes, and his hair, dark like mine, was mashed down from his helmet. He needed a shower. He didn’t always look this thrashed, but what happened to Patrick had taken its toll on him, too. That as well as something else, I suspected—and it was the
something else
I had my sights on.

“What in the name of creamed corn are you blabbering about?” he said.

What in the name of creamed corn, indeed? When I was younger, I would have laughed at that expression, because it was funny. Christian, if I was being objective, was often funny. But I’d fallen out of the habit of laughing at his jokes.

Anyway, my blabbering wasn’t the issue.
He
was the one leaning against the church wall in jeans and a dirty T-shirt. He was the one full of intrigue and secretive, shadowed looks.

“Where’re your buddies?” I asked. I called his gang of friends the redneck posse. Their leader was Tommy Lawson, whom I hated. The other main players were Beef and Dupree, and my brother, of course. The girls attached to the group were Bailee-Ann, who was Beef’s girlfriend, and occasionally Beef’s little sister, Gwennie.

They liked to hang out at the abandoned Frostee Top, drinking beer and smoking pot. Sometimes they raced their motorcycles up to Suicide Rock. They were all about being loud and having a good time, no matter how out of control it got. After Patrick and I stopped being friends, those guys took him in and made a mascot out of him, sort of. That’s how it looked. Like, they were always teasing him, and the teasing wasn’t always nice, especially with Tommy large and in charge. But they pretended it was all in fun, even Patrick.

“Tommy’s helping his grandmother with something,” Christian said.

“His
grandmother
,” I said scornfully. Other kids had grannies or meemaws; Tommy had a
grandmother
. Ooh la la.

Christian ran his hand through his hair. “Yes, Cat. His grandmother. She needs his help, and he told her he’d meet her here.”

“Then where is he?”

“In the front parking lot with Beef, loading stuff into her car.”

“Why aren’t you helping?”

“There were only two bags. God. And since I know you’re
gonna ask, here’s the answer: What’s in the bags are supplies for the new mailbox she wants, the kind that locks.”

“A mailbox that locks. How exciting.” I did a sweep of the parking lot to make sure Tommy truly wasn’t nearby. “So y’all were tearing up the hardware store while I was inside praying for Patrick. That just takes the cake, doesn’t it?”

Christian narrowed his eyes. “Lay off, will you? Or else tell me what’s gotten you so riled up. One or the other.”

I stepped closer. “You were with Patrick the night he got attacked. You ever going to tell me what happened? What
really
happened?”

“Patrick was attacked on
Sunday morning
. He was with us that night, yeah, but everyone was home by, like, one.”

“Not Patrick,” I said.

“I don’t know what you think happened, Cat,” Christian said. “It was just the bunch of us hanging out.”

“Then why do you and Beef and Tommy keep skulking around? Every time I see the three of y’all together, you’re deep in conversation. And every time I come over to say hi, you shut up quick. So what’s that about?”