Shine (7 page)

I’d made a promise—to Patrick, to Mama Sweetie, and to God—and I was going to keep it.

AFTER BREAKFAST, I BIKED TO BEEF’S HOUSE. His dad, Roy, answered the door.

“Well, well,” he said. “Look what the dog drug in.”

He thought that was funny, but then, he thought most everything he said was funny—or smart, or clever. He considered himself to be a pretty big deal, and most of Black Creek agreed. He wasn’t rich like Tommy Lawson’s daddy, but Roy Pierson was the wrestling coach at the high school, and he was good at it. Beef was the star of the team until he dropped out.

“Is Beef here?” I asked.

Roy stretched, his shirt hiking up to reveal his abs. His long hair was in a ponytail, and his frame was lean and mean, though
on the smallish side for a man. Beef was built the same way, but Beef was a good guy, and goodness, rather than meanness, shone through him.

“You wanna see Beef, do ya?” he said, leaning against the door frame. “Whatcha wanna see that sack of shit for?”

I stood my ground.

“Aw, I’m kidding ya.” He nudged my shoulder, making me rock back. “What’s a fella gotta do to make you smile, dumplin’?”

“I was just wondering if Beef was here,” I repeated.

Gwennie, Beef’s little sister, appeared behind her daddy, peeking at me from under his propped up arm. Gwennie and I used to spend a lot of time together, and she told me things about how her daddy treated her. Nothing sick, just lots of yelling and hitting and cruel remarks. Just one more reason I didn’t think Roy was “cool,” like most of Beef’s and Gwennie’s friends did.

“Cat,” Gwennie said from behind her daddy. She was surprised to see me. “What are you doing here?”

The sight of her made a pit open in my heart.

“Hey, Gwennie,” I said. Her dishwater hair was shot through with blond and done up in an attempt at fancy. Half of it was falling down, framing her round face. “I like your hair. When’d you do the streaks?”

“‘Bout two weeks ago. I used Sun In. You like it, for real?”

Roy grew bored and dropped his arm, making Gwennie have to duck to avoid being whacked. “I’ll leave you girls to your girl talk,” he said. “I’ve gotta see a man about a horse.”

He moved past me in a way that required I step back. He sauntered to his truck, hopped in, and cranked the engine. He reversed out of the yard and onto the road, roaring away in a cloud of dust.

“He means get more beer,” Gwennie said. She stepped aside. “Come on in.”

I did, and it brought back memories. Same old linoleum on the floor. Same pictures hanging in the living room. The kitchen, where Gwennie led me, still smelled of bacon, even. Their kitchen always smelled like bacon.

“What’s going on?” she said.

“Oh, you know,” I said. “Nothing, really.”

The lie felt awkward, because Gwennie and I used to be close, even though we were a grade apart and even though she was kind of not so bright. I didn’t say that to be cruel. God gave everyone different gifts, that was all, and hers wasn’t brain smarts. Something I learned from Gwennie was that being smart wasn’t the only quality that mattered in a friend.

Anyway, we used to hang out in youth group and stuff. It was easy to make her giggle, and being around her was just . . . nice. She looked up to me. Then, in the summer after eighth grade, I dropped her cold, just like I dropped the rest of my friends.

“Is Beef here?” I asked.

“Nah, I don’t know where he is.” She opened the refrigerator and pulled out a plastic pitcher. “You thirsty? I just made some Crystal Light. Want some?”

“Um . . . sure,” I said, taking a seat at the table.

She brought me a glass of bright yellow lemonade so fakely sweet it made my teeth hurt. She plopped down beside me, and before I even swallowed, she dove straight into talking about Patrick. She said how awful it was, just
awful
, and a lump rose in my throat. Unlike the Crystal Light, her reaction wasn’t one bit artificial.

Most people were shocked and upset about Patrick’s attack, but also excited, the way people got excited when they saw a car wreck, and the bloodier the better. But Gwennie had a big heart, same as Beef, despite being raised by her full-of-himself daddy and her hardly-ever-home mother, who was a nanny to some rich kids in Asheville.

She also had a big body. She’d grown
a lot
since we were thirteen. Unlike Beef, she’d always been plump, but now she had to angle her chair out from the kitchen table to make room for her thighs. Her breasts were big, too, and her upper arms puffed out of her tank top like marshmallows. I felt bad, knowing the sort of comments Roy surely made about her weight.

She was doing something about it, though. She told me so after we’d said all there was to say about Patrick. She wiped her eyes, blinked a few times, and pushed a fresh smile onto her round face.

“Guess what?” she said. “I’ve gone on a new diet, and it’s awesome. I think it’s really going to work. It’s actually more of a
lifestyle approach
. Can you tell?”

Fondness made my lips curve up. A “lifestyle approach.”
She must have read the phrase in one of those magazine articles saying only eat grapefruit or only eat steak or don’t eat anything at all, just drink diet lemonade all day long.

“Um, yeah,” I said. “You look pretty, especially your hair.”

“
You
look pretty,” she said wistfully. “Gosh, I wish I had your figure. And eyes. And pretty much every single thing about you.” She giggled. “Wanna trade?”

“Ha-ha,” I said, pretending she was teasing. “How does the new diet work?”

She told me about it, enthusiasm animating her features. She
was
a pretty girl underneath her extra pounds.

“. . .which means that in three months I’ll have dropped two full sizes,” she marveled. “Can you imagine? And then, once I’ve gone down another couple of sizes, well . . .”

Instead of finishing her sentence, she blushed. A heavy duty, this-is-serious blush.

“Omigosh,” I said, catching on. I shoved her shoulder. “Gwennie, you man-eater. Are you seeing someone?”

“No,” she said giddily. She tried to stop smiling, but couldn’t.

“Who is it? You know you have to tell me.”

She shook her head.

“Gwennie.”

She shook her head more, still beaming.

“
Gwenn
-ie,” I sang.

“Hush,” she said. “And don’t you say a word. Promise?”

I lifted my eyebrows and didn’t, just for the pleasure of teasing her.

“I’m
serious
, Cat,” she said. “You can’t tell a
soul
, especially with him laid up in the hospital and everyone and their mama already gabbing about him. Okay?”

My eyebrows came back down as I tried to put together the meaning of what she’d said.

She realized her goof a moment too late. “Never mind,” she said quickly. “I didn’t just say that. Nobody’s gabbing about no one.”

I half-smiled, because it was so
Gwennie
to think she could rewind the tape and erase her part of the conversation. Then the humor of the situation dribbled away. Gwennie had a crush on Patrick? How could Gwennie have a crush on
Patrick
?

He was crushworthy for sure, with his green eyes and light brown hair. He was the sweetest boy in all of Black Creek, and probably all of North Carolina. But he wasn’t just laid up in the hospital. He was gay.

I didn’t know what to say. Patrick and Gwennie would never be a couple. But what would be gained by telling her that?

When she was younger, maybe six, she and Beef came over for dinner along with their daddy. Afterward, we kids went outside while Aunt Tildy did the dishes and Roy and my daddy had a drink. Beef showed off his new .22 to Christian, and Gwennie and I chased after the tree frogs that come out at dusk. She caught one, and she was so happy she squealed. Then it peed on her, and she dropped it. When she lunged for it, she stepped right on it.
Squish
.

“Come on, Gwennie,” Beef pleaded when she wouldn’t stop
crying and wouldn’t stop crying. He threw an anxious glance at our house. If Roy heard Gwennie fussing, Beef would be blamed for not taking care of his sister, and later he’d get a beating.

Gwennie bawled. She scooped up the dead frog and tried to poke it back into shape, until Beef, losing his patience, slapped it out of her hands.

“You killed it, so quit. You can’t bring it back to life.”

I remembered how Christian came over and put his arm around her. He was in the fourth grade and knew stuff. He had yet to lose the title of best big brother in the world.

“It’s in heaven now,” he told Gwennie. “If you stop crying, I’ll bury it, and then I’ll catch a new one for you.”

Gwennie went from wailing to sniffling, from sniffling to a few last gulping swallows.

Later, when we gathered on the front porch for dessert, I peeked at Gwennie to see how she was doing. Well, she was gobbling down her slice of Aunt Tildy’s homemade pound cake without a care in the world. Not only that, but she was sitting on the floor in front of
my
daddy, leaning against his legs. Her own daddy was one chair away, but she’d taken mine.

“That’s some cake, huh?” my daddy said, watching her eat. “We need to get you to the state fair this summer. Sign you up for the pie-eating contest—what do you think of that?”

He said it nice. She giggled.

“Aw, she knows how to pack in the food, all right,” Roy said. “Shoulda named her Patty. Fatty Patty.”

“She knows good eating, that’s all,” my daddy said. He rumpled her hair. “Ain’t that right, Miss Gwennie?”

It should have been my hair he was playing with, not hers.

I used my pious voice to say, “Well, I’m just glad you’re feeling better, Gwennie.”

“Huh?” she said.

“About that frog you killed. That poor itty-bitty frog.”

Christian kicked me.

Aunt Tildy said, “What’s that?”

“Nothing,” Christian said.

But Gwennie, she drew her eyebrows together and said, “What frog?” and I have forever after been amazed at how Gwennie erased that dead frog right out of her mind.

Except, did she really? Maybe she was just very, very good at burying things that were ugly. Not that I’d know a thing about that
lifestyle approach
.

I downed the last of my fluorescent yellow lemonade and studied my once-upon-a-time-friend, who was lonely and fat and had a crush on a boy impossibly out of reach. And yet, he’d defended her at the Come ‘n’ Go, when those college boys called her a fag hag.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she said.

I didn’t know I was. I cleared my expression and moved my hand to hers. It was as if I was watching a movie, only I was the one on the screen. I wondered how long it had been since she’d been touched, not counting being smacked around by her daddy.

“Being backhanded, that’s the worst,” she once told me. She confided in me a lot back when we were kids. I suspected she’d confide in me again, if she had anything to confide.

“You have pretty hands,” I said. She did, too. Pale and soft and pretty, nothing bad about them at all. “I wish I had pretty hands.”

“You do,” she said. “You need a manicure, is all. You want me to give you one right now? Hold on.”

She got to her feet, left the kitchen, and returned with a plastic purse filled with polishes and lotions and those thingies you put between your toes to keep them separated.

“Give me your hand,” she commanded.

I gave her my hand. She got to work, and it was just one girl painting another girl’s nails. Except it was more than that, too.

I told her about running into Tommy at church. I mentioned how he was out with Patrick on the night Patrick got beat up, along with Beef and my brother and some others. I asked if she knew that already, and she said yeah. I asked how late they stayed out. She said she didn’t know about the others, but that Beef stayed out
real
late.

“Like, when did he get in?” I said. It felt nice, the way she was rubbing circles into my skin. The lotion smelled like coconut.

“Dunno. I was asleep. But Beef’s always out late.”

“I wish he hadn’t dropped out of school,” I said.

“You and me both,” Gwennie said.

Beef didn’t like school, but he studied enough to get by. He was
this close
to a high school diploma, with a wrestling
scholarship to Appalachian State waiting in the wings, when he blew out his knee in a meet and threw it all away.

“I just wish . . . gosh, so
many
things,” Gwennie said. “I wish he hadn’t dropped out school. I wish his knee didn’t get hurt. I wish he’d let me go out with him and the others last week.”

The misery in her eyes told me what she was thinking. Like me, she wondered if she could have stopped the bad stuff from happening if she’d been there.

“But Beef wouldn’t let me,” Gwennie said. “He
never
lets me hang out with him and his friends anymore.”

“Christian doesn’t like me hanging around, either,” I offered.

“But you like being alone. I don’t.”

I opened my mouth, then shut it, unsure where the truth lay. I didn’t like being alone. Being alone was slightly better than having to deal with people, that’s all. Or so I’d convinced myself.