The Boy Who Killed Grant Parker (6 page)

“You sure don't talk like your dad's a preacher,” Delilah said, unfazed by my rudeness. “Does your dad know you use words like that?” She was one of those people who expressed irony in a sincere tone, making it wrong either way you interpreted it.

“They say whore in the Bible all the time,” I said as I sat back on one heel and squinted up at her.

Her eyes widened a bit as she cracked her gum and pushed her hair back from her face. “I'm from a town of twelve thousand people in America's heartland. You think I don't know my Bible?”

I snorted out a laugh and let the subject drop. Remembering my conversation with the Misses Wingfield I said, “The word around town is that insanity runs in your family. On your mother's side. That true?”

Delilah stiffened and her eyes went hard, and I thought I had made her mad enough to set her off, but after a few seconds she relaxed back into her confident slouch.

“It usually skips a generation,” she said. “My grandmother was crazy.”

“Crazy how?”

“She thought she was the illegitimate child of Robert E. Lee.”

“How do you know she wasn't?” I asked.

Delilah gave me a wilting stare to articulate my stupidity before answering. “He died fifty years before she was born.” And then, after a beat of silence, added, “I googled it.”

“Well, you would have to, wouldn't you?” I asked.

“Anyway,” she said, dismissing my comment with a wave, “the Wingfield sisters are a couple of old maids who love to gossip about everyone in town. They're nosy busybodies.”

“I thought they were nice,” I said with a shrug. “They were the only ones with anything interesting to say at Doris's party.”

“Your stepmother is a disaster. At least my grandmother was legitimately crazy. Doris is just a snob and a backbiter. She's single-handedly setting back the feminist movement by several decades.”

“So what do people do in this town anyway? Besides gossip.”

“You mean people our age?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

She shrugged. “The kids with money go down to the lake, ride their WaveRunners, and go waterskiing. They party down there by the lake. The rest of us mostly smoke a lot of weed and eat Hot Pockets.” She paused to consider what other pastimes were immediately obvious but soon gave up the thought with a shrug and a grim, downward twist of her lips.

“Really?” I asked with some surprise. “You guys get weed here?”

Another wilting stare, as if I was possibly the dumbest person she had ever met. “We live in a farming community. Where do you think weed comes from?”

I took the question as rhetorical and didn't answer her, wondering at the time why it was physically impossible to stop a blush.

“Nice shirt,” she said, suddenly changing tack. “Is that a hand-me-down from your dad?”

“My dad has terrible taste in music,” I said, refusing to let her win this round, “and The Smiths rock.”

“Sure,” she said. “I wasn't judging you.”

She watched me for a long minute, long enough that I grew uncomfortable and had to focus all of my attention on the task at hand to avoid feeling awkward. The silence didn't seem to bother her at all.

“Well,” she said as she pushed herself up to a standing position in one fluid motion. “Guess I'll see you around.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said, but she was already walking away. When she looked back over her shoulder, she caught me watching her retreating form intently. Not because her baggy sweatshirt revealed anything of interest to watch. More like I was still trying to figure out if our conversation had been friendly or antagonistic. Either way, she caught my stare but ignored me and kept walking at the same languid pace.

 

8

The second week of school started out better than the first. Now I had a job, a car, and someone to sit with at lunch, even though the job didn't pay, the car didn't run, and Don wasn't really my first choice for a friend. Maybe not even a close third.

That Monday was also the day I met Grant Parker. I had seen him around campus, and we shared fifth-period American History. I was always on the lookout for Penny and her golden head of hair, and I usually saw her walking arm in arm with Grant or hanging around his locker. Before that day, Grant hadn't seemed to take any notice of me, even though I had physically assaulted his team's mascot.

I was sitting with Don and the dork squad when Grant stopped at our lunch table. It was almost like an afterthought, as if it just occurred to him that maybe it would be mildly entertaining to make our social status a little bit more painful. Grant had a buddy with him, a dark-haired guy who kept quiet and let Grant keep all the limelight for himself.

“Hey, Don,” Grant said through a smirk. “Great haircut. Did your mom do that for you at home?”

Don's expression was one of weary resignation. This was a chore he had to face and was resigned to it even though it was a pain in the ass.

“Yeah, Grant,” Don said. “She did.”

“Nice,” Grant said with a nod. “I thought so.” Unable to get much of a reaction out of Don, Grant lost interest in him and turned his attention to me. Grant gave a slight roll of his eyes, quick and subtle so that I was the only one who saw it. He made it seem like we were sharing a private joke, an allegiance, at Don's expense. It gave me a warm feeling in my chest. With that subtle gesture Grant was acknowledging that Don was a total dork, but I wasn't like Don. I was different. Better.

“Hey, so you're the new kid in town, huh?” Grant said with a lazy smile as he extended a hand for me to shake. “I like that move you pulled with Willie,” he said, as if my epic humiliation had been intentional, as if I had planned and executed a comical sparring routine with the wildcat and had somehow come out the winner.

“I'm Grant. Grant Parker,” he said. “I'm the president of the student council, so I wanted to welcome you to Ashland.”

Grant was standing so close to the table I had to bend my neck at an uncomfortable angle to really see him.

“Uh…” My voice came out as a squeaky gargle. I quickly cleared my throat, but the damage was done: the impression was there that I was self-conscious and weak. “I'm Luke Grayson.”

“Good to meet you, Luke,” Grant said with such warmth that I marveled again at how these southern, small-town people seemed to emerge from the womb with charm and manners to spare. “This is my buddy, Tony Hurst.” A moment of awkward silence passed as Tony sized me up like a piece of livestock. He did not greet me with the same warmth Grant had, just stood in stony silence with one hand slung in his jeans pocket and favored me with only a nod. I felt his eyes take in my clothes—and my insignificant size compared to his.

“When did you move here?” Grant asked, oblivious to Tony's coldness toward me.

“About a month ago,” I said.

“From where?”

“Washington, DC.”

“Yeah? Why?”

I've been asking myself the same goddamned question for a month, dude.
“My mom got tired of having me around, I guess,” I said, that particular resentment still very close to the surface.

“Interesting,” Grant said, though it wasn't really. Mom had said she wanted me to have a chance to get to know my dad before I left home for college and abandoned my childhood. She also thought that a positive male role model was something I was lacking, though Dad didn't offer anything remotely comforting in the form of a male perspective.

Tony, Grant's buddy, who still hadn't said a word, was well muscled and deeply tanned. He looked country strong, the kind of guy you see in a pickup truck commercial, with jeans that were faded almost white from age and abuse.

Grant parked himself next to me at the lunch table, one butt cheek rested comfortably on the edge of the tabletop, his boot planted on the seat. He placed his foot on the seat with cool and measured casualness, as if the bench—even the school itself—belonged to him and the rest of us were merely borrowing his things for a while.

“So like I was saying,” Grant said, his voice a mellifluous baritone drawl, “that was a pretty good stunt you pulled the first day of school.”

“Uh … yeah,” I said. Did he really think I had humiliated myself intentionally? It was a brilliant idea, that. If I'd had any coolness factor at all, I would have played it off that way from the beginning.

“Since you're new around here,” Grant continued, “Tony and I were thinking we should take you out, show you around the town.”

Which will take all of about five minutes.

“That would be … cool,” I said.

“So meet us at Parr's Drive-In Saturday night. About eight o'clock,” he said as he stood and straightened his jacket.

“Drive-in?” I asked. “Like a drive-in movie theater?”

“A drive-in diner,” Grant said, as if such a thing were so common I should know what that was.

“Like in the movies?” I asked stupidly, and wished I could take it back as soon as the words left my mouth.

“You've never heard of a drive-in diner?” Grant asked, maybe with a bit of impatience. “I thought you were from the big city.”

“Yeah, we don't … we don't have those … drive-ins, I mean.” God, it really was like I had moved five hundred years instead of five hundred miles. I still had no idea how far Tennessee was from DC, but it was starting to seem farther and farther every minute.

“We'll see you Saturday night, city boy,” Grant said as he started to walk away, Tony falling naturally into place a half step behind him.

I returned my attention to my lunch but our table had gone quiet. When I looked at Don and his friends, they were all watching me in awe.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Don said. “Just … I can't figure why Grant Parker would take an interest in you. I mean, you're … nobody.”

“Thanks for saying so,” I said.

“I just mean … well, you know, I'm nobody too. It isn't a
bad
thing.”

I shrugged, trying to mask my own shock at this development. “Maybe he's just trying to be nice,” I said.

Don gave an emphatic shake of his head. “Oh, no. Grant Parker doesn't have to be nice to anyone. It's weird that he invited you out like that.”

“Like he said,” I said as I pushed my lunch tray away, “he's the student council president. Maybe it's his job to welcome new people.”

“It's possible,” Don said doubtfully. “We've never had a new person before, so maybe there's some kind of student council rule I don't know about.”

“I still don't see what the big deal is,” I said, feigning indifference, though inwardly I couldn't help but feel a little excited. I thought,
Maybe this is it
. Now the popular crowd would take notice of me. Once they got to know me, knew that I wasn't a toolbag like Don and his buddies, they'd accept me among the in crowd.

I glanced casually over my shoulder to study Grant Parker and his friends. They sat at the table closest to the large window overlooking the football field, hogging the only space in the room that was in a warm patch of sunlight.

I could absolutely imagine myself among them.

 

9

Saturday night I rode my bike to Parr's Drive-In. It really was a drive-in diner where you could pull into a parking space and order through a brightly painted speaker. The waitresses did not come out on roller skates—slightly disappointing—but they wore uniforms with short skirts that violated all principles of modern feminism. I was standing against the wall, trying to exude cool and nursing a soda I didn't really want, when Grant pulled into a parking space right in front of me in a shiny silver pickup truck with a king cab, a spotlight, and gun rack on the roof. The gun rack was empty, thankfully.

The door to the truck opened, and a waft of country music floated out onto the night air. Grant stuck his head out of the door and, without so much as a hello, said, “Get in.”

I found myself crammed into the backseat of the king cab with two guys who were folded uncomfortably into the small space, both with cans of beer in hand. Grant threw introductions over the seat back, nearly lost in the noise from the speakers. Skip and Chet. Chet and Skip. It sounded like the name of a reality television show, like they could star in their own version of
Duck Dynasty,
hating gays and liberals for sport.

One of them, Chet or Skip, though I was unsure which, was blond, the other dark-haired. Their faces were largely hidden by baseball caps, both of them wearing hats with blaze orange accents. I wasn't country enough to know at the time what that meant, but blaze orange is the companion color of every man who hunts defenseless woodland creatures.

Penny was tucked in the front passenger seat and turned to look at me between the seat backs.

“Hi, Luke,” she said with a sweet smile.

I smiled and said hello in return, then I noticed Grant's eyes on me in the rearview mirror, the ridge over his brow furrowed. I sat back so that my face was no longer visible in the mirror and looked out the window to keep my gaze away from Penny.

Grant drove us out of town with two cars caravanning behind us. The boys kept up a steady stream of chatter with each other, inside jokes falling like grenades into the conversation. They were so familiar with each other, had known each other for so long, that it made anything they said among them overtly private and exclusive. I sat silently, trying not to let my eyes stray to Penny, who scrolled idly through her phone.

Soon we were on a dirt road that wound over the hills. The road ended and I thought we would stop, but Grant kept on, the snick of dry autumn grass slapping against the body of the truck.

At the top of a small rise Grant shut off the truck but left the headlights burning and the radio playing. Everyone piled out of the trucks and cars, and Grant's buddies got to work building a small campfire under his supervision. The truck bed held several coolers filled with beer on ice, and everyone got down to the business of partying.