A Better Bad Idea Read online

  He’s watching me carefully, too, and I get a small thrill from it, despite the circumstances. He’s never watched me before.

  “What are you drinking?” I ask him, edging slightly closer.

  He almost smiles, like he doesn’t mean it. “Tennessee’s finest.”

  “Cheers.” I’m close enough now to tap my bottle against his flask, and we both drink, but he’s still looking at me.

  “You sure you’re okay? Your eyes kind of have that look.”

  “What look is that?” I return, desperate to keep him engaged but afraid to give away too much. Sure, I may have just downed more gulps of vodka than I ever have, but I can’t respond with real words, can’t show myself, especially not now. That’s dangerous.

  “Wild,” he says. He licks his lips again, and I like when he does that. “Seen that look a time or two.”

  “Tragedy,” I tell him, wise and mysterious. Please like me like you liked Reid, I think. Like me, like me, likeme. “It’s always chasing me.”

  “I know the feeling,” he says.

  No, he doesn’t.

  Not like I do.

  Here’s how Ashton Harper looks: Imagine perfect pale skin and dark hair highlighted light brown in the moonlight, just long enough to be swept back, and a sharp jawline and dark lashes lining eyes like a storm. Imagine someone who looks so attainable but so beautiful all rolled up into one and a voice laced with southern in the best way possible, clipped vowels and forgotten syllables, dipped in bourbon and peaches and honeysuckle.

  Imagine the boy Reid Brewer fell for.

  Imagine Ashton Harper.

  “How long does it take?” I ask him.

  “The real question is how much does it take,” he answers enigmatically. “And the truth is, I still haven’t found enough to do it.” He rubs his boot across the ground. “Outrun tragedy and all that.”

  I tilt my head to the side. “Oh.”

  I stare down at his foot, the only part of him moving, and then I laugh, almost completely by accident, a sharp sound and then an intake of breath.

  “Are you … laughing?” he asks me.

  “Sorry, it’s just…” I look up, meet his eyes. “It’s a little melodramatic, isn’t it? For you?”

  “I don’t know.” He takes a drag from his flask like he’s really thinking about it. “I mean, here I was out at this abandoned still all alone, right? Am I being melodramatic if no one’s here to see me?”

  “If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it?”

  “Exactly,” he says. “I am a tree alone in a forest, holding on by a thread. Like, here’s what I figure—maybe I am melodramatic as all hell, but if it’s on my own time, it’s nobody’s business but mine. I’m not crying in the hallways at school or church or everywhere. I tried that whole running-around, tearing-the-world-apart thing, and it got me nowhere. Didn’t drive the thoughts away any faster and was a hell of a lot less efficient in terms of having other people trying to fix my problems. So here I am.”

  Because here’s what happened to Ashton Harper: He was perfect and he could’ve had anything he wanted, but he wanted Reid Brewer because she was not anything, she was everything. And when she died, he broke because he loved her so much. Of course he did, because she was bright and shining and wild and he’d tame her with a look. They were going to be together forever and ever because the sun rose over Reid Brewer and set behind Ashton Harper because they were never looking any other way but at each other.

  “That’s not really true, though, is it?” I ask.

  “How do you figure?”

  “Well, you’re not alone, are you? You’re with me.”

  He grins, this time for real.

  Tuesday, October 6, 2019, 3:12 p.m.

  Eight Hours and Twenty-Two Minutes Before

  I climb onto the bus and I sit next to my sister—our sister, mine and Savannah’s, if blood really is thicker than water—and she curls up into my side, falling asleep on the long slow ride through the greater McNair Falls area. Downtown, if you can call it that, is one blinking yellow light, a couple of abandoned buildings, a gas station, and a Dollar General. After that, we reach the open land: trees, pastures, trailers, dirt roads, and more nothing. A ghost town of nothing forever. A population that is dying faster than it’s reproducing, with a school where the yearly graduation classes are dwindling into the eighties. McNair Falls is all that’s left a town over from where the old mill closed down twenty years ago, though the way people talk about it, you’d think it was only yesterday. I lean my face into the grimy window and watch it all roll past.

  Kara breathes against me. She’s tiny—only six and small for her age, pretty hair, long and dark and straight, with easily tanned skin that looks nothing like mine. Nothing about her looks anything like me, like we share even less than half our genes.

  I tug on her hair right as our house comes into view. “Wake up, little nugget.”

  “Tired,” she mutters into my shoulder. Then she looks up at me, and it’s like looking into the sun. Mama’s always preferred Kara to me, and I get it—she looks like joy and I look like disappointment.

  “C’mon,” I say, and we get off at the end of our driveway, taking the long walk down the dirt road leading to our trailer. Kara sighs deeply, slinging her bag around from one shoulder to the other. “What’s your homework look like?” I ask her.

  “Borin’,” Kara says, her accent coating the word.

  “Obviously. All homework is, by definition, boring.”

  “You smell like cigarettes,” Kara tells me, annoyingly superior. I know. I smell it in my matted hair. Smells like weakness.

  “No one likes when you point out their flaws.”

  Kara shrugs.

  “All right.” I push her up the stairs of the caving-in deck in front of our single-wide, the deck Dane promised to fix months ago. “Let’s get you started on your homework before I leave for work.”

  She stops at the door, startled, and looks back at me. “Dane’s home.”

  “Shit.” I roll up on my toes to confirm what became clear as soon as Kara said it. Dane is at home and not at his scheduled shift. I don’t want to leave Kara alone with Dane until Mama gets off.

  “Shit is right,” Kara says.

  I spin her around from two steps below and bend over slightly so we’re eye to eye. “Listen, kid. Don’t piss Dane off.”

  “As long as he doesn’t piss me off first,” she returns, defiant. I stare at her until she deflates, glances down at the ground and then back up to me. “I won’t.”

  “All right, just call me at the store if he gives you any trouble.” I take the steps until I’m up behind her. “And stop cursing.”

  “You started it,” she says.

  “I know,” I say. “But I’m a shit person, all right?”

  “You’re my favorite person, Evie,” she responds with the simplicity of someone too young to know better.

  I push open the door and Dane’s in the kitchen, chopping something up at the square of linoleum counter. “Hey, girls,” he calls when he sees us. His hair’s all mussed up, dirty blond and sticking up in every direction, ten years younger than Mama and eight years older than me. He looks handsome like that. Handsome and dangerous.

  “I was making y’all some snacks,” he says. He’s smiling, grinning so hard it makes my skin crawl. Grocery bags surround him, meaning he spent money. Dane doesn’t believe in budgeting when he’s in his moods.

  “Kara’s got homework to do,” I say, biting my tongue so I won’t comment on the groceries. I spot several name brand boxes and feel sick. “I gotta get ready for work.”

  “I’ll watch her,” he tells me, and our eyes meet for a moment across the distance between. “We’ll be fine, won’t we, Kara?”

  “Sure,” she answers, obedient, dropping to a chair at the foldout table in the kitchen. I reach over, pull a folder out of her bag, and read the assignment written in the front.

  “I’ve got it, Evelyn,” Dane calls to me, fatherly—as if either of us would ever need a daddy like him. “Go on. You don’t wanna be late.”

  I keep reading, ignoring him, but I feel him watching me like fire on my skin. When I look up, I can’t hold my tongue. “Why aren’t you at work?”

  I see the flicker of annoyance behind his eyes, read it like a book, but he wipes it away as fast as he can. “There was too much to get done around the house. I woke up and I felt really good this morning,” he says. His eyes shine bright, genuine. Sometimes, I pretend I’m someone else and I imagine feeling sorry for Dane, for the demons, for the things he may actually hate about himself. But other people fight the same battles, don’t they? And they aren’t like Dane.

  I want to tell him that it doesn’t matter how he feels, that no one cares how you feel when you’re too broke to pay the bills, but I can’t say anything like that because any of it could so easily tip the scales the wrong way, lead to the crash that always comes eventually.

  I live in silence and don’t even get to complain about it.

  “Kara”—I bend down to her again—“you be quiet and stay out of Dane’s way, okay? He’s busy, you heard him.”

  She nods. “I didn’t mean—” he starts, but I turn tail on him and walk down the far end of the hall to my bedroom.

  “Evelyn, I was fixing to make you something to eat!” he calls then, trying to win me over, still trying after everything. Maybe, sometimes, you just want to believe so badly that you’re not a terrible person, that you’re more than the monster underneath.

  He ain’t.

  I stop, count real slow.

  “I’m good,” I say after a minute.

  Tuesday, October 6, 2019, 12:42 a.m.

  Sixty-Eight Minutes After

  We s
tand in silence after that, next to each other, drinking slowly and then quickly and then slowly again, the night spiraling out around us. Birds in trees sing their sad night songs and coyotes beckon to each other in the distance while mysterious creepers and crawlers rustle leaves nearby.

  I’m numb to physical pain by this point. Pretty soon, I’ll be numb to any pain at all. That’s a dangerous place to try and live, but I’ve been holding on to all of it for so long, silent, desperate to scream. Because no one wants to know. Not really.

  Not since Reid.

  I hear them somewhere in the night: the lies I’ve told, men I’ve smiled at, words I’ve held in, just to survive.

  This is survival?

  “The world is bullshit” is what comes out of my mouth, presumably filtered through several shots of vodka.

  “Yeah,” he says, barely more than a thought. “Fuck it.” He looks over at me, studies me a long minute. “You look different. From normal.”

  My fingers go up to my bare lips, fingertips sliding across peeling skin there. “No makeup,” I say simply.

  He doesn’t say anything about how I look, how he prefers me, simply nods and turns away again. I’m a noticeable girl, not hard on the eyes I’ve been told, and he looks at me like a ghost.

  I love it.

  I hate it.

  “Why are you here?” I stand next to Ashton, leaning against a barrel. A mean wind whistles through the trees, clinging to us, to our bare fingers, our skin. I push my curly blond hair out of my face, trying to see him clearer. He looks at me like he’s not sure what that means, so I incline my head toward his drink.

  “Wellll,” he says, drawing it out, “my girlfriend drowned and I’ve been drinking my demons away ever since. Nothing has to happen. It just has to be night and be too quiet inside my head and here is where I end up.”

  “I’d love the quiet,” I say, the words out before I can stop them.

  “You wouldn’t if it sounded like Reid.” The words are soft, and I bristle at them. Because I wish I could hear her again, wish she’d deign to talk to me, even now.

  If I were the dead one, I’d whisper to Reid, a voice carried on the wind. But now, in this reality, she’d never whisper to me.

  “That reason is bullshit, you know that?”

  He chuckles. “You got a better one?”

  “I got a lot,” I return, lacing my voice with confidence I don’t feel. And then I turn the bottle up and swallow and swallow and swallow—goodbye, memories.

  I imagine watching myself the way I used to watch Reid, seeing someone else, being someone else. Because I could be. Here in the dark, here with Ashton, I could.

  “Take this,” Ashton says, proffering his flask, “seems like you could use some of this.”

  I could.

  Tuesday, October 6, 2019, 5:40 p.m.

  Five Hours and Fifty-Four Minutes Before

  The store is completely dead.

  Mrs. Brewer is grumbling about being out of Budweiser in the height of deer season, and Mr. Brewer has been flitting in and out of the back, loading the cardboard boxes piling up into his pickup and taking them to the dump site.

  “Honey,” Mrs. Brewer is saying, walking quickly from the back of the store. I can tell she’s talking to me because I’m the only one there. “Give me a couple of minutes to count the register and I’ll drive you home, all right?” she says. “It’s too cold for you to wait for anyone to come pick you up.”

  Sometimes, she thinks I’m waiting for my ride and the truth is, I’m walking home as soon as she disappears from sight.

  Mrs. Brewer never seemed to care much for me before. But that was then, and once Reid was dead—

  Well, I guess sometimes, you’re all that’s left.

  Every day, it gets closer and closer to then, to the first anniversary of Reid’s death, and somehow, she’s still gone. Here, in this empty store, I wonder if any part of her is left, in the air or the walls or the sounds.

  Or is it over when it’s over? You’re just gone.

  I hope so. I can’t imagine Reid wanting to stick around McNair Falls.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, Mrs. Brewer pulls into my long driveway, the wind shifting the trees, clouds covering the usually bright starry sky.

  “You okay, Evelyn?” she asks me when she stops, turning her dark, kohl-rimmed eyes to me. Her skin is always too orange—going leathery from the tanning bed she frequents—and her eyeliner’s always a mess at the end of the day, but you can tell she was someone other women wanted to be once. Now, something about her just looks broken. “You’re looking tired, girl.”

  Mrs. Brewer married Adam Brewer from Columbia after she spent a couple of years down there getting a cosmetology degree. They moved back to McNair Falls, bought a building, started the country store, and had a kid. Mrs. Brewer had been trying to do everything by the book since before I knew her.

  But it didn’t change anything the other women around town felt about her. She wasn’t one of them; never had been.

  And things never change in McNair Falls.

  I remember Mama saying once, “I don’t know when Helen Brewer got so uppity. Back when she was a Morgan, her family were our next-door neighbors. She was older than me, and she got pregnant in high school, you know. Lost it.” And then Mama sucked on a cigarette and didn’t say any more.

  “I’m fine, Mrs. Brewer,” I tell her. “Just a long day.”

  Mrs. Brewer had finally taken to me, I think, because I was so close in age to Reid. After Reid’s death, she needed someone to cling to, and I’d been there, always instantly captivated at the sound of Reid’s name.

  “Do you need a night off?” she asks.

  I shrug. “It doesn’t matter so much. I’ve got insomnia.” Funny how people screaming all night will do that to you.

  “Look, I don’t wanna encourage anything you’re uncomfortable with, but if you ever need something to help, let me know. Melatonin is a nice little supplement. And if that’s not enough, I have some other things I might be able to give you.”

  Sad people got a drug for everything.

  “That’s real thoughtful of you, Mrs. Brewer. Thank you.”

  I can feel that Mrs. Brewer is watching me. Sometimes, I think she knows more than she lets on about me. About my family. Hell, I think pretty much everyone in McNair Falls knows who Kara’s daddy is. Not mine—he was a wanderer, Mama liked to tell me. Wandered into her life and wandered right out of it. He was no one to McNair Falls.

  Just like me. Half no one. Half infamous. All unwanted.

  “I’m happy to talk about anything that’s bothering you. You know that, right?”

  I don’t say anything because there’s nothing to say. There’s never anything I can say because saying it won’t change it.

  This is it. This is my life.

  “There were so many nights,” Mrs. Brewer finally says to fill the silence, “after Reid died, I thought I’d never sleep again. I’d be up, wondering what had really happened—the story those kids told made no sense. And I haven’t seen hide nor hair of Ashton Harper since then.”

  I sit with that, hungry for more. She stares out the window, off into the woods behind our house.

  “I know what it’s like not to sleep, Evelyn, is what I’m saying. I know what it’s like to hurt.” A long silence passes before she goes on. “I’ll help you in whatever way I can.”

  “I appreciate that,” I say.

  “I know she was difficult,” Mrs. Brewer tells me, the words spilling out, “but that’s because she felt it all so deeply. My Reid. She was always looking for answers.”

  “She wasn’t difficult,” I say. “She was strong. That’s how she survived it all.”

  Mrs. Brewer smiles gently, like I’m a child. “She loved the light as much as the dark. A sunny day as much as the rain. And there’s nothing wrong with that, Evelyn.”

  Reid shone brighter than any star in the night, I want to tell her. She always did.

  But it’s not normal to think things like that.

  “I’d just like to see her bang through that screen door at our house one last time. Doesn’t seem like so much to ask, does it?” She wipes away a stray tear and I think how suffering is a constant ache, pushing down on you.

  I wait like she’ll give me more, but she doesn’t. I’ve got nothing left either, so I get out, close her car door. Everyone in town knows the Brewers have conspiracy theories about Reid’s death. I’d heard them all, collected them, and flipped them over in my mind, but they made me sadder than I already was. So, I hike my bag up onto my shoulder, once, and then walk toward the house, scratching Dane’s pit bull, Porky, behind the ears as I go. He’s so gentle, it’s hard to believe he could belong to Dane.