“Nothing. Just thought I saw animals in the trash.” Maybe it was Brandon. Scaring the shit out of us would be his idea of fun. But still. How would he have set it up beforehand? And Landry would never go for that sort of thing. She’s pretty uptight about the jukebox.
“I want to go home,” Neveah says, thrusting her hands in her hoodie pockets. “This is all too much.”
I sigh. I want to go home, too. The night feels sour now, as if the joke’s on us and we’re not in on it.
She pulls her phone out of her pocket, swipes it on, and types furiously. “Where is Brandon? I knew he should have waited for my shift to end.”
“I can give you a ride.” Even as I say it, I’m wincing. Maybe it’s too much, too presumptuous. Like I said, we’re not really friends.
She glances up, and I can see the calculations run across her face: surprise, suspicion, hesitation, and then all that finally loses to her desire to get out of here as soon as possible.
“Okay, sure. Why not.”
I grin, strangely relieved. Maybe being rejected for offering her a ride home would have hurt more than I want to admit. It’s not that I like Neveah that way. I don’t like any girls that way. She knows that. But I’m the town loser. Nobody wants to spend too much time with a loser. It might rub off.
She bends and picks up the mop where I dropped it, hands it back to me. I gesture toward the rag and spray bottle on the counter. “It’ll be faster if you help.”
She exhales disapprovingly but slouches over to the counter, grabs the cleaning supplies, and gets to work. I start mopping, and we clean in silence, neither of us much wanting to try the jukebox again. But I can’t get that song out of my head, and before I know it, we’re both humming it.
We realize it at the same time and stop. Neither of us look up, an unspoken agreement to pretend like that didn’t just happen, but the horror still lingers on my skin, in the faster-than-normal beat of my heart.
Around midnight, we call it good enough. Neveah helps me put away the supplies, and I let her out the door first, locking up behind her. I pause in the parking lot, eyes scanning for the shadow of movement I saw earlier, but there’s nothing there. I tell myself it was probably just a raccoon, like I thought.
* * *
My old car putters through the empty streets of Blood River. I wouldn’t even own a car if I had a choice, but I need a car to get my mom to her weekly doctor appointments at the hospital in the next town over. That’s also why I got the job at Landry’s. My paycheck, what little there is of it, goes into paying off this piece of junk, and anything left over goes to Mom’s medical bills.
Blood River isn’t very big. About four square miles of gridded streets. We’re two dozen miles from the main highway. It’s one of those towns that was important back when the railroad ran through here and the grain silos were full, but now, with the big interstates and airplanes and nobody growing grain much anymore, people don’t come here. Blood River is what some folks would call a dying town. I mean, there’s the diner, and the high school football games are pretty popular on Friday nights, and there are a few places trying to draw in tourists for white water rafting or fly-fishing in the nearby river, but the only thing we’re really famous for, what gave the place its name, is a massacre.
Not so popular with tourists.
We pass the old graveyard and trail through the empty streets, past overgrown yards and single-story bungalows with paint peeling from the planked sides. I take the corner Neveah tells me to and we roll up to a trailer on blocks and a smattering of dead cars parked haphazard in the gravel out front.
“This is me,” she says.
I pull over. We haven’t said much the whole ride.
She opens the passenger-side door. The little light in the ceiling goes on, and I can see her face. Her skin is a peachy white, pretty much the opposite of my brown skin, and her hair is a bottle yellow, showing darker at the roots. Her nails are long and bright blue, little rhinestones embedded on the tips. She pauses, one blue-jeaned leg sticking out, the rest of her body still in the car. She looks over at me, bottom lip caught between her teeth, hazel eyes too big.
“What is it?” I ask, wary.
“Thanks for the ride,” she says. “I know people give you a lot of shit in town for being—”
“Native?”
“Gay.”
We both flush hot and embarrassed. The silence stretches like another lonely block of this trash heap town.
“I’m sorry about your eye,” she says in a rush.
My heart speeds up a little, but I frown like I’m not following. “How do you mean?”
“How Jason Winters beat the crap out of you, how he and the Toad Twins always beat the crap out of you. How that’s the reason you never go to school. Well, that and your mom being sick.”
I stare at her blankly, willing her to shut the hell up.
“I figure that’s why you like the Blood River Boys story so much. It’s like a fantasy, right? The idea of those Boys coming to rescue you from your shitty life in this shitty town.”
My face heats up, the flush creeping down my neck. “My being interested in the Blood River Boys has nothing to do with any of that,” I lie flatly. “I just like a good story.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
“Because if it were me…”
And I know she is not going to take the hint. “Good night, Neveah,” I say, reaching over and pushing her door open a little wider.
She frowns.
“Good night!” I repeat.
She leans back into the car and reaches for my arm. I shrink back. It’s an automatic response, not personal, but it leaves her hand hovering in the air. The overhead light catches in the rhinestones on her nails. She pulls her arm back and says, “I am trying to be nice to you. Trying to be sympathetic.”
“Keep it,” I say harshly, and even as the words leave my mouth, I regret them. But I don’t know what her kind of sympathetic means. It smells like white girl pity to me, and I don’t want Neveah’s pity. I throw a meaningful glance at her trailer, the beaters in her driveway. You’re not better than me, I say, without saying a thing. Just look around.
Her faces twists up, and my stomach slips to my feet like a deadweight. I’m being a jerk and I know it, but I won’t take it back.
She nods once and slides out of the car. Closes the door, and the overhead light goes off, casting me into the darkness.
Shame blankets me and I groan, rubbing a hand over my face. Why did I do that? No wonder I don’t have any friends. No wonder Jason Winters likes to kick in my face. I’m kind of an asshole.
I wait for her to walk to her door, and once she’s inside, I pull out, gravel rolling under my wheels. I’m halfway down the road, trying desperately to not think about what Neveah said, when I realize I’m humming that song again. The Blood River Boys ballad.
Later, after it is all over, I’ll wonder if things would have turned out different if I’d said something. Apologized for being a dick, admitted what I wanted and why the Boys fascinated me, how I felt about my mom and everything. Maybe Neveah could have said something, conjured some words or a warm touch that would have changed things. But I didn’t, and she didn’t, and things went the way they did in our dying town named after a massacre.