She dropped into his front seat and inhaled deeply. “I love it!”
“It’s bullshit, though. They don’t even bake the bread on-site. They just pump in this smell to make you think they did.”
“I don’t care.” Lucy sniffed closer and closer to Bucket, like a dog following a trail. “Smells so fucking good!”
“All right, all right. Cool your jets, weirdo.”
“It’s making me hungry, dude. Can we grab some big pretzels before we go to The Exchange?”
“I’ll stop there, but I don’t want anything.”
“Your stomach still all jacked up?”
“Yeah. I mean, I eat, but I don’t feel hungry. My nerves are kind of off now… you know?”
“I know. Can we not talk about it, though?”
Bucket gave a nod and boosted the volume on his stereo. Bass flooded up from the trunk and replaced Lucy’s bad vibes. She couldn’t make out most of the lyrics to the song, aside from some guy with an auto-tuned voice singing, “rub that yayo on your pussy/get that booty numb.” The music hit the right dumb/dead spot in her mind, and she smiled a real smile for the first time that day.
“This is good.”
“Yup. You want mall pretzels or you want to hit the corner market?”
Lucy thought about all the other kids who might be at the mall. Could be Chris Carmichael’s friends. Could be Brady Miller’s friends—Lucy barely knew anybody from Summit Ridge, but they’d had the prior week’s hot tragedy, holding a candlelight vigil for the loss of their classmate. Supposedly he’d been killed by his own mom, which triggered feelings in Lucy that made her ignore the news about that crime in its entirety. Even if they didn’t have to see people directly related to the awful things which had happened, other students would be there, and Lucy thought about how they’d pretend to be interested in her so they could drill down and ask about what had happened in Mr. Chambers’s classroom.
I can’t answer those questions. I don’t want to. I’m not even sure what I really saw.
Dr. Nielsen spoke with her about the way adrenaline affects memory, and how slowly the truth might float to the surface and find its place, and how some of the things she may think she saw were only visions filling in the gap until her true memories were ready.
But there was something on the back of Chris’s neck, right?
She hadn’t yet saved up the courage to ask Bucket what he might have seen.
Her smile dimmed.
Enough of this. Enough thinking. And no mall.
“Corner market’s fine. Can you turn up the music?”
“Sure. AC on or windows down?”
“AC, bitch, so I can keep smelling this crazy-good bread smell.”
She sniffed at him again, closing her eyes, pulling exaggerated amounts of air. Then they both laughed and shared the smallest moment outside their haunted lives.
* * *
The Exchange was cool because nobody went there. Music stores had become halfway museums, the only clients being people so computer illiterate that they still used CDs, and a mix of hipsters, DJs, and old-timers who worshipped at the altars of vinyl.
Lucy liked the quiet mustiness of the place, and the feeling of slowly flipping through their vast rows of records.
Bucket liked it because one of the clerks was a twenty-five-year-old named Toni who was rumored to also be an exotic dancer over at the Boiler Room. She was covered in tattoos and had bright purple hair and big blue eyes, and one time she’d even asked Bucket his real name.
“There’s no way you’re actually called ‘Bucket,’ ” she’d said. “Nobody is called ‘Bucket.’ ”
“It’s my name.”
“Yeah, listen… I know it’s not. I can feel it. I’ve got a few names myself. I’ll tell you what. I’ll tell you my names first, then you tell me yours, and we’ll be good, right?”
Bucket squinted. Lucy had been impressed by how he’d stood his ground against Toni’s charms.
Toni leaned forward across the counter. “The truth is, I have three names. There’s Toni. It’s what everybody calls me. And then there’s the name my parents gave me, which is Antoinette—way too fucking fancy for me to use on an everyday basis.”
It was Bucket’s turn to lean forward. She’d suckered him in by dropping that f-bomb. She wasn’t talking to him like he was a kid. He loved it.
“Then there’s my third name, and I only use that in one place.” Bucket’s eyebrows raised. Lucy knew what he was thinking—The rumors are true! Toni really is a dancer. “So this doesn’t go beyond here, but sometimes I go by the name Amity.”
“Wait… Amity? Like in Jaws?”
“Well, that’s not where I got it from, but sure. I like it because it sounds cool to the clients I work with, but I really like it because of what it means.”
“Friendship?”
“Yeah. That’s what my other job really is. My clients think it’s one thing, and it can be that, but a lot of times they don’t see what I’m really giving them. They need someone to say, I’m here for you, and I’m open to you. You can trust me. I can listen to you. I will look at you because you matter. I’m your friend. People are lonely, you know?”
Lucy looked over at Bucket’s puppy-dog face and thought that this woman deserved to be called something fancy like Antoinette.
“So those are my names. Now it’s your turn.”
“Fine. It’s not very interesting, really. It’s Bakhit. Bakhit, that’s all.”
“Bakhit. I like that. Kind of, I don’t know, exotic.”
Lucy riled. Exotic. Always fucking “exotic.” It’s a common name where he’s from.
Bucket smiled, putty in Toni’s hands.
Toni asked, “So why Bucket, then?”
“Oh, I don’t…”
“Come on! Nobody’s been in this store for the last three hours. The store cat’s got fucking diabetes. He lies there all day.” Toni pointed to a mound of tabby cat lumped in one of the store windows. “Please. Tell me something interesting.”
“Okay. It’s what my little brother Dalir called me, back when we lived in Pakistan. He couldn’t get ‘Bakhit’ quite right. He’d follow me around saying, ‘Bucket! Bucket!’ and we’d all laugh.”
“Oh my god—that’s so cute.”
“Yeah, but, uh…” Lucy saw something pass over Bucket’s face—maybe the realization that she was listening, or that he was about to talk about a part of his past he kept closed away. “My little brother, he, uh, passed away. He got some kind of fever that made his brain shut down… and after that my parents were so sad for a long time. We barely spoke. And when they came out of that they decided that we had to move, to get away from… everything, I guess. So then we ended up in California, before we moved up to Oregon. And once we moved up here, I noticed they’d started calling me Bucket instead of Bakhit. At first it really bothered me, but after a while I kind of figured it was part of… You know, it came from my brother. So I was cool with it.”