She smells like she belongs
Anywhere but here.
Or maybe it’s just me.
seventeen
Harper Apple
“Can I ask you a huge favor?”
I finish shoving the garbage bag into the faded bin before turning. Blue stands there, an extension cord in her hand and her gaze on the corner of the roof instead of mine. I fight the urge to protect the precious stash under the carpet in my closet. I could say no, could tell her the truth: Mom hasn’t paid the electric this month.
But then I think of her eating dinner in the dark, of little Olive taking a cold bath, and I know I can’t.
“Yeah, sure,” I say, gesturing to the outlet on the side of our house. “Go ahead.”
Maybe I’ll stick around for a third fight on Friday. At this rate, Mr. D’s going to rescind my scholarship, anyway. I’ve been reporting back to him for three weeks now, and I can’t imagine he’s found a single word of it helpful. Since Royal’s warning, I’ve stayed away from Colt, but if I thought I was going to get some kind of reward for that, I should have known better. The Dolces have proceeded to ignore my existence all week.
I know that’s a good thing, and that I should be glad. Dixie and her friends even invited me back to their table, probably because they felt sorry for me when I sat alone. Now that I’m not a target, apparently I’m safe enough to have around.
The problem is, I can’t just disappear off the Dolce’s radar. I need information about them, something real, not just gossip and rumors.
Or maybe…
My eyes fall on Blue’s mom’s car, the one that almost never leaves the driveway. Her mom doesn’t work, but she also doesn’t sell the car to pay for blow every few months. What if I don’t need to get in with the Dolces? What if I stay out of their way, stay on the outside, and just look in?
Suddenly I remember something Colt said after we got out of the dumpster. Something about how he doesn’t follow them around watching what they do.
“Hey,” I say to Blue when she straightens from plugging in the extension cord. “That’ll cost you.”
She swallows, but then she shrugs, her voice coming out flat as usual. “Sure, what do you need?”
“How much gas does that thing got?” I ask, jerking my chin toward the Cutlass.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe half a tank.”
“You think I could borrow it sometime?”
“I don’t see why not.”
I wait for her to ask, willher to. This itch to talk to someone builds inside me, but I can’t just dump this on her. I need her to care, to want to know. I fight the disappointment inside me when she walks away, saying I can come by and get the keys whenever I need them.
Fucking Colt. If he hadn’t reminded me what it was like to have a friend, someone to just shoot the shit with, I might not need one now. But I can’t talk to him without putting him in danger, and the other girls will just turn this into the latest story on Dixie’s gossip blog.
I consider calling Jolene, but that would be too weird. The trailer park is its own little world. There’s this odd sense of community among the kids who live there. I didn’t really notice it until I wasn’t part of it, but thinking back, that’s the last time I had real friends. There was this attitude of,Everyone thinks we’re trash, so we have no chance out there on our own, but if we stick together, at least we’ll have each other.
Freshman year, I still hung with Jolene at school, when I showed up, but it wasn’t the same. No one accused me of thinking I was better than them, but I’d achieved what they all dreamed of, so I no longer had the same dream. I wasn’t one of them. Calling her up to bitch about my rich new school would be rude, like I was rubbing it in her face.
After dinner and homework, I go knock on Blue’s door. I figure it’s dark, so if I cruise the Dolces’ neighborhood, they won’t really see the car too close, and even if they do, they won’t know it’s me. I’m in full stalker mode as I pull out of our narrow street and head north. Fifteen minutes later, I’m on the outskirts of town, driving on a winding road between open fields with horse barns in the distance, endless white picket fences surrounding their lush meadows. It looks like something out of a calendar. I had no idea there was anything this pretty just a few minutes from the gritty, grey side of Faulkner.
Little yellow leaves race across the beams of my headlights, the wind whipping them from the trees at the end of the pastures. I almost miss the turn onto another blacktop road, this one even narrower and winding through the trees that toss wildly in the gusting wind. The sky is dark with storm clouds, and a few fat drops of rain splatter the windshield. My GPS tells me to turn, but when I reach the neighborhood, a gate stands across it.
Of course they live in a gated community. They don’t want riffraff like me driving by gawking at their mansions.
I park the car along the edge of the road and get out. Glancing up and down the road, I make sure I’m alone before starting toward the gate. I scale it easily and hop down to the other side. Another covert glance around to make sure I haven’t been seen, and I start along the narrow road that winds through the neighborhood. Giant plantation-style houses stand back from the road on each sprawling lot. Some have giant oaks or magnolia trees or willows out front, and all have massive lawns and landscaped yards.
Thunder rumbles overhead, and the trees toss and twist in the wind. Even though it’s dark out, the white houses stand out well enough for me to spot the one from the online photo, the lights blazing in all the downstairs windows and half the ones upstairs. These people obviously don’t worry about their electric bill, that’s for damn sure.