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And in the incubator, the red light flickers.
Twenty-Four
Micah
“Hop in, we’re going for a ride,” Ethan says on Wednesday, shoulder-checking me in the parking lot as I head for my car after practice. I flop into the passenger seat of Ethan’s truck and am immediately enveloped in a cloud of my own funk. Ethan doesn’t smell any better than I do, and we’re forced to roll our windows down as he drives out of town, the roads switching from paved to gravel, gravel to dirt.
“I am not going back out to Hailey’s,” I say resolutely. “That is a no-shit statement.”
“Relax,” Ethan says. “I know you suck at it but chill out for a second.”
I never realized that Ethan had any clue about my stress levels, and the look I give him must convey that.
“C’mon, man,” he says. “You walk around like your mom stores your Christmas tree up your asshole eleven months out of the year.”
“The tree goes up the day after Thanksgiving and comes down on New Year’s, so it’s more like ten and a half months,” I inform him.
“Still”—he pulls a face—“ten and a half months up your butt is a long time.”
“I’m sure I could get some takers,” I tell him.
“I see a whole new photo challenge in our future,” he says.
“I’m all the way out.”
As we pass Hailey’s house, I ask, “Seriously, where are we going?” The fridge I knocked over is still on its side, broken hinges dangling, naked white interior displaying black mold. Across the road, Restoration Acres slips past. Ava Germaine’s car is parked there, causing a spike to drive upward from my gut and into my throat. We keep going, past the middle of nowhere and headed for the county line.
“Okay, dude, if you park this truck and try to kiss me—”
“You wish,” Ethan says, but he does pull into a gravel lane that runs parallel to an overgrown fencerow, with a NO TRESPASSING sign nailed onto a large maple. He pops his door open and motions for me to do the same. “We’ll walk to the back. The potholes here are bigger than Hailey’s tits, and my suspension is shit.”
“But are they bigger than her cousin’s tits?” I ask, falling into step beside him. “Also, your suspension is shit because you caught a few feet of air when you turned your truck into an airplane on the way to Hailey’s.”
“Duty called,” he says with a shrug.
“More like booty called,” I fire back, glancing into the deep woods running along my right, then the open field to the left, where there are a few POSTED signs nailed into trees. “Do I want to know who owns this or that the answer probably isn’t your dad?”
“It’s part of Restoration Acres,” he says, and I come to a complete halt. The Zedekers have a reputation the same way Hailey’s family does, but with the added spice that they tend to shoot at people on their property who don’t have the same last name they do.
“It’s fine,” Ethan says. “They’ve got hundreds of acres, and that old lady can’t keep an eye on everything. I’ve been coming back here for months, no problems.”
I start walking again but slowly. “If you’re growing pot back here, it’s better if you don’t show me. Plausible deniability, you know?”
“Nope.” Ethan shakes his head. “Remember how I said Jerkoff Dropbox isn’t what Quentin threatened you about? This is the other option.”
We come around a corner, and I see there’s a small pole barn tucked into the woods. It’s old; most of the metal siding is rusted and falling away in places. As we get closer there’s an eruption of noise from inside. I volunteered at the county pound last summer, and it reminds me of the morning greetings—an orchestra of joyful insanity, dogs losing their minds because someone was there to pay attention to them.
But this isn’t like that; the barking is nervous, high-pitched, a thread of fear stitching them together. The punctuating growls aren’t a warning that comes before an attack—they’re the last-ditch effort of a terrified animal that knows it’s going to lose the fight.
“SHUT IT,” Ethan yells, his voice cutting over the barking as we go inside. They do, but there’s still a low, discontented rumbling that hangs in the air, a heavily charged current ready to discharge at any second. There’s no electricity, but there’s enough holes in the ceiling that sunlight filters through. A plywood cage has been built in the corner, chicken wire rigged up as a gate, two pit bulls cowering inside.
“Ethan, what the fuck?” I ask.
“You know about the dogfighting rings, right?”
“Yeah,” I say, throat closing. I know because Dad’s arrested more than a few guys in Bethington, taken a lot of calls when somebody spots the tells—pull chains hanging from trees, dogs on heavy chains, scarred-up faces. I know because in the spring when a stray cat had kittens under our shed, Dad raised his voice to Mom for the first time in years when she put out a FREE KITTENS sign.
“Don’t do that,” he’d said, dragging it back into the garage. “Ever.”
