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She could still remember that moment.
She’d been so angry. And so hurt. Wearing one of her oversize T-shirts to school, her grandfather’s wristwatch, a pair of secondhand sneakers and jeans with holes in the knees. She had a brand-new pink binder that her grandfather had gotten her, and she knew that it had been a big deal. There were so many years where the bar that her grandpa owned—The Thirsty Mule—barely made ends meet, particularly back then. The downtown of Lone Rock had been functionally dead in the early 2000s. All the way up until the 2010s, and there just hadn’t been a whole lot of money to go around.
Most of the shops back then had signs in the window that they were for sale or rent, while they sat empty.
Not only that, her grandpa just hadn’t known what to do with a young granddaughter that he had taken in a few years earlier.
He loved her. Fiercely. But he had all sons, and his wife was long gone. And the gesture of buying her the pink Trapper Keeper that she had wanted so much had been... It had meant the world to her.
But there was a group of girls at the school who lived to terrorize her. For being tall and skinny and flat chested. For not being cool at all. For the fact that half of her clothes were men’s, and certainly weren’t in fashion. For her long blond hair, her freckles, her horse teeth...
She was occasionally amused by those memories. Because suddenly at age sixteen her boobs had come in, and when they had come in, it had been a real boon. She was stacked now, thank you very much. And it turned her a pretty impressive amount in tips on a nightly basis at the bar.
Whatever.
She thought maybe she should feel a little bit guilty that sometimes she wore a low-cut top to collect a bit more cash. But then she thought of the girl that she had been in seventh grade. The one who’d hadpresident of the itty-bitty titty committeewritten on the outside of her locker door. And then she pulled the tank top lower and leaned toward the patron with a big smile. Everybody had their childhood trauma.
But, her breast boon notwithstanding, she could clearly remember when that same group of girls had taken that light Trapper Keeper with its beautiful white butterflies and tossed it into the dirt.
And one of the boys on the football team had held her back while they’d made sure that it was irreparably torn and stained.
She hadn’t let them see her cry. No, she turned around and punched the boy right in his face. And then she got sent to the principal’s office. For fighting.
“What was I supposed to do? He was holding on to me.”
“You’re supposed to go and get a teacher,”the principal had said, maddeningly calm.
“Why wasn’t a teacher there to help?”
“They can’t be everywhere at once. You can’t retaliate. You have to get help.”
She had decided that was bullshit. Then and there. She had burned with anger.
And in fact, had said as much to the principal. “That’s bullshit.”
“Young lady, we can’t tolerate that language.”
And that was how she had found herself suspended, because she had thrown even more language in the principal’s direction. And the funny thing was, she had just been channeling her grandpa and the way he talked on any given Sunday.
But then, that was the root of the problem. Everything about her was wrong. Wrong on some level. She said the wrong words, and more, the wrong things. She didn’t know how to be a girl. Whatever that meant. Except that she knew that she wasn’t even in the same species as those other girls. And not just because she wasn’t a bitch. They had really been bitches. They werestillbitches.
But she had ended up crying down by the river behind the school. Not sure how she was going to go home and tell her grandfather that she was suspended for a week.
And she was trying to wash the dirt off the binder, scrubbing at it in the water, trying to find a way out of her misery.
And that was when he’d appeared.
He’d been in eighth grade. Tall and lanky at the time, with shaggy blond hair. His family had only come to town a couple of years before, and any other family would have still been considered new. But while the Carsons hadn’t lived in Lone Rock for a few years, they owned land there and were part of the original founding families, so they were considered foundational, not new.
“Hey,” he said. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Well. Everything. First of all, middle school is bullshit.”
“Right,” he said. “No argument from me. Why are you crying?”
“I got suspended. Because these girls ruined my binder. And this boy was holding on to me so that I couldn’t stop them. So I punched him in the face.”
“Good,” he said, nodding decisively.
