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So if she spares herself now, saves herself, then maybe it won’t feel like she can’t live without him.
With a huff, Billie stuffs her phone back into her bag, swallowing back that damn lump in her throat.
She uses the landline at the bar to try her mum. Tries her cell and the boyfriend’s number. Both don’t even ring. So she gives up quicker than she should, deciding her mom’s in a booze hole.
“I’m not going.” Tonya appears behind her, bag strap slung over her shoulder, her eyes like stones pushed into the sockets.
She doesn’t have to specify. Billie doesn’t expect her to go to the vigil.
“Yeah, I didn’t think you would,” she says and leans back against the shelves of bottles. She makes no secret of using the vodka to top up her own bottle. “But you know people will notice that, right?”
Tonya just ticks her jaw and looks away, looks over at the crowds swarming the bar, so many folk that the Joint should burst open at the seams.
“People talk, cops lookin’ for whoever killed him,” Billie says as she pushes away the empty vodka bottle and corks her own. “I get it, T. I wouldn’t want to go if I were you, even if it meant keepin’ up appearances. But the last thing you need is some cops turnin’ up at your dad’s house to ask you more questions because you were one of the very fucking fewnotgo to the vigil.”
Tonya’s jaw clenches even harder. “Fuck,” she grunts and slaps her hands to her tired face. She runs her fingers down her weary expression, leaving red and white marks on her olive-toned skin.
Billie says, “Best option, we call Gigi, tell her to meet us there, then head to the vigil. We didn’t do all we did just to…”
Tonya swallows, hard. Then—after a few heartbeats—turns to Billie with a nod. “Yeah, alight. I need to grab a few things from my place first. I’m driving,” she adds with a stern look. “You’ve been drinking that shit all day.”
Billie doesn’t say it, but ‘So have you’.
She also doesn’t say that a part of her only wants to go to the vigil, because she’s that desperate to keep herself as distracted as possible from Preston haunting her mind.
If she can keep herself distracted for the last month and a half that he’s in town, then that’s a damn win in her book.
11
Billie was right about the candles. Cheap crap passing from hand-to-hand along the rickety wood panels bridged across the narrow point of the swamp.
But what can anyone expect when the folk here at the vigil can barely afford their rent in a trailer park?
There’s no meaning within Billie as she brings the lighter to the wicks. On her flattened palm, she holds three of those plastic-like candles. One for her, one for Tonya, the other for Gigi. Neither of those girls want to light their own in memory or respect for Cletus, and Billie sure as hell can’t blame them.
So without a second thought, she lights all three before she crouches down at the edge of the bridge and carefully lowers them onto the water’s murky surface. Her heart tenses in her chest, as if squeezed by a death grip. All those lit flames already floating over the swamp’s surface, and she can only think of gator eyes watching them—a gator she fed Henry to about to jump out from the depths and chomp off her hand.
A shudder runs through her as she pulls away from the bridge’s rotten edge and staggers back into place by the girls.
Kate does hers and Carmine’s, and with much more grace than Billie could muster.
With a side-eye at the group of girls, Billie’s all too aware of the intruders. The outsiders. The reason Gigi and Tonya can’t say what they really think about all this.
Trevor, with his arm draped around Kate as she rises aback up to stand beside him, and Grace…
Grace isn’t one of them, one of the crows (what Billie calls them in her mind, but never aloud). Once, they were somewhat close with Grace. But a line divided them—the line that divides the Southside from the town suburbs.
Grace isn’t filthy rich, like the wasps who live further uphill in their damn mansions. Like Trevor. Like Preston. But she’s well off enough to live in a nice two-story house with a terrace and big bedroom and in a safe street. All that suburbs crap.
Guess that’s one of the reasons the girls never quite brought her into the fold. The other reason…
Well, she’s Grace fuckingMaxwell.
Billie clenches her jaw at the mere sight of her tucked too close to Carmine. Those two are closer than any of the other girls like. But they got close during their pageant year. Grace (in her wispy beauty and chocolate brown hair down to her tailbone, and those gleaming emerald eyes) came in second, behind Carmine. Hard to beat the natural blonde who looks like she stepped right out of Finland or someplace, tall and slender andsoft—it’s her softness, Billie thinks, that steals the show.
So yeah, they were close for a bit.
Then, of course, they killed Grace’s brother, chopped him up and threw him in the very waters beneath the bridge they stand on.
