Chapter 4

Briggs Lake was a long, narrow reservoir surrounded by trees and little cliffs. There was a spot in the woods, right by the front of the lake, that had sort of been worn into a small path. You could sit on the edge of the little hill there and look over at the water. If you scooted down far enough, you could dip your feet. Gary liked to fish there, but it was too dark and he didn't have his gear with him. It wasn't much. It wasn't like the water was sparkling and beautiful, but it was usually quiet and nobody bothered you much. We liked it.

The best part, by far, was that I was pretty sure Heather was gonna' hurl when Gary finally stopped the truck. He'd taken every back road he could think of, even though you could get to the lake by just taking a right off of Proctor Mill. Gary was all over Logan County, and it wasn't like the roads were paved. It was mostly gravel out in the country and Dennis' kids weren't used to it. Brad seemed to have had a good time, though. He hadn't spilled a drop of his malt liquor and he was grinning like the idiot he was when we got out of the truck. Heather, on the other hand, was trying her best to look like she wasn't disgusted. Her face was almost green, but she still managed to bat her eyelashes at Gary and he still managed to ignore her completely.

While Heather tried her damnedest to get Gary's attention, Sam and I retreated into the trees and hung our legs over the edge of the hill. Since we were alone, I stretched my legs out, not worrying about how short my skirt was for a few seconds. Then I made a mental note to remind myself later that I would never let Sam dress me again. I was aching for a pair of pajama shorts. The crickets hummed and I wished I couldn't hear anything but them. Instead, I could hear Heather in the distance, peppering Gary with questions about what he liked to do for fun and whether or not he had a girlfriend and what he'd been up to to get all those muscles. Brad was splashing around in the water like a five year old, and I barely even felt guilty for kind of wishing he would drown.

Finally, Sam let out a big, loud, dramatic sigh.

“I miss my boyfriend.” she pouted. “You've got boys fawning all over you and here I am all by my little lonesome.”

She was faking a southern accent because she knew it always made me mad. I was stuck with a thick Alabama drawl I couldn't quite get rid of and she had the diction of a trained actress. You couldn't really tell where she was from. But she was good at faking accents and I told her she should go into voice acting for cartoons and stuff.

My head whipped around so fast I almost felt my neck crack.

“Have you lost your mind?” I asked, “What's in that bottle of Boone's?”

“I'm serious.” she laughed, passing the bottle of pink liquid to me and letting me take my first sip of the night. “I keep trying to tell you how stunning you are and you don't even believe me when you've got a trail of boys looking at you like you're a goddess.”

There she was, being a big drama queen.

“What boys?” I demanded to know. “Every boy that talks to me is only talking to me to get to you.”

“That's not true.” Sam shook her head.

“It is so true!” I told her. “Do you know how many times somebody's come up to me and asked me what was up with you? If I had a dollar for every time, I could buy the whole damn country.”

Maybe now I was being a little bit dramatic. But it was mostly true.

“What about Gary?” she asked, not even giving me a chance to answer. “He's nuts about you and he and I are like cousins. Or brother and sister, even.”

“If you and Gary are like brother and sister, then me and Gary are like brother and sister.” I argued.

“No. He definitely doesn't see you that way.” Sam kept shaking her head, like it couldn't stop. “And James. You've got to be blind if you couldn't tell that he was interested.”

“If he was interested, he was interested in you.” I insisted.

“What about Brad?” Sam asked, pulling her hair back and turning her whole body so she was looking me right in the face.

“That's just disgusting.” I groaned.

“I agree that it's disgusting.” she shrugged her shoulders. “I'm just saying. He'd hit it. He might hit it and quit it, but he'd hit it. Hard.”

I scrunched up my nose and shook my head.

“You're gonna' make me throw up.” I grumbled.

“Speaking of hitting it and quitting it,” Sam ignored me. “Mike Stevenson is trash. And he's only gonna' use you for what he can get from you and then he's gonna' forget all about you. I heard Misty Kinser talking to Sandy earlier and she said that he was taking her to prom next year.”

“He's not taking her to prom!” I just about yelled.

Misty Kinser was probably the grossest thing I'd ever seen. She had been seen in the back seat of just about every boy in Logan County's car. If Mike was taking her to prom next year, which was almost a year away, I would donate my internal organs to science before I even died.

“Of course he's not taking her to prom!” Sam growled, shaking my shoulders like she was trying to jostle some sense into my head. “But he told her he was. He probably did it to get into her pants, which she gladly let him do, because she's a disgusting s**t.”

That, I could agree with. But I couldn't stop thinking about me and Mike on the glider swing the other night. If I thought about it hard enough, I could still feel his lips on my lips and our knees brushing together and I could hear his breathing if it was quiet enough. I didn't want to think about him taking anybody to prom. Even if it wasn't me. I didn't even care about prom. But I didn't want to see him going with anybody else. Was that too much to ask?

“Jesus H. Christ.”

The sound of Gary grumbling under his breath broke me out of my thoughts and I looked up to see him pushing branches back so he could get to the clearing. Heather was close behind, chattering away like a squirrel. He looked at me like a dog with a little kid trying to ride on its back. His eyes were begging for help. I almost laughed at how stressed he looked, because I'd never seen him so annoyed. He was so easygoing, it seemed weird for him to be anything else. But his jaw was tight and his eyes were glazed over like he'd been shot with a tranquilizer dart. I couldn't really blame him. Heather had that effect on me, too.

“So do you ride horses or just take care of them?” Heather was asking.

Gary scrambled to sit between me and Sam, almost pushing Sam out of the way to make room for himself, so that Heather couldn't sit next to him. Sam laughed, leaning against a tree, and waited for Gary to answer just as intently as Heather did.

“Both.” Gary said, his tone clipped. He pulled his knees up and rested his elbow on one of them, then he squeezed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger like he was trying to get rid of a headache. But Heather was the headache.

“He rides them and he grooms them. He takes care of them.” I said. “And sometimes he shows them and sometimes he sells them.”

I spouted off what I could think of so Gary didn't have to do any more explaining. Plus, I really wanted to get Sam off topic. But it didn't work.

“Let me ask you this, Gar-Bear...” she smiled.

“Don't call me that.” Gary laughed.

“Our little Jobie made out with Mike Stevenson and now she's sad that he said he'd take somebody else to prom. I think you should tell her what you think about that.” Sam almost sang the words.

“Prom's over.” Gary noted.

“I'm not sad!” I insisted.

“Next year, though.” Sam said, like I wasn't even part of the conversation.

“Well.” he said, rubbing a hand over the top of his short, dark hair. “That's... that's no good.”

“Do you like that guy, Gary?” Sam pressed, egging him on.

“No. I don't like that guy.” Gary admitted, sounding more annoyed. “He's a spoiled little a*****e.”

“I don't care if you don't like him.” I snapped. “Because I like him and I'm pretty sure he likes me.”

“Why wouldn't he like you?” Gary asked, shrugging his shoulders. “I didn't say he didn't like you. I said I didn't like him.”

“I don't care if you don't like him!” I repeated louder this time, exasperated.

“I know! You just said that!” he yelled back, then asked, “Why are we yelling?”

“Why are you yelling?” Brad asked, climbing up the hill and sitting on the other side of the tree Sam was leaning against. He was shivering a little bit, soaking wet from head to toe, and I was pretty sure his buzz cut was covered in leaves.

“Jobie's mad that Mike's taking some other girl to prom next year.” Heather filled him in.

“I'm not mad!” I groaned.

“Who's Mike?” Brad asked.

“He lives next door.” Heather explained.

“To us?” Brad looked impossibly confused.

“You are so f*****g stupid!” I yelled, surprised at my own outburst.

“Damn.” Brad laughed. “You are mad.”

“She's not mad. Her feelings are hurt.” Sam sat up straight, like she was about to go into one of her long drawn out explanations of something simple like we were all idiots.

“You shouldn't be hurt, though. You should brush it off your shoulders and move on.” she told me. “Because if I know about one thing, I know about boys. And I know that that boy is a piece of trash.”

“How can you possibly know that?” I argued.

“I just know.” Sam said. “Because I keep my ear close to the grapevine and you keep your head in books.”

“You're making fun of me for being smart?” I cut my eyes at her.

“No.” she leaned in front of Gary to hold my face in her hands, pushing her palms into my cheeks until my lips puckered. “I love how smart you are. But when it comes to boys, you're an idiot.”

“You're an a*****e.” I countered.

She kissed me on the forehead with a loud smack and sat back, swigging the last of her bottle and tossing it dramatically into the woods.

That seemed to be the cue that wrapped up the night. We stayed just long enough for Brad to ring out his shirt and shorts. Against all of our protests, he stripped down to his boxer shorts right in the beam of Gary's headlights. Heather cornered me behind the truck before we were ready to leave.

“I'm not sitting in the bed of the truck again.” she glared at me, like she was threatening me to say otherwise.

I didn't have to. Even if I couldn't count on Sam for anything else, I could always count on her to jump into any confrontation I didn't want to have. It was like there was something in her blood that made her good at fighting with people. She was fearless. And even though she'd thrown quite a few punches in the time I'd known her, more often than not, she could cut somebody down with nothing more than a few words. And sometimes, she did it so well that people didn't even know she was being nasty. She could make her voice so sweet it practically dripped like syrup.

“Look.” Sam said sternly, placing a protective hand on my shoulder and sort of nudging me to the side to say that she was handling things now. “Gary doesn't like you. You've been getting on his nerves all night. He's just too polite to say anything. Do yourself a favor. You're only embarrassing yourself.”

At first, I thought Heather might burst into tears. It was dark and her face wasn't very clear. But instead of crying, she crossed her arms over her chest and cocked her hip to the side.

“I don't think you know what you're talking about.” she enunciated every syllable slowly, like she was trying to teach a baby to talk. “I think you need to mind your own damn business.”

“I think you need to get in back of the truck before we leave you here to find your own way home.” Sam said, calm, cool, and collected.

Heather looked at Sam's face for several seconds and I guess she figured Sam was serious. Finally, she let out a dramatic shriek and climbed into the back of the truck with her brother.

“Your friend is crazy, Jobie.” she hissed at me as I came around to the passenger door.

“Yeah.” I mumbled, “I know.”

Gary didn't take as many of the back roads home, but he did go a little bit out of the way just because that's the way he liked to do things. Sam leaned her head against my shoulder and I looked over her out the window at the fields that passed. The corn wasn't in yet, but it would be soon. And there were miles and miles of soybeans that practically glowed bright green under the moonlight. The air smelled good and clean and I wondered why everybody didn't live out in the country. Sure, I would get stir crazy every now and then but Bowling Green was only a forty-five minute drive away.

Before I started to doze off a little bit, I thought about a lady from Washington state that Mama used to work with at the food stamp office. She said when she was in her twenties, before she and her husband got married and had kids, they lived in a converted school bus with a little kitchen and a bedroom and a sitting area. It even had a bathroom, she'd said. They just traveled wherever they wanted. They went all across the country, pulling in at campsites or parking lots, and sometimes, she said that they'd just drive into an empty field and stay there for a while.

I imagined how cool it would be to live that way�"not moving around from place to place, but parking somewhere in the middle of the country. Maybe I'd get one of those vintage Airstream campers. The silver ones that you had to pull with a truck were pretty cool. Or maybe I'd get one of those old Volkswagen buses. I didn't need much. But the more I thought about it, the more I figured I'd miss having a space. I actually kind of liked space. I'd probably hate living a life like that. Knowing me like I knew me, I'd probably figure out a way to hate wherever I lived. Our house was perfect. It was within walking distance to my best friend's house, it was bigger than any house we'd ever lived in before, and I loved hanging out in that gazebo with the glider swing. But just about every day I found something I hated about it. The bathroom counter was too low. The sink was too small. The carpet was too stiff. I was never satisfied with anything.

“Hey, wake up.” Sam whispered, knocking me out of my little half-asleep thoughts.

“Let me out.” I mumbled, yawning, “Thanks for the ride, Gary.”

“Any time.” he nodded, lifting a hand to wave at me.

Sam slid out of the truck ahead of me and followed me inside. At first I thought she was just stopping in to say hey to Mama, but apparently she told Gary she didn't much feel like going home, so she was just gonna' stay at my house. For some reason, it felt like it should be after midnight, but it was barely ten o'clock. The house smelled like garlic and I went into the kitchen to find pork chops and green beans still warm on the stove. There was a note on the refrigerator from Mama that said there was applesauce inside to go with dinner, if we wanted any. But she hadn't even gone to bed yet. She gave Sam one of those long, tight hugs that always made her feel calm and safe and right at home. And then she fixed us all a plate of supper.

When Sam first started coming around, Mama hadn't liked her much. She said she was warped and that she was a bad influence. But once she found out the kind of stuff Sam had to deal with at home�"even though she liked Lynn a whole lot�"she took my best friend under her motherly little wing. And then one time Sam confided in Mama that our house was the only place she felt safe and that maybe Mama didn't let me get away with as much as she got away with at home, but if she ever felt like she needed a place to feel safe and loved, she knew she could always come home with me. I think that probably broke Mama's heart a little bit. But ever since, Mama had been crazy about her. And because Sam was so skinny no matter what she ate, Mama loved feeding her.

After we ate, Sam put on one of my t shirts and a pair of shorts and I sat in the bathroom with her while she washed her face. I loved watching her do anything beauty-related, because it was mesmerizing. I put on makeup, sure, but she just seemed to be such an expert. And when she washed her face, she reminded me of one of those girls in Neutrogena commercials. She made sure ever inch of her face was clean before drying it off gently with a towel and then she put moisturizer all over her face and neck. I wondered where girls learned things like that. Had she watched Lynn or Granny do that when she was a kid, or did it just come natural? I was lucky if I even remembered to wash my face.

“You know what?” Sam said, sitting in the floor of the bathroom with her back against the door.

I was sitting on the edge of the tub, fiddling with a strand of fringe on the edge of my skirt.

“What?” I asked.

“I think you should invite Mike over next weekend.” she said, “That way you can get a feel of how he acts when it's not just the two of you.”

“Do you think he'd come?” I asked, not even bothering to ask what had changed her mind about him being a piece of trash.

“I still think he's a jerk.” she said, like she could read my mind. “But if he's not, he'll want to hang out with you no matter who's around.”

“What if he doesn't?” I asked, more myself than her.

Sam didn't say anything for a minute, but I knew she'd heard me because she was looking right at me. I thought for a minute she was gonna' say something deep and philosophical like she usually did. But instead she reached for the door handle.

“Then f**k him.” she shrugged, heading toward my bedroom. “He doesn't deserve you anyway.”

I followed behind like a loyal puppy and then I put on my pajamas and we both crawled underneath the covers on my twin bed. Heather was sitting up in the bed across from us and she put her magazine down just to tell us how weird we were and how we looked like lesbians, sharing the same bed. Sam asked her so what if we were, what was she gonna' do about it and that shut her up real quick.

Normally, it took me hours to fall asleep but that night it took no time at all. And for some odd reason, I dreamed that Gary was building us a house.