Page 33 of Necessary Cruelty

Twelve

Two days a week,I work as a cashier at the Gas and Sip on Main Street. Even though it barely qualifies as a convenience store, the Gas and Sip is the only place to get food in the Gulch that isn’t served under golden arches or out of a truck that stinks of pork and barbecue sauce. There is a fancy grocery store in the nicer part of town close to the Bluffs, full of organic produce and bulk foods that shoppers can measure out themselves. No one from the Gulch ever shops there, because not only is the store overpriced, but none of the bus routes go there. Even if you have a car, it takes half a tank of gas to make it up the steep roads of the valley

I walk to work, just like I walk most places, past broken storefronts and houses with boarded up windows. Low-hanging fog always descends on the valley in the afternoons, making everything seem like it has been painted in grayscale. Sometimes, the fog is thick enough that I can’t see someone coming straight toward me until their almost on top of me. I used to imagine myself as the heroine of some Gothic romance, pages from being spirited away to something better than her dreary and broken existence.

Then I remind myself how often those stories end in tragedy.

Anti-heroes are completely overrated. I’ve met my Heathcliff, and I need to stay as far away from him as possible.

Wind whips through my hair and casts a chill over my skin. The air smells like coming rain, and I pray it will hold off until I reach the Gas and Sip. It’s one thing to end up soaked on my way home, but I really don’t want to spend my entire shift at work soaking wet and shivering behind the counter like a drowned rat.

The sky is obscured by the fog, but I look up anyway. I imagine I can distinguish the outline of the tall ridge that marks the edge of the Bluffs, even though I know it’s impossible to see from here. If I could see the clouds, I know they’d be the threatening gray of my mood, oppressive and a signal of what might be coming next.

Cortland Manor would be just there, at the furthest point of the cliffs as if thrusting itself forward into the universe. Their private road is long and winding, dangerous even in good weather. My mother used to take the turns so slowly it was a wonder we didn’t go rolling backwards, but that didn’t stop me from gripping the door with both hands, imagining the catastrophic fate if we slipped just an inch off the paved road where sheer cliff awaited.

But thoughts of the manor only lead to reminders of its most notorious occupant.

Vin is the last thing I should be thinking about. He can torture me all he wants at school, but I refuse to let his shadow follow me everywhere else I go.

I pass a house, one of the few still occupied on this block. A bunch of guys I recognize from school are sitting on lawn chairs in the scrubby front lawn that is more dirt than grass. Empty beer cans litter the ground and will probably stay there until someone desperate for cash picks them up to recycle.

One guy, it’s hard to see who it is from the sidewalk, raises the can in his hand like a greeting but immediately lowers it when he catches sight of my face. Once he recognizes me, whatever adolescent mating ritual he had planned is abruptly curtailed. He knows better than to so much as catcall me.

There is no shortage of guys in the Gulch, but none of them are my type, and most don’t bother to briefly acknowledge my existence.

I used to wonder how it was possible that the influence of one guy still in high school could expand to cover the entire town. But then I remembered how many of the men in the Gulch are employed by Cortland Construction. Even the ones that don’t work could have charges laid or dropped on the whim of a county prosecutor who also happens to be Vin’s uncle.

The cone of silence that usually surrounds me is so much worse when I see how wary other people are of me.

It would be better if they didn’t notice me at all.

But Vin won’t let me go unnoticed, not for as long as I have the nerve to show my face in his town.

I enter the Gas and Sip just in time for an orange apron to be tossed in my face that I catch on reflex. Kathy, who works the early shift on the same days I do, isn’t trying to be rude, but she has four kids to get back to and a babysitter who charges for every minute she runs late. That woman is pretty much always in a hurry.

The wooden bowl on the counter next to me has half a bunch of brown spotted bananas and a few apples, which likely accounts for the entirety of the fresh produce available in the Gulch.

Everyone who lives in the Gulch filters through here. I know all of them by sight and most by name. From the drug dealers who think nobody knows about the stash houses they have along the train tracks to the migrant families who work the fields in the rural part of the county an hour away but live here because it’s the only place with houses they can afford. I know all the kids with reddened skin and pinched faces from living too close to the abandoned gold mine, because chronic exposure to heavy metals in the dirt leaves a visible mark.

Splashing water hits the window at the front of the store which is so close to the street that only the sidewalk separates the door from the cars speeding down the road.

“Fuckers!”

Amelia Makepeace slams into the store, soaking wet and fuming. Her long-waisted, ankle-length dress has a muddy stain down the front, and the blue checkered fabric is heavy from street water so it tangles around her legs as she tries to kick it away. She dresses like something out of Little House on the Prairie, but judging from the way she acts, that isn’t by choice.

“God, people drive like they have their heads up their assholes.”

It isn’t raining outside anymore, but there is almost always water in the streets that pools in the deep potholes that never get repaired. When a car drives too fast down the road, like all of them do, whoever happens to be on the sidewalk at the time is going to get soaked.

The Makepeaces don’t let Amelia drive, even though she is more than old enough to get her license. I’m not sure if it’s a financial thing or something to do with their beliefs.

For obvious reasons, I can’t exactly ask.

Not that I should be throwing stones. I have a license but no ability to use it, because Grandpa’s ancient Buick broke down over a year ago and there isn’t any money to get it fixed.

Amelia’s father is the preacher at the tiny little church in the Gulch, although you’d never know it from listening to her. She is a chain-smoking, curse spitting dynamo, but only when her parents are out of earshot. She doesn’t attend Deception High, so I can only assume they homeschool her, but we see each other around town all the time.

I get the feeling she saves up all the snarky things she isn’t allowed to say at home and then unleashes them all at once the moment that she leaves the house. She curses like a sailor and doesn’t seem to fear the consequences when word of it inevitably gets back to her father. Whatever punishment she gets is something she clearly is willing to deal with if it means she can be herself.