I’m hard as a rock.
A smile twists her lips. Her smiles are rare, like a ray of sunshine breaking through storm clouds. Usually I’d feel an urge to wipe it off her face, but it isn’t directed at me. My gaze moves to the other side of the counter and takes in the object of her obvious regard.
Jake Tully.
I tell myself to count to ten and calm down before I do something to sabotage my plan before it even starts.
One Mississipi.
This guy has been in town long enough to understand the rules of this game, but he clearly still needs a violent reminder.
Two Mississippi.
A nice guy who doesn’t have a decade’s worth of baggage, like a weed growing in a garden that doesn’t belong to him.
Three Mississippi.
And he makes her smile. The only smiles I ever see are the ones she gives other people when she thinks I’m not watching.
Four Mississippi.
My gaze shifts away from their faces as the fuckboy hands her a crisp twenty, their fingers touching for way longer than necessary.
A haze settles over my vision, casting everything in red.
Fucking ten.
The door is already slamming open in front of me, before I’ve even realized I’m moving. They don’t seem to notice me, which just ratchets my rage higher.
I should have known playing it cool wouldn’t be an option.
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
