Part 26 (2/2)

We have been drinking cough-syrupy wine that clings to the tongue. Beth calls it hobo wine, and it feels like we are hobos now. Wanderers. Midnight ramblers.

I forget everything and think that, hidden up here behind the sparkly granite of a thousand gorges and k.n.o.bs, I am safe from all hazard.

But there is Beth beside me, breathing wildly and talking in ragged lopes that seem to streak around my head, across the sky above us.

At some point I stop listening and instead focus on the loveliness of my own white hands, bending and canting them above me, against the black sky.

”Do you hear what I'm saying, Addy?” she asks.

”You were speaking of dark forces,” I tell her, guessing, because this is usually what Beth is speaking of.

”You know who I thought I saw yesterday,” she says, ”driving her wh.o.r.ey Kia over by St. Reggie's?”

”Who?”

”Casey Jaye. All last summer, cheer buddies in your camp bunk, giggling together in your matching sports bras, and that love knot she gave you.”

”It wasn't anything,” I say, feeling an unaccountable blush. ”It didn't mean anything.”

”Opening her thighs to show you her tight quads. I knew her wormy heart. But I shot my wad too soon and you weren't ready to believe me. You didn't want to.”

She will never let it go. She will never forget it.

But then she jerks up suddenly and I nearly slide from the car hood, hands gripping her jacket.

”Look out there,” she says, pointing into the distance, the place where Sutton Grove would be if it weren't just nightness out there.

I peer off into the black, but I can't see anything, just a s.h.i.+mmer of some town somewhere that's mostly, if not fully, asleep.

A lush wino haze upon me, I guess I've been hoping, with colossal navete, that Beth will determine she has won, that she is Captain, that Coach is barely even a coach these days, ceding more and more power, and now she will let it go...she will let it go and Coach will be free.

It's all over, or nearly so.

The police will realize the truth, and it will all be over.

And Beth will be done.

Or nearly so.

I am drunk.

”With her private jokes and her yoga orgies and her backyard jamborees,” Beth is saying. ”All of you curled at her feet. Cleopatra in a hoodie. I never fell for any of it.”

”You never fell for it once,” I agree, trying to fight off the feeling of menace piercing the haze.

”But when I look out there,” she says, sweeping her hand across the lightless horizon, ”all I can think is that she's getting away with it. getting away with it. Getting away with everything.” Getting away with everything.”

”Beth,” I warn. My eyes on the velvety dark below. The expanse of nothingness that suddenly seems to be throbbing, nervous, alive.

What does lie down there?

In this state, the unruly despair of Will's life, the battered end of it, comes to me freshly.

I want sparkled cheeks, high laughter, and good times, and I never asked for any of this. Except I did.

”Addy,” she says, kicking her feet in the air. ”I've got that fever in my blood. I'm ready for some trouble. Are you?”

I am not. Oh, I am not. But who would leave Beth alone when she's like this?

”Let's go look the devil in the eye, girlfriend,” she says, tilting that wine bottle to my lips, to my open mouth, and I drink, drink, drink.

Beth now at the wheel, we are looping endlessly, in curling figure eights, and the streetlamps overhead are popping over my eyes.

Then we're climbing upward again and there's a pause between songs and I hear a roar in my ears. Face to the window, I see the cras.h.i.+ng interstate is newly below us.

We're nearly there before I realize where she's taken me.

”I don't want to be here,” I whisper.

She stops the car in front of the lightboxed sign, The Towers.

We sit, the light greening our faces.

”This is not a place I want to be,” I say again, louder now.

”Can you feel the energy here?” she says, putting lip gloss on with her finger, like we are readying for our dates. ”It's some black mojo.”

”What are you talking about?”

”Our great captain's captain, the she-wolf. The li-o-ness. I can feel her here,” she smiles spookily. ”How it was for her that night.”

I don't say anything.

”The night she done shot her lover dead,” Beth says, crooking her fingers into little guns.

Bang-bang, she whispers in my ear, she whispers in my ear, bang-bang! bang-bang!

And there it is. She has said it.

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