Black Chuck Read online

  Her breath caught. It hadn’t occurred to her before that the number would still work. That it might trap his voice like a bug in a bell jar. No one used phones anymore—at least, not as phones. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d actually called him, even when he was alive. Phone calls, like Sunny had said, were only for serious things.

  She’d forgotten the sound of his voice, the way he drawled a bit, stretching hey and Shaun out from the back of his mouth, giving the words a lazy, friendly tone. It was mostly affectation. None of the others spoke the way he did, the way she imagined surfers talked in California, mixed with a little backwoods Brad Pitt. But no one questioned it either. It was just Shaun. Just the way he was.

  The voice mail beeped in her ear, snapping her back to the attic. She pressed End and dropped the phone to her lap. Nothing left of him is real, she thought. Just pictures on Facebook and voice mail that no one will ever check again.

  She pushed her chair back and went to the window, pulling the curtain aside. If she leaned her cheek to the frame, she could just see the patch of uncleared land at the edge of the yellow field. Nan’s place was beyond it, hidden from view at the far end of the road. Was his phone still there? Did Nan even know how to use a cell phone? The idea made Evie strangely sad.

  A picture of his room, the disaster of it. Pale-beige water stain blooming across a corner of the ceiling, clothes on the floor, peeling posters, broken skateboard decks. And at its center, Shaun turning to grin at her, embarrassed, pulling his earlobe, his other thumb hooked to his jeans. His toast-and-honey drawl: “It’s kind of a mess.”

  He’d once told his story about Nan walking in on him in bed with a girl. It had sounded so implausible, just an excuse to talk about sex. But after she’d seen his room, she wasn’t surprised that Nan hadn’t noticed the girl in the ruins. The place was like the crater of a blitz bomb. Evie’s own little attic might have been small and cold all winter, and too hot come spring, but it was sure better than Shaun’s room.

  But still, some of the best nights of her life had been at Nan’s. In the front room, all of them together. Sunny lounging her long bones in Alex’s lap, swinging her hair and laughing her bright, pointy laugh. Ré as slouched as the faded chair he sat in, looking dark and moody as always. And King Shaun, of course, holding court.

  To think of Nan’s place now, empty and still, was just too painful. Like swallowing something jagged that scratched all the way down.

  Three hours later Sunny pulled up to the house. She leaned on the horn for an obnoxiously long time, forcing Evie to leap down her front stairs so the neighbors didn’t shout out their windows.

  She threw herself into the car, breathless. “God, I didn’t think you were coming!” she said. “What took you so long?”

  Sunny threw the car into reverse and backed out of the drive with the same mighty confidence she’d had with Ré’s car. “I told you,” she said. “I had a thing.”

  “You always have a thing,” Evie said, clinging to the passenger door and her irritation.

  Sunny shrugged. “I’m a busy person. Besides, what else were you doing tonight?” She whipped a cold smile at Evie that pushed her down in her seat.

  Evie wondered what bug had crawled up Sunny’s butt and died, but she said nothing, just counted streetlights as they went by.

  “Earth to Evie!” Sunny snapped impatiently. “God, you’re so spacey, Ev. Seriously, if you don’t want to talk, why did you call me?”

  “Sorry,” she said. “It’s just been kind of a weird week.”

  “Yeah,” Sunny agreed. “Tell me about it.” But neither of them said anything more.

  Sunny drove toward town just a little over the speed limit. It was a bad habit every local shared—knowing the roads too well. Letting their shapes unfurl beneath the wheels, curves and dips and hidden stops as familiar as old gloves. Evie pitied the rare tourist who found himself a car length ahead of Cold Water drivers like Sunny, her high beams up his tail, insistent, annoyed, shouting, Go faster.

  On the south side of the highway, just before town, a flat-roofed strip mall stretched out. Its faded fluorescent-lit signs twitched and flickered, though the shop windows were mostly dark. The parking lot was empty, just a handful of cars catching red lights off the Chinese restaurant at the far end of the strip. Sunny pulled in, parking in front of the late-night pharmacy.

  “I gotta pick up a prescription,” she said. “You coming in?”

  Evie shrugged. “Sure.”

  There was a nicer pharmacy on Hope Street, just across from the Olympia. It was homey and well stocked, with leaded windows lit by string lights. Its aisles were filled with the plastic-vanilla scent of decorative candles, more like a gift shop for the unwell than an actual drugstore.

  This place was its opposite. Dingy and medicinal, with cold fluorescent lighting. Dust bunnies huddled under the shelves, awaiting extermination. Evie followed Sunny inside, but the other girl took off toward the back with a speed that said she didn’t actually want the company.

  Instead of chasing her, Evie wandered the aisles, poking through bins of cheap chocolate and tubes of sunscreen, the bright lights making her feel as faded as an old photograph. It was nearly closing time. She and Sunny were the only customers, maybe the only ones in hours, but the girl at the cash didn’t once look up from her magazine.

  Evie ran her fingers over plastic pots of eye shadow, lip pencils and rows of nail polish that looked like bright, bottled candies. A whole wall devoted to making women more enticing, lips and eyes like fishing lures twisting in river water. Masks to hide behind. Evie flicked a glance in the shop girl’s direction, then slid a twenty-dollar lipstick into her shirt pocket.

  “Christ, let’s get out of here,” Sunny said, stuffing a small paper bag into her fringed purse and pulling Evie along with her momentum. “This place is like a fucking zombie movie.”

  Evie smiled at the girl behind the cash as they sailed past her. “Thanks,” she said.

  14

  E

  Sunny parked behind the Olympia. A single streetlamp threw faded yellow across the parking lot and into the trees. It was barely enough light to see by as the girls picked their way down the cement steps into the park.

  At the band shell, Sunny jumped up, swinging herself easily onto the stage. Evie was too short for that route and went around to the stairs at the side. She crossed the wooden planks and sat next to Sunny, her fingers gripping the edge of the stage.

  Sunny had been tight-lipped all evening, which was not like her. She was never short on words like Evie was. But unlike Evie’s long silences, Sunny’s appeared to work furiously below the surface. Words seemed to boil under her tongue. Evie could almost hear them lining up to be said.

  When Sunny did speak, her voice was as hard-edged as her limbs.

  “What’s going on with you and Ré?”

  Evie’s mouth turned to glue. “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Sunny said, sounding like maybe she did know. “Seems like you guys are all super tight or something now.”

  “Oh.” Evie looked down at her bare legs. She could smell the sweetness of the stolen lipstick on her mouth—it tasted like cake.

  Sunny kicked her feet impatiently, boot heels smacking the wooden facing of the stage. She jutted her chin toward the park. “I don’t think you know him as well as you think you do,” she said. “That’s all.”

  That dark feeling seeped into Evie’s chest again. She wanted to ask Sunny how well she thought Evie knew him. But she didn’t speak. Sunny had been friends with Réal a lot longer than she had, and maybe she was right. Maybe Evie didn’t know him at all.

  Sunny’s long hair shook as she spoke, hiding her eyes. “He was with Shaun the night he died. Did you know that?” Her words were full of defiance and challenge, but they showed surprise too.

  Evie looked at the side of Sunny’s face, trying to pick out the meaning behind her challenge. “I knew,” she said.

 
; Sunny looked at her, lips pressed tight. Her eyes seemed to flick all over Evie’s face and arms, making Evie shrink behind the lipstick. Then she turned away, long hair hiding her face again. “See what I mean?” Sunny muttered. “You’re all tight now.”

  Evie expected Sunny’s voice to throw the knife it always carried, but instead it was a strangled, hurt sound, laced with envy. Totally un-Sunny.

  Evie sighed, looking away from her.

  Inky trees blurred the edges of the star-pricked sky; dull purple light shone in the streets beyond the river. It was a warm night, and they weren’t alone in the park, but Evie didn’t know the other voices floating in the grass, and they didn’t call out to be known. “Sunny,” she said, “Shaun is dead. My boyfriend, Ré’s best friend, is dead. Ré and I kind of have a lot in common right now.”

  “So what happened at the lake?” Sunny asked, with just the edge of the knife. “He’s been weird ever since then.”

  “Weird how?” Evie asked. Ré had never fallen asleep in her bed before. She’d never held him while he cried. Evie didn’t know what to compare that to.

  “I don’t know, like he’s avoiding us or something. He never answers my texts anymore.” Sunny shook her head and looked down at her jeans. They were dyed ombré, fading from black to pale gray the farther down her long legs they got before disappearing into her beat-to-shit biker boots. Evie pictured her on the back of a motorcycle, a Valkyrie in black leather.

  “Do you love Alex?” Evie asked.

  “Why do you keep asking me that?” Sunny snapped. “What does it have to do with anything?”

  “I just—” Evie hesitated. She pressed her lips together. “I never told Shaun I loved him.”

  Sunny stared at her, saying nothing. Then she looked away and said, “You don’t have to feel guilty for that, Ev.”

  “That’s the thing,” Evie told her. “I don’t. Not for that.”

  Sunny looked at her again, waiting.

  “I never told him,” she said, ”because I never really felt it.” She thought of Ré’s hand on her belly, of the look in his eyes before he’d run from her bedroom that night. “I didn’t know what it was supposed to feel like,” she said. “And I didn’t want to get it wrong.”

  “Well, Shaun loved you. He wasn’t worried about getting it wrong.” There was a sneer in Sunny’s voice, like Evie should be more grateful.

  Had he really loved her though? It might have been close to love, a cousin of love. It was huge and bright, and it had burned away the person she was before he came along. But was that love? Or was that just Shaun being the white-hot center of everything, like he always was? It had never been Us Against the World, Love Conquers All, blah, blah. The truth was, everyone close to Shaun was just a bit player on his stage, and they all knew it.

  And that’s why she’d never said I love you. Because Shaun had never really loved her. He’d never stepped outside his own spotlight long enough to love anyone but himself. He’d simply cast her in a role. He’d chosen her.

  Evie squeezed the wooden planks beneath her legs. “No, he wasn’t worried,” she said quietly. “But he was wrong.”

  Sunny scrambled to her feet and stalked away from her, stomping her boots. She stopped and whirled back. “What are you trying to say, Evie? That your whole thing with him was just bullshit?”

  The curve of the band shell grabbed her voice and threw it across the open park. There was laughter in the dark from where it landed, and other voices threw it back, mocking her: “Yeah, Evie, is that what you’re trying to say?”

  Evie sighed. Of course, she knew how they all felt about him. How they looked up to him, and how much it must hurt to hear that she didn’t feel the same way. It was like admitting that she was a fake. That she’d never really been part of their tribe.

  She lay back against the boards and folded her fingers over her belly, legs dangling over the side of the stage. The inside arc of the band shell was painted sky blue with wobbly gold stars spattered across it, but in the dark it was all just gray. “I hate this town,” she said, staring up at it.

  Sunny shifted but said nothing.

  “I hate being poor,” Evie continued. “My mom works all the time, and we still have nothing. And my dad barely stuck around to help her out. But you know what? They were in love too once. And maybe they didn’t think they were getting it wrong, but they sure as hell were.”

  Tears slid from the corners of Evie’s eyes down into her hair. She blinked them away, keeping a steady gaze on the painted sky. It wasn’t exactly self-pity she was feeling, though she couldn’t quite name it anything else.

  “I don’t want to get stuck here my whole life,” she said. “Living in a shitty house at the ass end of town, just like my mom did when Dad ran out.” Evie closed her eyes and breathed deep a few times, letting the air press her body outward from the inside. Then she sat up and rubbed her eyes, sniffling.

  Sunny crossed her arms over her chest. She looked away, into the dark. Neither of them said anything for a long time. And then, very quietly, Sunny said, “I have to go home now.”

  Evie remembered them all up at the lake, not so long ago. The last time they’d all been there together. Too late to be winter, but not yet really spring.

  If they were honest, it was still too chilly to be there, and despite the huge fire they’d built, the sand was cold and damp, and they’d all given up trying to sit in it.

  Evie had huddled in a too-big jean jacket and red flannel shirt, babysitting a bottle she wasn’t actually drinking from. She didn’t know which of them had started it, but Shaun and Alex were taking turns leaping over the flames, spraying sand and pebbles in all directions when their feet hit the beach.

  It was always like that when those two drank together. One would poke the other’s rib, crack a joke, and some silly dare would snowball out. This time, it was fire walking. Seeing whose long legs could fly highest over the flames. Screams of fearless joy bounding out across flat water.

  Alex loved Shaun. Loved him ferociously. He was Shaun’s coppery double, his adoring kid brother. Evie liked watching them together, the way Alex fought for dominance but was just as happy to lose it. The way they slapped each other’s arms and laughed and put each other down. The ape language of boys, all gesture, grunt and grin.

  She’d hovered at the edge of the fire, trying to stay warm, but the shrapnel of sand and pebbles kept pushing her farther back into the dark.

  Shaun landed a jump and fell into her, stumbling, laughing, arms windmilling. He snatched her up by the waist and kissed her hard, still smiling, so his teeth smashed into her lips, sparks flying out across her mouth. Then he pulled the bottle from her hand and whooped into the night sky.

  King Shaun, the invincible. Evie stepped back and walked away.

  The dark closed in pretty quick just outside the firelight. The smell of newly thawed earth filled her nose, sharp, cold and alive. She lifted her fingers to her lip and felt where Shaun’s teeth had crashed into it, hot with blood under the skin. He got like that when he was drunk. Careless. Reckless. Other bruises whispered under her clothes. He never really meant them, but he’d never tried to stop them either.

  The sandy, twiggy earth under her feet slid and cracked as she found her footing in the dark. When she blinked, she could still see yellow flames printed inside her eyes. She made her way back toward the cars, Shaun’s and Ré’s, trying to pick them out against the trees. She came upon them faster than expected.

  To her left, several feet into the darkness, Evie heard a small sound. It was hardly anything. The boys’ shouts from the fire were bouncing all over the beach and scattering in the sand, louder than anything else even at a distance. She sucked her lip, running her tongue over the angry part, trying to soothe it, trying to keep her eyes from filling with tears.

  And she heard it again. A whispered ahh and a soft laugh. A purr. Evie stopped and looked toward it, still sucking her lip. Her tears were flowing now. It wasn’t just the sting
of her lip. It was that Shaun was indestructible. Always falling into her like a freight train, like whatever was in his way couldn’t hold him, couldn’t stop him. She couldn’t even try.

  She heard Sunny’s voice. A low murmur, not her voice, and then Sunny’s again, dismissive, laughing: “He’s fucking drunk.”

  Evie could picture Sunny tipping her dark hair back, her long white throat releasing the sharp notes into the air. Evie walked toward the sounds.

  Sunny and Réal were strangely tangled against the trunk of the Buick. Evie blinked at the picture—were they…? She blinked again, but the picture had changed. Ré was walking away, toward the fire. Sunny looked over her shoulder at Evie, eyes gleaming in the black, the smile on her lips like a switchblade.

  Pictures from that night shuffled back to her now, like cards in a bad hand. The boys gone all Lord of the Flies—well, just Shaun and Alex. Ré had barely said a word that night. But of all of them, Ré was most like a stone, an anchor in the water. He was always quiet, so she hadn’t thought anything of it. Hadn’t even noticed. Her smashed lip and her irritation had got all her attention that night.

  But now? As she eyed Sunny across the tan leather seats, she could see the hint of that soft ahh on her lips. Her and Ré pressed to the back of the Buick, dark clothes and dark hair camouflaging the real shape they had made in the shadows.

  Sunny’s Valkyrie swung low over Evie’s shoulder, switchblade in her hand. How could she have been so blind? She tried to think of other moments, other clues. Ré’s low voice telling Sunny to stop it that day they’d taken his car. Sunny so stressed about what had happened at the lake without her. Was he flirty? It ate a hole through Evie’s gut right down to the leather seats.

  “Sunny,” she said, feeling sick. “Let me out here. I’m going to walk.”

  The moon was high and thin and lifeless, barely lighting her path. If she followed the highway, it would take an hour to get home from where Sunny had dropped her, so Evie aimed for the cemetery, the remains of that night at the lake playing on as she cut through the quiet streets.