Rewrite Redemption (32 page)

“I get it,” I said. “I’ll do everything I can—”

“Okay, then. Just so you know. Where were we?”

“The crazy gene.”

“The crazy gene…right. This was before A.J. was born. A.J.’s great-grandfather, Charlie, was supposedly one fry short of a happy meal.” She pointed to a photo of a tall, white haired man standing beside an oak tree.

“Is that this tree?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “It was Charlie’s tree first. And I guess that Charlie got a little absentminded as he got older. He disappeared from time to time, causing problems.”

“Disappeared?”

She shrugged. “Wandered off, I guess. He was old. It was a long time ago. I don’t know all the details. Anyway, Simone worshiped her grandfather. He was this sweet old man, and she claimed he was eccentric, not crazy. The two of them were tight, into the environment and stuff.  

“Simone’s mother died when she was young—car accident. Her father remarried some bimbo, trophy wife. He and Charlie didn’t see eye to eye on anything. Charlie was a gardener, a thinker, the artist type. He built this for Simone.” She gestured around the room. “Simone’s dad was country club. Charlie embarrassed him. So the dad pretty much just got him out of the way.”

“How?”

“Put him in a home and took control of all the assets. It was sad. Charlie didn’t do well locked up. He was an outdoor guy and he went downhill fast. One day he just disappeared. No one knows how he got out of the home. They never found him.”

“Harsh,” I said.

“Exactly.”

 “Simone spent years trying to track her grandfather down, but they never even found a trail. She blamed her dad and they never spoke again after that. A few months after her grandfather’s disappearance, her dad sold off the land surrounding this house. Then he and the trophy wife packed it up to Florida.

“Anyway, when no one believed her about A.J., Simone finally decided she had to be hallucinating. It made her question everything. If she was wrong about A.J., maybe she was wrong about Charlie too. Maybe he had a crazy gene, and she’d inherited it, and that was why she thought A.J. was disappearing. When we were nine, she wolfed a bunch of pills. It was massive heartbreaking.”

Yeah, I was familiar with the pill-wolfing thing. “Harsh,” I said again. “How do you know all this?”

“Simone kept a journal,” she said. “We found it the day she died. When it happened, Sam called my mom and asked if I could come stay with A.J. When I got to the house, A.J. was curled up in her mom’s chair, sobbing her little heart out. The journal was under the cushion. So that had a lot to do with why A.J. thinks it’s all her fault: her mom’s suicide, her dad being a mess, everything.”

My phone alarm buzzed and we both kind of startled.

“Perfect timing,” she said. “That’s A.J.’s story in Cliff Notes. You ready to spill?”

“You have an open mind?” I asked.

“I do,” she said, nodding.

“No problem then,” I said. “No problem at all.”

Before I could blink, the Indian was between the cowboys and me. “Not your child,” he said calmly. He gestured with his knife, which was dripping blood from skinning the rabbit.

Fear buckled my knees. Struggling to control my shaking, I took a few wobbly steps backwards and leaned against the tree for support. I clutched at my ripped hoodie, pulling it closed and wrapped my quivering arms across my chest. Then I crouched by the tree, my eyes riveted on the scene in front of me.

“Easy now, Chief, take it easy,” Joe said indignantly. “This here belongs to us.”

“We found her,” Edgar chimed in, licking his lips, as if I was a pork chop.

“Not your child,” the Indian repeated, wiping his knife on the grass.

Joe looked at the knife. Edgar whispered something to him. Joe nodded. “Hey, we’re happy to share,” Joe said, backing up, hands held up in front of him.

Edgar backed up too.

The Indian just stood his ground, staring them down.

The cowboys retreated to complain by the campfire. “No hurry…plenty a time,” said Edgar. “How bout we get that rabbit cookin?” He pointed to the rabbit and held up the stick the Indian had been sharpening to skewer it.

Completely ignoring me, the Indian walked over to him and grabbed the stick. Glaring at Edgar, he shoved it through the rabbit in one violent move. Edgar flinched. The Indian changed his gaze to Joe and did the same with the second rabbit. Joe, who’d just opened his mouth to say something, closed it abruptly.

Both cowboys suddenly got very interested in the whiskey bottle. The Indian put the rabbits on to cook. Then he crouched by the fire, staring into the heat. The cowboys passed the bottle back and forth talking low and urgently to each other. Not once during the little scene had the Indian looked at me.

Not once.

I was confused. I sat back against the cottonwood. Obviously, the Indian wasn’t on the same team as the cowboys. But he seemed a little scary. Still, he was the only thing between me and the Gross Brothers and things too horrifying to mention. I wanted to thank him, but had no clue how to do it.

When the rabbits were done, the Indian split them up, and the cowboys dug in greedily. The Indian walked over to me with a hunk skewered on a stick. He handed it to me gently and motioned for me to eat. I took the stick and nodded. He looked at me intently for a moment and then went back to sit by the fire.

Now that the action was over, he broke his pattern of ignoring me. As he sat staring into the fire, he glanced at me periodically from under a curtain of heavy, black hair. I knew that trick. Maybe he wasn’t
that
scary. I was feeling pretty good about him at that point. The cowboys were a problem, but if the Indian was on my side, I had a chance. I was still scared, but not quite as much.

Keeping an eye on the cowboys, I munched on the rabbit. It tasted a little weird, but hey, I had no clue when I might eat again. It was strange to eat something I’d seen, well, not exactly killed, but skinned, which was even grosser. I mean, I knew hamburgers came from cows, but I’d never seen one slaughtered.

A live animal had just turned into dinner in the blink of an eye, with no grocery store buffer zone in between—creepy. The rabbit skin peeled right off, like a freakin banana. I shuddered and struggled to swallow the wad of it in my mouth. Suddenly, I wasn’t so hungry anymore. I spit out the meat and tossed the bone in the bushes.

The cowboys were wolfing it down and leering at me. When he saw me looking at him, Joe gave me a freak-show grin.

I cringed and pulled my hoodie tighter. Then I sat back against the tree with my hand on the pepper spray. I needed a plan. There was no way I could fight them, especially not two of them.

So you need to slip away
, whispered Ipod in my mind.

Yeah, right. They had horses. They knew the terrain. I was on foot in Ipod’s big bulky jeans and Lex’s bedroom slippers. It wasn’t the best outfit for speed; even if I was a runner, which—cue laughter from the audience—everyone knows I’m not. And let’s not forget the weapons.

Pepper spray versus guns and a whip? You do the math.

If I could incapacitate them with the pepper spray, I could steal a horse and…and…what? Gallop off into the sunset? They’d just come after me and they’d be pissed. What were the chances of pepper spraying both of them without getting shot? And could I even climb up on a horse, much less make it go?

I turned my attention back to the Indian. He was sitting on the log, calmly gnawing on a rabbit leg, licking the grease off his long fingers. His hands were huge. He was huge. He ignored both the Gross Brothers and me. He was buffed, but he seemed like one of those Indians who might be more a peace-pipe smoker than a scalper. Would he keep defending me? Would he help me get away? I didn’t know.

But I knew one thing.

I might be strange. I might be a misfit. I might have some of the worst luck in the history of luck having. But I sure as heck wasn’t going to lose my V-card to one of those disgusting slime balls. I needed this Indian to be on my side.

I closed my eyes and went inside my head. Lex stood there, chin up, fists clenched, looking determined and fearless like she always did.
You can do this, A.J.! Shrink Four, “Instead of freaking out, access the situation and make a plan.”

Ipod told me to consider all my options.
Brains are more important than brawn. You just use them differently. If you can’t fight them, you have to outthink them. Look at your problem space. Focus. See it clearly…all the pieces…like a chessboard. What are the possible moves on each side? People who survive disasters stay calm and make their moves intelligently. Look ahead and your chances of winning increase exponentially. 

I took a breath and scanned the “board.” The light was fading fast. It would be dark soon, and with no cities, dark was really, really dark. The flashlight was in my pack in the bushes by the rocks where I’d hidden earlier. There was a chill on the side of me not facing the fire. I figured it would get a lot colder as the night progressed, and I didn’t have much fat keeping me warm. My hat was on the ground a few feet away. My hands were already cold and the gloves were in the pack. I needed that pack if I was going to head off on some survival get-away by myself.

I needed it to get through the night.

I took a mental inventory of what I did have: the knife, pepper spray, and the other half of the granola bar. My water bottle and the matches were in the pack. Ipod would tell me that getting the pack was my first move. And at that point, I really needed to pee. In the movies, people never had to pee. They could sit tied up for days and not pee. But this wasn’t the movies.

You can do this
, Ipod told me.

I can do this
, I repeated like a mantra. I stood up and instantly two pairs of eyes riveted my way.

Joe’s hand moved to his gun. What was he going to do, freakin shoot me for standing?

“Excuse me,” I said, my voice catching.

The Indian looked up.

“Excuse me!” I tried again, a little louder.

Joe’s eyes traveled up and down my body.

I swallowed. “I need to use the…” jeez, they didn’t have bathrooms in the olden days. What did they call it? “I need to…um…relieve myself…in private,” I said as firmly as I could. I waited, blushing furiously.

The Gross Brothers looked at each other and snickered. Joe stood up. “I’ll count to fifty,” he said, leering and pulling on his filthy beard. “If yer not back by the time I’m done, I’m comin’ after you. And maybe I’ll just relieve myself too.”

Edgar hooted and gave Joe a conspiratorial nudge with his elbow. I guess they hadn’t invented the high-five yet. Joe glanced sideways at the Indian to see if he caught on. The Indian just continued cleaning his knife, ignoring everyone.

I nodded.

Joe started counting, and I scrambled across the little clearing and back behind the rocks, where I’d hidden earlier. I could hear him, “seventeen, eighteen, nineteen…” At least I could tell by his voice that he was still by the campfire.

I quickly “relieved myself” and dug through the bushes for the pack.

“Twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one…”

I slipped one arm out of my hoodie and through the strap, flattened the pack against my chest, and closed the hoodie over it. It was a little bulky, but the hoodie was huge, and the pack didn’t hold much.

“Thirty eight, thirty nine, forty…” He started to speed up his count, the rat.

I scurried back to the tree, grabbing my hat on the way. Joe looked disappointed that I’d made it. I sat back down against the trunk, heart pumping. It was a small victory, but I felt pretty good about it. Maybe I was just soaking up energy from the tree, but I felt a little more powerful for having taken the risk… kinda as if I’d won round one.

Okay, I was still screwed, but at least I didn’t have to pee anymore.

Joe and Edgar were getting loaded at that point. They bumbled through a round of drinking songs and thumped each other on the backs talking about their run of good luck. They offered the whiskey bottle to the Indian, but he shook his head. He sat down and leaned against the tree facing me, knife in his hand. He watched me intently for about a half hour, and then his head began nodding against his chest. Soon he was snoring softly.