Shine (18 page)

Bailee-Ann welcomed me with a hug, which caught me off guard.

She pulled back. “You okay?” she said, her blue eyes full of concern. Most people, when they looked at me, didn’t really see me, but Bailee-Ann did.

She led me to a purple sofa patched with duct tape, which someone—probably herself—had colored with a purple marker in an attempt to make it match. On the sofa, as well as the coffee table in front of the sofa, were knitting supplies:
balls of pink and blue yarn, needles, and what looked like the beginning of a leg warmer.

“It’s Patrick, isn’t it?” Bailee-Ann said. “That’s why you’re here?”

I moved a skein of yarn and sat beside her, amazed we’d gotten to the heart of the matter so quickly. My eyes teared up, and I nodded.

“You two always were close,” she said. “Have you gone to visit him?”

“No,” I said. “I tried, but they wouldn’t let me. His condition has to be more stable or something.”

“Well, my mama just knows he’s gonna be okay,” Bailee-Ann said. Her mama worked for the hospital cleaning crew. “She says the doctors are taking good care of him, and the nurses, too.”

“They think he’ll regain consciousness?” I said. “For real?”

Bailee-Ann put her hand on my knee. “
Yes
. It’s something about his brain waves looking good, that’s what the nurses are saying. I wish I could grow up to be a nurse, don’t you? And we could wear those cute shirts with the little teddy bears on ’em?”

“Scrubs,” I said, still drinking in the news about Patrick. Hope fluttered in my chest for the first time in days.

“Huh?”

“Scrubs. That’s what the nurses’ outfits are called.” I paused. “Or that might be just the doctors.”

“Oh my God,” she said. She picked up her knitting project
and hooked a loop of yarn with one needle. “I am
so
marrying a doctor, and when we have our first baby, we won’t need the free hat.” She held up what she was working on. “I’ll have already made it!”

“That’s a baby hat?” I said.

“Not yet, but it will be.” She pushed up on one knee, reached behind the sofa, and came back with a plastic bin. “Like these, which I’ll get Mama to take to the hospital next week. See?”

Inside the bin were five tiny hats: three blue ones and two pink ones. They had pom-poms on top and were utterly, absolutely adorable.

“You made these?” I marveled. I picked up a blue one. “You’re good, Bailee-Ann. Like,
really
good.”

She was pleased, but tried to play it off. “Oh, hats are easy. Anyway, the hospital gives me the yarn.”

“And then the hats go to little babies? That’s so cool.”

“I think so, too. That’s why I said yes when the head of the volunteer program asked me to do it. I want to be a better person, you know?”

“That’s awesome,” I said. “But you’re already a good person.”

She got busy with her needles. “But I could be
better
. I could work harder at school and not do bad things.”

“Bad things?” I said. I returned the hat to the bin.

“I want to be, like, the best me ever, and then maybe I
could
grow up to marry a doctor. I’ll give him babies, and he’ll give me drugs.” She giggled. “Kidding! He’d only give me the legal kind, and only if I needed them. I might need them a lot is all.”

I saw
her
for just a moment, the real her, just as she’d seen through to the real me. I saw her weariness, which she tried to hide with sparkly eye shadow and berry-colored lip gloss. I also saw that she’d been pulling out her eyelashes again. Back when we hung out, she pulled out her eyelashes when she was nervous.

What was she nervous about now? And I wasn’t going to ask again, but what sort of bad things was she no longer going to do?

“There’s no reason you couldn’t marry a doctor,” I told her. “You could
be
a doctor, even. Or a nurse.”

She smiled. Not bitterly, because Bailee-Ann didn’t do bitter. It was more just a hat-knitting smile that said I didn’t need to lie.

“But, Bailee-Ann, why would you want your doctor husband to give you drugs?”

“Um, because they’re fun?” She looked up from her work. “Not street drugs. God, I would never. But Beef knows this guy, and sometimes he gets Vicodin from him. Beef had his own prescription once, from when he blew out his knee, but it ran out.”

“Oh.”

“And actually, I’m trying to quit. That’s one of the ways I want to make amends. But have you ever tried it?”

“Vicodin? No, I don’t do that stuff.”

“Riiight
,” she said. “You’re better than that. I forgot.”

Something shifted. It happened as quick as the click of her needles, and it made my skin tingle.

“No, I just don’t like feeling out of control,” I said.

“Oh.
O
-kay.” She hooked another loop of yarn. “
So that’s
why you dropped all of your friends, including Patrick. Including
me
. It wasn’t because you’re so much better than us. It was because you felt
out of control
, like maybe you’d accidentally catch a case of the stupids from us. Thanks for explaining. Now I totally understand.”

Whoa. Apparently Bailee-Ann
was
capable of doing bitter.

“Bailee-Ann . . .” I said.

She glanced at me. Her eyes held pain, but also a sliver of hope.

“I . . . I never . . .”
I never thought you were stupid
, I wanted to say.
I never stopped liking you
.

“Son of a goddang,” she cussed, looking back at the little hat. “Missed a stitch. Gonna have to do the whole row over.”

I felt awful. She’d let herself wish, and I failed her, and so, all right. Back to normal Bailee-Ann, who would take her disappointment and pretend it had to do with the dropped stitch instead of the dropped friendship.

My heart felt like lead, but what was done was done. I needed to regroup.

“Did Dupree give you Vicodin last Saturday?” I asked. “When y’all were at Suicide Rock?”

“I wish,” she said. Then she closed her eyes and gave herself a moment. She opened them, saying, “No, I don’t, because I’m quitting. I truly am. But anyway, all Dupree had was some herbal something-or-other. We put it under our tongues.”

There were old-timers all over the mountain earning a meager existence by selling herbal “remedies.” Aunt Tildy warned me and Christian to stay away. “If you can’t buy it at the store, don’t buy it at all,” she said. “Who knows what goes into their tinctures and potions?”

“You should be careful about that stuff,” I said.

“I know, I know. It didn’t do nothing but make us loopy, anyway.” She put down the little hat, balancing the needles on top of it. It was so small. I was that small once, and the thought blew my mind. I was that small, and so was Bailee-Ann, and so was Patrick. So was Patrick’s attacker.

“You wanna watch TV?” Bailee-Ann said. “Never mind. Set’s broke. Duh.”

I bit my lower lip. “Bailee-Ann, don’t take this the wrong way . . . but you don’t do meth, do you?”

She cut her eyes at me. “No, Cat, I don’t do meth,” she said, enunciating her words as if addressing someone very stupid who was also hard of hearing. “Meth eats your brain. Haven’t you seen those commercials?”

“Well . . . good. But some kids
are
using it. Here in our own town.”

“Kids are doing meth in every town in the country, Cat. Dang. Get your head out of your butt.”

“Do you know when it started? Um, people in Black Creek doing meth?”
Beef
doing meth?

“I don’t know,” she said. “When the paper mill shut down and all those folks lost their jobs, I guess. That’s when my
mama started seeing more tweakers showing up in the ER. She said the Mexicans were running it through Atlanta, and from Atlanta to here.”

“The Mexicans?” We didn’t have any Mexicans living in Black Creek. I didn’t know that I’d even seen a Mexican, period.

“I don’t want to talk about it. It’s depressing,” Bailee-Ann said.

“I know. It’s just—“

“And anything I
do
know, I know from my mama.” She looked at me hard.

I nodded. “Of course. Yeah.”

“Well, I guess what they were selling was crap, and then the dealers in Black Creek—down-and-out mill workers, what have you—they got the stuff from Atlanta and watered it down even more. Not
watered
it down, but you know.”

Yeah, I knew. They’d
stepped on it
by adding baby powder or something. Destiny had taught me well.

Bailee-Ann found a stray piece of yarn and pulled it repeatedly through her fingers. “It wasn’t good business, so eventually people in Black Creek learned to cook it themselves.”

“Wally,” I supplied.

Her face registered slight surprise. “Among others. Apparently, it isn’t that hard.”

“Until you blow yourself up.”

“Yeah. But until then, it’s easy money.”

“And that’s why people got into it,” I filled in. “People from here. People we might even know.”

The yarn in Bailee-Ann’s fingers grew taut. “Maybe. But like I said, this is all secondhand.”

“Must be a lot of gossip at the hospital, huh?”

“Almost as much as at church,” she said.

I laughed. It broke the tension. “I sure wish you’d come back to church, speaking of.” She rarely came these days, because her mama had Sundays off and wanted to sleep in. “Without you, I don’t have anyone to pass notes with.”

She half-smiled, perhaps remembering all the scribbling we used to do on the church bulletins. It perked her up, and she said, “Hey. Wanna go to Tommy’s and catch a movie on his flat-screen?”

I shifted. “Um, thanks for the offer, but movies aren’t really my thing.”

Her half-smile turned into something worse: a false smile. “Of course they aren’t,” she said. “Silly me, whatever was I thinking?” She wound the piece of yarn into a neat bundle, placed it on the coffee table, and said, “Well, it was nice chatting. Thanks for stopping by.”

I felt my cheeks heat up. I got awkwardly to my feet.

“Why
did
you stop by?”

“To talk about Patrick.”

She raised her eyebrows, wanting more.

“I’m trying to make sense of it, that’s all. And I guess I was just wondering . . .”

“Spit it out, Cat,” she said dryly. “I promise I won’t take it the wrong way.”

I splayed my feet so that my weight was on their outside edges. I stared down at them and said, “Beef said he drove y’all home. On Saturday night.”

“And?”

“He said he dropped Tommy off first, with Dupree. Is that true?”

“Yeah.
And
?”

“So Tommy was home by one thirty.”

“Oh my God,” Bailee-Ann said, blinking her patchy eyelashes. “Is that what this is about? Seriously?”

Adopting a dumb blond voice, she said, “Tommy was home by one thirty, and I was home by one forty-five. Beef made me feel like a slut when I kissed him, because he pushed me away and said I smelled like a brewery. But he made sure my truck was back in my driveway by the time I woke up the next morning. He even washed it for me. Wasn’t that sweet?”

“If you say so,” I said. I hesitated. “Are you and Beef doing okay?”

“Of course. Why wouldn’t we be?”

Well, let’s see. Because he quit school, and because he was possibly selling and/or using meth. Most of all because of the “slut” reference Bailee-Ann threw into her recitation.

“No reason,” I said. Anyway, Bailee-Ann didn’t say Beef actually
called
her that, just that he made her
feel
like that.

“Don’t listen to me,” Bailee-Ann said. “I’m just weird. I’m sure Beef didn’t kiss me because Patrick and your brother were waiting in the truck.”

“Uh, okay.”

“He hadn’t dropped them off yet. It would have been gross to make out in front of them. Plus, Beef was mad at them in a
big
way. That’s why—“

She broke off, zipping her lips together so purposefully that I understood where that expression came from,
zip your lips
.

“That’s why what?”

She shook her head.

“Bailee-Ann. I know something went on that night, something more than getting high and petting trees. Just tell me.”

“Who said anything about petting trees? I didn’t pet no trees. You think I’m so starved for love I’d pet a dang
tree
?”

“Why was Beef mad? Was there a fight?”

Seven or eight years ago, some older boys went at one another up into the forest, and things went south fast. One guy had a knife. The other had broken beer bottle, its edges jagged and sharp.

Bailee-Ann stared deliberately past me, but her eyes defied her, sliding to mine for one quick second.

My heart gave a peculiar double beat. Bailee-Ann was scared.
That’s
why she was keeping mum.

“You can tell me, Bailee-Ann. I swear.”

She leaned forward and got back her piece of yarn, winding it tightly around her index finger. I watched her fingertip go from red to white. “Tommy and Patrick had something they wanted to . . .
discuss
with Beef. Your brother was in on it, too.”

“In on what?”

“But Beef wouldn’t listen. He felt ganged up on, I guess. He wanted them to lay off, but they wouldn’t, and finally Beef lost it. He told Tommy and Christian to go play with their vaginas, though he didn’t use that word, and he called Patrick a fucking pansy. Nice, huh?”

“Wait. Beef called Patrick . . .” I shook my head. “
Wait
. In front of everyone, Beef called him that?”

Bailee-Ann cocked her head, and my mouth went dry. Beef was Patrick’s champion. Beef was every underdog’s champion.

Disoriented, I sat back down on the sofa. Different explanations vied for a toehold: Bailee-Ann was lying. It was Tommy who called Patrick that, not Beef. Or maybe Tommy said something worse and Beef lashed out without thinking, his words meant to hurt everyone in the redneck posse, not just Patrick.

There had to be more to the incident than Bailee-Ann was telling me. Everyone knew how stressed Beef was; whatever the guys wanted to discuss with him must have made him even more so.

“It’s probably losing his wrestling scholarship,” I whispered.