“Can I ask you something, and will you tell me the truth?”
I tilted my head to face him. In the moonlight, his black eye looked like a shadow spreading over his face. “Of course.” I didn’t think it was possible for me to lie right now, thanks to the pill.
He looked into the distance. “Why wouldn’t you let me bring you to Fred Fortenot?”
A chill stole over me despite the balmy air. “I’m not supposed to tell anyone. I promised my parents.”
His mouth quirked. “If it helps, I’ve been told I’m a nobody.”
I kicked his dangling foot, then blinked at the square of cotton taped over the fang marks on my thigh. Fear coiled inside me. I remembered vividly the night Beth, Fred’s daughter, came home late from a party. Beth was a year younger than me. Growing up as neighbors, she’d been one of the first people I’d tried to befriend. But ultimately we were too different: though she was naturally quiet like me, Beth was obsessed with being popular.
As we grew up, I watched her slowly become friends with the football players and cheerleaders. She wasn’t pretty like Lila LeBlanc or naturally charismatic, but her father was the boss of Fortenot Fishing, and that made her important. The night she tried to sneak in, she was wearing a scandalously short skirt with a frayed hemline, like she’d cut it herself. I could tell the moment I spotted her through my bedroom window that she’d had too much to drink. Though her father was as strict as mine, I wasn’t surprised to see it: Beth would’ve done anything to fit in.
“One night last year I watched Beth sneak in.” I cleared my throat.“She must’ve thought her parents were asleep, but I could see her dad in the kitchen, waiting in the dark. I waved to get her attention, but she didn’t see me.” I took a deep breath. “The moment she stepped inside, he found her and started yelling.”
I would never forget the image: tall, beloved Fred Fortenot towering over his small daughter in her short skirt, his face red, veins ropy in his forehead. I couldn’t hear his shouting, but I could feel it. I knew in my gut violence was coming—it was an instinct, or maybe the look on Fred’s face was close to my father’s right before he took out his cane. Either way, I watched it unfold through the window like a horror movie.
“She must’ve said something to him that made him really mad, because…” I waited for the lump in my throat to clear. “He started choking her.” Beth had sunk to the floor so fast it was almost astonishing. But he was very large, after all. She was a doll in his hands.
Everett went rigid. “He hurt his own daughter?”
Now that I’d started, the secret poured from me. “She was sobbing on the floor, but he hit her anyway. Over and over. His hands were all over her…”
Everett’s body grew so tense it practically hummed. I looked at his black eye and was about to ask about it when he said, tersely, “What did you do?”
I took a deep breath. “I ran and woke my parents. My dad went over to Fred’s house, but I don’t know what happened after that because they closed all the blinds.”
I’d come to the part of the story I was truly not supposed to reveal. I swallowed thickly, the words stuck in my throat. It was amazing how embodied obedience was. Amazing how, even though sometimes I thought I hated my parents, their commandments still wormed their way so deep into my subconscious that obeying them was more muscle memory than choice. That had to be the worst kind of prison—the onewhose bars were buried under your skin, invisible cages around your heart and mind.
Getting the words out felt like pushing through a heavy door. “Two nights later…when Fred went out…Mrs. Fortenot came to our house, crying. We didn’t have the front door locked, and she just burst in.” The sound of the door banging against the wall had cracked like thunder through the house. “My parents were in the living room. She fell at my father’s feet and begged him to help her and Beth escape, said they needed our mercy. He tried to shush her, but she only got louder, telling him Fred had been hurting Beth for years and it was only getting worse. She was grateful my family had finally witnessed it. Now my parents would believe her and help.”
“But Beth and Mrs. Fortenot are still here.” Everett’s face was unreadable. “They never left.”
“My father told her she was breaking her covenant with God, airing her husband’s business. And in front of a child, too.” I’d never forget Mrs. Fortenot’s face when she turned and saw me in the kitchen, frozen and watching. There’d been shame in her face. But underneath the shame was desperation, an instinct to survive. She’d looked at me, then kept on begging.
“My parents made me go to my room, but before I did, I heard my father say Scripture commanded Mrs. Fortenot to submit to her husband the same as unto the Lord. She had to have faith in him, like she had faith in Christ. Eventually Mrs. Fortenot went home, and my parents told me I wasn’t allowed to speak about what I’d seen. It would be a mercy to Mrs. Fortenot to hide that she’d betrayed her family. I tried to talk to Beth about it at school, but she practically shoved me away.” The look of horror on her face when she’d realized I knew. “Now she won’t speak to me at all. And the blinds at their house stay closed.”
Everett took a deep breath. “They can’t be allowed to keep doing this.”
I leaned so I could look at him more clearly. “They?”
“Fred Fortenot. Your father. Mine.” He jerked his hand out at the neighborhood, the bloodred lawns stretching in front of bloodred houses. “All the men who run this town, who are getting fat and rich being cruel while everyone sings their praises. Ihatethem, Ruth.” His voice thickened. “I hate them so much I can’t keep it inside anymore.”
His words shocked me into silence. I’d never heard anyone speak like that. It was more than complaining about school or Bottom Springs’s smallness. Everett’s words were a transgression, his visceral anger mixing with the red moonlight to form black magic, words capable of changing perspectives, opening doors. It felt in that moment that we really were glimpsing the beginning of the end. The waning of one world, the dawn of the next.
“They hurt people and they take things—” His voice grew ragged. “Things you can never get back.”
“Who took from you?” But Ever was already shaking his head, so I changed direction. “What do we do about it?”
Slowly, as silence stretched around my question, the stiffness left Everett’s body, melting into the night. He leaned back, bracing himself against the roof with his hands, and looked at me. A shiver ran the length of my body. The fog cleared from my mind and the night revealed itself with sudden sharpness: the sounds in nearby woods not melodic but the triumphant baying of predators, the houses on the street not peaceful but too still, like corpses, painted lurid bloody red by a moon with pockmarks, its face not a jewel but a network of pits and bruises.
“There are people in this town,” Ever said quietly, “who get away with bad things. People who face no consequences.”
He held me pinned with his eyes. And as I stared back, I saw him with a sudden sharpness, too. Saw beyond his outer strength to his fragility, this boy who had been bruised, both in ways I could see and some I was beginning to suspect. His anger was a life raft, keeping him afloat.
But I could be a life raft, too. I could help him like he’d helped me.
Slowly, shingles scraping my thighs, I slid over the roof until I fit against his side again. Everett leaned his head to rest on mine. On my leg, next to my bandage, our hands met, fingers lacing together, the same as they had in front of the fire.
