“You don’t know—”
“Only one more.” She waved her thumb, indicating the sixth bullet. “When you shoot me, my daughter will run out of here. Right, Andy?”
What?
“Andy,” her mother said. “I need you to run, darling.”
What?
“He can’t reload fast enough to hurt you.”
“Fuck!” the man screamed, trying to get his rage back. “Be still! Both of you.”
“Andy.” Laura took a step toward the gunman. She was limping. A tear in her linen pants was weeping blood. Something white stuck out like bone. “Listen to me, sweetheart.”
“I said don’t move!”
“Go through the kitchen door.” Laura’s voice remained steady. “There’s an exit in the back.”
What?
“Stop there, bitch. Both of you.”
“You need to trust me,” Laura said. “He can’t reload in time.”
Mom.
“Get up.” Laura took another step forward. “I said, get up.”
Mom, no.
“Andrea Eloise.” She was using her Mother voice, not her Mom voice. “Get up. Now.”
Andy’s body worked of its own volition. Left foot flat, right heel up, fingers touching the ground, a runner at the block.
“Stop it!” The man jerked the gun toward Andy, but Laura moved with it. He jerked it back and she followed the path, blocking Andy with her body. Shielding her from the last bullet in the gun.
“Shoot me,” Laura told the man. “Go ahead.”
“Fuck this.”
Andy heard a snap.
The trigger pulling back? The hammer hitting the bullet?
Her eyes had squeezed closed, hands flew to cover her head.
But there was nothing.
No bullet fired. No cry of pain.
No sound of her mother falling dead to the ground.
Floor. Ground. Six feet under.
Andy cringed as she looked back up.
The man had unsnapped the sheath on the hunting knife.
He was slowly drawing it out.
Six inches of steel. Serrated on one side. Sharp on the other.
He holstered the gun, tossed the knife into his dominant hand. He didn’t have the blade pointing up the way you’d hold a steak knife but down, the way you’d stab somebody.
Laura asked, “What are you going to do with that?”
He didn’t answer. He showed her.
Two steps forward.
The knife arced up, then slashed down toward her mother’s heart.
Andy was paralyzed, too terrified to ball herself up, too shocked to do anything but watch her mother die.
Laura stuck out her hand as if she could block the knife. The blade sliced straight into the center of her palm. Instead of collapsing, or screaming, Laura’s fingers wrapped around the hilt of the knife.
There was no struggle. The murderer was too surprised.
Laura wrenched the knife away from his grip even as the long blade was still sticking out of her hand.
He stumbled back.
He looked at the knife jutting out of her hand.
One second.
Two seconds.
Three.
He seemed to remember the gun on his hip. His right hand reached down. His fingers wrapped around the handle. The silver flashed on the muzzle. His left hand swung around to cup the weapon as he prepared to fire the last bullet into her mother’s heart.
Silently, Laura swung her arm, backhanding the blade into the side of his neck.
Crunch, like a butcher cutting a side of beef.
The sound had an echo that bounced off the corners of the room.
The man gasped. His mouth fished open. His eyes widened.
The back of Laura’s hand was still pinned to his neck, caught between the handle and the blade.
Andy saw her fingers move.
There was a clicking sound. The gun shaking as he tried to raise it.
Laura spoke, more growl than words.
He kept lifting the gun. Tried to aim.
Laura raked the blade out through the front of his throat.
Blood, sinew, cartilage.
No spray or mist like before. Everything gushed out of his open neck like a dam breaking open.
His black shirt turned blacker. The pearl buttons showed different shades of pink.
The gun dropped first.
Then his knees hit the floor. Then his chest. Then his head.
Andy watched his eyes as he fell.
He was dead before he hit the ground.
2
When Andy was in the ninth grade, she’d had a crush on a boy named Cletus Laraby, who went by Cleet, but in an ironic way. He had floppy brown hair and he knew how to play the guitar and he was the smartest guy in their chemistry class, so Andy tried to learn how to play the guitar and pretended to be interested in chemistry, too.
This was how she ended up entering the school’s science fair: Cleet signed up, so Andy did, too.
She had never spoken a word to him in her life.
No one questioned the wisdom of giving a drama club kid who barely passed earth sciences access to ammonium nitrate and ignition switches, but in retrospect, Dr. Finney was probably so pleased Andy was interested in something other than mime arts that she had looked the other way.
Andy’s father, too, was elated by the news. Gordon took Andy to the library where they checked out books on engineering and rocket design. He filled out a form for a loyalty card from the local hobby shop. Over the dinner table, he would read aloud from pamphlets from the American Association for Rocketry.
Whenever Andy was staying at her dad’s house, Gordon worked in the garage with his sanding blocks, shaping the fins and nose cone shoulders, while Andy sat at his workbench and sketched out designs for the tube.
Andy knew that Cleet liked the Goo Goo Dolls because he had a sticker on his backpack, so she started out thinking the tube of the rocket would look like a steampunk telescope from the video for “Iris,” then she thought about putting wings on it because “Iris” was from the movie City of Angels, then she decided that she would put Nicolas Cage’s face on the side, in profile, because he was the angel in the movie, then she decided that she should paint Meg Ryan instead because this was for Cleet and he would probably think that Meg Ryan was a lot more interesting than Nicolas Cage.
A week before the fair, Andy had to turn in all of her notes and photographs to Dr. Finney to prove that she had actually done all of the work herself. She was laying out the dubious evidence on the teacher’s desk when Cleet Laraby walked in. Andy had to clasp together her hands to keep them from trembling when Cleet stopped to look at the photos.
“Meg Ryan,” Cleet said. “I dig it. Blow up the bitch, right?”
Andy felt a cold slice of air cut open her lips.
“My girlfriend loves that stupid movie. The one with the angels?” Cleet showed her the sticker on his backpack. “They wrote that shitty song for the soundtrack, man. That’s why I keep this here, to remind me never to sell out my art like those faggots.”
Andy didn’t move. She couldn’t speak.
Girlfriend. Stupid. Shitty. Man. Faggots.
Andy had left Dr. Finney’s classroom without her notes or her books or even her purse. She’d walked through the cafeteria, then out the exit door that was always propped open so the lunch ladies could smoke cigarettes behind the Dumpster.
Gordon lived two miles away from the school. It was June. In Georgia. On the coast. By the time she reached his house, Andy was badly sunburned and soaked in her own sweat and tears. She took the Meg Ryan rocket and the two Nicolas Cage test rockets and threw them in the outdoor trash can. Then she soaked them with lighter fluid. Then she threw a match into the can. Then she woke up on her back in Gordon’s driveway because a neighbor was squirting her down with the garden hose.
The whoosh of fire had singed off Andy’s eyebrows, eyelashes, bangs and nose hairs. The sound of the explosion was so intense that Andy’s ears had started to bleed. The neighbor started screaming in her face. His wife, a nurse, came over and was clearly trying to tell Andy something, but the only thing she could hear was a sharp tone, like when her chorus teacher blew a single note on her pitch pipe—
Eeeeeeeeeeee . . .