“Hello? You got so mad you stepped on a fork and crushed it? And they didn’t let you back in the cafeteria for a whole six months?” Link examined his fork.
“I remember the fork, I think. But I don’t remember anyone named Dee Dee.” It was a lie. I couldn’t even remember the fork. Come to think of it, I couldn’t remember the valentine either.
Link shook his head. “We’ve known her our whole lives, and she totally ratted you out in third grade. How could you forget her?” I didn’t answer, and he went back to tapping his fork.
Good question.
Amma brought her teacup to the table, and we sat in silence. It was like we were waiting for a tidal wave to crash down over us, and it was too late to pack or panic or run. When the phone rang, even Amma jumped.
“Who’d be calling this late?” I said late, but I meant early. It was almost six in the morning. We all were thinking the same thing: Whatever was happening, whatever Abraham had let loose on the world—this would be it.
Link shrugged, and Amma picked up the black rotary phone that had been on the wall since my dad was a kid. “Hello?”
I watched as she listened to the caller on the other end of the line. Link rapped on the table in front of me. “It’s a lady, but I can’t tell who it is. She’s talkin’ too fast.”
I heard Amma’s breath catch, and she hung up the phone. For a second, she stood there holding the receiver.
“Amma, what’s wrong?”
She turned around, her eyes watering. “Wesley Lincoln, do you have that car a yours?” My dad had taken the Volvo to the university.
Link nodded. “Yes, ma’am. It’s a little dirty, but—”
Amma was already halfway to the front door. “Hurry up. We’ve got to go.”
Link pulled away from the curb a little slower than usual, for Amma’s sake. I’m not sure she would’ve noticed or cared if he’d skidded down the street on two wheels. She sat in the front seat, staring straight ahead, clutching the handles of her pocketbook.
“Amma, what’s wrong? Where are we going?” I was leaning forward from the backseat, and she didn’t even yell at me about not wearing my seat belt. Something was definitely wrong.
When Link turned onto Blackwell Street, I saw just how wrong.
“What the he—” He looked at Amma and coughed. “Heck?”
There were trees all over the road, torn from the ground, roots and all. It looked like a scene from one of the natural disaster shows Link watched on the Discovery Channel. Man vs. Nature. But this wasn’t natural. It was the result of a supernatural disaster—Vexes.
I could feel them, the destruction they carried with them, bearing down on me. They had been here, on this street. They had done this, and they’d done it because of me.
Because of John Breed.
Amma wanted Link to turn down Cypress Grove, but the road was blocked, so he had to turn down Main. All the streetlights were out, and daylight was just beginning to cut through the darkness, turning the sky from black to shades of blue. For a minute, I thought Main Street might have made it through Abraham’s tornado of Vexes, until I saw the green. Because that’s all it was now—a green. Forget about the stolen tire swing across the street. Now the ancient oak itself was gone. And the statue of General Jubal A. Early wasn’t standing proudly in the center, sword drawn for battle.
The General had fallen, the hilt of his sword broken.
The black sheath of lubbers that had covered the statue for weeks was gone. Even they had abandoned him.
I couldn’t remember a time when the General wasn’t there, guarding his green and our town. He was more than a statue. He was part of Gatlin, woven into our untraditional traditions. On the Fourth of July, the General wore an American flag across his back. On Halloween, he wore a witch’s hat, and a plastic pumpkin full of candy hung from his arm. For the Reenactment of the Battle of Honey Hill, someone always put a real Confederate frock coat over his permanent bronze one. The General was one of us, watching over Gatlin from his post, generation after generation.
I had always hoped things would change in my town, until they started changing. Now I wanted Gatlin to go back to the boring town I’d known all my life. The way things were when I hated the way things were. Back when I could see things coming, and nothing ever came.
I didn’t want to see this.
I was still staring at the fallen General through the back window when Link slowed down. “Man, it looks like a bomb went off.”
The sidewalks in front of the stores that lined Main were covered with glass. The windows had blown out of every one of them, leaving the stores nameless and exposed. I could see the painted gold L and I from the Little Miss window, separated from the other letters. Dirty hot-pink and red dresses littered the sidewalk, thousands of tiny sequins reflecting the bits and pieces of our everyday lives.
“That’s no bomb, Wesley Lincoln.”