“I’m not allowed.”
You can hold this one. It’s called an MP-5. It’s already loaded and ready to shoot. The safety isn’t even on. Pick it up.
It was heavier than he’d imagined. His arms shook a little. Maybe that was just his nerves. He brought it to his shoulder the way people did on TV.
Fire it. Shoot at the dirt twenty feet away. No one will hear.
He hesitated.
You’re not going to fight me on something this easy, are you, Owen?
He took a breath and pulled the trigger. The gun kicked hard against his grip—he almost dropped it.
You have to hold it tight. That’s why we’re practicing. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you all about how to use it.
*
The worst test of all came four months later. This time Grandpa was up in Cedarville looking for a new chainfall. He would be gone for hours.
Get on the quad and take it across the road, the Gravel Man said. Go straight north into the desert. We’ll talk while you ride.
Owen got the four-wheeler out of the pole barn and headed north. It was state land up here, this side of the road, no houses or two-tracks, not even Jeep trails. Just empty desert with a few hills and canyons and a lot of wide open nothing. Owen rode, topping one rise after another, his grandfather’s house falling farther and farther behind.
I need to tell you about something important. A basic rule of life that you probably don’t understand yet.
“What is it?”
The way most people deal with pain. The way they pass it off onto others.
Owen had no idea what that meant.
I know you don’t. It’s okay. I’ll explain. You must have had bullies in school, right?
“Yes.”
I’ll bet most of them were getting their asses kicked at home by their fathers. That was how the pain came to them. And maybe they could’ve just taken it in, absorbed it, dealt with it somehow. But they didn’t. They went to school and passed the pain off to you. That’s what people do. Not just bullies, either. There was a girl you liked, right? The summer before ninth grade. Carrie?
Owen had long since stopped being surprised the Gravel Man knew these things. You couldn’t keep secrets from someone who could get inside your head.
“Yes,” he said.
She liked you, too, didn’t she? Isn’t that why you still remember her? Because for those two months you had fun together. She liked working on cars, the same as you, and you weren’t so nervous around her, the way you were with everyone else.
Yes, he supposed Carrie had really liked him. So what, though. What could’ve really become of it, over time? How much chance had it had?
You got back to school that fall and you hung out with her for one day, and that was all it took for her to see what everyone else thought of it. How the girls with the nice clothes laughed at her for being with you. How everyone laughed. And the next morning you went to her locker to say hi, and her friends were there with her, and she looked at you and made that deadpan face. Remember what she said back to you, instead of hi?
Yes, he remembered. He was never going to forget that.
She said yep. You said hi and she said yep, with that face that really said, What are you doing here? Why do you think you’re good enough for me? And she walked away with her friends, and that was that.
“Why are you talking about this?”
Because she passed the pain off to you, like a bully. The pain she would’ve felt if she’d stayed with you and endured all their teasing. Or the pain she’d have felt if she tried to sit you down and explain the whole thing, how shallow that would’ve made her feel. The easiest thing for her was to make that face and say yep and walk away. No pain for her then. All of it landed on you instead. That’s what people do, Owen. That’s the axis the world spins on, and you need to understand it.
“Why?”
Because you’re going to do it, too. You’re going to pass your pain off onto someone else. You’re going to learn how, today.
*
A mile later he topped a final rise and saw a lime green convertible out ahead on the plain. As he closed in on it, he saw a low, dark shape tucked down behind the car’s back end. All at once the shape jumped, and Owen saw that it was a man sitting there, hunched on the ground. The man’s head turned toward the sound of the quad, and then he sprang up—not entirely up, though. There was something wrong with the man. He couldn’t seem to stand up straight.
In the last fifty yards Owen saw what the problem was. The man’s wrists were tied together and bound by a chain to the car’s bumper. His ankles were bound together, too, though they were free of the car. He moved like a fish on a line, his whole body jerking around in big arcing jolts. He had his feet on the ground and he was bent over at the waist, watching as Owen stopped ten feet away and killed the four-wheeler’s engine.