Outside, Charlie shoveled manure into a wheelbarrow, stopping liberally to rest and turn sunward. Out of school, she felt loose and free. The confines of the classroom, its garish decorations and fluorescent lighting, made her dizzy. Twenty kids to a class, the stupid chatter, the teacher calling for attention. The best part of school was the fifty-minute period of enforced silence during an exam.
She heaved the shovel into the soft pile and leveraged its handle over her thigh, then swung and deposited her load. She had not meant to stab the stupid bitch. Put her in her place, yes. Pierce her cheek with a number 2? No, that had been an accident, though she still thought Leigh Prentiss had had it coming. A lifetime of teasing had given Charlie a thick hide, or so she liked to think. But she wasn’t normally one of those kids that fought for attention. If anything, she had tried to lay low. Growing up in Pecan Hollow, with a batshit mom and no dad, was bad enough, but being that way and not attending church made people suspicious. The town was full of characters, but most went to church, every Sunday, whether the sun shone or rain fell. It was the only requirement of country living.
Trouble started when Charlie caught Leigh copying off her test. Cheating in and of itself didn’t bother Charlie—it was the hypocrisy. Leigh was supposed to be a big Christian, and to prove it, she carried the Good Book, with its ruffled and monogrammed Bible cozy, hugged to her chest like a teddy bear. While Charlie was trying to take the test, the girl kept leaning in, closer and closer. Charlie hissed a warning, but Leigh looked at her primly and jotted down an answer, then leaned in again for another look. She backed away from the tickle of Leigh’s frizzy hair, and smelled a waft of her cat breath.
Something about the stink pushed her over the edge. She went hot with claustrophobic anger and jabbed left to push the girl away. There was a hollow pop and Leigh’s eyes widened, her brows arched high on her forehead, lips forming an O. Charlie left the pencil in her cheek and laughed out of shock, focusing on the strange expression and not the horrible thing she had done. Once the teacher, Mrs. Blaine, saw what had happened, she came running and flapped her hands a bit before sending a student to fetch the nurse. She looked around and asked who had done this. Leigh, mute from shock, pointed a pudgy, shaking finger at Charlie.
She was sorry to have hurt Leigh. If she had been thinking clearly, instead of jabbing her, she would have leaned over and whispered, “I just wrote down all the wrong answers,” to fuck with her. Or, to be more to the point, Charlie might have said, “Brush your fucking teeth, you cheating stink-mouth bitch.”
Their classmates had encircled Leigh, who was screaming and bleeding, and Charlie was stung with jealousy. She couldn’t help wishing for some of that concern given so easily to Leigh. She thought of the times when she had been pushed around by kids in the hall, how the other kids turned away, how the teachers pretended not to see. Earlier that spring, she had tried out for the track team and had cleared a set of hurdles as part of the agility test. When she came around the bend for the second set, Nancy Sprenger, who was a few paces ahead of her, dropped a hurdle right in her path. Charlie tripped and went sprawling forward. She lay there reeling from the pain in her nose, blood in her mouth, on her face, in her hair. The top layer of skin on her hands had been sanded off on the dirt track. She could tell by the way people covered their mouths and looked at each other that they’d seen what happened. The coach had jogged over and slapped her on the back.
“You’re good, right?” she had said. “How about you go on and hit the showers?” She hadn’t offered Charlie a hand, or sent her to the nurse. Just had everyone take an easy lap and carried on with tryouts. Charlie held her palms to the light. The scars had faded almost completely, as if it had never happened. Some might say she was lucky, but she wanted something to show for her pain.
She lifted the wheelbarrow and guided it to a steaming compost pile of manure and kitchen scraps, grass clippings and old Times-Picayunes that Doc had delivered special. For twenty minutes she mucked the stalls and dumped the manure, running through a cycle of getting angry and cooling off. Just as she finished her fourth stall, someone cleared his throat behind her. A guy with a straw hat and no shirt leaned on the fence a few feet away. He smiled at her.
She brandished her shit-covered shovel at him. “What do you want?”
He tipped his hat up to reveal more of his face. He looked high school aged, was linebacker fat—chubby but with lots of muscle and thick bone underneath—and led with his chin. “Well, I sure don’t want a busted face,” he said, holding up a hand to block her.
“Put that shovel down, man. Goddamn.”
She kept the shovel where it was.
“What are you doing looking at me like that?” she scolded.
He laughed. “You just looked so happy with your face turned up at the sun, I was just wondering what you were thinking about.”
“I was thinking about how I punched a hole through some girl’s cheek with a pencil.” She felt a satisfaction that this was, in fact, what she had been thinking about and hoped to impress on him that she was not to be messed with.
“You’re serious, aren’t you?” he said, looking delighted. Charlie planted the shovel at her side.
“Daaamn,” he drawled. “Well, I guess she must have deserved it.”
“Yeah,” Charlie said. “She did. She was all up in my business. Kinda like you are now.”
The boy laughed again, unaffected in a way that irked Charlie. “Okay, I can take a hint. Not welcome. I’ll be on my way.” He waved goodbye and walked away.
Charlie felt a tug and was sorry to see him go. “Wait, what’s your name, perv?”
“I’m Jim Dirkin, but they call me Dirk.” He waited for her to offer her name, but she hesitated. “You’re Charlie, right? Kit Walker’s kid?”
Charlie tensed, expecting him to tease her. She nodded, not convinced a latent attack wouldn’t follow.
“Cool. I’m surprised we never met till now,” he said. “I like to know the misfits.”
She didn’t know what that meant exactly, but she had a feeling it meant “wild things.” She liked that.
“She is kind of creepy though, your mom.”
There it is, Charlie thought.
He went on. “I never seen such a dark look. It’s too bad, because she could be pretty if she didn’t always look like she wanted to kill you. You could, too.”
Charlie flushed, embarrassed and disappointed.
“Please don’t talk about my mom and me being pretty in the same breath.”
“You don’t have many friends, do you?” he said.
“I don’t care to have any,” she said, her arms basted across her chest.