Nick shrugged.
"Dummy-dummy-dummy," she said with sudden sharp viciousness. Her eyes shone with spite. Then she smiled. "I didn't mean that. I was just kidding."
Nick looked at her, expressionless. He had been called worse names, but there was something in her that he very much did not like. Some restless instability. If she got angry with you, she wouldn't yell or slap your face; not this one. This one would claw you. It came to him with sudden surety that she had lied about her age. She wasn't seventeen, or fourteen, or twenty-one. She was any age you wanted her to be... as long as you wanted her more than she wanted you, needed her more than she needed you. She came across as a sexual creature, but Nick thought that her sexuality was only a manifestation of something else in her personality... a symptom. Symptom was a word you used for someone who was sick, though, wasn't it? Did he think she was sick? In a way he did, and he was suddenly afraid of the effect she might have on Tom.
"Hey, your friend's waking up!" Julie said.
Nick looked around. Yes - Tom was now sitting on the park bench, scratching his crow's-nest hair and goggling around pallidly. Nick suddenly remembered the Pepto-Bismol.
"Hi, y'all!" Julie trilled, and ran down the street toward Tom, her br**sts bouncing sweetly under her tight middy top. Tom's goggle had been big to begin with; now it grew bigger still.
"Hi?" he said-asked slowly, and looked at Nick for confirmation and/or explanation.
Masking his own unease, Nick shrugged and nodded.
"I'm Julie," she said. "How you doin, cutie-pie?"
Deep in thought - and unease - Nick went back into the drugstore to get what Tom needed.
"Uh-uh," Tom said, shaking his head and backing away. "Uh-uh, I ain't gonna. Tom Cullen doesn't like medicine, laws no, tastes bad."
Nick looked at him with frustration and disgust, holding the three-sided bottle of Pepto-Bismol in one hand. He looked to Julie and she caught his gaze, but in it he saw that same teasing light as when she had called him dummy - it was not a twinkle but a hard mirthless shine. It is the look that a person with no essential sense of humor gets in his or her eye when he or she is getting ready to tease.
"That's right, Tom," she said. "Don't drink it, it's poison."
Nick gaped at her. She grinned back, hands on hips, challenging him to convince Tom otherwise. This was her petty revenge, perhaps; for having her second offer of sex turned down.
He looked back at Tom and swigged from the Pepto-Bismol bottle himself. He could feel the dull pressure of anger at his temples. He held the bottle out to Tom, but Tom was not convinced.
"No, uh-uh, Tom Cullen doesn't drink poison," he said, and with rising fury at the girl Nick saw that Tom was terrified. "Daddy said don't. Daddy said if it'll kill the rats in the barn, it'll kill Tom! No poison!"
Nick suddenly half turned to Julie, unable to bear her smug grin. He hit her open-handed, hit her hard. Tom stared, eyes wide and scared.
"You..." she began, and for a moment she couldn't find the words. Her face flushed thinly, and she suddenly looked scrawny and spoiled and vicious. "You dummy freak bastard! It was just a joke, you shithead! You can't hit me! You can't hit me, goddamn you! "
She lunged at him and he pushed her backward. She fell on the seat of her denim shorts and stared up at him, lips pulled back in a snarl. "I'll tear your balls off," she breathed. "You can't do that."
Hands trembling, head pounding now, Nick took his pen out and scrawled a note out in large, jagged letters. He tore it off and held it out to her. Eyes glaring and furious, she batted it aside. He picked it up, grabbed the back of her neck, and shoved the note into her face. Tom had withdrawn, whimpering.
She screamed: "All right! I'll read it! I'll read your crappy note!"
It was four words: "We don't need you."
"Fuck you!" she cried, tearing herself out of his grasp. She backed several steps down the sidewalk. Her eyes were as wide and blue as they had been in the drugstore when he almost literally stumbled over her, but now they were spitting with hate. Nick felt tired. Of all the possible people, why her?
"I'm not staying here," Julie Lawry said. "I'm coming. And you can't stop me."
But he could. Didn't she realize that yet? No, Nick thought, she didn't. To her all of this was some sort of Hollywood scenario, a living disaster movie in which she had the starring part. It was a movie where Julie Lawry, also known as Angel-Face, always got what she wanted.
He drew the revolver from its holster and pointed it at her feet. She became very still, and the flush evaporated from her face. Her eyes changed, and she looked very different, somehow real for the first time. Something had entered her world that she could not, at least in her own mind, manipulate to her advantage. A gun. Nick suddenly felt sick as well as tired.
"I didn't mean it," she said rapidly. "I'll do anything you want, honest to God."