“Ridiculous,” I say, remembering Tara McFee’s tits. “And pointless, and juvenile. I stayed too late. You didn’t come.”
“I wanted to,” she whispers. I can barely hear her. Four blocks away, a single car rips down Main, the exhaust backfiring like a gunshot. I can hardly hear Coralie Taylor’s voice.
“You should get back inside. Get into bed,” I tell her.
She picks at the bitumen on the roof beneath her, not looking at me. “I have nightmares when I sleep in there.”
“Then you should come and sleep in my bed. I’ll keep my hands to myself, I swear.” I wink at her, and her eyes dart to mine, round like saucers. “Don’t worry. I’m joking,” I say.
She breathes out heavily. “Good.”
“I’m coming to get you in the morning, though, Coralie. I’m going to knock on your front door, and I’m going to walk you to school.”
“Oh, god, please…don’t. That would be very bad.” She looks frightened all of a sudden.
“Why not?
“Because my father…he doesn’t like people coming to the house. Especially boys.”
“I’m your neighbor, though.”
“Still. He hates strangers over here. He’s protective.”
“Of you?”
She gives me a strange, strange look. “Of everything. Me. The house. Everything inside it. I’m not allowed to have people over here.”
“Not ever?”
“No. Not ever.”
“All right. I won’t knock. But I’ll be waiting outside my place for you at eight. You gonna walk with me?”
She thinks about this for a second. Eventually, she nods. “Just don’t come to the house.”
“I won’t, I promise.”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to leave my window open. If you want to come and sleep in my bed after all, just call me. I don’t mind crashing out on the floor.”
Coralie blinks at me some more. I can’t tell if she’s considering accepting this offer, or if she’s wondering how I can be so sleazy and persistent. “I’m sure I’ll be fine right here,” she says slowly, her voice wavering.
“Well. Like I said. If you change your mind…”
I lean back in, and I stand there, watching her for a second. She seems so breakable, sitting there all huddled up like that. I don’t like it. For the past few years, I’ve hung around with girls at school, driven by this powerful desire to have them stick their hands down my pants. The desire that drives me now isn’t that, though. I’m caught off guard by how badly I want to take care of this pale, interesting girl, perched on the rooftop opposite my bedroom.
She’s like the rarest of birds, endangered and at risk of expiration, and I want to fold my body around hers in order to protect it, not to glean some sort of sexual gratification from it. It’s not as though she isn’t pretty; she has this strange, ethereal quality to her that makes me feel a little dizzy. If I’m honest, that could actually be the beer, but whatever. I’d like to kiss her. I’d like to make sure she’s safe even more, though.
I drag my Nirvana t-shirt off over my head and discard it on the floor, and then the jeans come off, too. I collapse onto my bed, on top of the sheets, wondering if I’ll find a bruised, fragile butterfly curled up into a ball next to me when I wake.
I don’t.
CHAPTER NINE
CORALIE
Gumbo
NOW
Sheriff Mason is a woman, which, for some reason, surprises me. I was expecting an old, pot-bellied guy with a grand, waxed moustache and a cowboy hat. Instead, Amanda Mason is a thirty something blonde, thin as a rail, with a strangely shaped birthmark on her face, below her right cheek bone—it kind of looks like a tiny postage stamp.
“We’re ruling suicide, yes. We were planning on waiting until after the funeral, though. Doubt Sam’ll dig him up or anything. Doesn’t seem like he’d have the stomach for it.”
I very much doubt Sam has the stomach for it, either. I smile at Mason, tapping my fingers against the paperwork I need to give to the county morgue in order for them to release my father’s body. “Thank you, Sheriff. I know it’s a little underhanded, but I appreciate it. I’m sure my father does, too.”
She gives me a saccharine sweet smile, pursing her lips. “Frankly, Coralie, I didn’t care all that much for your father. He made a pretty good show of church-going and helping in the community, but I know a bad soul when I see one. Call it southern intuition. And people talk, of course. Talk about how he treated you and your momma. A man that hits a woman loses the right to call himself so, if you ask me. Still. I don’t want any headaches. And people should be buried where they wanna be buried, regardless of how they end up dead. It ain’t up to us to judge people in this life. That’ll happen on the other side, no doubt, when we meet our maker.”