I start to tuck it back into my waistband, not paying enough attention. I go down, the thing in my outstretched hand, slamming a rock as I fall, and the thing fires. I fire it, and then my hand closes on nothing. I fire a gun, and I’m so startled, I don’t even hang on to it, don’t even brace my fall. I hear the thwack of my head against a tree trunk before I even feel it. My hands go to my head, without thinking, which you can’t do when there’s a gun involved. You can’t stop thinking ever (think, Jack) but especially not then.
I hear my head cracking open against the tree, and the gunshot, and myself saying, “Shit!” all at once, although they couldn’t have happened at once.
My forehead is wet, I’m bleeding from the temple, wet fingers, and Nicolette has the gun.
She’s crouched in a good position, a two-handed stance, the gun in her right hand, right arm braced with the left, not crying, not shaking, not in any way weak or hesitant or anything you’d want a girl with a gun on you to be.
“Did you shoot me?”
“Are you serious?” Her voice is vibrating with indignation. “You bumped your head when you ran into a bush. It’s a boo-boo. When I shoot you, you’ll need more than a Band-Aid.”
Then she lowers herself onto a rock, not losing her aim for a second.
“It’s not what you think. Cat, it’s not. Put down the gun.”
“Nicolette,” she says. “My name is Nicolette Holland. But you already knew that.”
She doesn’t put the gun down.
57
Nicolette
His name isn’t J.
And he isn’t my boyfriend or my semi-boyfriend or my friend.
He’s the angel of death. Maybe not death in general. Just my death. The opposite of my guardian angel.
The opposite of what I thought.
I’m staring at his face across his gun. I have to get this right the first time, because the kickback is going to throw me off. Also, the sight of him, his head coming apart in pieces like a clay pigeon, could be bad. I know it won’t happen like that, but I imagine his face breaking apart like a porcelain plate you drop on a tile floor.
This doesn’t upset me as much as it should.
Maybe answering the Sunday School question of whether, if it was either you or this other person you were deeply into until five minutes ago, you’d kill the other person.
It isn’t down to him or me yet, but I’ll shoot before it gets there.
So, yes.
I don’t want him looking at me like this.
Scared out of his mind but planning something.
I don’t want him to see my face.
I mean, I want him to see how much I want to kill him, but I don’t want him to think I’m weak because I haven’t pulled the trigger yet. I want him in the dark.
My whole life is turning into a can-you-top-this fest of getting as angry as I thought I could possibly be. And then topping it.
This angry.
No, this angry.
No, THIS ANGRY.
I got therapy for this a long time ago, where the point was to figure out I wasn’t actually angry. No, Nicolette, you’re actually sad. Unbearably sad. Your mom is gone, and you’re left with this sweet Cuban stepfather you hardly even know.
But face it, as unbearably sad as I am now that my freaking boyfriend wanted to take me to see a romantic sunrise where he was going to freaking shoot me, the main thing is anger. Righteous anger.
Even if I deserved everything he planned to do to me, it wasn’t supposed to be him.
I’m this angry, and I’m not going down.
He is. Whoever he is.
I order him to close his eyes.
He just keeps watching me.
“Close your eyes!”
He says, “I can explain.”
I say, “Shut the fuck up!”
58
Jack
I shut the fuck up because when the person with the gun tells you to do that, you do. We sit there as the sun gets hotter and starts to fry me, long enough for me to sweat through my flannel shirt, just this side of forever. The gun is trained on me. She doesn’t look away from me for a second, the whole time glaring at me.
And I’m not my father’s son as much as I was afraid I was because it’s taking a lot of effort not to piss myself.
I need to be thinking about ways out of here as I tense and untense my muscles, preparing to flee or lunge. I ought to be calculating what to do tonight—if I last that long—when it’s so dark, she can’t see me unless she comes so close that I can overpower her. But I’m just staring at her staring at me.
I can’t tell if she’s talking herself into shooting me or out of it—or if I’m already dead. I wonder if the gun got messed up bouncing across the rock, and if she knows how to shoot it. But I look at her stance, the way she’s crouched, the way she’s got the gun braced, and I know she knows what she’s doing.
She says, “Eyes closed!” She sounds ferocious.
“What?”
“You heard me. Close them!”
I do, but not completely—I can still see a sliver of light and underbrush.
She says, “Keep your hands on your head!”
I sit there, frozen, not wanting to spook her. I keep trying to look at her through the slit between my eyelids, remembering the part of the equation I’d rather not remember—Connie Marino with her throat cut.
I make an inventory of the parts of my body that don’t hurt, in case I need them later: my left leg, my hands, my right arm up to the elbow.
She says, “How were you planning to do it?”
“Do what?”
“Shoot me? Push me over the edge? Shoot me and then push me over the edge?”
“I wasn’t.”