FOR SHANA
BECAUSE THERE’S NO ONE ELSE
I COULD DEDICATE THIS STORY TO.
I LOVE YOU.
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
BO
AGNES
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY KODY KEPLINGER
COPYRIGHT
I’m waiting for the sirens.
I know it don’t make much sense. The police ain’t coming for me—not yet, anyway—but I already feel like a fugitive.
My flip-flops slap against the muddy ground, and soggy leaves cling to my bare legs. Tree limbs catch and tangle and snap in my hair. I should’ve put it up before I left. But I’d barely had time to pack, let alone think about my damn hair.
“Slow down, stupid dog.” Utah’s leash cuts into my fingers. She’s running faster than I can, her tail swishing back and forth, like this is some kinda game.
By the time we reach the edge of the woods, I’m panting harder than the dog is. My chest hurts and my lungs feel like they’re screaming for air, but I ain’t got time to catch my breath.
She’s waiting for me, standing there behind her parents’ garage. In the moonlight, she looks like some sorta ghost. Her skin is so white it seems to glow, and her long black hair is darker than the night around her. She looks beautiful, and I look feral. Not that she can see me or anything else right now.
“Agnes,” I whisper so as not to scare her. My voice is ragged. I swallow and say her name again. “Agnes.”
“Bo?”
“Right here.”
I’m about to reach out for her when Utah decides she’s got first dibs. Agnes squeals, startled, as my dog jumps up and licks her right on the nose.
“Shh!” I yank Utah back, and Agnes covers her mouth.
Neither of us move for a minute. We stand, frozen, listening. But the only sounds are the crickets and a few loudmouthed bullfrogs down by the Putnams’ pond.
Slowly, Agnes lowers her hand. “You brought the dog? Really, Bo?”
“Sure as hell ain’t gonna leave her,” I say. “Did you get the keys?”
She nods and reaches into the front pocket of her jeans. She holds them out about a foot to my left. I don’t say nothing, though. I take a quick step to the side and wrap my hand around two cold keys, their jagged edges digging into my palm.
“Come on.” I take her arm and loop it through mine, then guide her around the side of the detached garage. Utah trots along on my left, while Agnes’s cane makes quiet thuds in the grass to my right. “Which key?” I ask when we get to the side door.
“Neither. They never lock the garage.”
“They’re crazy.”
“Nothing’s been stolen before.”
“Until now.”
“I’m not sure this counts as stealing.”
But I’m pretty damn sure it does.
I turn the knob and push open the door. Agnes lets go of my arm and slides her hand along the wall until she finds the light switch. A fluorescent light flickers on above us, revealing two cars parked side by side. One is the Atwoods’ regular car, a white Toyota. But the other is an old silver Chevy I ain’t seen before.
“My sister’s car,” Agnes says, like she’s reading my mind. “She’s still at college, so nobody’s using it.”
“Won’t she be home for summer soon, though?”
Agnes shrugs. “We need it more than she does.”
I can’t argue with that. Agnes and I toss our stuff in the back. Neither of our bags are heavy. We just packed what we absolutely needed. “Hop in, Utah,” I say, patting the backseat. She climbs in and licks the side of my face before I shut the door.
Agnes gets into the passenger’s seat, and I run to turn off the garage light before I slide behind the wheel. Above my head, attached to the visor, is an automatic garage door opener.
“Will your parents hear?”
“No,” Agnes says. “They sleep like rocks.”
My heart is pounding and my hands are slick with sweat as I shove one of the keys into the ignition. It takes me a few tries to get it to turn over, and the revving is so loud it makes me flinch. Her parents had better sleep like the dead, or else we ain’t even getting out of the driveway. The clock on the dashboard lights up and tells me it’s just past 3:00 a.m.
“Agnes,” I say, choking on her name. “You sure you wanna do this?”
“No.” She turns her head, and this time she’s looking right at me. “But I’m doing it anyway.”
I almost start to cry, right then and there, but I blink back the tears. My fingers fumble with the garage door opener, and a second later the groaning and creaking starts. I watch the gap between the door and ground get wider and wider. It’s been open a good minute before I shift the car into gear, and Agnes’s hand reaches out to cover mine.
“Love you, Bo,” she says.
“Love you, too.”
Every small town has that family. You hear their last name and you just shake your head because you know the whole lot of them are trouble. Not one will make it to their twenty-first birthday without being arrested at least once. Maybe it’s in their blood, or maybe it’s just how they’re raised. It’s hard to say. All you can do is steer clear because nothing good can come of getting mixed up with that bunch.
In Mursey, that family was the Dickinsons.
“They’re no good,” I grew up hearing my grandmother say every time we’d pass the double-wide where a few of them lived, on our way to church. “They’re dirty drunks and thieves. And godless, too. None of them have stepped foot in a church in generations. Probably get struck by lightning if they did.”
“Mama, please,” Daddy would say. “Don’t fill Agnes’s head with all that. There’s a Dickinson girl in her class.”
“That’s why she ought to find out now,” Grandma said. “Don’t want her getting too friendly with that girl. She’ll grow up just like the rest of them, and I don’t want Agnes to be dragged down with her.”
My parents did their best to teach me the Golden Rule—treating others the way you want to be treated and all—but it was hard to argue with Grandma when the whole town seemed to agree. The Dickinsons were a bad lot; it was a reputation they’d earned nearly a hundred years back, if town legend was correct, and it was a reputation they wouldn’t be shaking anytime soon.
You couldn’t miss a Dickinson, either. They all had lots of wavy strawberry-blond hair and eyes the color of sweet tea. At least, that’s what I’d been told. I wasn’t able to make out the color of their eyes or anybody else’s. Those little details escaped my vision. I’d been told most of the family had freckles, too, but that was something else I’d just have to take everyone’s word for.
Bo Dickinson looked just like the rest of the family. Her hair—the one feature I could really notice—was a wavy mane of gold with hints of red. Sometimes she wore it in a sloppy ponytail, but most of the time it was loose and unkempt, a mess of tangled curl
s and unbrushed waves. Seemed fitting, really. Her hair was as wild as she was.
Assuming the stories were right, that is. We were in the same grade, though I’d never spoken more than two words to her. But if even half the gossip was true, Bo Dickinson was wild.
“She’s a slut, that’s what she is.”
“Christy,” I hissed.
We were standing on the front steps of the Mursey Baptist Church, where we met every week before Sunday school. The minute I’d arrived this morning, Christy had grabbed my arm, pulled me aside, and said, “You won’t believe what Bo Dickinson did.” But five minutes had passed, and Christy still hadn’t gotten to whatever Bo had done. Instead, she’d spent the time recapping a whole bunch of old gossip, just in case I’d forgotten.
Bo Dickinson’s life was like a novel the whole town was working on. A collaboration that had been going on for sixteen years. You couldn’t start a new chapter without looking back on what had been written before.
“It just feels wrong,” I said. “Saying the word slut in church.”
“Why? God thinks she’s a slut, too. And besides, we’re not in the church yet. And I haven’t even gotten to what she did Friday night.”
“All right, well, what?”
Christy gripped my arm and squeezed. It was a thing she always did when she was excited about something. Or mad about something. “Sarah told me she heard Perry Schaffer telling his friends that Bo”—she leaned in closer and lowered her voice—“that Bo went down on him in the hayloft at Andrew’s party Friday night.”
“Doesn’t Perry have a girlfriend?”
“Yeah. Layla Masters. And she was at the party, too. I saw her.”
“Wait … You went to Andrew’s party Friday?”
Andrew was her on-and-off-again boyfriend. And as of Friday morning, at school, they’d been off.
Christy took a step back and adjusted her short auburn ponytail. “Yeah. Sorry, Agnes. I would have taken you with me, but Andrew wanted to talk, and I knew it would be too dark in his barn for you to see real well. I didn’t want to be guiding you around all night. You understand, right?”
“Sure.”
“And Andrew and I worked things out.”
“That’s good.”
“But Bo! Can you believe it? Something is wrong with that girl.”
I nodded.
“And Layla is gonna freak out. I bet they’ll get in a fight in the cafeteria. Hair pulling and everything.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you.”
I didn’t know the voice at first. I hadn’t heard it enough to connect a person with it. That’s how I recognized people most of the time. Faces were just a jumble of blurred features to me, but everyone had a different voice. A different rhythm to their speech. If I knew a voice well enough, I could pick it out of a crowd, just like everybody else spotted a face.
Not this voice, though. It hadn’t imprinted itself on my brain. Not yet.
Christy and I both turned, and I could see someone standing at the bottom of the church steps. For once, my vision was enough. The bright late-August sun glinted off a mane of thick, wavy hair. It was gold and red. A halo with a hint of hellfire.
Bo Dickinson.
My stomach clenched, and my fist tightened around my cane. Part of me expected her to lunge at us. For our hair to be pulled. Or our eyes clawed out. I’d never been in a fight before, and Christy hadn’t, either—as far as I knew—but I was sure Bo Dickinson had. And my guess was, she was the type to fight mean and dirty.
If Christy was scared, I couldn’t tell. She put on her Sunday school voice and said, “Good morning, Bo. You joining us for church today?”
Bo didn’t say anything. For a second, she just stood there. I didn’t know, but I guessed she was probably staring me and Christy down. My heart had lodged itself in my throat, and I wasn’t too sure if I’d ever breathe normally again.
But then, to my surprise, the burning halo began to move away, down the sidewalk.
“Maybe next week?” Christy hollered after her. “Jesus loves you, Bo.” Then, under her breath, she murmured, “Whore. Probably on a walk of shame home right now. No other reason to be out this early on a Sunday unless you’re church-bound.”
“Christy, Agnes,” Brother Thomas called from the top of the steps. “It’s almost nine, girls. Y’all come on inside and head to your class.”
“Coming, sir,” Christy said. “You ready, Agnes?”
I stared down the street, my eyes following the back of Bo’s head until she was too far away and the golden-red colors blurred with the rest of the hazy world around me.
“Agnes!” Christy tugged on my free hand. “Come on.”
“Oh, sorry.” I turned around and followed her into the church, my cane tapping the corner of each step. “Can you believe that?” I whispered as we made our way across the sanctuary and toward the hallway that led to the classrooms.
“What?”
“Bo,” I said. “That she just walked away.”
“Of course she did,” Christy said. “What was she gonna do, beat us up right in front of Brother Thomas? Besides, even Bo would never hit a blind girl.”
My sister hadn’t gone to church with us that day. Actually, she hadn’t been to church with us in a while. Not since she turned eighteen and declared that Mama and Daddy couldn’t make her go anymore. They’d tried. And Grandma had called and given her a talking-to. But Gracie didn’t budge.
Most of the time, she’d sleep in on Sunday morning and was gone when the rest of us got home. I was never sure where she went all day. There was hardly anything to do in Mursey on Sundays, and most of her friends had to be in church. The whole town was in church. Except the Dickinsons, but I doubted Gracie was hanging out with them.
Mama and Daddy didn’t question her much, though. Not lately. She was less than a week from leaving for college in Lexington, and she was spending as much of that time out of the house as she could.
She still hadn’t gotten home by the time I went to bed that night, but my parents had left the porch light on for her.
“She’s an adult now,” Mama said. “She can stay out a little late if she wants.”
It was just past one in the morning when I got up to use the bathroom. I had to hold my alarm clock up to my face to read the red numbers. I climbed out of bed and crept through the house in the dark, sliding my hand along the walls. I didn’t need my cane or any lights on. We’d lived in this house since I was born, and I knew it as well as I knew the sound of my mother’s voice. I could probably have left for years, not step foot in this house for decades, only to come back and still be able to find my way around in the dark without a second thought.
Not that that was real likely. Best I could figure, I’d probably grow old in this house.
The bathroom was right at the top of the stairs. I looked down and saw that the lamp in the living room was still on, which meant Gracie wasn’t back yet. She always turned it off on her way up to bed. With the light on, I could make out some of the living room furniture—the back of Daddy’s recliner, the coffee table, one side of the tan couch. It was still blurry, and if it had been anyone else’s house, I wouldn’t have been able to tell what a bit of it was. But it was my living room; it hadn’t changed in years, so my memory filled in some of the gaps my eyes couldn’t.
I opened the bathroom door, not bothering to turn on the light. There was no point unless I was checking my reflection, and I sure didn’t want to do that. Even I could see how messy my hair got after a few hours of sleep.
I’d just finished washing my hands and shut off the faucet when I heard the front door open downstairs. I poked my head out of the bathroom and watched as shadows crossed the living room.
“Come on,” my sister’s voice whispered.
“What about your parents?”
I didn’t know that voice, but it belonged to a boy.
“They’re heavy sleepers,” Gracie told him. “And we’ll sneak you out before
they get up in the morning.”
“You sure?”
“You don’t want to?”
“No. Believe me, I do.”
The shadows weren’t crisp enough for me to make out what they were doing, but I knew what it sounded like when people kissed. Not from personal experience—just TV and some awkward encounters in the hallways at school—but that’s what my sister and this boy were doing at the bottom of the stairs.
I felt my cheeks heat up.
After a second, the kissing sounds stopped. Gracie giggled. “Let’s go upstairs,” she whispered.
I backed up and hid behind the bathroom door. I heard the lamp switch off, and a second later two sets of footsteps hurried up the stairs and past me, down the hall. There were a few more seconds of giggling before Gracie’s door shut with a soft latching sound.
I leaned against the wall for a minute, then pressed my fingers to my lips, wondering what it was like to be kissed, wondering if I’d ever find out. I’d been jealous of my sister a thousand times over the years—she was the one with perfect vision, the more popular one, the more confident one. But it was more than that.
Gracie stayed out late. Gracie had boyfriends. Gracie went to parties and was going to college.
Gracie was getting out of Mursey.
And I was gonna be stuck here forever.
We don’t drive too far, just across the county line and a few miles down the highway. I mean to go farther, but the adrenaline’s fading fast, and the late hour is catching up with me. There ain’t no way I’m driving this tired. Not with Agnes in the car.
I pull into the parking lot of the first hotel I see. A giant, glowing sign tells us it’s Sleepy’s Spot. It’s awful big, two stories, and seems as decent a place as any to catch a few hours of shut-eye.
“Where are we?” Agnes asks. She don’t sound a bit tired.
“Hotel,” I say. “Come on.”
“Shouldn’t we keep going? We can’t be far from home yet.”
“I’m too tired to keep driving,” I tell her. “Your parents won’t know you’re gone until morning, and nobody’s gonna be hunting for me this late. If they are, they won’t be looking outside Mursey yet. We got a few hours.”
Agnes clearly ain’t so sure about this, but she don’t argue. I get out of the car and unload Utah, who stretches and yawns before hopping out of the backseat.