Ransom X

  Chapter 7 Darci

  Darci sat outside a truck stop on I-84 on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. She had a self-styled quaff of hair that looked like a muffin top. The front dangled below her eyes like an uneven greasy hat brim. Two dazzling blue eyes peeked out of the mess. Her skin had a pale shine, but like her body it was thin and fragile.

  “It’s all natural.” Darci said pointing to a stain on her shirt just beside the outline of her nipple.

  Bong, one of the three rebellious skateboarder boys cutting school and listening to her story, spit chew on the ground and grimaced.

  “So is that, but I don’t want it on my shirt.”

  “Some boys got no control.” She said wetting her lips then striking a match and putting a cigarette between them.

  A chorus of “damn” “whoa” and “shit that” came from the slacker boys. It was the most impressed they’d been in months.

  Bong pointed to three more stains on her shirt. “How often do you wash this?”

  His question was met with cat-trance sass. Darci smiled took a deep drag off of the cigarette. “Twice a day –”

  A semi-truck rolled by but it was like the entire world went silent as the boys digested this news. Darci slugged Bong in the arm to break the trance. “Tard, every week, what kind of slut do you think I am?”

  A watch alarm went off, and the boys explained that they needed to get home for dinner. Bong lingered after the other boys had mounted their skateboards. He did his best pre-pubescent James Dean impression and told Darci that he might be back, “after dark.”

  Darci said nothing. She put her middle finger all the way into her mouth then sucked it clean. The boy was halfway to an erection when he noticed that at the end of the seduction she was flipping him off, middle finger playfully tapping pursed lips. Bong responded by finding somewhere to target his anger.

  “Where’d you get that scar anyway? Was one of the guys pierced with a fishing hook?”

  Darci touched her neck, a protruding scar, called a “visceral scar” because of the way the tissue extrudes and forms a lump of tissue. It was misshapen and sported pigment that was like a bright red volcano. Most people who have such a mark pretend it’s a birthmark because the kind of cut that makes them is almost always the result of the insertion of a surgical steel blade or needle.

  “It’s a birthmark.” Darci sneered.

  “My dad’s a dermatologist, that’s a scar. So what’s up with the neck, baby?” It might have been all the concern a teenager could muster, but it sounded like a taunt.

  “Go home.” She turned away from him then hearing his wheels hit the pavement, she shouted after Him: “Don’t come back till after nine.”

  She pressed the scar between her thumb and forefinger, annoyed. She was a long way from home.