Now it’s my turn. But I don’t show him the gun. And I don’t think he’s stupid.
“I’m just sorry,” I say, kind of flustered, kind of defensive. But completely sincere.
“Sounds like they didn’t give you a lot of choices,” he offers gently, and it’s more than I deserve.
“No, they didn’t,” I whisper. “Just look away for a minute, okay?”
He shrugs and lets his chin drop to his chest, eyes closed. I grab my jeans off the floor and scramble into them under my blanket without knocking my gun to the ground or letting it make noise, which sounds a lot easier than it is. I leave the gun under the blanket before lurching into the front seat. Ass in the air, I check that my mail shirt is wadded up tightly and stuffed under the driver’s seat, making sure that the top button is wrapped inside the bundle. I have to keep it dry and near. If the camera button gets too wet or stepped on, it will break, and I’ll be in trouble. But I don’t want them to know about Wyatt. While I’m up there, I check the rearview mirror and lick my finger and scrub away the last of the zit cream before turning back around.
“Did you just do a mirror check?” The corner of Wyatt’s mouth barely turns up, and I realize I have no idea what he looks like when he’s smiling for real, or if he’s the kind of person who laughs a lot. I only know what he looks like when he’s crying and murderous. And that he was watching me when I asked him not to. And that he didn’t say anything about me going for the gun supposedly under the front seat.
“Yeah. No. I was checking my shirt. It’s bugged. Or whatever.” I look around the van, wishing I knew if anything else was likewise bugged. Too late. “Look, I’m not supposed to tell you anything, but I’m going to anyway.”
“I’m listening.”
I sit on my bed, leaning back against the opposite side of the truck from him and pulling my blanket up over me to trap the heat. The frosty metal bites through my thin tank top. His legs are stretched out, his bare feet crossed under the bed. I crook my knees so our feet don’t touch. My socks don’t match, but they never do.
“So you read your dad’s card. I got a card too. Turns out my mom’s in serious debt after a car accident and has cancer but was trying to hide it all from me. The guy from Valor who came to my door put a gun to her chest and said we would both die if I didn’t do this. He threatened to shoot us and burn our house down.”
Now’s the part of the conversation where he should say something, but he doesn’t. The silence feels wrong. I keep talking to fill the space.
“It’s not like I want to do it. It’s not like I want to kill people. But my dad left when I was really young, and my mom is all I’ve got, and I can’t let her die. For the next five days, I am the bank’s bitch.” I stare at my painted fingernails; I’ve already chewed off most of the paint. “Probably after that, too.”
“Why don’t you just kill yourself?” he asks quietly. Did I imagine him rubbing his wrist?
I snort. “They already thought of that. Much like the church, suicide doesn’t count. You die in duty, you’re excused. You off yourself, they treat it the same as running away.” I mime a big explosion, fingers shaking imaginary hellfire down on my mom’s house.
Wyatt’s eyes glaze over at the thin red line his knife made on my neck before wandering up to my posters, and he almost smiles again. He runs a hand through his hair, making it stand up in ragged spikes in the red glow of the clock. I probably look like a corpse, but it’s not like I’m trying to win a beauty pageant. I just want us both to get out of this mail truck alive, without hurting each other any more than we have to. And maybe, just a little, I want him to understand.
“You didn’t know your mom was in debt?” he finally says.
“I knew we were poor. And I knew her insurance sucked and the hospital time and meds were a serious problem after her accident. I didn’t know she’d been fired, lost her insurance, and pawned the car title. We were doing pretty good a year ago. You’ve probably passed our neighborhood. River Run? It’s just around the corner from you, but my entire house would fit in your living room.”
“Yeah, we pass it all the time.” He tosses his hair. I wonder if he straight irons his bangs. “That’s why I don’t know you. We go to different schools.”
I snort. “Yeah. You go to Haven with all the rich kids, and I go to Big Creek with all the losers.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” he says. “I didn’t ask for . . . It’s not like . . .”
“Like what?”
“I’m not going to say I don’t want to be rich, because we both know that’s stupid. Everyone wants to be rich. But I knew what my dad was doing. I knew he got fired for embezzling, and I knew he was blackballed, and I knew the bills were racking up. I saw them in the trash, the ones that they start sending in pink instead of white. Like you just forgot to pay them because they weren’t a bright enough color or something. But my dad . . . It’s not like I could have said anything. I mentioned it once, that we might need to make a budget or cut out . . . some stuff. And my dad went ballistic and smashed my laptop.”
Now it’s my turn to stare at him. I feel curious about this strange fake-rich boy who somehow tracked me down in the rain, possibly to kill me, and who is now waxing philosophic about his father’s debt. Did he actually think he could kill me? Does he really have what it takes to do that? Pulling the trigger on his dad was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, and that was four feet away with a gun. What does it take to put a knife through someone’s throat? He’s playing with it now, cleaning out his fingernails like it’s just the most normal thing to do with a steak knife. But maybe he knows how to use it on more than steak. I probably look pretty harmless from the outside too.
“Why am I telling you this?” he finally says.
He looks up, and our eyes meet somewhere in the center of a repurposed delivery truck.
“Stages of grief?” I venture, fiddling with my locket.
“Let’s see. What am I feeling? Well, I watched my dad die, and I felt confusion, fear, anger, and sadness. I got in my car in my pajamas to drive to the hospital because they wouldn’t answer the frigging phone and saw a familiar girl driving a big-ass mail truck past my neighborhood. That was anger again. I followed her into the middle of nowhere to kill her in some weird action-movie-revenge scene with the knife from my glove box. So that was more anger, and I’m pretty sure I felt insanity in there. I sat in my car for two horrible hours, crying and thinking and raging and waiting for this stupid truck to do something, anything but sit there in the rain.”
I open my mouth, and he stops me with a finger in my face.
“And I finally charged over here to kill you before the rain quit and I had to see your face in the sunlight. That was desperation. When I failed, there was more anger. And now that we’ve talked and I know we like the same music and that your mom’s dying and you don’t have a choice, there’s nothing but confusion.”
“Those aren’t the stages of grief they taught us in health class,” I say like an idiot.
“Oh, well, you go to poor school.” He gives a comic eye roll. “At rich school, we take notes on hundred-dollar bills using unicorn tears, and our grief is vastly different and more complex. I was talking to Chauncey just the other day, and—”
One lone chuckle escapes despite my best efforts to keep it tamped down.
“Shut up,” I say. “This is serious.”
“Maybe I’m off base here.” He recrosses his feet. “But things are majorly effed up. I don’t see how being serious is going to make our situation any better.”
“So.”
“So.”
He looks around the mail truck again, taking it all in.
“Did you see their show at the Masquerade last year?” he says, inclining his head toward a poster.
“Of course. It was amazing.”
“Were you
part of the conga line?”
“Of course.” I mimic his earlier eye roll. “We poor people live to conga. Because it’s free. We conga to the food stamp line. I already sold my hair to buy tickets for this year’s show, but I need to live long enough to go and conga. So what are we going to do?”
This moment with him has lasted way too long. I used to dream of being trapped in a small, dark space with a guy who wasn’t completely wretched. Not that I’m saying I like Wyatt, or that I even know him, or that there’s any point in pretending that anyone meets their soul mate on the first day of the apocalypse, but at least he’s not a mouth-breathing troglodyte or a dropout or a druggie. Probably. He can form coherent sentences. And he’s cute. But I don’t forget for a single second that there’s a gun under my hand and a knife in his.
Apparently, he can’t forget it either.
“We could pull a Romeo and Juliet,” he says brightly, holding up the knife. “But not suicide. Like . . . a homicide pact.”
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Whatever. It’s romantic as hell.”
I sigh dramatically. “That’s a story. This is real. We can’t just sit in the truck forever, making polite conversation and bad jokes and reliving awesome concerts. I’m on a pretty tight schedule.” I incline my head toward the bright red clock in the dash, the numbers ticking down. Ten more hours until it starts blinking again.
“Places to go, people to kill?”
“Seriously, shut up, Wyatt.”
He lets out a long, controlled sigh that ends in a groan, signaling that the flirty banter is over.
“You’ve got a lot of nerve,” he says. “You think you can just tell people to shut up and they’re actually going to do it? Just because you have a gun and work for the bank that, according to you and a printed card, now owns America? You can’t tell me how to feel. Which is back to anger, by the way, so thanks for that.”
“At least I didn’t try to slit your throat while you were sleeping,” I shoot back.
“But I’m on that list,” he says. “Aren’t I?”
I swallow hard and look away, my gaze landing on the stuffed turtle my ex–best friend gave me for my eighth birthday. She was as close as I’ve ever come to having a sister, to having anyone to love outside of my mom. How does Wyatt feel about Max? And if I tell him the truth, will he let me just drive away and get on with my business?
“Nope,” I say. “You’re not on it. If you were, I would have shot you already. I get a bonus for that sort of thing.”
“Jesus freaking Christ.” He bangs his head back against the truck. “They’ve turned life into a video game. And you just keep playing, or your guy dies.”
“It sucks. But that doesn’t change anything,” I mutter.
“I felt the same way about calculus.”
“Do you think this is a big joke?” I shout. “Seriously?”
The look on his face alerts me to the fact that I’m now waving around a loaded gun that’s supposed to be under the front seat. He clears his throat, and I lay the pistol gently on my flowered quilt.
“I know it’s not a joke,” he says quietly. “I just don’t see how laughing hurts anything.”
“It’s just so stupid,” I say. “Like—”
But he doesn’t get to hear my next great simile, because I’m interrupted by the sound of a car skidding to a stop, brakes squealing. Bass thumps the air, and my eyes meet Wyatt’s.
“I thought this neighborhood was abandoned,” he says.
“It is.”
Gun in hand, I scramble up and peek between the front seats of the mail truck. I can’t see anything yet, but car doors slam on the other side of the house, probably in the driveway.
“What is it?” Wyatt asks.
“Can you shoot a gun?”
“What?”
“Can. You. Shoot. A gun?” I say.
“Of course. This is Georgia.”
When the first guy appears around the side of the house, I glance back at Wyatt. He’s standing in the middle of my truck, stooped over and out of place in his plaid pajama pants and faded shirt and sleep-wild hair. He looks so big and helpless and clueless, and my heart clenches.
“Can I trust you?” I whisper.
Two more guys follow the first one, their arms straining to hold bulging black trash bags. The guys are in all black, with hoodies pulled down over their weird white masks. Gold chains glint around their necks, women’s jewelry in disarray. When they see my mail truck, they drop their bags and shout at each other and pull guns as they approach. My throat goes dry.
“Can I trust you?” I ask again, more urgently. Wyatt hasn’t answered, hasn’t moved.
“No,” he says quietly.
Six guys with six guns are creeping up on the truck, maybe fifty feet away. I still trust him more than I trust them.
“Wyatt, listen. There’s a gun in the microwave. It’s loaded. Don’t worry if you kill anyone. The police aren’t going to be involved.”
I don’t take my eyes off the men whispering as they surround the truck, but I’m satisfied to hear the microwave door open and the magazine sliding out of the gun as Wyatt checks that it’s loaded. I go cold all over, knowing that now is the decisive moment. Just as I had my chance to shoot him and didn’t, now he’s got a clean shot at me. I tense, refusing to turn my head to see if he’s aiming for the mess of loose hairs tangled around my exposed neck.
“You going to confront them or just start shooting when they get too close?” he whispers from right behind me. I wait to feel the kiss of metal against my back, but it doesn’t come, and I let myself exhale. But the cold tension doesn’t leave me, and it won’t until I’m dead or these guys are gone. Maybe not even then. Maybe not for four more days.
With a deep breath, I slip into the front seat and squash the US Postal Service hat down over my hair. The windows in the sliding doors have no glass, of course, so most of my body is exposed, and the transparent tank top doesn’t help against the chill. Almost without thinking, I reach under my seat, slip on the Postal Service shirt, and paste on a shaky smile as the men skid to a stop in front of the truck.
“Can I help you?” I ask.
“What the fuck, kid?” one of the guys asks, his eyes black pools behind his mask. He’s thick all over, with beefy shoulders and a belly running to fat. The women’s necklaces look ridiculous piled around his bull neck, and I wonder briefly if they’re loot or kill trophies.
“Just taking a quick lunch break before I finish my rounds,” I say. “Lots of mail to deliver.”
“Bullshit,” the guy says. “It ain’t lunchtime.” His eyes wander down to my chest and stay there. The other guys stare from him to me, but most of them can’t stop looking at me like I’m a Thanksgiving turkey with its legs tied together.
“I was sleepy,” I say defensively. “And I think it’s more my manager’s business than yours, anyway. What are you going to do, call the Postal Service and complain? ’Cause here’s a hint: you’re going to be on hold a long time.”
The guys edge in closer, snickering like hyenas behind their masks.
“I got a package for you,” the first guy says with a leer.
“So where’s your mail, honey?” another guy asks.
“Um, in the back of the truck?”
“Let’s go back there and check,” one of the guys says, moving closer and giving me a sort of smoldering look through his mask. “I’ll give her some mail. Hot, American male.” He reaches toward my leg, and I scoot away like I’m edging around a puddle of barf.
“What are y’all doing out here, anyway?” I ask. “This house is abandoned.”
“Hey, we don’t bust you for sleeping on the job, you don’t bust us for hanging out in an empty house,” the first guy says. “Bank owns it. Bank won’t mind.”
&nb
sp; “No phone over here,” a guy says, and I realize he sneaked around my truck to the passenger seat while I wasn’t watching. I’m surrounded.
“Jeans are too tight to hide a phone, anyway,” says the smoldery guy, leaning closer into my open door.
“Let’s go in back and I’ll show you that package,” the leader says. “Now.”
I feel a new kind of panic, one I’ve never personally felt before but as old as the word “no.” I’m not sheltered or stupid, and I know girls who have been raped. But I’ve always been careful, not going to dangerous places alone after dark or hanging with roofie hogs. I’ve been really lucky. Up until this week, I guess. But I have several advantages that I didn’t have before. Guns. Diplomatic immunity. Wyatt.
Seeing my hesitation, the lead guy pulls his own gun out of the back of his pants. It looks shockingly like mine.
“I said now, sweetheart.”
With a shaky breath, I edge between the seats and into the back of the truck, keeping my gun hidden in my waistband under my postal shirt while we’re still in full view of his friends. I’ve heard of guys like them. I can tell by their clothes and accents that they’re not trailer trash, not a gang. More like middle management and IT gone wrong, computer guys with desk-job paunches. Since the economy mostly collapsed, too many people are out of work, and the police can’t keep up with looting and theft. Gold is worth more than money, and judging by the metal each man wears like a badge, they do pretty well. I’m just another spoil of war, as far as they’re concerned. So I won’t feel too bad about killing them.
Or so I tell myself.
Something rustles in the truck behind me, and I realize that it’s darker than it should be. Wyatt must have shut the door. I only hope the rest of the gang isn’t going to come around back, reopen it, and watch the fun. I want surprise on my side. Our side, I guess, since Wyatt is in it now too.
The truck lurches as the leader climbs into the front seat. I duck farther into the blackness of the truck, shuffling into the back corner and pulling out my gun, holding it behind my butt.