“Where?” Frank says breezily, like Nathan has mentioned a really good deal he got on curtains. Later, Monday will wonder why Frank asked when Omar already told everyone. It’s the kind of thing that bugs Monday, but it’s a fair question. He needed to hear Nathan say it? He thought the rest of us needed to hear Nathan say it? He wanted to help Omar out, transfer the earlier ire away from our mayor to where it belonged?
“Maybe he wanted to pretend he didn’t already know and hadn’t already heard,” Mab will guess.
“Why?” Monday will press again.
“Didn’t want to give him the satisfaction,” Mab will posit, “of thinking we’ve just been waiting all these years for their return. Didn’t want him to think he’d just pick up where he left off?”
Whatever the reason Frank asked, Nathan’s answer seems canned. “Well, friend, you may have heard of a little company called Belsum. It’s a new day for us. New plan, new facilities, new name—Belsum Basics—but old stompin’ grounds. We’re renewing the old plant from the inside out, building our operations better than ever, and we wouldn’t dream of doing it without the good people of Bourne. So what do you say? Anyone around here need a good job?”
Nora looks like she’s going to cry. Nora looks like she’s going to scream. Nora looks like she’s going to smash the teeth of Nathan’s lightbulb smile from his mouth. She’s got her hands flat on the bar now, probably to stop them from shaking, but she looks like she’s going to vault over the top, take Nathan in her mouth, and shake him until blood and hair and guts rain down and his neck snaps and she spits his limp body into a broken heap on the bar floor and retreats to her corner to lick the gore off her haunches. Her eyes are on me, and I give her a small smile, a we-will-figure-this-out-too smile, a remember-we-have-each-other smile, an I-believe-in-you smile.
And maybe that’s why or maybe she’s lost her mind, but what Nora does is laugh. She throws back her head and laughs. She throws back her head and holds her belly and wipes her eyes and laughs and laughs and laughs.
Nathan laughs along with her. “What’s so funny?” He’s friendly, a little kid eager to be in on the joke.
Then she stops laughing. “Get out of my bar.” And when he doesn’t move, she leans across to him to add, “No matter the salary, no matter the job description, no matter how desperate, there is not a single person in this bar or in this town who would ever work for Belsum Chemical again.”
Nathan props his elbow on the bar before her and proffers his pinky finger. “Wanna bet?” Still smiling. All in good fun.
She struggles to hold on to her mirth.
“It’s a new day, Nora Mitchell. Even your daughters came to visit. Even they’re on board.” How does he know her name? How does he know Mab and Monday are her daughters?
“Get. Out. Of. My. Bar.” Her cool is slipping off her like snakeskin.
“My understanding is it belongs to my friend Frank here”—Nathan holds up both hands—“but I get it. I do. Didn’t mean to rattle you. It’s Saturday night. You’re busy. A handsome stranger comes to town and shakes things up.” He winks again, possibly at me. “Just wanted to say hello, buy some friends a beer, and check out the hottest place in town.”
Without looking, he takes two hundred-dollar bills out of his wallet and lays them on the bar, shoots in-cahoots smiles all around, and disappears with a whiff of brimstone which is probably just my imagination, but I look at Nora looking at me and wouldn’t swear to it.
“Never.” She starts cleaning up—wiping down the bar, clearing still half-full glasses, sweeping around her shell-shocked customers—all the while, under her breath, “Never never never never.”
And no one disagrees.
But I remember that other saying about the devil, that idle hands are his playthings. And honestly? There are a lot of idle hands around here.
One
For a couple weeks, we ignore each other. Really, though, everyone’s ignoring him, not just me. He sits alone at lunch. He sits alone in class too. We’ve always had more space than students, a (Petra would say) surfeit of chairs for all the kids who should be here but aren’t, and either he’s picking seats with wide margins of empties all around or the rest of us have made an unspoken agreement to keep him marooned. In chem lab, no one will partner with him, so he has to determine the caloric content of a potato chip all on his own. In debate prep, no one will partner with him, so he has to argue about the relative merits of human cloning with himself. In English, no one will partner with him, so he has to do Romeo and Juliet.
Then, slowly, we stop ignoring him. The Kyles walk past in the hallway and shoulder River sideways into the lockers. Adam Fell pushes him out front before school and then taps his own chest, showing River how to come back at him. Nigel Peterman sneaks out of his classroom into our lab and singes the hood of River’s sweatshirt and the back of his hair with a Bunsen burner. At first they aren’t ass-kickings. They’re short shocks to teach the mouse to stop touching the buzzer, stay in his own corner, and consort with no one. They’re short shocks to teach the mouse he is unloved.
Then, soon enough, they are ass-kickings. One day, River has a cut on his lip, bright red inside, crusty at the edges. Then his left cheek is one raw pink scrape. Someone drops a book in history, and he flinches, his face darkening all at once like clouds moved in fast. The next week one of his eyes is swollen, bright and tight.
His other eye looks at me hard when we get to Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech, but I pretend I don’t see. Twice he tries to come up to me in the hall, but I turn around and walk the other way. He goes to Petra and asks her how he can get me to talk to him, and Petra says, “‘Deny thy father and refuse thy name.’”
Not that River and I are going to be Romeo and Juliet. Juliet’s problem is she loves Romeo, and he’s cute and passionate and says a sonnet with her when they meet which makes him the perfect guy for her in every single way except his parents, so all he has to do is disavow them, and her objections go out the window. Romeo does not call her crazy. He is not rude and smug and a rich snob. When Romeo realizes he’s done something wrong, he says sorry, and even if it was something pretty big—he did kill her cousin—at least he’s not planning to do it again.
But halfway through World History one morning, there’s a rustling, some ripple in the fabric of Track A, and under the desk, Chloe Daniels shoves from her hand into mine a folded-up piece of paper which when I unfold it reads, “I might have been somewhat wrong. You might have been slightly right. I may be a little bit sorry.”
So, not completely unlike Romeo.
I look over at him. He’s already looking at me. His eye’s less swollen but more bruised, mottled purple all around, a sick yellow at the edges. His lip’s almost healed in one spot but newly split in another.
I show Petra the note. “Chicanery,” she pronounces.
So I write back, “Is this a trick?”
I watch the note make its way across the room. I watch him unfold and read it. He looks up and makes shocked eyes at me. Why, the very suggestion! I watch him write on the note, watch him fold it back up, watch it make its way back to me. I unfold it.