Dark Places

room—
-fuck, I need a goddam fucking bra that fits!
She stood glaring at him, and then her underpants started rolling under themselves, edging away from her stomach, up in her ass crack. None of those sexy underclothes fit. Ben thought first: chubby, and then corrected: pregnant.
    “Are you serious? You don’t know your own dad deals? He sold to me and Trey last week.” She tossed away the underpants, then put on a different bra, an ugly plain bra, and new jeans, pouting about her size.
    Ben had never bought drugs himself before. He smoked a lot with Trey and Diondra and whoever had pot in that crowd, and sometimes he chipped in a buck or two, but when he pictured a dealer, he pictured someone with slick hair and jewelry, not his dad in the old Royals baseball cap and the cowboy boots with the big heelsand the shirts that looked like they were wilting. Not his dad, definitely not his dad. And weren’t dealers supposed to have money? His dad definitely did not have money, so the whole argument was stupid. And if he was a dealer, and he did have money, he wouldn’t give any to Ben. He’d make fun of Ben for asking, maybe hold a twenty just out of Ben’s reach the way a bully would grab a nerd’s notebook, and then he’d laugh and shove it right back in his pants pocket. Runner never had a wallet, he just carried mangled bills in the front of his jeans, and wasn’t that enough of a sign he had no cash?
    “Trey!” Diondra yelled down the hall. She threw on a new sweater with patterns that looked like a geometry experiment. Ripped off the tags and tossed them to the floor, then rumbled out of the room. Ben was left staring at the rock posters and the astrology posters (Diondra was a Scorpio, she took it very seriously) and crystals and books on numerology. All around her mirror were stapled decrepit, dried corsages from dances Ben had not taken her to, they were mostly from this senior back in Hiawatha named Gary that even Trey said was a prick. Trey, of course, knew him.
    The corsages unsettled Ben, they looked like organs, with their folds and their twists, their pink-and-purpleness. They reminded Ben of the stinking globs of meat sitting in his locker right now, a horrible gift Diondra had left him—surprise!—the girl parts of some animal, Diondra refusing to say where it came from. She hinted it was from a blood sacrifice she did with Trey; Ben assumed it was just leftover pieces from a Biology experiment. She liked to freak him out. When her class did baby-pig dissections, she brought him a curlicue tail, thought it was hilarious. It wasn’t, it was just nasty. He got up and went to the living room.
    “You sorry sack of shit,” Trey called from the sofa, where he’d just lit a joint, not taking his eyes off the music video. “You don’t know about your dad? The fuck, dude.” Trey’s bare stomach was almost concave, but rippled, perfect, tan. The opposite of Ben’s soft white mouse-belly. Trey had balled the shirt Diondra gave him under his head as a pillow.
    “Here, you broke-dick dog.” He handed Ben the joint, and Ben took a big pull off it, feeling the back of his head go numb. “Hey, Ben, how many babies does it take to paint a house?”
    Annihilation
.
    There it was back, that word. Ben pictured barbarian hordes busting through the big stone fireplace, and swiping Trey’s head off with an axe, right in the middle of one of his fucking dead-baby jokes, the head rolling over across the dogshit and stopping next to one of Diondra’s black buckle shoes. And then maybe Diondra dies next. Fuck it all. Ben took another drag, his brain feeling minty, and gave it back to Trey. Diondra’s biggest dog, the white one, glided over to him and stared with no forgiveness in its eyes.
    “Depends on how hard you throw them,” Trey said. “Why do you put a baby in a blender feet first?”
    “I’m serious, Trey,” Diondra said, continuing a conversation Ben wasn’t privy to. “He thinks his dad doesn’t deal.”
    “So you can see its reaction. Hey, Ben? You’re smoking your dad’s stuff, buddy,” Trey said, finally turning to look at him. “It’s crap. Potent, but crap. That’s why we know your dad has money. He overcharges, but no one else has any right now. Think he said he got it in Texas. He been to Texas lately?”
    Runner had disappeared from Ben’s life after Patty gave him the boot. For all Ben knew he might have gone to Texas for a while. Hell, you can drive to Texas and