Dark Places

back in a day if you drive hard, so why not?
    “This is cashed,” Trey said, in a toke-choke voice. “Anyway, he owes me money, like everyone in this town. They love to make the bet, they never want to pay it off.”
    “Hey, I didn’t even get any,” Diondra pouted. She turned away and started sifting through the cabinets—the basement den had a minikitchen, too, imagine that, needing a separate room for all your junk food—and then cracked open the fridge, got herself a beer, didn’t ask Ben if he wanted one. Ben saw the inside of that fridge, which had been packed with food the month before, and now just had beer and a big jar with one single pickle floating in it like a turd.
    “You grab me a beer, Diondra?” he said, pissy.
    She cocked her head at him, then handed him hers, went back to the fridge for another.
    “So let’s go find Runner, and we’ll get some pot and get some money,” Diondra said, draping herself next to him on the chair. “And then we can get the hell out of Dodge.”
    Ben looked at that blue eye, that bright blue eye—it seemed like Diondra was always looking at him sideways, he never saw both eyes at the same time—and for the first time he felt really bone scared. He couldn’t even drop out of school without his mom’s permission before he turned sixteen. Much less get a job at the brick plant or anything that made enough money for Diondra to not hate him, not sigh when he came home at night, and now that’s what he saw, not even that little apartment in Wichita, but some factory near the border, near Oklahoma, where the really cheap work was, where you worked sixteen hours a day, worked weekends, and Diondra would be with the baby and she’d hate it. She had no mothering instinct, she’d sleep right through the baby crying, she’d forget to feed it, she’d go out drinking with some guys she met—she always was meeting guys, at the mall or the gas station or the movies—and leave the kid there.
What can happen to it, it’s a baby, it ain’t going nowhere!
He could already hear it, him being the bad guy. The poor, idiot bad guy who can’t provide.
    “Fine,” he said, thinking once they left the house, they’d lose track of the idea. He almost had. His brain was bundling itself up, getting woolly. He wanted to go home.
    Trey immediately shot up, jingling his truck keys—
I know where to find him
—and suddenly they were out in the cold, tromping through the snow and ice, Diondra demanding Ben’s arm so she wouldn’t fall, Ben thinking, but what if she fell? What if she fell and died, or lost the baby? He’d heard girls at school saying if you ate a lemon a day you’d have a miscarriage, and had thought about sneaking lemon into Diondra’s diet Cokes and then realized that was wrong, to do it without her knowing, but what if she fell? But she didn’t, they were in Trey’s truck with the heater wushing on them, and Ben was in the backseat as always—it was half a backseat, really, only a kid could fit on it, so his knees were smashed sideways to his chest—and when he saw a shriveled pinky of a fry on the seat next to him he popped it in his mouth and instead of looking to see if anyone saw, he just looked for more, which meant he was very stoned and very hungry.

Libby Day
NOW
    B ack in grade school, my shrinks tried to channel my viciousness into a constructive outlet, so I cut things with scissors. Heavy, cheap fabrics Diane bought by the bolt. I sliced through them with old metal shears going up and down:
hateyouhateyouhateyou
. The soft growl of the fabric as I sliced it apart, and that perfect last moment, when your thumb is getting sore and your shoulders hurt from hunching and cut, cut, cut … free, the fabric now swaying in two pieces in your hands, a curtain parted. And then what? That’s how I felt now, like I’d been sawing away at something and come to the end and here I was by myself again, in my small house with no job, no family, and I was holding two ends of fabric and didn’t know what to do next.
    Ben was lying. I didn’t want this to be true but it was undeniable. Why lie about a silly high school girlfriend? My thoughts chased themselves like birds trapped in an attic. Maybe Ben was telling the truth, and the note from Diondra really wasn’t to him, it was just part of the haphazard flotsam that went with a houseful of school kids. Hell, Michelle could have pulled it out of the trash after somesenior boy tossed it, a useful