“I like his yammering,” Tabitha said defensively before she turned back to Wyatt. “Are the linebackers the ones who throw the ball?”
“No, that’s the quarterback. Linebackers are the fellas that protect the quarterbacks. That’s what I am—a protector. No one touches Tommy if I’m on the field.”
Tabitha smiled. “Like a hero.”
“Or a cop.” Wyatt shrugged and returned her smile, his cheeks suspiciously pink, but it was cold out. “But a hero too—I guess.”
“That’s neat.” Tabitha hugged herself tighter. The wind was blowing, and her sweater wasn’t keeping out the cold like it did a month ago. She found Wyatt’s talking a nice distraction. “You can tell me more if ya want to.”
Wyatt frowned. “Where’s your coat?”
Tabitha winced. Her coat was so old it was ripped in a lot of places. It was way too small, and she hated wearing it. “It’s old. The other girls’ll make fun of me for it.”
“Then ya tell ’em to fuck off,” Clay offered helpfully. “If it keeps ya warm, who gives a shit?”
Tabitha did, but she tried not to admit it out loud. Sometimes those thoughts just slipped out. Her mama would go insane if she found out Tabitha admitted to Wyatt Conner that her jacket was too old.
“Jules ain’t making fun of you, is she?”
Tabitha lifted her head to see Wyatt’s look of concern. “No, your sister’s fine. Ain’t nothing wrong with her.”
“How come you don’t talk to her? All the other girls do.”
Wyatt’s sister Jules was too pretty. Too good at sports. Too perfect in every single way. She made Tabitha feel very uncomfortable, but she had never been mean to her.
“I could have my dad buy you a new coat,” Wyatt offered before Tabitha had to answer. “He buys them for Jules all the time.”
“Please don’t tell your dad what I said.” Tabitha’s heart dropped. The surge of fear made her forget about being cold. “Not your granddaddy neither. If they think I ain’t got a coat, they’ll send the state out.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
Tabitha knew Wyatt had no idea why that would be a terrible thing for her family, and just begged, “Promise me.”
“Okay,” Wyatt said, sounding a little unsure about the commitment. “I promise.”
Tabitha wasn’t sure why she did it, but she leaned forward and kissed Wyatt’s cheek quickly. “Thank you.”
She looked around, hoping no one saw. The doors had opened, and everyone was heading in. Tabitha let out a sigh of relief, knowing no one had seen but Clay, who had a disgusted look on his face. He pulled her over to him, his hand tight around her arm.
“Have you lost your dang mind?” he murmured into her ear. “You just
kissed
the piglet.”
“He gives us cookies,” Tabitha said in a defensive whisper.
“I don’t like you, Powers,” Wyatt suddenly growled, reminding them both he was still there. “You ain’t the boss of her.”
Clay responded by flipping Wyatt off and then standing up to walk to the doors. Tabitha sat next to Wyatt quietly for a few seconds, feeling embarrassed and awkward. Then she hopped up and followed after Clay.
* * * *
The thing about Clay Powers was, he had a reason to be mean. Tabitha understood it even if none of the other kids did. He didn’t have uncles who would buy pizza sometimes like Tabitha did. Her mom had a lot of sober moments. If it lasted long enough, she’d clean the house when she started to get paranoid about the state coming over. Sometimes she bought food and stocked the pantry.
Clay didn’t have that. His mother never got paranoid about the state. She just didn’t care anymore. One night, when Sheriff Conner showed up at the trailer park, Clay flushed all her drugs down the toilet and woke her up and managed to make things look almost normal before the sheriff knocked on their door.
His mama didn’t go to jail, but when the guy who was staying with them found out Clay flushed all their drugs away, he beat Clay so bad he had to miss a full week of school. So all things considered, Tabitha thought Clay was pretty darn nice. He wasn’t cruel like Brett or his friend Vaughn, who’d beat her every day for the cookies Wyatt had been giving her if they found out about it. Mean was the wrong word for Clay; he was just shy in a growly sort of way.
Clay’s last report card said he had socialization issues.
He asked Tabitha what that meant, since she was the only one who read the darn thing for him. She wasn’t real sure, but she thought it meant Clay had a hard time making friends.
To which Clay had mused,
“I guess you don’t count.”
And Tabitha had laughed.
“Probably not.”
It was really too bad Clay hated Wyatt so much, because Tabitha was starting to think she had socialization issues too, and she found herself considering the idea of trying to be Wyatt’s friend. She sort of liked the way he talked all the time and filled in the empty space left by her shyness.
Plus, he did neat things like karate.
He was like a safer Jules Conner, who was easily the most popular girl in the class. Around Wyatt she didn’t feel ugly in her old clothes, with her red hair and freckles and all the things that made her a runt. Jules Conner was so tall she stood at the back of the class with the boys when they took their class picture. Tabitha was always in the front row holding the sign.
“Tabitha, did you hear me?”
Tabitha turned from looking out the window, snapping her attention to the front of the class. “I’m sorry, ma’am.”
“Do you know whose birthdays we celebrate on Presidents’ Day?”
“George Washington?” she guessed.
Mrs. Hatly arched an eyebrow. “And?”
“Thomas Jefferson?”
“No.” Mrs. Hatly pointed to the open book in front of Tabitha. “If you were reading your social studies, you would’ve known it was Abraham Lincoln.”
The class laughed. Tabitha’s cheeks burned, and she sank down lower in her seat as she focused her attention back on the book.
“I didn’t know it either.”
Tabitha turned around, seeing Wyatt lean against his desk to make her hear him from two seats over and one back. She smiled.
“Mr. Conner, do you have something you’d like to add?”
He shook his head, looking undisturbed by the attention. “Not really.”
The teacher might have said more if the door to the classroom hadn’t opened. The principal came in, with her eyes bloodshot and watery. Everyone in the classroom just looked at her as she walked over to Mrs. Hatly and said something under her breath the rest of them couldn’t hear.
Mrs. Hatly cupped a hand to her mouth. “Oh no!”
She didn’t say more. The principal nudged her and then cleared her throat. “Wyatt and Jules. Gather your belongings for the day. Your father is here to take you home.”
“Why?” Wyatt’s voice cut across the silent room, and Tabitha turned around to see his gaze darting from Jules to the teachers standing at the front of the room looking horror struck. “What happened?”
“Grab your things, Wyatt,” she said a little more firmly, but the command lacked authority, as if she really wanted to hug Wyatt instead of reprimand him.
Wyatt and Jules collected their school bags and books. Tabitha saw that Jules was already crying, and she ran out the door first, leaving it wide open for the entire class to see. She stopped when her father stepped away from the wall, and there must have been something in the look on his face, in the slump of his shoulders as he stood there in his tan deputy’s uniform.
Jules let out an ear-piercing scream that Tabitha knew right then would haunt her for the rest of her life, especially when Tabitha turned around and saw the look on Wyatt’s face. He wasn’t crying. He wasn’t screaming, but it was as if Jules was verbalizing what he didn’t know how to express.
In that moment, Wyatt and Jules Conners’s perfect life tarnished in her eyes. How could they know without words what had happened unless there was an undercurrent of fear already? Maybe being in the sheriff’s family wasn’t as easy as Tabitha and Clay thought it was.
“Where is he?” Jules’s wail echoed in the halls. “Where’s my grandpa? I want my grandpa!”
“Come on, baby. Where’s Wy?” Big Fred Conner scooped her up, making tall and perfect Jules look small and broken as she wrapped her arms around him and started sobbing onto his shoulder. “We’re gonna go home and do this.”
When Wyatt walked out of the room, his father reached out and grabbed his wrist, pulling him to his side. Then he draped a big arm around Wyatt’s shoulders and turned to walk back down the hallway with his children.
Jules’s cries bounced off the walls until they left the building, but there were no apologies. No explanations.
Death was their companion, looming around the corner like a dark threat they understood more than the rest of them. It took years for Tabitha to figure out that most people get there eventually. They realize that life is fragile, that death is inevitable, but for Jules and Wyatt Conner, it’d been there from the very beginning. There was something so sad and terrible about it. Tabitha realized she’d rather go hungry every night than know by just a look that someone she loved was gone forever, as if expecting it all along.
Part Three
The Fallen Hero
Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them.
—Bruce Lee
Chapter Seven
July 1989
“Excuse me, Mr. Dower, but I was wondering—” Tabitha wrung her hands and glanced nervously at Mr. Dower’s wife Marisa. She didn’t like Tabitha, but she tried to forget that and glanced up at the dark-haired man. “Have you seen Clay?”
Terrance Dower stopped mopping the front of Maple’s One Stop shop and arched an eyebrow at Tabitha. He lowered his voice so his wife couldn’t hear him. “I try hard not to
see
Clay when he’s in here, if you catch my drift?”
Tabitha nodded, knowing what he meant. Clay had developed the habit of shoplifting. Which was the reason Marisa Dower hated her so much. She had inherited the store from her mother, and it was her pride and joy. She sat at the front counter where they sold the lottery tickets, watching the place like a hawk. Even if Tabitha didn’t steal, she was usually with Clay when he did. Mrs. Dower’s anger wasn’t odd. It was Mr. Dower who was the unusual one because he’d caught Clay stealing food plenty of times and just looked away when he did.
“I can’t find him,” Tabitha said in a hushed whisper, knowing Terrance Dower was her best bet at finding Clay. “I’ve looked everywhere, and I figured if he was hungry, he’d—”
“Darlin’, you’re mumbling.” Mr. Dower leaned down lower and looked her in the eye. “Now tell me again what’s the problem.”
“He ran away.” Tabitha’s voice was soft and fearful because she didn’t want Clay to get in trouble. “And I don’t know where he’s at.”
“I’m sure he’ll turn up,” he said confidently. “He’s probably just off finding trouble like boys do.”
Clay hadn’t been home in three weeks. When his mother moved out and left him with her boyfriend, Clay packed up and left after the first black eye. Up until two days ago, he’d been keeping in contact with Tabitha, but now she couldn’t find him. He wasn’t finding trouble. He was homeless and hungry, and Tabitha didn’t know how to verbalize all that in a way that wouldn’t have Mr. Dower calling the sheriff.
She nodded and turned away. “Thank you.”
“I might have seen him this morning,” Mr. Dower called out as Tabitha walked to the door.
Tabitha breathed a sigh of relief as she turned around and smiled at him. “Really?”
“You want Terry to help you look for him? He’s just in the back doing inventory.”
She shook her head, because Mrs. Dower was sending long, furious glances at her husband that made it clear she didn’t want Terry anywhere but in the stockroom. Tabitha would have declined anyway. Their youngest son, Terry, seemed like a decent kid, but he was already in middle school, and that made her nervous. She was always waiting for older boys to turn mean like Brett and Vaughn.
Boys could be cruel. She didn’t trust them, even the nice ones like Terry Dower.
Which was why it was so weird that her only two friends were boys.
Maybe Wyatt would help her look without telling his dad. He and Clay hated each other more than ever, but this was different. It sort of felt like an emergency. Clay had been getting thinner since he ran away. She couldn’t leave him out there all alone. He thought he didn’t want her help, which was basically what he told her the last time she’d seen him, but Tabitha didn’t really care. He was getting her help if he wanted it or not, and she’d even risk telling Wyatt about it to make sure he was okay.
Clay was going to be furious. Being homeless was making him
really
grouchy.
“I’ll find him.” She gave Mr. Dower another smile of gratitude, because now she knew Clay was still in town, and he’d at least managed to steal something to eat this morning. “Thank you.”
She got onto Brett’s old bike she’d parked outside the store and decided to ride to the rec center. Wyatt practically lived there since his grandfather died. Big Fred Conner had taken over as sheriff, and he was a very busy man. He took full advantage of all the after-school and summer programs and signed the Conner twins up for everything.
Unlike Clay, Wyatt was always easy to find.
The rec center wasn’t a far ride, but the bike didn’t cooperate that well, and the summer heat was unbearable. She was sweaty and miserable by the time she got there. She parked her bike in the rack on the side of the building, putting it next to Wyatt’s brand-new Huffy that he’d gotten for his birthday. She didn’t bother locking her bike up. No one would want it.
She worked on retying her long hair in a ponytail and wiped at the sweat running down her temples. Her shirt was sticking to her, and her jeans were stained from the rusted chain. She brushed at them as she walked up the front of the rec center.
Tabitha hated for anyone to see her looking dirty, but Wyatt most especially.
She made a detour to the ladies’ room to wash her face. She winced at her reflection in the mirror. Her freckles had multiplied under the summer sun, and she was burned from riding around looking for Clay the past few days.