after school, getting into a car.”
“You rat on me, I swear I’ll kill you.”
“Rat on you about what?”
In work pants and undershirt, Jimmy exploded onto the porch, a long belt wound around his hand. “Get up here, you little whore. I know what you been doing.”
Tereza backed up and Jimmy ran down the stairs. Tereza shoved Linda out of the way as Jimmy let loose with the belt, flicking it like a whip.
“Go ahead, you piece of shit,” Tereza said, dancing around. “The worst you can do is kill me. Do it and make me happy. I dare you.”
Linda dashed back to her house, screaming “Daddy!”
Tereza led Jimmy in circles down the middle of the street. He lashed the pavement with the belt, looking more and more pathetic as she zigged and zagged out of his reach.
“Ooh, big brave man,” she taunted. “Takin’ on a girl.”
Linda’s old man appeared at his front door and stood like a mummy. Linda ran into the street, waving her chubby arms, yelling at Jimmy to stop. It distracted him long enough for Tereza to scuttle to the end of the street, turn left and run like spit along the highway’s edge. Jimmy wouldn’t hurt Linda. Even so, Tereza owed her one. The ground burned under her thin-soled shoes and her lungs nearly blasted through her ribs but she didn’t look behind her until she made it to the White Castle a few blocks away. Jimmy hadn’t followed. Winded or too lazy, she didn’t care which. She bent over and clutched her knees, panting. Waited to catch her breath before opening the door to the smell of cigs and steamed onions. Richie, the beanpole, and blubbery Vlad perched on stools at the counter with a new guy, coffee cups and a choked ashtray spread out before them.
“Hey, Teeze,” Vlad said, moving his hand like he was jerking off. “Here to suck my dick?”
“Got five bucks?” she asked, still breathing hard. That was what Chevy Man had given her. Enough for fifty Castle burgers.
Vlad and Richie laughed like she was joking.
“You’re nibbing out,” Richie said, copping a feel of her left tit as she slid onto the stool beside him. He had a pencil behind his ear, as usual. A doodler: spaceships and ray guns mostly, sometimes the Green Giant with a hard-on.
“Asshole,” she said, slapping his hand away, but she wasn’t cheesed off at him. Vlad either. Talking dirty was their way of showing they liked her. She only ever let them stick their tongues in her mouth and flash their dicks at her. Guys were so impressed with their dicks.
“My cousin Buddy from Linden,” Richie said, nodding toward the new guy, two stools away, next to Vlad. “His grandma is my mom’s aunt.” Buddy spun slowly toward her and nodded. Pouty lower lip, sleepy eyes, slicked-back hair blonder than Richie’s. Under his black leather jacket, a white T-shirt strained against his muscles.
“You a body builder?” Tereza asked.
Buddy smiled at her with half a mouth and cracked his knuckles.
Richie smirked. “The next Charles Atlas.”
Buddy spun off his stool and swaggered toward Tereza, his pointy-toed black boots scraping the floor and his shiny black pants squeezing his thighs. He shrugged off his jacket and draped it around her shoulders. “Turning frosty out there,” he said, not letting his gaze slide down to her chest like most guys. Something stirred between her legs.
“Thanks,” she said, slipping her arms into the sleeves still warm from his body. The jacket weighed her shoulders down. “The name’s Tereza, not Teeze.”
“Pleased to meet you, Tereza,” Buddy said. He cupped one of her hands in both of his, as you might a wounded bird. He released it seconds later, turned his small, high ass to her and strutted back to his seat.
“What’s with your eyes, Ter-eese-a?” Richie asked. “Your old man try to punch your lights out again?”
She fished around in her pocketbook and pulled out a small mirror. “Mascara,” she said, licking a finger and swiping at the purple streaks. Her eyes must have leaked doing Chevy Man. She lifted Richie’s cig from the ashtray and took a long drag that went to her head. “He’s not my old man,” she said. “My real father speaks three languages.” She paused to pick tobacco off her tongue. “Jimmy only speaks cave man. Ugga, ugga.”
Richie slapped his thigh and hooted. Vlad’s laugh was more like a wheeze.
“He tried to belt-whip me but I got away.”
“Want me to take care of him?” Buddy asked.
She snorted. Who was this guy?
“Don’t laugh, Teeze,” Richie said. “He can rip a phone book in half and hold me over his head with one arm. Show her, Buddy.”
Buddy’s face flushed. “Later, Rich.”
“I’ll take a rain check,” Tereza said, although she liked the idea of Buddy hoisting Jimmy off his feet with one hand and flattening his pointy nose with the other.
Buddy stood abruptly. “Time to cruise town. Coming along, m’lady?”
“He’s got a cool car, Teeze.”
“What are you, his pimp?” she said. Richie looked hurt. Tough gazzobbies. “Can’t,” she said to Buddy. Ma would be having a cow by now assuming Jimmy had told her what happened. She shook one arm out of the jacket but Buddy held up his hand.
“Keep it until you get home.” He pulled the pencil from behind Richie’s ear and wrote his phone number on a napkin. “Call me. I’ll come pick it up.”
Richie and Vlad stood to leave.
“See you on the flipside,” Vlad said. He tried to be cool but slobbered when he spoke and lived with his Russian immigrant mother. Some people said they were spies.
The three guys filed out. Tereza stayed on her stool, chewing over Buddy’s offer. Why’d she keep taking Jimmy’s shit? And why didn’t Ma make him stop?
“Hey, Buddy!” she called out. “You got a flashlight in that car?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
With Buddy’s phone number and flashlight in her pocketbook, she ordered an orange soda and, for a buck, a sack of the little square burgers you could down in three bites. She liked having her own money, spending it how she wanted.
Allen would be in bed already. If she were home, she’d be skulking into the room they shared and undressing in the dark. Instead she headed for the woods where she and Linda had played that lame shipwrecked game in the summer. It was just plain dumb Linda wanted to live there forever. And it was just plain dumb for Tereza to wait to be rescued from Jimmy.
Buddy’s flashlight beamed the way four blocks to the hollowed-out log and the crowbar, then to Crazy Haggerty’s house. It loomed like a ghost ship in the night sea. Sounds leaped out of the quiet dark—a truck downshifting on the highway, a dog’s whiny yelps. Each left a shivery silence when it died.
