don’t love you. I hate you.’
‘Be careful what you say,’ he hissed at her. ‘If you reject me, I might go crazy and kill your entire family.’
She shut her curtains against him.
The next morning when her father went out for the paper, he found Pugsy lying on the sidewalk. His neck was broken and his hips were crushed as if he’d been run over by a car and had dragged himself into their yard to die. Alexandra sobbed but was too frightened to tell her parents what she suspected.
After they buried the dog down by the canal, Alexandra lay all morning in her room and thought of the summer on the beach, trying to revive the feelings she’d had just a few weeks earlier. How every morning she woke to the pleasant mumble of the surf, then right after breakfast ran across the empty roadway to check her sand castle. Dolphins rolled past in groups of three and four; the Gulf changed colors all day, from blue to emerald green, and then to silvery red. Each night, the sunsets turned the sky into immense paintings that the three of them would try to interpret. At lunch, they had lemonade and sandwiches on the screened porch with the radio playing country music, the paddle fans circling. Lazy lizards climbed the screens, puffing out the orange disks at their throats. The air was rich with honeysuckle and coconut suntan oil. Her mother and father were quietly in love. Alexandra was tanned and healthy, Princess of the Sugary Sands.
But recalling it didn’t help. She was no longer that girl. Last week, after Darnel raped her, Alexandra had risen out of her body, and now she hovered above herself like a shadowy haze. She looked down at the little girl with the pistol that was too heavy. Floating near the ceiling, she watched the girl open the cylinder of the .38 and look at the bullets, spin the cylinder as she’d seen her father do, then click it closed.
Alexandra wasn’t afraid of guns. She’d been around them since she was little. Her father had shown her how to clean them, how to put the safety on and take it off. He had pistols and rifles and shotguns around the house and he said it was important that she knew how to handle them responsibly.
Alexandra listened to her father pushing the lawn mower through the brittle September weeds. She felt dizzy and far away. She had been forced out of her body by Darnel Flint and she doubted she would ever be able to return. She would have to live in exile for the rest of her days, forever homesick, forever banished from her own flesh.
The Flints’ front door was unlocked, as it always was. When Alexandra pushed it open and stepped into the house, she heard one of Darnel’s heavy-metal albums playing from his bedroom stereo.
She shut the front door and stepped into the Flints’ living room. Mr Flint’s Old Testament verses crowded the walls and shelves and mantel. Women’s magazines littered the floor; ashtrays overflowed. There was the smell of stale cigarettes tinged with Mr Flint’s English Leather cologne.
She walked down the hallway to Darnel’s room and pushed open the door.
He was propped against his pillows, still in his pajamas. J.D.’s twin bed was neatly made beside his. It took Darnel a few seconds to look up from his Penthouse magazine. When he saw her, he grinned. His cheeks were puffy and white, and as always they seemed to be printed with circles of rouge.
‘Well, well, well, look who came for a visit. My little fiancée. Couldn’t stay away, could you?’
He set the magazine aside and started to get up. Then he saw the pistol and his grin crumpled.
‘You killed Pugsy,’ she said.
She watched herself from above, a girl in pink shorts and a yellow top, white Keds, holding a .38 Smith & Wesson down by her side. She felt giddy and breathless from being so far outside her body.
‘Jesus Christ! What do you think you’re doing with that gun?’
He was kneeling in the center of the unmade bed.
‘You killed my dog, Darnel. Admit what you did.’ She lifted the gun a few inches but didn’t point it at him.
‘Okay, okay, I killed the damn dog. He was getting old anyway. He was a pest.’
She took a deep breath and blew it out.
‘You shoot me, they’ll send you to the electric chair. You’ll get fried.’
‘You’re going to stop bothering me, Darnel.’
‘Yeah, yeah. Sure. Whatever you say.’
‘You’re going to stop coming to my window and you aren’t ever going to touch me again, either.’
‘All right, all right,’ he said, staring at the gun. ‘I won’t ever bother you again. Okay? Now get out of here.’
‘You’ve got to swear on a Bible.’
She kept the pistol at her side.
He looked wildly around the room.
‘This will do.’ He leaned over to his bedside table and picked up one of his schoolbooks – twelfth-grade civics.
‘And swear you’ll never tell anyone what you did to me, either.’
‘Okay, yeah. I swear. I swear. All of it. Every single word you just said.’ He pressed the civics text against his heart.
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Goddamn it, I swore, didn’t I? You and me, it’s finished. I got another girlfriend anyway. I’m not interested in you anymore, you little shrimp.’
‘You’ll never stand outside my window again. Say it.’
‘Okay, okay, never in a million years will I stand outside your window.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Now when your parents get home, you’re going to tell them what you did to Pugsy.’
‘Christ,’ he said. ‘I can’t do that. My dad’ll kill me.’
She raised the pistol, supported it with her left hand, cocked the hammer with her thumb, and aimed at the wall a couple of feet beside him.
She heard her father’s lawn mower sputter and die out. She heard him trying to start it. Pulling the cord, pulling it again.
She was very calm, floating high, watching herself, that little girl.
‘All right, all right, goddamn it.’ He put his hands up beside his shoulders. ‘I’ll tell my dad about your stupid dog. Okay? Now get the hell out of my room.’
Alexandra took a deep breath and let it go. She was lowering the pistol when behind her she heard the surge and flutter of water – a toilet flushing.
She swung around and peered down the hall toward the Flints’ single bathroom. As she waited for the bathroom door to open, she heard Darnel fling his civics book aside, then heard the screech of the bedsprings.
She spun back and glimpsed his snarling face, his hands clawing the air as he leapt at her. Jerking away, she slammed against the door, stumbled, and fell to the floor. On her way down, the pistol fired.
Darnel
