Gently Tommy dropped a hand between them, so the wine bottle laid along the length of Agatha’s arm. Shockingly cold to the touch—or else Aggie was burning up. Tommy asked, “What’s your name, Red?” because, of course, she hadn’t even shared her name yet. Like a superhero, Agatha made to grin.
“Aggie,” she said, “Aggie Gardener,” at the very moment an unwelcome shadow fell back across her feet.
She recognized Eddy Vega first by the bottle in his shade’s grasping hand, the septic scintillation where firelight passed through. Agatha’s soggy limbic system keyed immediately to his return, wrung-out in expectation for him to say something irritating, which of course he did: “I fuckin’ knew it!” The interjection hit quick and sharp, a silver fish-hook in her lip. Just one good reel was all it took to drag Aggie away from Tommy’s gentle current and hatefully ashore.
There slouched Eddy next to the wood pile, tearing the last bites of a pizza crust like a dog working the bones: “You’re Charley Gardener’s sister,” he informed her proudly, as though he’d solved her witchy riddle. Agatha froze. “Shit, man! I knew I recognized you. Me and Charley were in Miss Wolfer’s homeroom together, back in ‘89 during the whole rape case. You look exactly like her.”
His chosen context for the invocation was the last thing in the world Agatha wanted to talk about. Stupidly, her instinct was to protest: She didn’t look like Charley at all. But she fumbled a blistering repudiation in the opening consonants, and nervously flicked sideways to check on Badger instead. He remained unconcerned in his armchair, nodding along to a very credible account of UFO activity near Boise. Aside Agatha, Tommy remained at attention, patiently jiggling her leg and waiting for an invitation down this intriguing new garden path.
“I was kinda involved in your sister’s case,” Eddy continued, without waiting to hear a word from Agatha first. “Not officially, obviously. But there was shop-talk at the dinner table, you know, just the kind of thing that happens when you’re a cop’s kid. Saw some shit, behind the scenes. Followed events as they unfolded. Really fucked-up.
“I think I actually remember you from back then. The day your mom… Naw. Your Russian grandma, right? I was at the police station, the day you came in to make your statement. My old man is Lieutenant Sam Vega. And you asked for a sucker out of the basket on the counter.”
He spat in his bottle. A pale worm of cheese swam in the bottom sludge.
Agatha stared at Eddy hard, until her view dried out and began to distort. Two effigies stood in the place of him, now three, catching fire in her retinas. Even full immolation wasn’t enough to make him stop talking. She thought for a moment she’d risen from the couch to silently walk away, but that happened in spirit only. Her plaster-cast body stayed behind her, and Eddy was left rattling at the hollow shell.
He started to ask her, “Did Charley…?”
But then he stopped. He shut his mouth and considered her stony non-reaction, compared to whatever he’d been hoping for when he brought up the sore subject. He appeared to realize that this wasn’t going to play out as he would have preferred, so he changed the game. Instead of dropping the issue altogether, he broke his gaze from Aggie and looked up to angle for Tommy instead.
“It’s really sad stuff,” he reiterated loudly. His brow was cocked, tone pointed: “You know the, uh, the story? With Charley and Eli?” Bait on a feathered lure.
And Tommy bit. “No.” She sounded cautious, but still primed to hear whatever came next. She couldn’t have known any better. “Who’s Eli?”
Eddy cocked half a grin and spat again. “You’re not a Junkie, right? Didn’t grow up here?” He took up a lean against the sofa’s other arm, relishing the opening that he’d prised. “Yeah, it’s a fucking sad story. Ten years back, I knew both of ‘em. Charley—that’s her sister—and Badger’s big brother. Eli Sylvester? Doesn’t ring a bell?”
Broadly he gestured toward Badger, flagging the attention of any wandering eye. Tommy leaned forward, and her center of gravity shifted along Agatha’s shoulder. At that point of friction: a spark. Aggie felt the first flutter of renewed life in her carapace, but her quickening wasn’t quick enough.
Matter-of-factly in solemn tones, Eddy conveyed, “Charley said Eli raped her.” Abruptly, Tommy’s interested leg stopped jouncing. “And he killed himself over it. In public. Shot himself in the head—” At this point, even Eddy Vega seemed to realize that he couldn’t continue at a bluster, and he dropped his voice. “Then Charley offed herself too, pretty soon after. Like a fucking suicide pact.”
He cast back at Agatha, inviting her contribution. She couldn’t speak; she could just about move enough to clench a fist, cutting moons in her own palm.
Tommy sounded mortified. “Jesus.” That was when the last momentum of their sparkling conversation finally drained away into the dead shadows on the ground, and Agatha knew it was never coming back. The light of their connection extinguished; her soft palate quivered at the loss.
Still Eddy wasn’t done. “Thing is.” He leaned further forward, intimating conspiracy, feigning respect for the dead. “Look, Charley was fucking nuts, okay? No offense. I knew her. She didn’t even stick to the story—that’s the kind of shit she did, telling stories. She really liked attention. And after like two weeks she got bored and said it wasn’t rape, but here’s the really fucked-up part, because it didn’t change anything. You know if she’s underage, it’s rape no matter what? And the cops had evidence.
“I saw the footage myself once. She was sixteen, and it was the two of them having—”
Agatha’s lungs swelled inside her. No.
In an instant, all the latent energy in her body came to realization. She didn’t make the conscious choice to stand, but felt herself seem to explode; from somewhere far away, she heard a groan of pain. Behind her, Spooner had been displaced shoulder-first onto the ground in front of the couch, while Tommy sat wide-eyed on her perch, knees slightly splayed into the space that Aggie’s body had occupied just a second ago.
Afterimages of fire and human faces bloomed in Agatha’s eyes as she lurched forward. From a point of dissociation, she returned to herself in discrete and vital chunks: her thumping heart, her heavy feet, a million plumb goosebumps impelling her to stop Eddy from talking about the video, stop talking about anything. All her newly-exposed skin was clammy, and her head was full of blood.
“Fucker,” she gurgled, an epithet spat out just to jam the airwaves. At long last, Eddy did shut up, eyeballing her from his end of the couch as though she’d grown a second head. “F-fucking—fuck—”
Two steps put her within arm’s reach of him. She struck out and landed a pillow-fist in the middle of his chest. Thump.
Eddy looked down in raw confusion at the point of impact. It took him a moment to remember himself, and uncertainty morphed into smug amusement: “Okay. Wow. What—?”
“You fucker.” She swung at him again. “Fucking liar—”
“Who fucking lied?” Eddy raised a laughing hand to ward her off. Hung from his fingers, the Gatorade bottle cast a limp-dick shadow across his face. “Nobody but your crazy-bitch sister.”
Agatha was only half-conscious of how much attention her outburst had drawn. Phosphene and flickering shadows pulsed hellishly inside her orbits; she pulled back to punch or yell again, but caught sight of Badger at the corner of her vision and drew to a hung stop. Her best friend slumped like a toasted marshmallow in his armchair by the fire, wasted beyond any comprehension of why she would try to fight someone at his party. Agatha felt his injury and confusion like a spear through the heart, and she turned uselessly to face him. Even though she couldn’t explain, she needed him to understand.
Eddy clocked her desperation, and one last time purposefully wrenched the hook in her lip. “Badger’s a nice fucking guy, isn’t he,” he snorted. “I wouldn’t want to be friends with some chick whose sister killed my brother.” A sharp inhale sounded over Agatha’s shoulder, and she felt a hand on her arm.
“Aggie,” Kaylee urgently whispered. Where the hell did she come from? Agatha didn’t appreciate the playacted intimacy, not coming from her, as if they were friends or something. Kaylee always used a gentle touch, though. She didn’t put up any resistance to Aggie’s forward lunge, so Eddy didn’t see it coming.
Agatha swung up her hand and slapped the bottom of the Gatorade bottle. Its open mouth squarely hit his chest, and a stinking brown shitstain instantly blossomed across white cotton. Eddy yelped.
“Fucking cunt—!”
In an instant the atmosphere changed, silenced and snuffed like a candle as Badger finally rose to his feet. His mile-long shadow cleanly split the ground between Eddy and Agatha; on opposite sides of the penumbra, both of them froze. Without expression, Badger looked at her, and then at him, and he didn’t say a word.
Eddy couldn’t meet his eye, but Aggie acted as though she weren’t intimidated at all. She took a wide stance and raised her chin. No one spoke. The perpetually-murmuring wind held its breath, but Bonanza played a triumphant outro.
Eddy finally broke the glass in the air by turning on his heel. “I need a fucking smoke,” he snarled, and sloped off along the bald path toward the front yard. Agatha watched him go with bitter satisfaction, but when she looked back at Badger she found that the cloud cover across his face had not broken. He didn’t smile, he didn’t even blink. Aggie was half his size, but she had never really felt like it before.
Absolutely everyone was watching her. Spooner still lay sprawled on the ground. Kaylee hugged herself anxiously next to the couch, while Tommy had bent double to clutch her bare feet, chewing her lip and staring at Aggie like a rare animal.
Agatha swayed, almost staggered, but managed to save face by turning the faint into a purposeful stride. “Need a fucking smoke,” she echoed as she scrabbled at her pocket. “Fucking—fucking asshole…”
The only response came from popping cinders. She shambled away into the woods, held to no account, hunched tightly around herself and failing repeatedly to light an American Spirit.
Junction, Chapter 5 | part 3 of 3
Per the revision notes left on part 2 of Chapter 3, Charley and Eli's relationship probably needs to have already been established by the time Eddy spills the tea in this chapter--I know where to go back and fit that in, I just haven't done it yet. Apologies to all readers watching me work my shit out in real time.
It's great to read writing in progress, when the author is commenting on their work. I wanted her to knock that bottle into his teeth, unintentionally breaking one & then going through mixed feelings about it. But that's just me...