The Dead Run Read Free Page A

simplest.
    â€œNobody’s ever invited me to one.”
    Eric laughed, in a friendly way. “That’s not really how it works around here. You just, you know, hear about a party and show up. But okay. There’s a thing tonight, at Shawn Chen’s house. If I invite you personally, will you come?”
    Sherry felt herself blush. “I—”
    And then a pleasantly awkward situation became an awful one. She saw Eric’s eyes flit past her, turned, and saw five more kids from her school walking toward them. One guy, another athlete whose name she didn’t know, and four girls.
    Bikinis, big designer sunglasses, mani-pedis. Iced coffee drinks in hand, celebrity magazines poking from their shoulder bags.
    Trouble.
    â€œUm, hi, Eric,” said the blondest girl, in the smallest bikini. She plopped her bag down between Eric’s legs, planted her hand on her hip. “Who you talking to?”
    Eric did the best he could. “You guys know Sherry?” He made a back-and-forth gesture with his tanned arm. “Sherry, this is my girlfriend, Caroline, and this is Laura, Dave . . .”
    The names didn’t register. The way they looked at her was enough. Sherry threw herself out of the deck chair, started shoving her stuff into her lame cloth bag.
    â€œNice bathing suit, ” said Caroline, looking her up and down. Her eyes lingered on Sherry’s crotch, and she leaned back, cupped her hand over her mouth, and whispered something to her friend. Both of them giggled.
    Caroline crossed her arms and looked down at Sherry over the tops of her sunglasses. “I know a great Brazilian wax place, if you’re interested.”
    â€œI’ve got to go,” Sherry mumbled beneath the laughter of the girls. She registered Eric’s displeasure at their cruelty, filed it away for comfort later, and got the hell out of there.
    She made it through the blocks of sprawling Victorians, the dried chlorine drawing her face taut, and passed into her familiar neighborhood of modest split-level ranches. Home was two blocks away. The house would be cool and dark and empty, her mother off at one of her marathon church meetings, gone until at least lunchtime.
    The street was deserted except for a couple of missionaries, Jehovah’s Witnesses or something, doing their doorbell-ringing thing up ahead, on the other side of the street. She tracked them idly as she walked: two men clad in dark suits and fedoras, climbing methodically up and down the identical front steps of each house on the block. They must have been unbelievably hot. One was slim and young, the other bulkier and older, the fabric of his suit stretched tight across his back. She couldn’t make out anything of their faces, beneath those hats.
    Sherry imagined seeing them on the other side of her screen door, rivers of sweat running down their cheeks as they brandished their earnest hellfire-and-damnation literature, and decided that their church could use a serious image overhaul. Then she thought about her mother. She’d probably invite them in, give them lemonade, and try to convert them to her church. Thank God she wasn’t home.
    Sherry was still watching the men when she heard a car slow down beside her. The window buzzed down, and she steeled herself, refusing to look. The clack of her flip-flops against the soles of her feet doubled the pounding of her heart.
    â€œYo, bitch,” from inside the car.
    Sherry walked faster.
    â€œI’m talking to you, you little slut.”
    Sherry gave in, looked over. “Leave me alone.”
    â€œLeave my man alone,” said Caroline. She was leaning out the passenger-side window of a late-model SUV, iced coffee still in hand. “Hello? You hear me, freak show?”
    Sherry stopped short, cut behind the SUV, and crossed the street. That sent them into hysterics.
    The driver accelerated, U-turned, and stopped a few feet in front of her. Caroline stepped out