The Deadsong Read Free Page B

said.
    He held up a card between his index finger and the finger he used to greet his mother’s gentlemen callers. Miss Webb snatched it from him and perched her spectacles on her beak to read Mr. Pearson’s scrawl. Her contempt for the slacker jock receded, reshaping her face into one that was rather pleasing to look at, despite the river of wrinkles flowing from the corners of her eyes––no doubt carved there by an eighteen-month feud in and out of divorce court.
    “Oh, I see.” She grinned and handed the card back to him. “Go on, then.” Her tone was encouraging like that of a giddy mother hearing of her son’s daring plan to stop the love of his life from boarding a plane to some distant city and wedding the douchebag who stole her away––the way most Hollywood garbage seemed to end.
    He stepped out in the empty hallway and closed the door behind him.
    She secretly lusted after this young man the way most of her female students (and Danny Rickles) did, but Gloria Webb would never see him alive again.
     
    8
    They lived only three miles from Durden High. It stood just off Highway 7 near the Hemming city limits across from Ava’s Flowers & Things. Hemming had been an agricultural whore in the 1920’s, peddling corn, cotton, and tobacco to the more well-to-do folks north and east of Tennessee for half the price of the competition. Ruins of the bygone era freckled the community, a stolid reminder of profitable heydays that had given way to more substantial commercial industry such as the aluminum manufacturing plant where Dick Starkweather had been crushed by a metal press two winters ago.
    It had been a dream and nothing more. Still the stench of the nasty thing lingered. It was a dream, right? Gina threw on the AC in her Volkswagen, blasting the cool, faded smell of vinyl and leather through the vents. She sucked it in through her nostrils like a white powder junkie snorting her paycheck.
    "Keep you feet on the mat, will ya?" Gina barked.
    Dylan looked down at the chocolate muck caked on his sneakers. "They're on the mat," he sneered.
    What was she going to tell Mr. Kessler? The dog ate her homework? Hell, it was a believable scenario, at least to her. Fender would happily feast on a term paper seeping with bullshit just as much as the dime novel he had for dinner the night before. Even actual bull shit seemed appetizing to a senile farm dog.
    “I’ll drop you off at the side doors. All I need is someone to see me and go snitch to Pearson,” she said. Ellis Pearson was the vice principal who had given her some broad marks across the ass for chewing gum in his economics class her freshman year. It was his first term as the almighty peacekeeper with a flaming sword of discipline and a handful of shit-nosed minions known around school as the hall-pass police. It was one of these fine young fellows that had given Dylan a shiner for looking at him the wrong way. You squeal on me you shit-freckled fuck I’ll rip that red mop right off your retarded noggin ! Dylan had said nothing about it. No member of Pearson’s personally selected saints would have done such a cruel thing. They had, though. Many times. A handful of them would take turns putting the boot to his guts on the floor of the boy’s restroom between classes. There had been a time when corrective action would deliver justice to the cruel and peace to the weak. But those days were long gone.
    Weak. Just a weak, shit-freckled fuck.
    He shivered away the self-loathing long enough to say “They’ll recognize your car. Just park in the lot and go inside with me. Say you were helping me with the flat tire, and they’ll excuse you. I’ll need a ride home later anyways.” He was afraid, weak with fear.
    Gina wasn’t aware of his suffering or his fear of the Pearson posse, but right now, she was preoccupied with her own tangled emotions and the escalating uneasiness swimming beneath her straw hat. The sight of Jared Kemper’s metallic blue muscle car