Cover design by Cyanotype Book Architects

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014912061

Dedication Page

This book is for the bullied.

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

PART ONE: SHOTGUN GRAVY

Sometimes she wakes…

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

PART TWO: BAIT DOG

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

PART THREE: THE FARM

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

PART FOUR: KISSING FIRE

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

PART FIVE: BAIT GIRL

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

EPILOGUE: THE MESSAGE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PART ONE: SHOTGUN GRAVY

PART ONE: SHOTGUN GRAVY

Sometimes she wakes…

Sometimes she wakes up at night, smelling that gunpowder smell. Ears ringing. A whimpering there in the darkness. Doesn’t always hit her at night. Might be in the middle of the day. She should be smelling pizza, or garbage, or cat shit wafting from the house next door, but instead what she smells is that acrid tang of gun smoke. All up in her nose. Clinging there like a tick.

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER ONE

She hears the clanging, the echoing reverb of an open-palm slap on the side of a dumpster. Voices carry across the empty parking lot near Bogner’s Produce: a mean cackle, a goofy haw-haw, the murmur of threats culminating in some pleading bleat. Atlanta Burns is on the way home from school, walking the five-mile stretch from town to country, for the burg of Maker’s Bell lives on that line between rural and suburban, between farmland and white picket fences (with a crooked zigzag of trailer parks smack in the middle). She thinks, Fuck it, fuck this, no, no, just keep walking, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars, do not go kicking over logs to see what worms squirm beneath.

A few folks mill around. They ignore the sounds from the parking lot in favor of watching her. Ever since she got back, the eyes are always on her. As if she makes people uncomfortable now.

Whatever. They don’t care about the noise. Neither does she.

But then she hears the laughs again. Crass and cruel. And the sound that follows: the sound of someone—a boy or a girl, she can’t tell—scared shitless, maybe in pain.

Atlanta sighs. She pulls her tie-dyed bag—bought at a flea market some years ago when she was thirteen or fourteen and didn’t know just how bad things could be—and crosses the street.

The sound’s coming from behind the old garage. An abandoned husk of gray concrete.

Her mouth’s dry. All the moisture gone to her hands: palms slick and sweaty.