“Poor kitty,” she hears her mother say, just a peeping whimper, and she thinks, Poor kitty, indeed. Atlanta’s not a cat person, not at all; not that she’s much of a dog person, either. Even still, those two killing a cat like this—well, that means they’re a lot more serious than she thought. She figured their antics the other day were amateur-hour karaoke: slap a kid around, make him eat dog shit? Ain’t nice, but it also isn’t the calculated bullying of, say, kidnapping a gay boy and burning him with cigarettes.

Killing a cat, though, takes it to a whole other—

Oh. Oh.

That’s when Atlanta sees. It’s a black cat, black as crow feather, black as a midnight specter, but she can see the smashed-flat tail and the tire tread on the rear half of the animal. The guts are poking out, too—or, rather, squished out.

It’s then she knows that she’s seen this cat: she saw it on the road a couple days before, hit by a car. Probably one of the Cat Lady neighbor’s kitties—that woman is running a whole feral colony next door, accepting any and all felines regardless of demeanor or disease, and this one’s probably just an escapee from that kitty-cat cracker factory.

Those idiots scooped up some roadkill and wrapped its mortified carcass around a brick.

Still ain’t normal, but not exactly the plan of a cunning evildoer, either.

Either way, she’s got to handle this. She can’t have people throwing dead-cat deliveries through the windows of her house. And this on top of the thing with the Coyne bullies.

Atlanta glances at her mother. Mama’s got out her clamshell cell phone and is trying to punch in numbers with trembling fingers. Atlanta takes two long strides over and snatches the phone.

“No cops,” she says. “It’s just a prank. Go to bed.”

“It’s gonna get cold out here with the broken window.”

Atlanta clenches her jaw. Thinks, So fucking what, you fucking scag hag jerk bitch I don’t care if you catch hypothermia, but she’s not sure how much of that is her and how much of that is the angry Adderall squirrel that’s doing laps around her brain.

Instead, she says through clenched teeth, “Fine, go inside, sleep on the couch or whatever.”

Mama slinks inside like a guilty cat. One that didn’t get run over and thrown through a window.

Though she deserves that, too.

Shut up, brain.

No, you shut up.

Atlanta goes back inside to do something, anything, but sleep.

Next day she finds that someone has put a Hello Kitty sticker on the outside of her locker. They’ve drawn comical, oversized dicks surrounding it. Some of the dicks are jizzing little jizz bullets. Underneath is the text:

DADDY WANTS DICK PUSY