She thinks, this is how it goes. This is how it has to be. You want bullying to stop, you gotta take it all the way. Can’t just make some threats. Can’t just hose ’em down with bear mace. There’s a line, and they’re not afraid to cross it, so why should she be? If she hadn’t had that bear mace that day, what would’ve happened? They probably would’ve come at her. Hit her. Maybe raped her. The look on Jonesy’s face that day was plain as the pealing of a bell—he’s a predator like all the rest.

John Elvis brings the bat down on the back of Virgil’s legs. Mitchell kicks Jonesy in the face.

She hears Chris again, this time in her head: They’re going to kill them.

The voice that answers is cold and unmerciful, a cutting and uncaring wind, and maybe it’s the Adderall talking, or maybe it’s really her true voice found after she’s been stripped down to the quivering nerve endings:

So what?

And then finally the Skank steps in and her hand makes a motion and there’s a glint of something and it’s a knife—rather, a switchblade, bright and mean, and she’s advancing toward Virgil with a look in her eyes that shows just how much she’s looking forward to what comes next.

“Stop it!”

The scream comes across the cemetery, a hoarse shriek that surprises the hell out of her.

She stands up, waves her hands.

They all see her. Mitchell steps over Jonesy. John Elvis twirls the bat. Skank points the switchblade in her direction as if to curse her, as if to say, Now I’m going to cut you.

“Get up,” Atlanta says to Chris. “Get up. We have to go.”

The three foes are already clambering up over the side of the cemetery wall toward the hill, toward Atlanta and Chris, leaving Virgil and Jonesy bleeding and moaning amongst the dead.

“Run!” she says to Chris, and they both take off up the hill.

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER NINE

Atlanta bursts through the tree line at the top of the hill. Thorns grab at her clothes. She knows that on the other side of these trees is a road—Hilltop Road, which will take her back down into town toward Chris’s minivan, which is hidden along the side of the road by the old half-collapsed covered bridge—and that’s her plan. Get to the road, she thinks.

One minute she sees Chris running alongside her, darting through beams of sunlight coming down through the unfurling canopy of springtime trees above, whorls of dust and pollen in his wake.

The boy can run.

But so, it turns out, can John Elvis. He comes out of nowhere, his face a twisted rictus of meth-cranked rage. The neo-Nazi prick shoulders hard into Chris, slams him into a tree. Laughs.