“Help pay for pain and suffering. Help make me feel better. Recompense and all that.”

Just to make things clear, she cocks the hammer back once more.

“Fine,” he says. He unscrews the ring from his finger with some difficulty—his knucklebones are big enough to be hooves on a kid goat—so he spits on it, and that grants it some give.

He tosses the ring. It bounces across the concrete floor and lands at her feet.

Atlanta stoops. Scoops it up. Never lets the gun barrel drift from its target.

“Then that concludes our business,” she says.

“I don’t think it does,” he says.

She nods. “Not unless you feel like getting into a gunfight with a teenage girl. Hard to avoid the police attention that would cause, I figure. Maybe next time? I’ll bring my shotgun. It’s got a taste for the blood of monstrous men.”

Then she backs out of the gun club and runs for the car.

It takes a while to convince her mother—and Chris, actually—that she didn’t kill anybody in there, didn’t even shoot anybody. Her mother drives erratically, weeping, babbling about how her daughter’s going to have to go on the lam and that they’ll head home now and pack their things and drive to Mexico because that’s where they can escape the law, but eventually, finally, Atlanta makes it clear that the only casualty of war was a hunting picture of some fat asshole and a dead bear.

“Besides,” Atlanta says, “what did you expect? You gave me a gun. Here! Pull over.”

Her mother eases the car along the side of the road. Atlanta steps out. There, by the road, is a murky pond with algae already blooming green, thick with scummy clumps that look like foamy spinach. Past it is a pasture of cows. And crows dancing on fence posts.

Atlanta takes Orly Erickson’s ruby ring and pitches it into the scum-topped pond.

He’ll never find it in there. Were she to pawn it, he could get it back one day. But unless he feels like diving into dark waters and pulling it out from the belly of a hungry catfish, it’s lost to him.

Small price to pay for what he did.

And she knows it was him who did this. Maybe not directly. But it was him.

A rotten apple doesn’t fall far from its diseased tree. She gets back in the car.

They drop Chris off. She gets out with him. Together they stand by his mailbox.

He holds her hand. He gives it a squeeze. “Thanks,” he says.

“It’s like Mitchell said. I didn’t do anything but poke a stick inside a snake’s nest.”

He shrugs. “Sometimes that’s what needs to happen.”

“I guess. So what now?”

“Maybe it’s really like those YouTube videos say: It gets better.”

“Shoot, I hope so.”