The Outskirts Duet Read online

  Rusty and Blue were both…old. However, when I turned the key for the first time and Rusty roared to life I squealed with joy. After a week of teaching myself how to drive a manual in the parking lot, I still wasn’t great, but I could manage.

  I didn’t have time for great.

  The front door slammed shut, my spine jolted with unwelcome awareness.

  He was home early.

  “Get down here, Sawyer!” Father’s deep voice called up the stairs. “The deposit from last week was never made.” I heard him opening and slamming drawers in the kitchen, rustling through the contents.

  Instinctually, I froze as if my lack of movement might make him think I wasn’t really there. My heart was beating so hard and so loud that I was afraid he was going to hear it through the closed door of my room. I held my breath for a few beats. Blood rushed to my ears, burning them as if the walls of my room were on fire.

  If I’m going to do this, I have to do it now.

  I pushed the building panic down deep inside, and resumed hastily shoving whatever clothing was within reach into a backpack.

  “I know you’re up there! Answer me, girl!” Father yelled out. This time there was a discernable slur in his words. His heavy footsteps hit the stairs. The smell of liquor wafted under my door just as he thundered onto the landing. “Once you remember where you placed the church’s money you’re going to face the harshest discipline of your life.”

  He thinks I misplaced it.

  I snapped thick rubber bands around the ancient pink shoebox in both directions and shoved it into my backpack.

  The door handle jiggled, and my fingers fumbled as I tried to zip my bag without crushing the box. When it finally gave way and I was able to zip it all the way shut, I slung the backpack over my shoulders.

  What sounded like a balled fist connected with the door. Twice. The third bang came with the sound of wood splintering. “Sawyer, you open this fucking door right fucking now!”

  Jogging over to my window I slid the slow moving thick pane of glass open with a grunt. I was sitting on the ledge with my legs dangling over the side when the door flew off the hinges and fell with a thud into the room.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Father barked. There was a slight sway to his step and I knew he was more than his usual weekday-drunk when he stumbled sideways into my dresser, sending picture frames crashing to the floor.

  I lowered my feet onto the roof below. It was angled so in order not to fall off the narrow space I turned sideways and shuffled toward the back of the house.

  When I reached the edge, I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the ladder I’d stowed under the corner of the overhang was still there.

  I lifted it up and lowered it down to the grass, the muscles in my arms trembling under the heaviness of the metal ladder.

  There was a commotion behind me followed by the sound of Father’s boots shuffling over the rough asphalt of the shingles.

  There was no time to check the sturdiness of the ladder. It shook each time I placed my foot on another rung. Father stumbled toward me, reaching the edge of the roof while I was still only in the middle of the ladder.

  He looked down and with his dark eyes glinting in the moonlight he kicked over the top of the ladder, sending me sailing back into the grass and the heavy metal to land on top of me.

  When I connected with the ground, the air was forcefully pushed from my lungs. Thankfully, my backpack had protected me from suffering any major injuries. Other than the wind being knocked out of me, I was bruised and battered, but in one piece.

  “You’re leaving everything you’ve ever known. You won’t survive out there and I won’t come looking for you. You’ll be dead to me, Sawyer. Dead!” Father swayed slightly and then he lost his footing completely. His hands waving in the air as he attempted to regain his balance, but it was no use. He began to fall.

  I was shaking with adrenaline as I pushed myself to my feet. I stood just in time for him to land right where I had.

  I could barely register the sound of snapping bone over my heart hammering in my ears.

  Father groaned in pain and grabbed at his leg which was jutting out from his body at an unnatural angle.

  Help, obey, and serve your father.

  Not anymore.

  I turned around and without the worry of him chasing me I strolled casually toward the back fence.

  “Fuck, you!” he roared after me. “Don’t you dare come back here. You will rot in the depths of hell for this!”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t ever be coming back,” I called in a calm tone that surprised even myself. I risked a glance back and watched as he tried to get up, only to fall again when his leg didn’t cooperate.

  Father might’ve actually meant what he said, although it wasn’t true. He might have thought he had no intention of coming for me, but again, I knew better. I patted my pocket, the one that held the deed.

  Too bad he was never going to find me.

  I lifted my long skirt and started to climb over the tall fence. At the top, I paused.

  When Father spotted me looking back at him writhing around on the grass, he went silent. For a moment, we were locked in a war of unspoken words. There had been a time for words. There had been a time when I’d have felt sympathy for him. A time when I would’ve rushed to his side without question.

  Those times were long gone.

  “Help me,” Father begged.

  I tore my eyes from his and dropped down to the other side of the fence.

  “Saaaawyer!” his screams echoed through the alley over and over again. The anger he had momentarily shoved aside to beg for my help was back in full force.

  It always was.

  The door to Rusty squealed when I opened it and leapt inside, tossing my bag to the passenger seat. Getting him and Blue into the alley was nothing short of a miracle. Now there I was, starting the engine. The loud noise thankfully drowning out my father’s cries.

  I wasn’t stupid. I knew I would still hear him. No engine would ever be loud enough to mask him completely. No amount of distance between us would ever truly silence him.

  But I was going to try anyway.

  I blew out a long-held breath. Twenty-one years long-held, and shifted the truck into drive. I took off into the night. Before I turned down the road that led to the highway I glanced in the rearview mirror and whispered the last words I’d ever speak to the man who had become a monster.

  “Goodbye, Father.”

  Chapter 4

  Finn

  “I can’t believe it’s been two years,” I said, feeling the effects of the whiskey as it heated my skin and dulled my senses.

  Perfect.

  “Two years without you,” I continued. “Two years of thinking about you every single day.”

  I chuckled. “Two years of sitting up here talking to myself and pretending like you’re still here.”

  “Oh, sorry, Jackie,” I noticed the slur in my own words. I was well past the point of giving a shit that I’d drank too much.

  Two years past the point, to be exact.

  “I haven’t offered you any,” I continued. “You remember this?” I pointed to the label. “This stuff here is the gross shit we used to drink after a game. You remember? It’s the cheapest crap Donna sells at the Go-Mart but she would sell it to us for three times the price because we were underage. What a scam.” I laughed, remembering how Jackie was an expert at getting people to do her bidding for her. It may have come at a price but she always got the job done one way or another.

  I tipped the bottle over and poured a generous amount of the cheap booze down the slide watching it twirl around and around the graffiti covered plastic until I heard it leak onto the concrete of the empty pool below.

  “Drink up.” I saluted the air with the bottle and swallowed down the last of the contents in several large gulps.

  My eyes watered and my throat burned. I coughed and whiskey dripped down my chin. I wiped it wit
h the back of my hand.

  “I guess whiskey was never meant to be chugged,” I said with a chuckle. “It never stopped us though, did it?”

  I tossed the empty bottle into the air and watched it spin around and around and around until I was rotating the upper half of my body to spin with it. The sound of shattering glass echoed all around me when it crashed to the ground five stories below.

  “You know. I kind of fucking hate you,” I said, sniffling hard. The weather must have shifted because the air was growing thicker and more humid than when I’d first arrived. “We were supposed to do…we were supposed to do a lot more than we got to fucking do is all.”

  I lit a joint. “Josh told me a while back that I haven’t properly grieved you.” I scratched my forehead with my thumb. “She’s wrong, you know. All I feel is grief. The only thing I’ve done wrong in this whole process is recover. Get over you. Can’t seem to wrap my head around that concept. Josh may have a dude’s name, but she’s all woman and wrath and things I’m not going to get within ten feet of.”

  I pounded my closed fist roughly against my chest, growling out my frustrations.

  “You know, it fucking hurts,” my voice grew scratchy. I cleared my throat.

  “It still hurts just as bad as it did two years ago. If you were here right now I’d…” I could feel the pang in my chest at the sound of my words. “Doesn’t matter,” I muttered. “Because you’re not here.”

  My heart sputtered out a few irregular beats and I coughed. After it calmed down to a regular pace I took a long hit from the joint and blew the smoke out into the empty space next to me. It was Jackie’s spot. It’s where she should’ve still been sitting.

  If it weren’t for me, she might still be.

  I held up my joint. “It’s not the shit I used to get from Miller, but it does the job.” I sighed.

  “You know, I haven’t seen him in a while. Or Josh. After you died, I couldn’t face them. They gave me the space I wanted and now it’s become this big crater between the three of us. I can see them on the other side, but in order to get to them I’d have to jump in and see what’s sitting there at the bottom of it all.” I shook my head. “I’m not ready. I don’t know if I’ll ever be. They just remind me of how things will never be the same again. It was too fucking much to lose you. I just can’t have even more reminders that you’re not here,” I explained.

  My eyes watered. I must have been blowing the smoke too close to my face. “Every building in this damned town. Every back road. Every drip of moss and every single song reminds me that you’re not here.”

  “It should have been me.” I pushed up to my feet and hung onto the railing for support. “It ain’t fucking fair.” The railing gave way and suddenly I was gazing straight down five stories at the ground below, falling forward.

  At the bottom, I saw Jackie smiling up at me. Perfect blonde hair and matching smile. She was waving up at me.

  Waiting for me.

  Jackie disappeared when I was yanked back onto the platform with such force I landed on top of the person who’d done the yanking.

  “Jackie?” I asked in my confused, drunken, high, and somewhat delirious state.

  I was pushed over and then lifted off the ground. My arm was hoisted across a set of broad shoulders that assisted me down the rickety metal steps while a deep voice muttered every swear word in existence.

  “Jackie, is that you?” I asked, unable to focus on the person’s face while the background of trees and swamp were spinning all around us. “Have you been working out?”

  “Jackie’s dead, kid. She’s been that way for a long while now,” the deep voice rasped.

  “Yeah, I know that. But I still talk to her…” …hiccup… “sometimes.”

  “It’s good to know you’re talking to someone these days. Why don’t you try and focus on the people still breathing? Might do you some good.” I couldn’t place his familiar voice.

  Then again, I couldn’t place anything, including one foot in front of the other. I stumbled but was held upright and urged to keep moving forward.

  “Okay, Jackie. Whatever you say,” I slurred as I was loaded into a vehicle.

  I didn’t know if it was a car or a truck. It could have been a school bus for all my inebriated brain knew. All I wanted to do was sleep. My eyes grew heavier and heavier under the weight of my drunkenness. “I love you, Jackie. Always have. Always wiiiiiiiillllllll.”

  “Stay out of the damned water park or you’re gonna end up dead too,” the voice said, starting the engine. “Then there will be a lot more people who feel the way you do now. Like they were left behind.”

  “Nooooo, they can’t feel that way,” I argued.

  “Oh yeah, rock star? Why exactly is that?”

  “Because, I’m already dead,” I explained, although the point of making any sense had long passed as I dropped my head against the window and closed my eyes.

  “You can try and pretend you’re dead all you want, kid, but you ain’t foolin’ anyone.” I felt the sting of a slap against my cheek and lazily swatted the air in retaliation. “It’s best you start acting that way.”

  I woke up in the driver’s seat of my Bronco with my seatbelt fastened feeling as if I’d spent the last several hours standing directly next to the speakers at a death metal concert…during the drum solo.

  It was still dark out and I was parked in front of the house I hadn’t lived in for years. “How the fuck did I get here?” I grumbled, starting the engine.

  It was the very last place I wanted to be.

  I checked the clock. It was ten p.m. I vaguely remembered going to the water park earlier in the day.

  Jackie.

  The memory of why I went there hit me like a hammer to the heart. The anniversary of her death.

  I turned up the radio to drown out the memories that always came when I thought of her. I lit a joint and put the Bronco in drive.

  I’d just turned onto the highway, still in a Jackie and alcohol induced daze when I almost didn’t see the RV in the middle of the road.

  Or the girl.

  She was staring at me as I grew closer and closer with a panicked expression on her face. She was probably wondering why I wasn’t stopping.

  She had a good point.

  I slammed on the brakes, or at least I thought I did.

  My brain was sluggish in sending out the message to my foot. When it finally cooperated, the stop was sudden. The brakes squealed as metal scraped against metal. I yanked on the wheel and my truck turned sideways and started to spin.

  I glanced up through the open roof to the stars rotating above me. I wondered if tonight was the night I’d finally be able to stop missing Jackie.

  Because there was a real possibility I’d be seeing her again soon.

  Chapter 5

  Sawyer

  The highway grew smaller and smaller until I was sure it was going to just disappear. Smooth tar pavement was now pot hole riddled and mixed with sections of only dirt or rock. My tailbone ached from all the ups and downs.

  I passed an exit ramp that looked as if it had been started but never finished. A few feet off the highway the broken pavement turned to dirt with tall weeds growing up through it. Bright yellow barricades, most of them heavily dented, blocked the way off the main road.

  Was that the exit?

  There was no sign, but I knew I had to be getting close.

  I also knew that I was kind of lost.

  The town of Outskirts was barely a dot on the old faded map from the glove compartment. It was located at the tip top of the Everglades and smack in the middle of the two Florida coastlines. I’d been driving for two days, but as my eyes grew heavy, my spirit grew with determination.

  I pressed on the gas pedal to increase my speed to something above grandma level, but nothing happened.

  The only other car on the highway zipped past me and it wasn’t because they were speeding, it was because I was slowing down.

  Way d
own.

  The sound of something exploding boomed from under the hood causing me to shriek in surprise. White smoke filled the night air like a mini mushroom cloud.

  “No! No! No!” I screamed to no-one as Rusty, who was aptly named, sputtered and coughed.

  The dashboard lights switched off all at once and Rusty the truck sadly and dramatically rolled to a stop in the middle of the deserted highway. “Not now. Please. I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll keep you in the shade. I’ll wash you every day. I’ll sing to you at night. Please just please don’t stop now.” I promised all of that plus anything else I could think of to keep him alive, but with one last final death rattle, both my heart and my gut sank along with any hope I had of spontaneous revival.

  Rusty was no more.

  I ground my teeth and pounded my fist on the steering wheel, hissing when the side of my hand vibrated with pain up to my elbow. “Ouch!” I screamed as if he’d actually hit me back.

  Hopping out into the road, I kicked the driver’s side door several times which it responded by partially falling from its hinges. Chips of faded paint and rust fell onto the cracked asphalt. With one last grunt of frustration, I turned around to face the dark empty highway. I dropped to the ground and leaned back against the worn front tire, dropping my head between my knees.

  “What the hell do I do now?” I muttered as a dark cloud rolled over the stars, turning the night from dim to black.

  “What about you Blue? Are you going to give up on me too?” I asked the camper that was hitched to Rusty.

  Blue’s metal siding was white on the top and bottom. A faded dove blue stripe ran down the center separating the white. It was thick and horizontal, the same width as the height of the single window.

  When I first saw it, I thought my mom had called her Blue because of the stripe. I was wrong. Inside, the walls, the little cabinets above the mattress, the tiny stove, and even the countertops and composting toilet were all baby blue. Even the torn linoleum covering the floors was white and blue checkered.