Chapter 12 #2
I shrugged in response to his question. I didn’t get the fascination with my tolerance.
My own mild curiosity had pushed me to drink three beers, despite the old fridge barely getting them colder than room temperature.
I had none of the loose, buzzy energy that his friends swam in.
I wondered if it was the small piece of Blessing I had that made me resistant to the alcohol, or if it was something else.
I didn’t care either way, but Fenton’s friends saw me as a challenge.
They passed around a joint, and this time, I passed it up.
Even just breathing the fetid air in the cramped house made my lungs itch, and I didn’t want to add to that uncomfortable sensation.
Fenton took a long drag, and I watched him, fascinated at how different his face looked when he was here with his friends.
He stretched to hand the joint over to the guy next to him, then took hold of my jaw so he could kiss me, spilling smoke into my mouth and nose, the rest curling up my face.
After a few seconds of trying to fight the spasm in my lungs, I turned my head and coughed.
His own coughing fit was mixed with laughter.
“Scumbag.” It was one of the girls who said it. “Fenty loves the idea of corrupting the good little girl.”
I was an oddity to this group, and I just wanted them to stop asking me questions, maybe even stop noticing me altogether. Fenton didn’t seem to mind being their punching bag, but I wasn’t quite so keen.
“Maybe we can make her smoke heroin next, see if that finally gets her.” The guy laughed like a donkey until Fenton dumped me out of his lap and punched his friend in the face. Cartilage cracked, and the guy’s yells were muffled by his hands that cupped around his broken nose.
I was on my feet before the moment of shock could pass, and Fenton was pushing me out the door with a filthy stream of curses aimed back at his friends.
He paused only to nab a half-full liquor bottle.
I considered apologizing and giving my thanks for allowing me to intrude, but the front door closed before I could.
The first breath of clean outside air was like a gulp of water after a day wandering the desert, and I tried to cough out the dense, dirty smog in my lungs.
“They’re so fucking stupid, saying shit like that. Fuck ‘em all.” Fenton spat on the cracked concrete in front of the door, and I looked away from the disgusting act. He wrapped an arm around my shoulders, and we started walking. It was only then that I could process the last two minutes.
What had it been that had made him so angry? The suggestion to try “heroin” next? My mind tried to place the term I’d never heard in that context. No, hadn’t I? Was it something like opium? I’d read in a book about the Opium Wars, but that couldn’t have been why Fenton was so mad.
“Did I mess that up?” I asked. “Because I wasn’t drunk?”
“Shut the fuck up, Fallon,” he growled, then cringed at his own words. “That’s not what I meant. It wasn’t your fucking fault. They’re just…” I couldn’t make out what else he said about his friends. “Sorry.”
“I’m—”
“Don’t. Don’t apologize.”
“Is it really that weird?”
It was a moonless night, probably closer to sunrise than sunset, and I’d been following Fenton, hoping he knew where he was going.
We’d walked from my apartment to his friend’s house, but I’d gotten turned around, and I couldn’t see the mountains that would lead me back east. His hands cupped my face, and his thumbs brushed my cheekbones.
“Come here. Come with me.” He took my hand and led me to a vast, empty stretch of cracked asphalt, the place where the Gray Dog Brewery had burned down that winter, next to some enormous metal warehouse.
“Did they piss you off, Fallon?” he asked, drinking from his stolen liquor and offering the bottle to me.
“No.” I took a small sip and winced at the awful burn. “I didn’t even understand it. I don’t really care, either.”
Fenton tipped the bottle back my way before I could hand it back to encourage me to drink more. I took another reluctant sip, then pushed the glass to his chest to make him take it. I didn’t want any more.
“You ever put earbuds in your pocket, and the wires turn into a little rat’s nest? You’re like the worst case of that I’ve ever seen. You’re so tightly wound, I don’t know how you even function. You’re like a can of spray paint over an open flame. Ever seen that?”
“I’m not…” I struggled to pick out the adjective he was even accusing me of being. Tightly wound? About to explode? “I’m not anything.”
“That’s what scares me.” Fenton got too close to my face, so that all I could see was aggressive green eyes. The stale odor of his friend’s house still stuck to us. “Have you ever just fucking…let loose?”
I shrugged. “Sure.”
“Scream.”
“What?”
Fenton threw his head back and yelled so hard it was like his lungs were splitting. I laughed at the unexpected sound and stepped away. He pointed at me.
“Come on!”
I shook my head. I didn’t want to scream. He growled and shoved the liquor bottle into my hands.
“Throw this on the ground and break it!”
“Fenton,” I sighed. I had to put my hand against his chest to keep him an arm’s length away.
“Fallon,” he said back sarcastically. “Let loose. You keep everything locked inside that gun safe you call a heart, and you’re going to explode one day. Break the bottle! Cause some destruction, scream, let something out!”
I tucked the bottle against my body so he couldn’t take it and do it himself. “That’s not me.”
“Who the fuck are you, then?” He was nose-to-nose with me, and I didn’t know if he was antagonizing me or preparing to kiss me. Either way, I wasn’t scared.
“I’m Fallon Marlow.”
He took a step back to look at me, and I let him study my face for as long as he needed.
“Punch me, then.”
“What?” I laughed. “I’m not—”
“Come on,” he grinned and bounced on the balls of his feet. He rolled his head around, actually preparing for it. “One good punch. It’ll make you feel so much better.”
“I feel fine.”
“You don’t feel anything!” he shouted, then pointed to his cheek. “Punch me!”
I curled the fingers of my left hand and considered giving him a full-strength punch to teach him a lesson.
Would Josephine have done it? She’d hit me plenty over the years.
I didn’t have that kind of authority, though.
Fenton was probably more used to being hit than I was, but it wasn’t fair for me to use my power that way.
I held out the liquor to him, and he wrenched it from me anyway.
Then, before he could make a mess and throw it himself, I offered the only other thing I had, the photo of the two of us that his friend had given me.
“Here. Hang onto this, Fenton.”
The moment he looked at it, his shoulders relaxed, and a goofy smile came to his face. “You don’t want to keep it?” I told him to put it in his wallet, and that was the last time I saw it.
I’d told him I was Fallon Marlow, but that was only half-correct.
That was the name my mother had put down on my birth certificate, and it was part of me, but at that time, I was Fallon Hunter, and I was in the town of Cibola not to get drunk or high, not to cause destruction, not to punch my best friend, but to make the city safer and cleaner, to fight back against the hunger of evil that would spread without someone like me to beat it back.
I lived a life Fenton knew nothing about and would never really understand, but I let him follow behind me like a lost dog back to my apartment, like sometimes I was just a normal girl with an idiot for a friend who cared enough to try to soothe wounds neither of us knew how to heal.