From: Burchik, Deanna <deeberzxo43@aol.com>
To: Stealey, Cameron <mrstealer182@yahoo.com>
Sent: Thurs, April 25, 2002 3:12 p.m.
Subject: u ok?
hey cam. im Realllly sorry. i feel like such an asshole.joes gunna get expelled pleaze text or call me back!!
Dee <3 xoxo
ps ur nose looks HOT 
LOL luv ya!!!
Readers and writers — the end has come. But the end is the beginning. And the beginning is endless. So in this end of this Prologue, the story continues.
Following will be Grace, the space between writing. The space filled with even more writing. The space that will extend till the next Chapter is revealed. And hear you me—the wait will be well worth it.
To catch up, simply click on Prologue at the top of the screen.
With the handful of bills finally in hand, Russell expected her to have left the room at that point. There had been no vocalizing since he had gotten there, and he was certainly not going to instigate so much as a clearing of the throat. He pressed a flat smile across his face, dug both hands into his pockets and anchored his head down low into a kind of nod as he turned and left.
She listened to his footsteps squeak against the old floor, the door hardly budging open and then being tugged shut. Though none of the windows were open, she could almost hear the sound of him treading over the walkway, into the road and to his car. Then, hearing an engine start and a car quickly pulling away, her hand grabbed the baggie beside her, without even glancing down at it, and she exited the room.
Her shadow danced like a ghost along the walls of her glooming home as she moved into the living room. There, atop a tattered, brown rocking recliner, Beth Prackett sat herself down and lounged back, the chunky, fist-sized bag of weed on her lap. Proceeding to carefully tear it open, she laid a magazine from her side onto her legs and poured out some small crumbs of the green and furry nuggets.
Unrolling a leathery, brown cigar wrap from a plastic wrapper that could have held grape bubblegum, she flattened it out on the magazine and pressed the edges to keep them from curling back. Sprinkling bits of weed onto it in a thin, steady line, she poured it generously. Then, sealing one end to the other, her fingers began kneading the folded wrap into a long, curdled tube. The edges were wrapped around and around until forming a perfectly lumpy blunt, spilling at the ends, but trimmed finely by Beth Prackett’s precise and delicate fingertips. She brought one end of it to her lips, tasting it, complacent, but indifferently dour. From her other hand, she sparked a flame from the mouth of a cheap, orange lighter and lit the opposite end, singeing the moist paper and watching the tip of her cigar cherry and smolder.
She inhaled. Her throat stung. Pulling the paper paraphernalia from her mouth, a blanketing fog of smoke rolled out from her lips, shape shifting in thick, cloudy caricatures lined in black and bodied in a ghoulish grey.
Her head floats back. The room darkens under the smoke.
If she could have heard the music from Russell’s car, it would have seeped through her. It would’ve sounded like something she’d have listened to when she was younger, when she was Russell’s age. But it also would have haunted her. The words would have stuck and would have crept through her lonely empty house like a thief, bent on a kill.
The lyrics went like this:
Most of the kids not out partying were in bed. Cameron Stealey was microwaving a stuffed croissant. The heads were still talking and laughing. The cheerleaders were still interrupting. Tom “Crayon” Cranston was not getting caught masturbating. Beth Prackett was asleep in her recliner, the blunt snuffed in an ashtray. And by the time she was asleep, Russell was home finishing an essay he had just remembered he never started.
Crawling out onto the roof from his window, a fresh red pack in his hand, Russell smoked his fifth and last cigarette of the day…
The sink and stove stored a mosaic mess of too many used things. Pots, pans, dishes and drunken glasses teetered atop the other and bridged along the counters till they met the equally brimming trashcan. Each thing was coated in grease and each dish or pan still held the crumbs from some cheap finger food. When Russell looked at those things, unable not to, his stomach sunk, tugging at him, trying to pull him back towards the door. But he wouldn’t budge, because he would wait, because it would be quick.
The nervous look on her face sort of reminded him of a school dance date he had once picked up at her home. The girl’s parents were an old couple whom he thought were too old to be parents. But maybe they weren’t her parents. Maybe they were adoptive. Maybe her grandparents. Maybe that’s why she looked so nervous. What could they have taught her about modern relationships? What was she expecting? Russell thought about those things on dates, probing the cliff notes of personality. And Russell thought that way with Beth Prackett.
While the image of himself as a crew-cut Eisenhowered malt-shaker haunted him, movement snapped him back into reality. Beth Prackett held the money out, though she hadn’t the last time. The last time, she placed it on the counter, left the room and must have just trusted that he would leave her share and close the door on the way out. It was another form of adjustment for Russell.
Leftovers were the way he would sell to her, he had decided. Throughout the day, between half an ounce and roughly seven grams of it sold before Beth Prackett, he rounded out in her favor and gave what she roughly estimated, plus the considerable amount that’d be left over. It was overly generous, especially in regard to teenage chronic. Taking the small handful of bills, he promptly laid the plastic baggie onto the counter, flame-sealed and wholly accounted for. She didn’t know her way around the stuff, he could tell, but she looked satisfied enough on account of not saying anything.
He apprehensively reached out casually for the money, feeling the weight of some mentally atrophic anvil practically rendering him brain-dead. That was not the casual sell-and-toke empire he had envisioned. There were no laughing teens. There was no closing quip. He remembered the Red Dub Club again — the horrible, stupid name — and used the picture he had in his mind of them to steer him through that suddenly gut-shredding transaction.
A parade of weeds lined the path on the short walkway to the door. Swallowing the last drop of his last cigarette, Russell wished he had stopped for another pack. But there he was, at the peak of The Peaks, void of nicotine and nerve.
The small porch was a closet with a wall of punctured screens. On it was a hook that maybe held a welcome sign once. And on it, Russell softly tapped his knuckles. He did it softly, and so softly as to not call any attention. He would inch himself in through a pace of apprehension. It was the faux knock. It was the weaning process. It was the second time he had sold to Beth Prackett. To him, even, it was weird. But he thought, if not him, then who?
He squeezed the rusting button on the doorknob and pulled it open. The porch floor was carpeted and a pair of nearly dried, but soggy, boots leaned against the siding and Russell wondered if they were a man’s or a woman’s. He rang the doorbell. He could hear inside. It was so quiet. A wooden chair dragged against a wooden floor. Weight shifted. A person’s things shuffled. Footsteps. Walking. The sound of a light switch — and a light goes on through the window. A lock on the door, unlocking. The doorknob turning. The door opening.
Beth Prackett’s hairline peeked through. Barely a welcome — barely a face — it revealed her for a sudden moment before retreating quickly and disappearing behind the door. Russell heard the footsteps again, the walking, and the shuffling. But the door remained open for him, so he let himself inside.
In the kitchen, the woman of about 50 years — to Russell’s estimated guessing — leaned against a counter, her hand resting on it over some money. Unsettlingly stoic, her expressions were as empty as the house. And he didn’t feel so rude not looking at her, as she wasn’t looking at him. So in the few seconds between entering the room and exchanging drugs for money, Russell scanned the perimeter, curious for just those few seconds.
Doused in an ashtray, half an inch of a wrinkled and lipstick-stained roach rested on a painting of a lobster in the ceramic bowl. Russell was proud of himself for how long it was lasting her.
In fact, around the holidays, the town even somehow figured to stream Christmas lights around its crown and hold this sort of odd memoriam celebration the week before Christmas, even though the boat wreck never actually resulted in a single death. It was unique enough, though, so in its defense, the town wasn’t a complete void.
Leaving Main Street, Russell made for the fleet of condominiums and dual housing, the part of town that divided itself by lower income and browner lawns. They unofficially called it The Peaks, a sort of romantic alias for its peaking tumor on the town. And its height. Hills of roads nearly strangled the next, twisted and gnarled around each other like dried up latticework. Nobody particularly liked The Peaks. They were central when they should have been out of the way. They scared off a blooming market. On every October 30th, The Peaks was where parents dropped off their children to decorate trees in toilet paper and cars with catapulted eggs. Once, word had gotten around some time in the 80s that some someone living in The Peaks had been molesting kids. But no case of molestation had ever been summoned and it was ultimately pure fiction. Even on a town considered merely average, downtown overlooked uptown in regrettable, underachieving irony.
So after his car deliberated its own trust and stability at the apex of Crow Den Galley Lane, one of a set in streets that ran perpendicularly down spinal and demandingly steep hills, he strangled the neck of his emergency brake to merciless force. The guts of the car’s gears churred and squealed. In a vehicle whose registration may or may not have been expired, their confidence wavered and their faith — though fueled by Premium petrol — lost the gusto Russell once prided them on. It was just cause, too. The cratered potholes and divots were like early graves dug for the surely eventual victims that the roads must have undoubtedly produced. On a street with more cracks than pavement, its odds were morbid. But only figuratively, so they remained to see another day.
Russell opened his door to a sharp breeze exclusive only to the peaks. There was that sting up there, even in the spring. The home, a bone white triplex with shedding shingles stood at the hill’s summit and the highest peak of downtown. Its stature so stooped and crooked, it looked as if it might nearly avalanche down through all the other helpless houses beneath it.
It loomed.
His name would go back to plain old Tom and the sock drawer, infused with the unflattering combination of Wintergreen Air Fresheners and the spicy, charcoaly musk of a cheap cologne he thought he discarded after his Freshman Year, would regress into just a sock drawer, solitarily, and nothing more. As he had already pointed out, his mother had a tendency of going through his things. A sock drawer could only smell so pungent for so long before its hybrid of cheap fumes was clearly and suspiciously a haven for something illegal. It had run its course. Until he found some clever alternative, the closet would have to suffice.
Then, there it was again, the rift. Russell was behind a schedule that existed around nothing, really. Maybe except dinner, which his family ate casually and unscheduled anyways. It had crossed his mind a few times that the rift hadn’t come from particular incidences between his dealings, but the dealings themselves. That there was something else he could have or should have been doing with his time. But he didn’t bother with that thought. It was too deep. And if he were wrong, the rift would only worsen.
The drive from Tom Cranston’s was long. Out in the Hutton Sticks, every road was a trail, and none were thru-streets. In the spring bloom, Sycamores and White Oak’s fenced the area’s tiny roads in like meandering cattle, out where they belonged, but pointless and perpetually lost. Each tunneled road looked identical to the last, distinguished only by retired numbers scribbled onto old metal mailboxes. Incidentally, if the considerable knowledge of trees were to grace a particular individual, it’d be savored food for thought to know that the smaller the trees became on each street sign, (most main roads, though small in Hutton, were named after local agriculture) the further from town the road stretched. To be lost there without a compass in Hutton was to have failed Botany. And at Staghorn Sumac Road, Russell pulled into the corner just two blocks from the Green and four from downtown.
It wasn’t a horrible town, but sort of was to him because he was 17 and lived there. But in the general sense, it wasn’t too perfect, it wasn’t too bleak and it wasn’t even too ordinary. A tattoo parlor stood next to the Dentist and one of the two war-waging diners sandwiched a prenatal clinic between a nail salon, but, visually, it was inoffensive. There was still some leftover character from the town’s industrial era and bones of the misguided riverboat from 1916 still poked its skull above the Wells Canal, just meters from the shore.
The enemy was nigh. Metal barriers barred the road; trails of non-disappearing corpses glitched within the roots of fern leaves. Sweat soiled his trigger. A shot fires from the enemy. His life gauge lowers, blinking. A checkpoint lies but inches from his presently eventual graveyard. He rises, figuratively. Sorting between an M4 Carbine, bazooka, F2000, dual TMPs and recently unlocked Plasma QP-Xeno Obliter-X Sniper, he leads bare-knuckled. He checks his Points Meter, top right of the screen. Aerial Force Artillery-Equipped. Hold D-Pad and press B.
Fuck! As hard as his fingers can tap, he tapped. Leaning against the wall, Russell never even noticed. Whatever Crayon was vehemently jarred over, Russell obliged through. It wouldn’t last forever. Judging by the blinking red bar on his screen, Crayon’s avatar was dwindling. A few more seconds should do it. It always did after the exclamatory fucks. And so it did.
Incidentally, Crayon never downloaded the Air Force Artillery expansion.
He paused the game and slammed the controller onto the floor beside him, to either vent or teach it a lesson, and heaved a deep breath against his teenage-male-acceptable denim chaise lounge before rolling his head over toward Russell’s direction.
Yo. Sorry. What’s up? (Again)
Digging into his coat pocket, Russell pulled out the Ziploc stash. How much did you want, he asked curiously, as if he usually remembered that sort of thing.
Just a 20. I gotta like race through this shit before my mom finds it. Your mom go through your shit?
Russell heard 20. So he opened the bag, fingered through it and scooped out a lump, eyed it, trimmed it, repackaged it in a smaller bag from his other pocket, sealed it and handed it to Crayon.
Dude, I’m telling you—delivery head shop. Papers, pieces; you’d make bank. Did you grab a 20?
Russell just shakes his head, casual. Peeking into his wallet before pulling out a twenty-dollar bill, Crayon laughs goofily as he shoots Russell a strange look that stresses the fact that his brain is more or less compromised. Just checking, he said, corny.
Whatever conversation followed, Crayon wouldn’t have remembered it and Russell wouldn’t have cared. Within the next half hour, anyway, Crayon would have to transform himself.
Luckily, when Russell parked his Red Volkswagen along the center of Tom’s crescent driveway, he’d find Tom in no such awkwardly scandalous scenario. Tom had hit the last of a roach he found in the corner of his sock drawer and was sort of high, had already made two sandwiches, one of which he had already eaten, and after remembering his mom had forgotten to return the RPG video game he had rented a week earlier, had his hands more than enough filled than to bother them with a quick foray into precautionary safe sex with his secret stash of Baby Jergens.
Russell welcomed himself inside. He could already hear the digital bullets spraying off overhead, upstairs in Crayon’s room. Sounded heavy, too. He considered not bothering him. But the thought passed quickly, remembering how cranky Crayon got if he wasn’t up or down on either uppers or downers. Plus, it was a job. He was the dope-dealing delivery boy and periodic off-days were nowhere near any staple in his credentialed credo.
Even under the unreasonable volume of grenade launchers and artificial firefights, the clicking on Crayon’s controller from his unremittingly feverish thumbs added an irritating tagalong tic to the explosives. Hopefully he’d pause. Hopefully he wasn’t expecting a session of banal back-and-forth banter between mission checkpoints and the occasional power-up. For the first time in his life, Russell was praying for a pause.
A pause that would never come…
He was an easy pass for a hoodied corpse, were it not for his unrelenting pinchers. With his eyes anchored to the flatscreen in the corner of his room, he let out some strangely casual Sup that droned on like an exaggerated burp, to which Russell merely responded with silence.
Could you…
Crayon’s beginning of a request halted on account of a horde of Nazis.
On the desk, could you grab my wallet?
And so Russell made for the desk. He politely handed it to Crayon, over his shoulder. Tom took it quickly and dropped it at his side.
What’s up?
Just… chillin’. ‘Tsup?
You know, fu-ckin’…
But off he went again, interrupted as he met the call of destiny, thwarting his artificially intelligent opponents with an arsenal of batteries and plastic.
