Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock (general ebook reader .TXT) 📗

and inside one of them, she’d slid a switchblade, nestled between her calf and a long woolen sock. He didn’t know she had it, and she didn’t know she wouldn’t need it with him, but that’s the beauty of strangers, all the things we cannot know.

He stereotyped her as a sullen, introverted runaway, mainly because of the greasy hair hanging out of her purple hoodie.

Beware of stereotypes, he reminded himself, thinking of how Conrad had been voted most eligible bachelor and how all the girls in town vied for his attention. It was so easy to make people believe what they wanted to believe. Until it wasn’t.

The hitchhiker had an expensive backpack with one of those Nalgene water bottles that hippies and climbers used, but if he had to guess, she was not a hippie or a climber. He leaned across her to get aspirin out of the glove box, and she flinched as if he might touch her.

Ben was a “nice guy,” to the point of being boring—he’d been told—and even though he was starting to regret picking her up, he was not used to being flinched around.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m just a moth attracted to the flame,” she said. Then she stared blankly out the window.

Was that sarcasm?

He wanted to tell her how much of a cliché that was, but then he remembered sitting around the campfire—just a year ago—with Conrad and his older sister, Lula, and her friends from college. Everyone had been feeling carefree. He and Conrad were about to graduate from high school. There had been something thrilling about being with Conrad’s sister and her friends, drinking beers and passing a joint, just a few miles from where he was driving now. He passed the turnoff to the the grate and cattle fence with the broken chain that all the kids in town knew was a ruse. Beyond it was the trail that led through thick pine and juniper trees and then opened out to nothing and everything at the same time. Their secret, beautiful place.

If he closed his eyes he could almost smell the lingering pot and woodsmoke and that mysterious girl smell he could never quite understand. One of them even smelled weirdly like oranges.

Lula had brought three girlfriends home to Granville during their college break. All her friends had very white teeth and long hair that hung straight like curtains down along their ears. They talked about things he and Conrad never really thought about, mostly politics and how messed up the government was. They kept telling Ben and Conrad to start paying attention, to start getting involved, to think about protesting or they’d be sorry, man. They said man a lot; everything was Yeah, man and I know, man. And Can you believe it, man?

They couldn’t be serious. Protest where? In front of the Piggly Wiggly? These girls obviously had no clue about Granville. But that seemed silly. Two of them were sisters from a town just thirty miles up the canyon, Pigeon Creek, and it ticked all the same small-town boxes Granville did.

But Lula and her friends seemed to think that by going to college they had cracked some mysterious code that people from small towns could never crack. Granville did not qualify as being in “the real world.” Or maybe they just wanted to believe that.

When they laughed—even though nothing seemed all that funny—their white teeth stood out like miniature marshmallows lining dark caves inside their faces. He imagined pulling one out of the mouth of the girl closest to him, skewering it on the end of a sharpened willow, and roasting it in the fire until it turned black.

It had to be the pot affecting him, because it was disturbing to think he could come up with that all on his own.

Conrad had slung a Coleman lantern up in a tree, and when Ben stood up he’d knocked his head on it. Everyone had laughed. He was always jostling and bumping into things, trying to navigate a world that was getting smaller and smaller around him, like Jack and the beanstalk, except that he was the beanstalk.

He was constantly teased about how long and lanky he was. Just getting up to take a piss and knocking the lantern might have caused a forest fire, which was not a joke. It was always fire season in the west, especially near Granville, which had been in a drought for the past decade.

He’d steadied the lantern and immediately noticed the moth. Somehow it had squeezed its furry wings inside the little glass doors, and it was licking the flames, either hungrily unaware of the danger or too much in love to care.

Whenever Ben smoked weed the world was slower, fuzzy around the edges, not unlike the moth’s wings. Its eyeballs, however, were inky, like humungous poppy seeds, hypnotized by the heat that bounced off the tiny glass doors of the lantern, which looked warm and inviting. Ben would have squeezed inside himself too, if he could have managed it.

While everyone else had babbled on about how the world was going to hell in a handbasket (what did that even mean?), he had watched the little creature die. He was helpless to do anything else. It could have been him inside that lantern, drawn to all that dangerous orange heat.

Now, as he drove, he thought about the smoky wings and the slow lapping flame against the moth’s body. If only he’d paid more attention.

He wondered if the moth had actually been a warning: Be wary of too much beauty and light.

He had kissed Conrad that same night, admitting that he’d wanted to for years. And Conrad had kissed him back. But now Conrad was gone, and Ben could not see the road because his eyes were getting blurry.

—

He swerved the Mustang onto a pullout near the river, where it curved dangerously around a bend and then dropped into a steep ravine.

“I need some air,” he said, slamming the door and