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

of a brother. He had found his own way of coping, and she had to admit, it looked a lot saner than clinging to a gum chain.

He’d also fooled her. He’d fooled everyone.

But even the best contortionists can fit into those tiny boxes for only so long.

His record had recently been shattered by a total unknown from Kansas whose horse had the most impressive hind end Delia had ever seen.

Her brother and Maverick had been expected to win easily, but they hadn’t even placed at this year’s National High School Finals Rodeo.

She thought he’d just run the patterns too often and Maverick had grown bored by the time the event rolled around. But now she knew the real reason: her brother’s mind had worked and reworked a pattern of its own; nothing to do with a rodeo.

Delia knew that pattern.

She knew how it made you question everything else about yourself, even things you were good at. It could destroy you.

He was right that it was pointless to talk because nobody listens to boys who seem untouchable or little girls who speak up.

But the thing about little girls is that one day they aren’t little anymore.

So Delia began to plan.

She disguised her voice and made phone calls to men who were higher and higher up in the church. She praised her missing priest for guiding her on the right path, she wanted to send him a card of thanks, how might she find his address?

It was almost too easy.

Her praise was like oil, greasing the wheels of information on the other end of the phone line. “Oh, he’s been many places,” she was finally told one day. “Let’s see: Alaska, Minnesota, Wyoming…but we’ve moved him again. One moment, dear.”

Delia didn’t understand why she was the one who had to act. Why hadn’t anyone protected them or stood up for them or at the very least believed her when she spoke out years ago? Waiting for help had been her first mistake. But Michelle was right about one thing: Delia was a fighter. She wasn’t waiting anymore.

She heard a file cabinet being opened, papers rustling.

“Most recently Granville, a tiny mining town in Colorado. He’ll be so happy to get your card, Miss—what did you say your name was?”

Click.

Delia scribbled “Granville” on the inside of a matchbook.

She slept all night on the bus with her hood up and a switchblade in her boot, between her sock and shin. Inside her backpack, her gum chain was now forty feet long. It was a stupid, simple thing, but it was a part of her, like a beating heart she carried outside her body. She wanted to keep it close. For now.

Her plan went as far as getting herself to the door of the Granville Catholic church, but after that she didn’t have a clue. It was time to act, and still she was unsure—until she saw the schedule tacked to the door.

Father Lazaria was hearing confessions from noon to one.

Oh, the irony!

She slid into the pew closest to the door and looked up at the stone walls, the stained-glass windows with the midday light cutting across the etched faces of disciples and followers of Christ. She wondered whose daddy had paid for these windows and what else had they cost? The church had meant so much to her, until it hadn’t.

Was there a little girl here in Granville who was feeling like the chosen one? Did that little girl have a brother? Or a mother who cared more about what people thought than about keeping her children safe?

Delia knew that on one side of the confessional was the priest, waiting to hear the sins of his sheep.

The wolves have been in charge long enough, she thought, slipping into the box. She was supposed to say, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned….”

She didn’t say anything. She waited.

“My child,” said the voice that had haunted her, that had driven a wedge between her and her parents, that had broken her brother. The voice she wished she could forget, now a long fingernail running down the chalkboard of her spine.

“How long has it been since your last confession?”

“How long has it been since yours?” she said, pushing her hand through the hole that had been placed right above the kneeler, just like she knew it would be. But this time she was armed. She flipped the blade open with an ominous click and pressed it hard against his crotch. She hoped it was the last time she would ever get this close to him.

“Don’t move,” she warned. “Or you will regret it.”

She thought about the little girl Michelle had known, the one who would fight back against anything.

“This is what being helpless feels like,” she said.

He wheezed, disgusting nose hairs whistling with fear. He did not want her to hurt him, and she realized now, that wasn’t why she’d come. She just wanted to make him afraid of what she might do.

“If you ever threaten another child or even think about threatening another child, I will hunt you down. I will find you. Give me your robe.”

Yes, that little girl was still in there, even if her voice was rusty and shaky from lack of use.

She heard him struggling to disrobe in the tiny confessional while also trying to avoid the switchblade. She pulled the fabric through the hole, feeling like a magician tugging on an ever-growing silk scarf.

She knew he would be transferred again, that the church would always cover for him. But he deserved to be afraid.

“Don’t hurt me. Please,” he begged.

She had done what she came to do.

She told him to stay in the confessional for at least an hour after she was gone. Somehow she knew he would stay much longer than that.

She set the robe on fire behind the Piggly Wiggly on the edge of town and threw it into the dumpster. It was white, not the purple one he’d worn all those years ago. She remembered how he’d raised his purple