Page 72

She turns away to head back to the building, and I grab her elbow. “Bristal, wait—”

Bristal spins, one hand curled into a fist. It hovers as her lips pull back, rage contorting her face, rippling the purple skin of the bruise she got defending me and my parents. There are fresh cuts on her knuckles where she went after whoever attacked us, but now that fist is aimed at me, and I’m certain it’s about to fall.

“Stop!” MacKenzie screams, jumping out of the car and throwing herself between us. “I swear to God, you hit Lydia and your ass is in jail!”

Bristal’s lip flickers, a wild animal delivering a warning. I put my hands on Kenzie’s shoulders, feel the tension pulsing through them.

“She’s not going to hit me,” I say.

And she’s not. There was a moment when she would have, right when she spun on her heel and located a target. But it wasn’t me she saw; there was a lifetime of hurt in her eyes, for every person who had ever taunted her or hurt her first. Bristal’s punch was primed to land—and she stopped when she realized it was me—her supposed friend. A person she’s protected in the past, and still is.

“She’s not going to hit me,” I say again, more loudly, fully realizing it. And she’s not going to tell Kenzie that I stole the class election, either . . . because she knows no one will believe her.

“Get in the car, Lydia,” Kenzie says, the voice she uses for her little siblings. “And you . . .” Kenzie’s finger comes out, shaking in Bristal’s face. “You ever raise your fist to Lydia again, you’re done. You hear me? I don’t give a shit.”

“MacKenzie, stop,” I warn her, watching as Bristal’s arm comes down, her face falling into the cold, cement pattern I’ve seen her wearing when she comes out of the office, suspension slip in hand. This is a Bristal who doesn’t care, or, at least, wants people to believe she doesn’t.

“Find your own ride home,” MacKenzie sneers, finally backing away as she moves to get into her car. “This isn’t a dump truck, and I don’t drive trash around.”

“Fuck you,” Bristal says.

“Great comeback, write it down for future use,” MacKenzie says blithely, sliding into the driver’s seat and pushing open the passenger door for me. I stand still, rooted to the sidewalk.

“Lydia,” she says sternly. “Get in the car.”

“We can’t just leave her here,” I argue.

But Bristal shakes her head and pulls out her phone. “I’m fine. Get the fuck out of my face, Lydia Chass.”

“Let’s go,” MacKenzie says, and Bristal turns her back on me, walking toward the prison, phone up to her ear. I turn to Kenzie, torn.

“We can’t just—”

“We can,” my friend insists. “She’s fine.”

Bristal isn’t fine, and I know it. But the cold ice at the bottom of her eyes when she said my name—hitting hard on Chass—had matched her uncle’s when he blithely enumerated the bones he’d broken on a woman’s body. And I’ve played with fire enough for one day.

I climb into Kenzie’s car, crank the heat, and curl into a ball, my chin buried in the down fleece of my winter coat. I try not to look back as we pull away, try not to wonder how Bristal will get home, try not to think about her thin jacket as the first heavy patters of ice hit MacKenzie’s windshield when we pull onto the highway.

But mostly, I try not to think about the single tear I’d seen streaming out from under her black eye, and the absolute betrayal that had shown in the other one. Open, blue, hurt.

Hurt like a dog that’s been kicked by someone it trusted.

Thirty

Excerpt from podcast episode “What Was Lost in a Hometown Tornado” of On the Ground in Flyover Country

Welcome to Henley, Ohio, a place you can always come back to. . . . I’m Lydia Chass, inviting you to join me as I explore the past and traverse the present of our hometown. This week, I’m covering the first in the series of events locally known as the long stretch of bad days.

Everyone has a tornado story. . . .

Ask anyone in Henley where they were on June thirteenth of 1994, and they’ll know, right down to the hour. Janice Pascale was pulling hornworms off her tomato plants when she says everything went very still.

“The light was just wrong. It was like everything turned pink, and it got real quiet. I straightened up and looked toward town, and there it was, just like the movies. A black snake coming down out of the sky. It touched down, and I could see things flying. I just ran for the house fast as I could. Ran right out of my flip-flops. They were still sitting there, by the garden, when I came back out.”

Next to Janice’s flip-flops was a cast-iron stove, later identified as being part of the front lobby of the Fairlawn Hotel. Those in town had a more direct experience of the tornado, like Bill Milhaus.

“I heard that sound, not something you forget. Like a train, but a train if God was driving it. The siren started going, but it wasn’t much of an early-warning system. I saw the damn thing bearing down on Main Street before the siren went off. Then it just chewed up the courthouse and spit it out, siren and all.”