Page 51 of The Bright Lands
“That’s fucking unfair, bro.” Whiskey Brazos appeared at his side, T-Bay a few steps behind him.
The diner went very quiet. Even the Perlin boys hushed. Joel had the distinct impression he’d somehow stumbled into a rift within the team: Garrett and Mitchell sneering from one side, Whiskey and T-Bay on the other.
What, Joel wondered, had Dylan thought of his arrogant teammates? And what had they thought of him?
The silence was broken when the waitress emerged from the back with two heavy to-go bags for Mitchell. He took them with a perfect political smile, a distant air of superior gratitude.
“Keep your head down, Mr. Whitley.” Garrett said, before following Mitchell out the door: “Plenty of folks ’round here wouldn’t mind you got yourself hurt.”
Joel emerged from the diner a few minutes later, his hands trembling. Whiskey and T-Bay had apologized for their teammates’ behavior, seeming genuinely aghast, and even the Perlin Stallions, perhaps out of sympathy, had begun joking loudly about their food.
Mitchell had just been trying to fuck with him—he was ninety percent certain of it—but still Joel felt as if he’d been mowed down by a truck.
Joel was so preoccupied that when he saw the young boy standing under the eave of the diner in a Bison ball cap too large for his head he at first mistook him for Dylan, looking just as Joel remembered him as a boy. The sensation lasted precisely long enough to be painful.
As Joel made to open the door to the convertible, the boy called to him.
“How kem you ain’t got Snapchat?” The kid’s accent was so thick Joel struggled for a moment to understand him. He had a pinched face, a bad overbite, wore a T-shirt of a grinning Mario leaping toward a mushroom just out of reach.
Joel stopped. “Excuse me?”
“Some’un wanna talk tee ye.” From a pocket of his cargo shorts the boy withdrew a folded slip of paper and held it out for Joel. He made no effort to come closer.
Joel looked both ways up the street. They were alone. Joel accepted the paper, and without another word the boy set off running.
Seated in his car, Joel saw one word when he unfolded the note. He presumed the word was a screen name:BBison50k. Staring at it, Joel felt his fingers start shaking again.
He logged into Snapchat—an app he had installed years before and promptly ignored—and fumbled with an interface that appeared designed to bewilder anyone with a living memory of the Clinton administration. The search bar for new friends was concealed, bafflingly, near what appeared to be an options menu with no options.
He typedBBison50kinto the search bar. His phone buzzed seconds after he hitAdd Friend. The user had been waiting for him.
Is this Joel?
Yes.
I need to talk to you.
Would you like my number?
There was a pause. Joel accidentally backed out of the chat and when he opened a new message from BBison50k he saw that the previous messages in the conversation had evaporated. This person didn’t want to leave a trace.Clever, Joel thought.
Or dangerous.
BBison50k wrote:
In person would be better.
Joel could still hear Garrett Mason in his head:“Plenty of folks ’round here wouldn’t mind you got yourself hurt.”Joel didn’t doubt it.
He chewed an Adderall and typed:
Where works for you?
LUKE
Far to the southeast of town, Luke Evers, the Bison’s muscled running back, loaded two shells into a shotgun. He brought the gun to his shoulder, trained it on the wild expanse of open country behind Coach Parter’s property and shouted “Pull!” The Turner twins released a pair of clay birds. Luke held his breath, cleared his mind of everything but the sights of the gun, waited.
The first bird exploded. The second. The twins cheered. They wore a pair of matching Ray-Ban sunglasses that Luke would never have thought their poor parents could afford.
