Read Online Hick by Andrea Portes - Free Book Online

crashed that old Buick. Good Lord.” She sighs. “Boy, he is just one bad apple. Just rotten to the core.”
    She grabs another cigarette off the dash, where each cigarette is lined up, one by one, in a row, a ready-to-smoke system conceived of in some brilliant moment of necessity into invention.
    “So . . . did ya think he’s cute?” She clicks in the cigarette lighter.
    “No. Wull. I don’t know.”
    “Yeah, there’s something about him, I know. Even though he’s so ugly. There is something. Hell, he had me fooled.”
    She lights her cigarette.
    “One thing about him, though. He was just real weird, you know, like he had a few screws loose or something. Whatever, Iprobably shouldn’t be tellin you this, anyways. Did he call you darlin?”
    “Yup.”
    We drive on silent, the road disappearing underneath us into the dark.
    “Okay, here’s the plan. If we stop anywhere, and I do mean anywhere, and there he is . . .run, don’t walk, back to the car, lock the door and duck. No questions. No talking. We’ll just take off. Got it? Lesson two. Although, that’s more like a rule. We’ll call it rule slash lesson two.”
    She takes a drag off her cigarette. I shuffle in my seat. I’ve been nodding at her this whole time, pretending like I’m right there with her, more so than the bunny rabbit.
    “Guys like that, you just gotta put to bed. Kiss them good night. Turn out the light. Walk out the door. Cut your losses.”
    She goes to put her cigarette out in the ashtray and I can see her hands are shaking. I want to change the subject but I don’t know how to without making her feel like she’s just been spilling her guts out while I’ve been counting fence-posts. She starts reaching behind her, grabbing around the backseat, steering this way and that, not paying no mind to the zig-zag we’re making on the asphalt. It’s starting to get reckless and maybe just a bit too carefree for comfort.
    “Um, you want me to help, while you steer?”
    “Yeah, kid, sure, can you hand me my purse? It’s red.”
    I nod, relieved, and search the backseat beside me, through the puzzle of wrinkled clothes and empty cigarette cartons, wanting to make her like me. I pull out a ruby-colored alligator rectangle with a gold clasp. She sure has good taste. Classy.
    “All right, now, you hand that to me and reach up over here and grab the wheel.”
    I do what she says, leaning awkward over the seat. She unclasps the gold and pulls out a tiny oriental vial with a dragon on it, squiggling up the side. She presses it to her nose and sniffs up hard, tilting her head back. Her face freezes for a second, like the world is on hold. I am watching her with every bone in my body, trying not to drive us into the ditch. I feel like I’m with a movie star.
    And then I remember something, something about the sniffing back hard and the back-of-the-knuckles wiping off the nose. I know it. I know it cause my dad got fired from the Kuhnel farm down on Highway 34 and there was five days of sniffing back and knuckle cleaning and white powder and never sleeping and some guy named Randy that I’d never seen before and never saw since.
    There it was, for all the world to see, cut out in lines on the kitchen table and a dollar bill rolled up and razor scraping, always scraping, for just a little bit left. And there was my dad and Randy, the new-best-friend stranger, with all their plans of all this stuff they were gonna do, like start an alpaca farm or make a ranch out of tires or open up a barbecue slash strip joint down on Savage Boulevard.
    And he would get up, my dad would, and start pacing around the floor and gesticulating all around the room and they were gonna get this guy to do this and they knew that that guy would do that other thing for free and they were gonna have the whole world on a string, no doubt about it, right after doing this next line.
    And there was no sleeping or eating or even going out. It was just days and days of this new