Read Online How to Kill Yourself in a Small Town by eden Hudson - Free Book Online Page B

even remember what we had
talked about except that she swore she wasn’t drunk and then got all
embarrassed like she knew I knew she was lying. And there was that whole thing
about my name.
    Up
at the bar, I got a Whitney special—a shot, a longneck, and a shot—from Rowdy.
Killed the shots, then leaned back against the bar and tried to watch Desty
through the crowd. Not exactly an easy thing to do, considering everybody kept
talking to me.
    “Hey,
Tough, good to see you back in town… Sounding great tonight, man… Really
killing it… Band needed you back… Wasn’t the same without you…”
    No
one mentioned Colt, probably because that was month-old news. No one made any
vamp-whore jokes or asked me any questions they wanted a response to because
everyone knew about Mitzi and Jason stealing my voice and taking off.
    I
looked around Owen at Desty. She was by the stage talking to Willow.
    Willow
shook her head, but they didn’t stop talking. Will was like that. Something
about her made you feel safe, made you want to stick around. Except for her
baby-daddy, I guess. Willow was a year older than Scout and she had a
three-year-old, so if you did the math, you came up with a fourteen-year-old
Willow having unprotected sex with a tourist. But you’d never have guessed it,
talking to her. She didn’t even cuss.
    Willow
nodded in my direction and Desty looked at me. When Desty saw that I was
already looking at her, she looked away real fast. Willow raised her drink to
me. The top part of my cheeks got hot, so I took a drink of beer and nodded at
whatever Owen was saying to Dodge and me.
    Out
of the corner of my eye, I could see Desty and Willow keep on talking. I sure
would’ve liked to know what about.

 
     
     
     
     
     
    Desty
     
    “You
could try Seventh Circle, the angel club on the north end of town,” Willow
said, tucking a long, red-orange curl behind her ear. “They let humans in
sometimes.”
    “Maybe
I will,” I said.
    “So,
why would your sister want to become a familiar?” Willow asked.
    The
question caught me off guard. I laughed, but it sounded as uncomfortable as it felt.
    “Starting
us off with an easy one, huh?” I said.
    Willow
smiled.
    I
took a drink of my orange juice and stared down into the cup.
    How
do you explain to someone that after sixteen years your dad suddenly started
liking women closer to your age than your mom’s? Like that, I guess, pretty
much word-for-word, unless you still kind of wished he’d get over his midlife
crisis and come home.
    “A
few years ago, our dad left,” I said. But that wasn’t far enough back to make
Willow understand. “See, before, Tempie and him were always really close.
They’d go deer hunting and do stuff together. But then he ran off with this
girl who was only like five years older than we were. Tempie went after him.
She said he took her out to eat and told her that he was happy with Gianna—that
he was starting a new life and he needed some time alone to adjust. It really
hurt her.”
    “What
about you?” Willow asked.
    “What
about me?”
    “You
must’ve been pretty upset, too.”
    Upset?
I didn’t like hunting or fishing, and camping was definitely not for me.
Reading—that was pretty much the extent of my hobbies. Dad and I had hung out
as much as two people with only genetics in common could, but he was still my
dad. If he emailed me tomorrow and said he wanted to take me to Freezer for a
butterscotch milkshake, I would go running home like my butt was on fire. Of
course I’d been upset when he left, but there had been school and work and
college applications and trying to get Mom to eat and act like a living,
functioning human being. So, yeah, I was upset, but not everybody gets to
self-destruct.
    Willow
touched my arm and I jumped.
    “Sorry,”
she said. “You looked like you were about to cry.”
    “It’s
okay.” I tried to laugh. “I forgot, what was the question?”
    “I
was just wondering why your sister would