“Okay, okay, I get it. Smiling shirtless guy coming out of your trailer is off limits.”

“Fine, you want to be nosey?” She sprawled back in her chair.

“No. I don’t.”

“Too late. What are you going to do now?”

I blinked. “What do you mean?”

She shrugged. “You got away from the guy who hurt you…what are you going to do next? I mean, you can’t kill yourself in that field forever.”

“I’m thinking of becoming a stripper.”

Joan laughed. “Honey, you need a few thousand dollars in plastic surgery on those boobs before you’ll make a living.”

I put a hand to my chest as if I were stung.

“Seriously.” Joan poured herself more wine and the sun sunk down below Ben’s garden. I stretched out my legs, which were knobby and scratched. Looking at them made me think of Dylan’s lips, for some reason. Like the worst part of my body was connected somehow to the most beautiful part of his. Opposites—that why I thought of his mouth. We were a combination of opposites, the far edges of the beauty spectrum. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. I barely graduated high school; all I’ve ever done is farm. I don’t think there is much I can do.”

“That’s some grade-A bullshit, right there.”

“Joan, you know nothing about me. You have no—”

“I know you’re pretty fucking tough. I know you’re pretty fucking brave. I know you’re a little bit stupid, but all of us can be. The way I see it, you can do anything.”

You know those puzzles, the moveable squares inside a frame, that when all lined up correctly make a picture of a cow or something? But they come scrambled and you have to move squares around to try and make the picture.

They’re impossible, those stupid puzzles.

But Joan moved a lot of squares for me when she said that.

—

A week passed quietly. Nothing but me and kudzu during the day. But at night…

At night I thought about Dylan’s voice and slipped my hands over my body, finding new things I liked. The edges of good pain. The depths of real pleasure.

I made up for some serious lost time on my bed, the curtains open, breeze fluttering over my body, cooling the sweat I’d made all by myself. Despite my imagination—which was also making up for lost time—I could not imagine anyone else’s hands on my body. It was just me. Over and over again.

Another week and it was the middle of September. The nights were cooler. Just a little. We had a few days of storms that everyone seemed to think were out of the ordinary. Ben seemed to get better. Not that I saw him much. His oven sat out in the pouring rain, half finished. His garden growing, untended, into a jungle.

Joan was not around either.

I felt like we were all hunkered down, backs to the wind, preparing for something. I had no idea what.

But my gut said it was going to be bad.

—

It started with an engine waking me up. Not Phil’s shitty muscle car, a different engine. Smaller. The engine came into the park and roared past my trailer before coming to a stop.

Fuzzy-headed and bleary, I glanced over at the clock by my bed. Two thirty in the morning. On a Wednesday. If it were Friday, I wouldn’t think twice. Things got rowdy at the park on Friday. But it was Wednesday.

I jumped when there was a sudden pounding against the outside of a trailer. Not mine.

Joan’s?

Oh God, had some freak followed her home from The Velvet Touch? She said that happened sometimes; girls got stalked. Renee had to call the cops and stay with her mother for like a month. Joan said they usually told the owner, some guy named Zo, and he had that shit taken care of, but that first night, the first time the guy followed a girl home—there was no Zo to protect them.

I leaned over my bed and lifted my curtain, just a little to see outside.

Joan’s trailer was quiet. Dark. Still.

But there was a motorcycle outside of Ben’s trailer.

“Open up, old man!” a man shouted and kept banging on the trailer.

A dog on the far side of the park started barking. A kid was screaming.

This was bad.

Worse than bad.

My gut didn’t have to tell me that.

I slid from my bed and crept to the window over my settee. I could see things more clearly from there. I pulled back the curtain just in time to see the light outside Ben’s trailer turn on. Moths immediately flew in from places unknown to buzz around it. Ben’s door opened and the man standing outside it, big and tall, wearing a black leather vest with some kind of design on the back, shoved his way inside and I saw Ben fall to the side as the man pushed past him.

And then the door closed behind them.

I stood up, my shaking fingers to my shaking mouth. What should I do? Call the cops?

And then the yelling started.

There was no way to understand what the guy was saying, but it was loud and it was aggressive. Ben was an old man. Frail and sick. That guy…that giant man could kill him. Easily.

Back in my bedroom I grabbed the phone. The .22 was sitting there, in a small splash of moonlight. Terrified, freaking out, I grabbed it too and then ran out my door.

The plan was—as much as I was able to make a plan—to listen to what the guy was yelling, and if it seemed dangerous, I’d call the cops.

I ran out my door and circled my trailer only to find Joan standing in the dirt track between our two trailers. She wore her green robe and no shoes.

“What the fuck are you doing?” she whispered.

“Making sure Ben’s okay.”

“Is that a gun?” She was still whispering, but her voice had all the power of a shriek. “Are you nuts? What the hell are you doing with that?”

I could see on the edge of her deck, in easy reach, her own gun.

“The same thing you are,” I said, trying to sound bold. It might have worked if the gun felt natural or right in my hand. But it felt awkward and dangerous, and I probably projected that all over the place.

“Look,” Joan whispered and stepped closer to me. “Go back inside and call Dylan.”

I blinked, blood falling down to my feet, leaving me dizzy. Did she say Dylan?

“How…” I couldn’t even finish the sentence, I was so shocked. I’d never said his name to her. Not once.

Inside Ben’s trailer something crashed to the floor and I could hear Ben yelling, and I jumped, a small scream squeaking from my throat.

“Go inside,” Joan said, her voice calm and firm. Her eyes locked on mine. “And call Dylan. Tell him Max is here.”

“Max?”

“Go!” she said, and for emphasis pushed me back toward my trailer. I stepped inside the dark and relative silence of my trailer and felt as if the walls I recognized were being pulled down around me, revealing darker shadows I didn’t even realize existed.

I pressed call on the phone and lifted it with a shaking hand to my ear. It was three in the morning; there was no way—“Layla?” he said after the second ring. His sleep-roughened voice stroked over me and I could do nothing to stop my reaction. Not one thing. I shivered at the sound of his voice. Goose bumps rising on my arms. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. But Ben…there’s a guy here. Some guy on a motorcycle—”

“Oh fuck.”

“Joan…knew your name. She knew we were talking and she said I needed to tell you that Max is here—”

“Listen, Layla, listen carefully: I need you to stay in the trailer. Don’t go over there. Don’t…don’t even leave your trailer. Get down on the floor by your bed, the side farthest from Ben’s trailer.”

“Why? What the hell are you talking about?”

I could hear his breath shake as he exhaled and was suddenly a dozen times more scared. “Bullets go through trailers like cheese, Layla. I’m sending a car for you—”

“What?”

“I’m sending a car for you. He’ll be there in ten minutes. Tops. Don’t leave until you see a black sedan in front of your trailer.”