“I never liked that bastard anyway.”

“The way he’s always brushing his hair, thinking he’s pretty,” Lori said. “Talks down to me like I’m a kid. Like when he comes over on Sunday before your parents get home and he tells me to get lost. Who talks to someone like that?”

“He’s a real jackass.”

“Maybe this would make us feel better,” Lori said, stopping in front of the closed storefront of Snooky Williams’ Insurance, opening her purse and showing Diane a little baggie with a couple joints in it. “I stole them from my mom. She won’t say anything because she doesn’t think I know about her liking to smoke.”

“Lori?”

“Yeah,” she said, as they walked side by side around the shops, the Tibbehah Monitor, the old laundromat, Kaye’s Western Wear, and the old Rexall Drugs.

“You’re my hero,” she said.

Around the Square, the old movie marquee showed The Exorcist II still. They wouldn’t be getting that Star Wars movie for another two years. They turned away from the big celebration and followed Cotton Road to the west, out of town and into the country, and the little houses off County Road 234 where they lived. They made the walk a lot of days, sometimes coming into the Rexall for milk shakes or ice cream, mainly to meet up when there wasn’t much to do, before Diane had taken that afternoon job at the Dairy Queen off Highway 45. Something else that her dad didn’t like, again saying she’d come into highway trash. Diane thinking he must have a whole system of how to divide trashy people by geography.

The music was still loud coming from the Square a quarter mile away as they walked through people’s yards and little gullies and on the soft gravel shoulder of the road. Headlights popped up only every few minutes, and they’d walk into shadows and away from the road when a car would be coming up on them from town. When they got to the creek bridge, just a little concrete span, they walked down the bank, a hell of a lot easier when they took off their clogs and didn’t slide. There was a big flat rock where they could jump over the shallow sandy creek. They used to come here a lot as kids and play and watch the old men fish. Lori’s stepfather and Diane’s dad had been friends for a while but had a falling-out when Lori’s parents had left the church and become Methodists.

Lori pulled out a joint and lit it with a matchbook from the Rebel Truck Stop. She sucked on it a few moments, coughed out most of the smoke, and smiled as she passed it.

“Listen,” Diane said, straining to hear the music off the Square. “What’s that song?”

“‘My Name Is Lisa.’”

“Yes,” Diane said, taking a long pull. “Yes. Jessi Colter. God damn, I love Jess Colter.”

“Anyone ever tell you that you favor her?”

“Jess Colter?” Diane said. “Um, no. You can’t be high yet.”

“You’re dark like her,” Lori said. “And the way you do your hair, all black and feathered. Makes you look like an Indian.”

“I am part Indian,” Diane said. “On my momma’s side. Her daddy was full Cherokee.”

“You never told me that.”

“My daddy says it’s an embarrassment to have Indian blood,” Diane said. “He said those people were godless and did nothing but worship trees and rocks.”

Lori passed back the joint. There was a very large moon that night and a lot of stars, the rock where they sat still warm from the hot summer days. They both heard cracks off in the distance and both turned to the sky above Jericho thinking that the fireworks had started.

“Shit,” Diane said. “Just some rednecks shooting off pistols. Every Christmas and Fourth of July they got to make a lot of noise and raise hell. They’ll be shooting all night long.”

“You think we can see the fireworks from here?”

“Sure,” Diane said. “Why not?” Diane reached into her purse and pulled out a pint of Aristocrat Vodka and took a swig.

“Are we both going to hell?” Lori asked. She said it with a great deal of seriousness, spending way too much time as a kid at Diane’s daddy’s church.

“All I really know, Lori, is that I don’t want to be like my dad or even my mother,” Diane said. “What they do is not living. It’s preparing to die. My dad won’t be satisfied until he’s fitted into his coffin, waiting to take the journey to heaven to square-dance and drink apple juice.”

Lori laughed so hard, she spit out a little vodka. Diane smoked the joint, the idea of Jimmy making her laugh, too. The hair, all that goddamn blond hair, and that little joke of a mustache. He thought he looked like Burt Reynolds but really looked like he’d forgotten to wipe his face.

After a while under the moon, and finding warmth on that hot rock, they finished the joint and a lot of the vodka and walked back up the hill to the road. They slid into their clogs and laughed and walked over the bridge, a big expanse of cattle land stretching out to the north of them, cows grouped under shade trees as if they couldn’t tell when the sun had gone down, and a gathering of trailers and little houses every quarter mile or so. Their road wasn’t too far, a turn at Varner’s Quick Mart and about a half mile beyond that into the hills. Diane would have to run straight to the bathroom to get off the smoke smell and brush her teeth, she could guarantee the pastor would be checking on her before he turned in from his nightly Bible readings at the kitchen table. And if he started in on her again, the animated yelling and screaming, her mother would be just assured to be back in their bedroom covered up and hiding, waiting to be bright-faced and beaming in the morning as if the words hadn’t been said.

They were about a quarter mile past the bridge, laughing and talking, planning some kind of revenge for Jimmy, learning of two boys that Lori thought she could get once her braces came off, and deciding that if it came down to Jan-Michael Vincent and Parker Stevenson, that Parker seemed to be much smarter and better-looking. They both liked how he handled himself on the Battle of the Network Stars.

“Who’s that?”

Diane turned and looked over her shoulder, walking kind of sloppy on the gravel, not caring to move back off the highway. “Who cares?”

“They’re slowing down.”

“Shit,” Diane said. “Probably Jimmy wanting to explain how it was really that tramp’s fault for jumping into his backseat and starting to make out.”

The car had slowed to a crawl, but when she looked back again, she didn’t see those telltale cat eyes of the Trans Am. This was a bigger car, black, probably a Chevy, with big headlights that switched onto bright and blinded them a bit, the engine in neutral and growling.

“Fucking asshole!” Diane yelled.

“Yeah,” Lori said. “Fucking asshole!”

The engine growled again, leaving the high beams on, following them slow and steady. The creep really getting on Diane’s nerves. She waved for the car to move on, and when that didn’t work, raised her right hand high and shot the bird. The driver revved the engine and blasted up ahead of them and then just as fast hit the brakes hard. The car idled in the hot summer air up in the high gentle curve of the country road, the exhaust chugging, taillights glowing red.

“You shouldn’t have done that.”

“Someone is just messing with us,” Diane said. “I’m not scared.”

“Me either,” Lori said. “Fuck you, man!”

They laughed and kept walking, waiting for the car to speed off, but instead it just sat there maybe forty yards away, and then the driver shot the car into reverse, heading back for them. The girls jumped off the shoulder and found themselves caught between the road and a long barbed wire fence. Diane felt the fence poking and catching her top and biting into her side. “Goddamn son of a bitch.”