“I—I—”
Alice looked up and down the street, then darted forward
and kissed Gutsy. It was very, very quick. It was on the lips. And then she turned and walked back to her laundry and did not so much as glance back in Gutsy’s direction.
Gutsy had no idea how long she stood there.
She had no idea how she even got home.
Floated, maybe . . . because Gutsy did not remember her feet touching the ground at all.
61
“WHAT ARE YOU SMILING ABOUT?” asked spider as he and Alethea came up her garden path.
“Smiling?” asked Gutsy. “Who’s smiling?”
“You are,” said Alethea, scowling at her.
“Am I?”
Her friends plunked down on chairs on either side of her. They looked exhausted and smelled like sweat and vegetables. Even the black widows on Spider’s shirt looked limp and listless.
“We have to be back no later than an hour after sunset,” Alethea said. “And we have double chores all week.”
“Sorry,” said Gutsy, meaning it. They were in trouble because of helping her. She didn’t remind them that they did not have to stay out all night. That would be a slap in their faces, because they’d done it out of friendship and love.
They all sat in silence for a while, looking down the street, looking at nothing. Looking inward, really. Spider reached down to pet Sombra, and the coydog stood and laid his head on Spider’s thigh, eyes closed, tail wagging back and forth very slowly. In another world, in another time of her life, this would have been a nice moment. Maybe, she mused, it was like the eye of a hurricane. Calm for as long as it lasted, but there was destruction behind and ahead.
Keeping her voice quiet so only they could hear, she said, “I talked to the Chess Players.”
“Oh?” asked Alethea.
“They know about the Rat Catchers.”
“Oh,” she grunted.
Gutsy told them everything; and as she did, the happiness of talking to Alice melted away and left her with the cold reality of the Rat Catchers, the lab, the base, and the Night Army. Her friends listened without comment, but their mouths slowly fell open and their eyes bulged wide. Finally another silence settled over them as Alethea and Spider digested the details.
Spider eventually said, “Whoa.”
“Yeah,” agreed Gutsy.
Spider said, “This is bad.”
“Thank you, Captain Understatement,” said Alethea.
Gutsy looked up at a family walking past. Father, mother, two little kids, all talking and laughing at some joke. The father cut a look at the three of them and the dog sitting in the shade of a canopy. He smiled and moved on. The smile looked creepy. Suspicious.
“Okay,” said Spider, “I officially don’t trust anyone.”
“Sweetie,” said Alethea, “glad you finally caught up to where I’ve always been.”
“I don’t want to be like this, though. I like people.”
Gutsy and Alethea exchanged a quick, small, sad look. Spider was without doubt the nicest of the three of them. Most people treated him like he was a weirdo, but he never seemed to mind. Gutsy was sure he noticed, but it didn’t matter to him as much as being himself. It had to hurt on some level, Gutsy knew. It was tough to be disliked for no good reason. It probably made Spider go deeper into himself. It sure as heck made her do that. And Alethea, tough as she was, as uncaring as she always seemed to be, had her own scars from cheap shots.
Unlike Spider, Gutsy didn’t automatically like people. She was much more calculating in that she had to have a reason to like someone. Maybe that was a flaw, or maybe it was how she was wired, but it was a fact of her life. Now, after talking to the Chess Players, she was even less enthusiastic about bonding with the people in town.