i

I am going to get the weed. It was Brooke’s decision; she was paying, so I should be the one to go out to the barn and pick it up. It doesn’t seem fair—Brooke has a driver’s license and could drive the mile out on Kreeger Road, while I have to walk—but fairness is not one of Brooke’s virtues.

It’s a cool night in late August, and above me the stars shine, like light straining through pinpricks in a great dark skin that divides our world from the next. But there’s no moon tonight, and as I turn off Brooke’s block to head out on Kreeger, I’m reminded of just how isolated the old barn is. There are no streetlights on Kreeger; the road is dark, snaking across a meadow and plunging into the trees. I strain my eyes to see into the forest past the oaks and hemlocks at the road’s edge, but everything is covered in layers of shadow.

What kind of person lives in an abandoned barn anyway? Is he homeless? Hiding? He could be a serial killer. It sounds like something a serial killer would do, live in a barn at the edge of a small town and target his next victim. Maybe he just sits around sharpening his knives and waiting for the next stupid kid to come knocking on his barn door wanting to get high, and then…

Shivers raise gooseflesh on my arms, and they have nothing to do with the breeze. I’ve arrived at the path to the barn, so overgrown that it would be difficult for anything bigger than a deer or a smaller-than-average sixteen year old girl to get through. I slip through the trees and onto the path, the forest so dark it’s like walking through a bruise. Years of decaying leaves rustle under my sneakers.

The barn sits in a small clearing. Years ago when I was little, there was a cow pasture here, but now the trees have begun encroaching on the space, the forest taking back the land. Pines grow tall with limbs hanging dangerously near glass windows. It was probably a falling limb that made the gaping hole in the back of the roof. Everything must drip-drip-drip in the rain.

Everything is dark; everything is still. Is there really someone here? I knock hard on the doors, and call out. “Hello? Is anyone here?”

No answer. The sound of my fist pounding on the door echoes through the forest, and a bird sings out sharply in alarm.

I grab the heavy iron handle and tug. The door gives, creaking loudly as I pull it open and step inside. It’s hard to see, but the hollow sound my sneakers make on the wooden floor leaves me with an impression of a large, cavernous space.

“Hello?”

My voice echoes back at me: Hello? Hellohellohello?

“Anybody home? I’m a friend of Brooke Rossi. She told me to come see you.”

Seeyouyouyou.

I walk across the floor, kicking up wisps of old-old hay and straw. The smell of cows hangs in the air like a ghost-scent, and I can almost see them here, patched black and white with great soft eyes, milling around and lowing and chewing sweet orchard hay. I wonder what happened to them when the farmer died. Did they get sold to another farm? Sold for slaughter? Great soft cow eyes going dark.

“What do you want?”

I stop walking and scan the darkness, searching the shadows for the disembodied voice. “Uh, I’m Brooke’s friend…”

“I heard you before. What do you want?”

The edge in his tone brings back my earlier thoughts about serial killers. Maybe he’s hiding because he doesn’t want me to see that he’s covered in some dead girl’s blood. Or maybe I’m about to be the dead girl; maybe it’s a butcher knife he’s hiding.

“Brooke said you hooked her up yesterday with some really good shit.”

Silence.

“You have any more of that?” I keep probing the shadows. One glint of metal in the dark, and I’m gone. I’ll run so fast my Phys. Ed. teacher would bust a gut with shock.

“Jesus, I’m her dealer now, is that what she thinks?”

Shit. Just once, I would like something to go my way. Just once, I want to be the one making out my boyfriend at the house, while Brooke gets hassled by a psychopathic, barn-dwelling dope-smoker. But that’s never the way it works.

“Look, I don’t what your deal with Brooke is, but I’m just the messenger.“ My voice is calm; my heart is not. Squint into the shadows, where is he? “Do you think you could come out where I can see you, or would that be too much to ask?”

There’s no sound at all. He could be anywhere, could be creeping up behind me with a pair of rusty-sharp shears that will stab into my back, blood filling my lungs so I can’t even scream.

Movement in the corner of my eye. I jerk my head to the left as he steps out of the shadows. No shears, no butcher knife. Just a guy who doesn’t look much older than me, dark-eyed with a wide mouth and a tangles of dusty-brown hair falling over his shoulders. He’s barefooted and shirtless, wearing only a pair of worn blue jeans that rest low on his hips. His chest is sleek with muscles, like maybe he swims or runs track or kills people.

“Hi,” I say, feeling stupid, and more afraid than I want to admit. “I’m Shaun.”

“Jesse.”

“Sorry about barging in.”

He blinks. “Sorry if I scared you.”

I relax a little. Maybe he wants me to relax. I shift my weight, gauge how fast I can get to the door if he makes a funny move. “So do you have anything to sell me or not?”

He looks at me for a long time, giving me plenty of opportunity to observe just how gorgeous he is, and just how much of an asshole he must be.

“You or Brooke?” he asks finally.

“Does it matter?”

“Would I have asked if it didn’t?”

I rock my weight onto the balls of my feet, uncomfortable under his third-degree. “So if I say the right name, you sell me some weed, and the wrong name, you don’t?”

“Pretty much.”

“Brooke.”

“Wrong answer.”

“Are you serious?”

He stares at me.

“You know what, fine.” I turn and head for the door, my back stiff with anger. “Thanks for your help, asshole.”

Psycho-killer, my ass. He’s a common, pathetic jerk who gets off on screwing with other people. Probably if Brooke had been here with her perfect hundred dollar haircut and her perfect whitened smile and her perfect shirt with too many buttons open, probably then Jesse wouldn’t have any problem selling shit to her.

My toe kicks a piece of rubble in the straw, and it hits the wall with a hollow ding. Asshole, I think, and my face is flaming red with embarrassment. Asshole, asshole, asshole.

“Shit, Shaun, I’m joking. Come back.”

I stop walking, but don’t turn. “Do you seriously have nothing better to do than fuck with people?”

“Not really.”

I turn. “If we’re doing this, could you hurry it up? I’ve got places to be.”

“Date?”

“None of your business.”

He grins, his teeth white in the dark, his eyes sly. “Okay, come with me.” He turns and steps back into the shadows, disappearing. In a second I can’t tell he was ever there, and my heart speeds.

“Jesse?”

“Right here.”

Stupid, why am I doing this? Why am I following his voice into the dark? Don’t talk to strangers, don’t go off the path. These are the first warnings we’re taught as little know-nothing kids, and they’re the first warnings we forget as we grow up. Why?

I duck after him into the shadows, catch sight of him further ahead, moving like a panther, silent. I stumble over uneven floorboards until he stops at a ladder leading up into the loft.

“We have to go up there?”

“If you want your weed.”

“Jesus.”

He starts up the ladder, pauses and looks down at me. “Coming?”

If I come back without weed, Brooke will not be happy. It’s Friday night. We’re supposed to get high and go out, hit Hollydale’s only club with our fake IDs and get hammered. And then Brooke and TJ will disappear so they can go somewhere and fuck, leaving me to walk the two and a half miles home, alone in the dark. It happens every Friday, but we are best friends and this is what we do.

I catch hold of the splintery ladder and start climbing, looking up, only up. Jesse helps me off the ladder and into the loft, his hands warm and strong, fingers lacing with mine before he draws away.

Is he flirting with me? Guys never flirt with me. I’m thin and small and wear baggy dark clothes, but besides that I’m the fucked-up girl, the one with the dead father, the Girl Who Tried to Kill Herself.

I can deal with being ignored or singled out. I’ve gotten used to being “accidentally” slammed against the lockers, my lunch thrown onto my clothes, my money and my homework stolen. What I am absolutely not used to are guys looking at me long and slow like Jesse’s doing, holding my hands, teasing me. I don’t know what to do, and suddenly my palms are damp with nervous sweat.

As Jesse opens a weathered canvas backpack, I take a look around at the place where he’s been making himself at home. His only possessions appear to be the backpack and a denim jacket throw over a bale of straw. He broke open one of the bales and spread it across the floor beneath the damaged roof, so that when he sleeps he must be able to look up and see the stars.

No possessions, no responsibilities, nothing to tie him here. He can roll up his sleeping bag and walk away from Hollydale any time he wants. I wonder what that would be like. To be free.

I don’t realize Jesse is beside me until he bumps his shoulder against mine. He holds out a tiny bag, like the kind extra buttons come in on clothing. This one is full of weed, an eighth of an ounce of sticky green bud. I unzip the bag and breathe in the skunky odor.

“It’s the same stuff your friend smoked,” Jesse says, “so it’s twenty.”

“Cool.” I fish out the cash Brooke gave me, and while he turns to put it into his bag, I tuck the baggie down the neck of my shirt and into my bra. I ready to get out of here, go back to Brooke and tell her what a bitch she is for making me come out here alone, and what a freak Jesse of the Barn is.

Then Jesse says, “So, Shaun, you want to smoke one for the road?”

A/N: Less than smooth, I know. Sorry! Still trying to find my groove with this one.