WHAT LITTLE GIRLS ARE MADE OF.

     "no shit.” there’s a lot more built up behind those two words, and she can feel its pressure climbing her throat to kick at the backs of her teeth. her chest hurts, like it’s full of rocks, because she knows her options and she hates every single one of them.

    frank had called the guy a friend. that’s the only reason she isn’t arguing as much as she could be. a friend, someone he trusts, somewhere she can hole up for a few days until he straightens this out for her. she gets it; that doesn’t mean she likes it. her composure cracks like old clay and she wants to tell him no and i can handle this and i don’t need anybody’s damn help and she never quite gets the words out. she wants to ask why she can’t just crash at karen’s place instead.

     what comes is a demanding, “why can’t i just stay with you?”

     he’s sitting adjacent to her on the couch, fixing her with that infuriating, unyielding stare. “because it’s not safe, that’s why.”

     “’n what, this curtis guy’s got bulletproof walls? hidden arsenal behind the bookcase?”

     “c’mon, don’t start that shit —”

     “nowhere’s safe. don’t start that shit.”

     she folds her arms and draws her knees up, already knowing she’ll be at curtis’ this time tomorrow no matter what else she says today. he doesn’t say anything for a while. prompts her with a hey when he finally does, and when she looks at him, ready to be disappointed, he says, “i’m gonna come back for you, you know that, right?”

     yeah, she knows that. like he knows it’s exactly the right thing to tell her. she considers trying to push this over the cliff’s edge anyway, because that wasn’t a fair play, but ultimately decides against it.

     “fine,” it’s a grouse and a sigh rolled into one, but that’s mostly for show. he’ll come back. he always does. “guess i can play nice for a couple days, if it’ll stop you gettin’ all ornery on me again. that’s the best i got. you satisfied?”

     He never stopped looking.  Not once,  not for a second.  Not until he found her.  There were nights he didn’t sleep,  days he pushed on in the  blistering heat  of summer as if his body wouldn’t fold and collapse.  Times that Karen had to stop him,  force him to  eat,  to drink his fill before  dehydration  catches up to him.  The possibility that Loretta hadn’t made it wasn’t something Frank could reckon with,  even as David pulled a bloodied army green JanSport from the backseat of a wrecked vehicle near the state line of Pennsylvania.

     It’s not hers,  he said.  Doesn’t have the keychain.

     Loretta found him before he could find her,  somewhere between Ohio and Virginia;  he hasn’t let her out of sight since then.

     “Big talk comin’ from somethin’ smaller than the shit I pushed out last week––‘cause that ain’t just my  native language  you’re insulting here,  right,  that’s my goddamn heritage.  Show a little respect,  huh?  Entire world goes to shit ‘n us  Northerners  still can’t get a moment of peace without you rednecks showin’ your asses.  First you,  uh,  you hit me with that  honky-tonk  bullshit,  then you start talking ‘bout our food stalls.  If I didn’t know any better,  I might start taking this a little personal.”

     That smile is still around,  with the bonus of a quiet laugh that rolls out of him.  “Yeah,  I ain’t gonna argue that.  Think he’s just,  uh …  at a level these people haven’t gotten around to  accepting  yet,  you know,  they––they think they can turn the world into what they want now that it’s lost all its  structure  and that ain’t the way it works.  They’ll figure that out for themselves one day or,  uh …  or they won’t.  Tell you what,  we ain’t stickin’ around long enough t’ find out.  I gave him an out.  Whether he takes it or not is up t’ him.”

     kentucky had always seemed small,  a narrow,  isolated world,  until she had to cross the bulk of it on foot.  she’d done a few miles in a stolen car before it ran out of gas;  with no hose to siphon fuel,  and the main roads all jammed up with vehicles,  that only left one option.  her feet were ready to fall off by the end of the first day.  but she’d pushed on,  meandering up towards new york state,  no plans for when she got there,  no idea what she’d do if she didn’t find him.  when she did,  everything else fell by the wayside.

     she’s never held onto anybody like that before,  literally and figuratively.

     “watch your tone,  shithead.”  the mock offense is real,  and she still doesn’t miss a beat.  “respect is a two - way street.  insultin’ your heritage  ...  what,  you can dish it out but y’ can’t take it?”  he laughs,  and she’s struck with a sense of accomplishment.  suddenly the world’s a little less dark and dead.  she fusses with her sleeves again,  pushing them up to her elbows and wrapping her arms around her knees.  “think he’s just ahead’a the curve,  then?  ain’t surprising.  don’t know how he’s stuck around for so long.”

      “you ever hear about not lookin’ a gift mouth in the horse?” deanna manages to scrounge up her best look of offense before throwing it loretta’s way, but the truth is the back and forth is nice. she shifts in her seat, huffing when she brings her thumb up to rub against her nose. “the guns would just be limp chunks of wood and metal without my talents.” 

                 three seconds; it’s the length she’s able to hold off before cracking with a grin.

         “worst case scenario, we’ll shoot at trees and hope wood nymphs don’t come after us,” her eyes flick back to the road, the white lines still shifting beneath them. “but yeh,” she starts again, more sincere. “we can do that. i’ve got more than enough ammo ‘n i’m sure there’s some bottles or cans or who knows what in the back for target practice.” 

                her fingers flex against the worn grooves of baby’s steering wheel. 

         “by dawn, we oughta be close to kansas and there ain’t shit by open fields for miles.” kansas. lawrence. some off color phrase about dorothy returning home flits through her mind and she wants to shoot it out the second it surfaces. why she’s dragging loretta there, she has no answer. something about it feels important. like it needed to happen at some point. deanna doesn’t bring it up, just nudges what’s left in her thermos towards her co-pilot. “we can raid a gas station for snacks after.” 

     "heard somethin’ similar,  but y’ sound a touch confused.  how much’ve y’ had to drink tonight?  should i be concerned,  what with you behind the wheel ‘n all?”  the lapse back into banter is so seamless that it’s almost like the initial exchange hadn’t happened.  they do this,  though;  and they do it well.  “—  uh - huh.  s’pose you have your moments.”

     she rolls her window down the rest of the way,  letting in the cool night air.  it’s clean,  all pine and earth,  and it feels good when she pulls it into her lungs.  makes it easier to breathe.

     “—  i don’t even wanna know.  next you’re gonna be tellin’ me the bottles ‘n cans might be possessed ‘n my bullshit detector’s gonna short circuit.”  there’s a knowing grin,  eyes going from the blur of greenery outside to deanna and back again.  kansas  makes her lift a brow;  she knows that’s home turf,  and she knows it’s not a common subject to offer.  that’s why she doesn’t question it.  but it’s heavy  —  she feels that,  on an almost visceral level.

     That  kevlar  is worn like a second skin.  Sometimes Frank thinks it fits better than his own,  better than the  real  skin beneath it.  The one that bleeds and scars,  pervious to damage.  The symbol,  the spray-painted white skull Loretta became so fond of,  serves as more than just an omen.  I’m a reminder.  He remembers first turning that keychain over between his fingers,  thumbing over the cool metal of the design before he held it in an open palm and felt the weight of it.  How gravity held it down,  kept it grounded there.  She hadn’t known what it  meant  then;  only that it was a piece of him and that was enough for her,  but what it was still remained lost on her until the day it wasn’t.

     Until he  explained  it to her,  and saw her the following day,  the following two weeks with that same keychain still clipped to her bag.

     “Shit,  is  that  what that is?  Your native language?  All this time I thought it was just a bunch of  bullshit  comin’ up out of everybody’s throats.  Guess you,  uh––really do learn new things every day,  huh?”  He finally breaks into a smile then,  the half-crooked kind at one side of his mouth.  “Probably right about that.  Soon as those,  uh …  those goddamn  food stalls  went down,  you know,  all those  vendors  started closin’ up shop,  us New Yorkers,  man,  we really knew we were in the shit then.”  It’s a half-truth,  at the very least,  but Frank has an inkling of suspicion that tells him Loretta’s wasn’t a hair off course.  “Yeah.  Just,  uh …  thought I’d run somethin’ past you,  you know,  Shane ‘n his old lady––they might be comin’ with us.  You good with that?”

     memento mori,  that’s what he’d called it.  she can still conjure memories of that whole conversation,  word for word,  like she has a recording of it in her mind.  turned out the symbolism was just as apt as the sentiment.  that damn keychain kept her going for two solid months;  made her feel connected,  somehow.  less alone.

     “comin’ from a bona fide bullshit connoisseur such as yourself,  your position’a  judgment  ain’t that credible.”  it’s the smile that does it.  the ease of all this.  “y’all with your food stalls.  tellin’ me the dead could’a rose up ‘n chowed down on the living,  but there wouldn’t’a been a word of complaint as long as y’ had your hot dogs?  northerners.”

     He knows.  

     He’d known since day one,  when he first pulled open the hatch to the trunk of that Honda;  she was younger then,  but no less  feral  than she is today.  It was how she reeled back from him the first and last time he ever laid a hand on her without explicit permission,  to avoid getting  clipped  in the jaw by the head of a wrench,  and the way she told him  ‘I know who you are’  with a jut of her chin,  her arms wound tight around herself.  These weren’t the kind of lines a man could miss.  Most of them didn’t.

     When he looks at her like this,  sees the grin on her face and the soft flare of  light  in her eyes,  he can almost forget.  Despite everything,  the weight of what she carries and the fingerprints that may as well have been burned onto her skin,  she still smiles like that.  Almost like she can forget,  too.  “Hey––c’mon––don’t start––what’d I just say to you?”  He nearly laughs,  but nearly is enough;  he doesn’t do that as often anymore.  “Christ,  it’s like there’s the  rest  of the world,  right,  and then there’s the goddamn  south.  Surprised all this shit didn’t end there.  Your people––what,  they run outta  shotguns,  or did they just  waste  all their ammo trying to hit a barnyard door?”

     she’d almost forgotten about the wrench.  it was the first thing she could grab from that trunk and she came out swinging in about ten different ways,  like a caged animal set loose.  he wasn’t a threat,  at least not to her.  that much,  she’d worked out pretty quick.  the rest of it,  those other pieces,  fell into place as soon as she registered the skull  —  white spray paint on black kevlar,  unique as a fingerprint.  she has an identical skull in the form of a keychain still clipped to her backpack.

     he’s amazingly calm for somebody who’d killed a man,  pulled a kid out of a car trunk,  and taken an elbow to the face,  all within the last forty - five minutes.  in contrast,  she’s like a feral cat  —  skittish,  bristling,  tucked into the corner of the room’s only chair.  it’s a wonder she’s not hissing with bared teeth.  regardless,  he keeps his distance.  kept it the whole walk back,  before and after she’d told him,  point blank,  i know who you are.  as if the skull decal isn’t enough of a tip off.  she watches the news.  what he’s doing all the way down in the ass - end of kentucky,  she still doesn’t know.

     no hospitals.  she’d made that clear.  she isn’t hurt,  not really;  a bruise or two,  marks on her wrists.  nothing serious,  nothing she can’t handle.  how ‘no hospitals’ turned into this,  she doesn’t know either.  holing up in a shitty motel room with the goddamned  punisher  isn’t quite the turn she’d pictured her night would take,  but then again,  neither was the car trunk.

     five or ten minutes ago,  he’d asked if she wanted to go home.  she told him there wasn’t much of one to go back to so there was no sense in hurrying.  why rush,  she’d said.

     “for starters,  you’re alive.”  that’s what he came back with.  that’s why she’s looking at him strangely,  like the sentiment is somehow lost on her.  she has a matched set of crescent - shaped shadows beneath eyes rimmed with pale red,  mouth a little swollen,  hair forming a halo of frizz at her temples and the crown of her head.  you’re alive.  she doesn’t know what to do with that.  how to make it fit in her mouth when her tongue feels too big.

     “that s’posed t’ mean somethin’?  prompt a catharsis,  moment’a clarity  —  gimme a new lease on life?”

     don’t misunderstand;  she’s grateful.  there was only one solid ending to all this before he showed up,  and it didn’t involve a motel.  or,  maybe it did.  maybe they would’ve found her body in a room just like this one,  only it wouldn’t have been a  room,  it would’ve been a crime scene.  maybe they wouldn’t have found her body at all.  she’s accustomed to the smell of dirt and grit,  and that earthy,  rotten darkness drifting up from the bottom of a mine shaft.  she’s kissed death on the mouth twice before this,  and that’s twice too many times for someone who’s barely pushing sixteen.  so,  she’s alive.  so  —  ?  so what?

     there’s something in his eyes like understanding,  like  i get it  without the pity.  she hates pity.  she got enough of that after her mama died,  and then her daddy,  and it makes her want to swing.  but he isn’t giving her that.  he’s giving her something genuine,  stripped clean of any bullshit.

     it unsettles her,  only because it’s unfamiliar.

     she squirms,  repositions,  draws the sleeves of her flannel down over her hands.  the loud bray of her heartbeat reiterates what he said.  you’re alive,  you’re alive.

     “…  whatever.”  swallowing,  glass and grave dirt,  she drops her gaze.  “y’ don’t have t’ do that.  talk me through it  like that.  this ain’t the first time some asshole tried punchin’ my ticket,  it comes with the territory.”  so much of that is wrong,  on an intrinsic level.  so much of her life up ‘til this point has been one long line of wrong.  part of her wants to tell him,  how she was fourteen the first time and she went quietly because they had a gun on her daddy,  and she was scared,  and she’s still scared,  and she thinks she’ll go through the rest of her life scared,  but she doesn’t.  it’d be easy to tell him,  and that unsettles her,  too.

     instead,  she looks at him again.  her throat’s as dry as her tone,  but her tone doesn’t shake like her hands.  “—  reckon your timing was on point,  though.  thanks for that.”

     “No doubt in my mind about that,”  but it doesn’t mean she has to do it alone,  and those are the words left unspoken between them  ––  what he wants to say but  doesn’t,  because Loretta isn’t the type of person you  crowd in  without first making her skin crawl.  Frank knows she’s more than capable;  it’s the idea of having someone he  cherishes  more than life itself being taken away from him that twists him up inside.  Like swallowing a handful of razorblades and feeling them cut and slice all the way down.  He looks at her again,  and sees the exhaustion on her,  just the way he described.  It’s just like his.  Like a second skin.  “Gonna bust out a little  Kenny Chesney  on me?  Maybe,  uh …  shit,  what’s that guy’s name,  uh,  Luke Bryan?  Tell you what,  I might let it slide as long as I don’t hear any of that  honky-tonk  bullshit.”

     it’s not placation,  coming from him.  she was hypercritical of that for a while,  trying to pull apart every micro expression,  every damn  breath  he’d take between syllables,  because she’s used to bullshit and the line she draws is made of barbed wire.  but he never pushed.  never forced his way through with wire cutters or crossed it before she was ready to let him.  and that matters.  it matters more than he knows.

     “Yeah,  well,  you haven’t known him as long as I have.”  Even if she  had,  it wouldn’t have made a difference in her opinion.  Loretta’s right,  and he knows it as well as she does.

     Curtis was nothing if not  honest,  but there were things he believed that were completely disparate from Frank’s own warped opinions about the deaths he carries with him,  all that  blame  he shoulders.  The kind of blame that would swallow him whole if anything happened to her,  and Loretta knows this,  too.  That’s why she says what she does,  and why it gives him pause,  his gaze flickering up to look at her from beneath the brow.  “…  you ever get hurt,  that means I wasn’t doing what I should’ve been to  look after  you,  alright,  and that––that’s just how it goes.  I’ll tell you somethin’ else,  you go off ‘n waste  ammo  like that,  I’m gonna tie your goddamn ass in a knot so tight it’ll take you a week to get out of it.”

     she hadn’t.  that’s half the tragedy of it,  not knowing him long enough.  but it’s losses like that,  she thinks  —  like curtis,  and that girl in the barn.  losses like that are the world’s way of tripping you up and kicking you in the ribs with one hard truth:  nobody’s safe.  nobody.

      “Doesn’t have t’ be today.”  He cuts the blade a little too sharp over the whetstone.  Realizes he’d been holding it  tight,  closed his fingers around its grip until his knuckles were white.  This isn’t anger.  It’s something else.  He gestures to the fold-out chair beside him and waits until she’s seated to continue.  “Look,  you ever get bit ‘n that’s how you wanna go out,  then that’s how it’ll be.  I just don’t––I don’t want you wakin’ up every goddamn morning wonderin’ if  today’s  the day,  yeah?  I don’t want that for you.  I know it sounds like a crock of shit,  like …  like some shit  Curt  would say,  huh?  I know what’s out there.  I know how easy it would be to,  uh …  to make a mistake.  Maybe you do it on  purpose,  you know,  think you’re givin’ yourself an  out  ‘cause you can’t find another reason ‘n you’re tired,  you know,  you’re just––you’re tired of every day being a fight to  survive.  Long as you can promise me that ain’t how it’s gonna be,  then,  uh …  you go out however you want.”

     “Hey,  quit that shit,  alright.  Unless you’re goin’ out of your way to be a dumbass,  that ain’t somethin’ you gotta worry about.  You know how to handle yourself.  I’ve seen you do it,  even before all  this  shit happened.”

     “Yeah,  okay,  smart-ass.”  He knows her better than that.  He knows her better,  but that didn’t stop the swell of  panic,  however fleeting it may be.  “Think you know the answer to that.  When I go out,  it’s gonna be on my terms  ––  nobody gets to make that choice for me.  God help ‘em if they tried.”

     “––  somethin’ you wanna tell me?”